The Rudolf Steiner Archive

One may say that the original idea of Festivals was to make people lift their eyes, turning them from dependence on earthly things to dependence on super-earthly ones. And it is consideration of the Easter Festival that can especially bring about such thoughts. In the course of the last four or five hundred years the civilization of the world has gone through a spiritual evolution which has inclined humanity to turn its attention more and more away from its connection with cosmic forces and cosmic powers. Human attention has been restricted increasingly to the study of those conditions prevailing between man and earthly forces and powers. It is also the case that with those means of knowledge which are considered legitimate to-day it is impossible to keep other connections in view. If anyone in pre-Christian times, or even in the first Christian centuries, who was closely associated with the Mysteries could have experienced our present-day knowledge, he would not in the least have understood—if he approached things with the thoughts and feelings of those days—how it was possible for people to live without a consciousness of their super-earthly, their cosmic connections.

I might here give an outline of many things which you find more fully described in different cycles of lectures; but as these present lectures are intended to give a more intimate understanding of the thought of Easter, I naturally cannot bring forward every particular but can only hint at how things are.

If we were to transfer ourselves in thought into the various ancient religious systems of the past, we might choose as an example that one most familiar to modern people, the ancient Hebrew-Jewish system; we would find, when these ancient systems are mono-theistic, the worship of the one Godhead. This is that Godhead of whom, in accordance with Christian acceptance, we call the Father.

Now, in all those religions in which the thought of this Father-God lived, there has existed more or less, but especially among the priests of the Mysteries, a connection between this God and the cosmic moon-forces, a connection with everything streaming down to earth as force from the moon.

Of this ancient consciousness of the connection between man and the moon forces, hardly anything has remained other than the stimulus given to the poetic fancy of the soul by the moon, and the number of months in the gestation period of man, in accordance with the ten lunar months as reckoned in medicine. But in the older ideas concerning such things a clear consciousness did exist, that when man came down from the spiritual world, where in pre-earthly times he had lived as a psycho-spiritual being, into physical life, he was filled with and strengthened by impulses that streamed to him from the moon. When a man considers what it is that has formed him as living being, what lives in him as the forces of nutrition and ˂ breathing, and as forces of growth generally, he must not look to the forces of the earth but to forces outside the earth.

It is easy for him to see how, when looking to earthly forces, these are connected with him. But if our body were not held together by forces outside the earth, if it did not receive its form from forces beyond the earth, what could the mere earthly forces do towards its preservation and cohesion (Zusammengehalt)?

The moment the non-earthly forces—those coming from beyond the earth—leave it, the body is exposed to the forces of the earth: it then perishes, disintegrates, and becomes a corpse. The forces of the earth can only make corpses of men, they cannot construct their human form. Those forces living in man, by which he is raised above what is earthly, so that between birth and death he can live on earth as a coherent organic form and not succumb to the forces of earth that lay hold of him at death and destroy him, against which he wages a life-long struggle here—for they must be struggled against—these forces he owes to the influences of the moon-world.

If on the one hand we can state theoretically that the moon contains the forces by which the human body is formed, we must realize on the other hand that ancient religions reverenced these as the divine Father-forces which were the means of bringing man into physical existence at birth. The ancient Hebrew Initiate had a distinct consciousness of the fact that the forces leading man to earthly existence streamed to him from the moon, maintained him on earth, and were torn from him as physical man when he passed through the gates of death.

A kindly feeling of love for these Father-forces, a looking up to them in the practice of their cult by means of prayers, etc., was the content of certain ancient monotheistic religions. These ancient mono-theistic religions were more consistent than people think. Such matters are very incorrectly represented in history, because history can only go by external documents, not by what is observed with the help of spiritual vision.

Those religions which looked up to the moon, and to that which existed in the moon as spiritual Beings, belonged to a later period. Compared with the opinions held by them concerning the moon, those held by earlier religions concerning the Sun-forces, and even the Saturn forces, of which I shall have something to say later, were very clearly defined, but they concerned themselves principally with the Sun-forces.

With these early religions we enter an historical field of study for which external documents no longer exist, lying as they do many thousands of years earlier than the foundation of Christianity. In order to provide this age with a name I have called it in my book, “An Outline of Occult Science,” the “Old Indian,” which was followed by the “Old Persian,” age. In these civilizations human development was very different from what it became later, and religious beliefs depended upon this development. During the last two thousand years and more we have developed so that we are not aware that a split has occurred in our earthly evolution. This has hardly been noticed. What takes place in the greater part of present-day humanity, inwardly, at about their thirtieth year, has also hardly been noticed. It has remained to a great extent in the subconscious; it has not entered into man's consciousness. Conditions were very different in a humanity that lived eight or nine thousand years before the foundation of Christianity. The development of individuals was then more continuous up to about the age of thirty. With the thirtieth year a great change took place. What I have now to say about this change has naturally to be spoken of somewhat crudely, but these simple descriptions are in accordance with the facts that concern us at the moment.

In those remote times the following might happen: A man might have contracted a friendship with someone (before his thirtieth year who was considerably younger than himself—perhaps three or four years younger. This man shortly afterwards experienced the change that took place about the age of thirty. It might happen, these two men not having seen each other for a long time, that the one who had experienced the change at his thirtieth year was spoken to by the other without his knowing who he was. His memory had been so completely changed. I have had to put this in the language of to-day, hence it may strike you as being somewhat crude. In olden times the control of certain arrangements (Einrichtungen) stood in close connection with the Mystery schools; and by these, in the small societies then existing, a register of the lives of the young people was kept, because they themselves forgot, owing to the great alteration (Umschwung) that had taken place in them, and had to be taught again what they had experienced in life before their thirtieth year. These men then knew: I have become a quite different being in my thirtieth year, I must go to “the registry” (a modern expression, of course) in order to learn what I had previously experienced. This is actually what happened! Through instructions they received, at the same time they were told: Before your thirtieth year the Moon-forces worked in you exclusively; after attaining this age the Sun-forces entered into the development of your earthly life. The Sun-forces work on man with an entirely different purport from the Moon-forces. What does present-day humanity know of the Sun-forces? Only the outer physical part. Man knows that they warm him, that they cause him to perspire; he knows besides this that people practise sun-bathing, that there is something therapeutic connected with the forces of the sun, but all this he learns in a merely external way. He has no idea what the forces that are spiritually connected with the Sun do to him.

Julian the Apostate, the last of the heathen Cæsars, had experienced something of these forces in the last lingering note of the Mysteries, and just when he desired to make proof of these experiences he was murdered on his expedition into Persia; so powerful in the early Christian centuries were the forces which desired all knowledge of such things to be lost.

It is therefore not to be wondered at that even to-day no knowledge concerning them can be acquired. While the Moon-forces are those which determine what man is, which permeate him with an inward necessity (Notwendigkeit), as to his actions, and determine his instincts, his temperament, his emotions and the nature of his physical-etheric body generally, the spiritual Sun-forces free him from this compulsion. They caused this necessity or compulsion to dissolve, as it were, and man became really a free being through the Sun-forces. In that ancient time to which I have referred, the difference between these two forces in human evolution was strictly defined. In his thirtieth year a man then became a Sun-man, a free man; up to his thirtieth year he was a Moon-man, and was not free. To-day these two conditions slide one into the other. To-day the Sun-forces work along with the Moon-forces even in childhood, and the Moon-forces continue to work on into later years; so that to-day these two things, compulsion or necessity and freedom, work one into the other. This was not always the case. In the early pre-historic times of which we are speaking the action of the sun and that of the moon were absolutely distinct in the course of a man's life. This is why it was said at that time concerning the greater part of humanity: a man was born not once but twice. For it was held to be abnormal, something pathological, if a man did not experience this great change of life in his thirtieth year. It came about in the course of human evolution that the second of these births—they were spoken of as the Moon-birth and the Sun-birth—that the Sun-birth was no longer so noticeable in man, and certain ceremonies were carried out, certain exercises and actions were performed on those who desired initiation into the Mysteries. Such persons then experienced, in the Mysteries, what could be no longer experienced generally by men, and they became the “twice-born.”

When this expression “twice-born” is found in Oriental literature to-day it is misleading. Any Oriental scholar, any Sanskrit expert, might be asked—I think Professor Beckh is present here and you can ask him—if it is not the case that, as a matter of fact, no Oriental science can clearly and distinctly put before you, in a few words, what the content of the expression “twice-born” really is. Formal explanations there certainly are in plenty, but what it means in substance no one knows. Only those who are aware that it reaches back to a reality know the reality I have just explained to you. In such things spiritual observation alone can speak. And when once it has spoken, I would like to ask all those who hold with what can be learned from documents, with everything external science can discover—I would like to ask, taking for granted that science has gone to work in an unprejudiced manner, if this science does not corroborate in every particular the investigations made by spiritual science? Your attention must, however, be directed to certain things which take precedence of all documentary science; for the understanding of life, of man, cannot be gained by a science of documents.

Let us turn our gaze back to a very far-off age when people spoke of the Moon-birth of man as creation through the Father. With regard to the Sun-birth, people were quite clear that in the spiritual Sunlight the power of Christ, the Son, was active, and that this was the power that freed people. Consider for a moment what this force, this Sun-force, does. It is the force that enables us as men on earth to make something out of ourselves. We would have been strictly confined within an unchangeable, natural—not fateful—necessity, if the liberating Sun-forces had not by their influence dissolved this necessity.

This fact was known to those who held the more ancient opinions concerning the world. They looked up to the sun and said: This eye of the world, from which the power of Christ streams forth, is the cause of my not having to remain always under that brazen necessity with which I was born from out of the forces of the moon, as a man whose whole life had to evolve under compulsion. It is the Christ-force looking down on me through that cosmic Sun-eye that enables me through my inner freedom to make something of myself during my life on earth, something I could not have been, through the Moon-forces which placed me here.

This consciousness that he could transform himself, could make something out of himself, is what men saw in the forces of the Sun.

I would like to add here, but only by way of parenthesis, that Saturn was also looked up to as a third source of birth. In the Saturn forces these men saw all that preserved them when they passed through the gate of death: the third earthly metamorphosis. Birth on earth, meaning birth through the Moon; the second birth, meaning birth through the Sun; the third birth, meaning Saturn birth or earthly death. Man was here upheld by the mighty forces of Saturn, forces then holding sway at the extreme limit of the planetary system of the earth. These forces preserved him, bore him out into the spiritual world, and provided a connecting link for his being, when the third metamorphosis took place. This was absolutely the mental outlook of the men of those ancient times.

But human evolution goes on. A time arrived when it was no longer known in the Mysteries how the Sun-forces affected mankind. Knowledge concerning these forces was preserved longest among the medical workers in the Mysteries. For the forces which in his ordinary development give man freedom, and the possibility of making something out of himself—the Sun- or Christ-forces—live also under various conditions in certain plants and in other earthly beings and things, and reveal in these earthly things properties of healing.

Generally speaking, all sense of their connection with the sun was lost to humanity; and while for a considerable time the consciousness still remained that man is dependent on the Moon-forces, or Father-forces, all consciousness of his dependence—or rather his liberation by means of the Sun-forces—had long been lost. What to-day we call Nature-forces, almost the only ones we do speak of when discussing our conceptions of the world, are but Moon-forces that have become entirely abstract. But the Sun-forces were still known to One, even Jesus of Nazareth, the bearer of the Christ, who lived His life in accordance with them. He knew them because he was ordained to receive these forces into his own body as they streamed to earth from the sun—forces which men had only been able to come in touch with in the Ancient Mysteries when they looked up to the sun. This I explained in the last lecture. What was of greatest importance was this, that in the thirtieth year of His life a change took place in the body of Jesus of Nazareth similar to that change which in primeval times took place in everyone, only it was but the reflection (Schein), as it were, of the Spiritual sun that shone into these men, while now the original Lord of the Sun, the Christ himself, came down into human evolution and took up His abode in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This fact lies behind the Mystery of Golgotha as the supremest event (Urergebnis) affecting all earthly life.

You will realise the full connection of these things when we now consider how the festival of Easter, which in those days was an entirely human concern, was actually carried out in the Ancient Mysteries—the Festival of Easter was, in fact, an initiation. The ceremony progressed through three stages. The first requirement, before the neophyte could attain true knowledge, before he could be initiated, was that through all that came to him from the side of the Mysteries he should be made so humble that people to-day can hardly form an idea of this deep, inner humility. People imagine to-day that they have the appearance, as regards knowledge, of being exceedingly modest, while for those who can see into the matter they are really possessed by pride. When about to enter upon initiation a man has, in the first place, to feel convinced that he cannot consider himself to be a man at all, but says rather: I have first to become a man!

It cannot be said of people to-day that at any point in their lives they consider themselves not to be men. But this was the first demand made on them, that they should hold themselves not to be men and should address themselves as follows: I certainly was a man before I came down into an earthly body; in pre-earthly existence I was a man of soul and spirit. The Soul-Spirit then entered a physical body, which it had received from its parents.

It, then, not clothed itself with the physical body—that would be to express it incorrectly—but it permeated itself with this physical body (durchdrungen mit diesem physischen Leibe). Men have really no idea of the manner and means by which the Soul-Spirit, in the course of long ages (das Geistig-Seelische durchsetzt das Physische), permeates the physical, permeates the nerves and sense-system, permeates the rhythmic-system, the digestive-system, and the limbs of man. They have no idea of this. They know very well that they are able to perceive the physical world by means of their senses. But what is a man capable of when he has reached the point where he has permeated his physical body so profoundly with his soul and spirit nature that he considers his development to be complete, when he is a fully evolved, fully developed man. ... What is he then capable of? At present he can certainly see external objects, he can hear external sounds, perceive through his skin things warm or cold, smooth or rough: he can perceive things outwardly; but he cannot perceive inwardly. He cannot look into himself with his eyes; he can at most remove the skin from a dead body and think that he sees into it, but he does not do so really. It is childish to think, for instance, here before me is a house, it has windows but I cannot see through them, so I will take all kinds of instruments, and, if I am strong enough, smash the house down, but then I will have only a heap of broken bricks before me, and these ruins are all I see. This is what people do to-day. They flay, they dissect people, in order to learn about them; but by such means they learn nothing. It is not the man at all they learn to know by such methods. If it is desired really to know something of man, you must be able to turn your eyes inwards and view him exactly as we view him to-day when we direct our eyes to him outwardly, and in the same way you must hear inwardly with your ears. All these activities taken together—those of the eyes, the ears, the whole skin as organ of touch, the organs of smell, etc., all these were called in the Mysteries the door to man (das Tor zum Menschen).

Initiation depended principally upon a person becoming aware that he knew nothing at all of human nature (vom Menschen); therefore, as he had no self-consciousness of human nature, he could not be a man. He had first to learn to look inward through his senses as ordinarily he looked outward. This was the first stage or degree of initiation in the ancient Mysteries. As soon as the pupil learnt to look thus inwards, in that same moment he became conscious of his pre-earthly existence. At that moment he knew: I am now “in my soul and spirit.”

The ordinary man looks outwards; instead of this the pupil of the Mysteries learnt to look inwards. In this inward gazing he became aware of what had entered into him in his pre-earthly existence, what had passed into him through his eyes, his ears, his skin, and so on. He was aware of these things, and through this was also aware of his pre-earthly existence. At this stage he was told that he would learn to know what we call natural science.

When we study natural science to-day, how do we do it? We are led to observe the things of Nature, to describe them, and so on. But this is much the same as if I were to meet a man again whom I had known long ago, and someone were to insist: You have to forget everything you did in company with this man; on seeing him again you are not to recall the intercourse you had with him. It is unbelievable that responsible people would do such a thing as this! I can indeed believe that occasionally this might be agreeable.... but under such conditions life could not go on. But this is imposed on the man to-day simply through the laws of civilization. For he knew the kingdoms of Nature; he knew them from their spiritual side before he came down to earth. To-day he is told to forget all that he knew of the mineral, plant, and animal world before he came down to earth, whereas the ancient Initiates taught him about them in what was called the first stage of the Mysteries. The Initiate said: Look at this piece of quartz. ... And then he did everything he could that might enable the pupil to recall what he had known about quartz before he came down to earth, what he had known, say, of the lily, the rose, etc. What was thus imparted as knowledge of Nature was a remembrance, a re-cognition (wieder erkennen). And anyone who had learnt the teaching regarding Nature as a remembrance of what he had seen before he descended into earthly life was received into the second degree.

In the second degree the pupil learnt Music, which at that time was Architecture, Geometry, Surveying, etc. For in what did this second degree of initiation consist? It comprised all that a man perceived when he not only looked inwards into himself with his eyes, or listened inwardly with his ears, but when he actually entered into himself (in sich hineinsteigt). The neophyte seeking initiation then said to himself: Thou enterest now into the grotto of the human temple (Tempelgrotte). He now learnt to know this grotto of the human temple. This was that physical part of him which was permeated by the soul and spiritual forces which were man before he came down into earthly life. Into this he now entered. He was told that this hidden place had three chambers. The first was the chamber of Thought; there he learnt all that was connected with this. ... Verily seen from outside the head is small.... when a man enters and sees it from within it is as vast as the whole universe. Here he learnt to know his spiritual nature. This was the first chamber. The second chamber was that in which he learnt to know Feeling. The third chamber was where he learnt to know Will.

He then learnt how a man is organised according to his instruments of thought, feeling, and will; he learnt what was of value on earth. Knowledge of Nature was not only of value on earth; man had already acquired knowledge of Nature before he came down to earth. But here we must remember that houses are not built above in the spiritual world as they are here with the help of earthly architecture. Over there, there is music, but it is spiritual Melos. Earthly music is something projected into earthly air; it is a projection of heavenly music, but as experienced by men it is earthly. It is the same when we measure things here on earth. We measure earthly space; the art of measuring, geometry, or surveying is an earthly science. It was important that those seeking initiation in the second degree should be made to realize that all talk of knowledge gained by mere earthly means, unless connected with geometry, architecture, or the art of surveying, is illusory; that true natural science is a recollection of pre-earthly knowledge; and that geometry, architecture, music, and the science of measuring are sciences that have to be learnt here on earth.

Thus in the second degree of initiation a man descended into his own self and learnt to know the men of the three chambers in respect of the single earthly incarnation, as he would otherwise learn to know them from outside, without descending into their inner being.

In the third degree the pupil learnt to know men, not simply by sinking down into himself (wenn er nun nicht bloss in sich untertaucht), by getting to know himself as spiritual being, but when this spiritual part of him learnt further to know the body. Therefore in all the Ancient Mysteries this degree was known as the gate of death. Here he learnt how it is with a man when he lays aside his earthly body; only there is a difference between actual death and that experienced during initiation. Why this must be I will explain in the next lecture; at present I only mentioned the fact.

When man really dies he lays aside his physical body. He is no longer bound to it, nor does he follow any longer the forces of the earth, having been freed from them. But while still bound to his physical body, as was the case in olden times at initiation, he had to attain liberation from the body (which at death comes of itself), and had to maintain it for a certain time through his own inner power. The attainment of those strong powers by which a man is able to maintain his soul in freedom, apart from the body, was necessary to initiation. It is these that give him a higher knowledge concerning the things he can never perceive through his senses, never think through his understanding. They place him as man in the spiritual world as the physical body places him as man in the physical world. He had then advanced so far as to be able to realize what he was as man of soul and spirit, to know that he had been initiated while still in earthly life. From this time onwards the earth for the Initiate was as a star existing outside humanity (Von da ab war die Erde ein ausser dem Menschen befindlicher Stern für den Initiierten), and in the ancient Mysteries he had before all else to learn to live with the sun instead of with the earth. He knew what he had received from the sun, and how the Sun-forces worked in him.

This third degree that I have just described was followed by a fourth. It affected the man seeking initiation in the following way: When on earth a person eats vegetables or game, when he drinks various things, he knows that such things were outside him and that now they are within him. He breathes the air; at first it is outside, then within him, then outside again. He is so closely bound up with the forces of the earth that he bears within him earthly substances and forces which otherwise were outside him. It was clearly explained to those seeking initiation in ancient times: Before initiation thou art a bearer of Earth, of vegetables, game, pork, etc. But when once initiated in the third degree, and when all those things have been imparted to thee that can be imparted to one who is free of the body, thou art no longer a bearer (träger) of cabbage, pork, or veal, but thou then dost become a bearer of those things which the Sun-forces give to thee.

That which the Sun-forces give spiritually was called, in all the Mysteries, Christos. Therefore, he who had surmounted the first three degrees of initiation—though on earth he might feel himself to be a bearer of cabbages—knew that he was a bearer of the Sun-forces and that he was called a Christophoros. In nearly all the Ancient Mysteries this was the name for those who had entered the fourth degree.

In the third degree certain things had to be grasped; the Neophyte had principally to realize that, in moments of knowledge, desire according to the physical body must cease, that as regards his physical body he belonged to the earth, but that really the earth has only to do with the destruction of his physical body, not with its construction. If the man of those former ages had been addressed in the words of to-day, he would have had things explained somewhat as follows (the sense would certainly have been made clear to him, but to you I can only say these things in the language of to-day, not in that of those former times): If you would know the teaching concerning substances, how these unite and separate, you must look up to the spiritual forces that from out the cosmos permeate all substance. This you cannot do unless initiated. For this you must have been initiated in the fourth degree. You must be able to perceive with the forces appertaining to Sun-existence; you can then study chemistry.

Supposing that someone to-day, wishing to take a degree in chemistry or in pharmacy, had first to submit to the necessity of feeling as a cabbage feels with regard to the forces of the sun, how absurd this would seem! But this was a fact. It was made absolutely clear that with such forces as people have in life, and which are generally employed during life, only geometry, surveying, music, and architecture can be studied ... not chemistry. If people speak of studying chemistry to-day, they speak in an entirely external way. All talk of chemistry has been entirely external ever since the time when the ancient initiation-wisdom was lost. This is a fact. It is enough to drive to desperation those who really wish “to know,” when they have to learn modern official chemistry, for it is founded only on assertion, not on any inward understanding of the matter. If men were only unprejudiced they would acknowledge that something else is needed, that people must be able to understand or realize differently if they wish to study chemistry. It is the modern timidity regarding knowledge or realization (erkennen) that has been implanted in people that holds them back from such an impulse.

After this a man was ripe. When sufficiently ripe to become Astronomos, which was a still higher grade (for to learn something of the stars externally, through calculations and the like, was considered absolutely unreal), he knew that in the stars spiritual beings dwelt who can only be known when physical perception has been overcome, when geometry has also been overcome, when man actually lives in the universe (Weltenall) and learns the spiritual nature of the stars—he was then a “Risen One.” He could then see how the Moon-forces and the Sun-forces actually work within earthly humanity.

I must therefore endeavour to-day to help you to understand from two sides how Easter was experienced inwardly in the ancient Mysteries—how this Festival did not take place at any fixed season of the year but when a man attained a certain degree of development. Easter was then experienced by him as a resurrection of his soul and spirit-nature out of the physical body, as a rising into the spiritual universe (Weltenall). It was thus that those who still knew something of the wisdom of the Mysteries at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha regarded this Mystery. They said: What would have happened to mankind if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place? In olden times it was possible for man to be initiated into the secrets of the cosmos, for in quite ancient times he experienced a second birth naturally, as one might say, when he was about thirty years old. At that time at least there were still memories of this, and there was a science of the Mysteries which preserved in its traditions what an earlier age had experienced. All this had faded and been forgotten by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Mankind would have become entirely decadent, if the Power to which Initiates of the Mysteries rose when they became Christophoroi had not entered into One Jesus of Nazareth—so that it has remained on the earth ever since—and men, through Jesus Christ, have been able to unite themselves with it.

Thus what rises before our eyes to-day in the Festival of Easter had already formed a part of the history of the Mysteries. Men will only know the real meaning of Easter when they revive this ancient portion of the history of the Mysteries. They will only approach an understanding of the real meaning of Easter when they endeavour in some way at least to understand what men seeking initiation experienced in olden times. Such an Initiate said to himself: Through initiation I have become aware of how sun and moon work in me in their reciprocal relations to each other; I now know that I have been formed as physical man in a certain way; that I have eyes of a certain kind, a nose, a whole bodily form constructed within and without as it is; and the fact that this form is able to grow and continue to grow to-day through the nourishment it receives depends on the Moon-forces. All I require comes from them. That I am inwardly free, that I can be active as a free being within my bodily nature, that I can transform myself, take myself in hand, depends upon the Sun-forces, upon the Christ-forces. These I must stimulate, if I wish to achieve consciously by my labour what the Sun-forces accomplished in me under other conditions through a sort of natural necessity.

From this we can understand how man still looks up to Sun and Moon to-day and from their reciprocal constellations fixes the time of the Easter Festival. This method of reckoning is something that has remained from former times. People ask: When is the first Sunday following the first full moon after the Spring equinox? And they fix the Easter Festival of the year on the first Sunday after the full moon; indicating thereby that people see something in the structure, in the form of the Easter Festival, that comes from the cosmos and must accord with it. The thought of Easter must be grasped once more. It can only be understood when people look back to the content of the Ancient Mysteries, where man was first made aware of what took place when he looked into himself: the door of humanity! When he entered into himself, living inwardly in himself: the three-chambered inner man! When he made himself free: the Gate of Death! When he moved freely in the spiritual world: when he was a Christophoros.

The Mysteries themselves went back to a time when free human development had to find a place. And the time is now come when the Mysteries have to be found once more. They must be found again. People must realize consciously that preparations have to begin now, by which they can be found again.

Out of this consciousness the “Christmas Session” (Weihnachtstagung) was held, for it is an urgent necessity that a place should exist on the earth where Mysteries can once more be established. The Anthroposophical Society in its further development must provide the means for a renewal of the Mysteries. Your task, my dear friends, must be to co-operate towards this end, doing so out of the right consciousness. This demands that life be considered according to its three stages—according to the stage in which a man looks into the nature of men; according to the stage when he strives towards the inner being of men; according to the stage in which he is in that state of consciousness which otherwise he only experiences in the reality of external death.

As a remembrance of the lesson that has been given here to-day, let us take with us the following words, allowing them to work powerfully in our souls:—

Stand before the portals of the lives of men,
Behold on their lintels words of power.

Live in the inward souls of men,
Feel in this realm the beginning of worlds.

—otherwise world-beginning is not always perceived, but only what is in the world—

Ponder the earthly-end of man;
Find in it the Spirit's turning-point.

In these words you have the essence of to-day's lesson—

Steh' vor des Menschen Lebenspforte;
Schau an ihrer Stirne Weltenworte.

Leb' in des Menschen Seeleninnern;
Fühl' in seinem Kreise Welt beginnen.

Denk an des Menschen Erdenende;
Find' bei ihm die Geisteswende.

At the close of yesterday's exposition we indicated the intention to consider next the cardinal issue within the Christ impulse: the Death on the Cross and its significance. But before turning to a delineation of the death of Christ, and thus to the climax of this study cycle, we must discuss today the true meaning and significance of much that we find in the John Gospel itself, as well as its relation to what the other Gospels offer. In the last few days we have been endeavoring to comprehend the Christ impulse and to establish it as an actual event in human evolution by means of quite a different source: by clairvoyant reading of the akashic record; and in a sense we referred only to those passages in the Gospels which appear to confirm what clairvoyant research justifies us in stating as truths.

Today, in order to follow up our studies, we shall consider the John Gospel itself and characterize this important document of mankind from a certain aspect. We said yesterday that the theological research of our time, in as far as it is affected by materialism, can find no points of contact with this John Gospel, is unable to see its historical value; but regarded with the vision of spiritual science this Gospel proves to be one of the most marvelous documents possessed by the human race. It is not too much to say that not only as a religious document but—to use a profane expression—among all purely literary works in existence it is one of the greatest. Let us now approach it from this literary angle.

From the very first chapters—if rightly understood and if one knows what all lies concealed in the words—this Gospel of St. John shows a rounded beauty of style equal to any in the world, although a superficial study does not reveal this fact. What superficial observation discloses first is that in enumerating the miracles the writer of the John Gospel, whose back-ground we now know, mentions precisely seven up to the Lazarus event proper. (The significance of the number seven will be treated in the following lectures.) What were these seven signs?

1. The sign in connection with the Marriage in Cana in Galilee.

2. The sign given in the healing of the nobleman's son.

3. The sign given in the healing of the man who had lain sick for thirty-eight years by the Pool of Bethesda.

4. The sign given in the Feeding of the Five Thousand.

5. The sign given in the vision of Christ walking on the sea.

6. The sign given in the healing of the man born blind. And finally:

7. The greatest of the signs, the initiation of Lazarus, the transformation of Lazarus into the writer of the John Gospel.

These are the seven signs. But now we must ask ourselves, What about these signs, this question of miracles? If you listened attentively to a number of things that were told you in the foregoing lectures you will remember having heard that the state of human consciousness has kept altering throughout the entire course of evolution. We cast our gaze back to remote times and found that men did not issue from a merely animalistic stage of development, but from a form in which they possessed the power of clairvoyance as a congenital endowment. People of that time were clairvoyant, even though their consciousness still lacked the ability to say “I am”. The capacity for self-consciousness was something they had to acquire gradually, and for this they had to forfeit their old clairvoyance. In the future the time will come again when all men are clairvoyant, but without loss of self-consciousness, of the “I am”. Those are the three stages which humanity has in part passed through, in part still has ahead of it.

In Atlantis men still lived in a sort of dream consciousness, but this was clairvoyant. Then they gradually achieved self-consciousness, outer objective consciousness, in exchange for which, however, they gave up the old gift of dim clairvoyance. And finally, what man will have in the future is clairvoyant consciousness coupled with self-consciousness. Thus man traverses the path from an ancient dim clairvoyance through an opaque objective consciousness, finally ascending to conscious clairvoyance.

But in addition to consciousness, everything else about man has changed as well. The belief that conditions must always have been as they are today is due to nothing but human shortsightedness. Everything has evolved. Nothing has always been as it is today, not even men's relation to each other. You have already gathered from intimations in the last lectures that in older epochs—up to the time when the Christ impulse entered human evolution—the influence of soul upon soul was much stronger. Such was human disposition at that time. A man did not merely hear what was told him in externally audible words: in a certain way he could feel and know something that the other felt and thought vividly, livingly. Love meant something quite different from what it does today, albeit in those times it was largely a matter of blood ties. Nowadays it has taken on more of a psychic character, but it has lost its strength. Nor will it regain this until the Christ impulse shall have entered all human hearts. In olden times active love possessed at the same time a healing property, a powerful balm, for the soul of its recipient.

Coincident with the development of the intellect and of cleverness, qualities that came into being only gradually, these ancient direct influences of soul upon soul dwindled away. The gift of acting upon the other's soul, of causing one's own soul force to stream into it, was unquestionably peculiar to the older peoples; and you must therefore imagine the force that one soul could receive from another as much greater, the influence one soul could exert upon another as much stronger, than is the case today. The external historical documents may report nothing of all this, the tablets and monuments may not mention it; but clairvoyant study of the akashic record nevertheless discloses the fact that in olden times the healing of the sick, for example, was extensively accomplished through a psychic influence passing from the one to the other. And the soul possessed many other powers as well. Though today it sounds like a fairy tale, it is a fact that in those times a man's will, if he so desired and had specially trained himself for the purpose, had the power to act soothingly upon the growth of a plant, to accelerate or retard it. Today but scanty remnants of all this are left.
Human life, then, was very different at that time. No one would have been surprised—given the right mutual relationship—at the passing over of a psychic influence from one person to the other.

It must be kept in mind, however, that two or more are needed if the exercise of a psychic influence of that sort is to take effect. We could imagine the possibility of a man imbued with the power of Christ entering our midst nowadays; but those with the requisite faith in him would be very few in number, so that he would not be able to achieve all that can be accomplished by the influence of one soul upon another. For not only must the influence be exerted: someone must be present who is sufficiently developed to be affected by it. Remembering that formerly those who could receive such influences were more numerous, we should not be surprised to learn that for the healing of the sick there indeed existed the means by which psychic influences could take effect; but also, that influences which today can be transmitted only by mechanical means were at that time applied psychically.

We should keep in mind that the Christ event entered human evolution at a very special point in time. Only the very last remnants, so to say, of those soul currents that flowed from man to man were left as a heritage of the old Atlantean age. Humanity was about to descend ever deeper into matter, and the possibility for such psychic currents to be effective constantly diminished. That was the moment at which the Christ impulse had to enter, the impulse which in its nature could accomplish so very much for those who were still sufficiently receptive.

Those who are really familiar with evolution as it applied to mankind will therefore find it quite natural that the Christ Being, having once entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth in about the thirtieth year of His life, could unfold very special powers in this sheath, for the latter had been developing since time immemorial. We mentioned yesterday that this individuality of Jesus of Nazareth had in one former life been incarnated in ancient Persia, and then, passing through one incarnation after another, had continued to rise in its spiritual development. That is why the Christ could dwell in such a body, and why this body could be sacrificed to Him. This the Evangelists knew well, hence they presented the entire narrative in such a way as to be wholly comprehensible for spiritual research. Only, we must take everything in the Gospels literally—that is, we must first learn to read them. As has been said, the deeper meanings of the miracles we shall learn in due time; but here we can ask, for example, why, precisely in the first of the miracles, it is specially emphasized in dealing with the Marriage in Cana of Galilee that this took place in Cana “of Galilee”. Seek as you will, you can find in old Palestine within the radius then known no second Cana; and in such a case it would seem superfluous to specify the locality. Why, then, does the Evangelist tell us that this miracle occurred in Cana "of Galilee"? Because the important point to be stressed was that something occurred which had to take place in Galilee. It means that nowhere else but in Galilee could Christ have found just those people whose presence was indispensable. As I said, an influence implies not only the one who exerts it, but the others as well—those who are appropriately fitted to receive it. Christ's first appearance would not have been possible within the Jewish community proper, but it was possible in Galilee with its mixture of many different tribes and groups. Just because members of so many peoples from various parts of the world were assembled in one spot, there was far less blood relationship, and above all, far less faith in it, than in Judea, in the narrow circle of the Hebrew people. Galilee was a heterogenous racial mixture.

But what was it to which Christ, in view of His impulse, felt Himself particularly called? We have said that one of His most significant utterances was,

Before Abraham was, was the I am

;

and the other,

I and the Father are one

.

By this He meant: among those who cling to the old forms of life the ego is entrenched in a system of blood relationships. The words I and Father Abraham are one aroused a very special feeling in the true confessor of the Old Testament, a feeling nowadays very difficult to share. What a man calls his own self, circumscribed by birth and death, he sees as transitory. But one who had true faith in the Old Testament, who was influenced by the widespread teachings of that time, asserted—not allegorically, but as a fact: As regards myself I am isolated; but I am a member of a great organism, of a great living whole reaching back to Father Abraham. Just as my finger can remain a living member only as long as it is part of my body, so my memory is contingent upon my feeling myself a member of the great folk organism that goes back to Father Abraham. I am part of the great complex, exactly as my finger is part of my body. Cut off my finger and it ceases to be a finger: it is safe only as long as it is part of my hand, my hand part of my arm, and my arm part of my body; it ceases to have meaning if severed from my hand. And in like manner, I myself have meaning only when I feel myself a member of all the generations through which the blood flows down from Father Abraham. Then I feel sheltered. My individual ego is transient and fleeting, but not so this whole great folk organism way back to Father Abraham. When I sense and feel myself wholly embraced by it I conquer my temporally transient ego: I am sheltered in one great ego, the ego of my people that has come down to me from Father Abraham through the blood of the generations.

That represents the conviction of the Old Testament adherents: all the great events narrated in the Old Testament, everything that today seems miraculous, occurred through the power of the inner experience contained in the words, I and Father Abraham are one. But the time came when men were destined to relinquish this state of consciousness for another, hence it gradually disappeared. That is why Christ could not address those who, on the one hand, had lost the magic power of influencing by means of blood ties, and on the other, still believed only in the common bond with Father Abraham. Clearly, among these Christ could not find the faith necessary for enabling His soul to flow actively into other souls; and for this purpose He had to turn to those who, owing to their mixed blood, no longer clung to this old belief: to the Galileans. That is where His mission had to commence. Even though the old state of consciousness was generally on the wane, still He found in Galilee a medley of peoples that stood at the beginning of the era in which blood became mixed. From all quarters tribes assembled here that had previously been governed solely by the forces of the old blood ties. They were on the point of finding the transition. They vividly retained the feeling that their fathers were still endowed with the old consciousness states, that they possessed the magic powers which act from soul to soul. Among these people Christ could inaugurate His new mission, which consisted in endowing man with an ego consciousness no longer bound to blood relationship; an ego consciousness which could say, It is within myself that I shall find the connection with the spiritual Father Who, instead of letting His blood flow down through the generations, radiates His spiritual force into each individual soul. The ego which is within me, and which is in direct communion with the spiritual Father, was before Abraham was. It is for me, then, to infuse into this ego a force that will be strengthened through my being aware of my connection with the spiritual Father force of the world. I and the Father are one. No longer I and Father Abraham—that is, a physical ancestor.

Such were the people to whom Christ turned, people who had arrived at the point of understanding this, people who, having broken away from the blood ties by intermarriage, needed to find the strong force—not in consanguinity, but in the individual soul: the force that can lead men gradually to express the spiritual in the physical.—Do not ask, Why do we not see things happening today as they happened then? Aside from the fact that he who has the will to see them can see them, we must remember that men have emerged from that state of consciousness and descended into the world of matter; that the period in question represented the boundary line; and that Christ used the last representatives of the previous epoch of human evolution in whom to demonstrate the power of spirit over matter. The signs that were done while the old state of consciousness was still present, but disappearing, were intended as an example and a symbol—a symbol of faith.

Now let us turn to this Marriage in Cana of Galilee itself. If I were to develop in detail all the implications indicated in the John Gospel, in the entire Gospel content, fourteen lectures would certainly not suffice: several years would be needed. But such a literal development of the subject would only serve to confirm what I can suggest in brief elucidations.

The first thing we are told in connection with this first sign is:

There was a marriage in Cana of Galilee

.

Here we must stop to realize that the John Gospel contains not one word that has not a definite meaning. Well, then: why a marriage? Because a marriage brings about on a single occasion what the Christ mission effects with such far-reaching results: it brings people together. And then, a marriage “in Galilee”? It was in Galilee that the ancient blood ties were severed, that mutually alien bloods came to mingle. Now, Christ's task was intimately connected with this mixing of blood, so we are here dealing with intermarriages having the object of creating progeny among people who are no longer related by blood.

What I am now about to say will seem very strange to you. What would people have felt in such a case in very old times when there still prevailed the close or endogamous marriage, as one is inclined to call it in the spiritual-scientific sense? We must realize that the transformation of this close marriage into a distant or exogamous marriage is very much a part of human evolution, and that what I have already said explains what an endogamous marriage means. Among all people of ancient times it was contrary to law to marry outside of the tribe, away from consanguinity. People related by blood, members of the same tribe, intermarried; and this custom of marrying within the tribe, within blood relationship, resulted in the marvel of engendering intense magical force. This can be verified at any time by means of spiritual-scientific research. The descendants of a blood-related tribe possessed, as a consequence of such intermarriage of relatives, magical powers that permitted one soul to act upon another.

Let us imagine that in ancient times we had been asked to attend a wedding, and that the customary drink—in this case, wine—had given out. What would have happened? Provided the right relations existed among the blood-related members of this wedding party, it would have been possible, through the magical power of love arising out of consanguinity, for the water—or whatever was offered later in place of wine—to be sensed as wine as a result of the psychic influence of the people present. Wine is what they would have been drinking if the right magical influence had been exerted by the one person on the rest. Do not tell me this wine would still have been but water! A sensible person would reply to that: For the human being, things are of the nature in which they communicate themselves to his organism: they are what they become for him, not what they look like. I believe that even today many a wine lover would like water if, by means of some influence or other, it appeared to be changed into wine; that is, if it tasted like wine and produced the same effect in his organism. Nothing else is necessary than that a man should take water for wine.—What, then, was required in olden times to render possible such a sign as that of the water in the vessels becoming wine when it was drunk? The magical power deriving from blood relationship, that is what was required. And furthermore, those assembled at the Marriage in Cana of Galilee possessed the psychic capacity for sensing that sort of thing. Only, a transition had to be brought about.

The story continues in the John Gospel:

And the mother of Jesus was there: and both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage.

And since they lacked wine, the mother of Jesus drew attention to this, and said to Him:

They have no wine.

I said that a transition must be effected if such an event is to take place: the psychic force had to be assisted by something. By what, then? Here we come to the utterance which, as it is usually translated, is really a blasphemy; for I believe it will strike any sensitive person as offensive when, to the statement “they have no wine”, Jesus replies: “Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.” From any angle it is impossible to accept that in a document of this sort. Imagine the ideal of love, as the Gospels describe the relations between Jesus of Nazareth and His mother, and then try to imagine Him using the expression, "Woman, what have I to do with thee"! It is not necessary to say more: the rest must be felt. But the point is, these words are not in the text. Examine this passage in the John Gospel and then look up the Greek text. This contains nothing more than the words employed by Jesus of Nazareth in indicating a certain event:

Woman, this passeth over from me unto thee.

What He referred to was that subtle, intimate force which passed from soul to soul, from Him to His mother; and that is what He needed at this moment. Greater signs He was as yet unable to perform: for this the time must gradually ripen. Therefore He says: My time—the time when I shall work through my own force—is not yet come.—For the present, that magnetic psychic union between the soul of Jesus of Nazareth and His mother was still indispensable.

“Woman, this now passeth over from me unto thee.” Otherwise—well, after an utterance like “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” why would she turn to the servants and say, “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it”? She had to possess the old forces of which nowadays people can have no conception; and she knew that He referred to the blood tie between them, to the bond that should then pass over into the others. Then she knew that something like an invisible spiritual force held sway, capable of effectuating something.—And here let me beg you to read the Gospel—really to read it. I ask how anyone can come to terms with the Gospel who believes that something happened at that wedding—I really don't know what—that six ordinary jars stood there “for the purifying of the Jews”, as we are told; and that according to ordinary observation—without reference to anything such as we have just been considering—the water turned into wine. How could such a thing have come about externally?

What is the meaning of this miracle? And what is the belief in it held by him who stands before you—in fact, the only faith anybody can have in a miracle? Can it be that here one substance was transformed into another for the benefit of those present? No ordinary interpretation will get us far.—We must assume that the jars which stood there contained no water, for nothing is said about their being emptied. But it says they were filled, so if they had been emptied and then refilled—assuming the water had really been changed to wine as by a sleight of hand trick—one would really have to believe that the water which had previously been in the jars had been turned into wine. You see, this does not help: nothing squares.

We must understand that the jars must obviously have been empty, because a special significance attached to the filling of them. “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it,” the mother had told the servants. What sort of water did Christ need? He needed water fresh from the sources of nature; and that is why it was necessary to specify that the water had just been drawn. The only water suitable for Christ's purpose was such as had not yet lost the inner forces that are inherent in any element so long as it is united with nature. As has been said, the John Gospel contains not one word that is not fraught with deep meaning. Freshly drawn water had to be used because Christ is the Being Who had but recently approached the earth and become associated with the forces that work in the earth itself. Now, when the living forces of the water work, in turn, with “that which flows from me unto thee”, it becomes possible for the event described in the Gospel to take place. The governor of the feast is called, and he is under the impression that something unusual has occurred. He does not know what this was—it is specifically stated that he had not seen what happened—only the servants had seen it; but under the influence of what has taken place he now takes the water for wine. That is stated clearly and distinctly, so we know that through psychic force even an outer element—that is, the physical component of the human body—was affected.

And what did the mother of Jesus of Nazareth herself have to possess in order that at this moment her faith might be sufficiently great to produce such an effect? She needed just what she did indeed possess: the realization that He Who was called her son had become the Spirit of the Earth. Then her strong force combined with His, with that which acted from Him upon her, developed so mighty an influence as to produce the effect described.

Thus we have shown, through the whole constellation of conditions surrounding this first sign, how the unison of souls which results from blood ties produces an effect even in the physical world. It was the first sign, and the Christ force is shown at its minimum: it still needed the intensification resulting from contact with the mother's psychic forces, as well as the additional strength residing in certain forces of nature that remained intact in the freshly drawn water. The active force of the Christ Being is here shown at its least; but what is stressed as especially important is its influence upon the other soul and its calling forth from it an activity which the latter is fitted to perform. The essential point is that the Christ force had the power to render the other soul capable of exerting influences: it engendered in the wedding guests as well the ability to taste the water as wine.—But every real force increases through its own exercise, and the second time it is called upon it is already greater. Just as any ordinary force increases with exercise, so is especially a spiritual force strengthened when it has once been successfully applied.

The second of the signs, as you know from the John Gospel, is the healing of the nobleman's son. By what means was he healed? Here again the right answer will be found only by reading the Gospel in the right way and by concentrating on the crucial words of the chapter in question. In the fiftieth verse of the fourth chapter, after the nobleman had told Jesus of Nazareth his story of distress, we read:

Jesus saith unto him, Go thy way, thy son liveth.
And the man believed the word that Jesus had spoken
unto him, and he went his way.

Again we have two souls in accord, the soul of the Christ and that of the boy's father. And when Christ said, Go thy way, thy son liveth, what effect did this have? It enkindled in the other soul the force to believe all that Christ's words implied. These two forces worked together. Christ's utterance had the power so to kindle the other soul that the nobleman believed. Had he not believed, his son would not have recovered. That is the way one force acts upon another: two are needed. And already here we find a greater measure of the Christ force. At the Marriage in Cana it still required the support of the mother's force in order to function at all. Now it has progressed to the point of being able to impart the kindling word to the nobleman's soul. We behold an intensification of the Christ force.

Passing to the third sign, the healing at the Pool of Bethesda of the man who had lain sick for thirty-eight years, we must again seek the most important words that throw light on the whole subject. They are these:

Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.

Speaking of his being forced to remain prone, the sick man had previously said that he could not move:

Sir, I have no man, when the water is troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another steppeth down before me.

But Christ spoke to him—and it is important that it was on the Sabbath, a day of general rejoicing and great brotherly love—clothing His injunction in the words, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk. This utterance we must take in conjunction with the other equally important one in which He tells him:

Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee.

What does that mean? It means that there was a connection between the man's sickness that had persisted for thirty-eight years, and his sin. We need not enquire at the moment whether the sin had been committed in this life or in a former one. The point is that Christ infused into the other's soul the force to accomplish something that reached right down into his psycho-moral nature. Here again we see an intensification of the Christ force. Previously, all that was involved was something intended to produce only a physical effect; but here it is a question of a sickness of which Christ Himself said that it had to do with the man's sin. At this moment Christ was able to intervene in the sick man's very soul. The previous sign still required the presence of the boy's father, but here the Christ force acts directly on the sick man's soul.

A special magic is lent this event by reason of its having been enacted on the Sabbath. Present-day man no longer has any feeling for such things, but the fact that this happened on the Sabbath meant something to a believer in the Old Testament: it was something out of the ordinary; hence the reason why the Jews were so indignant at the sick man was that he carried his bed on the Sabbath. That is an extraordinarily significant detail—people should learn to think when they read the Gospels. They should not consider it a matter of course that the sick man could be cured, that one now walked who for thirty-eight years had not been able to walk. What they should do is ponder a passage such as the following:

The Jews therefore said unto him that was cured, it is the sabbath day: it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed.

What struck them was not that the man had been cured, but that he carried his bed on the Sabbath.

So it was an integral part of the healing of this sick man that the whole scene should play on the hallowed day. Christ Himself harbored the thought, If the Sabbath is indeed to be dedicated to God, the souls of men must enjoy special strength on this day by virtue of the divine force.—And it was by means of this force that He worked upon the man before Him; that is, it was transmitted to the sick man's own soul. Hitherto the latter had not found in his soul the force that would overcome the consequences of his sin, but now he has it as an effect of the Christ force. Another intensification.—As I have said, the essential nature of the miracles will be dealt with later, and for the moment we will pass on.

The fourth sign is the Feeding of the Five Thousand. Again seeking the most significant passage, we must bear in mind that an event of this sort should not be viewed in the light of present-day consciousness. Had those who wrote about Christ at the time the John Gospel was written believed what our materialistic age believes today, their narratives would have been very different, for quite other things would have struck them as important. In this case they were not particularly surprised even at the phenomenon of five thousand being fed from so small a supply; but what is most important and specially emphasized is the following passage:

And Jesus took the loaves; and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down; and likewise of the fishes as much as they would.

Just what is it that Christ Jesus does here? In order to bring about what was to take place He makes use of the souls of His disciples, of those who had been with Him and had by degrees matured to the level of His stature. They are a part of the procedure. They surround Him; and in their souls He can now evoke the power of charity: His force flows forth into that of the disciples. Of the manner in which this event could take place we will speak later, but here we must again observe an increase in the Christ force. At the previous sign He infused His force into the man who had lain sick for thirty-eight years, whereas here it acts upon the force of His disciples' souls. What is active here is the intensification of forces that proceeds from the soul of the master to the souls of the disciples. The force has expanded from the one soul to the souls of others: it has grown.

Already at this point, then, there dwells in the disciples' souls the same principle that dwells in the soul of Christ. Anyone inclined to ask what happens as a result of such an influence should observe the facts, should consider what actually occurred when Christ's powerful force acted not alone but kindled the force in other souls, so that it then worked on. There are none today with such living faith: they may believe theoretically, but not with sufficient strength. But not until they do so will they be able to observe what occurred there. Spiritual research knows very well what occurred.

So we observe a step-by-step increase of the Christ force.—The fifth sign, told in the same chapter, begins:

And when even was now come, his disciples went down unto the sea, and entered into a ship, and went over the sea toward Capernaum. And it was now dark, and Jesus was not come to them. And the sea arose by reason of a great wind that blew. So when they had rowed about five and twenty or thirty furlongs, they see Jesus walking on the sea, and drawing nigh unto the ship: and they were afraid.

Modern publishers of the Gospels assign to this chapter the highly superfluous title, “Jesus walks on the sea”—as though that were stated anywhere in this chapter! Where does it say, “Jesus walks on the sea”? It says, “The disciples saw Jesus walking on the sea.” That is the point. The Gospels must be taken literally. It is simply a case of the Christ force having again increased in strength. So powerful had it become as a natural result of its exercise in the previous deeds that not only could it now act from one soul upon another—not only could the soul of Christ communicate itself, in its force, to other souls—but the Christ could live in His own form before the soul of another who was ripe for it.

The event, then, occurred as follows: Someone who is absent possesses so great a force that it acts upon men at a distance, far away. But the influence of the Christ force is now so powerful that it does more than set free a force in the disciples, as had been the case with those who had sat with Him on the mountain: there the force had merely passed over into the disciples in order that the miracle might be performed. Now, although their physical sight could not reach the Christ, they had the power to see Him, to behold His very form. Christ could become visible at a distance to those with whose souls His own had united. His own form is now sufficiently advanced to be seen spiritually. At the moment when the possibility of physical vision disappeared, there arose in the disciples all the more intensely the ability to see spiritually—and they saw the Christ. But the nature of this seeing at a distance is such that the image of the object in question appears in the immediate vicinity.—Again an increase of the Christ power.

The next sign is the healing of the man born blind; and this narrative, as it appears in the John Gospel, is again particularly distorted. Doubtless you have often read the story:

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did this sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

And then He healed him.

We need only ask, could any Christian attitude interpret the matter as follows? Here is a man born blind; his blindness is not a result of his parents' sin, nor of his own; but he was rendered blind by God in order that Christ might come and perform a miracle for the glory of God. In other words, in order that a miraculous act might be ascribed to God, God had first to make the man blind.

The original passage was simply not read correctly. It does not say at all that “the works of God should be made manifest in him”. If we would understand this miracle we must examine the old usage of the word “God”. You can do this most readily by turning to another chapter in which Christ is positively accused of asserting of himself that He and God were one. How does He reply?

Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are Gods?

What Christ meant by this answer was that in the innermost soul of man there is the potential nucleus of a God: something divine. How often have we not pointed out that the fourth principle of the human being is the potential human capacity for the divine! “Ye are Gods.” That is, something divine dwells in you. It is not the human being but something different, not the person of a man as he lives on earth between birth and death; and it is different also from what man inherits from his parents. Whence derives this element of divinity, this human individuality? It passes through repeated earth lives from incarnation to incarnation: it comes over from an earlier earth life, from a previous incarnation. Hence we read, not the man's parents have sinned, nor has his own personality—the personality one ordinarily addresses as “I”; but in a previous incarnation he created the cause of his blindness in this life. He became blind because out of a former life the works of the God within him revealed themselves in his blindness. Christ Jesus here points clearly and distinctly to karma, the law of cause and effect.

What principle in man had to be worked upon if this kind of sickness was to be healed? Not upon what lives as a transitory ego between birth and death: the forces must penetrate deeper, must enter the ego that continues from one life to another. Again the Christ force has increased. Hitherto we have seen it influencing only what is directly before it; now it acts upon the principle that survives human life between birth and death, that continues from life to life. Christ feels Himself the representative of the I Am. As He pours His force into the I Am—as thus the exalted God of Christ communicates Himself to the God in man—the blind man receives the force enabling him to heal himself from within. Now Christ has penetrated to the innermost being of the soul. His force has acted upon the eternal individuality of the sick man and strengthened it by causing His own force to appear in this individuality, thereby influencing even the consequences of former incarnations.

What intensification still remains for the Christ force to achieve? None but the ability to approach another and awaken in him the capacity for enkindling the Christ impulse in himself, so that his whole being is saturated with it and he becomes another, a Christ-permeated man. And that is what occurred in the Raising of Lazarus, where we find still another increase in the Christ force. It has progressed step by step throughout.

Where else in the world could you find a lyrical document of such glorious composition? No other author has mastered composition on such a plane. Who would not bow down in reverence when reading the marvellous step-wise upbuilding in the narrative of these events! Even contemplating the John Gospel only as an artistic composition we cannot but feel deep reverence. It all grows step by step and rises steadily.

One point remains to be elucidated. We have pointed out a number of isolated features tending to show the intensification in the sequence of signs, of miracles; but the narrative embraces a great deal in between, and we must examine the organization of the whole. Tomorrow it will be our task to show that, in addition to the admirable intensification in the miracles, there is definite purpose in the way all the connecting links are embodied: we realize that these could not possibly have been filled in better than was done by the writer of the John Gospel. Today we have considered its artistic composition and found it unthinkable that a work of art could be more perfectly or beautifully composed than is the John Gospel up to the description of the Raising of Lazarus; but only one who can read aright and knows what is essential senses its great and mighty meaning. It is the mission of anthroposophy to bring this meaning before our souls. But this John Gospel contains more. Our expositions of it will be followed by others imbued with a wisdom loftier than ours; but this wisdom will in turn serve to find fresh truths, just as during the past seven years our wisdom has served to find what cannot be found without anthroposophy.

Our lecture to-day will consist of a kind of summing up of all we have heard in the course of the various lectures given here this winter, which may be taken as a continuation of the lectures on St. Luke's and St. Matthew's Gospels and of what was given here with reference to the lectures on St. John's Gospel which I gave in Stockholm. From the way in which these lectures were given, it will be clear that there never was any question in a narrow sense of explaining the Gospels, but rather that from the truths which in the first place are truths in themselves and as such can be found in the Gospels if rightly understood, light can be thrown in different ways upon other riddles of life.

When we go back beyond the founding of Christianity, we find two different kinds of Initiation: that of the North, described in more detail in the above-mentioned Stockholm Lectures, and that of the South, the chief characteristic of which is its connection with the Egyptian methods of Initiation. In the world of the ancients there were two different methods by which they could penetrate into the Spiritual world. In old Egypt a candidate for initiation had to descend into the depths of his own soul, beyond all that plays its part in the ordinary soul-life, as thinking, feeling and willing, and the like. There he found that from which the soul itself came forth: the divine Spiritual life of the world. A descent beneath those regions of the soul which are illuminated and permeated by the Ego, was the essential point in the Egyptian, or indeed, in any southern Initiation. In the Northern Initiation, on the other hand, the object striven for was that man should come out of himself, and expand into the phenomena of the world in a state of ecstasy. This was especially the case in the Germanic Druidic Mysteries and those of the Trotten. We heard how these two kinds of Initiation were combined in one stream, in what we call the Christian Initiation, and how this represented a higher unity combining the ecstatic Initiation of the North with the mystical contraction of the South. This gives an indication of a deeper foundation of cosmic Mysteries, permeating all existence. In reality this is in itself as great and mighty a fact as the fusion of the two different forms of Initiation of ancient times into the one single form of Christian Initiation; it is an example of a great and still more comprehensive law permeating all human existence, and also interwoven in the existence of all the outer world-phenomena, in so far as these are known to man. Everywhere we find ourselves confronted by opposites, by two parts of a duality. The Northern and Southern initiations offer one example of two opposite sides—polarities, as we might call them—that confront us in the life of the world. The other, the Christian initiation—in which these two forms of initiation flow together and as it were celebrate a Spiritual marriage—is an example of how opposites, dualities of any sort, reunite. This takes place without cessation; unities are always separating into dualities for the purpose of furthering evolution, while dualities unite again, and once more form unities. We can point externally to one great and mighty fact, extending beyond human evolution, which is an example of this division of unity into a duality, and of the streaming back of the two into one.

We have often thrown light on the Lemurian Epoch, which experienced, among other things, that great fact in the evolution of the world, the separation of the Moon from our Earth. That epoch also saw the first beginnings of that which in the present day sense of man's development, we may call the two opposites: man and woman; whereas in the ages preceding that of Lemuria we should only find unity of sex. There was an original unity, which separated into man and woman. We have already indicated, moreover, that in a future age the two sexes will once more become one, that the duality will again become a unity, a unity will come forth from a duality. That is the external indication of a far-reaching series of facts connected with the relation of two to one, or one to two.

What we thus meet with in the development of mankind is actually the expression, the image, of a still greater cosmic polarity rooted in a unity; greater than the example in our present-world life, of the two that in a distant future will be fused into one. It is necessary that we should take every one of the thoughts given us by Spiritual Science in its full depths, not allowing ourselves to form a habit of taking such thoughts in the same superficial way as other thoughts and conceptions which prevail in the world to-day, and which our present civilisation in its hasty and superficial triviality accepts. The thoughts of Spiritual Science must be taken as earnestly as possible. Therefore such a thought as that often spoken of and which indeed underlies all our teaching—that man as a little world, as a microcosm, is born out of the Macrocosm, the great world—must not simply be taken as an abstract thought, for in its content it is manifold and infinite. Above all, we must realise that the world contains more depth than is supposed; and that even when we have grasped a polarity or a truth in one of its aspects, that does not by any means signify that we know the last truth about it; rather must we patiently wait and observe, so that when we know one side of a thing, we should try to learn what refers to the other side of it.

Man is born out of the whole Cosmos; he must look up it to as to his Father-Mother, of whom he himself is an image. Yes, man is an image of the whole world with which he is acquainted, there is nothing in the being of man which does not in some way relate to what can be found in the great Cosmos. If we compare man, as seen to-day in the light of Spiritual Science, with the human forms of early ages, we find among others one characteristic feature of immense importance for the understanding of the nature of man. This sign can teach every one of us that, as regards what we have known about the world, the fact that some things that have been said are true, is not of sole importance; there is something else besides, something very different. When a man has proved the truth of a thing, he has not even then told us what is of greatest importance in it. For example, there is much truth in what a trivial natural scientist will tell about the resemblance between man and the higher mammals. It is an indisputable truth that man has the same number of bones and muscles, and so on. But after this has been proved, the last word on the subject has not been said. Man must learn, through the deepening and inwardness of Spiritual Science, to acquire a feeling for the value of a particular truth, to sense whether or no it is important and essential for the elucidation of a matter. People come along to-day and speaking from their trivial consciousness, keep on assuring us of the truth of their assertions. We have no wish to contradict them. But the point is, of what value are they for the understanding of the world? Now there is a certain fact—which is undeniably true, and with which everyone is acquainted, because we meet with it over and over again every day—the value of which, in its significance to man should be realised and felt in the right way. That is, the fact that man stands and walks upright and can gaze out into space around him. Man alone is capable of that! For we must say that even though the apes look as though they might possess this power, they have somehow missed it, for they cannot walk upright. Man is the only being who has achieved this, and who has succeeded in raising his countenance freely into the space around him. This fact is immeasurably more important than all those that a trivial Natural Science tells us as to the position occupied by man among the animals. What science says is true, but this is of much greater importance. If we wish to feel the force of this, we must make ourselves acquainted with the reason why man is a being that walks upright, a being certainly still bound to the earth, but one who, through his mental outlook and even through his sense-perceptions, raised himself into an upright position in space. The reason is that there is a certain polarity, a duality in the Cosmos, which corresponds to another duality in man. We can point to a duality in the universe and to a duality in man, as two opposites, existing in the microcosm and the macrocosm. The one alluded to in the macrocosm, in the great world, is that of the Sun to the Earth; and the same polarity that exists between Sun and Earth exists also in man. It is that between his head and his hands and feet; between his head and his limbs. As time goes on these things will be gone into more fully, but we must in the first place make ourselves acquainted with them and learn to feel that in a certain respect the head and limbs of man bear the same relation to each other as the Sun does to the Earth in our solar System. There are, in fact, in our earth those forces which in the course of the ages have brought about the whole form and movement of our hands and feet through certain mysterious forces which bind man to the Earth; while the forces which have lifted his countenance up in space, and which have transformed him from a being which gazes on to the earth to one who can look out into the infinite distances of cosmic space,—these forces have their seat in the Sun. Anyone who really has the right feeling will have the same impression when contemplating the self-evident polarity between man's head and his limbs, as he will if he turns his attention to the polarity between the Sun and Earth. This polarity will some day become a unity in the life of man, just as the Cosmic polarity will do.

Even as the Sun and Earth were once a single being which later divided into a duality, so will they some day be re-united; and the polarity in man between head and limbs will also some day become unity, difficult to imagine as it may seem to the man of to-day, who is not accustomed to such concepts.

We have thus pointed to a polarity in man and to its correspondence in the universe. There are, however, other polarities in man, which also have their corresponding counterparts in the universe. As regards the polarity between the head and limbs, all human beings on the earth are alike. It exists equally in man and woman. In this respect there is no difference between them; for every other polarity, for example that in the configuration of the soul, is not affected by this. If there were no other polarity but that existing between the microcosm and macrocosm, man and woman would be alike, but as it is they form another polarity in the being of man. Now we may ask: can we not also find a polarity in the universe corresponding to that between man and woman in human life? That can be found too. But before we are able to look for it we must make ourselves to some slight extent acquainted, in an occult sense, with the polarity between man and woman. In so doing we must not fall into the error of our materialistic age, which applies the polarity between man and woman—taking it simply as a question of sex—to the whole universe. Not only is that a trivial thing to do, but our learned men are taking a liberty when they consider that what is found in one domain is applicable to every other.

The corresponding polarity in the universe to that existing on our earth between man and woman cannot be called male and female. That would be nonsense. We must investigate the occult foundations of this other polarity. The polarity between male and female in our earthly evolution does not, of course, apply to the ‘human being.’ The human being as such is the same in both man and woman. When we speak of man and woman we only refer to the configuration of their physical and etheric bodies. This has nothing to do with the inner being of man; so that we cannot, in an occult sense, speak as our materialistic age does. A man and woman each possesses an astral body and an ego, but the ordinary perception knows nothing of that which makes a man or woman a human being, it can only speak of them as it sees them. We are not now speaking of the human being as such in man or woman, but of what constitutes a man or a woman, which is merely their outer sheaths. This must be thoroughly understood; for if what is about to be said were to be applied to the human being as such, it would be completely wrong. The polarity between man and woman within the above-named limits is as follows:—

In primeval ages the external human form was totally different. The present human forms—male and female—have gradually evolved out of an earlier single form, which had not yet divided into two. There was formerly a unity, where now there is a polarity, between man and woman. Now we know too, that the earlier uni-form was of a finer, more spiritual kind. Only in the course of ages did man develop a dense material form. When we look back not only do we find uni-form, but one which was more spiritual than the human form to-day. We have a primeval human being neither man nor woman, unity as yet undivided, and finer, more etheric, more spiritual than the later and more material human being, now separated into man and woman. What was the cause of the original unity having later developed into Man and Woman? This cause came about because, when the unity became a duality, the woman formed a physical body for herself which, if we may say such a thing, did not completely pass from the earlier form into the normal material form. The body of woman remained at a more spiritual stage, it did not fully descend into the material. It has certainly become dense and material, but at the same time it has retained an earlier, more spiritual form. Thus a spiritual stage has become material. The body of woman has, as it were, retained an earlier, more spiritual form, which has not descended completely into matter. Though it has become material, it has not done so as regards its form, for it still retains the form the human being originally possessed. Hence we may say: Woman is a manifestation of an earlier formation which was intended to be Spiritual and which, as seen to-day, is actually false, a maya, an illusion. If we accept the idea of a certain point in evolution when a spring-forward was made and when matter was crystallised, we can say: -the woman did not press forward as far as that point, she crystallised an earlier form. To one who can really perceive the facts of life, or who learns them through imaginative cognition, a woman's body is a somewhat truer imprint of the Spiritual behind it only as far as the head and limbs are concerned, that is to say, that her head and limbs alone express in their material appearance, something of a resemblance to their spiritual counterpart. The Spiritual behind the material form does not look like that, because the latter is not a true form.

Thus the saying that the world is ‘Maya’ can be applied to every region of life. It is very easy simply to state that ‘the world is Maya,’ but a man cannot grasp its meaning, if he does not go seriously into it, inquiring: ‘In how far are forms illusion?’ Some are more so and others less. There are those which at any rate approximately do in their outer semblance express the Spiritual behind them; these are the head and limbs. Others there are which are completely wrong and out of drawing; to these belong the rest of the human body, which is quite out of drawing. When the world understands these things it will no longer speak as foolishly as it does to-day, for it will then see that a certain deep, yet more delicate artistic sense tells us that the female form, with the exception of the head and limbs, is out of drawing, and if it is to be artistically represented the defects must be corrected. In better and more artistic times this was actually done, for no one who really has an eye for form can fail to observe that in the Venus of Milo the form has to a certain extent been corrected; but this as a rule is not noticed.

In this way we have divided the human being into two parts, consisting of those members of the body which are less of an illusion and those others that are more so and quite out of drawing. This does not apply to woman alone; but where a man is concerned the whole thing is reversed. He is the opposite pole. Just as the female form did not descend so far as the normal point necessary for rightly expressing the spirit in matter but crystallised at an earlier stage, so the male body on the other hand sprang just as far beyond that normal point as the female form stopped short of it. Thus the male body descended more deeply than the normal into materiality, and manifests this in its outer form. It would have quite a different appearance if it had not sprung beyond the middle point. Only as regards the head and limbs does the human body even approximately correspond to truth. As regards the rest of its form we must say that the female body, having reached a certain point, remained at a standstill; it consolidated before the waves of material existence broke over it; hence it manifest quite a different form from that which we should have seen if it had but waited till it had come in contact with material life before crystallising. The male body on the other hand plunged too deeply down and is just as greatly out-of-drawing as that of woman. Thus the woman's body manifests a distorted form in the Spiritual, while the man's body is distorted in the material. The true form would be between the two; it would consist of a happy average of both. Of course this affects the whole human being in his earth-life, in so far as he has a physical covering. What I have just said has nothing to do with the polarity between the head and limbs, it refers to the whole human being in one incarnation between birth and death. We incarnate either as man or woman. In so doing we have to take into account that which is out-of-drawing in the man or woman; but that extends to the whole human being, and the consequence is that if in one incarnation one has the body of a woman, the whole of this female body is influenced by the fact of its having remained behind at an earlier stage when the form was more pliable. In a male incarnation the whole physical body is permeated with the effects of having plunged down too strongly into coarse solid matter. If people had even the smallest inkling of what it means to think in the spirit, to live in the spirit, using the physical body only as an instrument,—so that one does not feel firmly fastened into it, identifying oneself with it—they would sing psalms about the misery of having to use a male body in an incarnation, for of course these material effects have also filtered into the brain. One observes that the forms of the male brain, through having been deeper into matter, are more difficult to manage than the more flexible forms of the female brain. It is truly a more difficult matter to train a male brain for the ascent into the higher worlds, and to translate the truths into thoughts, than it is to train a female brain for the same purpose. ‘For this reason it is not surprising to people who think, when a new conception of the world arises such as that of Spiritual Science, it is more easily grasped by the more manageable female brain; for it is more difficult for the male brain, being less pliable and obedient, to free itself from certain thoughts which it has absorbed. Hence Spiritual Science will not find an easy acceptance amongst the men who are to-day the leaders of culture and of the cultured ideas prevalent in our day. We must realise how awkward an instrument is the brain of a learned man to-day, not only for the acceptance of Spiritual Science, but also for thinking along those lines. But we must not look at these things in a wrong way and draw our own conclusions—rather should we look upon it as all the more significant that there are so many men whose brains are so pliant that they have become intimately acquainted with Spiritual Science.

These things can at first merely be hinted at, but if you allow them to work on you and then reflect over them, you will find immense perspective opening out regarding the life of man.

When we think of human life in its two opposites of man and woman, we are confronted with two forms, one that has remained at a standstill at an earlier stage, and one which has jumped on beyond the present stage and which draws into the present a form intended for the future, but presents it as a caricature. The female has preserved an earlier form and the male has taken on a later form, but has made it what it must not be in the future. The male form is incorrect, because it has brought later conditions of life into an age as yet too early for them.

Can we find a correspondence in the Cosmos to the polarity between male and female. Is there anything in the Cosmos which on the one hand shows us a development which has retained earlier forms and carried these over into a later age? And are there on the other hand forms which have transcended a certain stage, thus representing the caricatured form of a future state? If we bring to mind the concrete development which we know from the Akashic Records, we may put the question thus: Is there anything in the Cosmos outside, resembling an old Moon-existence which would not enter the Earth-existence, but retained from the old Moon something feminine in the Cosmos?

Is there anything which carries into the present time something like an old Moon existence belonging to an earlier stage? And is there in the Cosmos anything which has gone beyond a certain stage, and has condensed and thickened, so that it represents a later condition, a Jupiter condition?

There is! There is in the Cosmos the same polarity as we have described between male and female; and that is the polarity between a Comet and the Moon. If we wish to understand the nature of a Comet, wandering as it does in cosmic space regardless of the other laws of the Solar System, we must be clear as to the fact that the Comet carries the laws belonging to the old Moon-existence into our own. Those laws it has preserved, and with those it enters our existence. It has taken on the present substance of the solar-terrestrial system; but, as regards its motion and its nature, it has remained behind at that stage of natural law which prevailed in the Solar System when our earth was still Old Moon. It carries a former condition into a later, into the present; just as the woman's body carries an earlier condition into present-day existence. The nature of the Comet is one part of a polarity, and that of the Moon represents the other pole. When, in the Lemurian age the Moon evolved out of the Earth, it took with it certain portions, which had to be removed in order that the human being as such might develop. The earth was not to become as dense as it must have become if it had retained the Moon within it. The Moon actually represents a caricature of the Jupiter-condition. Just as a fresh ripe fruit is found in a petrified state in a stalactite, so the Moon in its configuration transcended the middle form, as has the male form of the human being. Exactly the same polarity that we find in human life between the male and the female, we can find in the Cosmos between the natures of Moon and Comets.

Thus are these things connected: as sun to earth, so head to limbs,—as Moon to Comet, so man to woman in the human being. Here again we must not go home and say:—well, now, we have some nice polarities to observe!—We must take these things very seriously and remember that on other occasions I said something more besides this. We must take into consideration the fact that a man is only male as regards his physical body, for as regards his etheric body he is female; and the woman on the other hand is only female in her physical body. A woman can only be said to be female as far as her physical body is concerned and that can be said of the etheric body of a man; so that the relation of the etheric body of a man to the etheric body of a woman is as that of Comet to Moon. If you like you may perhaps say: this makes everything confused again! But these things are so. In a culture which has created its ideas with a densified brain, those same ideas tend to create dense outlines which cannot be modified, so that when ideas are once formed they must be held on to. But the spirit does not admit of this. That is mobile, and when we form ideas, we must keep them plastic. So we must apply what has just been said as to the relation of the Moon and Comets to Man and Woman, to the male in the woman and the female in the man. It applies to the male and female elements in the human being but not to man and woman as we meet them externally.

We have now found some extremely interesting connections between the development of the human being and that of the Cosmos. Of course, as I have already observed: Those who sit in the high places of ‘true scientific observation’ will consider what has just been put forward about the Comet and the Moon, as utterly wild and absurd. That cannot be helped. They do not desire to investigate the truth. But on the ground of Spiritual Science, we can build a bridge between that which comes from the Spiritual and what is seen on the physical plane. Those others will not do this.

In the year 1906, during the Congress in Paris, I called attention to the fact that Spiritual investigation from its knowledge of the nature of Comets, was able to say: As the combinations of carbon and hydrogen play the same part on our earth as did the combinations of carbon and nitrogen (cyanogen) on the Old Moon, the cometary life must contain cyanogen compounds,—combinations of carbon and nitrogen. Those persons who have followed these things attentively will remember this. Our Spiritual Science, therefore, some time ago announced that the cometary nature must contain cyanogen in some form. During the last few weeks this fact has been mentioned in all the newspapers as an external fact discovered by spectro-analysis. This is only one case—hundreds of others could be quoted—in which Spiritual investigation builds bridges for the facts of external research. In this case spectro-analysis asserts what Spiritual Science stated years before. The results of external materialistic investigation never contradict those of Spiritual research. We may depend upon statements such as the above-mentioned, when those who sit in the high places of true science constantly point to the external facts. Only we must not confuse these facts with the limited conclusions which people draw for themselves. If everything in Natural Science to-day was really a fact, Natural Science would greatly contradict Spiritual Science; but their facts are no facts, only the corrupt conceptions of those who, through the conditions prevailing in our age, are called upon to deal with such matters.

Now, having brought before our minds the polarity to be found in human life as well as in the Cosmos, we may ask: What then is brought forth from the Universe as a result of this?

It is rather difficult to describe in a somewhat short time the immensity underlying such a fact. You will allow me, therefore, by way of example, to describe the life of man as it runs its course seen externally. First of all, we see something of which we may say, it pursues its course like the life of a good citizen, from day to day. He gets up in the morning, eats his breakfast and completes the rest of the day in accordance with the usual rules. There are certain events, however, which can intervene in a man's life at one fell swoop, and may bring about changes in the day's course. Take the case of a man and wife living for a while the life of good citizens with but little variety in the usual programme of their day, till something occurs which actually causes a leap in the ordinary external life of people in such circumstances. When a new human being incarnates, and enters life as a citizen of the world, the event causes a leap, a great change in the ordinary process of everyday life. When a new citizen of the world comes on the horizon of man and wife, something actually occurs which gives the whole family connection a new form. I brought this forward as an example by means of which we can gain some little understanding of the deep occult background of cometary life. In the Cosmos too, life goes on from day to day, from year to year—like the life of the good citizen—one day is like another; the Sun rises and sets, the plants blossom in spring, and wither away in autumn, and when there is rain or sunshine or hail or the like, these correspond to such events in ordinary life as, for instance, when instead of our ordinary five o'clock tea, we have a little party. We see these things happening as a matter of course. All this hangs together with the laws underlying the movements of Sun, earth, and so on, and the way in which these continue day by day and year by year. Into this regular process, there intervenes the rarer, yet in a certain respect recurrent, appearances of the comets. They come upon the process of Cosmic happenings like a new citizen entering the horizon of man and wife. Through the appearance of a comet in the cosmos, something is actually brought about in the life of humanity which could not occur in the ordinary process of life. If evolution is to continue, there must be, not only that which repeats itself day by day, but something new must be introduced into it. Just as something quite special enters the life of a family with the birth of a new earth-citizen, so something quite different enters the progress of the human race on earth through the appearance of a comet, which breaks through the ordinary process of cosmic existence. It is actually as though something new were born, when a comet appears.

One who can investigate these things spiritually is able to indicate quite definitely the different functions of the separate comets, and how each one has to introduce something spiritually new into the world. Thus Halley's comet is one of those which, in its periodic appearances, always introduces something specially new into the life of man. Whereas otherwise things recur in the ordinary way, this comet brings about a new birth in human inner life and culture. I can only characterise what I mean, by referring to the three last appearances of Halley's comet, in the years 1759, 1835, and the one we are now expecting. What are the tasks of these three appearances? Other comets have other tasks. New births in the universe are not always to be greeted with the same joy as the birth of a young citizen into a family. All sorts are born into the universe; those that bring humanity forward as well as those that drive it back. Now the appearance of Halley's comet, or what it signifies spiritually for the further evolution of humanity, is connected with that which humanity had to absorb out of the Cosmos at the various periods of Kali-Yuga in order that thought should descend more and more into materiality. With every new appearance of this comet a new impulse was born, to drive humanity further away from a spiritual cosmic conception by the Ego, and to urge it to grasp the world in a more materialistic way. This does not mean a descent into matter, but rather the driving of that Spiritual substance which the human Ego should draw from the universe for its Spiritual existence, down into the sphere of materialistic conception. All those conceptions of the second half of the 18th century, which are called shallow and superficial and which Goethe so ridiculed in his Truth and Poetry and which found their exponent for instance in Holbach's Systeme de la Nature, are understood in their cosmic sense through the appearance of Halley's comet in the year 1759. The commonplace materialistical literature of the second third of the 19th century was preceded by the appearance of that comet in 1835. Things that take place microcosmically on the earth are macrocosmically connected with events of the great world. A new impulse towards materialism was again given by the appearance of Halley's comet in 1835. Buchner, Vogt and Moleschott are examples of those who were influenced on the earth by what appeared with Halley's comet, as a mighty sign from the Cosmos. We are now to be confronted in the near future—for humanity must be tested, must rise out of itself, must feel the resistance to Spirituality so that it may unfold all the more forces for its re-ascent—we shall be confronted with the forces which the new appearance of this comet will send forth from the universe, forces which may lead humanity down into a still more arid and dreadful materialism. Something may be born, which even the most arid and driest thoughts of the Buchner school could not have imagined. but this possibility is a necessity, for only if man overcomes the opposing forces can he acquire the strong force able to lead him up again.

If we bear this in mind, we shall then encounter in the right way what we call ‘Signs from the Heavens.’ This is really a fact; though what I have said must not be taken in a superstitious sense, as though God were pointing with a wand from Heaven to show men what they have to do! The approaching appearance of Halley's comet is one of these signs, and notice should be taken of it. For a mighty ascending impulse must follow it that we may rise from the depths of materialism into which we have sunk, into Spirituality. Just as we are given the possibility of being swamped in materialism, we are also given the chance to ascend into clearer, spiritual heights.

It was clearly and distinctly indicated in the last lectures that during the first half of the 20th century an etheric clairvoyance will develop in a few single individuals, as a natural capacity. In order that man may not sink more deeply into the materialism indicated by the present sign of 1910, those who have understanding of Spiritual Science have the possibility of developing those forces in the human soul which can lead man beyond materialism. If a man understands these forces, they will teach him how he may himself see the etheric nature of Christ. We are living at an important crossing-point, when men will be taught, even by signs from heaven, that in one direction the path will lead deeper into the mire, while the other path leads to the development in themselves of the forces which, at the conclusion of Kali-Yuga, will lead to etheric clairvoyance. The cry of John the Baptist: ‘Change the disposition of your souls,’ applies to us to-day! This may really be said. Just as on the one hand we are given the possibility of perishing in the materialistic morass, on the other it is possible, through the Sun reaching a certain point in the Constellation of Pisces at the Vernal Equinox, that a certain etheric clairvoyance may be acquired. For the spiritual ascent there are also signs, to show us how the forces come from the Cosmos. If a man is a student of Spiritual Science he will of necessity grow to understand this decision; if he does not, that means that he has not understood Spiritual Science aright. We must pass through the test submitted to us by the sign in the Heavens which we now recognise to be the appearance of Halley's Comet.

Let us now picture the vision of Christ, as it will appear to the first fore-runners during the next 2,500 years, and as it appeared to Paul on the way to Damascus. Man will ascend to a cognition of the spiritual world and will see the physical world permeated by a new ‘country,’ or new realm. Man's physical environment will present a totally different aspect in the course of the next 2,500 years, through the addition of an etheric realm, which indeed is already here now, but which he will learn to perceive. This etheric sphere is even now spread out before the eyes of those who have carried their esoteric training as far as ‘Illumination’—as was the case with the Initiates even in Kali-Yuga. That which men will see more and more in the future is visible in its greatest heights to the Initiates. The Initiate draws from thence at repeated intervals, the forces he requires. When he has to carry out some special work, he draws his forces from those realms within the earth's circuit which are visible to him, but which can only be seen by those who have the vision. It will help us to understand this, when we know that a part of that land from which the Initiate drew his forces during Kali-Yuga, will be thrown open to a great part of humanity during the next 2,500 years. Formerly, in the days of primeval clairvoyance, man, though then without the strong Ego-consciousness, could see into the Spiritual world—and in a way he saw more or less what he will see now,—but he will now enter it with his newly acquired self-consciousness. At that time he saw it in dream-like ecstatic conditions, or by looking into his own soul. That world which during Kali-Yuga became physical was then open to man's gaze. Hence the traditions, which have preserved recollections of the old clairvoyance, tell us of an unknown Fairy-Land which has now disappeared from sight. There are wonderful documents in Eastern literature full of a peculiar tragical enchantment, and telling us that at one time it was possible for human beings to travel to a land where the Spiritual flowed into the physical. It is that Land from whence at certain times the Initiates—and at all times the Bodhisattvas—drew fresh forces. The Eastern writings speak with deep sorrow of that land, asking: ‘Where is it? We are told the names of places, paths are named; but the Land itself is concealed, even from those most initiated among the Lamas of Thibet!’ Only to the highest Initiates is it accessible. But it is always stated that some day this Land will return to earth. That is true; it will return to earth! And the guide thereto will be He Whom men will see, when, through the vision of the Event of Damascus, they reach the Land of Shamballa. ‘Shamballa’—for so this Land is called—has withdrawn from the sight of man. It can only be entered to-day by those who, as Initiates, go there from time to time to be strengthened. The old forces can no longer lead man thither. That is why Eastern literature speaks with such tragic despair of the vanished Land of Shamballa. But the Christ-Event, which will be vouchsafed to man in this century through his newly-awakened faculties, will bring back the Fairy-Land of Shamballa, which through the whole of Kali-Yuga could only be known to the Initiates.

Thus humanity is now called upon to make a decision, whether it shall allow itself, through what comes with the Halley Comet, to be lead down into a darkness even lower than that of Kali-Yuga, or whether through an understanding developed by Anthroposophy it shall not neglect to cultivate the new faculties by which it may find the way to the Land which according to Eastern Literature has disappeared, but which Christ will once more reveal to mankind;—the Land of Shamballa. That is the great question of the dividing of the ways: either to go down or to go up. Either to go down into something which, as a Cosmic-Kamaloka lies still deeper down than Kali-Yuga, or to work for that which will enable man to enter that realm, which is really alluded to under the name of Shamballa.

In recent years it has been possible to speak in Swiss places about a highly significant topic in spiritual science, a topic that is fundamentally the highest for spiritual science: the Christ-problem. And if many people of the present time, who are quite outside the spiritual science movement, believe that this is basically the simplest topic that can be discussed, then from their point of view these people of the present time are right. What is greatest for the development of the earth and of humanity, the power of Christ, the Christ impulse, has certainly worked in such a way that the simplest, most naive mind can somehow understand it. But on the other hand, this impulse has worked in such a way that no earthly wisdom is sufficient to truly understand what happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era, what happened for humanity and, in fact, for the whole world.

Now, in recent years, the Christ problem has been discussed, and perhaps I may point out in a few words that the German Section has just completed its first seven-year cycle. It was founded seven years ago; at that time there were few branches, hardly ten. Now the number has grown to over forty. The number seven is so often mentioned when we speak of anthroposophical wisdom and world view, and a certain lawfulness is also expressed in it, so that this development is taking place in seven successive cycles of time. We need only recall what we have already touched on here, the development of our earth; it is passing through seven planetary states. The law of seven also applies on a smaller scale, to every single fact of world evolution as well as to a movement such as the development of spiritual science. Those who look more deeply into our movement can see that in a certain respect this seven-year cycle has unfolded quite regularly, and that we are at a decisive point where what was laid seven years ago is repeated at a higher level and at the same time returns to itself in a cycle; but this could only happen because we really worked in a spiritual sense, that we did not work arbitrarily and randomly, but according to the law.

Then you remember that we distinguish seven aspects to the human being: first the physical body, then the etheric body, the astral body and the I; then, when the I reworks the astral body, the spirit self or manas arises; when it reworks the etheric body, the life spirit or buddhi arises; when it finally reworks the physical body, the highest link, the spirit man or atma, arises, so that we first distinguish four links and then three more, which arise as a transformation from the first three.

If you now want to implement something in the world so that a spiritual law is embodied in it, then this great law must be followed everywhere. If you, as a young branch, so to speak, want to enter into spiritual life in the appropriate way, it is good to see how the organization of the whole work has progressed. For the young branch will recognize that it is necessary to catch up on this process of development on its part, to follow it. We have followed this process exactly in the German movement: in the first four years we gathered together everything necessary to gain a concept of the world from which spiritual science begins. First of all, we presented the sevenfold nature of the human being, the doctrine of karma and reincarnation, the great cosmic laws, the evolution of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and the laws of the individual course of life, so that this is available in our literature and in various branch works. This was done in the first four years.

In the last three years, we have basically gained nothing new in any systematic way, but have instead planted the higher wisdoms in what has been achieved in the first four years, and have then ascended to the comprehension of the highest individuality that has walked our earth, the individuality of Christ Jesus - which we would not have been able to do if it had to be done with nothing but unknown ideas. We could only speak about Christ after we had spoken about the nature of man in general. We could only comprehend how this Christ event occurred if we understood human nature and its entire sequence of stages. Those who heard the lectures on the Gospel of Luke in Basel, and also the others who heard something here and there, know that very complicated processes took place. But how could it have been understood that, for example, something significant happened to one of the Jesus-boys in the twelfth year of his life if we had not known what actually takes place between the ages of twelve and fifteen? We prepared systematically and then, in deep reverence for the greatest truths of our earthly cycle, we tried to grasp what is associated with the name of Christ Jesus. It was like ascending to ever greater heights. Thus it came about that one could contemplate the Christ Jesus in connection with the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Luke. Even then in Basel it was emphasized that no one should believe that, having heard all the truths in connection with these two Gospels, he then knew what the nature and essence of that high spiritual entity is. He has learned this only from one side. One should not believe that it is unnecessary, or only like a renewal, to hear the truth from another side as well. The gospels are images of this great event, each evangelist presenting from a certain point of view what happened in Palestine.

Now, the day before yesterday in Bern, I demonstrated what is now happening in various branches. For very specific reasons, I tried to sketch out a reference to Christ in connection with the Gospel of Matthew. There are very specific reasons for this. Spiritual science should be a way of looking at life, not a theory or a doctrine; it should transform our innermost soul life. We are to learn to look at the world in a new way. And there is a quality that we must acquire, that man acquires more and more, learns more and more, precisely through the wisdom of anthroposophy. There is no single word in any language that properly describes this quality, but spiritual science will still find the word for this new feeling of the heart. And until then we can only use the word that is there for this quality: humble modesty is what is to take ever deeper root in our soul, especially with regard to those documents that, as gospels, bring us tidings of that most significant event in the evolution of the earth. For there we learn that basically we can only approach very slowly the truths and wisdoms that are necessary to fathom the Christ-problem. We learn to develop a completely different feeling in us than that which today's people have, who are so quickly finished with their judgment of the event. We learn to be careful in presenting the truth, and we know that when we have considered it from any one side, we only perceive one side, never the whole at once.

This is connected with the fact – and only gradually will we gain an understanding of it – why there are four Gospels at all. Today, the fact of the matter is that even theology is intellectual, materialistic, and that the intellect, when applied merely to the four documents, will compare them externally. And that is when contradictions are perceived. First of all, the Gospel of John was examined. What it presents to the intellect, they say, is so contrary to the other three Gospels that the best way to understand this Gospel is to say that the writer did not want to describe real events, but wanted to present a kind of hymn, a kind of confession, a rendering of his feelings. In the Gospel of John, one sees a great, comprehensive poem, and thus it is dismissed as having no documentary value. But only the external, materialistic mind does this. Then the other three Gospels are considered. Certain contradictions are also found there; but these are explained by the fact that the Gospels were written at different times. In short, people today are well on the way to picking these documents about the great event apart, so that they no longer mean anything to humanity. But spiritual science is called upon to show why we have four different documents about the event in Palestine and to reconquer these documents for spiritual science. Why are there four documents?

People have not always thought as they do today. There were times when the Gospels were not in the hands of everyone, but only of very few people, precisely those who were in charge of spiritual life in the first centuries of Christianity. Why do people today not ask themselves: Were these people not complete fools that they did not see that the Gospels contradict each other? Or were they so benighted that they did not see these contradictions? The best of their age accepted these documents in such a way that they looked up humbly and were glad that we have four gospels, of which today's people say they cannot be documents because they contradict each other!

Now, without dwelling on this any longer, we want to draw attention to how the Gospels were received in the first centuries of Christianity, and how they must be received. They were received in those times in such a way that one can compare it to this: If we take a photograph of the bouquet of flowers standing here from four sides, we get four photographs. If we look at them individually, they differ from each other, but if you look at a photograph like this, you can get an idea of the bouquet. Now someone comes along and takes a photograph from a different side. You compare the two pictures and find: Yes, these are two completely different pictures ; they cannot represent the same thing. And yet, one will then have a more complete picture of it; and only when one has taken pictures of the bouquet from four sides and compares all four pictures with each other, will one obtain a complete picture of the real bouquet. — So one has to take the four Gospels as characterizing the same fact from four different sides.

Why is the same fact now characterized from four different sides? Because it was known that each of the writers of these Gospels was imbued with a great, modest humility, a humility that told him: This is the greatest event of earthly evolution; you dare not fully describe it, but you may only describe the side that you, according to your knowledge, are able to describe. In humble modesty, the writer of the Gospel of Luke refrained from describing any other side than the one that was close to him because of his special spiritual education, which told him that Christ Jesus was the one individuality in whom the greatest development of love lived, a love to the point of sacrifice. How does this love reveal itself? The writer of the Gospel of Luke describes it, saying to himself: I am unable to describe the whole event; therefore I will limit myself to describing only this aspect, this love.

We can only understand this limitation of the Gospel writers to a particular area if we gain a little insight into the initiation process of the ancient mystery service. Only from this point of view can we understand the attitude of the Evangelists. They know that initiation is the leading of human beings to the higher, supersensible worlds, the living into the higher, supersensible worlds, the awakening of the soul powers, the awakening of those powers and abilities that otherwise remain hidden and slumber in the soul. Such initiations have always existed. In pre-Christian times, the ancient mysteries of the Egyptians and Chaldeans existed, in which people who were ready were led up into the higher worlds. Only there the work was done in a very special way, in a way that can no longer be fully carried out today. Today, as you know, human beings have three soul powers: thinking, feeling and willing. In everyday life, the human being applies these three soul forces in such a way that they are all three active, so to speak, in his dealings with the outside world.

An example will make clear how these three soul powers are active. You are walking across a meadow. You see a flower. You form an idea about it: you think. You like the flower: you feel that the flower is beautiful; feeling has joined with thinking. And then you desire to pick the flower: you thus activate the will. Thus thinking, feeling and willing were active in your soul. And now survey the whole life of man: insofar as it is soul life, it is a confusion of thinking, feeling and willing. And man gets through life by these three forces interacting. The soul lives in thinking, feeling and willing.

When a person is led up into the higher worlds, this is an expression of these three powers as they are in ordinary life. One can develop thinking higher, so that it becomes vision. And in this way one can also raise feeling and willing into the spiritual world. This is what initiation consists of.

Those who have looked around a bit in “How to Know Higher Worlds” will have read about what happens when a person develops thinking, feeling and willing up into the spiritual worlds. What is called “splitting of the personality” occurs. The three forces are usually organically connected: a person thinks, feels and wills in one personality. But in the process of evolution upward into the higher worlds, these three powers are torn apart. While they are otherwise powers, they now become independent entities when man evolves upward into the higher worlds. Three independent entities arise: a thinking, a feeling and a willing entity. This is what is meant by the danger that man's soul life could be torn apart. If a person does not proceed in the right way when treading the path of higher knowledge, it may happen that he raises his thinking to the higher regions. Then he may indeed see into the higher worlds, but he stops there; he can kill the will, or it can take quite different paths. Today it happens that the I rises above itself, that the I can become a ruler, that it can reign as king over the three soul powers, namely over thinking, feeling and willing.

In ancient times this was not the case. In the pre-Christian mystery schools, the principle of division of labor prevailed. For example, a person was accepted into the initiation sites and it was said: This person is particularly suited to develop the power of thinking. - Then his thinking was developed, raised to a higher level; he was made a sage who sees through the spiritual connections that lie behind all sensual events. That was one category of initiates from the ancient mystery sites: the sages.

Other people were trained in the mystery schools in such a way that the forces of feeling slumbering in them were developed higher, while thinking and willing were left at their original level. Feeling was thus elevated. When a person's feeling is particularly developed, he acquires special qualities. There is an essential difference between a person whose feeling had been developed in an ancient mystery center and a person of today. The influence of such a developed person, the soul-psychic influence, was much stronger than it is today. This development of the powers of feeling meant that the soul of such a person could exert a powerful influence on the souls of those around him. Thus those who had particularly developed the sphere of feeling became the healers of their fellow human beings. By developing their feeling through the sacrificial service, they were called upon to have a healing effect on other people.

The third level of initiates were those in whom the will had been developed. These were the magicians. Thus there were three types of initiates: the magicians, the healers and the wise. These were people who received their training in the mystery schools of antiquity. Today it would no longer be possible to develop one of these qualities in a one-sided way because today it is no longer possible to achieve such a high degree of harmony between individuals as was possible in the mystery schools of antiquity. Those who were wise in the ancient mystery schools, so to speak, renounced it. That is how it is. Those who were healers carried out the instructions of the wise with the greatest obedience, renounced higher wisdom, and used their powers of feeling as directed by the wise.

Besides these, there was still a fourth category of people in the mystery temples. These were necessary. There were cases in these temples where it was not possible for the three categories of initiates to have the right effect in the outside world. Some things could not be done by the initiate of one of these three categories, but only by the presence of a fourth category of people. This consisted in admitting certain individuals who were suitable for it into the mystery centres and saying to themselves: those high degrees of initiation that can be developed in the wise men, healers and magicians cannot be developed in the people of this fourth category. But one could go so far with them that one could raise each individual ability of the other three categories to a certain degree. No ability was as strongly developed as in the one-sidedly developed initiates who were sages, healers or magicians; but in return, a certain harmony of all three qualities was present in this fourth. Such an initiate represents in himself the harmony of the other three initiates. And now it is necessary for certain tasks to abandon all sense of one's own individuality and to rely entirely on the word of someone who is in a certain respect inferior to oneself. So there were cases in the ancient mystery schools where neither the wise nor the healers nor the magicians made the decisions, but they simply placed their powers at the service of those who were not as advanced as they were. Nevertheless, they placed their powers at the service of this fourth initiate. It always turned out that world evolution progressed better when the higher one obeyed the lower one in such cases.

This was the case in the Oriental mystery centers, where those of higher station applied their powers as the fourth one directed, whom they obeyed blindly. In the mystery centers of Europe there were colleges of twelve who were initiated, and at the head of them was a thirteenth who was not initiated; they obeyed him. Whatever should happen, he should indicate. He relied on his instinctive will and the others, who were higher than he, carried out what he indicated. You can only understand this if you look back to those times when there was still great trust in a being in the world that was not bound to human thinking and willing. Today man considers himself to be the cleverest being in the world. But it was not always so. There were times when man said to himself: Yes, it is actually true that I can develop to a high level. I have the ability to do so, but I must not assume that just now I am already the creature in the world that has progressed furthest in its development.

We can see from a simple example that this is a truth. Let us remember that it was only in the course of historical development that people gradually invented paper, namely, that activity by which certain substances are formed into paper. The wasp has been able to do this for a long time! Now man would have to say to himself: I had to acquire my knowledge only at a relatively late time. The wasp could not have learned its art from man; divine art rules in its ability. In what the wasp does, it is interwoven with divine wisdom.

Similar feelings inspired such initiates, who came together in groups of twelve in pre-Christian times. They said to themselves: “We have certainly developed great powers within us, but with all our powers and abilities we achieve only that which is prescribed at a lower level in less developed individualities by higher divine beings.” They look to a thirteenth, who, in comparison to them, had remained at a childlike, naive level. They said: He does not have human wisdom within him as we do, but he is still imbued with divine wisdom. The oriental wise men, healers and magicians also said: We follow the one who is not as far along as we are, but who is at a stage where he still has divine wisdom within him. This renunciation spread like a magic breath over the ancient mysteries that had known this. And now you will remember Goethe's poem “The Mysteries”, where a thirteenth member is introduced into the circle of important men, Brother Mark. Here we have an apparition that is deeply rooted in human nature, even if it is far removed from today's man, consisting in the fact that an initiate of the fourth category, who does not reach such a high level through the development of his own powers as the others do, is nevertheless so respected that he leads the other twelve.

We therefore have four types of initiates: healers, sages, magicians and the fourth type, which was called “human being” in a special sense. Four such initiates set out to describe the greatest event in the evolution of the earth: a sage, a healer, a magician and a human being in the sense of the initiates of the fourth category. One described it from the standpoint of the ordinary man, one is the magician who had a special understanding of the willpower of the Christ and enshrined it in his Gospel, and one is the healer who wrote the Gospel of Luke. That is why you find the tradition in which Luke is seen as a physician, and that also corresponds to the facts that Luke stands by his fellow human beings in sacrificial love. Then there is a wise man who has written what constitutes the wisdom of the nature of Christ.

These are the four initiates who, renouncing to describe the whole, said to themselves: We can only describe what is close to our soul. Indeed, the humble modesty of these four people, who refrained from giving the whole picture of Christ, but only what they could see, could perceive according to their particular individuality, appears as something lofty and powerful compared to the consciousness of today's man, who does not doubt that he can grasp even the highest things with his intellect in every respect.

Having already examined two sides of this momentous event in Basel in the lectures on the Gospels of Luke and John, today I would like to say a few words about the Gospel of Matthew. We could just as easily link to the Gospel of Mark. But there are certain reasons why I have chosen to describe this great event from a spiritual point of view after taking over, and why I have now chosen the Gospel of Matthew after the Gospels of Luke and John. The reason for this is that one should develop a feeling for how to approach the understanding of this world event in humble modesty. We learn great truths in the Gospel of Luke and in the Gospel of John. But what we encounter in the Gospel of Mark is so harrowing in part that if one has not yet heard the various things that tie in with the Gospel of Matthew, one would, so to speak, believe that there are profound contradictions between the Gospel of Mark and the other Gospels. One would not be able to cope with the Gospel of Mark, because it is in this gospel that the greatest, the most harrowing truths of the world are communicated; not the highest, these are contained in the Gospel of John. Therefore, today I will speak about the Gospel of Matthew.

In our study of the Gospel of Luke, we saw that the most diverse spiritual currents in the world merged to form a common stream at the time of the Christ event. It has been shown how, on the one hand, the teaching of compassion and love from the Buddha flows into Christianity; and on the other hand, it has been shown how the teaching of Zarathustra has flowed into Christianity. But all pre-Christian spiritual currents have also flowed into this significant event. And the Gospel of Matthew shows particularly how the ancient Hebrew spiritual current, the spiritual current of ancient Judaism, has flowed into it, so that in order to understand the Gospel of Matthew, one must speak of the actual mission of the ancient Jewish people.

As you know, spiritual research draws not only from the Gospels, but also from the spiritual world, from the imperishable Akasha Chronicle. If all the Gospels had been lost due to some cataclysm on earth, what spiritual research has to say about the events in Palestine could still be said from the pure sources available to spiritual research. When we have this from the pure sources available to spiritual research, we compare it with the great records, the Gospels, and then that wonderful agreement appears, which instills in us a great reverence for the Gospels, to which we look, and from which it becomes clear to us what high source they must come from. For the writers of the Gospels tell us what we can only understand if we are schooled in the way spiritual science gives us to look.

What is the mission of the Hebrew people? To understand this, we must look back a little on the course of human development. You know that human abilities have developed. Only materialistic science, which sees no further than the tip of its nose, believes that these human abilities have developed by themselves. At the most, it still believes that humanity has developed from animality, but it is not able to go back to real soul abilities. Spiritual science, however, knows that the soul abilities thousands of years ago were different from today. Thus, in ancient times, people had what is called a dull, dim clairvoyance. It was only in later times that today's consciousness gradually emerged from this clairvoyance; and this development began at a very specific point in time, when this kind of imagination began to affect humanity.

If we look back to ancient Indian culture, we find a kind of clairvoyance there. Today's man must look at the things around him if he wants to get to know them. The ancient Indian did not get to know things in the way he looks at them now. There was no science like the one taught to children today. A wise man in ancient India received his knowledge through inner inspiration when he turned his inner self completely away from the outer world, when he rested in himself or in his higher being. He called this his union with Brahma. He thus received the knowledge through inner inspiration. It was knowledge based entirely on clairvoyant inspiration. External knowledge, on the other hand, was maya for him.

But this clairvoyance increasingly receded. Even in the ancient Persian culture there was a strong admixture of external observation, even if inner knowledge still prevailed. Similarly, in the third cultural epoch, inner inspiration was still present, even though people had already progressed in grasping external things. In ancient Chaldea, there was what is called astrology today; it was a kind of star science. Today, in the outer sciences, no one knows anything about the essence of astrology. Today, no matter how closely you examine the stone records, you know nothing about the actual essence of astrology. No one today can evoke the feeling that astrology evoked for the ancient Chaldeans. It was not knowledge born of observation of the starry heavens. The Chaldean did not study the physical planet Mars by turning his gaze up to it, but what was known of it by inwardly allowing the clairvoyantly inspired knowledge to shine forth. This is not an external process of combining, and there is no full awareness of what this knowledge reveals about the outer space of the heavens. In the ancient places of initiation, only the first concepts of knowledge of the world of the stars arose. In what is communicated there about the evolution of the Earth and the connections between the Earth and Mars, and so on, we still have knowledge born out of the inner being. Similarly, Egyptian geometry was knowledge born out of the inner being and applied only to the measurement of the outer field. It was only through the development of other powers that the ancient Chaldeans were able to arrive at external knowledge. This mission of bringing humanity to an external, combining knowledge was assigned by the spiritual leaders of world evolution to the Hebrew people. All the knowledge of the Indians, the Persians, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, however significant it was, did not require a physical brain. This knowledge was stored in the etheric body, which is not bound to the physical brain and functions freely. When man works freely in the etheric body, the picture arises that constitutes the knowledge of those ancient peoples; just as even today all clairvoyant knowledge arises when man is able to lift the etheric body out of the physical body, not to use his physical brain.

Mankind should acquire the ability to perceive through its brain. For this purpose, the personality had to be chosen that had the most suitable brain, that was least predisposed to clairvoyant inspiration, but that could use the brain. Here we have another point where reading the Akasha Chronicle confirms the facts of the Bible. What is written in the Bible is correct to the letter. Indeed, a personality had been chosen who, by virtue of her physical organization, had the most suitable brain to establish what made spiritual work possible through the brain. This personality was Abraham. He was chosen to fulfill that mission which was to enable people to perceive the outside world through their physical brain. It was a personality that was least likely to have any kind of inspiration, but who logically explored the external phenomena in terms of measure, number and weight. An older tradition regards Abraham as the inventor of mathematics, and it has more right than today's outer world-sense.

Now it is important that this mission be properly introduced into the world. Let us consider how a mission was transmitted in the past. How was it propagated in humanity? It was transmitted from teacher to pupil. He who had an inspiration transmitted it to his successor. But that which was transmitted to the ancient Hebrew people was bound to a physical tool that could not simply be passed on to descendants if they did not have the appropriate brain. Therefore, it had to be bound to physical inheritance, had to be inherited through generations. It was not a group of disciples that followed Abraham, but a people to whom this brain could be inherited through generations. Therefore, Abraham became the progenitor of his people.

It is wonderful to see from the Bible how the leading spiritual powers entrusted this mission to Abraham. What was to be given to humanity through the mission of Abraham? What had been known earlier through inspiration was to be rediscovered; it was now to be achieved again through mere combination on a different level. Through this, what had been found through combination had to be modeled according to the law. Therefore, Yahweh said: This mission should be an image of the highest lawfulness that we know. He said: Your descendants shall be organized as the number of stars in the sky. It is a complete misunderstanding to translate this passage from the Bible as if Yahweh had said that Abraham's descendants should be as numerous as the stars in the sky, but that they should reproduce in a lawful manner, so that the lawfulness is expressed as the lawfulness of the firmament.

Abraham had a son Isaac and a grandson Jacob. We see how the twelve tribes of the Jewish people descended from him. These twelve tribes are a reproduction of the lawfulness of the twelve signs of the zodiac. A new organization of the people was to be ordered in Abraham like the stars in the sky. So we see how spiritual science extracts the real meaning from the documents of the Bible, and there we get a correct idea of this deepest document of humanity. What is old clairvoyance should be renounced. No longer should existence take place in such a way that one keeps one's gaze averted from the outer world, but man's gaze should penetrate and search the outer world. But this mission was a gift that was to come to mankind from outside. Abraham had the mission to pass on the ability of the brain to his descendants. It was to be a gift, and so we see that Abraham receives all the Jewish people as a gift. What could a spiritual power have given to Zarathustra? A teaching, something one-sidedly spiritual; but to Abraham there had to be a gift of his people, a real gift based on the reproduction of the physical brain. How were these people given to him? By his willingness to sacrifice his son. If he had done that, there would have been no Jewish people. By receiving his son back, he received the entire Jewish people as a gift from outside. In the moment when Abraham receives back Isaac, whom he was supposed to sacrifice, he receives the entire Jewish people, his descendants, back as a gift. This is a gift from Yahweh to Abraham. And so the last of the gifts of clairvoyance was also given. The individual gifts of clairvoyance are divided into twelve, and they are represented by the twelve constellations, for they are gifts of heaven. The last of these gifts of clairvoyance was sacrificed by Abraham in order to receive the people of Israel. The ram that Abraham sacrificed in place of his son is the image of the last of the gifts of clairvoyance. Thus the Jewish people received the mission to develop the ability to combine, to get to know world phenomena through their own abilities, which are contained in the brain, to a certain unity, which is presented as Jahve. And this mission is so exacting that everything inherited from the earlier form of perception is eliminated from the Jewish people, namely, the old form of clairvoyance. Joseph still had dreams of the old clairvoyant kind. He still used the old form of clairvoyance; but he was cast out of the community because the Jewish people had the mission to eliminate this old ability of clairvoyance from its development. And so Joseph is sent away. But this makes him the mediator between the Jewish people and that which they must accept in order to fulfill their cultural mission. Abraham's sons had renounced the inspiration that comes from within; so they had to receive from without what would otherwise have come to them as inspiration, as a message from within. When they are led to Egypt, they receive it through Moses, they who are now the missionaries of external physical thinking. What the other peoples have received through inspiration, they now receive from outside as law. It is indeed the case that what we call the Ten Commandments is the same as what other people have received through inner inspiration. From Egypt, through Moses, the Jews received from outside as commandments what should actually have been heavenly inspirations.

After receiving the inspirations from Egypt, this people settled in Palestine. This nation was destined to give birth to the one bearer of the Christ out of its own ranks. These qualities, handed down from generation to generation, were to produce the physical body of Jesus; therefore all the abilities that were present in Abraham in the first instance must add up. The entire Jewish nation had to mature and develop to such an extent that what was present in Abraham as an inclination was brought to its highest peak in one descendant. To understand this, we must draw a comparison with the development of an individual human being. During the first seven years, it is mainly the physical body that develops. From the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year, i.e. in the second cycle of life, it is the etheric body that develops, then the astral body; only then does the I emerge. What is present first as a predisposition only comes out when these three bodies have developed. This also applies to an entire nation. The Abraham predisposition first had to be incorporated into the physical, etheric and astral bodies before it could be taken up by the ego. We have to divide the development of the Jewish people into three epochs. What takes seven years in the development of an individual human being is spread over seven generations in the development of a nation. Or, as you know, in inherited traits a son does not resemble his father so much as his grandfather. Therefore, two times seven, or fourteen generations, are actually necessary to allow a people to mature, which unfolds in an individual human being between birth and the change of teeth. Fourteen generations developed the qualities that were present in Abraham in his physical body; fourteen more generations in the etheric body and fourteen more in the astral body. Only then was it possible to allow such a human being to mature as was needed by the Christ-being.

This is described by Matthew in the first chapter of his Gospel, where he says that from Abraham to David fourteen generations passed, from David to the Babylonian captivity fourteen more generations, and from there to Jesus fourteen further generations, thus three times fourteen or six times seven generations had to pass. The writer of the Gospel of Matthew based his book on this profound wisdom. That which was Abraham's specific mission was also to flow into the body of Christ Jesus; but this could only happen through the succession of generations in a lawful manner. Then this child Jesus, who derived from Abraham through forty-two generations, was able to complete the mission of the patriarch. Matthew describes to us the wonderful lawfulness with which this happened.

When a cycle of development is complete, a brief repetition of the earlier facts at a higher level must take place, and indeed we find this repetition wonderfully described in the Gospel of Matthew. Abraham comes from Ur in Chaldea, migrates to Canaan, then goes to Egypt and back to Canaan again. That is his journey. The reborn Zarathustra was incarnated six centuries before our era as a great teacher of the Chaldean mystery schools under the name Zarathos. That was his last incarnation before he was reborn in Jesus. Now he walks the same path that Abraham came by. He starts from roughly the same place that Abraham began his journey. And in the spiritual world he also follows the route that Abraham took, all the way to Bethlehem. So the path that Abraham covered physically is taken spiritually by Zarathustra. And the successors of those who were his students six hundred years ago follow him again in the star that shows them the way to Bethlehem. They retrace the steps of Zarathustra as he takes incarnation. Then he arrives there and is reborn in Canaan.

In the Old Testament, we see Joseph being led to Egypt as a result of a dream; now we see another Joseph being led to Egypt physically as a result of a dream. And so the boy is physically led back to where the Jewish people await the Redeemer. The ancient Jewish people also received food from Joseph during the famine in Egypt. If you draw on a map the same route taken by the Magi, and further compare the route that Joseph, the son of Jacob, was led to Egypt with that traveled by the Solomonic Christ Child, you will find that the corresponding routes are almost exactly the same. There are some slight deviations, but these are due to different circumstances. The writer of the Gospel of Matthew describes the route so precisely.

It is precisely from such facts, which we can know even if all the written Gospels were to be lost, that we get the great reverence for the Gospels. Mankind could come to ever higher truths and achieve ever greater wisdom, of which perhaps very little is suspected even today; and when, after millions of years, we know much, much more about the mighty event, we can also draw this wisdom from the Gospels. This, again, is a piece that can lead us further to an understanding of the Christ event. Just as the teaching of Buddha and of Zarathustra, so also the nature of the Hebrew people has been incorporated into the nature of Christ Jesus. All that had appeared on earth before was reborn in a higher form through Christianity. All that was previously on earth in the way of spiritual culture came to earth through the great leader of earthly development, 'Christ, who sent to earth those to whom he had first given the mission of preparing on earth what he had to do. He was still in the heights of heaven and sent the messengers down. And they, the great founders of religions, had to prepare people for his coming. The last of these messengers was the Buddha, who brought the teaching of compassion and love. But there were other Bodhisattvas before, and after Christ there will be other Bodhisattvas who will have to expand what came to earth through Christ Jesus.

It will be good if people listen to the Bodhisattvas who come afterwards, because they are his servants. Every time a Bodhisattva appears in the future, for example after three thousand years, people will understand the Christ, who outshines everything, a little better. Christ is the one who is the deepest essence, and the others are there so that Christ may be better understood. Therefore, we say that Christ has sent the bodhisattvas before to prepare humanity for him; and he sends them after so that the greatest act of earth evolution can be better and better understood. We are only at the beginning of our comprehension of this Entity, and the more Sages and Bodhisattvas come to earth, the better we shall understand the Christ. Through all this wisdom that is pouring down upon the earth, we shall be able to recognize the Christ more fully.

So we stand on earth as seeking human beings. We have begun to struggle to understand the Christ. We have applied what we have recognized about him and will apply everything the bodhisattvas teach in the future to better understand the Master of all bodhisattvas, the center of our system. In this way, humanity will become ever wiser and will come to know the Christ ever better. However, it will only understand him fully when the last of the Bodhisattvas has done his duty and brought the teaching that is necessary to enable us to grasp the deepest essence of earthly existence, the Christ Jesus.

My dear friends!

One of the things that I otherwise always find difficult, despite what one might think, is speaking, and it always means a kind of difficult decision for me to speak, despite having to do so so often. It seems particularly difficult to me in this day and age, in this time when the heart and soul are burdened and weighed down by so many things.

Not only do I long to be with you, my dear friends, again after a long time, but today there is also a very special reason for our being together. Today is the eve of the anniversary of our laying of the foundation stone. It will be exactly one year from today, Saturday; according to the date, it will be one year tomorrow, Sunday. We will therefore gather today and tomorrow, and I ask our dear friends to please gather in this room tomorrow at six o'clock as well. We will not read the drama, as was the custom during the time I was not present, but we will try to spend the evening in a different way tomorrow. The drama reading can take place again in the near future.

But today, above all, I would like to remind you of the ideas, feelings and emotions that moved our souls when we laid the foundation stone for this building here on this hill a year ago. Even though few of you, my dear friends, were present at that time in terms of your external, physical personality, in terms of your hearts and feelings, you were all there. And all those who have since then worked so lovingly and selflessly on this building have experienced for themselves and also shown how closely they are connected to the feelings and emotions that, at that time, in the most beautiful sense of the word, namely, glowing with divine fire, when we - it had to be so; it was brought about by the circumstances of the time - laid the foundation stone in a small circle.

At that time, we tried to use few words to guide us in the soul, which spirit this building should be. We tried to envision how we could see from this hill to the north, south, east and west, and how we want to serve that spiritual life, which we are convinced humanity in the north, south, east and west needs if the development of the earth is to proceed in the appropriate way intended by the spiritual hierarchies.

Indeed, I also believe I have sufficiently pointed out that it is not a proud feeling with which we present our view of spiritual life as the one that must be intimately connected with the salvation of humanity. Rather, this emphasis is truly connected with the feeling of humble modesty that we only want to be servants of that spiritual life that wants to flow in, through the peaceful harmonies of the higher hierarchies, into the salutary development of the human race.

So we understand the matter, that we do not rise in pride because we believe we recognize something special, but that we feel blessed by the divine spiritual beings, feel blessed to be allowed to be servants in the development of the stream of spiritual life to which our soul, our heart, our whole human being is attached.

And it was at that time, my dear friends, that I was allowed to speak for the first time the words of which I not only believe I know, but – with all the certainties with which one can know such a thing – I truly believe I know that they were heard from the divine-spiritual heights by that entity that was to become the bearer of the Christ who would harmoniously unite people.

It was one of the most uplifting moments for me that I have experienced in our movement when I was allowed to speak the words for the first time:

Amen!
The evils prevail,
Witnesses of dissolving egoism,
Guilt of selfhood incurred by others,
experienced in daily bread,
in which heaven's will does not prevail,
because man has separated himself from your kingdom
and forgotten your name,
you fathers in the heavens.

In these words, whoever reflects on them often enough will gradually find that they contain everything that can move human hearts and souls in a great and sublime way. But these words also contain everything that can cause human pain and suffering in human hearts and souls. And if we allow them to work in the right way in our souls, these words contain the strength that can sustain us in the sense of our spiritual current, can endow us with inner security, in whatever situation in life we may find ourselves, whatever life circumstances we may be forced to face.

What, my dear friends, inspired us when we turned our thoughts to such a building, as it now stands before us as a landmark, years ago? We were inspired by the conviction that the salvation of humanity depends on not only the theoretical knowledge and conviction of the existence of the spiritual worlds flowing into humanity, but also on our direct experience of them, on our being united with the spiritual worlds in our souls.

We are permeated by the belief, my dear friends, that this spiritual life is present in the world everywhere, but that it is up to people to grasp it, because man is meant to be free in the world, and this spiritual life approaches him only on condition that he wills it, that he take it up into his will. This justifies the necessity that we find imposed on us by karma to do everything that can release this sacred human will from the depths of human nature, wherein it is often so hidden that it may unite with the converging will of the hierarchies, who will then choose the earth as the site of a cosmos where, in the future, holy, spiritual Christ-sunlight will shine if humanity wills it, if humanity wants to mature for it.

The thought occurred to us at the laying of the foundation stone before the year was out - but it did not live much longer, but that is our karma - that with the last days of July this year our building would be ready, so that it could be spoken in the sense that had been indicated by the reality of spiritual life and its reception by man.

Of course, karma willed otherwise, and the human soul must learn to submit to necessity through spiritual science. If the idea of coping in July had been realized, then, my dear friends, we would now be able to feel how, during the entire construction of the house dedicated to our sacred cause, we could look down – as we looked down at the time of the laying of the foundation stone to the north, south, east and west – on the peace that prevailed among people.

Now, that did not happen. The last work of our construction must look down on a completely different world, my dear friends, on a different world, which can truly evoke deep feelings of suffering in those hearts that have already been filled to a certain degree with the spirit of the spiritual life that we mean.

However, as I already indicated when I last spoke to you from this pulpit, it would be a sign of weakness for those who are engaged in the spiritual life if we did not , at least in our inmost being, we have developed the faith in the one great victory that must come – may it come in whatever way – in the victory and the victoriousness of the spiritual life. We can celebrate, my dear friends, the annual festival of a building that is intended to serve in the most eminent sense to bring together human souls across the earth in harmony. If it should happen, as honestly and uprightly as it can happen, then the way we stand by our building should correspond to what is the first principle of our spiritual movement, and what is expressed in the foundation of every single, even artistic, form of our building.

If anyone takes the trouble to study the individual artistic forms of our structure, they will find that, in addition to everything I have allowed myself to say in the course of the lectures in this room about the meaning of the forms of our structure, every detail expresses the sense of the true Christ impulse to embrace all human hearts, as they are found among the peoples and races of the earth. For, my dear friends, the spiritual life of humanity, life in the spirit, is one; and from the words I spoke here last time, you will have gathered how this must be understood in the most earnest and worthy way.

The spiritual life of humanity is one. But if we want to make this sentence completely our own in the immediate present, we will have to take some of what we have learned in the course of our spiritual work over the years seriously, deeply, deeply seriously.

And let us not hide from ourselves that it will be difficult for some souls to perceive the things that have been accepted as truth in the deepest peace, in the immediate present with the same intensity as truth. But on the other hand, let us remember that this is precisely our test in the present time: to take things seriously.

Now, my dear friends, let us look at an example. It was during the time of deepest peace that I spoke to a number of our friends in the north, in Christiania, about the nature of the folk souls and their significance in the evolution of humanity. There is no doubt that the lectures given at that time on the nature of the folk souls were understood by our dear friends in an objective way; but it is also equally certain that many other people in the world who are outside our society could have understood these lectures in an objective way at that time.

It cannot be assumed that we would be able to accept such lectures with the same objectivity today without being truly moved in our innermost being. And yet, I would like to say, how instructive for today, for the immediate present, what was said in Christiania at that time about the nature of the souls of the people could be! Perhaps we may be permitted to remind our friends of some of the lectures of those days, and particularly of what was said at the time of the greatest peace, at least for the greater part of the European nations.

My dear friends, before I draw your attention to what was said about the national souls of Europe in the course of these lectures, let us consider a fact, a fact that is, so to speak, intimately connected with a correct, deep and serious understanding of our spiritual science. This is this: our soul nature itself, our individual soul nature, is by no means the simple being that exoteric science would like to present it as out of convenience. It is one of the simplest things we have to recognize when we place ourselves on the ground of spiritual science, that we see what a complicated being works and lives in our own inner being. We immediately get to know in our soul being: sentient soul, mind soul and consciousness soul, and how the I is predisposed in it and the striving upwards to the higher members. Immediately we are confronted with a fivefoldness of effective elements. There are still people today who laugh at this description of the soul's elements. But a time will come when people will recognize the complexity of the human soul life, when they will turn their gaze - because life will become more and more difficult in the course of our development on earth - to what so irrefutably shows the multiplicity of our soul elements. This is that our soul members can come into inner conflict, into inner soul war.

We know, of course, how the human soul can feel divided within itself in everyday life at these or those times. The more one delves into the life of the soul, the more significant it becomes when the individual soul members, as it were, rebel against each other within the human being. One perceives how they stand within the human being, one cannot say otherwise: fighting against each other. And the way we are tuned, our state of soul, whether we are more inclined to immerse ourselves in a matter with the element of feeling or more in a rational frame of mind, is reflected in the structure of our being, which is meant to express this.

However, the soul members will only behave correctly if each one finds its corresponding weight, with which it draws the human being, so to speak, to the truly true earthly task required by the spiritual hierarchies, when the soul members come together in harmony. They will become so in the highest sense when they overcome the difficulties that lie in the mutual struggle of the soul members.

In one of the Mystery Dramas there is a scene – in the Test of the Soul – where this inner working, surging and weaving is pointed out in the most eminent sense, but also the fighting of the individual soul forces.

But there is also a representation - and this representation forms the final tableau of the Gate of Initiation, the first mystery play - where what basically lives in the individual soul is distributed among what stands before us in the final tableau. There are Mary and Thomas Aquinas, Lucifer and Ahriman, the hierophants, and so on. They speak with each other, and their voices reflect what speaks in the individual human soul. The goal of the human spirit is to be found in such a union, as depicted in the final temple tableau, where every single soul force and every single personality is placed in its proper place and each contributes what lies in its nature.

I would like to point out the many-sidedness of the human being and how it has been attempted, in the various representations and discussions, to show what works and weaves in the human being in connection with the many-sidedness of the human soul , how we can look into our own soul in true, not theoretical self-knowledge at many an inner war and struggle, and how we can look at the lofty solar ideal that wants to be achieved in human, harmonious cooperation. Basically, our spiritual scientific literature contains everything that can give us not only comfort but also security and support and strength, at least for the inner life of our soul, even in the most difficult situations in life.

Now, in that lecture cycle in Christiania, it was shown how what we otherwise find in the individual soul is, as it were, distributed among the folk souls of Europe. Read about it in the lecture, I think it is the penultimate one, how it is pointed out how the three western folk souls relate to the middle and in turn to the eastern folk soul. Read it up and bear in mind the fact that everything in the evolution of humanity is based on repetition. Bear in mind the fact that the folk soul that prevails on the Italian and Spanish peninsula expresses in a special way what we know as the essence of the sentient soul - a repetition of what was connected with the essence of the sentient soul in Atlantean times. Read up on what has been said about the shades and nuances of the French folk soul and its relationship to the mind soul, and about the British folk soul in its connection with the consciousness soul. Read further and see that in Central Europe, above all, the nuance of the I exists, which prevails in the three folk souls.

Once historians write history in connection with spiritual science, they will be able to objectively describe the rule of the I in Central Europe, from the moment when the army of the Goths and Alarich's wild hordes passed through these lands, through all phases into our and even later times, which are to shine forth in Europe's east: Then they will show what will once be allotted to a distant future.

Yes, so certain, my dear friends, so reassured I would like to say, could one say this a few years ago and know that not the slightest sensitivity could be seen in any of the listeners, but rather it could be seen how what humanity is to achieve is to be achieved in community, but in such a community that flows from objective knowledge, from knowledge that comes from spiritual science.

And now take together what has been repeatedly said about the character of our time, how our time is the period in post-Atlantean cultural development that strives to cultivate the consciousness soul, how all soul forces must work together to give our time the nuances of the consciousness soul. The human I must assert itself in such a way that it finds a way through the consciousness soul, which must necessarily unfold the greatest egoistic strength in order to find the way up into the spiritual self. Not only deeper thoughts, but deeper feelings, feelings of understanding for human development and the character of the times, can move through our soul when we allow such things, as they were spoken at the time and printed as a lecture cycle, to enter our soul with seriousness and dignity.

How does it appear before our soul, this I in relation to the consciousness soul and mind soul, striving upwards to higher realms, forging the way through struggle and war? Frankly, my dear friends, one could not touch these truths again, which were expressed and felt in the deepest soul at the time, in such serious times as ours; they would have been spoken in vain, they would have been understood as a childish game with intellectual concepts and theoretical scientific ideas.

But these things do not only mean that our soul plays with them and finds a theoretical stimulus, satisfies a curiosity about knowledge. The significance of these things lies in the fact that what lies in them can really become the power of our soul. If it becomes a force in our soul, then we can find our way, we can find the possibility to understand ourselves when these things hold their earnest countenance towards us, we can find the possibility to understand them as far as we have to understand them through the power and consciousness of our soul. I know that these must also be the thoughts with which I would like to greet our building one year after the laying of the foundation stone: that it will become a symbol of the strength that we can gain in the sense in which the words just spoken are meant.

“Do we not belong to this building?” one might ask. We belong to the building in a different way than the Gothic church and the community.

It has already been discussed that we form the larynx in the same way as the gods speak. But when we mature and pay attention in our soul so that we receive the science of orientation, the science of finding our way, revealed, then we will recognize in the forms from which our structure is composed the letters of a divine language. We will learn to speak many things differently in the course of human development when we gradually understand this structure.

Time itself is pressing, I would say, out of the configuration of our words often what should no longer be in our words. But everything that is in the spirit of our spiritual science will come, if only we honestly strive to pursue this spiritual science with all the powers of our soul and our mind. We should not be surprised – at most, we may wonder about the point in time at which these things have occurred, and this point in time is explained to me by some occult insights that have been granted to me recently – we should not be surprised, especially not on the basis of our spiritual science, that these events have occurred.

My dear friends, how often have we heard it said that there are basically two currents flowing through the evolution of humanity. One of these currents is still weak, it is the spiritual current to which we want to cling with all our hearts and minds. The other is one that has a materialistic character. I have often spoken to you over the past years about the many forms this materialistic character takes. But you could learn from all that I have said about the materialism of our time that materialism has an effect on all the individual main and secondary currents. Materialism does not only enter into theoretical views. How often has this been emphasized, for example in the last Hague cycle of lectures. Materialism enters into the whole of human coexistence. It has a strong power that is by no means exhausted, that will continue to have an effect in one area – my dear friends, it is good to be clear about how materialism expresses itself; based on the words I have said before, I may assume that the words I will have to follow shortly cannot be misunderstood – [that] will continue to have an effect in the area of human coexistence.

Among other things, materialism has been asserting itself for some time in the fact that – yes, it is difficult to find words for such things – an idea has arisen in the life of European nations that is not really an idea at all and that, in certain respects, is a major step backwards from earlier times: it is what is often referred to as the nationality idea.

Much would have to be said if this nationality idea, which should not be called that at all, were to be discussed exhaustively. But a sense of what prevails in this area can run through our soul when we remember earlier times, times that seem so backward to our supposedly enlightened humanity. Let us remember that a time of ours has preceded, which is called the dark ages, in which people of all nations = one may think otherwise about this time, as one wants - have fought for religious ideas, for ideas that have gone beyond the idea of nationality.

What is present in the spirit as the content of an idea can become present in the spirit and can take hold of the human being as such. It is something that has entered into the formula that was presented here last time as the conversation between the individual and the spirit of his people. But the life of the spirit has receded. Natural scientific thinking and naturalistic feeling have taken hold of humanity. How this presents itself in the field of philosophy is shown in The Riddles of Philosophy, which you will find discussed in my latest book; the second volume also offers an outlook on anthroposophy.

How did it come about that what is called the nationality idea has emerged, I might say as a reflection of the darkening of spiritual life? As soon as one comes to the national aspect – please take this quite objectively – as soon as one comes to the national aspect, the forces that can no longer be overlooked by the spiritual core of our soul come into action. They pulsate through the human organism in an ahrimanic-luciferic way and dissolve into what are called ideas, but which are not ideas.

It may be said here: the more a person frees himself from this nationalistic thinking, the more he comes to see the spiritual world.

I am not saying this out of arrogance, my dear friends, but rather, I would like to say it with inner humility. I grew up in a country in which the most diverse nationalities are not even as far apart as they are here in Switzerland, but live in complete confusion, where one could experience as a child everything that is connected with the rise of the national principle, the national impulses. I do not have one, precisely because of this circumstance – I say it objectively, you may judge it as you will – I have no homeland and I do not really know, from subjective feeling, what is called the feeling of home. It is connected with a certain strange inner tragedy, which is perhaps difficult for someone else to understand if one is prepared by one's karma to be homeless. But all this enabled me to hold my head up high, even as a child, in a country where the individual powers of the soul, like the individual people, stood in relation to one another.

In the middle of the picture of the clashing nationalities, I was in my youth in Austria in it. There one learns about the origin of the nationality idea in a different way than one can learn when living in a homogeneous national body. I was also unable to acquire what is usually called “patriotism” or “national enthusiasm” by working for it. »; nor to the people whose language I speak, for the reason that at the time when one acquires these feelings, when one experiences these feelings, the people among whom I lived were filled with a hatred that can truly be called »hatred of Germans«. Nowhere was this hatred of Germans more intense than in the area of Austria where I grew up. I got to know it in my own family. I did not grow up or was educated in the love of Germanness.

Perhaps some of you recognize that it was precisely because of this homelessness that I was entitled to speak in our area about things about which I would otherwise have to remain silent. That is how it is in my feelings, that is how it is when you struggle through life and its pitfalls. And one can only justify a judgment in one's own soul if one has truly fought for it for decades. I would not make anything out of all the studies I have devoted to the current European situation, I would not believe that I could see the big picture if I did not feel justified in speaking about these things in a few words as I have just done.

One must submit to necessity. But how tempting it is to judge great situations such as the one we are facing on the basis of individual experiences that one has here or there. How tempting it is to judge an entire nation on the basis of individual experiences, which may – as is inevitable in the present day – be rather poorly substantiated.

But occasionally we may also, dare I say, rise a little on a hill, as symbolized by the hill on which our building stands, and look at the matter with the eye of the soul, which the years of working in spiritual science can give us. There would be much to say and perhaps much will be said when calmer times return. But the one thing I would particularly like to emphasize this evening, my dear friends, is how – I would say – those impulses that are now discharging in such a heartbreaking and often horrific way were prepared within European humanity. One could see, as it were, how, with forces still superior to our own, what is expressing itself in our time seized everything that strives towards the true goal of humanity out of goodwill, but less out of insight, because only spiritual science strives out of insight. I say this without arrogance, because it strives under the motto: “Wisdom is only in truth.”

My dear friends, a peace movement spread across the various countries. When the Libyan war broke out, the members of the movement in Milan united and passed a resolution in favor of the Libyan war. They expressed their confidence in the minister who had unleashed this war. Facts are what matter, not opinions. And how could it have been hoped otherwise than that it would have to turn out as it has in Europe now, since, I would like to say, for centuries materialism, rooted in the most diverse living conditions, produced the impulses that are now there. The beginning of the 19th century still saw the Napoleonic campaigns across European soil. I do not want to talk about them, but I want to draw attention to one thing that we must write in our souls when we are carried away by what the individual hears: a saying that Napoleon said to the Austrian Chancellor Metternich:

"You, Metternich, were never a soldier and therefore do not know what goes on in a soldier's soul. I came of age on the battlefield; a man of my stamp does not care in the least whether a million soldiers have to bite the dust. I spared the French wherever I could. Of the 300,000 men that Moscow cost me, only 30,000 were French. As long as I could, I sent Germans and Poles into the fire...

I think we have come a little further than we were at the time when Napoleon, of the 300,000 people who lost their lives at Moscow, sent not Frenchmen but Germans and Poles into the fire.

“Any weak-kneed protection of human life is a dangerous mistake in war. That Louis XIV turned the Palatinate into a scene of fire was not, as our miserable histories gossip, worthy of blame, but of the highest praise. But the glory of this act belongs not to the king, but to the minister Louvois.”

Goethe, who was undoubtedly intimately connected with the whole of modern intellectual life, was not inclined to underestimate the man who cherished this attitude. Goethe, who was therefore accused of unpatriotism by lesser minds, hurled the words at all those who reproached him for it: “The man is too great for you.”

Yes, my dear friends, objectivity does exist. As Hegel was writing his Phenomenology of Spirit, the thunder of the French cannons was rolling near Jena; and as he watched Napoleon ride past his window, he said: “It is nevertheless an uplifting feeling to see the world soul riding past on horseback at your window.” He was the great master whose military writings and sentiments are still studied in all European war colleges to learn what he thought about war. One must not forget how Europe learned war.

Goethe had a different view of revolution from that of the German princes. This is clear from the words he wrote in Verdun in 1792:

"Between order and disorder, between preservation and ruin, between plundering and paying, one lives after all, and this may well be what actually makes war pernicious for the mind. One plays the bold, destructive part, and then again the gentle, invigorating one; one gets used to phrases in the midst of the desperate state of inspiring hope and invigorating. This gives rise to a kind of hypocrisy that has a special character and is quite distinct from the priestly, courtly – or whatever else they may be called – quite distinct.

My dear friends, the certainty of recognizing the great necessity of spiritual science can plant that in our soul.

We can see what historical necessities are at hand, we can see how I and consciousness soul, mind and soul of mind and soul, under the influence of the impulses of which has been spoken, could give the world such a picture as we now have before us. It is wrong to apply the everyday standard to these things, and wistfully, I may say, it may make one's heart sink when one has experienced what I have already modestly related to you.

This book, the second volume of my work Die Rätsel der Philosophie (The Riddles of Philosophy), was completed up to page 206. From page 199 to page 204, it deals with French philosophy as represented by Boutroux and Bergson. The book was finished up to this point. It could only be printed during the war. I hope that you will be convinced that, just like everything else, French philosophy by Mr. Boutroux and Mr. Bergson has been treated objectively.

It makes one's heart ache to hear the words as they are spoken by the West and to see what is happening in Europe. One then realizes how much needs to be done for the spiritual life and how much to struggle to be objective.

But there are other things that confront you, my dear friends. I have had a lot to go through in the last few weeks, I have seen and experienced many things. It is remarkable how karma manifests itself in the smallest details of the day.

When I was traveling from Vienna to Salzburg, I happened to come across an Austrian magazine dated September 1, 1914, at a train station. In addition to many other articles, this magazine contains a piece written by Robert Michel while he was in the field. So a soldier in the field wrote this article. He describes how the soldiers were loaded into the wagons, how they were sent into the field, how many were wounded and fell, how the Samaritans came and so on. I do not need to elaborate further. But the conclusion of this article speaks deeply to my heart. I will read this conclusion to you in context. Pay attention to one sentence and listen to the remarkable thing that is said to us:

"But every single person left behind in the monarchy has a duty to support them to the best of their ability until the victorious decision has been made. All the good words, hearty cheers and blessings that were bestowed on the troops as they left increased their courage and confidence, they were tiny splinters of strength that were by no means lost. This boost of mental strength must continue to be given to the poor, and the will to win must be passed from each individual to the fighters at the front. Therefore, let no one rush ahead of the decision that is being prepared in the north. Those who are lucky enough to be able to actively help should stretch their strength to the utmost. But those who must idly watch the tremendous power of the army and the empire should try to contribute their mite on the path that Scelic forces are taking: those whom God hears, pray; those who cannot pray, he should gather all his thoughts and willpower into a fervent desire for victory; and he who can do nothing else should press his fingers into the palms of his hands and say: We must go, we must win! ... In this way, the least and weakest will also have contributed to the victory that we are preparing to fight for, even if it is with the sacrifice of our last drop of blood!"

What education! For years we have spoken of the reality of the powers of thought and will. Here it comes back to us like an echo: “Those who cannot pray should gather all their powers of thought and will in a fervent desire for victory.”

I have to think of what I said to you last time. I said that human evolution must progress; by a certain point something must give way. To do this, it is necessary that in our time a certain amount of selflessness and willingness to sacrifice is achieved. Our spiritual science knows that this must come, but whether it is heard is another question. What must happen, must happen.

And now the second great teacher enters the stage. Does he not teach people what seems like an echo of what we have been saying from soul to soul for years – the appeal to the reality of the powers of thought and will?

We must only find the possibility, through all our efforts and through a non-arrogant nature, to rise to the greatness that the problem of our time presents.

How could it not be self-evident, my dear friends, that what occurs as a force between individual human souls should also occur in the external world, and that we must preserve it so that we can judge great things with a healthy view, that is the sense of justice and truth.

The world will only learn the truth about past events little by little. Our spiritual science gives us guidelines for everything, if only we want to use them to find the right tones and nuances of feeling in our hearts, as far as possible removed from all criticism. But understanding must

s achieved who but, my dear friends, how, under the influence of the other impulses, the constellation has arisen in such a way that, on the one hand, what has come as materialism can neither be lived out differently nor fought differently than as it happens. We must take things objectively, we must be clear about the fact that only the lack of spiritual impulses has gradually led to the surfacing of nationality principles based in instincts rather than in spirituality. We must be clear that only by freeing ourselves from this instinctual life can we move forward.

And how can our Russian friends, embraced by our hearts, not consider that the noble Russian people today must especially take to heart the spiritual science that will enable those who want to see things objectively and clearly to truly distinguish between the great task of this people and has been conjured up by an excessive imperialism, by an excessive materialism, which only wants to make up for a defeat by attacking European culture, and what has been conjured up by the foolish and mendacious talk of Pan-Slavism. Our Russian friends, who have our full support, must gain the conviction from the humanities that they must distinguish between the noble forces that lie in their nationality and the collaboration with what is not fundamental to their national soul, with what has happened in such a terrible way, to justify which would represent a lack of inner objectivity.

They [you?] will find each other in their hearts and minds if they [you?] keep an open mind for objectivity, for the objective.

I know, my dear friends, that there is a way and that there is ground – if you just look for it – on which our English friends can judge the statesman Grey just as I judge him. This ground exists, and it is the most sacred task, the most sacred task, to find this ground. If we find it, we will understand this structure, which we laid the foundation stone for a year ago. We will find the paths from soul to soul, from heart to heart.

The present is also expressed through something else. I only need to give a few figures to show the contrast we are facing. I am not criticizing these figures, far from it. But we must be aware of the figures, because figures speak for themselves, and since we live in a neutral country, I will use the figures of this neutral country.

My dear friends, we face each other according to our principle: heart to heart, soul to soul. What stands in Europe facing us? There is no rejection in this, no blaming criticism. In Europe, we face each other on the field that we looked out on a year ago as such a peaceful field. Now we face each other with fighting armies in their wartime strength, and this wartime strength speaks a clear language. First, France has a war strength of 4,372,000 men; second, Germany has 4,350,000 men; third, Russia has 3,615,000 men; fourth, Austria-Hungary has 1,872,178 men; fifth, England has 1,081,294 men.

To get a sense of the statistics, let's compare Germany, Austria, Hungary and France with Russia and England. Germany, Austria and Hungary, where the ego comes to life, have a total wartime strength of 62,221,780 men. France, Russia and England have a total of 9,068,694 men. The peacetime strength shows somewhat different numbers. At that time, when there was still peace, it amounted to 655,899 men for Germany, 414,679 men for Austria-Hungary, a total of 1,070,578 men, compared to 609,865 men for France, 1,384,000 men for Russia, and 254,968 men for England, a total of 2,248,833 men. The latter three empires thus had more than twice as much as Germany and Austria-Hungary in peacetime.

My dear friends, I would rather not comment on these figures, because it is difficult to do so at this time. It is really necessary that we let these official figures, which I have not taken from any of the individual states, but from this country, which is neutral to our satisfaction and where we are allowed to be with our construction with thanks, have an effect on us. I will not add anything to these figures. They speak of the necessity that the world now faces. It is necessary for us to be objective. No matter how trivial this truth may sound, I am not afraid to emphasize it again and again, because I know how difficult it will be to be objective in this time, justifiably difficult, naturally difficult, excusably difficult! After all, one can only see what is closest.

But, my dear friends, let us allow the spiritual science within us to be a truth! Let us not forget that what we have worked for over the years is not a game. Let us not forget, my dear friends, that we have no right, after having gone through all this and looking into the structure of the interrelationships of the folk soul, to fall back on the words of a Maeterlinck, who only drew his wisdom from Novalis and is now taking such a strange and ungrateful stand on current events. It is heartbreaking to see how he reflects what he has drawn from Novalis. It is heartbreaking, but I say it without bitterness. And it may be received without bitterness, even though today, of course, we are confronted in the outer world with what has really occurred after every outbreak of war: that it was always the other person's fault. That was always the case and, of course, it is the case today. That is understandable.

But for us it should not be about the guilt of the other, but about the realization of the necessity of existence and, in the second place, about what necessarily arises from our spiritual striving. It should be about learning to distinguish between those who made the war - these will not be the nations, but individual people, cliques and so on - and those who have to endure the war.

I would rather just hint at this as a question today, my dear friends. Let us build on what spiritual science can give us. In it we will find the possibility of coming together across all boundaries, from soul to soul, and we will grow stronger and stronger in forging this bond that leads from soul to soul. We will not grow stronger in this if we are unjust and unobjective towards individual nations, but [we will grow stronger] if we really find the hill, the spiritual hill, on which our judgment and our feeling, [like] our building, to which we laid the foundation stone with sacred feelings a year ago, stands symbolically on a hill.

That is my constant yearning now, the thought I pursue and which I would very much like to share with those of our friends who have some of the insights that I believe I have gained from the spiritual world.

You know that I do not want to claim authority, but I will say over and over again what lives in me as my faith, my conviction, my knowledge, as that which I myself have experienced and must experience anew every day and every hour: May our spiritual current may our spiritual current pass the test that must now be passed, by acquiring the right feeling and objectivity towards the events we are now experiencing; by acquiring feelings that exclude injustice towards the individual nations that are now fighting each other.

That is some of what I wanted to say to you at the present time.

Among the ideas advanced by Spiritual Science, that of Reincarnation occupies a foremost place. The idea that the human individuality has to manifest over and over again in a single personality in the course of the development of mankind on the Earth is at present but little understood, and, moreover, it is generally unpopular. As we have seen and shall still see, many questions arise in Spiritual Science, among them that of the meaning of repeated earthly lives.

When we study the evolution of human life on Earth in the light of Spiritual Science, we find that there is a very deep meaning behind the fact that the human individuality passes, not only once, but many times through earthly life. Every epoch and every age has its special content, its special characteristics, and all the varied possibilities which it offers have to be assimilated over and over again by the individual life-germs of man. This is possible because man, with all that composes his being, is connected not once and for all, but over and over again with the living stream of evolution. Looking upon this evolution as a rational progress into which new contents, new qualities are poured, we begin to realise the true significance of those Great Ones who have been the leading and guiding spirits of the different epochs. From each of these Great Ones, new qualities, new impulses for the progressive evolution of humanity have emanated and in the course of these lectures we shall be considering important questions connected with such leaders of mankind.

To-day our attention is turned to an individuality who, so far as historical investigation goes, is shrouded in mystery—an individuality lost in dim prehistoric ages, of whom no documentary records exist. I refer to the personality of Zarathustra.

A personality such as that of Zarathustra, whose gifts to humanity, in so far as they are preserved for us, seem so strange to the present age, makes us realise what great differences arise in the sum total of human nature during the various epochs. Superficial opinion may state that ever since man has been man, he has thought, felt and conceived ideas of morality exactly as he does to-day. But Spiritual Science shows us that the life of the human soul and the nature of man's thought, feeling and will, have undergone great changes in the course of human evolution. Human consciousness in olden times was of quite a different nature and we have reason to believe that, in the future, other stages of consciousness will be reached, again very different from the normal consciousness of to-day.

When we turn our attention to Zarathustra, we must look back over an infinitely long period of time. It is true that certain modern investigators have fixed the date of Zarathustra as contemporary with that of Buddha, which would mean that he lived some five or six centuries before the Christian era. It is however significant that our modern historians, after careful investigation of the traditions referring to Zarathustra, have been obliged to indicate that the personality hidden beneath the name of “Zarathustra,” the original founder of the Persian religion, must be placed a great many centuries before Buddha. Greek historians have repeatedly pointed out that Zarathustra must have lived about five or six thousand years before the Trojan War. We are prepared to state that historical research will, however unwillingly, eventually be forced to admit that the Greek tradition is correct in regard to the epoch in which Zarathustra lived. Spiritual Science, which is based on inner knowledge, agrees with the Greek tradition and it is therefore reasonable to indicate that Zarathustra, living as he did thousands of years before the birth of Christianity, was confronted by a consciousness entirely different from that of the present day.

I have often pointed out, and I shall explain it further, that human consciousness in ancient times was bound up with certain dream states, or rather clairvoyant states, in normal human life. Primeval man did not contemplate the world with the strong, clearly-defined sense perceptions of to-day. We shall best understand the way in which man of those primeval times took his environment into his consciousness, if we think of a last remnant of the ancient consciousness, still left to us in dreams. Everybody knows how dream images appear and disappear, how they emerge and fade away. To our present consciousness they are for the most part dream pictures, meaningless reminiscences of the outer world. Interwoven though they are with higher states of consciousness, they are incomprehensible to people of our time. Images, ever-changing pictures, symbols—of these our dream consciousness consists. Everyone has experienced how a fire, for instance, is symbolised in a dream. Think of the difference between a dream and ordinary waking consciousness. Such as it is, this dream state represents the remnant of a primeval consciousness of man. Man then lived in a world of images—images not vague or empty but proceeding from a real external world. In this ancient consciousness there were intermediate states between waking and sleep and in these states man was face to face with the spiritual world. The spiritual world actually entered into his consciousness. Nowadays the door into the spiritual world is locked against the normal consciousness of man, but this was not the case in olden times; for he then entered into those intermediate states between waking and sleep when the spiritual world appeared before him in dreamlike images. In these dreamlike images he saw the working and the weaving of the spirit behind the physical world of sense. He had direct experience of the spiritual world, although by the time of Zarathustra this was already indistinct and dim. A man of antiquity could say to himself: “I behold the outer physical world and the life of sense, but I also have experiences and perceptions in a different state of consciousness; I know that there is another world behind the world of sense—a spiritual world.”

Evolution consists in one faculty being acquired at the expense of another, and thus as the epochs took their course, the faculty which man once possessed of understanding the spiritual world became less and less. Our clear reasoning and cognitional faculties, our present logical thinking which we regard as the most important feature of modern culture—these did not exist in those early times. They had to be developed by man in the epoch to which we now belong, at the expense of the old clairvoyant consciousness. Clairvoyant consciousness will have to be cultivated again in the future evolution of mankind, but in a different way. It has to be added to the purely physical consciousness that is bound up with the faculty of intellectual logic. A rising and a falling can be traced in the evolution of human consciousness and we see therein a deep purpose in man's development.

The old consciousness described above dates back to a prehistoric age of which there is no documentary evidence. Zarathustra himself belongs to this age of which, as yet, no historical traditions have reached us. He was one of those leading personalities who gave a stimulus for great steps forward in the civilisation of mankind. Whatever the level of human consciousness at the time, these leading personalities must always draw from the source which we may call Illumination, Initiation into the higher mysteries of the universe. Among such personalities were Hermes, Buddha and Moses, as well as Zarathustra, whom we are to study in the course of these lectures.

Zarathustra lived at least eight thousand years before our present era, and the gifts to civilisation which poured from his enlightened spirit shine forth clearly across the centuries. Those who penetrate into the inner currents of human evolution can detect them even after this lapse of time. Zarathustra was one of those whose soul had experienced Truth, Wisdom and Intuition to an extent far transcending the normal consciousness of the age. In that part of the Earth which later on was known as the Persian Empire, Zarathustra proclaimed mighty truths from the super-sensible worlds—regions lying far above the normal consciousness of the men of that time.

If we would understand the significance of Zarathustra's teaching, we must realise that his mission was to communicate a certain conception of the universe to one particular section of humanity, while other streams had, as it were, a different mission in human culture. The personality of Zarathustra is all the more interesting to us in that he lived in a part of the world directly adjoining on its South side another land whose people transmitted an entirely different order of spirituality to mankind. I refer to the peoples of India, from whom arose the Vedic poets. The region permeated with the mighty impulse of Zarathustra lies to the North of the land from which the great teaching of Brahma went forth. Zarathustra's message to the world was fundamentally different from the Brahministic teachings of the great leaders of ancient Indian thought. These Indian teachings have come down to us in the Vedas, and in the profound philosophy of the Vedanta, of which the revelations of Buddha represent, as it were, the final splendour.

We shall understand the difference between the two thought currents—the one proceeding from Zarathustra and the other from the ancient Indian teachings—when we consider that man can reach the spiritual world along two paths of approach. There are two ways by which we may raise the inner powers of the soul above their normal level so that we may pass from the world of the senses into the super-sensible world. One way is to penetrate deeply into our own souls, to immerse ourselves, as it were, in our inner being. The other way leads behind the veils spread around us by the physical world. Both ways lead into the super-sensible world. If in the intimate experiences of soul life we so deepen our feelings, ideas, and impulses that the powers of soul grow stronger and stronger, we can descend mystically into the “Self.” Passing through that part of our being which belongs to the physical world, we may indeed find our real spiritual essence—the imperishable essence that passes from incarnation to incarnation. When we pierce through the veil of the inner being with all the desires, passions and inner experiences of soul (which are only one part of us in so far as we live in a physical body) we then reach our eternal essence and enter a world of spirit. On the other hand, if we develop powers which not only perceive the physical world with its sounds, colours, sensations of warmth and cold—if we so strengthen our spiritual powers that they can penetrate behind the encircling veil of colour, sound, warmth, cold and other physical phenomena—then our strengthened spiritual forces will reach the super-sensible worlds, stretching before us into boundless distances, into infinity. The first way is that of the Mystic; the second the way of Spiritual Science. It was along one of these two ways that the great teachers attained to the revelations of truth which they had to inculcate into mankind as the basis of culture.

In primeval times the evolution of humanity was such that only one of the two ways was open to a particular people. Only later, in the Greek epoch (coinciding with the beginning of the Christian era) did these two currents mingle and gradually become a single current of culture. When we speak to-day of the ascent into higher worlds, it is right to state that the man who would make the ascent must to a certain extent develop both kinds of spiritual powers within his soul—the mystical powers on the path into the inner self and the powers developed by Spiritual Science as it penetrates the outer world. To-day these two paths are no longer strictly separate from one another, for it is part of the purpose of human evolution that the two currents should meet. Before the Greek and Christian eras these two methods of development were practised by different peoples living in regions not very far apart in space. We find traces of them in ancient Indian culture, in the Vedic songs and in the Zarathustrian civilisation to the North. All that we so greatly admire in the old Indian culture—which later on found expression in Buddhism—all this was attained through inner contemplation, by turning away from the outer world. The eye had to become insensitive to physical colour, the ear to physical sound, the senses to turn away from outer impressions, and finally, with his inner powers of soul made strong, man attained to Brahma. In Brahma, he felt himself united with the inner being of the Cosmos, moving and creative. And so there arose the teaching of the Holy Rishis which flowed into the Vedas and lived on in the Vedantic philosophy and in Buddhism.

The other path springs from the teachings of Zarathustra. Zarathustra handed down to his disciples the secret of how to strengthen the powers of understanding in order to penetrate the veil of the outer world of sense. Zarathustra did not teach as did the Indian mystics: “Turn away from colours, sounds and all the outer impressions of the senses, and seek the way into the spiritual worlds entirely by means of inner contemplation, in your own soul life.” On the contrary, Zarathustra taught: “Strengthen the powers of knowledge and understanding for everything that lives, be it plant or animal; understand all living things in air and water, on the mountain heights or in the valleys. Look upon this world!” We know that for the Indian mystic, this world was Maya—illusion; he turned from it in order to find Brahman; but Zarathustra taught his disciples rather to penetrate the world with understanding and to feel, behind the outer realm of physical phenomena, the reality of a spiritual power, active and creative. This is the other path.

It is remarkable how these two paths converge in the Greek age, where the understanding of things spiritual was far deeper than it is in our time. This understanding was expressed in symbolical imagery, in mythology. The two thought currents, the mystic path into the inner self and the other leading into the outer Cosmos, blended in Greek culture. One current derived its name from the mystical God Dionysus, the mysterious being who was to be found when a man descended more and more deeply into his inner being and there discovered the sub-human element which formerly he did not know, and from which he evolved into full manhood. This element, still unpurified, still partly animal, was known by the name of Dionysus. The other element, in which the eyes of spirit beheld the phenomena of the physical world, was expressed by the name of Apollo.¹ Thus we find the teachings of Zarathustra expressed in the cult of Apollo and the mystic doctrine of contemplation in the cult of Dionysus in Greece. In ancient times, these two currents arose separately, but in the Apollonian and Dionysian cults they were united and blended. If we, in our modern culture, undergo a true spiritual training, we can re-experience them both in one.

Nietzsche had an inkling of the significant difference between the cults of Apollo and Dionysus. True, he did not enter very deeply into the matter, but in his first Essay, “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,” he shows that the Apollonian and Dionysian cults of ancient Greece are represented on the one hand in the mystic current, and on the other in the current which is now expressed by Spiritual Science.

Zarathustra taught his disciples to see the Spirit behind every physical phenomenon. The whole civilisation inspired by him was based on this principle. Now it is not enough to say that behind the world of the senses there is the Divine-Spiritual. Man may think he has discovered a great truth here, but it leads to nothing but a vague Pantheism. We may think we express a truth when we say: “God is at work behind every physical phenomenon”—but this is merely a conception of a nebulous spiritual power behind all things physical. A teacher like Zarathustra, who had actually ascended to the spiritual world, did not speak in this abstract and vague terminology to his disciples and his people. He showed that just as individual physical phenomena are different, so the spiritual essence behind them is at one time more evident, at another less. He taught how behind the physical Sun—the origin of all life and activity—there is the centre of spiritual life.

Let us try to condense into simple language the doctrines which Zarathustra tried to inculcate into his disciples. He spoke thus: “Man, as we perceive him, is not merely composed of a physical body, for this physical body is but the outer manifestation of the Spirit. Just as the physical body is nothing but the manifested crystallisation of the Spiritual in man, so the Sun, in so far as it is a body of luminous matter, is nothing but the external body of a spiritual Sun.” The spiritual part of man is spoken of as the “Aura”—or “Ahura,” to use the old expression—in distinction to his physical body and in the same sense the spiritual part of the physical Sun may be called the “Great Aura,” for it is all-embracing. Zarathustra called that which lies behind the physical Sun, Aura Mazda or Ahura Mazdao—the Great Aura. With this spiritual essence behind the Sun, all spiritual experiences and conditions are bound up, just as the existence and well-being of plants, animals and all that lives on Earth are bound up with the physical Sun. Behind the physical Sun lives the spiritual Lord and Creator, Ahura Mazdao. This is the derivation of the name “Ormuzd,” Spirit of Light. While the Indians searched mystically in the inner self to find Brahma, the Eternal, shining like a luminous centre in man, Zarathustra pointed his disciples to the great periphery, showing them that the mighty Spirit of the Sun, Ahura Mazdao, the Spirit of Light, dwelt in the physical body of the Sun. Ahura Mazdao has to face his enemy—Ahriman, the Spirit of Darkness—just as man, who bears within himself the enemies of his good impulses, strives to raise his real spiritual being to perfection and has to battle against his lower passions, desires, and the delusive images of lying and falsehood.

Zarathustra was able to transmute his conception of the universe from mere doctrine into real feeling, real vision. And so he was able to teach his disciples that within them was an active principle of perfection. Whatever their development might be at the time, they were taught to realise that this principle of perfection could raise them to higher and higher stages of existence. They were taught that passions and desires, lying and deceit within the soul lead to imperfection. Zarathustra taught of the attacks made upon Ahura Mazdao in the outer world by the principle of imperfection, by the evil which casts shadow into the light, by Angra Mainyus—Ahriman.

Zarathustra's disciples were thus enabled to realise that the great universe is reflected in each individual. The real significance of this doctrine lay, not in its theoretical concepts and ideas but in the feeling it called forth in man—a feeling which taught him of his relationship to the universe and made him able to say: “Here I stand—a little world, but a little world which is a replica of the great world. In human beings, the principle of perfection is opposed by evil; in the great universe, Ormuzd and Ahriman face one another. The whole universe is, as it were, a man grown immeasurably great and the highest human forces are Ahura Mazdao—their enemy, Ahriman.”

If man directs his attention truly to the physical world he must finally discover that all phenomena are part of the great cosmic process; he is filled with awe when spectro-analysis reveals the fact that the same substances which exist on Earth exist also on the farthest stars. In the light of Zarathustra's teaching, man felt himself in his spiritual being, part of the Spirit of the whole Cosmos; he felt himself emanating from this Spirit. Herein lies the great significance of the doctrine.

The teaching was not abstract but very concrete. Even when people of our time have a certain feeling for the Spiritual behind the physical world it is very difficult to make them realise that there must necessarily be more than one central spiritual power. But just as there are different natural phenomena—heat, light, chemical forces and the like—so there are different orders of lower spiritual Powers, subordinate forces whose realm of activity is more limited than that of the One All-Embracing Power. Zarathustra made a distinction between Ormuzd and other lower spiritual beings, who were his servants. Before we turn to consider these lower spiritual beings, let us realise that the doctrine of Zarathustra is not mere dualism, a teaching of the two worlds of Ormuzd and of Ahriman. He taught that underlying these two currents in the universe there is one power whence both the realm of light (Ormuzd) and the realm of darkness (Ahriman) proceed. Old Greek writers tell us that the unity behind Ormuzd and Ahriman was worshipped by the ancient Persians as the LIVING UNITY, but it is difficult to re-create this idea nowadays. Zarathustra calls this Zervane Akarene—that which lies behind the light. To get at some conception of the meaning of this, let us think of the course of evolution. We must conceive of all creation as travelling towards greater and greater perfection, so that if we look towards the future, the Ahura of Ormuzd grows clearer and clearer. Looking into the past, we see the Ahrimanic powers in opposition to Ormuzd; in course of time, however, their existence must cease. In all these things we must understand that a survey of the future and of the past leads to the same point. It is very difficult for the man of to-day to realise this. Let us think of a circle, by way of illustration. If we start at the lowest point and pass along one side, we arrive at the opposite, the highest point. If we pass along the other side, we also arrive at the same point. If we enlarge the circle, we have further to go, and the curve of the arc becomes flatter and flatter. Draw the circle larger and larger, and the arc eventually becomes a straight line; thereafter both lines lead to infinity. But before this, with a smaller circle, we arrive at the same point along both sides. Why should we not assume that the same result obtains when the sides of the circle are flat and its fines straight? In infinity, the point must then remain the same on the one side as on the other. Therefore to conceive of infinity, we may imagine a line continuing indefinitely on both sides—in effect, a circle.

This is an abstract conception of what underlies the Zarathustrian doctrine of Zervane Akarene—Zaruana Akarana. Taking the concept of Time, we look into the future on the one side and into the past on the other. Time, however, is welded into a circle; the completion takes place in infinity. This is symbolically represented as the serpent biting its own tail; into the serpent the Power of Light which grows brighter and brighter, is woven on the one side, and on the other the Power of Darkness, which appears to grow deeper and deeper. While we ourselves remain in the centre, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Light and Shadow, are intermingled, and into all this is woven the self-contained, mysterious “Zaruana Akarana”—Time.

This ancient conception of the universe did not merely state vaguely: Outside and behind the world of the senses which works upon eyes and ears, there is “Spirit.” A kind of alphabet, records of the spiritual world were revealed. Suppose we to-day take a page of a book. We see letters on it and we build up words from these letters, but we must first have learnt to read. Those who have not learnt to read in the spiritual sense, cannot understand Zarathustra; they cannot read the sense of his teaching but merely see signs and symbols. Only those who know how to build up these signs into a doctrine to which their souls respond can understand Zarathustra.

Now behind the world of the senses, in the ordered grouping of the stars, Zarathustra perceived a symbolic writing in cosmic space. Just as we have a written alphabet, so Zarathustra saw in the starry worlds of space, a kind of Alphabet of the spiritual worlds, a language through which they became articulate. Thus arose the science of penetrating into the spiritual world and of reading and interpreting the constellations. He knew too, how to decipher the signs in which the Cosmic Spirits inscribe their activities into space. Their language is the grouping and movement of the stars. Zarathustra and his disciples saw that Ahura Mazdao creates and manifests by describing an apparent circle in the heavens, in the sense of our Astronomy, and this circle was for them the outward sign of the way in which Ormuzd manifested his activity to man. Zarathustra showed—and this is a most important point—that the Zodiac is a line which returns on itself, forming a circle as the expression of the rotation of Time. In the highest sense, he taught that while one branch of Time goes forward into the future, the other turns backwards into the past. Zaruana Akarana, the self-contained line of Time, the circle described by Ormuzd, the Spirit of Light, is what was later called the Zodiac. This is the expression of the spiritual activity of Ormuzd. The course of the Sun through the Zodiac is the expression of the activity of Ormuzd. The Zodiac is the expression of Zaruana Akarana. Zaruana Akarana and Zodiac are one and the same word, like Ormuzd and Ahura Mazdao. Two things must here be remembered.

When the Sun passes in summer through the light, his full powers fall upon the Earth; they are the forces of spiritual light sent forth by Ormuzd from his realm of light. The signs of the Zodiac through which Ormuzd passes in the summer or in the daytime reveal his activity unhampered by Ahriman. The signs of the Zodiac below the horizon are symbolical of the realm of shadow through which Ahriman passes. What, then, are the expressions of Ormuzd (who represents the light part of the Zodiac) and of Ahriman (the dark part), in their activity on Earth? Now there is a difference between the influence of the Sun in the morning and at noon time. When Ormuzd ascends from Aries to Taurus, the effect of his rays is not the same as when he is descending. His rays differ in summer and in winter and they differ with every sign through which the Sun passes. The course of the Sun through the signs of the Zodiac revealed to Zarathustra the many sides of the activity of Ormuzd, and he beheld here the expressions of spiritual beings who are, as it were, the servants, the “sons” of Ormuzd, who execute his commands. These subservient powers, each having their own special activity, are the “Amschaspands” or “Ameschas Pentas.” While Ormuzd represents the collective activity of the Zodiac, the Amschaspands have to perform the specialised activities expressed in the raying forth of the Sun from Aries, Taurus, Cancer, and so forth. The activity of Ormuzd is expressed in the raying of the Sun through all the light signs of the Zodiac—from Aries to Libra or Scorpio. According to Zarathustra, Ahriman works from the centre of the Earth, from the darkness where his servants, the Amschaspands, dwell; they are the opponents of the good genii surrounding Ormuzd. Zarathustra distinguished twelve orders of spiritual beings, six or rather seven, on the side of Ormuzd; six, or rather five, on the side of Ahriman. They are symbolised as good and evil genii, or subservient spirits, according to whether the Sun's course runs through the light or the dark signs of the Zodiac. Goethe was thinking of these helpers of Ormuzd when he wrote at the beginning of Faust, in the Prologue in Heaven:—

“But ye, pure
Children of God, enjoy eternal beauty:—
Let that which ever operates and lives
Clasp you within the limits of its love;
And seize with sweet and melancholy thoughts
The fronting phantoms of its loveliness.” (Shelley's translation).

The Amschaspands of Zarathustra are the same beings to whom Goethe refers as the “pure children of God,” who serve the highest Divine Power.

There are twelve Amschaspands or genii; below, there are other spiritual powers of which the teaching of Zarathustra distinguished twenty-eight grades. The number is approximate, for it varies between twenty- four, twenty-eight, and thirty-one. These subordinate powers are called Izerads or Izods. What class of beings are these? If we think of the Amschaspands as the twelve great powers in Space, then the Izods are the subordinate forces behind the lower activities of Nature, and of these, there are from twenty-four to thirty-one. There is yet a third group of spiritual powers—powers which, in our sense, are not really active in the physical world as such. They are called by Zarathustra, Ferruhars or Frawashars. The twelve forces behind which the Amschaspands live are active in all the physical activities of light upon the Earth: behind the Izods we must imagine the forces affecting the animal kingdom. The Frawashars are to be thought of as the spiritual beings guiding the group-souls of the animals.

Thus Zarathustra saw a real super-sensible world behind the world of sense: Ormuzd and Ahriman, behind them Zaruana Akarana, below them the Amschaspands, good and bad. Now what are the Izods and Frawashars? According to Zarathustra they are the spiritual essence pervading the macrocosm, the living essence² of the external physical phenomena we perceive with our senses. Man, as he stands in the world, is a replica of this greater world; therefore he contains within himself all the powers which ensoul the greater world. Just as we have recognised Ormuzd in the struggle of man towards perfection, and Ahriman in man's impure instincts and impulses, so we can also find in man the imprint of the other spiritual beings, the lesser genii.

And now I have to speak of something which may appear extraordinary to-day to the usual conceptions of the Cosmos held by man. The time, however, is not far distant when even external science will discover that there is super-sensible element behind all physical phenomena, a spiritual world behind the world of the senses. It will then be realised that the physical body of man in all its parts, is an image of the whole Cosmos The Cosmos pours itself into, and densifies within the physical body of man. Thus, according to the conception of Zarathustra—which much resembles that of Spiritual Science—we can say that both Ormuzd and Ahriman work upon man: Ormuzd as the impulse towards perfection, and Ahriman as the impulse in opposition to this. But the spiritual activities of the Amschaspands are also at work in man. We must think of these beings as so far densified in man that they are physically manifest.

In the time of Zarathustra there was, of course, no science of anatomy in our sense of the word, but he and his disciples, with their spiritual conception of the world, saw the twelve currents of the Amschaspands as a reality. They saw these currents flowing towards man and working in him. The human head was to them the visible expression of the activities of the seven good and five evil currents of the Amschaspands. How is this truth expressed at the present time? To-day, the anatomist has discovered the existence of twelve pairs of cerebral nerves which are repeated in the body. These are the physical counterparts, the frozen currents, as it were, of the Amschaspands. There are twelve pairs of nerves and by their means man can either attain the highest perfection or sink to the greatest evil. Thus the spiritual teaching given by Zarathustra to his disciples appears again, materialised, in our own age. People may regard it as so much fancy on the part of Spiritual Science to say that Zarathustra was referring to the twelve pairs of cerebral nerves when he taught of the Amschaspands, but the world will have much to learn besides this, for it will be found that all the moving and weaving Cosmos works on further in man. The ancient teachings of Zarathustra are indeed revived in modern physiology. The twenty-eight to thirty-one Izods occupy the same subordinate position to the Amschaspands as do the twenty-eight nerves of the spine to the nerves of the brain. The spinal nerves which stimulate the soul life of man are created by the spiritual currents of the Izods outside; they work into us and crystallise, as it were, into the spinal nerves. And in that which is not of the nature of the nerves but which makes us individuals, which does not now pour in from outside, but lives within—there dwell the Frawashars or Ferruhars. They live in those thoughts which transcend the merely physical activity of the brain and nerves.

There is a remarkable connection between the tendencies of our own time and the doctrines which Zarathustra gave in spiritual pictures flowing behind the veil of the world of sense. There is, however, one significant thing to be remembered. The teachings of Zarathustra influenced the thought of the people for a very long time and then for a while they receded into the background. Sometimes it was the mystical way of thought which predominated, sometimes the occult, after Greek thought had in a measure united the two currents. Nowadays there seems to be a tendency to the mystical way. Many feel drawn towards Indian occultism with its tendency towards introspection and this explains the fact that little heed is paid to the essential features of the doctrines of Zarathustra in the spiritual life of to-day. There is a great deal of ancient Persian thought in our own spiritual life, yet in a sense, its most essential features, the very core of the doctrine of Zarathustra, is lost to our age. When we realise once more that the teachings of Zarathustra are the spiritual prototypes of countless examples of physical research, then the key-note of our present day culture will be replaced by another. Now one important feature in almost all other mystical currents of culture is missing in the religion of Zarathustra. The reason for this is its entire preoccupation with macrocosmic phenomena. Other religious systems have accentuated the contrasts presented by the division of the sexes. In most old religious systems, Goddesses and Gods are contrasting symbols of the two streams active in the world. The religion of Zarathustra rises above this conception in the symbols of Goodness as Light and Evil as Darkness. Hence the sublime purity of this religion and the nobility which lifts it above ideas which play an ugly part in any endeavour to deepen the thought life of our time. Even the Greek writers stated that the highest Godhead had perforce to create Ahriman as well as Ormuzd in order that there might be the necessary contrast. This implies that one Primal Power was set over against another. In the Hebrew religion, woman, Eve, is the symbol for the evil which came into this world. In the religion of Zarathustra there is no element of sex antagonism. The ugly things which nowadays enter so largely into our daily literature, pour into our thoughts and feelings and so unpleasantly accentuate the chief causes of health and disease without touching upon the essentials of life—all these will disappear when the “heroic” conception of Ormuzd and Ahriman is understood, when the true Zarathustrian influence spreads in present-day culture, clothed in the words of its great founder. These things pursue their own course in the world and nothing can arrest the progress of the truth inherent in the culture of Zarathustra. If we follow the progress of culture in Asia Minor, down to later times among the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and even up to the Christian era, we find traces of concepts derived from the illumination of the great Zarathustra. And we shall not wonder at the view expressed by a Greek writer, that the great spiritual leaders of the races imparted to the people part of a future culture of which they stood in need. This Greek writer pointed to Pythagoras, showing what he had learned from his great predecessors—Geometry from the Egyptians, Arithmetic from the Phoenicians, Astronomy from the Chaldeans—and how he had turned to Zarathustra's doctrines to learn from them the sacred teaching of the relations of man to the spiritual world and the true conduct of life. The same writer asserts that the conduct of life laid down by Zarathustra leads man above all minor conflicts, that they all culminate in the one great conflict between Good and Evil, where victory can only be gained by purification from evil, lying and falsehood. The worst enemy of Ormuzd bears the name of “Calumny”—one of the chief qualities of Ahriman. The Greek writer tells us that Pythagoras could not find the highest moral idea (the moral purification of man) among the Egyptians from whom he learnt Geometry, nor among the Phoenicians from whom he learnt Arithmetic, nor among the Chaldeans from whom he learnt Astronomy; but that he had to turn to the followers of Zarathustra to understand the heroic conception of the universe, since purification alone can vanquish evil. This shows the high value placed upon the noble teachings of Zarathustra in olden times.

What I have said may be illustrated by quotations from historical documents. Plutarch, for instance, says that Zarathustra teaches the worship of Light because Light is the greatest factor for the well-being of the Earth and the highest spiritual factor is Truth. This is in complete agreement with what has been said.

Let us now return again to the ancient Vedic conceptions. They were the result of a mystic descent into the inner being. Before man can penetrate to the inner light of Brahma, he meets with his own passions, his wild and semi-human impulses. These oppose his entry into the true life of spirit and soul. The Indian mystics realised that the mystic union with Brahma could only be attained by the elimination of all the impressions of the physical world, that the sensuous appeals of colours and sounds must cease. So long as these elements enter into meditation, the opponents of the attainment of perfection are there. The Indian mystic would have said: “Cast away all that may enter the soul from the outer powers; deepen yourself in the innermost core of your own soul; descend into the realm of the Devas, and when you have vanquished the lower Devas you will find the kingdom of Brahman. But shun the world of the Asuras, those beings who would fain penetrate into you from the world of Maya, the outer world. These must on no account be allowed to enter.”

And now listen to what Zarathustra taught his disciples: “The peoples of the South are differently constituted and they seek the spiritual world in another way. Their way would not help a nation whose mission is not only to dream and meditate in this wonderful world, but to teach mankind the art of Agriculture and the conquest of savagery. Do not look upon external things merely as Maya; you must penetrate behind this veil of colour and sound around you. Shun all that threatens to keep your soul within the bonds of egoism, shun all that bears the stamp of the Deva qualities! Make your way through the realm of the lower Asuras and ascend to the higher. Your nature is such that you can do this if you will!” In India the Rishis had taught that man was not so organised as to enable him to seek what lies in the realm of the Asuras, and that he should therefore shun their world and enter that of the Devas.

This is the difference between the Indian and Persian cultures. The Indian peoples were taught that the Asuras are evil spirits and must be avoided, for the organisation of the Indians was such that they only could know the lower Asuras. The Persian peoples, on the other hand, knew only the lower Devas and were therefore taught: ‘Penetrate to the realm of the Asuras and you will be able to rise from there to the realm of the higher Asuras.’

The impulse which Zarathustra gave to the men of his epoch lay in the fact that he had a gift for mankind which could work on through all the ages—a gift which would make clear the upward path and conquer all the false doctrines deceiving man on his path to perfection. Zarathustra therefore looked upon himself as the servant of Ahura Mazdao, and as such, he personally knew the opposition of Ahriman. His teaching was intended to aid mankind to a heroic conquest of the Ahriman principle. We find his words recorded in the documents of a later era. Inspired by the inner impulse of his mission, and fired by the passion with which he felt himself the antagonist of Ahriman, he said: “I will speak! Harken, ye who journey from afar, and ye that come from near at hand, with longing to hear. Mark well my words! No longer shall the Evil One, the false leader, conquer the Spirit of Good. Too long has his evil breath permeated human speech. I will refute him with the speech which the Highest, the Primal One has put into my mouth. I will speak what Ahura Mazdao says to me. And he who hears not my words nor understands their meaning as I speak them will experience much evil ere the end of the world-cycles!” Thus spake Zarathustra.

May we realise from these words that Zarathustra's message to mankind can be felt and experienced through all later epochs of culture. Those of us who have ears to hear the dim echoes still living in our time, will, if they listen with spiritual ears, hear the faint tones of Zarathustra's words to mankind thousands of years ago. For those who have ears to hear, the message of Zarathustra and other great Leaders of whom we shall speak in these lectures, may be summed up in the following words: “These God-sent Spirits shine as stars in the heavens of Life Eternal. May it be vouchsafed to every soul to behold their radiance in the realms of earthly life.”

• 1. See Chapter VI. of “The East in the Light of the West” by Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophical Publishing Company
• 2. das Wesenhafte

My dear friends, I should like to put together various things today which will give us the possibility of going into some important matters that we will speak of in connection with our present subject.

Let us suppose that here were the surface of the earth—arable land, meadow, or what you will (a drawing was made), and plants, any kind of plants grew in this meadow. And suppose that here were a worm or some little creature, that lives and burrows under the earth and has its home under the earth and never comes above the surface. This little grub or caterpillar, or whatever it is, creeps about inside and learns by its creeping about to know the roots of these plants. Naturally, as this creature never comes out above the surface of the earth, it only learns to know the roots of the plants, it learns to know nothing else; it creeps about and learns to recognise the roots. And what will happen is the following, is it not?

When a certain time comes in this creeping about of the caterpillar, processes are going on up above in the plants, in the whole plant nature; real processes are going on which are dependent on the sunshine, on the sun's giving out a certain warmth. The processes which the plants are undergoing naturally also bring about changes in the roots. When the plant above begins to put out fresh shoots and to bear blossoms, changes occur similarly in the roots. All the roots processes are affected when something occurs above. So we can say: when this worm is creeping about underneath, up above, caused by sun-activities, shoots, leaves, fruits are called forth, and processes are then brought about in the roots. But the caterpillar only crawls about in the earth; it creeps from root to root.

Now let us for once suppose—hypothetically we can accept it—that this caterpillar or grub were a worm-philosopher or a caterpillar-philosopher, and evolved a world-conception. Thus it creeps about there down below the earth and makes itself a world-conception. In the picture that it devises as world-conception, there can naturally never play a role, the fact that the sun comes and the shoots spring forth—for the caterpillar can know nothing of this; it creeps around, this caterpillar, this worm, and studies the changes in the roots, and notices quite clearly that something is going on, that the roots become different, and also that in the part of the earth lying round something is happening, and he now expresses all he knows, this worm. He expresses all of this, but in the picture of the world which he makes for himself, never a word is to be found about the existence of the sun, the coming forth of the plants; this indeed is self-evident. That is to say, a world-conception arisen in this worm-philosopher which will give a proper picture of the condition under the earth, whether it becomes damper, becomes warmer ... To be sure he does not know, this worm, whence this warmth comes ... That it becomes warmer, that all sorts of processes go on in the roots, all that he comprehends. And let us suppose the worm were not an ordinary worm-philosopher but was inspired by some modern philosopher of the opinion so current today, that all depends on cause and effect, everything is subjected to causality, as it is expressed in a scientifically philosophical-technical way. Then this worm will creep about down below and will call one thing a cause and another an effect and say: Now the earth becomes somewhat warmer from above downwards; that causes alterations in the roots. With the further processes he will represent the one as cause and the further processes in the roots as effects, and so on ... and a consistent picture will emerge, which classifies all the processes under the earth as cause and effect. But it would not include that fact that the sun shines, and the plants come out, and through this the processes in the roots are changed. Still, the worm's world-picture would be quite a consistent one. It could be a genuine picture of causality, there need be nothing lacking in the chain of cause and effect.

Now you see, it is quite clear to you, I think, that this worm-philosophy represents a one-sided world-conception which is quite correct ... except that it lacks what man considers the most important of all. That is, that the sun comes with its warmth and light and brings about what the worm actually observes down there below; it is clear, indeed, how in fact his whole causality only depends on the fact that he does not come up above the surface of the earth.

You see, as a matter of fact, such worms are the people who philosophize today on the chain of causality, of causes and effects. The image is completely opposite: men makes researches into what their senses see; and move about in what—well, not in what is shut off spatially from above—but in what is shut off through sense observation, and they simply do not perceive the spiritual extended everywhere, that causes the causes. They do not distinguish the spiritual which is behind cause and effect. It is really an exact analogy.

Now if the worm should suddenly come out and see the sun, he could discover that the cause of all he has puzzled out down below is, as a matter of fact, what other beings up above are seeing, and that his world-conception simply does not hold good. He would have to realize that what he himself underneath has had as perceptions of differences, is up above. It is just the same when one raises oneself from ordinary human sight to spiritual sight, for one notes how then something comes into the sense-world which cannot be perceived under ordinary circumstances.

You also see from this how the much vaunted inner completeness of a world-conception means nothing for its correctness. One who can set himself genuinely with his whole heart and soul into this worm-existence can give the assurance that nothing at all in this worm-conception need rest on a logical error. Hence all logic can be correct and complete in itself, there need be no logical error in it, it can be a world-conception completely tenable inwardly. You will realize from this, however, that it is in no way a question of being able or not able to prove something with the instruments of the world in which man is. I have often referred to this from other aspects. This we are not concerned with, whether or not a man can prove something with the means offered by the world in which he dwells. World-conceptions can have ever such fine proofs in themselves, they still remain—well—let us say: worm-world-conceptions. When we let this really work upon our soul, we see what stands behind of great importance: we note how—when we once guess that there are yet other worlds—a kind of general world -the duty arises of entering into those other worlds. For no matter how complete in itself is a world-conception, it does not follow that it gives one any knowledge of the actual events and processes. And this is truly what one finds with the majority of the philosophies of today and the immediate past; they are worm-conceptions. They are complete in themselves in a really extraordinarily logical way, they have an immense amount of value for the worlds in which man dwells; but they are only constructed with the means of the worlds in which man dwells. You see from this that you cannot rely on so-called proofs, unless you first come to understand where these proofs originate. For our time, it is truly a matter of getting a feeling for the way other worlds permeate our world, for the way other worlds allow themselves to become manifest. Certainly, this is difficult. For truly, conditions for the worm are such that he lives underground; the worm would not endure well up above, if he were forced to go out there; first he would have to adapt himself to the new conditions. Thus it is also difficult for the human being, when he detaches himself as soul from his bodily nature, to adapt himself to the new conditions.

Now you can raise a question, my dear friends, you can say: ‘Fine, you have now compared the world in which the human being lives with his senses to the world under the earth. Show us something, anything at all, that limits, truly limits our ordinary sense-world conception in any such way.’ One can raise this point quite seriously. In the course of the process of consecutive formation of Saturn, Sun and Moon, Time (during the Moon-existence) and Space (during the Earth-existence) first entered into humanity's world conception. When we speak of Saturn, Sun and Moon, and use spatial conceptions to aid is that description, we actually speak only in Imaginations, and we must remain conscious throughout of the fact that when we speak of these three worlds in spatial conceptions, these space-conceptions have only as much to do with what was brought to completion in those worlds as ... well, let us say, as the forms of the letters of the alphabet have to do with the meanings of the words. We must not take contemporary conceptions as they are, but rather as signs, as images of these worlds. For Space only has meaning for that which evolves within the span of Earth-existence, and Time has actually only become meaningful since the separation of the Old Moon from the Sun; that is the strict point in which the Old Moon separated from the Sun. Then for the first time it is possible to speak of events occurring in time, as we speak today.

Since, however, we have our mental concepts in time and space—for everything external that we conceive is in space, everything that we bring to consciousness and let arise within, runs its course in time—we are thereby between birth and death, but only between birth and death, shut in by space and time, as the worm dwells down there in its earth. Space and time are our boundaries, just as the earth substance is the worm's boundary. We are worms of space and worms of time; we are so, truly, in a quite high, in a quite exact sense. For as incarnated men we move about in space; we observe things in space, and that which observes is our soul, which itself lives in the concepts (Vorstellungen). Between birth and death time goes on, from falling asleep to awakening time goes on. The comparison is by no means a bad one, when one sees the reality. Insofar as our soul is enclosed in the body, as regards the world-picture it forms, it is truly a worm, who creeps about in space and who, if it wishes to arrive at realities, must come out of space. Then it must also get accustomed to viewing things not merely under time-conditions, but under conditions, for which that which takes its course in time is nothing but an outer sign, like a letter of the alphabet.

Now after I have called attention to this, I will lead these studies over to the realm of soul and spirit. Just as the coming plant is already actually contained in the seed, so, naturally, there was already contained in an earlier germinal state, what has developed for man today on earth in perceptions of space and time. I have already pointed out here in one connection that rudiments were already contained in Saturn, Sun, Moon. So that when here on earth we assign a certain meaning to what goes on around us, we must as it were see this meaning already present, in the old evolution of the Moon, the Sun, etc. With the forming of time and the forming of space, the meaning of life on earth must in some way have prepared itself. The forming of space and time must have so come about that then the meaning of the earth-life was added to it like a kind of flower. Now we can picture these processes—Saturn, Sun and Moon in the following way. We can say: We have an Old Saturn existence which is surrounded by the cosmos; we have an Old Sun-existence, again surrounded by the cosmos; we have an Old Moon-existence but already developing out of it a sort of neighbouring planet (you may read this in my Occult Science and we have then learnt to know that the Earth separates from the Sun and again from the Moon.

If the man of materialistic thought (I will suppose what is most favourable for our Spiritual Science) could prevail on himself to believe in these developments, he would still have to overcome the next step, which consists fundamentally in the fact that the whole evolution (origin of Saturn, of the Sun, further development to Moon, separation of the Moon, separation of Earth, Sun and Moon) all really occurs in order to make Man possible, as he is on earth. Just as the processes of a plant's root- and leaf-building happen in order to make possible the blossom and the fruit, so do all these processes, these macrocosmic processes, happen in order to make possible our life on earth; they arise so that we may live on earth in the way we do. One could also say: These processes are the roots of our earth-life; this life is there so that we can develop on Earth as we do. Let us be quite clear that we have to do with the separation of the Sun on the one hand, the separation of the Moon on the other hand—that we have to do with separations so that our Earth could come into existence as Earth. That is to say, we were left behind on the Earth planet, and Sun and Moon separated from us and work on the earth from outside. That had to come about, otherwise nothing could have developed in us as it does on earth. For everything to develop on Earth in the way it does it was necessary that once in primeval times Sun and Moon were united with the earth and that then they separated, and now let their activity shine in from outside upon the earth. That is absolutely necessary.

Now I should like to show that our inner soul life has taken on quite distinct configurations through the fact that this has taken place. Among the very varied ideas which we have—I could adduce many as examples—and which play a certain role in the whole state of our earth existence, is the idea of ‘possessing something,’ ‘having something.’ This implies that our own person unites itself with something which is outside the personality. We speak in the rarest cases of possessing our arm and our nose, for most people experience their arm or nose as so much belonging to them that they do not speak of a possession. But what could be separated and then belongs to us we describe purely in the legal sense as a possession, a genuine possession. Now the concept of possessing something which is outside could not be formed in us at all, if there had not arisen the separation of what had formerly belonged to the earth, and the being drawn in again of the Sun and Moon to the earth. Our life was quite different on the Old Sun. There Sun and Moon were united as Sun with what were processes of Earth; they were inwardly united with the whole human existence. There the human being could say: ‘Sun activity in me,’ ‘I Sun activity’ (if he could have said ‘I’ already, as the archangels could) ‘I Sun activity’; not ‘the sun shines on me, Sun activity comes toward me.’ This Planet or Fixed Star Sun had to be separated so that we as earth men could develop this special configuration of the possession-concept.

Now this is connected with something else. Imagine an Archangel on the old Sun-existence; he says: ‘I Sun.’ That we see something rests upon the fact that the sun's rays or other light-rays shine on the object and are thrown back to us. Were the sun to shine from the midst of the earth, we should see nothing of the objects which are upon the earth. We should then say: ‘I Sun,’ ‘I Light,’ but we should not separate the individual objects, we should not see them. Thus something else still is connected with this. In the Earth's evolution from Saturn, Sun, Moon to Earth, we have for the first time, through this macrocosmic constellation, the possibility of seeing and perceiving objects as we do now. Such perceptions were naturally not present during the Sun-existence. Although the first rudiments of our sense-organs had already been prepared on Old Saturn, they were only opened upon the Earth, only there were they made organs of perception. These rudiments on Saturn were blind and unperceiving sense-organs. The sense-organs were first opened by the separation of the Sun and the departure of the Moon from the earth. You see from this that two processes go parallel—the activity of our sense-perceptions and the sight of external objects, and running parallel with this, the possession-concept. For how do we come to the concept of possession? You could not imagine that an Archangel during the Sun-existence wished to possess anything. He does not behold things; he is everything. If all objects and beings of the earth were like this, they would never have the urge to want to possess anything. With this development of the senses develops for the first time the possession-concept, the possession-concept is not separable from the development of the senses; these two things run parallel. The senses were on the one side, and something like the possession-concept on the other side. Other concepts can also be taken.

And when we consider in a more comprehensive sense what stands in the religious records, in the Bible (for in such records as the Bible very many things lie concealed)—then we can say: What is given at the beginning of the Bible about the Luciferic temptation is connected with the promise of Lucifer to man that his senses shall be developed: ‘Your eyes shall be opened.’ He means that all senses shall be opened—the eyes only stand for the senses as a whole. In this way he has guided the senses to external things and at the same time called forth the concept of possession. If we wished to relate somewhat more in detail what Lucifer promised to the woman we should have to say: You will become as gods, your senses will be opened; you will distinguish between what pleases you and does not please you, what you call good and evil, and you will wish to possess all that pleases you, that you call good.—One must connect all this with the Luciferic temptation.

Now we must reflect about something, if we wish to grasp aright such a conception as I have now developed. Here is one of the points where it is necessary in a lecture on Spiritual Science to call upon the reflection and meditation of each individual who wants to assimilate what is given. One must reflect upon something; In developing for you the arising of the senses, the perception of objects, and the evolution of the possession-concept, we have not been obliged to introduce any concept of space or time. To be sure, if a man wants to picture these things to himself, if he sketches them on a board, he avails himself of the assistance of the space and time idea. But in order to grasp what this means: 'the senses are opened' or 'the possession-concept is developed' one does not need the idea of space and time. These things are independent of space and time. You do not need to think you are spatially distant from something when you want to possess it; nor do you need to call on the time-processes. I have said, here one must summon self-reflection, for everyone can object: ‘I cannot do it’ ... But if he makes sufficient effort, he can imagine such things without the aid of space and time concept. Indeed, something else is true: when you try to bring such concepts clearly to consciousness, that is, to meditate them as I have just done with you, you gradually come out beyond the idea of space and time. You come out into a world where space and time really do not-play the eminent role in your experience that they play in everyday life.

Now there exists in the evolution of humanity a peculiar longing. Wherever in history we meet with the human race in its innermost striving, we come upon a certain longing. And that is the longing to have concepts which are independent of space and time, which have nothing to do with space and time. Historical events are transformed into myths, or in the historical presentation there is an indication of the spiritual in order to make it possible to show how historical events take a mythical form. And the further we look back in history, for instance, the more we find as historical traditions, the historical facts veiled in the myth. Only reflect how already in ancient Greek history all is veiled in myth and in regard to earlier mid-European history all is enveloped in myth and legend! The further one goes back the more one is removed from the external, merely physical feeling of facts, and the presentation plunges into symbolism. When you study myths you will remark that in the arising of myths there is clearly to be seen the desire to work oneself out of space and time. Not only that fairy tales—the most elementary myths—often depict how some human being (I am thinking of the Sleeping Beauty) passes out of time and enters the timeless, but when you examine myths you will see that you do not rightly know which facts are meant to be spiritual. Something that lies centuries earlier may be related later. Sometimes, too, facts which lie hundreds of years apart in history are welded together in a myth. The myth seeks to lift itself above space and time. This means that there lives in man's existence the longing to rise above this space-condition which makes us think and visualise in space and time. There is a longing to live in such concepts as depict, free of space and time, those realities which rule as the eternal things in the succession of events in our space and time existence, or, if they have once been formed, remain as the eternal things.

You see, if you take what I have just said together with something which I said last time you will see a wonderful connection. I said that if a Luciferic quality was not active in us, we should see that our world of concepts is really in the Old Moon. But now it follows from this that the Old Moon is actually present, has remained, and that it is only Lucifer who bewitches us into thinking that our concept is now in ourself. Thus time becomes there a means of deception and illusion for Lucifer. The ancient Moon-existence endures and so also do things that arise, endure. Our possession-concepts are enduring. This means that what earthly man develops as social earthly-order, by reason of his possession-concept, this remains, this will also still be in existence when the Jupiter and Venus conditions are one day there. And then if corresponding temptations do not come as Luciferic and Ahrimanic temptations, one will see how social orders were formed on earth through the possession-idea. They will then present something like physical orders. For that is a part of Maya-existence, of illusion—the idea that things pass away; in reality they are enduring, in reality they go on subsisting. And already, if one understands things aright, one finds the enduring behind the actual past. You can grasp it to some extent in what I have just related.

But now, if we truly grasp what I have said, we are really looking into profoundly important foundations of our whole earth-existence. For do we not see how beneath the spatial and temporal earth-existence the eternally enduring earth-existence, or existence in general, is veritably spread out? How we have a spatial, a temporal-spatial condition on the surface, and within, the condition of duration. And now comes our mode of viewing things when it takes its course in space and time, our views and concepts that live in space and time. Just consider, how one can picture that concretely in detail, think for once ... nowadays men no longer grasp this thoroughly ... but somewhere or somehow, think simply 'red.’ In order to think 'red' you need no space and you need no time; you can think 'red' to yourself anywhere; it does not have to be there in time or space, because it is thought of just as quality. (red was put on the board.) It is difficult nowadays for a man to picture it because he wants to give the red a boundary. It was not difficult like this for the angels on the Old Moon for they had no desire to distribute red over separate objects. They had time already, but not space. Actually they pictured, that is they experienced 'red' or 'green' or any other colour as flowing current. Try to conceive this vividly: blue = flowing current; red = flowing current; conceive, too, of the other sense-experiences in the same way—streaming, but only in time, letting no real spatial concept, intermingle ... we can say: at the transition from Moon- to Earth-existence one can feel how the mere time-quality was yoked into the spatial. What then actually determines the essential nature of earth existence, that a 'red' is in this way given a boundary and yoked in? On the Moon it would have been impossible to see an enclosed 'red,’ on Earth it is possible to see red enclosed in a boundary. (A sketch of a flower was drawn.) This, however, is connected, inwardly connected, with the separation of the sun from the earth, and with the falling of the sun's rays from outside upon the earth. So that in a true sense I can say: the sunbeam falls on earth from outside. That already shows you that our present existence is inconceivable without the space-concept. Yes, for our present perception and life, this external position of the sun betokens something real.

Now from what I have brought forward you can easily gather that we can really say: colours are harnesses into space. In ‘Theosophy’ I have called that which lives in man after death ‘flowing sensitivity,’ since there he is not bound to space. I therefore spoke of the first world through which he lives as the ‘world of flowing sensitivity.’ For the sun's must first come in from outside, must harness sense-perceptions into space. With this is connected, as I have explained, the fact that man evolves ideas of possession; for in a world of flowing sensitivity a person can never think of possession -time at most is present there—and he would soon see the futility of it if he were to think of possession. It would be rather like thinking of possessing a piece of water, flowing along in a brook. This only arises inasmuch as the sun, separating from the earth, brings the sense-perceptions into the framework of space.

You see, something like this that I have just expounded must be transformed into an experience, a feeling; one cannot leave it as a mere theoretical concept. One must change it into a feeling, one must really get an inner living sensation how as man, as microcosm, one is placed into the macrocosm, and how this very yearning, i.e. to possess something, is connected with the whole development of the macrocosm, with the course of events through which sense observation has developed. When one feels this rightly, when one begins, so to say, to feel cosmically how, for instance, the simple concept: thou wouldst like to possess what thou seest and what pleases thy sight ... how this is born out of the macrocosm, then for the first time one really gets the truly living idea that the human soul nature is dependent on the whole cosmos. Then one gets a strong and vividly living feeling of how in every concept of ordinary life one is connected with the macrocosm, and how actually in all that we picture and conceive and experience in the soul, the macrocosm lives in us. And there exists a continual longing in man to experience such hidden connections as actually exist in life, and to express the experience. This exists—this longing in the human soul, in the heart of man. And let us imagine that there arose in a human soul a vivid feeling and sensation ( I wish to express the cosmic connection of this single soul experience): ‘My eye falls there on an external object; I want to possess it; I will appropriate it’ ... then from such a feeling, one can experience what I might call—the tragedy of Nature. I say 'the tragedy of the world of nature.’ We really take from a whole world,—extending to the Moon and still present as the basis of our world,—we take from it what we wish to possess. What we desire to possess we take away from this world which rests on the basis of our natural world. That we take away. And this it is which must be consistently felt by a human soul felt by a human soul that is really sensitive to nature: that there, in the background of Nature, lies something which she must continually submit to; namely, that man contests Nature, who will give all to all, and says: ‘This belongs to me!’ And now consider with full human feeling this gainsaying of Nature, who gives all to all: This I will have for myself, and that I will have it for myself is induced by the fact that my senses find it good or less good for me, sympathetic or antipathetic. Here one can enter deeply with one's own soul into natural existence, can feel with Nature how something is taken away from her. And it is taken away because the human being, under the impression of his senses, forms the thought that he wants to have for himself what Nature wishes to give to all.

I once felt in my soul, my dear friends, suddenly and with special profoundness, how one can experience this whole relationship that I have just sought to characterize. How one can learn to feel with Nature when she says: Protect myself as I will, world evolution has gone so far that the human being declares that my things are his things. Yes, in a certain moment years ago, I felt that experience most warmly and intimately in my soul. It was years ago in a society where there was to be a programme of Recitations. And as it happens from time to time, especially in Recitation programmes, that the persons concerned are prevented from coming and excuse themselves; so it happened here too, a lady reciter sent her excuses and at once a substitute had been found. And now one may think as one will about the value of the declamation that followed and about the substitute—I will not go into that now,—but he was of a quite particular kind, namely, there was found ready to recite the programme in place of the actress who had fallen out, one of the purest, noblest Catholic priests that I have ever come to know in the world. And one had then, or could have, a quite specially significant experience, which in effect condensed for me into what I just now expressed to you.

For this grave and earnest priest—with all that Catholicism brings with it for the really true and upright priest—had according to the programme to recite the ‘Heidenröslein’ of Goethe. And in this recitation one could really experience something, for the man was not only a priest in the ordinary sense, but he, was so learned and so purely given up to spiritual studies, that many said: ‘This man (I will not mention his name) knows the whole world ... and in addition, three villages ...’ for they found him so wise and experienced in things one can know. Now although the recitation was not particularly good, there actually lay in the whole mode and manner in which he gave the ‘Heidenröslein,’ something immensely significant, since one could feel that his whole perception of the world was derived, one might say, from a perception that had been turned away from everything of a sense nature. One could feel how, precisely through the fact that a priest came forward instead of an actress, the whole cosmic power, the immense cosmic power and fineness that lies in this unique poem ‘Das Heidenröslein’ (see end of lecture for poem and translation) came into the recitation. This poem has, indeed, what one might call a prelude; it is an old folksong. And I have already said that men have ever the longing to experience what lives cosmically in the subsoil of existence. And precisely in this poem ‘Das Heidenr&öslein’ there enters something of this quite grandly sublime cosmic subsoil in infinitely simple images. Therefore one must count ‘Das Heidenröslein’ among the very finest pearls of poetry that ever have been given to the world. Years ago I have also heard of people who have attributed something or other, I know not what, of everyday human, all-too-human, connexions to ‘Das Heidenröslein’; that merely comes from a perverted condition of mind. If people can do that—interpret anything which is not quite pure into the ‘Heidenröslein,’ this appertains to a mind that from its sense-exhalations likes continually to revel in all sorts of ‘sacred love.’ One can indeed revel continuously in ‘sacred love’ from sensations of sense-exhalations but that which underlies as cosmic foundations such a poem as ‘Das Heidenröslein’ can only be felt with pure, with chaste heart, and every misconstruction would show a complete desolation and emptiness of mind.

For let us take the wonderful thing which this ‘Heidenröslein’ has actually become as it has been given us by Goethe, and through the fact that the folk song passed over into the youthful lyric depths of his art. Something quite remarkable it has become: in every line always the very thing that ought to be there! Consider for a moment that one felt what lies in the activity of sense-perceptions and how they have developed throughout cosmic evolution ... and that one wished to describe this. How could one do it better than by taking the red in an object, eliminating the space-boundary and letting echo: ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot’ ... ‘rot’ (red) echoing in ‘Röslein,Röslein,Röslein rot.’ Immediately there confronts us the whole mystery as it is set before us out of the cosmos. The sense-world stands there: ‘Röslein,Röslein,Röslein rot,’ in the continuous ‘Röslein,Röslein,Röslein rot.’ Now in the first line we are shown at once that we are concerned with this mystery—this being able to look out from the senses,’sah ein Knab' ein Röslein stehn, Röslein auf der Heiden.’ Now already in the next line in a wonderful enhancement, which is rarely so beautiful in poetry, a nuance is brought out that now the little red rose begins to become sympathetic—‘War so Jung undmorgenschön’ ... it thus already becomes something which warrants sympathy with what is revealed from the senses. So the next line is inserted with precisely what belongs to it: ‘lief er schnell, es nah zu sehn’: there you have the whole correspondence of the senses with what is presented to them: he runs to see it close to! And now the next line, again an enhancement, but this time in himself; to begin with, the intensification was outside,—‘Röslein auf der Heiden,’—simply the object; then ‘was so young and morning-fair,’ the enhancement outside, and in him ‘ran he fast, it near to see’ ... inasmuch as he ran fast to see it near, ‘Sah's mit vielen Freuden’ (saw it with much joy). You see how the outer corresponds with the inner. Now comes the refrain, ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden,’ in order to show us quite particularly how the correspondence is between him and that which appears outside as the object ‘red.’ And the mysterious connection with possession: ‘Knabe sprach: ich breche dich.’ He wants to possess it, he wants to pluck the little rose, he wants to take it home with him. There is nothing else in it, but what is in it is of wonderful cosmic depth.‘Knabe sprach: ich breche dich, Röslein auf der Heiden. Röslein sprach: ich steche dich ...’We can see in this sentence, ‘ich steche dich’ (I prick thee) the whole mystery of Nature, who wants to protect herself from man's assertion: ‘I will take thy things home.’ She, Nature, would like to do with all her objects as she would have done with the little rose ‘ leave it for all to see who pass by. For in this ‘Röslein sprach: ich steche dich’ is indeed uniquely contained what I have described as a feeling that shares in the tragedy of Nature. ‘bass du ewig denkst an mich’ (that thou must think of me eternally); he must think of Nature forever, for he transforms her permanence into something fleeting, he brings the possession-relation into what has first arisen in space and time. The human being must atone for his having come out of permanence and must therefore at least think of it eternally, it must be perpetuated, made eternal; the untruth must not persist that it is not perpetuated. Then again: ‘und ich will's nicht leiden’ (and I will not suffer it). The little rose simply stands as the representative of the whole of Nature—every natural object actually says this when one wants to possess it. And again, so that attention may be fully fixed on the real subject, ‘Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot, Röslein auf der Heiden...’ And the next verse again shows a wonderful enhancement: he will not let himself be held back—‘und der wilde Knabe brach's Röslein auf der Heiden’—thus he nevertheless determines to possess it! ‘Röslein wehrte sich und stack’ ’¦ Again as the representative of the whole of Nature. ‘Half ihm dock kein Weh und Ach’—this is the general experience of Nature, and we feel that tragedy which expresses itself like a mood in Nature when man wishes to possess her: ‘Musst' es eben leiden’ (she must after all permit, suffer it.) Infinitely profound are these words ‘musst' es eben leiden!’

But this microcosmic mystery has in fact a macro-cosmic counterpart, and if one now leaves the microcosm for the macrocosm one may say—who then in the macrocosm is the wild boy who plucks the little rose on the heath? It is the sunbeam, which separated from the earth with the Sun and which now falls on earth from outside. It actually calls forth on the one hand the little rose on the heath, but then when it sees it, when it is there, quickly gathers it again, makes it wither and fade.

Thus it is in nature everywhere. Nature still gives us a memory of the ‘Musst’ es eben leiden’: next to the rose the thorns, the shrivelled thorns which are a token that Nature nevertheless remembers how the sunbeam takes from her what she possesses. But when we do not merely observe as the materialist does, but include the whole cosmic feeling, the thorn near the rose is also the expression of the grief of nature in contrast to Nature's great joy; the jubilation of nature when the rosebush stands there with all its roses, the grief when the wild boy, the sun-ray comes and makes the roses wither. That is the Goethe-poem in the macrocosm: and one can only say: if anything is fitted to stimulate esoteric feelings, it is such poems, where there is no need to think and attribute all sorts of dry allegories to them, but where one only needs to remember a great truth:—when the true poet goes beyond nature it is because he seeks to put into words what can be felt behind the surface of facts, and beyond space and time.

And when a poet produces something in such simple incidents as a boy's plucking a rose on the heath, which yet speaks so deeply to our hearts, it is because this heart of ours received its rudiments when we ourselves were not yet united with the earth, when we were still united with the ancient Sun existence—and were able to feel with the whole world. Although through the Luciferic-Ahrimanic illusion we now ascribe our feelings to ourselves as I have shown, yet all the same they arise out of the cosmos, and on this rests the fact that we can so inwardly accompany the true poet although he describes the simplest incident of the plucking of a rose. For into what arises from the human soul in the simplest events, the whole cosmos is placed. And we need not make assertions and think it out, but we feel it, when we let such a marvellously delicate poem as ‘Das Heidenrösslein’ work upon us. We feel that the whole world is secreted in it, world mysteries are laid within it,—so that the secrets of art too gradually reveal themselves to us. They unfold as we ascend from the perception and experiencing of objects in a purely external way to an inward perception, as we ascend from microcosmos to macrocosmos and seek gradually to learn the hidden but active mysteries in our souls.Das Heidenröslein—¹

• 1. ‘rosebud’ is not strictly ‘Röslein,’ but is used for the sake of the metre. (Translator)

I have often pointed out how the need of modern mankind for a socialization of the social order arises precisely from the antisocial impulses of mankind, which are more prominent in the present than in earlier times. People today are much more antisocial in their emotional life, in general in their soul life, than in earlier times. And one would like to say: In relation to the more elementary, natural development of mankind, the antisocial impulses are increasing. It can also be said that in the course of the last four centuries people have more or less given themselves over to certain antisocial impulses in the wide circle of social life. And the countercurrent against this abandonment to antisocial impulses is the call for socialization. This call for socialization flares up in people's consciousness precisely because strong antisocial impulses awaken in people's subconscious.

Today this can be traced into the most intimate life of the soul. Never, however, has it been so difficult for people to convince themselves of anything that comes to them as an opinion, or even as the evidence of another; never has the stubbornness with regard to standing on opinions been so great as it is at the present time. And when it happens that someone draws attention to the one-sidedness of every human opinion, yes, also to the one-sidedness of everything that is called human truth, when it happens that someone illuminates things from different sides, then he is reproached for expressing one opinion and another. We will not come to healthy socialization, which is based on social understanding of people, if this ability of adaptation of the individual to the other does not also occur for the human soul.

Now, of course, it is deeply, deeply rooted in the historical development that this is the case today with the antisocial instincts. For people have been developing since the middle of the 15th century in the age of the consciousness soul. People should gradually place themselves on the basis of individual consciousness. Therefore, they can reach a social life only in a different way than in earlier ages, where still the group instincts, the group-egos played a much greater role than they play today. Therefore we see discrepancies everywhere today in the social life of people. We see strange non-coherence. Man always has something in him somewhere in the subsoil of his soul through which he understands everything that can reveal itself in any time. Only he is usually not far enough with his head understanding, with his intellect. Then the strange phenomenon can occur - which should be observed especially by those who join a spiritual-scientific movement - that just those who have learned too much in any direction, lag behind in the development. We experience this today in the most sufficient measure. We would be able to make much faster progress today in understanding what is socially necessary if the masses were not held back by those who have learned too much from the old, who live too much in old concepts, who have adapted themselves too stubbornly to the old concepts. On the whole, it can be said that today the broad mass of the proletariat would certainly have understanding for the most advanced impulses, if they were not held back by that leadership which for decades has fitted itself into quite definite rigid concepts and now cannot go any further. The holding back of people by those who have learned too much, just too much of what could be learned in the 19th century, that is something very significant for the psychological understanding of our time. Therefore, one will only slowly and gradually be able to see something, which, however, is very intensively necessary to see.

On what - this must be asked again and again - have the present leading people formed their concepts, their ideas, their feelings, also their social will? They have trained them on the scientific ideas that played such a great, such a decisive role in the 19th century. One must not be deceived about this. Scientific ideas have penetrated everywhere. But scientific ideas, as they have emerged in the last four centuries, are only applicable to the dead, to that which has died, to that which no longer has life. It is not an extraordinariness, but it is deeply rooted in the essence of the matter that the present ideas about the essence of man can only be applied to what is gained from the corpse, to what is gained in general outside the context of life. What scientific conceptions can give about man, that does not lead to man, not to Homo, that leads only to the homunculus. And that is why people, when they begin to think socially today, always think past reality. They think only of that which basically destroys the social organization, which dismantles it, and not of that which brings new fertilizing life to the social organization. Because people have not absorbed any ideas about the living during the last four centuries, they have not learned to supply fruitful life to the healthy organism. It is the tragedy of the present time that we live only from concepts about the dead, and that the social organism demands from us to assert impulses that are valid for life. But we have no concept of the living precisely within that which is today regarded as the formation of mankind. Does anyone today ask about the social organism as if it were a living thing? He does not.

I have already pointed this out to you the other day: Let us imagine that someone raises the question: Why should we always eat? We satisfy ourselves by eating, but we achieve nothing other than that we are hungry again afterwards; so we might as well keep hunger! - It is not true that it would be foolishness if someone thought in this way towards the natural organism; but according to this pattern of foolishness one actually always thinks with reference to the social organism! This has the effect that this social organism must again and again be shaken and trembled by shocks, which, if the misunderstanding of social life lasts very long, must become revolutionary shocks and even revolutions on a large scale. Because in the last centuries people have become entangled in all kinds of social illusions, that is why the terrible revolutionary train has arisen in our time. What can help there? It can only help to see social life as something really alive. What, then, is a revolution? You see, a revolution is nothing more than the sum of all the necessary small revolutions. There are always revolutions. As in the natural human organism, which also undergoes very significant revolutions from one saturation period to another, so there are always revolutions in the social organism. Why? Because it cannot be otherwise than that through the interaction of the individual human faculties, of the spiritual part of man with the economic life, the tendency arises continually for individual men to gain the upper hand over others. This tendency is simply always present in economic life and in spiritual life. In economic life, for example, there is always the tendency to form capital. If this tendency of economic life to form capital were not present, then economic life would have to die out altogether. For it is only through capital that it is possible that the complicated means of production exist in our advanced times.

But the performance of work on these means of production cannot be achieved by anything other than individual human abilities. When capital is formed, small revolutionary foci are naturally always formed. And government must consist in being vigilant against the formation of small revolutionary foci. We must constantly work against revolution, but not by asking: How can we prevent the creation of capital? -but: What must be done with capital when it has developed for a certain time in one place? - It must be transferred from one individuality to another! That is what matters. The way must be found, also for the material goods, which are expressed in the means of production, which, as I said to you the other day, is found to be the most feasible for the most wretched good, which today's mankind regards as the most wretched good. What one produces spiritually, is lost after some time for the family of the producer, it goes over into the 'general public. The material goods must find their transition into the social organism even at the moment when they no longer have any connection with the individual ability of man, so that they are in turn best utilized by other individual abilities. Socialist thinkers today ask quite wrong questions with regard to the social organism. Socialist thinkers today ask: How can private ownership of the means of production, including land, be prevented? That is, how to kill the life of the social organism? We have just seen in the course of the capitalist economic order that private capital in the means of production and in land produces great damage. The simplest question then seems to be this: How do we get rid of that which causes damage, how do we prevent it from arising in the first place? But this is a killing question. A living question is this: What is to be done with private capital so that it does not cause further damage? How can it be appropriately separated from the private capitalist and transferred to another producer when he himself no longer produces in the service of the social organism? The questions already have to be asked from a much deeper understanding than the present mankind even suspects. The present mankind actually lives in its illusions only because it does not draw the consequences of these illusions in reality. All kinds of professors of national economy in all universities of the world teach today many things according to the recipe: Wash my fur, but do not wet it. - This is the basis of these teachings, which aim at socialization. The very old antisocial teachings are still represented only by some old buttons. But that these good professors teach these things is only possible because they do not draw the consequences. The consequences of what these professors teach are drawn by Lenin and Trotsky. There is a continuous connection. And one should actually rise to a completely different thinking towards the social organism. One should not stop at the old habits of thought, but go over to new habits of thought, because the old habits of thought, consistently carried out, must lead to the robbery of the old social order. And this is what people find it so difficult to decide to embrace new habits of thought. This will perhaps not happen until people really think in a spiritual-scientific way, and until the thoughts they get used to in spiritual science will also be the teachers, perhaps better the disciplinarians, for the way they should think socially. It will always remain something half if one merely spreads social teachings today without imbuing them with the actual spiritual-scientific teachings which make thinking and feeling and imagining, above all judging, so flexible as we need it today if we want to fit into the great complication of life which has now necessarily come upon modern mankind.

Is it not necessary to ask: What is this human being who is to be integrated into the social organism, this human organism? Can one actually promise oneself to feel right about the social organism if one does not first feel right about man himself? For man is a member of this social organism. Now natural science, in spite of all its great progress, has led away from the understanding of the real man, not towards it. That is what must be considered.

If one says to people today: Look, the healthy social organism must consist of the three independent members, the spiritual organization, the political state and legal organization and the economic organization, and if one then points out that the natural man also consists of three members, of the nervous-sensory system, of the lung-heart or rhythmic system, and of the metabolic system, then the clever people come and say: Again such a game with analogies! But it is not a question of playing with analogies, it is a question of training the spirit on the one hand in a correct understanding of the natural man, so that with the spirit trained in this way one can also understand the social organism correctly. It is not a question of making conclusions from one to the other, as Schäffle did in the past, and Meray has done again, but of making one's thinking so flexible in relation to the human organism that one can really understand the social organism in its needs.

One of the basic phenomena of the future understanding of man will be precisely this, how man descends from a spiritual life through birth, how he lives in his physical existence between birth and death and lives a social life with society, and then returns to the spiritual world through death. There it is a question of understanding already once this man as such really in his threefoldness. The present anatomist, the present physiologist, has man before him; for him a muscle in the head is the same as a muscle in the arm. He does not divide man into his three parts, he knows nothing about it, this present natural scientist, how man's origin comes from three sources. He does not ask properly, therefore he does not come to a proper answer, for example, what man has from the mother and what from the father. We have often spoken about the matter, today we can again speak about the matter from a certain point of view. You know, when man lives in this ordinary life, he lives in two different states of life or consciousness. While awake, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego interpenetrate each other. In sleep, the physical body and the astral body are in bed; in the spiritual world, the I and the astral body are in bed. In the morning the ego and the astral body again unite with the physical body and the atheric body. Consider the human being who, when he sleeps, lies in bed without the ego and without the astral body. Of course, this is not a human being; but it is something essential of the human being who lives on the physical earth. You can separate very precisely from the whole man that which is there of the man who lives on the physical earth when he sleeps, and which manifests itself in the physical body and etheric body. Let us now first look away from the whole man, let us look at that which lies in bed at night, when the ego and the astral body are gone, and let us ask about the origin of this man, which consists of the physical body and etheric body, which lies in bed at night, let us ask about its next origin: Where does it come from? It is only a piece of man, but where does it come from? - What lies there in bed comes according to its disposition, its powers, not as it is first formed in the full human being, in the adult human being, but according to its dispositions, its powers, it comes from the mother and is already with the mother before any fertilization. That which merely comes in through the woman is that which then lies fully grown in the bed of man when he sleeps. That is not a human being; but it cannot become a human being either, what comes only from the mother.

It is not arbitrary talk when one divides man into these limbs of which one usually speaks, but it points to very real things. When one speaks of the physical body and etheric body, one speaks of what is predisposed in the mother before fertilization, what is always predisposed in the mother. When man from spiritual heights, after he has lived for a while the life between death and new birth, again inclines to the physical life, then he feels, as it were, that in a female personality related to him that disposition is found into which he can pour that which has developed in him since the last life from the rest of the organism to the head. The human embryonic formation therefore starts from the head. The head is that which first develops in a certain perfection in the human embryonic formation. That which acts on this head formation, which actually comes from the cosmos, is already in the ego and in the astral body. And the fact that the ego and the astral body can be together with the physical body and the etheric body comes from fertilization. Fertilization mediates the coexistence between the ego and the astral body, and the physical body and the etheric body. What is the origin of fertilization? Fertilization is first of all concerned with the mere metabolic life of man. It is aimed at giving him a new metabolic and respiratory organism, because the forces of the head organism originate from the previous incarnation. All that, therefore, which brings man, who comes from the previous incarnation, together with the head organism, man owes to his relation to the spiritual world. Everything that, so to speak, enters the human being in embryonic life, when fertilization has taken place, the human being owes to the coexistence with the earth being, with the earthly being.

There you see how complicated that comes about, what the human being actually is. To a certain extent, man's limbs, to which the metabolic system also belongs, are given to him internally, from the earth. That which functions in the human head is given to him from the spiritual world. And that which is breathing and heart system, that is in between.

And now you can ask: What is the essence that we can inherit from our father and mother? In which system of the human being do the forces lie by which we can inherit something from our father and from our mother? - We inherit nothing for our head from our father and mother, because, what works in our head, we bring with us from the previous incarnation. We do not inherit anything for our metabolic system, because that is what the earth gives us after fertilization. We inherit only within the lung-heart system, we inherit only in all the forces that live in breathing and blood circulation; there we inherit. Only one limb, the middle limb of man, the respiratory-circulatory limb, is that which owes its origin to the two sexes. Man is so complicated. He is a tripartite being also according to his physical organism. He has his head, which he can only use for that which is not earthly; he has his limbs with the metabolic system, which he can only use for that which is earthly; and he has that which lies in breathing and circulation, through the relationship of man to man.

I can only indicate to you here what leads to a wide, wide field of knowledge of man. What I have indicated to you looks like a theory. But for our time it is not a theory, but there is something in man today which feels in the sense of what I have just said, There is something developing in the present time which feels in this tripartite sense in man. Today man has complicated feelings in the innermost part of his being, without being fully aware of it. He knows himself through his head as a citizen of an extraterrestrial, he knows himself through his lung-heart system in a relation of man to man. There is something inside the human being that says: When I meet another human being, this meeting is an image of that which was transplanted into me also from human being to human being, namely through father and mother. Through his lung-heart system the human being feels quite placed among people. Through his metabolic system man feels himself as a member of the earth, as belonging to the earth. These three kinds of feelings are already in man today. But the mind does not want to go along. The mind wants everything to be simple, the mind wants that everything can be traced back to some monon. And this is what the people of the present day suffer from. They will no longer suffer from it only when the tripartite feeling in the inner being, which is really already found in man, corresponds to a tripartite social organism, when man finds a mirror image of his being on the outside.

You see, this is the terrible thing that lies in the subconsciousness of people who today belong to the social movement, For three to four centuries the spiritual life and everything that dominates the social coexistence of people has developed in such a way that this spiritual life is a mirror of the material life. Inside, however, the longing pulsates, the outer life should be a mirror of the inner. Today's mankind suffers from this. It wants to form the outer life in such a way that the outer social organism is an image of man, whereas today man is an image of the outer world. And people in the present see past this, they find it complicated, they find it theoretical. They find it easier to put the human being as a whole. Of course, it is more complicated to have to answer someone to the question: What is man? - to answer: Look at the representative of mankind in the middle and above Lucifer and below Ahriman! All three belong together in the unity of man. But the man is just tripartite and differently you do not understand the man.

This is not a theory, but something that is very, very real, that occurs in the human nature. Because man begins to feel tripartite about himself and about the world, he demands in his subconsciousness a tripartite social organism, not only a uniform monistic state organism, which also includes economic life and state life: A spiritual organization for itself, a legal or political or state organization for itself, and an economic organization for itself. Only then will man find himself in this outer world. And the earthquake-like tremors of our time stem from the fact that a culmination, a highest point, has been reached with regard to the non-correspondence of the outer social organism with the human inner being. While people are basically striving to feel the independent threefoldness of the social organism, their leaders, the leaders of the socialists, appear and say: Everything will already result from the economic life, if we let the economic life develop correctly, if we only reverse it a little, so that that which has been below comes above, and that which has been above comes below; then the right thing will already develop.

Nothing right will develop out of economic life alone, but only if one admits the independence of economic life on the one side, and on the second side of political legal life, of security life, and on the other side of the spiritual organization as such. If one really places the spiritual life on itself, then it must form its reality out of itself. Otherwise the chasms will always remain between the human classes. Today one does not even suspect how these abysses have actually opened up. Sometimes one can be confronted with the most justified in the sense of contemporary culture, and one will not understand how that which one who belongs to a class must feel to be completely justified cannot be understood by the other.

Take, to choose an obvious example, a well-painted landscape, a quite artistically painted landscape. The member of the bourgeois class has acquired certain feelings, certain ideas, as to how a well-painted landscape should look. With these feelings, with these ideas, he places himself in front of a landscape picture that is clamped in a frame and admires it. The proletarian may be induced to admire it, too, because he is gradually persuaded that it belongs to "education" to admire such a thing; some who are not proletarians do not understand anything about a landscape painting and admire it because they have been persuaded that it belongs to education. But this even breeds untruthfulness, because if one does not belong to the class where, among those who work physically, some are also bred who are allowed to be physically tired so that they can paint, so that they can think up how to paint, he only remains true if he confronts such a landscape in such a way that he says: What for? Someone paints a piece of forest on a canvas with blots of color, and I see it every day when I walk through the forest, much more beautiful. You can never make a landscape painting as beautiful as it is outside in nature. Why do people, who don't want to look into nature to see the piece of landscape, hang a piece of landscape, which is only a clumsy imitation of nature, in a gold frame in their room? - That would be the true sensation. And this feeling rests on the soul of many people who are not brought up to admire things out of educational backgrounds. Certainly the admiration of a certain class is sincere; but the admiration of by far the greatest mass of people for such a landscape cannot be sincere, because they are not educated with the others.

One must touch on much deeper things in the life of feeling if one is to understand today what abysses lie between human souls. We will not awaken understanding for art - and you can transfer this to other branches of life - until, for example, one will also want to pursue in painting that which one cannot see every day outside in nature, but which must be brought down from the spiritual world. All people will understand this, and something else will come on this detour. The spiritual must be carried down from the spiritual world by people. Trust will again arise from person to person, because through one person this, through another person that must be carried down from the spiritual world. In another way than by carrying things down from the spiritual world, it will not be possible for soul to find itself again socially with soul.

So one must, I would say, speak more deeply into that which today pulsates through time than one usually does. Preachers full of unctuousness, who actually bring only a copy of what the Catholic pulpit orators can do better in their way, now go around a lot and talk about the fact that "inwardly" people should find each other again, after this terrible catastrophe of the last four and a half years has shown how little people are inclined to a harmonious life. Yes, but you can't let people find themselves inwardly by talking, you can only let them find themselves inwardly if you have the will today to really radically go over to other habits of thinking and feeling. The other day someone said that you have to get to know poverty in order to develop a social feeling in yourself. Today it is not enough to have looked at poverty, to have gone to some neighborhood in a big city and seen how ragged the people are, how little they have to eat; that is not enough today. Today it is enough to really know the souls of those who want to work their way up socially. Today it is necessary not only to know poverty, but to know the poor in their souls, in their innermost life. But there is no other way to achieve this than by finding a new way to the human soul, by really learning to penetrate into the innermost being of man. And then one will find that people can henceforth be nothing without finding the mirror of their own being in the social outer organism.

One must be able to lead people on the one hand to the highest heights of spiritual life and on the other hand to be able to really submerge the spirit in economic problems. Today, however, one has to say strange things. On the one hand, one must say: Take the schools away from the state, take the spiritual life away from it, base the spiritual life on itself, let it be administered by itself, then you will compel this spiritual life to lead the struggle continuously from its own strength. Then, however, this spiritual life will also be able to place itself in the right way to the constitutional state and to the economic life, for example, the spiritual life will be straight - I have explained this in my social writing, which will now be finished in the next few days -, then the spiritual life will also be the right administrator of the capital.

On the other hand: Let the economic life be turned in on itself. This is truly not a phrase in relation to concrete questions. If you turn economic life in on itself, if you take it from the state, then above all you must take something very, very concrete from the state, namely money, the administration of the currency. You must return the administration of the currency to economic life. In the various territories where people have worked their way up from the natural economy to the money economy, they have initially kept to a money representative who is something of a hybrid between a commodity and a mere instruction. The very learned people argue about whether money is a mere instruction, whether a banknote is a mere instruction, or 'whether money is a commodity. One can argue about it for a long time, because money is one thing and another. It is one thing because it mediates the economic process; that makes money a commodity. The other is that the state determines by its law the value of the coin in question. But money must be returned entirely to economic life. Then one thing will occur, but only gradually. In order for it to occur, the very thing I am touching on now must become international. This will take a long time, because the leading trading state, England, on which it really depends that we have the gold standard, will not easily let go of the gold standard. So it will take a long time. But the self-sufficient economic organization, to which also the currency is left, the monetary system, will no longer need to place a commodity "gold" between the other goods as a means of exchange. The economic organization does not need that. The economic organization will, however, also have money, but only for the distribution of the exchange of goods. For it will turn out that always that which is the solid, real basis of economic life, that this is the monetary basis also for money. Gold is money only because gold has gradually become a particularly popular commodity among people, because people have agreed to value gold. This looks dilettante when you say it, but it is much more correct than what the non-dilettantes, the scholars of today, say. The value of gold is merely based on the tacit agreement of people about this value of gold. Something else could come to such an estimate. But with the centralization of the three social links, something that actually has a mere apparent value will always come to this estimate in economic life. Gold, after all, has in reality only an apparent value. You cannot eat gold. You can be very rich in gold; if nobody gives you anything for it, you cannot live from gold, of course. This is based only on a tacit agreement among people. You don't need it at all in national traffic. In interstate traffic, it is needed only to bring about certain compensations that cannot otherwise be brought about because the necessary great trust does not exist. But this illusory value attributed to a certain metal will cease when the administration of money is handed over to the economic body and the state no longer has any say in the administration of money. Then the state remains on the ground of mere law, remains on the basis of what can only be agreed between man and man on a democratic basis.

Now, if certain money tokens, money orders are in circulation, the state has a certain gold treasure. What will then be there when truth will have taken the place of appearance through the threefold division? Then everything will be there as a cover for the money, which in truth will not belong to the individual, on which the individual will only work, but which has an equal value for all people who live in the social organism: The means of production will take the place of gold, that by which one can prepare something for the commodity character. By bringing the means of production into flux, as today only the spiritual productions are in flux, the character of the means of production as a monetary basis is gradually brought about.

These things are very difficult, and one must make very complicated national economic assumptions - which I naturally do not presuppose with you - if one wants to prove them scientifically; but they can be proved quite scientifically. But I would rather give you a concrete example of what I mean. You see, I once got to know a strange kind of money myself - I think I have already spoken of it here once. This strange kind of money consisted in Goethe letters and Goethe manuscripts. I got to know a gentleman, no, several, who were actually quite clever as financiers. They began to buy Goethe letters and Goethe manuscripts cheaply in the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. You didn't have to pay much for them then. Now they had them. Now came the time when everything had already been bought up, when due to circumstances, the description of which would lead too far, Goethe letters and Goethe manuscripts acquired a great value. These letters and manuscripts were sold. That was a strange money, the value of which increased considerably in about thirty to forty years. I was assured even by one of the gentlemen who did that, that no stock exchange papers have fructified so, for a time, as Goethe letters. They were the best paper, and they had actually taken on a money character. One got a great deal for them. Now think what that depended on. It depended on the fact that constellations had occurred that were completely independent of the first coming into being. It's not true that when Goethe wrote his letters, these letters were perhaps worth a great deal to the recipient. Nobody bought them. They were not money at that time. You couldn't buy bread for them. Mr. von Loeper, who bought Goethe letters in the fifties, could buy a lot of bread in 1895 for these Goethe letters. They were like good money. The way in which ordinary money stands inside in the economic organism is also not different than this standing inside was with the Goethe letters. The value of these pieces of paper, on which Goethe's letters were written, was based on a social process, on a social process, on what had happened in connection with Goethe's personality from the fifties to the nineties. One has to know the social organism well if one wants to judge these strange processes, where something that at a certain time does not need to be worth anything special in the economic process becomes valuable.

The usual demand of the social democrats for the socialization of the means of production would naturally lead to the paralysis of the spiritual qualities, the spiritual talents of the people. This is something that is impossible to carry out. But just think, for example - of course, one can think of it in the most varied way -: Whoever has certain talents for some branch of the economy will be able to obtain capital in completely free competition, namely, saved capital, which he collects as a loan. Of course, there can be intermediaries; I reduce the process to the simplest form, so to speak. The person concerned will make certain claims for his intellectual achievement, for his leadership achievement, for his leadership. Once a real contract is concluded between employer and employee - the contract usual today is only a sham - the employee will realize that his interests are best represented if the entrepreneur manages the enterprise well with his individual powers, but without owning it. And this is possible precisely when the entrepreneur originally sets the demand for his intellectual performance on his own initiative and negotiates it with the workers. If this demand cannot be fulfilled, the entrepreneur must go down with his demand. But the demand must be made originally from completely free initiative. If the entrepreneur does not find any customers, he must go down, which goes without saying. But now it must remain so. He now draws from the enterprise nothing more than the agreed share, which, if his work increases, can be increased. But it remains interest. In addition, there is the productivity of the means of production itself, the profit that comes out of the enterprise. These are two quite different things, that which one acquires through one's intellectual effort and that which comes out of the enterprise. It is quite different to work with means of production than to put one's saved capital into means of production. These things are not distinguished today. These things will be distinguished in the healthy social organism.

If I put a certain capital, which I have saved myself, into a factory, that is something completely different than if I use this capital to buy a room. If I use the capital to put it into a factory, then I have worked for the social organism by saving the capital. If I use it to get myself room furnishings, I am making the social organism work for me. These things are distinguished in the healthy social organism. They are not distinguished in today's sick social organism. Of course, I am not saying that no one should buy a furniture. But buying furniture will mean something completely different in the healthy social organism than it means today. Today it can be exploitation; later it will be the use of the room furnishings as means of production, because one will have nothing from the room furnishings if one does not produce something for the social organism with the help of the room furnishings, whatever it may be. The term "means of production" is first put on a sound basis in the healthy social organism.

There you see that one can distinguish exactly between what someone draws as interest and what comes from the self-work of the means of production. As long as one uses the profit of the means of production to enlarge the enterprise, well, it remains so. But at the moment when something is gained from the means of production which is not used to enlarge the enterprise, to expand the enterprise, then the leader is obliged to transfer what is gained to another who can produce again.

There you have a circulation of capital. There you have the transfer to another individuality. Whoever does not consider himself capable of transferring his capital to another individuality, transfers it to a corporation of the spiritual organization, which may not use it itself, which in turn will transfer it to an individual or to a group of people, to an association. There you bring everything that is produced by the means of production into the social flow, into a real social circulation. That which circulates in this way in the social organism, which is in a perpetual circulation, has a permanent value, even though it is always changing. But it has a permanent value because what is worn out must be replaced again. If you read in national economic books today why gold is so well suited for money, you will find all kinds of beautiful properties of gold; first, that it is popular with all people, second, that it is durable, does not wear out, does not oxidize, and so on. All these beautiful properties have this ideal good, which circulates as a means of production. The future cover for the money notes will be, if in the economic organism, not in the state organism the money is created, the money is administered, will circulate, the cover will be the capital goods not accumulating in the private property, it will be the means of production, which can be really fructified in the economic process.

To believe in this, my dear friends, the Central European states and especially Russia will have to bite the bullet first. The Western states will not believe in it for the time being, as long as the reprieve lasts; they will still believe in gold. The Central and Eastern states will have to believe that their now completely derouted currency, their completely ruined currency, will not get back on its feet in any other way than by turning economic life over to itself. No matter how many projects for the improvement of the currency in the Central and Eastern States may arise, they will all be useless and will lead to nothing; only the transfer of the currency from the state to economic life will solve the currency question in these Central and Eastern States. Certainly, the economic organizations in the Central and Eastern States will have to work with gold as long as gold is insisted upon. But this will only be a sham. When trade with the Western states is resumed, the gold treasure will have to be there. But the real prosperity, the real cover for the money will have to lie in what are circulating means of production.

At a very concrete point this threefoldness begins to become an international matter. People so easily believe that this threefolding, of which I am always speaking now, is a mere domestic affair. And that is why I have just argued in the "Appeal" that a healthy negotiation of the Central States with the Western States, if it should ever occur, can only be based on the fact that in the Central States the delegates are elected independently by the economic body, the legal body and the spiritual body. After all, the Western states can be indifferent as to whom they have to negotiate with; they can say: They are all equal to us, that is not important. - But these middle states can only come to a real recovery by themselves, by coming to a real threefolding. For the time being, the Western states can still harbor illusions that they will go beyond the threefold structure. But there will be no other way in the world than for people to convert to this threefold structure in order to live in accordance with the forces of development that want to be realized in the civilized world in the next twenty to thirty years. It could be that just those states in which things are still relatively good, like Switzerland, would make themselves comfortable to take up such a threefold structure before things go haywire. But the others, the central and eastern states, should already realize that they must either continue to destroy or move toward threefolding. We will talk more about this tomorrow.

Dear assembled guests! A wish has been expressed that I should say something here about more economic questions, that is, about the economic realm of the threefold social organism. Actually, my intention during this School of Spiritual Science course has been to devote my energies to showing how spiritual science can have a fertilizing effect on the most diverse scientific fields and on life in general. The field of economic life is precisely that which most urgently requires the insightful collaboration of those active within the anthroposophical movement. And above all, it is necessary that what these practitioners can gain from their practical experience be brought to the spiritual scientific field, just as the scientific knowledge from many different fields has been so beautifully brought to it from so many different sides. We shall be speaking about these matters in greater detail in a moment. Since the wish has been expressed that I should also say something about the third link of the social organism, I thought it best to put down on paper the wishes that have been expressed by the honored audiences themselves, so that I could, as it were, work them into today's lecture. Today, however, was so busy that this could not be done in the way I would have liked, because the most diverse wishes were formulated in 39 questions, which really could not be studied in the short time available to me today. But in addition, I have seen from the way in which these questions were asked how much still needs to be done in this area in particular, and so it will be necessary for me to discuss some of this today, which to a certain extent emerges from the general impression created by these questions. And I will then take the opportunity to continue today's reflections in more detail next Tuesday at 8 a.m., so that perhaps those asking the questions and others who would like to learn more about these questions will get their money's worth. Today, I would like to speak only preliminarily, so to speak, so that on Tuesday we can go into the details in a very practical way. But such preliminary speaking is necessary for a healthier mutual understanding. Then, perhaps, on Tuesday evening, a kind of general discussion, a kind of discussion, can be added to what I will have to say, and in this way we will perhaps be able to cope with the matter.

Dear attendees, although I have already done so here in the late evening hours, I would like to emphasize once again that my book “The Key Points of the Social Question” and, in connection with it, the other book , which has now been published by the Stuttgart publishing house “Der Kommende Tag”, “In Ausführung der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus” (The Threefold Order of the Social Organism), that these two books are intended to be read in a practical way and that those who take them theoretically misunderstand them. They are intended for those people who, as it were, have a vivid and lively sense of social life and are able to grasp it. It will hardly be possible to substantially advance what is today called the social question through other people as such. Above all, I have already emphasized that nothing utopian should be sought in these two books. But I have noticed that many people who approach these two books, basically translate the matter into utopianism out of a certain tendency of our time, that they form ideas according to their own taste, which then appear utopian. I would like to draw your attention to a remark that you will find on some page of my “Key Points”. There I say explicitly: In a matter that is conceived in practical terms, conceived as a challenge for our time, one can think differently about the details of the implementation. And that is why in the book “The Core Points of the Social Question” I only give examples of the details. What is said about one or the other detailed question concerns things that can be carried out in the most diverse ways in practical life. The fact that I also speak about these things in the sense that I present a [possible] realization [happens, therefore,] so that one can see vividly how the whole impulse of the threefold social organism is put into practice. Above all, it was my opinion that after this book was published, people who are practical in their lives would set about letting the results of their practical life enter into the stream of the social question, inspired by this book.

From the questions that have been put to me again today, I can see how much thoroughly impractical thinking lives in our time and how difficult it is for people in the present day to think practically. This is precisely the tragedy of our time, this is the great difficulty that does not really allow us to approach life, that on the one hand we are completely immersed in materialistic views and ideas that we have absorbed through the one-sided pursuit of natural science, that we have become accustomed to looking at all things as we necessarily have to look at external natural things - including things that have to be looked at differently from these external natural things, things that above all necessitate that one penetrates more deeply than one has to in relation to external natural things - that we have actually lost all feeling for the appropriate treatment of these things. And so, on the one hand, one thinks in a completely materialistic way and, on the other hand, in a completely abstract way, especially when it comes to social issues. Thoughts are expressed that have no prospect whatsoever of having any real impact on real life. Or one also finds that people who believe they are putting forward something quite real simply indulge in generalities. We are accustomed to hearing practitioners expound in generalities when discussing something as specific as the social question. It is simply the case that through centuries of education within Western civilization, we have not been brought closer to life, but have actually been alienated from life. And I would like to say: this realization leaps out of everything, how much one has actually been alienated from life, but how one misjudges the nature and character of this alienation. This is misjudged within the most diverse parties, and each party always blames the other. This was particularly evident to me from the questions that were asked.

There were questions that reminded me of some of the bitterness I have felt in dedicating myself to the study of modern, contemporary social conditions over the decades. For example, the question arises in several forms, which suggests the almost impossibility of an understanding that should play a role between the proletariat on the one hand and the other classes of humanity on the other. On the proletarian side, there is a question that is actually couched in the form of an accusation, a bitter accusation. I may, so that nothing remains in the background, but so that we face each other in full sincerity, honesty and truth, I may read this question, which actually involves an accusation, here:

The workers gathered here have found that it is not possible to work together with anthroposophists, with bourgeois circles; in particular, the student body seems to lack the impulse to be able to think its way into the cooperation of all people, otherwise it would be impossible to continue here as fellow students.

That, on the one hand, my dear attendees: no knowledge at all of how much there is a struggle within the student body to come to terms with the social demands of our time! A terrible mistrust has taken hold, especially in the circles of the proletariat. And anyone who is able to look at the social question with open eyes cannot ignore this mistrust, because it is one of the most real factors. But it actually concerns less the student body, which, it seems to me, is wrongly accused by the proletariat, at least it does not concern part of the student body. But, ladies and gentlemen, in general it must be said that in our time, especially in the circles of the bourgeoisie and those just above and below the bourgeoisie, there is little inclination to really look at the social question from its proletarian aspect, to really gain an understanding of how the proletarian question is intimately connected with the entire social question and thus with the fate of our modern civilization in general. As I said, I am only speaking preliminarily today, so that we can then understand each other better, because one can only present these things sympathetically if one knows the background to them.

You see, my dear audience, when we began last year to work from April onwards from Württemberg in the sense of the “Appeal” I had written and my “Key Points of the Social Question” for a recovery of our social life, there was the time, which in a was still, in a certain sense – let us say, overshadowed by the one or illuminated by the other – overshadowed or illuminated by what was like a kind of revolutionary wave sweeping over Europe; and at that time one met above all the big bourgeois and their followers, the entrepreneurial class, in the stage of fear. They were terribly afraid of what could arise from the depths of proletarian social existence, and in April and May one came into a social wave where socialism, or at least socialization, was dreamed of, or rather, dreamed up in wide circles. But then came different times. It turned out how little the proletariat is actually trained in the first place to arrive at any clear formulation of its demands in such a way that something socially positive could arise from it. Certainly, the broadest circles of the proletariat would be sympathetic to the impulse towards threefolding in particular if it were possible to overcome that which is the leadership of this proletariat. And we must not deceive ourselves about this, as can be clearly seen from the experience we have just had with our efforts: the proletariat will only come to a clear understanding when all the leaders are gone and when it can rely on its own instincts and reason. One will be able to speak to them. One can speak to the instincts of the proletarians, one can speak to the reason of the proletarians, but one cannot speak to the leaders, who combine two characteristics: firstly, a terrible parroting of what the bourgeois have thought out for them, and secondly, in all their behavior, an exaggeration of the most vulgar philistinism. But that, as I said, is directed only against the leadership.

But it must be recognized, as it is necessary in our time in general, to take it very seriously and radically into account that everything that stands out from the old times and would like to bring up what was before 1914, that it is not suitable for further development – that must be recognized. And as long as people in all parts of the civilized world think of nothing but how to get so-and-so back into this or that office because he was in such an office before, before 1914 or during the war, as long as people think like that, as long as they do, practically nothing can be worked out that can lead to progress. We absolutely need new people who emerge from a new way of thinking. We have no use for those who want to fall back on the old ways because they are too lazy to develop ideas that will lead to the appreciation of new people. I said that different times were coming. The proletariat proved that it could not come to any clarity on its own. The panic gradually turned into a kind of certainty, certainty to the extent that people said to themselves: Now we can try to continue along the old lines. I would like to say that at the time, from week to week, one could see how everything that was previously entrepreneurial fell back into the old ways of thinking; and now it is basically back on track, but just doesn't realize that it is dancing on a volcano. That was the first experience, that the complete uselessness of the leaders of the proletariat had emerged, so to speak, and that on the other hand the complete impotence of those who had previously held leading positions in the economic field had emerged. Yes, in these circles and in the entourage of these circles there is really no inclination to get to know what is actually pulsating in the present, what often wants to work its way to the surface from the proletariat in an unclear way. They simply do not want to get involved in what is important.

That is why so little of the first third of my “Key Points of the Social Question” has been understood, that first third, which is mainly concerned with presenting that “double bookkeeping”. I am not talking about the one Mr. Leinhas spoke about here in a historical context, but I am talking about another one that he even hinted at. It is that double bookkeeping that has gradually been consists in regarding the world, so to speak, only in terms of its material, mechanical context, in thinking only within this material, mechanical context, in, as I once put it, turning the practice of life into a routine, and then, on the other hand, wanting to develop all kinds of beautiful, all kinds of spiritual, all kinds of moral things.

We know how much the aim of practical people is to have their practice inside the factory, but then, when they have closed the door of the office in the evening, their aim is to be able to indulge themselves somewhere where thoughts can live freely, where the soul can develop, where one can become inwardly warm in thoughts that finally free one from what is behind the office door and so on; there should be a spiritual life outside of the factory – that will be such a motto [for these people], and my book actually wanted to reverse this motto. In this book I wanted to draw attention to the fact that it is not a matter of closing the factory behind you to find spiritual life outside, but that it is a matter of carrying your mind into the factory in the morning when you go into the factory so that reason, spirit and so on might permeate the material, mechanical life, so that the spirit does not develop alongside real life as a luxury, which it has gradually become through this double accounting. On the one hand, there is the business practice, which I don't need to describe to you further, as it is often found today; on the other hand, there is the church, there are the folded hands, there is the asking for a happy, eternal life, the interweaving of the two.

What is needed, this thinking together, is highly inconvenient for many people. On the one hand, they want a spiritless routine that they can adopt without really being present to it, and on the other hand, they want a mystical haziness through which they can satisfy the lust of their souls. How often have we experienced, especially at the time when the transition should be made from anthroposophical spiritual striving to practical striving, that people of practical life approached us who wanted to become successful in practical life from the practices that have arisen in recent decades. How do these people want to become successful? Discussions that have been held, when it came to recruiting people, say for the future or for the coming day - people who were supposed to work with the real spiritual, but who conquer the material - these discussions have shown: Such people are extremely difficult to find today for the simple reason that out of economic life, the practice has developed that the young person actually allows himself to be trained from the outside. He lets himself be brought into a business somewhere, and while his thoughts are actually somewhere else, on a spiritual level, sometimes on a very good one, he does not carry the spirit into his business. He is not there with his soul, he lets himself be trained from the outside, he lets himself be made business-savvy; then he lets himself be sent somewhere, to America or London, and there he is trained further. Afterwards he knows how to do it, and then he goes back, and then he does this or that.

Yes, my dear attendees, this leads to the social question, because we cannot make progress with such people; if we do not decide to shine a light into these things and work on them, nothing can be done. We need people who are educated, even through school, to intervene with their initiative when it comes to preparing themselves in the right way for practical life, so that, as it were, the initiative wants to come from within. To do this, however, it is necessary that the school does not stifle this initiative. I would like to say that, especially when viewed from the human side, this is the case.

A completely different spirit must enter into our economic life. Above all, this spirit will invigorate the connection that must exist between the human being and what he or she produces directly or indirectly in the world. For many branches of our lives, this connection no longer really exists. Many people are utterly indifferent to what they work on and how what they work on fits into the social context. They are only interested in how much they will acquire through their labor, that is, they reduce all interest they have in the outer material world to the interest they may have in the amount of money that can come to them from this outer world through their particular constellation in relation to this outer world. This reduction to the interest in acquiring, not in the thing that is being made, is what basically poisons our entire economic life. But here also lie the serious obstacles to understanding the impulse of the threefold social order.

As I said, I am speaking preliminarily, but I would like to refer to a few aphorisms today. It has been mentioned again and again – and rightly so – that we must work towards an economic life that is governed by the impulse of association. Associations – I have had a strange experience. I once spoke about associations in a circle of proletarians in Stuttgart. They said to me: We have heard of all kinds of things, of cooperatives, of trusts, of cartels, of syndicates, but we have not heard anything about associations. - One must be able to grasp the novelty of this concept quite practically, especially from the point of view of economic life, quite practically, I would say quite vividly, if one wants to find one's way around in these matters. Associations are not cooperatives, associations are not cartels, associations are not syndicates; above all, associations are unions, or rather, federations that work towards a specific goal. What can this goal be?

We will gradually approach a practical understanding of economic life: what can this goal be? My dear audience, this goal can be none other than working towards a very specific pricing of individual goods. It will not be possible to think correctly in terms of political economy until one is able to place the price problem at the center of this economic thinking, as the third third of my book “The Core of the Social Question” does, perhaps not always pedantically with theories, but certainly in the spirit of the whole.

What is important about the price problem? It is important to realize that each good can only have one specific price, at most there should be small fluctuations up and down. Each good corresponds to a specific price, because, dear attendees, the price of a good is – now let go of the money, I will also talk about that the day after tomorrow – the price of a good is nothing other than what represents its value in comparison to the value of the other goods that a person needs. The price expresses a ratio, for example the ratio between the value of a skirt and a loaf of bread or a boot and a hat. This proportionality is what ultimately leads to the price problem. But this proportionality cannot be solved by any ordinary arithmetic, nor can it be determined by law, by any body at all, but can only be achieved through associative work.

What is it in today's economic life that works against the healthy formation of prices, and what is it that has led us into such economic misery? It is that the price of commodities is not formed out of economic life, but that something intervenes between the commodities – the goods that correspond to needs – that cannot be a commodity, that can only serve as a means of equalization for the mutual value relationships of the commodity: money. As I said, we will discuss all of this in more detail, but I would like to touch on a few general points now. Money has been endowed with a commodity character, namely through the emergence of the real ambiguity between paper money and gold money, which is now at its culmination. Thus it has become possible not only to exchange commodities, with money serving merely as a means of facilitating exchange in a large area with a rich division of labor and employment, but also for money itself to become a commodity. And this is simply demonstrated by the fact that one can trade in money, that one can buy and sell money, that the value of money changes through speculation, changes through what one accomplishes on the money market. But now something is coming into play here that very clearly shows how the unitary state still holds together today what wants to become tripartite. Money as we have it today: its value is, so to speak, determined by the state in accordance with the law. It is the state that sets the impulse that essentially determines the value of this 'commodity'. And through this interaction of two things, the exchange of goods and the determination of the monetary value on the part of the state, our entire economic life is made confusing, so that it is no longer comprehensible to the person who is in it today.

If only the people who are involved in economic life would honestly admit to themselves that, on the one hand, any amount of money that is circulating is a complete economic abstraction – circulating like the most abstract concept in our thinking, and that on the other hand there is the production, exchange and consumption of goods, which is so closely connected with human weal and woe, and that, to a certain extent, the present monetary value, like a great forgery, drowns out everything that is supposed to be alive. These things, however, must not be viewed in an inflammatory way, but must be considered soberly and soberly, quite objectively, otherwise one cannot get to the bottom of them. It is ideal, in the first place, that every kind of commodity within economic life should be based, in a very real sense, on having a very definite value. Some kind of commodity X must have a definite relationship to the other kinds of commodities in terms of its value.

But for this value to emerge, various things are necessary. First, it is necessary that the knowledge be available, the real technical-universal knowledge, to be able to produce the relevant goods in the best possible condition and in a rational way, that is, with the least labor and without harming the human being, for any particular age. And secondly, it is necessary that no more people are employed in the [whole production process] than are necessary to ensure that this one commodity, in particular, receives the one specific price, the clearly defined price, based on its production costs and so on. If too many workers are employed in the direction leading to a particular type of goods, the goods will receive a price that is too low; if too few workers are employed, the goods will receive a price that is too high; and it is therefore necessary to understand how many people must be employed in a particular area of goods production in order to be successful in economic life.

This knowledge of the number of people employed in the production of a particular type of goods intended for consumption is necessary in order to arrive at the culmination of economic life, the price problem. This is done by working positively, by negotiating with people in economic life how they are to be placed in their jobs. Of course, this must not be understood in a pedantic or bureaucratic sense. You will notice that complete freedom, including economic freedom, is secured for the human being precisely through the means that The Core Problems of the Social Question propose. It is not a matter of a bureaucratic or mechanistic Leninization or Trotskyization, but of an association through which, on the one hand, industrial life in particular is considered in the right way and through which, on the other hand, the freedom of the individual is fully preserved. So you see what ultimately matters. But how money comes into it: we will see that the day after tomorrow.

What matters first, despite the intervention of money, is the mutual value of the goods, that is, the mutual value of the products of human labor. That is what matters, and the associations must work to extract this value through their actions in economic life, through their negotiations, through their mutual contracts, and so on. Yes, but how do such negotiations come about that deal with the mutual value of goods? Never through an organization of equals, through a corporation of equals, but only through associations. How are you supposed to figure out what the ratio of the price of a boot to the price of a hat should be if you don't let the hatmakers and cobblers work together associatively, if there is no association, if no associations are formed? Associations within a branch do not exist, because these are not associations, but associations go from branch to branch, and above all go from the producers to the consumers. Associations are the exact opposite of what leads to trusts, syndicates and the like. We shall then also see how certain connections between the entrepreneurs of a product category are necessary; but these then have a completely different function. But the process by which the right price comes into being – I do not say is fixed, but comes into being – can only develop through associative life, passing from branch to branch; only when the associations work together with their experiences can the right price be fixed on the basis of experience. It will not be more complicated than, for example, life in our police states or in our democracies; on the contrary, although it goes from industry to industry, it will be much simpler.

Now, it must be clear to everyone that life thinks quite differently, if I may put it this way, than the abstract thinkers, even if they are practitioners. These abstract thinkers will think above all: So, it depends either on the associations of the producers [with each other] or on the associations of the producers with the consumers. Yes, but, ladies and gentlemen, that is only a matter of time. Just imagine (it is drawn on the board) that you associate the producers of industry A with some number of consumers of B, these with the producers of industry C and these in turn somehow with some number of consumers of D – well, then an association arises.

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But it arises in such a way that initially one only looked at the producer or only looked at the consumer; but the consumer is, after all, a producer of another article, unless he is a rentier or a loafer. It is not at all important that you proceed according to [abstract] categories; if you think about the matter in a more universal way and make associations out of all the connections, then you also have the consumers in the connections. But the way things are today, you can't even start with the producers among themselves, because only trusts or cartels would arise that only want to have business interests, I don't even want to say, but can only have.

Today, the main task is to form these associations according to the model that I once mentioned as a very primitive model. We wanted to establish a consumer association for bread in the Anthroposophical Society and associate a bread manufacturer with it, so that a relationship would arise between all those who could pay a certain price the Anthroposophists, by producing something else at the same time; and for the value of what they produced, they received what the baker in question produced. So, it actually came down to influencing the price in mutual business transactions. That will be the essence of these associations, that they gradually, by actually functioning properly, strive towards the correct, economically justified price.

If you consider this carefully, you will see that it does not contradict practical experience, insofar as it can still be gained at all in today's perverse economic life. Because take the simplest economy: in the simplest economy, the person who knows how to manage ultimately also has to find the right prices, and he develops the right prices based on his conditions. He determines the right prices from two specific components: firstly, from what he would like to get for his products, and secondly, from what he gets; that is, even if it is still so vague, he enters into an association with the consumer. It is always there, even if it is not externally closed. It is just that our lives have become so complicated that we have to bring these things to full consciousness and external form. If you don't think your way into these things, then something utopian always comes out. But above all, it would be necessary to bring together the experiences that are related to production and consumption. And in those circles that work with us, we would need, above all, practitioners who could, so to speak, synthesize the experiences of life into a science of experience about economic life, so that - and this could well be - it would start from experience.

But today, my dear attendees, you can read about economists in the following style: For any given territory, let's say Germany, they calculate how much of the total wealth, or let's say of the total annual income generated in that territory, is made up of entrepreneurial profits, and how much is made up of the sums that have to be used for intermediate trade in the broadest sense. And those who talk about these things as economists usually reduce everything to the abstract monetary relationship. But that does not give any insight into the real course of economic conditions. One would only get an insight if one heard from those who are involved in economic life how they work in intermediate trade. One would have to be told, for example, how lives are ruined in intermediate trade. And one would also learn, for example, the interesting fact that in a closed economic area, approximately as much entrepreneurial profit is reaped as unnecessary stocks of goods are brought onto the market. Quite curiously, the number given for any territory as the sum of entrepreneurial profits roughly corresponds to the market price of those goods that are unnecessarily in stock on the market and are not sold. You see a connection there that you can see, look at together, but which would only be interestingly illuminated if the practitioners, who basically don't understand the real practice, if these practitioners would come and show you how things really work for them, so that it comes out exactly how the connections are between what is worked and not sold on the market and the entrepreneurial profit that now comes from surplus labor, I mean the pure capital profit. It is quite natural that people who have no idea of how such connections are in economic life are also not in a position today to talk about the actual composition of associations. For what is the task of these associations? Their task is to use the very knowledge that is still lacking in order to arrive at the economically justified price. When association and association exchange their experiences, when these experiences are exchanged in a lively way, instead of being calculated, the price problem can be solved simply and practically in the end. There is no theory to solve the price problem. It cannot be formulated, but only by starting with any given product and really experiencing in life which other products are exchanged with it. Only then can you practically determine how much this product should cost, but practically and with almost complete accuracy. This cannot be done with numbers, but by having a group of people who have experience in one industry, another group who have experience in a different industry, a third in a third industry, and so on, so that these groups can pool their experiences. The matter is not as complicated as one might imagine today; and you can be quite certain that the number of people needed to get the associations up and running in this way and solve the price problem is not as high as the number of people that certain states have used for their militarism and policing. And that is the most important thing in economic life. Then, in a sense, everyone has a standard; they can see from the price how much they need to work. There is no need to think about how to get people to work, because they can see from the price-determining factor how much they have to work; they will be able to act accordingly, and they will be able to negotiate on a completely different basis with other people, on a reciprocal basis, about the amount of work they do, the time they work, and so on.

I would just like to say this today: What is the most important thing in economic life? The price of goods. If you look beyond economic life, in the sense of the “key points of the social question”, you will also find what is most important in state life – but we must think of a living state life. In the life of the state, the most important thing is the rights and duties that can be established through democratic coexistence, which people set for each other. We must bear in mind how, in economic life, experiences are gathered through the activity of associations, in order to arrive at the price of goods that ultimately dominates economic life; we must bear in mind how everything that does not tend towards this price fixing must be removed from economic life. In the life of the state, democracy, or, when it comes to the life of the mind, the free integration of the spiritual element into the social organism; in the life of the mind it is trust that founds the constitution, in the life of the state it is the intuitive sense of rights and duties. The associative principle works towards the right price. Economic life needs trust as a force of spiritual life, needs a sense of right and duty. With this rhythm of right and duty, we have a duality, just as we have exhalation and inhalation in human life. This is what should pulsate in state life, and trust is what should pulsate in spiritual life.

Regarding the questions – as I said, today I have only taken the general impression from the various questions – there is, for example, something that comes into question in relation to such a general impression: it is the question of how this spiritual life should actually work on the other two limbs of the social organism, how it should be constituted in itself. But we will talk about that the day after tomorrow. But just let your soul be filled — intuitively and without prejudice, not influenced by what is already there and has been constantly brought into the spiritual life from the state side — let your soul be filled with what the self-contained spiritual life is. Now, my dear audience, I think you will all be able to understand me quite well in this: When spiritual life is free, then the first thing to take effect in it will be the steadfastness that is born of trust; this steadfastness will take effect to the same extent that this spiritual life is emancipated from the state. And with all those “pigtails” who wanted nothing to do with our cultural advice, it was quite clear – I have already hinted at this from a different angle – that if it came down to the efficiency borne by trust, not the efficiency stamped by the state, then they would very soon no longer be sitting on their curule chairs. That is why the people fled so quickly from our call for a cultural council on all sides that, figuratively speaking, the tails of the tails and coats flew far, far in the wind from the speed with which they fled when we called on them to join us in a free intellectual life.

Now, I wanted to speak today, my dear attendees, about some preliminary matters that may lead us to address individual issues in response to the questions raised. Above all, because I see that there is an urgent need for it, I would like to address the specific question regarding the organization of the individual members of the social organism and their interaction. But I want to be understood, and to do so I want to study and process the questions thoroughly for next Tuesday. But you will see from studying the “Key Points of the Social Question” as well as from everything else I have said in this regard, based on our spiritual scientific work, that it is truly not utopian. But perhaps this also gives me a certain right to say that what is meant by the “key points of the social question” should not be translated into utopianism. I hear this utopianism in many of the ways people talk to me, for example, when someone comes and asks: “If we have the threefold social organism, what will happen to this or that?” — That is precisely how the utopian thinks. The practical person, however, thinks above all about whether something positive will be established. It really does not matter what should happen to the banker A, the milliner F, the sewing machine owner C - all these questions are raised - but something else is essential. What is important is that steps be taken that are in line with one or other of the three impulses for the threefold social order.

It is important that some kind of start be made with associations. It must be shown how neither the productive cooperatives nor the consumer cooperatives can work well for the future. We must turn away from the productive cooperatives because they have shown in practice that people with real personal initiative do not devote themselves to them, nor could they. But we must also turn away from the consumer cooperatives, although they are still the best, especially when they start producing for themselves; but they cannot achieve the necessary goal for the future for the simple reason that they do not arise from the association of what is there, ation of what is already there, but because they are still rooted in the most ordinary capitalism – at least in one corner of it, in that they initially organize consumption only on one side and actually incorporate production only into the organization of consumption, if they incorporate it at all. Even less indicative of real progress are cooperatives such as the raw materials cooperative and so on; such cooperatives have no sense of associative life at all, but instead they actually only amount to doing something in a partial area of economic life, in any old corner, while the raw materials question is closely related to the consumption question. One might say, but this is a somewhat figurative way of putting it: within the whole of economic life, it is actually the smokers who should have the greatest interest in the work of processing tobacco raw materials in tobacco-producing areas. Now I would like to know how, in our decadent, perverse economy, the interest that the smoker has in the raw materials question, in the raw materials economy, is connected to the product that he finally vaporizes into the air; after all, he only considers the very outermost periphery. I have chosen only one example, which seems a bit strange because it is so far away; in other examples, the connection is much more noticeable. The necessary associative connection between the procurement of raw materials and consumption is not noticed at all today.

It is simply the case that this abstract thinking always translates what is actually meant in a practical way in the “key points” into a theoretical one. And I found the most theory, the most bare business mysticism, if I dare use the term, when today's practitioners translate the practical ideas of the “key points” into their language, because they usually think only from a very tiny corner; and everything that is outside of this corner, which they, as routiniers, dominate, becomes blurred for them in a nebulous business mysticism. But that is precisely against the associative principle. The associative principle must work towards the value of the goods being determined by their mutual relationship. However, this can only happen if the most diverse sectors associate, because the more sectors that are directly or indirectly associated, the more sectors tend to work out the economically appropriate price of the goods through their activity. You can't calculate the price, but you can combine economic sectors associatively, and if they combine in such a way that the result of this combination is the number of people who have to be employed in each individual sector in the economy as a whole, according to production and consumption, then it comes out all by itself: you give me your boots for so many hats, which I give you. - Money is then only the mediator. But behind what is mediated by money, however much money is inserted as an intermediate product, there is still the value of the boot that determines the value of the hat, the value of bread that determines the value of butter, and so on. But this only comes about as a result of branch rubbing against branch in associative life. To believe that associations can only be established between producers in one branch is to fail to recognize reality. We shall see what that means next time, the day after tomorrow. Association is the union, the uniting, so that this uniting can produce that common exponent which then lives in the price. That is the living development of economic life, and only in this way does this economic life come close to a proper satisfaction of human needs. This can only happen when people place themselves with full interest in economic life, not just asking: What are the interests of my industry? What do I acquire in my industry? How do I employ the people in my industry? - This can only happen when people care about: How my industry must relate to the other industries, so that the mutual values of goods are determined in the right way?

As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, it is not just a cliché when I say that it is a matter of changing the way we think. Anyone who believes that they can get ahead by continuing to bubble along in the old way of thinking is only leading people further into decadence. We must believe today that we really do need to relearn most of all in economic life.

So I'll talk about that the day after tomorrow.

Now, my dear friends, it is still my duty to speak to you about the so-called last rites. The last rites are to be carried out in such a way that they follow a confession and communion. In such a case, where Communion is given outside of Mass, it is natural that the Priest connects this Communion with the thought of his own Communion and that it is celebrated in the same way as it is celebrated during Mass, but only in the thought of the Mass. After this Communion, therefore, the Anointing would have to take place, in the vestments that we already spoke about yesterday. It is of course the case that this sacrament of unction must be administered with the greatest delicacy, so that it does not upset the person to whom it is administered, does him no harm, and also so that he is not placed in a context that would inevitably evoke the realization on all sides: this is a dying person. For he may indeed recover.

So one connects with the distribution of Communion. The priest appears with his altar boy for the anointing and connects with Communion a number of sentences from the 17th chapter of the Gospel of John, which in the version you are to receive should read as follows from the original text. I note in parenthesis that a real translation of the gospel is only possible if this translation happens out of the world consciousness from which these sentences were once written or spoken, and that later translations suffered from the outset from the fact that the one who translated did not have this world consciousness within him, from which these sentences were written. It is a very superficial way of speaking when we say that the Gospel was translated in later times in a “plain” way, for this simplicity is an untruth, and we must do our utmost today to counteract it; so that this seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John reads thus:

Jesus placed himself in the spiritual vision
and spoke: Fatherly ground of the world:
Let the works of Your Son be revealed,
so that through the works of thy Son, thou also mayst be made manifest.

You have made him a creator
in all human bodies of flesh,
that he may lead all who who came to him through you.

They will live in the future because
that their soul's eye is prepared
to behold You as the truly united foundation of the world
and the creative Christ Jesus, whom You have sent to them.

Through me You were again revealed in earthly existence,
when the earth clouded over Thy Revelation.
This was thy will, which worked through me.

So too, Fatherly Ground of the World,
now let the revelation shine,
which was already made through me
before You were revealed in the earthly world.

Through me, the word
that reveals you, was revealed in human souls,
who came to me through you.
You were in them, through You they came to me,
and they have taken in the knowledge of You.

They recognized that that what I spoke to them was spoken by You through me

was spoken to them by you.

Fatherly world-ground, I implore,
that they who have come to You through me may always live with You as I live with You, and that they may behold there Your revelation,
which you lovingly let shine before me,
before the earth was.

Through me was revealed the word
that reveals You,
and I will bear this word into human souls, so that the love with which You love me be preserved in them,
and so my eternal life
preserve their life eternally.

The altar server says, “Yes, Father, may it be according to your word.”

Then the oil is taken from a small capsule in which the oil was brought, with the thumb and index finger of the right hand, and the words are spoken:

In the healing oil
that is outside your body

— by this is meant the sick person — the spirit soars to the heights
Feel yourself living and vibrant

— make a sign of the cross over the right eye with the oil, the altar boy says:

Yes, so be it.

The ceremony continues:

Christ's blessing receive
as life-bearing power
In it lives, lives, which conquers all that is dead.

— make the sign of the cross over the left eye on the forehead, the altar server says:

Yes, so be it.

The words continue:

Christ's strong soul
Leads in the weak body ¹
From existence to existence

Through all the worlds.

The altar boy:

Yes, so be it.

A cross is made with the oil at the top of the forehead, between the eyes, but at the top. Each time after saying the four lines, the altar server says:

Yes, so be it.

That is the ceremony, and when it is properly performed in this manner, the ceremony has the delicacy that it must have if confusion is not to be caused, or at least some kind of agitation in the soul of the sick person. That such a ceremony can be performed without causing such agitation in the soul of the sick person, that would be the task of the ministry of souls for life, so that the sick person is sufficiently prepared to also receive such a ceremony in the right way in his thoughts. Now, in this context, my dear friends, there are still a few words to be said about the one question you asked me regarding the three ages of Peter, Paul and John. Yes, and then you also asked about the periods of church history after the twelve apostles. Now these things are such that they have always only formed the core of teachings that have been handed down and that can, of course, be expressed in the most diverse ways. The fact that they appear in Schelling's work is due to the fact that Schelling once read a writing from around the 13th century in which such things were still spoken of as something self-evident. In terms of content, this can be understood by saying the following: First of all, we are dealing with the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth, with his Passion story, with the Mystery of Golgotha, with the Resurrection and with the appearance of the Christ in the etheric body before those who could recognize him in such an etheric body. In this way the Mystery of Golgotha first affected the disciples who were close to Christ Jesus, so that it appeared to them as the conclusion of the old time. Above all, they saw in the first man, Adam, that which had become so within the physical organization of this Adam through the cosmic events - whereby the spiritual cosmos is meant here - with all its adversaries - that in the course of the evolution of the earth up to the Mystery of Golgotha, it had to become more and more fragile and diseased. And they saw in the Mystery of Golgotha, also according to the teaching that was given to them after the Resurrection, that which in turn heals man, so that his fragile body does not allow sins to fall into the earth, which would be corrupted by them, but that sins are kept for redemption. Thus they saw in the most eminent sense in Christ Jesus the man as he now appeared on earth, in order to raise up mankind again that part which man was bound to lose through the special manner of entering into earthly existence through Adam.

This was the most essential idea, and the teaching that can be attributed to Peter was nourished by it. Peter spoke in this sense, he understood this teaching in such a way that, in the esoteric sense, the Petrine Age can be said to have begun at the creation of the earth, when people were led, through the Mysteries, to see the Christ as a supermundane being, and which found its conclusion in the appearance of the Christ on earth. Thus Peter taught in a manner that was almost taken for granted, how the Christ descended to earth.

This was opposed by the teaching of Saul. The teaching of Saul begins with the fact that the Christ is indeed on his way down to earth from the supermundane worlds, but that this event could not be realized at all in the same way as it was realized as the Mystery of Golgotha in Palestine. For from the places of initiation that Saul had gone through came the view that the Christ would appear in the world in glory and not go through what appeared to the Jews to be a shameful death: the death on the cross. Saul balked at the crucifixion, and only came to profess the Christ after the event of Damascus, through which it became clear to him, in a way that was not earthly - and therefore also not from the mysteries - but from the etheric, that the mystery of Golgotha is really the appearance of the Christ on earth. From that time on, there arose the necessity to understand the event of Golgotha more and more with the human mind. However, during the time when Paul lived on earth, the human mind was still so developed that it could easily understand such things as we then find as the interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha in all of Paul's letters, where the idea of the re-establishment of human nature, which had fallen as the Adamic nature, through Christ Jesus, also shines through.

The direct continuation of what is in the Pauline letters forms everything that then emerged as Western theology, through Augustine and the other church teachers, and continues up to our time; so that one can say that Protestant theology is also a continuation of Paulinism, even if Paulinism is already very much veiled there. Yes, well into the 19th century and into our time, of course, this Pauline interpretation prevailed; in our time, however, there was quite strong opposition to this Pauline view among Catholic priests, in that many Catholic priests, whose teaching is considered orthodox, contrast the original Petrine Christianity with the Pauline one. One can say: Petrinism ends with Peter himself, and then Paulinism begins to take effect. And Western Christianity now awaits Johannine Christianity, which will be a Christianity based on the spirit. This is how Schelling understood it in his mature years, at forty or fifty.

The other question was about the periods of Church history after the twelve apostles. Such a division is not only peculiar to Christianity, but is basically characteristic of all mystery religions. It is that the evolution of the world, in which the evolution of the earth is also included, proceeds in periods of twelve epochs each, that after a cycle of twelve epochs the first epoch is repeated and again twelve epochs are traversed on a higher, on a modified level. It can be said that at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was to shine most intensely into physical earthly vision through its direct earthly presence in a certain way, there was a time of darkness for the outer world. And one can say: precisely in contrast to what was to shine as a light into the souls of the apostles, there was the darkness of Judas Iscariot. The cosmic aspect is the one that sees the most apostate spirit of this time as the ruler of the world, the apostate spirit that always follows a time of Michael. This cycle, which always takes up about three centuries, has arrived at the point in our time where the transition has taken place from a Gabrielic cosmic age, from the age of Gabriel, to the age of Michael, which in turn will last about three centuries. The development intertwines in many ways, so that if you express it in a calculation, nothing completely adequate comes out. (It is written on the board: 330 times 12 = 3,960.)

These are things that are also known within the Catholic Church as esoteric wisdom. But I do not think that at the present moment it would have any particular significance for you if anything were added to what I have said about some of the esotericism of the Catholic Church in the course of my lectures. Of course, there would be a lot to say about the esotericism of the Catholic Church, especially that the Catholic Church is well aware that when a new form of clairvoyance emerges today, it reveals something that it wants to conceal from its faithful, and that it has set itself the task, above all, of fighting this newly emerging clairvoyance. This is one of the teachings that the initiates among the Catholic priesthood are already receiving today.

Now, regarding the question you raised: music and chorales in worship, it would have been very nice if something like this could have been tackled already now. When the Mass is celebrated on solemn occasions, it is possible to introduce the Mass before the relay prayer is said, with appropriate choral music, with instrumental table music that may also include singing, which refers to the motif of the relay prayer, and that each individual part of the Mass can then be commented on in the appropriate way. Likewise, the mass can end with a composition of the “The Act of Human Consecration, that was it”. So it is that before Communion everything in the music should be preparatory, and after Communion there should be a dying away of the music, so that Communion would be introduced by a musical motif, which would then fade away, ending with the words “The Act of Consecration of Man, that was its purpose”.

This is something you can study. And those who are seeking to compose from the spirit of the Mass and are looking for a musical stimulus will find the most intense stimulus in Bruckner, who was stimulated by the motif of the Mass. His compositions of the Mass offer more than those of Beethoven and Brahms. You will also gain a great deal here if you follow older [composers], but you must be aware that in this direction, some things have to be done anew. In particular, it should be noted that Bruckner's compositions of the Mass were actually consciously composed for non-ecclesiastical purposes, so that one cannot see completely adequate models in them.

Then there is the question – the other questions, which are more practical in nature, will be best answered this evening – about the Bible: What can be said about textual corruption in the New Testament? How did it come about and with what intention, and how can the sources of error be eliminated?

You see best of all, whenever translations are given, including today's translation, how the consciousness of the connection between the human soul and the cosmic worlds has faded in humanity. Just as a blind person, if he does not hear about it from the outside, could not describe trees, rivers, clouds, so today's person, when he has a text in front of him, cannot interpret it with what he sees; he will interpret what he does not see. Thus, the powerlessness in the face of what lies in the Gospels has gradually led to the lack of translations. And since, in the intellectual age of the mid-15th century, an enormous arrogance and pride has asserted itself in the face of this lack, the view has arisen that it is a purely arrogant conceit to exclude what is cosmic in the gospel texts, that one should speak to the simplest of people.

Yes, my dear friends, in the time when one officially translated as you have it today in the Lutheran translation, in that time it was not this translation of the Gospels that spoke to the simplest people, but rather what Jakob Böhme or Paracelsus spoke. They translated the Gospels differently and understood them correctly, and they translated them for simple minds in the right way, quite unlike those who boast that they speak to simple minds. In Paracelsus, you have a personality for whom religion was something that had a much broader meaning than the religion that must be gained in the age of intellectualism by those who want to replace this intellectualism of the head with a very strong intellectualism of the mind by freeing the concept of God from everything, in contrast to which everything must also be freed... [here the stenographer marked a gap]. That is what has become most un-Christian in modern Christianity. Just consider that in Paracelsus there lived a personality for whom religion applied to such an extent that it included medicine. In Paracelsus there lived a conception of religion that enabled him to hold on to the spiritual so firmly that it could permeate him to the point of illness, so that the physician is the one who carries out the will of God on earth in relation to the sick person. For him, medical service was religious service. And that is what is absolutely necessary today: not just to talk endlessly about the eternal, but to bring this eternal into all of life and to make it active and effective in all that is alive.

Now here the synoptic question is also touched upon in relation to the well-known agreement of the first three Gospels down to the details and the contradictions to the fourth, the Gospel of John (second section of the sixth point of the question).

Now, you will understand that these circumstances must be so if you consider the following: Especially about the Mystery of Golgotha and everything connected with it, was spoken of as something secret in the first centuries of Christianity. You know how they dealt with mystery wisdom in ancient times. This mystery wisdom was not something that was taken directly onto the streets, but was considered something that was only given to someone who had been properly prepared with the whole person in the right way. Thus, even in the remnants of mystery wisdom, in which Christianity first appeared before the most intimate of its adherents in the first Christian centuries, the mystery of Golgotha itself was also taught. However, they did not proceed with all the facts in the way that today in external science, where one proceeds according to the so-called historical sources, but rather, great value was placed on determining the day of Jesus' death not from a historical source but from stellar wisdom, thus saying: at this and that stellar constellation, the death of Jesus occurs. Such was the form.

But this knowledge of the stars was no longer very much alive at the time when the Gospels were written down in the form in which they now exist, and so you can very easily find that one person saw it one way and another person saw it another way. As for the similarities, they mostly relate to the teaching content. The fact of the matter is that at that time, when this teaching content was passed down from personality to personality, people had a very different memory than they do today, and what they were told over and over again and continued to say was naturally continued into future times. This must be explained, otherwise we fall back into the old days, which must not be. We must seek to overcome what was customary in the old days on a higher level. In this day and age, it is necessary to write down everything that is said; even the listeners here sit and write, horribile dictu. One should not imagine that the sayings reported in the Gospels were recorded by a proud stenographer. That was not necessary even in those days, the development of memory was quite different, and people memorized everything much more faithfully than they can today. The human brain, the physical brain, is much more fragile today than it was in those times. In those times, the brain cells lived almost to a real life in certain hours of the day, to the life that only clouded consciousness – those cells that cloud consciousness, that underlie the will, those are the white blood cells – not only at night, but also during the day, and even weaker at night. The brain cells did not have such an intense life as the white blood cells, but they did have a certain life, and that caused a very different memory to be present than it is today, so that what had been learned and what should be learned was faithfully preserved. Those who know this fact also know that the synoptic question of the Gospels is answered by the faithful memory of ancient times.

These were the questions that required me to answer them in a way that was conducive to the lecture, insofar as the answer had not already been given in what had been said so far. The further questions should actually be developed in the discussion, so the discussion should really be started in such a way that it can still be continued during your stay here. It is better to develop the things that are still questions here in speech and counter-speech. I know very well, my dear friends, that a great deal more could be said about such questions as historical questions, questions about the Bible and so on, but here we must come to an end. Certainly, there are still many questions to be answered, which in the course of time can be answered on other occasions, but to those who are beginning to question, I would also like to advise them to engage in self-knowledge, which can be done in the right can be done in the right direction by the following little story, which I give without any allusion, but which, if used in the right way in self-knowledge, can lead one to expect the future with regard to certain questions.

Once upon a time there was a little boy who asked questions about everything, and his father was quite disconsolate about it and said one day: “I longingly await the day when my son stops asking questions, because otherwise I'll go crazy over all this questioning.” — Then another person came along, a family friend, who decided to answer the questions the little boy asked until the little boy himself would be in a position where he could no longer ask questions, that is, until no more questions occurred to him. That took a very long time, and the danger was already approaching that the little son would run out of questions, but he kept asking: Why is Friday noon before Friday evening? Why do the stars shine in the evening? And so on. Now, nevertheless, the danger was approaching that the little son would run out of questions, but he wanted to overcome this danger, and so he finally asked the terrible question: Why is the What? Well, we should incorporate such a narrative a little into our soul when we should be sad that in these days the time is approaching when questioning will no longer be possible for some time. But we still want to deal with the questions that are to be discussed in speech and counter-speech now. So from now on I will again be more of a listener and only occasionally interrupt you.

A participant: I would like to ask why Luke has the Risen One eat.

Rudolf Steiner: The matter is such that it can only be properly understood if one is clear about the fact that in order to interpret such things from the consciousness of the time in the right way, it is really necessary to reawaken the idea that was associated with the concept of eating at that time. Today, we simply imagine that we consume physical matter and that this physical matter passes into the human body. Now, as today's physiology tells us, the concept of eating was not always, but in the time when the Gospel of Luke was written down, the old wisdom was still valid in many ways, that man takes what he builds his body with from the etheric world, and that what he takes from the etheric world also appears in the image of eating when one sees the etheric body. So you also see in the image of the physical eating that which is the correlate for eating in the etheric world. If you base your interpretation on this, you will see that the passage could, of course, be expressed in a completely different way than it is expressed, but that it does not need to be eliminated. This is the case with many passages.

A participant asks a question about the marriage ritual [the wording of the question was not written down in shorthand].

Rudolf Steiner: Of course, this is about what marriage is as a sacrament. You have to bear in mind what the content of the church ritual of the sacrament of marriage means. The content of the church marriage sacrament is no more the consummation of the marriage than, for example, the blessing of the ripening of the fruit in the course of the year corresponds to the reality of the ripening of the fruit. The performance of the marriage sacrament in the Christian view is that which is performed by marriage in the civil sense, is elevated to the ecclesiastical, to the ceremonial. So that with regard to the dissolution or the indissolubility of marriage, nothing is given within the content of the sacrament, because what is elevated into the sacrament is what is considered to be the essence of marriage. The Catholic Church has also retained this; of course, originally it fully recognized the marriage performed by civil law and then blessed it in church. In more recent times, when the emancipation of [church from civil] marriage occurred... [larger gap marked by the stenographer in the transcript]. The Catholic Church regards what has been agreed between the spouses as the ecclesiastical and blesses that. With regard to this matter, the Church takes the most liberal position, only that it has been confused by the fact that it speaks out on marriage in all sorts of ways because, in recent times, it has presumed not to bless marriage but to perform it, that is, to assume the function of the secular power of the prince of this world... [further gap]. There the fact is that the church, by entering into the secular, has also secularized the sacraments, and then these secularized sacraments have been taken over by the state. With these explanations, you will also see the relevant passages of the testament in harmony.

A participant asks a question about emergency baptism (the wording was not noted).

Rudolf Steiner: As it stands, emergency baptism can be administered in any situation. It is different from baptism in the course of worship. It is performed when there is danger to the life of the person to be baptized, but a priest cannot be called in time. In this case, baptism can also be performed by a lay person. It does not matter how it is performed. It just has to be rectified by the priest and recognized by the community. What can happen in addition is that the priest includes baptism in the next communion, so to speak making it an ideal baptism if death has occurred; otherwise it is ritually reenacted.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We have a colleague who is Jewish. How should adult baptism be performed?

Rudolf Steiner: Actually no different from the baptism of a child. The ritual does not contradict this at all. He must first be baptized before he is ordained a priest.

A participant: Why is child baptism necessary for the time being and not adult baptism? In the past, it was the custom to baptize adults first.

Rudolf Steiner: I have said that this cannot be avoided in today's world. We cannot introduce the baptism of adults in today's world. You have to take that into account, otherwise you will either bang your head against a wall or smash your head. I believe that we must retain infant baptism, and once it has been performed, we cannot repeat it. We have to let baptism take effect before confirmation.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: How does what is necessary today to bring healing facts to people differ from the proclamation that was possible a few centuries ago?

Rudolf Steiner: Bringing all the facts of salvation to people will have to take the course that you will first do what is possible in order to increasingly move on to what is necessary. The necessary has already been outlined, but it will really differ even in one and the same place, depending on whether you have one community or another there or there. Let us assume that one finds a community of nothing but socialists. He will have to proceed somewhat differently than the one who finds a community of old dethroned German princes. [The following remarks have only been recorded in fragments by the stenographer.] In scholasticism, this type of discussion occurs very frequently. That is something that clarifies the matter, if one says it radically. You must experience that. With what can result from it, one comes to differentiating.

[Questions are asked about the loyalty formula. Friedrich Rittelmeyer proposes an amendment. The stenographer did not write down the wording of the question and Rittelmeyer's vote. ]

Rudolf Steiner: What I consider necessary is this: At first, in a purely intellectual sense, some might believe that someone can separate [from the community] by simply continuing to do the same things within the community after the separation. Now this is against the tradition of the cult. The granting of the right to practise this cult and likewise the speaking out of the mediated Christ-power, which belongs to this cult, must be regarded as belonging to this community. Therefore, the community has the right to deny anyone the right to practise the cult or to teach in connection with this cult. He can, of course, teach, but not in connection with this cult. So he simply loses the right to continue to practise what he has taken on within the cult. The moral evaluation lies in the fact that the conference, the meeting, the community of leaders and senior leaders, has to pronounce on how his relationship to this community can now be understood in relation to real things, that is, that he loses the right to do this and that and so on. The natural connection with this community is such, and that is expressed [in the formula]. You can formulate it differently, you can grasp it more clearly if you are aware that it is so. The interpretation must also be passed on. So in this respect I could not object to this formulation, but it must be recognized not by me but by the community.

[The question was asked about the possibility of distributing it to individual cities. The questions were not noted by the stenographer.

Rudolf Steiner: There is no reason to exclude Vienna. Because it is geographically remote? Well, after all, Vienna is no further from Stuttgart geographically than Königsberg is. That is a question that is only related to whether you find the opportunity to occupy Vienna from the outset. That it is good to occupy it is something that I fully accept. Firstly, there is no reason not to occupy Vienna. Secondly, the situation in Austria is such that the configuration of religious life that you now find in Austria is actually only about fifty years old, and in the years before that, this religious life had a completely different configuration. Austria would have been an extraordinarily favorable ground for such a renewal of Christianity if it had been carefully implemented, because the orthodoxy of Catholic priests has become very alien to many people, not only to the laity but also to priests. Now, the completely untrue Christian-social element has taken over everything that existed in Austria until the 1980s – it is an embodied lie. It has also seized the religious element, and today the situation is such that one would think there was no receptivity at all for the renewal of Christianity in Austria. In Austria one could speak fairly freely about anthroposophy if one did not touch on anything that reminded one of Catholicism... [space in the text marked by the stenographer]. Then it was claimed that anthroposophy was just a form of Jesuitism in disguise. But in fact this earlier current is still there in latent form and, if approached in the right way, is good soil. [Another question is asked that was not noted by the stenographer.]

Rudolf Steiner: In such areas, the need for ritual often arises as a reaction. In the east and in the north, a great deal is suppressed that lives in people's minds. You are not justified in assuming that you would not find a yearning for ritual in the north and in the east.

A participant: I think Silesia is a very good field. I have heard from the people of the social work group that they are much more popular in Breslau, in Silesia, than in Berlin.

Rudolf Steiner: I am very surprised that you think that the Protestant spirit has had such a deep influence in northern and northeastern Germany. That is actually impossible. The influence only goes so far in the north and east because it has been and is being artificially generated. It is the Prussian state power that has worked so extraordinarily, that has brought about what is there and suppressed the religious inclination of the people. What basically holds it back is Prussian militarism and the assessoral spirit, and not the spirit of the people. It cannot be dismissed out of hand that precisely on the way to the East something of what made it possible to Christianize East Prussia in earlier centuries is reviving.

Marie Steiner: I think you should go to places like Essen and Bochum. I don't know of any places that need more spiritual life than these. I felt so sorry for these people from the factories.

Rudolf Steiner: This question is one whose answer depends on whether it is possible to fill these positions.

I must say that I sometimes heard the question: “Why don't you have a Swiss person in your class?” when I came up to you. The last time we were here, there were still Swiss people among you. So with the general process of elimination, all the Swiss left. What you have now is enclosed within the borders of the German Reich, and of course it cannot remain that way, otherwise you would found a German church. Christianity cannot be enclosed within national borders, nor within political national borders. We must think not narrower, but much further. It is something that weighs heavily on me that you have been left so alone by the members living outside the borders of the German Reich. Those of you who were already pastors are few in number. The Swiss pastors had to withdraw. This is very understandable given the special nature of these personalities. But there is a tendency that even the younger Swiss people do not approach this work, who, as Swiss, could found communities in Switzerland just as you can found communities in Germany. This is because there are not as many idealists among young Swiss people as there are among young Germans. They know that they will not receive their salaries in the same way on the new path they are about to take as they would on the old path. The mistake of Old Catholicism is that it has not accepted a new element in an entirely unbiased way, but essentially wants to go back to what was corrupted by ultramontanism. Old Catholicism suffers from its own negation; it is actually only anti-ultramontane.

Gertrud Spörri is Swiss, but initially prefers to work in Germany rather than Switzerland.

Rudolf Steiner: But the Swiss are not coming either. And you must not present it as an ideal that they should also have a war so that they can catch up on what the others went through [during the war]. It would be necessary to do something for the Swiss in particular. I just want to have said that. I realize that it cannot be done the way you are now. But national borders must not be the limits of our work.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer suggests going to the universities and trying to get students to participate.

Rudolf Steiner: Actually, the whole world comes into consideration, where today there is only that name Christianity. Where is true Christianity today? The whole world comes into consideration. When in earlier times such a movement as the present one is to be, was kindled, it necessarily had to have a completely different character: it is the Hussite movement; only it was cut off at that time. But the Hussite movement had, besides the negative elements mentioned in history, also its positive elements. The conditions already exist everywhere beneath an upper stratum that has become purely Ahrimanic.

The question concerns Thuringia and Erfurt. Is it important to start immediately or to think about Thuringia later?

Rudolf Steiner: Thuringia naturally has the one characteristic that the population is the most unintelligent in all of Germany. There is a lot of native wit in Thuringia with regard to everyday life, but in terms of understanding all higher questions, Thuringia is quite backward. That is why it is difficult to work there. But why not overcome these difficulties in this way? Thuringia does not need to be an exception. I could well imagine that a center can be created in Erfurt, for example. I cannot believe it in Weimar, because even today people there are blasé about religious matters. Weimar has the harmful after-effects of the fact that Goethe and Schiller lived there. The fact is that Goethe and Schiller, who are well known by name, are basically two plaster figures in Weimar. The people are satisfied with that. A participant: Is it time to start in Munich?

Rudolf Steiner: No, in Munich it is still the case, even today -— although today much is immersed in untruth -, that everything is still possible, as it was before the war, when Munich was the German city where everything was possible. In Munich you could really do anything. But in most cases, either a very open or at least a hidden path leads from everything to the Hofbräuhaus; of course to the republican Hofbräuhaus, just as in Vienna people were surprised to get the republican roll instead of the Kaiser roll. In Munich, everything leads to the Hofbräuhaus. That is the difficulty. And so in Munich the Catholic movement is also flooded by that standard life, that standard living, the mighty Hofbräuhaus. But I believe, on the other hand, that your movement is precisely about the necessary strength and energy. Other movements will have a much harder time of it than this one of yours. So it's not a matter of saying we can't occupy Munich, but rather of asking how to properly occupy Munich, or rather, who should be admitted as Mr. Klein's helper, because he will cause offense in Munich due to his excessive youthfulness. That will cause some difficulties. But he will be supported.

Emil Bock: This is our concern, especially with regard to the large cities. We are convinced that we do not have enough older personalities who could tackle a larger city in such a way that it would attract public attention. That is why we have the question of how we want to deal with Klein and Munich: Who would be best suited for the job? We are such a small group and, after all, we don't have so many different people among us that it seems possible for us to adequately serve these cities. Therefore, we have hesitated as to whether we want to leave out the big cities because we cannot properly staff them.

Rudolf Steiner: What were the difficulties? Objective difficulties? There were none. It is precisely in Catholic cities – both Munich and Cologne are Catholic cities, although Catholicism manifests itself quite differently in the two – that you meet people who initially have a high degree of neutral feeling. At first everything is more or less the same to them because they have become indifferent; then gradually they are seized. One can achieve a great deal there. I am counting on a great deal in Munich and Cologne, that people will gradually be seized. It could also happen in Vienna, for example, that a larger number of people will simply go there out of curiosity at first, which should not be the worst thing, but the best. It could be the same in Cologne. Catholicism prepares the ground for people to become dulled to the Church out of habit, but actually have a deep urge to experience something true. Among the old Catholic population, there are many who are striving for religious renewal. The only question is: do we have the necessary personalities, and if not, how do we get them?

[Another question is asked about the dangers of sectarianism.]

Rudolf Steiner: It depends on the spirit, on the seriousness, not on the appearance. Sectarianism will arise immediately if you see something in the seclusion that is a danger for the cause. Why should it be sectarian to spread higher insights among the people.

• 1. See note