The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] As I explained in my preceding remarks, it is the beings who completed their human stage of development during the previous incarnation of the earth—the old moon period—who guide human spiritual evolution. Their guidance, however, is obstructed and opposed by beings who did not complete their development during the moon period. Nevertheless, while these “imperfect” beings obstruct the guiding activity of those who completed their development, they also, paradoxically, further it. The resistance they offer to our progress strengthens, solidifies, and lends increased weight and significance to the forces that are called forth by the beings who advance our development. In Christian esotericism, these classes of superhuman beings who have attained the developmental level immediately above our own, both those who advance our development and those who help us by introducing obstacles, are called angels or angeloi. Above them are the beings of the higher hierarchies, the arch-angels, archai, and so on, who also take part in guiding humanity.

In each of these hierarchies we find beings of varying degrees of perfection. At the beginning of the present earth's evolution, for instance, we find angeloi of higher and lower standing. Those of [lower] standing barely attained the minimum level of development when the moon stage of evolution ended and the earth stage began, while those of higher standing had passed far beyond it. Between these two types are to be found angeloi of every possible level of development whose participation in the guidance of human evolution on earth is in accordance with the level they have attained. Thus, the beings who had the guiding role in Egyptian cultural development were those who had reached a higher stage of perfection on the Moon than those who guided humanity during the Greco-Latin age, and these, in turn, were more perfect than the beings who guide us now. Those who were to guide humanity later trained themselves for this task during the Egyptian and the Greek periods. By this means, they were prepared to guide a culture that had progressed further.

[ 2 ] In the time period following the Atlantean catastrophe seven successive cultural epochs may be distinguished: first, the ancient Indian; second, the ancient Persian;^S1 third, the Egypto-Chaldean; and fourth, the Greco-Latin. Our own period, which began around the twelfth century, constitutes the fifth cultural epoch and, although we are still in the middle of it, the first preparations for the sixth epoch are already underway. In other words, these individual periods of evolution overlap and transitions are very gradual. A seventh post-Atlantean epoch will follow the sixth.

Looking more closely at the guidance of humanity, we realize that it was only in the third cultural epoch—the Egypto-Chaldean—that the angels or lower dhyanic beings became to some extent independent guides of human evolution. This was not the case in the ancient Persian period. The angels then did not yet possess this independence and were subordinate to a higher guidance to a greater degree than they were during the Egyptian period. In ancient Persian times, angels still worked according to the impulses of the hierarchy above them. Thus, although everything was already subject to the angels' guidance, they themselves submitted to the direction of the archangels (archangeloi).

In the age of ancient India, on the other hand, during which post-Atlantean life reached unequaled spiritual heights—natural heights—under the guidance of great human teachers, the archangels themselves were still subject to a higher guidance, namely, that of the archai or “primal beginnings.”

[ 3 ] Thus we may say that from the Indian period on, through the ancient Persian and Egypto-Chaldean cultures, certain beings of the higher hierarchies increasingly withdrew from the direct guidance of humanity. Consequently, by the time of the fourth, Greco-Latin post-Atlantean cultural period, human beings had become, in certain respects, entirely independent. To be sure, the superhuman beings described above still guided human evolution, but they held the reins as loosely as possible.

As a result, the spiritual beings guiding humanity benefited as much from our actions as we did ourselves. This explains the entirely “human” character of the Greco-Roman period: human beings were left completely to their own resources. [ 4 ] The characteristics of art and political life in the Greek and Roman epochs grew out of this necessity of human beings to live out their individuality in their own way.

When we consider very early periods of cultural history, we find humanity guided by beings who had reached their human level of development in earlier planetary stages. The fourth, Greco-Latin epoch was intended to test human beings to the greatest extent possible. For this reason, the entire spiritual leadership of humanity had to be arranged in a new way.

In our epoch, the fifth post-Atlantean one, the beings guiding us belong to the same hierarchy that ruled the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans. The beings who were guiding people then are in fact now resuming their activities. As I said above, certain of these beings remained behind in their development, and we can feel their influence now in today's materialistic feelings and perceptions.

[ 5 ] Both the angelic (or lower dhyanic) beings that advance our development, as well as those who try to obstruct it, progressed in their development by guiding the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans through qualities they had themselves acquired in very ancient times. At the same time, through their work of guidance they advanced their own development. Thus, these advancing angeloi are guiding our fifth post-Atlantean epoch with abilities they acquired during the Egypto-Chaldean period. As a result of this progress, they can now develop very special capabilities. Namely, they have qualified themselves to be filled with forces that flow from the most important being of the whole of earthly evolution. The power of Christ works on them.

This power works not only in the physical world through Jesus of Nazareth but also in the spiritual worlds on superhuman beings. Christ exists not only for the earth but also for these higher beings. The beings who guided ancient Egypto-Chaldean culture were not then guided by Christ; they submitted to Christ's guidance only later. This submission was the step in their development that enabled them to guide the fifth post-Atlantean period under Christ's influence. Now they are followers of Christ in the higher worlds.

On the other hand, the angelic beings I have described as obstructing our development were held back in their development precisely because they did not submit to Christ's leadership and continue to work independently. This is why the materialistic trend in our culture will become more and more pronounced. There will be a materialistic stream guided by the Egypto-Chaldean spirits whose development was held back. Most of what is called modern materialistic science is under this influence.

Besides this influence, a second, different stream is also making itself felt. This is geared to helping us find the Christ-principle, as we call it, in all we do. For example, some people today claim that our world consists, in the final analysis, only of atoms. Who instills into human beings the idea that the world consists only of atoms? They get this idea from the superhuman angelic beings whose development was arrested during the Egypto-Chaldean period. [ 6 ] However, the angelic beings who reached their goal in the ancient Egypto-Chaldean cultural period and encountered Christ at that time can instill other ideas in us. They can teach us that substance is permeated with the spirit of Christ right down to the smallest parts of the world. And, however strange it may seem now, a time will come when chemistry and physics will not be taught as they are today under the influence of the Egypto-Chaldean spirits whose development was held back. Instead, scientists will teach that matter is built up piece by piece the way Christ ordered it. People will find Christ even in the laws of chemistry and physics, and a spiritual chemistry and a spiritual physics will develop.

[ 7 ] Undoubtedly this now seems to many people merely a daydream or worse. But yesterday's folly is often tomorrow's wisdom. Careful observers can already discern the factors working toward this end in our cultural development. At the same time, of course, such observers know only too well the scientific or philosophical objections that can be raised—with apparent justification—against this supposed folly.

[ 8 ] On the basis of the assumptions presented here, we can understand the advantages the guiding superhuman beings have over us. Post-Atlantean humanity encountered Christ when the Christ-event entered human history in the fourth post-Atlantean or Greco-Latin epoch. The superhuman guiding beings encountered Christ during the Egypto-Chaldean period and worked their way up toward him. Then, during the Greco-Latin epoch, they had to leave humanity to its fate, in order later to take part in guiding its development again. Today when we practice theosophy [anthroposophy] this means that we acknowledge that the superhuman beings who guided humanity in the past are now continuing their guiding function by submitting themselves to Christ's leadership. The same is also true for other beings.

[ 9 ] In the ancient Persian epoch archangels took part in guiding humanity. They submitted to the leadership of Christ even earlier than the beings of the lower hierarchies. Zarathustra, for example, turned the attention of his followers and his people to the sun, telling them that the great spirit Ahura Mazda, “he who will come down to earth,” lives in the sun.¹ The archangels who guided Zarathustra taught him about the great sun-guide who had not yet come down to earth but had only started on his way so as to later be able to intervene directly in earthly evolution. Similarly, the guiding beings presiding over the great teachers of India taught them about the Christ of the future. It is an error to think that these teachers knew nothing about Christ. They only said he was “above their sphere,” and that they “could not reach him.”

[ 10 ] As in our fifth cultural epoch it is the angels who bring Christ into our spiritual development, so in the sixth cultural epoch we will be guided by the beings who guided the ancient Persian epoch. The spirits of primal beginning, the archai, who guided humanity in ancient India, will, under Christ, guide humanity in the seventh cultural epoch. In Greco-Latin times, Christ came down from spiritual heights and revealed himself in the flesh in the body of Jesus of Nazareth—he descended right into the physical world. When they are ready, human beings will find Christ again in the next higher world. In the future, Christ will no longer be found in the physical world but only in the worlds directly above it.

After all, human beings will not always remain as they are now. We will become more mature and will find Christ in the spiritual world, as Paul did in the event on the road to Damascus, an event that prophetically foreshadows the future. And as the great teachers who led humanity in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch also guide us, so too it will be they who will lead us in the twentieth century to a vision of Christ similar to the one Paul saw. They will show us that Christ works not only on the earth but spiritualizes the entire solar system. Then, in the seventh cultural epoch, the reincarnated holy teachers of India will proclaim Christ as the great spirit, whose presence they first sensed in the unity of Brahman but which received its meaning and content only through Christ.² They will recognize Christ as the spirit they believed to rule above their sphere. Thus, step by step, humanity is led into the spiritual world.

[ 11 ] To speak of Christ as the leader of successive worlds and of the higher hierarchies is the teaching of the science that has unfolded since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries under the sign of the Rose Cross, a science that has increasingly proven essential for humanity.³ Looking at Christ from this perspective, we gain new insights into the being who lived in Palestine and then fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, as the following shows.

[ 12 ] There have been many different views of Christ before today's. For example, certain Christian gnostics of the first centuries claimed that the Christ who lived in Palestine did not have a physical body of flesh at all but had only an apparent “etheric”body that became visible to physical eyes.⁴ Consequently, since for them only an etheric body was present, they said Christ's death on the cross was not a real death but only an apparent one. There were also various disputes among the adherents of Christianity—for example, the famous dispute between the Arians and the Athanasians,⁵ and so on—as well as many different interpretations of the true nature of Christ. Many different views of Christ, indeed, have been held by people right into our own time.

[ 13 ] Spiritual science, however, must see Christ not just as an earthly being but as a cosmic being. In a certain sense, we human beings are also cosmic beings. We live a dual life: a physical life in the physical body from birth until death and a life in the spiritual worlds between death and rebirth. While we are incarnated in the physical body, we are dependent on the earth because the physical body is subject to the living conditions and forces of the earth. We ingest the substances and forces of the earth, and we are also part of the earth's physical organism. But once we have passed through the portal of death, we no longer belong to the forces of the earth.

Yet, it would be wrong to imagine that having passed through the portal of death we do not belong to any forces at all, for after death we are connected with the forces of the solar system and the other galaxies. Between death and rebirth we live in and belong to the cosmos in the same way as between birth and death we live in the earthly realm and belong to the elements of air, water, earth and so on. After death, we enter the realm of cosmic influences; for example, the planets affect us not only with gravity and other physical forces explained by physical astronomy but also with their spiritual forces. Indeed, we are connected with these cosmic spiritual forces after death, each of us in a particular way appropriate to our individuality. Just as a person born in Europe has a different relationship to temperature conditions and so on than a person born in Australia, so each of us similarly has a unique, individual relationship to the forces working on us during life after death. One person may have a closer relationship to the forces of Mars while another is more closely connected to those of Jupiter and yet others may have a closer relationship to the forces of the entire galaxy, and so on. These forces also lead us back to the earth to our new life. Thus, before our rebirth we are connected with the entire starry universe.

[ 14 ] The unique relationship of an individual to the cosmic system determines which forces lead him or her back to earth; they also determine to which parents and to which locality we are brought. The impulse to incarnate in one place or another, in this or that family, in this or that nation, at this or that point in time, is determined by the way the individual is integrated into the cosmos before birth.

[ 15 ] In the past the German language had an expression that poignantly characterized the birth of an individual. When someone was born, people said that he or she had “become young” (“ist jung geworden”). Unconsciously, this expression indicates that following death we are first subject to the forces that made us old in our previous incarnation, but just before our new birth, these are replaced by other forces that make us “young” again. In his drama Faust, Goethe says of someone that he “became young in Nebelland (the land of mist)”; Nebelland is the old name for medieval Germany.⁶

[ 1 ] People who are knowledgeable about these things can “read” the forces that determine a person's path in his or her physical life; on this basis horoscopes are cast. Each of us is assigned a particular horoscope, in which the forces are revealed that have led us into this life. For example, if in a particular horoscope Mars is above Aries, this means that certain Aries forces cannot pass through Mars but are weakened instead.

[ 16 ] Thus, human beings on their way into physical existence can get their bearings through their horoscope. Before ending this discussion—which, after all, seems a daring one in our time—we should note that most of what is presented today in this area is the purest dilettantism and pure superstition. As far as the world at large is concerned, the true science of these things has largely been lost. Therefore, the principles presented here should not be judged according to the claims of modern astrology, which is highly questionable.

[ 17 ] The active forces of the starry world push us into physical incarnation. Clairvoyant perception allows us to see in a person's organization that he or she is indeed the result of the working together of such cosmic forces. I want to illustrate this in a hypothetical form that nevertheless corresponds fully to clairvoyant perceptions.

[ 18 ] If we examined the structure of a person's brain clairvoyantly and could see that certain functions are located in certain places and give rise to certain processes, we would find that each person's brain is different. No two people have the same brain. If we could take a picture of the entire brain with all of its details visible, we would get a different picture for each person. If we photographed a person's brain at the moment of birth and took a picture of the sky directly above his or her birthplace, the two pictures would be alike. The stars in the photograph of the sky would be arranged in the same way as certain parts of the brain in the other picture. Thus, our brain is really a picture of the heavens, and we each have a different picture depending on where and when we were born. This indicates that we are born out of the entire universe.

[ 19 ] This insight gives us an idea of the way the macrocosm manifests in the individual and from this, in turn, we can understand how it manifests in Christ. If we were to think that after the Baptism, the macrocosm lived in Christ in the same way as it does in any other human being, we would have the wrong idea.

[ 20 ] Let us consider for a moment Jesus of Nazareth and his extraordinary life. At the beginning of the Christian era, two boys named Jesus were born. One belonged to the Nathan line of the house of David, the other to the Solomon line of the same house. These two boys were born at approximately—though not exactly—the same time.⁷

[ 1 ] In the Solomon child portrayed in the Gospel of St. Matthew, the individuality who had lived earlier as Zarathustra incarnated. Thus, in the Jesus depicted in the Gospel of St. Matthew, we actually encounter the reincarnated Zarathustra or Zoroaster.⁸ The individuality of Zarathustra grew up in this child just as Matthew describes it, until the boy's twelfth year. Then Zarathustra left his body and entered the body of the other Jesus, the one described by the Gospel of St. Luke. That is why at this moment the child Jesus so suddenly became entirely different from what he had previously been. When his parents found him in the temple in Jerusalem after the spirit of Zarathustra had entered him, they were astonished. This is shown by the fact that they could not understand what he said when they found him for they knew only the Nathan Jesus as he had been before. The Jesus who now stood before them could talk as he did to the scribes in the temple because the spirit of Zarathustra had now entered into him.

The spirit of Zarathustra lived and matured to a still higher perfection in this Jesus, who came from the Nathan line of the house of David, up to his thirtieth year. It should also be noted that impulses from the Buddha streamed out of the spiritual world into the astral body of this youth, in whom the spirit of Zarathustra now lived.

[ 21 ] It is true, as the Eastern tradition teaches, that the Buddha was born as a “bodhisattva” and only reached the rank of buddha on earth in his twenty-ninth year.⁹ [ 22 ] When Gautama Buddha was still a small child, Asita, the great Indian sage, came weeping to the royal palace. As a seer, Asita knew this royal child would become the “Buddha.” He only regretted that, since he was already an old man, he would not live to see the son of Suddhodana become Buddha. This wise man Asita was reborn in the time of Jesus of Nazareth; it is he who is introduced in St. Luke's Gospel as the temple priest and sees the Buddha reveal himself in the Nathan Jesus. And because he saw this he said: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace ... for mine eyes have seen thy salvation” (Luke 2:29-30). Through the astral body of this Jesus boy—the one presented in the Gospel of St. Luke—Asita could see what he had not been able to see in India: the bodhisattva who has become Buddha.¹⁰

[ 23 ] All of this was necessary for the development of the body that was to receive the Baptism by John in the river Jordan. At the moment of the Baptism, the individuality of Zarathustra left behind the threefold body—physical, etheric, and astral—of the Jesus who had grown up in the complicated way that enabled Zarathustra's spirit to dwell in him—for the reborn Zarathustra had had to undergo the two developmental possibilities represented in the two Jesus boys. Thus John the Baptist was brought before the body of Jesus of Nazareth in whom the cosmic individuality of Christ was now working. Other human beings are placed into their earthly existence through cosmic-spiritual laws, but these are then counteracted by those originating in the conditions of the earth's evolution. In the case of Christ Jesus, however, the cosmic spiritual powers alone remained active in him after the Baptism. The laws of the earth's evolution did not influence him at all.

[ 24 ] During the time that Jesus of Nazareth pursued his ministry and journeys as Jesus Christ in Palestine in the last three years of his life—from the age of thirty to thirty-three—the entire cosmic Christ-being continued to work in him. In other words, Christ always stood under the influence of the entire cosmos; he did not take a single step without cosmic forces working in him. The events of these three years in Jesus' life were a continuous realization of his horoscope, for in every moment during those years there occurred what usually happens only at birth. This was possible because the entire body of the Nathan Jesus had remained susceptible to the influence of the totality of the forces of the cosmic-spiritual hierarchies that guide our earth.

Now that we know that the whole spirit of the cosmos penetrated Christ Jesus we may ask, Who was the being who went to Capernaum and all the other places Jesus went? The being who walked the earth in those years certainly looked like any other human being. But the forces working in him were the cosmic forces coming from the sun and the stars; they directed his body. The total essence of the cosmos, to which the earth belongs, determined what Christ Jesus did. This is why the constellations are so often alluded to in the gospel descriptions of Jesus' activities. For example, in the Gospel of St. John the time when Christ finds his first disciple is described as “about the tenth hour” (John 1:39). In this fact the spirit of the entire cosmos expressed itself in a way appropriate to the appointed moment. Such indications are less obvious in other places in the gospels, but people who can read the gospels properly will find them everywhere.

[ 25 ] The miracles of healing the sick must also be understood from this point of view. Let us look at just one passage, the one that reads, “Now when the sun was setting, all those who had any that were sick with various diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on them and healed them” (Luke 5:40). What does this mean? Here the gospel writer points out that this healing was connected with the constellation of the stars, that in those days the necessary constellation was present only after the sun had set. In other words, in those times the healing forces could manifest themselves only after sunset. Christ Jesus is portrayed as the mediator who brings together the sick and the forces of the cosmos that could heal them at precisely that time. These were the same forces that also worked as Christ in Jesus. The healing occurred through Christ's presence, which exposed the sick to the healing cosmic forces. These healing forces could be effective only under the appropriate conditions of space and time, as described above. In other words, the forces of the cosmos worked on the sick through their representative, the Christ.

[ 26 ] However, these forces could work in this way only while Christ was on earth. Only then were the cosmic constellations so connected to the forces in the human organism that certain diseases could be cured when these constellations worked on individuals through Christ Jesus. A repetition of these conditions in cosmic and earthly evolution is just as impossible as a second incarnation of the Christ in a human body. Thus, the life of Christ Jesus was the earthly expression of a particular relationship between the cosmos and human forces. When sick people remained for a while by Christ's side, their nearness to Christ brought them into a relationship to the macrocosm and this had a healing effect on them.

[ 27 ] What I have said so far allows us to understand how the guidance of humanity has been placed under the influence of Christ. Nevertheless, the other forces whose development was held back in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch also continue to work alongside those that are Christ-filled, as we can see in many contemporary interpretations of the gospels. Books are published that take great pains to show that the gospels can be understood astrologically. The greatest opponents of the gospels cite this astrological interpretation, claiming, for example, that the path of the archangel Gabriel from Elizabeth to Mary represents the movement of the sun from the constellation of Virgo to another one.

To a certain extent, this astrological interpretation is correct; however, in our time, ideas of this sort are instilled into people by the beings whose development was arrested during the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. Under their influence there are some who would have us believe that the gospels are merely allegories representing certain cosmic relationships. The truth is, however, that the whole cosmos is expressed in Christ. In other words, we can characterize Christ's life by describing for each of its events the cosmic relationships that, through Christ, entered life on earth.

As soon as we understand all this correctly, we will inevitably and fully accept that Christ lived on earth. The false view mentioned above, however, claims that, because Christ's life is expressed in the gospels through cosmic constellations, it follows necessarily that the gospels are only an allegory of these constellations and that Christ did not really live on earth.

[ 28 ] Allow me to use a comparison to make things clear. Imagine every person at birth as a spherical mirror reflecting everything around it. Were we to trace the outlines of the images in the mirror with a pencil, we could then take the mirror and carry the picture it represents with us wherever we went. Just so, we carry a picture of the cosmos within us when we are born, and this one picture affects and influences us throughout our lives. Of course, we could also leave the mirror clean as it was originally, in which case it would reflect its surroundings wherever we took it, providing us with a complete picture of the world around us. This analogy explains how Christ was in the time between the Baptism in the Jordan and the Mystery of Golgotha. What enters our earthly life only at our birth flowed into Christ Jesus at each moment of his life. After the Mystery of Golgotha, what had streamed into Christ from the cosmos merged with the spiritual substance of the earth, and it has been united with the spirit of the earth ever since.

[ 29 ] When Paul became clairvoyant on his way to Damascus, he was able to perceive that what had previously been in the cosmos had merged with the spirit of the earth. People who can relive this event in their soul can see this for themselves. In the twentieth century, human beings are able for the first time to experience the Christ-event spiritually, as St. Paul did. [ 30 ] Up to this century only those individuals who had gained clairvoyant powers through esoteric schooling were able to have such experiences. Today and in the future, however, as a result of natural human development, advancing soul forces will be able to see Christ in the spiritual sphere of the earth. Beginning with a certain point in the twentieth century, a few people will be able to have such experiences and will be able to relive the incident at Damascus, but thereafter gradually more and more people will be able to do so, and in the distant future it will have become a natural capacity of the human soul to see Christ in this way.

[ 31 ] When Christ entered earthly history, a completely new element was introduced into it. Even the outer events of history bear witness to this. In the first cultural periods after the Atlantean catastrophe, people knew very well that the physical planets, such as Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn, were the expressions or manifestations of spiritual beings. In later ages this view was completely forgotten. People came to see the heavenly bodies as merely material things—to be judged according to their physical conditions. By the Middle Ages, people saw in the stars only what their physical eyes could perceive: the sphere of Venus, the sphere of the sun, of Mars, and so on up to the sphere of the firmament of fixed stars. Beyond that, they believed, there was the eighth sphere which enclosed the others like a solid blue wall around them.

Then Copernicus came and shook to its foundations the established outlook of relying completely and exclusively on what the human senses could perceive.¹¹ According to modern natural science, only people with muddled minds can claim that the world is maya or illusion and that we must look into a spiritual world to see the truth. Scientists believe that true science is based on what our senses tell us, and they record those perceptions. However, the only time when astronomers relied exclusively on their senses was in the days when the astronomy prevailed that modern astronomers oppose!

[ 32 ] Modern astronomy began to develop as a science when Copernicus started to think about what exists in the universe beyond the range of human sensory perception. In fact, it is true of all the sciences that they developed in opposition to sensory appearance. When Copernicus explained that what we see is maya, illusion, and that we should rely on what we cannot see—that was the moment when science as we know it today began.

In other words, the modern sciences did not become “science” until they stopped relying exclusively on sensory perception. Giordano Bruno, as the philosophical interpreter of Copernicus's teachings, proclaimed that the eighth sphere, which had been considered the boundary of space enclosing everything, was not a boundary at all.¹² It was maya, an illusion, and only appeared to be the boundary. In reality, a vast number of worlds had been poured into the universe. Thus what had previously been regarded as the boundary of the universe now became the boundary of the world of human sensory perception. We have to look beyond the sense world. Once we no longer see the world merely as it appears to our senses, then we can perceive infinity.

[ 33 ] Originally, then, humanity had a spiritual view of the cosmos, but in the course of history this was gradually lost. The spiritual world view was replaced by an understanding of the world based exclusively on sensory perception. Then the Christ impulse entered human history. Through this principle humanity was led once again to imbue the materialistic outlook with spirituality. At the moment when Giordano Bruno burst the confines of sensory appearance, the Christ-development had so far advanced in him that the soul force, which had been kindled by the Christ-impulse, could be active within him. This indicates the significance of Christ's involvement in human history and development, which is really still in its early stages.

[ 34 ] What, then, are the goals of spiritual science?

[ 35 ] Spiritual science completes what Bruno and others did for the outer physical sciences by demonstrating that the conventional, sense-based sciences can perceive and understand only maya or illusion. At one time, people looked up to the “eighth sphere” and believed it to be the boundary of the universe. Similarly, modern thinking considers human life bounded by birth and death. Spiritual science extends our view beyond these boundaries.

[ 36 ] Ideas like this one allow us to see human evolution as an uninterrupted chain. And, indeed, what Copernicus and Bruno accomplished for space by overcoming sensory appearance had already been known earlier from the inspirations of the spiritual stream that is continued today by spiritual science or theosophy [anthroposophy]. Modern esotericism, as we may call it, worked in a secret and mysterious way on Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and others.¹³ Thus, people whose outlook is based on the findings of Bruno and Copernicus betray their own traditions when they refuse to accept theosophy [anthroposophy] and insist on looking only at sensory appearance.

Just as Giordano Bruno broke through the blue vault of heaven, so spiritual science breaks through the boundaries of birth and death and proves that the human being comes forth from the macrocosm to live in this physical life and returns again to a macrocosmic existence after death. What is revealed in the individual on a limited scale can be seen on a much larger scale in the representative of the cosmic spirit, in Christ Jesus. The impulse Christ gave to evolution could be given only once. Only once could the entire cosmos be reflected as it was in Christ; the constellation that existed then will not appear again. This constellation had to work through a human body in order to be able to impart its impulse to the earth. Just as this particular constellation will not occur a second time, so Christ will not incarnate again. People claim that Christ will appear again on earth only because they do not know that Christ is the representative of the entire universe and because they cannot find the way to the Christ-idea presented in all its elements by spiritual science.

[ 37 ] Thus, modern spiritual science or theosophy [anthroposophy] has developed a Christ-idea that shows us our kinship with the entire macrocosm in a new way. To really know Christ we need the inspiring forces that are now imparted through the ancient Egyptian and Chaldean superhuman beings who were themselves guided by Christ. We need this new inspiration, which has been prepared by the great esotericists of the Middle Ages since the thirteenth century. This new inspiration must now be brought more and more to the attention of the general public. If we prepare the soul properly for the perception of the spiritual world according to the teachings of spiritual science, we will be able to hear clairaudiently and to see clairvoyantly what is revealed by these ancient Chaldean and Egyptian powers, who have now become spiritual guides under the leadership of the Christ-being. The first Christian centuries up to our own time were only the preparation for what humanity will receive and understand one day.

In the future, people's hearts will be filled with a Christ-idea whose magnitude will surpass anything humanity has known and understood so far. The first impulse that Christ brought and the understanding of him that has lived on until now is even in the best exponents of the Christ-principle only a preparation for a true understanding of Christ. Strangely enough, those who present the Christ-idea in this way in the West will in all probability be accused of not basing themselves on western Christian tradition. After all, this western Christian tradition is utterly inadequate for understanding Christ in the near future.

Western esotericism allows us to see the spiritual guidance of humanity gradually merge with the guidance proceeding from the Christ-impulse. Modern esotericism will gradually flow into people's hearts, and the spiritual guidance of the individual and humanity will more and more be seen consciously in this light.

[ 38 ] Let us recall that the Christ-principle first entered human hearts when Christ ministered in Palestine in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth. In those days, people who had gradually resigned themselves to trusting only in the sensory world could receive the impulse appropriate to their understanding. The same impulse then worked through modern esotericism to inspire such great minds as Nicholas of Cusa, Copernicus, and Galileo.¹⁴ That is why Copernicus could assert that sensory appearance cannot teach us the truth about the solar system and that we must look beyond it to find the truth.

At that time, people were not yet mature enough—even a brilliant man like Giordano Bruno was not yet ready—to integrate themselves consciously into the stream of modern esotericism. The spirit of this stream had to work in them without their being conscious of it. Giordano Bruno proclaimed proudly that the human being is actually a macrocosmic being condensed into a monad to enter physical existence; and that this monad expands again when the individual dies. What had been condensed in the body expands into the universe in order to concentrate again at other levels of existence and to expand again, and so on. Bruno expressed great concepts that fully agree with modern esotericism, even though they may sound like stammering to our modern ears.

[ 39 ] We are not necessarily always conscious of the spiritual influences that guide us. For example, such influences led Galileo into the cathedral of Pisa. Thousands of people had seen the old church lamp there, but they did not look at it the way he did. Galileo saw the lamp swing and compared its oscillations with his pulse beats. In this way he discovered that the church lamp swung in a regular rhythm similar to that of his pulse—the “law of the pendulum,” as it is known in modern physics. Anyone familiar with modern physics knows that physics as we know it would not exist if it had not been for Galileo's laws. What was at work in leading Galileo to the swinging lamp in the cathedral—thus giving modern physics its first principles—now works in spiritual science. The powers that guide us spiritually work secretly in this way.

[ 40 ] We are now approaching a time when we have to become conscious of these guiding powers. We will be able to understand better what must happen in the future if we correctly grasp the inspiration coming to us from modern esotericism. From this inspiration we also know that the spiritual beings whom the ancient Egyptians considered to be their teachers—the same beings who ruled as gods—are ruling again, but that they now want to submit to Christ's leadership. People will feel more and more that they can allow pre-Christian elements to be resurrected in glory and style on a higher level. In the present era we need a strengthened consciousness, a high sense of duty and responsibility concerning the understanding of the spiritual world. For this to enter our soul we must understand the mission of spiritual science in the way I have outlined.

• S1. Ancient Persian here does not refer to what is called “Persian” in ordinary history but rather to an ancient Asian prehistoric (Iranian) culture that developed in the region where the Persian Empire flourished later.
• 1. Zarathustra, 660?–583? B.C., Persian religious leader, also known as Zoroaster.
• 2. Brahman, Hindu Godhead or Absolute; the creator god of the Hindu sacred triad (with Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer).
• 3. The Rose Cross is the emblem of the Rosicrucians. Tradition associates the rose with Persia, the cross is the symbol of Christianity. Historically, the Rosicrucian Order is thought to have been founded as a secret society c.1430 by Christian Rosenkreutz. Commonly associated with healing, occultism, alchemy; Steiner counters the “... materialistic caricature of Rosicrucianism ... presented today. The task of the Rosicrucians was to formulate a science by means of which they would be able to let their (universal) wisdom flow gradually into the world.” Rosicrucian Esotericism, (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1978), 6. See also George Adams, The Mysteries of the Rose-Cross, (Sussex, England: New Knowledge Books, 1955).
• 4. Gnosticism arose in the Hellenistic era. Gnostics believed that salvation is attained through knowledge rather than through faith or deeds.
• 5. Arius, c.250–336, Greek ecclesiastic at Alexandria. Taught Neoplatonic doctrine that God is alone, unknowable, and separate from every created being, that Christ is a created being and not God in the fullest sense but a secondary deity, and that in the incarnation the Logos assumed a body but not a human soul. Growing dispute over his teaching led Emperor Constantine to call the Council of Nicaea (325) where Arianism was declared heresy. Saint Athanasius, c.293–373, Greek theologian and prelate in Egypt. Lifelong opponent of Arianism. Attended Council of Nicaea (325) as deacon. Bishop of Alexandria. Advocated homoousian doctrine. Often exiled because of his opposition to Arianism. Wrote doctrinal works. Not author of Athanasian creed, which originated later (5th or 6th century).
• 6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, leading German poet and playwright. Faust (1808–32), a drama in verse, is Goethe's masterpiece. The lines referred to are in Part Two, Scene 2.
• 7. Nathan and Solomon were both sons of King David, the second king of Israel. The Gospel of St. Luke cites Nathan as a forefather of Mary (Luke 3:31); St. Matthew traces Joseph's lineage to Solomon (Matthew 1:16). For a detailed account of the two Jesus children, see Rudolf Steiner, From Jesus to Christ, (London Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973), lecture 8.
• 8. The Zoroaster mentioned here by Steiner lived in very ancient times, according to the Greeks—already 5000 years before the Trojan war. He is not identical with the Zoroaster or Zarathustra mentioned in ordinary history.
• 9. Buddha, Indian religious leader, founder of Buddhism. Historical name Siddhartha Gautama, c.563–483 B.C. Some Eastern religions believe him one of the last incarnations of the Godhead. Son of a royal family, he renounced luxury and became an ascetic. Bodhisattva, a being that compassionately refrains from entering Nirvana for the salvation of others.
• 10. Steiner describes the human being as comprised of four “bodies”: physical, etheric, astral, and ego. The astral body bears the inner world of desires, pleasure and pain, and the qualitative world of emotions. See Occult Science, 21–28.
• 11. Nicolaus Copernicus, 1473–1543, Polish astronomer. Made astronomical observations of orbits of sun, moon, planets. Gradually abandoned accepted Ptolemaic system of astronomy and worked out heliocentric system in which the earth rotates daily on its axis and, with other planets, revolves around the sun.
• 12. Giordano Bruno, 1548–1600, Italian philosopher. Arrested by the Inquisition and burned at the stake. A critic of Aristotelian logic and champion of Copernican cosmology, which he extended with the notion of the infinite universe.
• 13. See Lecture Two, note 2
• 14. Nicholas Cusanus, 1401–1464, German prelate and philosopher. Bishop and later created cardinal. Wrote treatises for church councils as well as works on mathematics and philosophy. Anticipated Copernicus by his belief in the earth's rotation and revolution around the sun.
  
  Galileo Galilei, 1564–1642, Italian mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. First to use telescope to study the skies. Tried by the Inquisition for supporting the Copernican system.

Poets, seers, and even the shepherds at Bethlehem have reported on the music of the spheres or the sounds of heavenly beings. Goethe heard the thunder tones of the sun as it rose, Dryden a heavenly harmony, Shakespeare the singing of the star- orbs, large and small, like angels. Even our nineteenth century American, Bryant, wrote of “the world of light and their silver- noted chorus.” Is it music they are describing—or the Word? Robert Graves calls it “Star Talk” and overhears a witty, wry conversation on a cold night, somewhat earthbound. May Swenson has recorded the sun's rising with its “first ringing word of potent joy.”

We have been assured of the reality of these heavenly sounds by Rudolf Steiner. In Art in the Light of Mystery Wisdom (December 2, 1922) he speaks about the starry heavens which we see from the earth. After death, however, as we journey out into the universe, we look back at the stars “from the other side.” There we no longer see merely the points of light as star. The fixed stars now are near, the planets further away, and everywhere, on Saturn, on the Moon, on Aries and Taurus, are spiritual beings. Seeing them means at the same time hearing them. From every heavenly body come sounds that we perceive as a singing speech or as a spoken song. Like a great cosmic musical instrument, the fixed stars are ranged in their zodiac circle; the planetary gods are moving actively, for it is they who play upon the instrument.

In our life on earth, the words we speak are an echo of this divine sound. Each consonant has been “spoken” by one of the constellations; each vowel has been “sung” by a planet. We can discover, too, the relationship of our physical body in its structure and movement to the heavenly creative world. Physical language echoes the sounds of the stars; physical movement can trace their movements. Through Rudolf Steiner's heightened ability to see andhear what most of us are blind and deaf to, he was able to give the poem “Zwoelf Stimmungen” (“Twelve Moods”) to the early group of eurythmists in 1915, after they had accomplished their fundamental training.

In each of the twelve stanzas of the “Twelve Moods”, with its seven lines “spoken” by the seven planets—always in the same sequence—there is inbreathing and outbreathing; there are ever-changing moods according to the constellation, expressed by the speech sounds—alas! not to be attained to any degree in the English translation. In each verse the first line carries the Sun's radiance; the second line takes us to the gentle warmth of Venus; the third, to the ego-impelled activity of Mercury; the fourth, to the outgoing aggressiveness of Mars; the fifth, to wisdom-illumined Jupiter; the sixth, to the profound, contemplative mood of Saturn; and the last line, to the creative strength of the Moon, reflecting back the Sun line at the beginning of the verse. In German the fifth and sixth lines—Jupiter and Saturn—always rhyme (another loss in the translation). Rudolf Steiner explained this to the eurythmists: They are the planets furthest away from the earth, and through the rhyme they support each other. He spoke of the whole poem as the journey of the sun through the day: Aries at sunrise, Cancer at noon, Leo in the afternoon, etc. It could also denote, he said later, the changing course of man's life on earth.

There was a eurythmy performance of the “Twelve Moods” at the festive opening of the first Goetheanum in September 1920. On that first stage it must have been unbelievably beautiful, surrounded by the carved forms and columns, beneath the colorful ceiling of the small dome. It is still an impressive event. Jan Stuten's music, introducing each zodiac verse, and the reciting by the Goetheanum Speech Chorus, trained in the earlier days by Marie Steiner, match in objective grandeur the movements of the nineteen eurythmists, twelve standing in an immense outer circle, seven others moving slowly like the hour hand of a clock from one zodiacal figure to the next; the Sun alone, like the minute hand, circles twelve times through the rainbow colors of the “day signs” (Aries through Libra) and the night spectrum (Scorpio through Pisces). Each of the twelve constellations, standing in its unique formative gesture, sings out in movement when its own consonant sounds forth. We hear the first word:Erstehe!(Arise!) and we see Taurus's strong, rolling R, Scorpio's knowing S, Leo's light-filled T, and Gemini's rousing H, while the Sun moves with the three-toned crescendo of the E. When we reach the final line:

May the loss be gain in itself

we have truly witnessed there on the stage and, at the same time within ourselves, a mighty journey. It cannot help but awaken.

Tatiana Kisseleff, one of the first eurythmists, describes in her memoirs (Eurythmie, Malsch 1949, not yet translated) how the group worked on the “Twelve Moods” and on its twin poem, “Das Lied von der Initiation, eine Satire” (“The Song of Initiation, a Satire”). Showing how the zodiac circle and planets' movements for the satire should be changed from what was done in the “Twelve Moods”, Rudolf Steiner told the eurythmists “that we should not think that the gods are continually solemn and serious. They can also laugh! One hears huge peals of laughter in heaven every time we human beings on earth do something foolish!” We are fortunate to be able to include “The Song of Initiation, A Satire”, translated by Virginia Brett, as well as her translation of the “Planet Dance”, a poem given to the eurythmists and described in the “Introductory Words” that Rudolf Steiner spoke in Dornach, Switzerland, on the day that all three cosmic poems were first shown in eurythmy to an audience.

The “Twelve Moods”, like the poetry of theMystery Dramas, was created out of listening. Just as the pounding ocean can be caught in quiet cups and caves of rock, the Word can be heard and caught, as Rudolf Steiner has caught it here. When you study the poem—intellectually, artistically, meditatively—you realize that the blending of meaning, speech sounds and rhythm make it absolutely untranslatable. The effort in the following translations is similar to the vague, black lines the astronomer can draw on paper, charting the tremendous spirals and ellipses of the planets in their courses. Light and space are lost. But the reader, if he will, can bring the translator's effort the compensating effort of light-filled eye and expanding imagination. What is here is merely study material. If it is an incentive to work on the cosmic poems in their original language, it will have accomplished its task.

We have seen that there is a significant difference between knowledge of the spiritual world such as has existed through all the ages and the particular form of knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual to which the organic constitution of the Hebrews enabled them to aspire. Through their progenitor Abraham they had inherited a physical constitution in which there had been implanted an organ whereby, to, the extent possible through knowledge transmitted by way of the senses, men were to be able to have actual experience of the Divine-Spiritual, not merely vague inklings. Knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual has existed everywhere and at all times, but this knowledge of the Eternal was attained in the Mysteries, on the path of Initiation. A distinction must be made between knowledge acquired as the result of individual development through specially devised methods and knowledge of the spiritual world that is normal in some particular epoch and connected with the fulfilment of a definite mission in the evolution of humanity.

In Atlantis the normal form of knowledge was astral-clairvoyant perception of the Divine-Spiritual. But in the times of the ancient Hebrews the normal form of exoteric knowledge of the spiritual world became dependent upon a particular physical organ. It has already been said that in the people of Abraham this knowledge arose in the form of a feeling that the Divine was united with their inmost being. It was therefore inner knowledge, a realisation of the Divine in the deepest core of being that had been made possible.

But this inner realisation of the Divine-Spiritual did not immediately enable a man to say: When I sink into my own being, striving to fathom its depths, I find the drop of the Divine Spirit that can give me knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual by which the outer world too is permeated.—This experience was not immediately possible—not, indeed, until the appearance of Christ in the evolution of humanity. The Hebrew people could experience the Divine only through participating in their Folk-Spirit. When a man felt himself to be a member of his people as a whole, as distinct from a separate individuality, when he felt that through his blood he belonged to a sequence of generations—then he became aware of the presence of the Divine; his consciousness of Jahve lay in the Folk-consciousness, in the very blood of his people. Hence in the spiritual-scientific sense it is not correct to speak of the God Jahve or Jehovah merely as the God of Abraham. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—he is the Being who passes on from generation to generation, manifesting himself in the Folk-consciousness in and through individual men.

The great advance of this form of knowledge to thc Christian form lies in the fact that the latter recognises in each single individual what ancient Hebrew knowledge could reach only by contemplation of the Folk-Spirit, of the Spirit flowing in the blood of the generations. Thus Abraham might have said: According to the covenant that has been made with me, I shall be the founder of a people through my descendants; in the blood flowing down the generations descending from me there will live the God we venerate as the Highest, who reveals himself to us in our Folk-consciousness.—This became the normal experience of that time.

As already said, at all times and through all the epochs there has existed higher knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual. This knowledge, acquired in the Mysteries, is not dependent upon any of the other, special forms of cognition. In ancient Atlantis every human being was endowed with a certain astral-etheric clairvoyance enabling him to gaze into the divine-spiritual ground of existence; by developing his inner faculties he could then acquire knowledge that was. available in the Mysteries or Oracles. Also during the epoch when the spiritual knowledge characteristic of the Hebrews was the normal form, it was still possible in certain sanctuaries for man to experience the Divine while out of the body but not while in the body as in the case of the people of Abraham; in the eternal part of his being a man could rise to vision of the Divine-Spiritual.

You can readily imagine that one thing was essential for Abraham. He had experienced the Divine-Spiritual in his own special way, through knowledge acquired by means of a physical organ; this was how he had learnt to know the supreme God. To become a living power in evolution, however, it was infinitely important for him to know that the God revealed in the Folk-consciousness of the Hebrew people was identical with the God venerated in the Mysteries of all ages as the creative Deity. It was therefore necessary for Abraham to be able to identify his God with the God revealed in the Mysteries, and that was only possible upon one very definite premise. Upon one very definite premise the certainty could be given him that the powers manifesting themselves in thc Folk-consciousness were identical with those ma.nifesting in a higher form in the Mysteries. To understand what this certainty implied, we must turn our minds to a fact closely connected with the evolu-tion of humanity.

In the book Occult Science you can read that in ancient Atlantis there were Initiates known as “Priests of the Oracles”—the actual names are not of essential significance. One of these great Initiates was the leader of all the Atlantean Oracles; he was the Initiate of the Sun-Oracle, in contrast to the subordinate Oracle-centres to which the Mercury-, Mars-, Jupiter-, Initiates, and so forth, belonged. I have said too that this great Initiate of the Sun-Oracle was also the leader of the civilizing colony which, having moved from the West across to the East, from Atlantis to the interior of Asia, spread out from there to inaugurate post-Atlantean culture and civilization. This mighty Initiate—for such he was, already at that time—withdrew to secret centres in the heart of Asia, and made it possible for the wise men known as the holy Rishis to become such illustrious Teachers of their people. And it was he, this great and mysterious Initiate, who conferred Initiation upon Zarathustra.

The Initiation conferred upon Zarathustra was not the same as that received by the Rishis, for their tasks were different. Through their Initiation the Rishis were able, when their inner faculties had further developed, to give utterance as it were out of themselves to the great secrets of existence. Thereby they became the illustrious Teachers of pre-Vedic, ancient Indian culture. Though their powers were awakened by means specially devised, they were otherwise on a par with thc old Atlantean clairvoyant faculties, but they were distributed among the seven Rishis individually. Like the leaders of the several Oracle-centres, each of the seven Rishis had his own particular sphere and task. But a whole collegium spoke when any onc of the seven voiced what he knew of the primeval wisdom. The grcat Sun-Initiate who brought the old Atlantean wisdom from the West across to the East passed it on in a particular form to those who were to become the bearers of post-Atlantean culture. He imparted it to Zarathustra in a different form, enabling him to speak in the way I have already indicated.

The Rishis declared that in order to reach the highest realm of divine-spiritual existence, everything in the surrounding world, everything presented to the outer senses, must be regarded as maya or illusion; man must turn away from this outer world and sink into his inner being: then there will dawn in him a world entirely different from the one out-spread before him in everyday life.—To ascend into the spheres of divine-spiritual existence by turning away from the illusory world of maya, by developing the inner life—such was the teaching of the Rishis of ancient India.

In contrast to this, Zarathustra did not teach men to turn away from what is outwardly manifest. He did not say: everything external is maya and we must turn away from it. He said : this maya is the revelation, the actual garrnent of divine-spiritual existence. We may not turn away from it—on the contrary, it is our duty to fathom it. We must conceive of the Sun's body of light as thc outer texture in which Ahura Mazdao lives and weaves!

In a certain sense, therefore, the gist of Zarathustra's teaching was the opposite of that given by the ancient Rishis. The essential significance of post-Indian civilization lay in the fact that its task was to impress upon the outer world the fruits of man's spiritual activity. As we heard, Zarathustra transmitted to Hermes and to Moses the greatest gifts that were his to bestow. In order that the wisdom of Moses might become fruitful in the right way and work as a seed, it had to take root in the people who were the descendants of Abraham. Abraham was the first into whom was implanted the organ for acquiring consciousness of Jahve; but it was essential for him to know that the God who could announce his presence inwardly to physical faculties of cognition, was speaking with the same voice as the eternal, all-pervading God of the Mysteries, save that he was revealing himself here in the form in which Abraham was able to understand him. It is not possible for a Being of such lofty rank as the great Atlantean Sun-Initiate to speak without more ado in words that are intelligible to those who live at some particular time and have a special mission. An Individuality as exalted as the great Sun-Initiate is one who leads an eternal existence, of whom it was truly said—indicating the hallmark of eternity—that he was without name or age, ‘without father, without mother, having neither beginning of days nor end of life’. (Heb. VII, 3). A figure of this eminence in the evolution of humanity is only able to manifest by assuming a form whereby he can establish relationship with those to whom he is to reveal himself. Thus in order to impart the necessary enlightenment to Abraham, the great Teacher of the Rishis and of Zarathustra assumed a form in which he bore the etheric body of Abraham's original forefather; it was the etheric body of Shem, the son of Noah, and it had been preserved as the etheric body of Zarathustra had been preserved for Moses. The great Initiate of the Sun-Mystery used the etheric body of Shem in order to reveal himself to Abraham and be understood by him. This meeting between Abraham and the great Sun-Initiate is referred to in the Old Testament as the meeting of Abraham with Melchisedek, or Malek-Zadek as it has become customary to call him—the ‘king and priest of the most high God’. (Gen. XIV, 18; Heb. V, 6, 1o ; VII, 1-3). It was a mecting of supreme, world-embracing significance. In order that Abraham should not be utterly dumbfounded, the great Sun-Initiate manifested himself in the etheric body of Shem, the progenitor of the Semites. And the Bible points, most significantly, to something that is unfortunately all too little understood, namely, to the source of that which Melchisedek was able to impart to Abraham. What was this? He could impart the mystery of Sun-existence which Abraham could naturally only under-stand in his own way. The same mystery lay behind the revelation that had been announced, as a prophecy, by Zarathustra.

To his chosen pupils Zarathustra spoke of Ahura Mazdao, the spiritual Being behind the Sun's body of light, saying in effect: Direct your gaze to a power that is behind the Sun, that is not yet united with the Earth but will onc day descend to the Earth and pour into Earth-evolution!—Realising that Zarathustra could only make a prophetic announcement that Christ, the Sun-Spirit, would come in a human body, we shall be aware that even greater profundities of the Sun-Mystery had to be revealed to those who were to prepare for and subsequently be instrumental in bringing about the incarnation of Christ on the Earth. This deeper revelation was made possible because, at the meeting referred to, the same Being who had been Zarathustra's Teacher brought influence to bear upon Abraham from the same source as that from which Christ's influence was eventually to pour. This again is indicated symbolically in the Bible where it is said that Melchisedek, king of Salem, this ‘priest of the most high God’, brought to Abraham bread and wine. (Gen. XVI, 18). Bread and wine were dispensed on another, later occasion—when for those who were believers the Christ-Mystery was given expression in the institution of Holy Communion. The emphasis laid upon the similarity of the sacrificial acts points to the fact that the source of the impulses given by Melchisedek and by Christ was one and the same.

Thus through Melchisedek an influence emanating from a Power that would subsequently come down to the Earth was to be brought to bear in advance upon Abraham, the great preparer of the later event. As the result of this meeting the realisation dawned upon Abraham that the source of the power he felt within him and venerated under the name of Jahve or Jehovah as the loftiest reality of which he could conceive, was also the source of the consciousness of the supreme, all-pervading Godhead—consciousness such as was gained by Initiates in the realm of earthly knowledge too. Abraham was now able to carry this consciousness to a further stage.—A new and different experience came to him. He realised that in actual fact the blood flowing through the generations of the Hebrew people was to contain something only to be compared with what was revealed in the Mysteries when clairvoyant vision was directed to the secrets of cosmic existence and the language of the Cosmos understood.

I have already spoken of how, in the Mysteries, secrets of the Cosmos were expressed in terms derived from the stars and constellations. There were times when the teachers in the Mysteries made use of words and images taken from the courses of the stars and their mutual relationships. Such images were a means of expressing what man experiences spiritually when he attains consciousness of the Divine-Spiritual.

What was it that the Mystery-wisdom was able to read in this stellar script? The secrets of the Godhead pervading the world! The order of the stars was the visible expression of the Godhead. Men turned their gaze to the heavens, saying: There the Godhead reveals himself; the order and harmonies of the stars are for us the manifestation of the Divine. According to this view, therefore, the God of all the worlds was made manifest in the order of the stars.

Thus if the same God were to be made manifest in a special way in the mission of the Hebrew people, the manifestation must necessarily be an expression of the same order as that governing the courses of the stars in the Cosmos. Through the blood of the generations as the outer instrument of the Jahve-revelation, there must be expressed the same order as that made manifest in the courses of the stars. To put it differ-ently: in the sequence of the generations, in the blood-kinship of Abraham's descendants, there must be a mirror-image, a reflection, of the stellar script in the heavens. Hence the promise made to Abraham: The ordering of thy descendants shall be that of the stars in heaven! (Genesis, XXIII, 17.) Such is the correct version of the sentence that is usually rendered to mean that the descendants would be as numerous as the stars in heaven.—This implies number only and is not the true meaning. The true meaning is that the line of the descendants was to be in accordance with an ordcr perceptible in the groupings of the stars, which in turn arc an expression of the speech of the Gods. Looking upwards, mcn beheld an order such as is manifest in the Zodiac. The positions and relation-ships of the planets in the Zodiac formed constellations from which was drawn the language used to proclaim the deeds of the Gods in the Universe. The firm bond demonstrated in the Zodiac and in the relations of the planets to the twelve constellations was to come to expression in the blood-kinship of the descendants of Abraham.

The twelve sons of Jacob, also the twelve tribes of the Hebrew people are therefore images of the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. Just as the language of the Gods is pressed in these twelve constellations, so does Jahve manifest himself in the blood flowing through the generations of the Hebrew people, divided into thc twelve tribes descending from the twelve sons of Jacob. Conditions established in the Zodiac are designated by the name of the planet concerned—Venus, Mercury, Sun, as the case may be. And we have heard how certain parallelisms can be drawn between particular periods in the historical life of the Hebrew people and the paths of the planets through the Zodiac. Thus there is a parallelism between the age of David, the royal minstrel, and Hermes or Mercury; similarly, between the period of the Babylonian captivity—when we see the forrn taken by the Jalive-revela-tion six centuries before our era as the result of a new impulse—and the planet Venus.

It was to be indicated to Abraham that there is a parallelism between the place of a personality such as David in the line of generations, and the position of Mercury in the Zodiac. The tribe of Judah corresponds to the constellation of Leo and the advent of David into that tribe would correspond, in the history of the Hebrew people, to the cosmic phenomenon of the occultation of Leo by Mercury (Mercury in Leo). Such occultations are indicated in many places: in the actual succession, in the conferments of kingly or priestly offices, in the battles or victories of one tribe or another, indeed in the whole history of the Hebrews. All this was implicit in the momentous words: Thy descendants shall be ordered in accordance with the harmony of the stars in heaven.—We must never accept the trivial interpretations so often placed upon records founded on occultism but realise their immense profundity.

Thus there is actual evidence of order prevailing in the generations enumerated in the Gospel of St. Matthew. This evangelist has shown how the blood of the body that was to receive the Zarathustra-Individuality was prepared in a very special way to be instrumental in bringing about the manifestation of Christ on the Earth.

What bad been achieved through the forty-two generations from Abraham to Joseph was that blood, blended in accordance with the laws of the stars and of the holy Mysteries, had finally been produced. In the composition of this blood—which was needed by the Zarathustra-Individuality for the fulfilment of his great mission—there was inner order and harmony, reflecting one of the most beautiful and significant principles manifest in the heavenly constellations. The blood available for Zarathustra was therefore an image of the Cosmos, having been prepared through generations in accordance with cosmic law. The basis of the record we now possess in a modified form in the Gospel of St. Matthew is this profound mystery of the evolution of a people as the image of cosmic evolution.

Those who were the first to know something of the sublime Christ-Mystery felt that the very blood of Jesus of Nazareth of whom the Gospel of St. Matthew tells was a reflected image of the Cosmos, of the Spirit holding sway in the Cosmos. And they expressed this secret by saying: The Spirit of the whole Cosmos lived in the blood wherein was to dwell the Ego who then became Jesus of Nazareth.—This physical body must therefore have been an imprint of the ruling Spirit of the Cosmos. Hence it was said originally that the power underlying the composition of the blood in the body of Zarathustra when incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth, was the Spirit of our whole Cosmos, the Spirit which, in the primal beginning, after the Sun had separated from the Earth, brooded over and permeated with warmth what had emerged into manifestation in the course of the evolution of worlds. From the lectures given in Munich to which reference has already been made, we know that the sentence with which Genesis begins—B'rescht bara elohim et haschamayim w'et et ha'arets'—should not be translated into the trivial words of modern language which no longer convey the ancient meaning. Instead of ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’, the rendering should convey the following meaning: In what has come over from Saturn, Sun and Moon, the Elohim pondered, in cosmic soul-activity, the outwardly manifesting and the inwardly active, throughout which darkness prevailed; but there spread out and into this, brooding over it, permeating it with warmth—as a hen radiates warmth into the egg—the creative Spirit of the Elohim, Ruach-Elohim.—This same Spirit created the heavenly order that is expressed in a certain way in the constellations of the stars. The original Initiates of the Christ-Mystery felt that the blend of blood in Jesus of Nazareth was an image of the work accomplished by Ruach-Elohim throughout the Cosmos. And of the blood that had been prepared in this way for the great event, they said: it was ‘created by the Spirit of the Universe, the spiritual Being called “Ruach” in that significant passage in Genesis beginning "B'reschit bara ...” ’.¹

Such is the sacred meaning, infinitely greater than any superficial interpretation, of ‘the conception by the Holy Spirit of the Universe’; it is also the basis of the saying: ‘And she who gave birth to this Being was filled with the power of the Spirit of the Universe.’—If we feel the sanctity of such a Mystery we shall realise that in this way of presenting it there is something infinitely higher than any of the exoteric interpretations of the Virgin Birth. Consideration of just two points in the Bible will enable us to avoid trivial interpretations of this ‘immaculate conception’. The one point is this: Why should the writer of St. Matthew's Gospel have enumerated the whole sequence of generations from Abraham to Joseph if he had wished to indicate that the birth of Jesus of Nazareth had no connection with this line of descent ? He is at pains to show how the blood was led down the generations from Abraham to Joseph; how, then, could he possibly have intended to indicate that the blood of Jesus of Nazareth had nothing to do with this blood? And the other point of which account must be taken is that in the Hebrew language the gender of ‘Ruach-Elohim’—rendered ‘Holy Spirit' ’ the Bible—is feminine.—We shall speak further of this. I only wanted now to call up a feeling of the sublimity and grandeur of the thought originally underlying this Mystery.

What took place at the beginning of our era, known only to wise men who were initiated into the secrets of cosmic existence, was expressed in the Aramaic language in the original record upon which the Gospel of St. Matthew is based. And it is possible to prove, not only through occultism but through actual philological investigation, that this record was already in existence in the year 71 A.D. The actual way in which the Gospels originated is set forth in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact.² By proceeding with exactitude, however, it is possible to show, even through philology, that statements attributing a later date to the Gospel of St. Matthew are not correct, for there is evidence that an original Aramaic script of this Gospel was already extant in the year 71 A.D. comparatively short time, therefore, after the events in Palestine. But as I am concerned here with facts of spiritual science, not of philology, I will quote only one reference in Talmudist literature, the authenticity of which is accepted by Hebrew scholars.

There is a passage in this literature to the effect that Rabbi Gamaliel II was involved in a dispute with his sister over the estate left by their father who had been killed in a fight with the Romans in the year 7o. It is narrated that Rabbi Gamaliel II appeared at the timc before a judge who, according to the account, was a so-called Jewish Christian. (Such men not uncommonly occupied offices in the judiciary courts set up by the Romans for the jews.) A strange incident occurred during the proceedings. The dispute between the Rabbi and his sister was over the inheritance of their father's estate. And before a judge who certainly had some knowledge of Christianity, Rabbi Gamaliel insisted that according to Jewish Law it was only a son, not a daughter, who could inherit, and that the estate therefore passed to him. The judge replied that in the circle where he officiated, the Thora had been set aside, and that as Gamaliel was seeking justice and a verdict from him, he would not give judgment in accordance with Jewish Law but with the Law that had superseded the Thora. As already said, this happened in the year 71—the year after the death of the father of the litigants during the persecution of the Jews. Rabbi Gamaliel's only loophole now was to bribe the judge. This he did, and the following day the judge quoted from the original Aramaic script of St. Matthew's Gospel, to the effect that ‘Christ did not come into the world to destroy the Law of Moses but to fulfil it’. The judge believed he could still his conscience for deflecting the Law by maintaining that in allotting the estate to Gamaliel his judgment was in accordance with Christian tenets.

Here we have evidence that in the year 71 A.D. there existed an original Christian script from which words now contained in the Gospel of St. Matthew were taken. The passage in question was actually quoted in Aramaic and thus we have external proof that this original text of St. Matthew's Gospel, part of it at any rate, was then in existence. We have yet to consider the findings of occult investigation on the subject. The above episode has been quoted merely in order to show that when the aid of external scholarship is sought, it is not right to adopt the usual procedure which is to collect all the literature available for a.cademic study but leave out of account the Talmudist writings which are exceedingly impor-tant for knowledge even of the exoteric aspect of these things.

Thus there are very good grounds for affixing a comparatively early date to the Gospel of St. Matthew. This alone provides certain exoteric proof that the men who participated in its compilation were living at no great distance of time from the actual happenings in Palestine; the outer circumstances in themselves, therefore, are evidence that nobody could simply have lied to people, saying that Christ Jesus did not live at the beginning of our era. For as not even half a century had yet elapsed, it was a mattcr of speaking to those who had been actual eye-witnesses and therefore could not be persuaded that certain events had never happened. Exoterically these things are important and they are mentioned here merely as evidence of that aspect of the subject.

We have seen how measures founded on mysteries of cos-mic existence were taken in the evolution of humanity in order to prepare from the 'filtered' blood of the Hebrew people—blood in which the order of the Cosmos itself prevailed—a body in which the great Initiate Zarathustra could reincarnate. For it is of the Zarathustra-Individuality, of him and no other, that the Gospel of Matthew speaks in the first place.

It must not be imagined that everything brought to light here from profound secrets of world-evolution took place quite openly, before thc eyes of all men. Even for contemporaries the events were veiled in deep mystery and comprehensible only to a very few Initiates. Hence it is understandable that such complete silence should have been maintained concerning what came to pass at that time as the greatest of all events in the evolution and history of humanity. And when historians to-clay, basing their views on the records available to them, point out that no mention whatever is made of this event, we shall not be at all surprised but on the contrary regard it as a matter of course.

Having characterized the part played by Zarathustra in the preparation of this great event, we must now consider the many other currents and influences at work immediately before and also immediately after the coming of the Christ, and all the happenings that took place around Him. Prepara-tion for the event had been in process for a long time. We have heard that preparation for the development of the outer sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth had been made by Hermes and Moses as the emissaries of Zarathustra, and by Melchisedek, the bearer of the Sun-Mystery, but there had also been preparation in a different form, constituting as it were a sub-sidiary stream. But subsidiary though it was, it nevertheless played a part in the wider stream of happenings originating with Zarathustra. This contributory stream came slowly into existence in centres of which external history informs us by calling attention to certain religious sects where men, named by Philo the `Therapeutae', were endeavouring by inner paths to purify and develop their souls, to expel any elements cor-rupted by outer concerns and external knowledge, in order thereby to rise into the sphere of pure Spirit. An offshoot of the sect of the Therapeutae, where this subsidiary stream undenvent still further development, was the community of the Essenes in Asia. All these men in the sects both of the Therapeutae and the Essenes were under a common spiritual guidance. A brief account of them is contained in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact.³ To have any exoteric knowledge of this spiritual guidance we must remind ourselves of the lectures given last year on the Gospel of St. Luke and published with that title.⁴ Reference was there made to the mystery of Gautama Buddha, the exoteric aspect of which is also presented in oriental writings, and it was said that one who is to attain Buddhahood in the course of evolution must, to begin with, be a Bodhisattva, as in the case of the Being known in history as the Buddha. He too was a Bodhisattva until the twenty-ninth year of his life as the son of King Suddhodana, and it was not until then that through his inner development he rose to Buddhahood. Many Bodhisattvas work in the course of the evolution of humanity and the Bodhisattva who became Buddha six hundred years before our era is one of those who guide and direct evolution. An individuality who rises from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha does not again incarnate in a physical body on the Earth. From the same lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke we have heard how from the day of the birth of the Jesus of the Nathan line of descent, the power of the Buddha radiated into the etheric body of this child. And we heard that this is not the same Jesus as the Jesus with whom the Gospel of St. Matthew is primarily concerned.

An ancient phase of evolution came to a conclusion svith this attainment of Buddhahood by thc Bodhisattva, the son of King Suddhodana. In point of fact, this phase of evolution belonged to the same stream as that of the holy Rishis of India; but it was brought to a certain culmination when that Bodhisattva attained the rank of Buddhahood.

When a Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha, his successor takes his place. This is also narrated in the old Indian legend where it is said that in the spiritual realms, before desccnding to his final birth, the Bodhisattva who was born as the son of Suddhodana and then rose to Buddhahood, handed to his successor the crown belonging to the office of Bodhisattva. Thus since that time the Bodhisattva who then became Gautama Buddha has been succeeded by the new Bodhisattva who had a par-ticular mission to fulfil in the history of mankind. The task allotted to him was the spiritual guidance of the movement represented in the doctrines of the Therapeutae and Essenes and it was in these communities that his influence worked. During the reign of King Alexander Jannaeus (about 103 to 76 B.c.), a certain Individuality was sent by this Bodhisattva into the communities of the Essenes to be their guide and leader. This Individuality—he is well-known in occultism and also in exoteric Talmudist literature—was the leader of the Essenes about a hundred years before the appearance of Christ Jesus on the Earth.⁵

Thus a hundred years before our era there lived a personality who is not to be confused either with the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel or with the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel; he was a leading figure in the Essene communities and is known in occultism as a herald of Christianity among them. He is also known in Talrnudist literature under the name of Jesus, the son of Pandira, Jeschu ben Pandira. He was a great and noble personality, about whom inferior Jewish literature has woven all kinds of fables that have been recently revived, and he must not be confused, as some Talmudists have confused him, with the ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ of whom we are speaking in these lectures. This herald of Christianity among the Essenes is known to us too as Jesus, the son of Pandira; we also know that he was accused of blasphemy and heresy by those to whom the teachings of the Essenes were anathema, and after being stoned was hanged on a tree, in order to add to the punishment the stigma of infamy. This is an occult fact, also recorded in Talmudist literature.

In Jeschu ben Pandira we have to see a personality stand-ing under the guardianship of the present Bodhisattva. The facts are therefore clear.—A stream, as it were accessory to the main Christian stream, originated from the Buddha's successor, from the present Bodhisattva who later on will become the Maitreya Buddha and who sent his emissary into the Essene communities, where in executing his mission he achieved what we shall come to know in the following lectures.

The name ‘Jesus’ is that of the Individuality of whom the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke tell; but it was also the name of that noble personality—regarding whom everything contained in inferior Jewish literature is calumny—who worked in the Essene community a hundred years before our era, was accused of blasphemy and heresy, stoned and finally hanged on a tree.

• 1. See Genesis. Secrets of the Bible Story of Creation. Study of this cycle, particularly of the first two lectures, is indispensable in connection with the above passage.
• 2. Chapter VII.
• 3. Chapter X.
• 4. Notably Lectures Two and Three.
• 5. Appendix II, p. 236.

In earlier times man's etheric body was still outside his physical body, and so also, of course, was his Ego-consciousness. His soul worked on the physical body from outside. The horse today has its etheric body still outside.

How did the names of the zodiacal constellations originate?

The whole animal kingdom was once within man; this means that he was at a stage between the human realm and the animal kingdom of today. In order to be able to develop further, he had to separate off from himself those parts which could not go with him. He separated the parts which form the animal kingdom of today. Originally, therefore, the animals were much less sharply differentiated from man than they now are. They have gradually degenerated.

The separating off of the animal kingdom did not occur suddenly, but by slow degrees. First the fishes were separated, then the reptiles and amphibians, then the birds and the mammals. And within each group the separating off was again gradual: thus the beasts of prey, for example were separated earlier than the apes.

When the lions were separated, the constellation in which the Sun then stood was called Lion, and when the bull-nature was separated, the relevant constellation was called Bull. The names of the four apocalyptic creatures in the Revelation of John—Eagle, Lion, Bull, Man—point in the same direction. But the names of all the zodiacal constellations are not thereby explained.

The Moon in earlier times—before the Earth separated from it—consisted of soft plant-substance, like living peat or spinach-stuff, penetrated by a woody structure which has today hardened into rock. In this soft substance lived the Moon-plants, real plant-animals, halfway between the plants and the animals of the present time. Then the Earth separated, bringing into being the four kingdoms of nature—minerals, plants, animals and men. Some of the plant-animals failed to transform themselves completely into present-day plants. The sponges arose in this way.

“Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters, it must have lost the power to wound.”
—From Light on the Path, by Mabel Collins.

When we send forth a loving thought, it creates a wonderfully beautiful thought-form, like a flower which gently opens and then surrounds the person to whom the thought applies. Anyone who thinks a thought full of hate creates a sharp-pointed angular form, closed at its apex, designed to wound. That which is here called “the Masters” is the divine voice which speaks in us. It speaks constantly, but we do not always allow it to emerge. The thought-form of love is open; hence the voice of the Masters can sound through it. But the closed thought-form of hate leaves the divine thought-form no way out, so that it has to remain unheard.

In the astral, a lie is a murder

Suppose I think the following thought: I met a man. A quite definite thought-form will be engendered by that. Now to someone else I say it again: I met a man. The same thought-form is again engendered. The two thought-forms meet and strengthen each other. But if I tell a lie and say: I did not meet a man—this engenders a thought-form opposed to the first. The result is an explosion in the astral body of the liar.

How can one protect one's astral body against bad influences?

The best way is to be sure and true oneself. As a special protection you can create through forcible concentration of the will an astral sheath, a blue, egg-shaped mist. You must say to yourself firmly and emphatically: “Let all my good qualities surround me like a coat of mail!”

Why did the first Christians have the Fish as their symbol, besides the Lamb?

Among the fishes, especially Amphioxus, the spinal marrow began to take form. Man was once at the stage when he had the fish nature still within himself; he was wholly a soul-being and worked on his body from outside. Then he separated the fishes from himself. Later on the brain was formed out of the spinal marrow. [Goethe already knew this. Dr. Steiner found the relevant pencil sketch drawn in a notebook while he was working in the Goethe Archives in Weimar.] In this way man becomes a Self. But the Self is ennobled by Christianity and hence the Fish is the symbol for the early Christians. The story of Jonah indicates the same thing. Jonah—man—is at first outside the fishes: this means the soul working on the body from the outside. Then he becomes a Self and enters into the fish—the physical body. Through Initiation the physical body is again left aside.

Can physical objects be seen after death?

After death we see nothing physical, but the corresponding astral images, astral and devachanic counterparts. The mineral realm is absent; it appears as an empty space, like a photographic negative. In Devachan one can see a clock, for a human design enters into it. All human artifacts can be seen there.

The universal flow of life is called Prana. It flows like water; but if it is given form by being poured into the physical body, rather as water is poured into a jug, then one speaks of the etheric body. The general astral substance, desire-stuff, is called Kama. If it is given the form of a body, one speaks of the astral body. The Ego is the centre of the person. Kama plays into it, and Manas also. Thus the Ego comprises a mixture of Kama and Manas. The Kama has to be completely transformed and ennobled, so that Manas may develop from it. If the etheric body is ennobled, Buddhi emerges; and Atma arises from the ennoblement of the physical body.

The continental realm embraces everything physical; the oceanic realm, everything living; the airy sphere, the whole range of feelings; and the etheric sphere, all thoughts. At the boundary of the etheric sphere is the Akasha Chronicle. It contains everything that has ever been thought. On the far side of the Akasha Chronicle lies everything that has not yet become thought. All new thoughts, all discoveries and so on, come from the Arupa region. Anyone who has developed Kama Manas comes after death as far as the etheric sphere, to thoughts that exist independently. The Ego shapes the astral body, so that Manas develops out of it. All Manas which has not yet been drawn into the astral is Arupa.

Denial and affirmation of life

Schopenhauer says that the world has been built by irrational will. Therefore the reason has to destroy the irrational will, so that the world goes to ruin. Schelling, Hegel and Fichte represent a different standpoint which can be expressed in the words: “From God—to God!” Let us consider the denial and affirmation of life through a parable. I show someone a piece of magnetised iron, and I tell him that in the iron resides an invisible force, called magnetism. He replies: I want to know nothing about this force; I affirm the iron. It is much the same if someone, looking only at the things of the world, says that he affirms the world. Certainly he affirms the world, but he denies the invisible forces within it. Life is truly affirmed only by someone who seeks for spiritual realities. Anyone else denies half of life. Many Theosophists say: I don't bother about the world; I am concerned only to develop my higher self. In fact they are seeking only the lower man. The higher man is everywhere outside. If I feel the whole world in myself, then I have found my higher Self. My Self is outside me. Knowledge of the world is self-knowledge!

How does suggestion work?

Suggestion works on the Ego. The higher bodies are drawn out of the physical body, and then the Ego-body, without the physical brain, unconsciously follows the hypnotiser. The physical brain, the controller of actions, is detached. With an Initiate it is different. He retains conscious control without the aid of the physical brain, and so he cannot be hypnotised.

The “Pistis Sophia”

This book, written in the Coptic language, contains much of the discourses of Christ at the initiation of His disciples, and many inner expositions of parables. The thirteenth chapter is especially important. The αιμαρμενη (Haimarmene) is Devachan. The entire super-sensible world is divided into twelve aeons. These are the seven divisions of the astral plane and the five lowest divisions of Devachan. Aberrated spirits can be purified from out of Devachan. The light-bearing purifier before Christ was Melchisedek. He is meant when we read of light coming from the επισχοπος (episkopos). By αρχοντες (Archontes), the powers of evil are to be understood.

Conflict and arguing are not a realm for Theosophy. We should not squander time uselessly on disputes, but should speak only to those who have the heart and mind for Theosophy.

Why does Christ say: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”, when previous great founders of religion had already pointed to the Way?

We must first transpose ourselves into past ways of speaking. In former times the spiritual content of speech was perceived at the same time as the words were heard. Then we can reflect on the following: Christ was the embodiment of the Second Person of the Godhead. No previous founder of a religion had embodied in himself the fullness of the Logos. But the divine element that His predecessors had embodied was a part of the Logos, and so of Christ Himself. Therefore Christ embraces everything previous to Him in the words, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”.

Then one can take these words literally, in yet another sense. The previous founders of religions had shown the Way and taught the Truth, but they did not live out the Mystery of the Godhead in the sight of men. Hence they could say, “I am the Way and the Truth”. Christ alone could say: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

Now Elias means “Way”, and Moses, “Truth”. At the Transfiguration, Elias and Moses appeared with Christ. Hence the Transfiguration says: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. The passing of Buddha into Nirvana, his death, is the same as the Transfiguration of Christ. At the moment when Buddha brought his working to an end, the real working of Christ, His Life, begins.

If we want to appreciate theosophy at its true value, then we need to be imbued with the fundamental perception that in the theosophical stream we receive a widening of the soul, we feel the heart broadened and uplifted for higher tasks, for participating in the affairs of the universe. No one can have an inkling of this who does not know something about occultism.

The great purpose is often discussed, of leading humanity, through the theosophical movement, towards that point when, in the future, a new race of human beings will arise, when our intellectuality, as it now is, will no longer play the leading role in the world, but will be made fertile by Buddhi. We have to work together with this great world current, and therefore we have a great responsibility towards the theosophical movement. The task of the theosophist extends into the distant future. In this we do not withdraw into some cloud-cuckoo-land; for what we learn about so distant a future is invigorating for us, is something productive for us, that is useful also in everyday things. Anyone who allows these great world perspectives to occupy his mind for even only ten minutes a day, will behave differently from someone who is immersed in everyday matters. He can bring something to contemporary life which is new, productive and original. All progress depends on bringing originality into humanity.

We want to start with something which belongs with the influence of the Devas.¹ Devas are beings who are at a higher stage than man and are able to work on higher levels of existence. Thus we find Devas when we enter the higher planes clairvoyantly. We find Devas on the astral plane, on the Rupa plane, on the Arupa plane, and higher still. What does the influence of the Devas mean for the world in which we ourselves are? We will answer this question by asking another: What is the purpose of our human existence, of this continuing reincarnation? Man would come into this world quite purposelessly, if he learnt no particular lesson, fulfilled no particular task at each coming. Every time [man incarnates] the earth must have changed so much that he meets a situation that he has not encountered before in his earlier incarnations.

A male and female incarnation [together] are occultly reckoned as one incarnation. Between two such connected incarnations lie 2,600 to 3,000 years. The experience, which men undergo during this present stage of earthly evolution are so different in man and woman that it is most necessary for this to be so.

The changes which are brought about in the world between two incarnations of a person are really rather incomprehensible for people outside the theosophical world. Actually, however, people find quite different situations, not only morally, but physically as well. For anyone who looks back occultly, the physical circumstances have fundamentally altered as well, in the last three thousand years. On average, we would encounter our previous incarnations in the time of the ancient Greeks, the Homeric Greeks, 800 B.C. At that time there were quite different geographical and climatic conditions, a basically different plant life and even a different animal world. In these kingdoms, [continual] change is taking place. An outer expression of these changes is the progress of the sun across the vault of heaven. We have twelve signs of the zodiac, and the sun continually moves on from one to another at the vernal equinox. Eight thousand years ago the sun entered the constellation of the Crab for the first time. The time during which the sun traverses a constellation, this time that then elapses, lasts some two thousand six hundred years.² That is also the time between two human incarnations. At about the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, the sun left the constellation of the Ram for that of the Fishes, so that it now stands in the constellation of the Fishes at the spring [equinox].

Those who still had a feeling for occultism knew something about the connection in man's life with these changes in the firmament. Earlier, before the sun entered the constellation of the Ram, the cult of the Bull (Mithras, Apis) prevailed in Asia. Then began the worship of the Ram, which began when the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece originated. Christ is called the ’Lamb of God.’ Still earlier one finds the Persian symbol of the Twins. That is connected with the [Persian] culture of that time [and its view] of Good and Evil.

If the sun shines on the earth from a different aspect, then the situation there changes too. Hence the entry of the sun into a new constellation also leads each time to a new incarnation. Above, in the heavens, is the progression of the sun, below, on earth, an alteration in climatic conditions in vegetation and so forth.

Who causes this? The theosophist has to ask this because for him there can be no miracles. There are facts on a higher level, but no miracles. Faced with the question of the connection of the human being to the manifestations of the earth, one must adopt a higher vantage point.

After death, man is in Kamaloka. We do not ask: Do the animals and plants have [any] consciousness? Instead we ask: Where is their consciousness located? We know that the animals have their consciousness in Kamaloka, on the astral plane, the plants on the Rupa Plane, and the minerals on the Arupa Plane. Man has his consciousness on the physical plane. Let us suppose that man now comes to Kamaloka. He will then be in the same place as the consciousness of the animals. He then ascends to Devachan, where the plants have their consciousness. At the present stage of evolution, man is not in a position to exercise any influence on the animal kingdom or plant kingdom. However, he does have such an influence in the lower regions of the Devachanic plane, His companions there are all those who possess a Devachanic consciousness; these are powers, beings, who work out of Devachan to promote the growth and welfare of the plant world. The whole life of the plants is controlled from the Devachanic plane. There, man helps create and transform the plants. Powers develop in him there, so that he can really develop an influence on the vegetation. But the Devas are still there to manage this activity. He is guided by them so that he can help in the transformation of the plant world. He makes use in Devachan of the powers he has gathered in incarnation to reshape the plant world. As the life forces alter during man's time in Devachan, so he [helps to] change the vegetation on earth. From Devachan, man actually changes the surroundings that grow about him.

By remaining a long time in Devachan, [man] also helps transform the physical forces. If one goes back a million years in Germany,³ one finds volcanic mountains still there, and the Alps as low undulating hills. The subsequent changes were brought about by man [working] from the Arupa Plane, so that he would meet with suitable physical configurations in Europe, later on. The activity of man in the universe is the inner aspect of what we see outwardly in the environment.

Now we come to what will influence transformation in the world from a still higher plane and in another form.

One often reads about the Logos streaming down from above, and asks oneself how this is [to be conceived], how one can come to a conception of the Logos, to a conception that is something more than a mere word. We will now examine the connection between the Logos and the smallest [particles]. I will give you a description—not speculations—of the results of very ancient occult research, as they have been handed down and worked upon specifically in the occult schools of Germany especially from the fourteenth century onward.

If we meditate on the atom, what strikes us is that it is a very tiny thing. Everyone knows that this small thing called the atom has never been seen through any kind of microscope, no matter how sophisticated. Yet occult books give descriptions and pictures of the atom.⁴ Where were these pictures obtained? How can one, as an occultist, now know anything about the atom?

Now just imagine it to be possible to make an atom grow continually bigger and bigger until it was as big as the earth; one would then discover a very complicated world. One would perceive many movements, different kinds of phenomena, within this small thing. Keep in mind this analogy of the atom being enlarged to the size of the earth. If it were actually possible to enlarge the atom to that extent, we would be able to observe every single process in it. Only the occultist is in a position to enlarge the atom so much and to contemplate its interior.

Let us next look at the range of human motives on earth, beginning with the lowest human levels of development, with the instincts and passions, rising to moral ideals and religious communities, and so on; we will then see that human beings are, as it were, spinning threads between each other, that weave from person to person, forming continually higher associations: the family, the tribe and further ethnic and political groups, finally religious communities. In this, the activity of higher individualities comes indeed to expression. Such associations have sprung up out of the springs and wells of pure universal wisdom, through a religious founder. All religions agree [in the deeper sense], because they have founders who belong to the great Lodge [of the Masters].

There is a particular White Lodge which has twelve members, of whom seven have a special influence, and this seven indeed founded religious groupings. Such were Buddha, Hermes, Pythagoras, and so on. The great plan for the whole of human evolution has actually been spiritually devised in the White Lodge, which is as old as humanity itself. A coordinated plan for the guidance of all human progress confronts us here. All other associations are only subordinate branches; even family groupings, etc, are all linked up in the great plan which leads us up to the Lodge of the Masters. There the plan according to which all mankind develops is spun and woven.

Let us follow all that subsequently happens. Now we must first become acquainted with a particular plan, namely the plan for our earth. Let us contemplate the fourth Round of the earth in which we now are. It is intended to humanise the mineral kingdom. Think how human understanding has already transformed the mineral world, for example, Cologne Cathedral and modern technology. Our humanity has the task of transforming the whole mineral world into a pure work of art. Electricity already points for us into the occult depths of matter.

When, out of his inner being, man has restructured the mineral world, the end of our earth will then have arrived; the earth is then at the end of its physical evolution. The particular plan by which the mineral world will be reshaped exists in the Lodge of the Masters. This plan is already finished; so that if one studies it one can see what is yet to come by way of wonderful buildings, wonderful machines, and so on. When the earth has reached the end of the physical Globe [state] the whole earth will have an inner structure, an inner articulation, given to it by man himself, so that it will have become a work of art, as planned by the Masters of the White Lodge. That accomplished, then the whole earth will pass over into its astral state. That is something like when a plant begins to fade; the physical vanishes, everything goes into the astral. In passing into the astral world, the physical gradually contracts, becomes a shrinking kernel encircled by the astral, going over into the Rupa state and then the Arupa state, until it vanishes in a sleeplike condition.

What then is left of the physical? When the earth has passed over into the Arupa state, there is then still a quite condensed tiny imprint of the whole physical evolution of what was devised in the Masters' plan; like a tiny miniature version of what the mineral earth once was. That is what goes across [from the physical]; the physical is there only as this tiny miniature version of previous evolution, but the Arupa is large. When it passes over out of the Devachan state, it multiplies itself outwardly into innumerable similar things. And when the earth again passes back into the physical state it is then composed of countless tiny globules, each of which is a print of what the earth previously was. All these globules are however differently arranged, although sharing a common derivation. Thus the new physical earth of the fifth Round⁵ will consist of innumerable tiny parts, each of which contains the purpose of the mineral world which the Masters have in plan form in their Lodge. Every atom of the fifth Round [of earth evolution] will contain the whole plan of the Masters. Today the Masters are working on the atom of the fifth Round. Everything which precedes, in humanity, is compressed into a result, that is the atom of the fifth Round.

Therefore, if we examine the atom in its present form and then go back in the Akashic Record, we will then see that today's atom is undergoing a process of growth. It is growing more and more, it is becoming more and more separated [Gap in text] ... and contains the interweaving forces of mankind from the third Round of evolution. In that we can consider the plan of the Masters for the third Earth Round. What is at first entirely external becomes quite inward, and in the smallest atom we see mirrored the plans of the Masters. These tiny particular plans are nothing else than a piece of the whole plan for humanity. If one thus considers that the plan of one Round is the atom of the next Round, then one can see the pattern of the great universal plan. The great universal plan develops in continually higher stages, to beings who have continually higher plans for world development. When we contemplate this plan we arrive at the third Logos. The Logos is thus continually slipping into the atom; first it is outside, and becomes the blueprint for the atom, and then the atom becomes an image of this plan. The occultist simply notes the plan from the Akashic Record for the earlier rounds and so studies the atom.

Now from where do the higher beings obtain this plan? We find an answer to this if we consider that there are still higher stages of evolution where the plans are devised. That is where world evolution is worked out. These higher stages are indicated to us by the Ancients, for instance by Dionysius, the pupil of the Apostle Paul⁶ and also by Nicolaus Cusanus.⁷ His perception was: Higher than all knowledge and perception is the Unperception. But this Unknowing is a higher knowing, and this Unperception is a higher perceiving.

When we stop looking at what we hold in our thinking and concepts of the world, and turn ourselves to what wells up, to our inner powers, then we find something still higher. The Masters can weave the [third] Logos because they have ascended still higher than the nature of thinking. When the higher powers are developed, then, in such beings, thought appears as something different. It is then like a spoken word with us. The thought which constitutes the innermost being for the Masters, can itself be the expression of a higher being, just as the word is the expression of thought [with us]. If we ourselves consider thought as the word of a still higher being, then we come near to the concept of the Logos. Knowledge taken out from thought stands on a still higher level.

When we behold the world we find the atom at the one extreme. It is an image of the plan that proceeded out of the depths of the spirit of the Masters, which is the Logos.

If we now look for the transformation of man himself during the great world epoch- then we are led back again into the world.

Just as man has descended, has plunged down to the physical plane, so is it also with the world as a whole. What man's self has developed lies around him in the world.

But then we are led down to the lower planes, which however, themselves contain the higher planes the Lodge of the Masters.

The Spirit of the Earth is living with the Masters today and this Spirit of the Earth will be the physical clothing of the next planet [the future Jupiter]. The slightest thing we do will affect the smallest atom of the next planet. This feeling gives us first a full connection with the Lodge of the Masters. That should provide a central focus for the Theosophical Society, since we know what the Wise Ones know.

When Goethe speaks of the Spirit of the Earth⁸ he is expressing a truth. The Spirit of the Earth is weaving the clothing of the next planet. ’In life's floods, in the storm of action’ [In Lebensfluten—im Tatensturm] the Spirit [of the Earth] weaves the clothing for the next planetary Godhead.

Supplement: Two years later, on 21st October 1907, again at the time of the General Meeting, Rudolf Steiner spoke once more—in an as yet unpublished lecture—about the atom in the context of how spiritual influence passes from one planet to another, how therefore this will be ’between the [Old] Moon and the Earth and again between the Earth and its successor, the [future] Jupiter.’ This lecture is to be published in German in Volume 101 of Rudolf Steiner's complete works.

The relevant extract runs as follows:

You all know that the earth is guided in a particular way by the so-called White Lodge in which highly developed human individualities and individualities of a still higher kind are combined. What do they do there? They work; they lead the evolution of the earth; while leading this evolution, they are devising a quite specific plan. It is really the case that during the evolution of each planet, a specific plan is worked out by the guiding powers. While the earth is evolving, plans for the atom for the evolution of Jupiter—which succeeds the earth—are drawn up in the so-called White Lodge of the Earth. The plan is worked out in full detail. Therein lies the blessing and salvation of progress—in that it is undertaken in harmony with this plan.

Now, when a planetary evolution comes to its end, thus, when our earth has completed its [present] planetary cycle, then the Masters of Wisdom who harmonise perceptions will be ready with the plan that they have to work out for the Jupiter [cycle]. And now, at the end of such an evolution of planets something very special occurs.

This plan will, through a procedure, be endlessly reduced in size, and endlessly multiplied in number; so that in numerable copies of the whole plan for jupiter are to hand, albeit very much miniaturised. Thus it was on the [Old] Moon, too: the plan of earth evolution existed there. infinitely multiplied and miniaturised. And do you know what they are, these miniaturised plans that have been spiritually developed there? They are the actual atoms which underlie the earth's structure. And the atoms which will underlie the Jupiter [planet] will also be the plan, reproduced in the smallest possible unit—the plan which is now being worked out in the guiding White Lodge. Only he who is aware of this plan can indeed know what an atom is.

If you want to develop your knowledge of this atom, which underlies the earth, you will then, to explore the atom, encounter precisely those mysteries which come from the great Magi of the world.

Naturally, we can now only speak indicatively about these things, but we can at least give something which will impart a concept of what is involved.

The earth is composed of these, its atoms, in a specific way. Everything that is, yourselves included, is composed of these atoms. Hence you exist in harmony with the whole earth evolution, since you carry in you an infinite number of miniaturised [copies] of the plan for earth which was worked out in the past. This plan for the earth could only be evolved in the previous planetary condition of our earth, the [Old] Moon; the guiding beings worked it out in harmony with the whole planetary development through [Old] Saturn, [Old] Sun and [Old] Moon. Now the point in question was to introduce something into this infinite number of atoms which would bring them into the right relationship [with one another], which would arrange them in the right way. To introduce this was only possible for the guiding spirits of the Moon, if, as I have often already said, they managed the evolution of the earth according to a very specific plan.

The way the earth appeared again after the Moon evolution, it was not at first really ’Earth’ but ’Earth plus Sun plus Moon;’ a body such as you would have if you mixed the Earth and the Sun and the Moon together to make one single [heavenly] body. Thus the earth was, at first. Then first the Sun separated itself, taking with it all those forces which were too thin, too spiritual for man, under whose influence he would have spiritualised himself far too quickly. If man had merely stayed under the influence of the forces which were contained in the joint Sun-Moon-Earth body, then he would not have evolved downwards towards physical materiality, and he would not have been able to attain to that consciousness of self, of ego, which he had to attain ...

• 1 . The gods of Devachan, or the heavenly world.
• 2 . Later Rudolf Steiner gave more precise figures for this, according to which the precession of the equinox through the whole zodiac takes 12 x 2 x 160 = 25,920 years, which is a Platonic or world year. Human incarnations are generally connected with these epochs of 2,160 years.
• 3 . It is unusual for Rudolf Steiner to give specific figures for such distant events. If we go back in time beyond the end of the Ice Age (10,000 years ago), there is a great discrepancy between the figures given by modern science and those of spiritual science. For instance, modern science sets the date of the commencement of the Ice Age at one million years ago. Spiritual science, on the other hand, puts the commencement of the Ice Age into the middle of Atlantis—‘The cosmos became calculable for the first time around 13,500 B.C. At that time most of Atlantis was already submerged’ (Blavatsky). The trouble with chronology is that modern science still takes present-day conditions as its norm for calculating (e.g., rate of disintegration of matter) and projects it into the past. Spiritual science, on the other hand, calculates according to cosmic rhythms (progression of the sun through the zodiac).
• 4 . Rudolf Steiner obviously refers here to the representations of atomic structures as they appeared in theosophical literature. Just at the time of these lectures a new edition of Occult Chemistry, written in 1895 by C.W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant had appeared with illustrations. Many of the latter were also depicted in Annie Besant's most popular work: The Ancient Wisdom, 1899. The first to represent atomic forms in this way was the American, Babbit, in his work: The Principle of Light and Colour, 1878, which was referred to in the Besant-Leadbeater study.
• 5 . In explanation of the terms ‘Round,’ ‘Globe,’ etc., see diagram at end of lecture 10, 23rd December 1904.
• 6 . Dionysius is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 17, verse 34. Two works appeared under his name at the end of the fifth century in Syria: Concerning the Heavenly Hierarchy and Concerning the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which were translated from Greek into Latin in the ninth century by John Scotus Erigena.
• 7 . Nicholas of Cusa, 1401–1464, German mystic. Compare: Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens und ihr Verhaltnis zur modernen Weltanschauung, translated variously as: ‘Mysticism and Modern Thought,’ ‘Mystics of the Renaissance’ and ‘Eleven European Mystics.’
• 8 . In the first part of Faust, Scene I.

In recent times, the question of the unconscious has come to the fore and is often spoken of in psychology. Everything in human soul life that cannot be reached, observed or explained by ordinary consciousness is relegated to the region of the unconscious. When this unconscious realm is mentioned, it is always supposed—notwithstanding the assumption that it must remain unknown—that it contains forces that do work into the conscious soul life. The emergence of this idea of the unconscious is due wholly to the fact that a certain skepticism, indeed a feeling of impotence, has arisen in recent times in regard to solving specific problems of philosophy, cosmology and religion. The insight that we have described here as imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge has the task now of probing into this undefined reservoir, which figures in so many ways in recent science as “the unconscious.” It is just by means of this supersensible knowledge—by reaching other levels of consciousness in which a different soul condition exists, hence a different perceptual capacity—that the concrete facts, which are not accessible to ordinary consciousness, must be investigated. Today I would like to give you an example of such research in an unconscious region of the soul, namely the experiences the human soul undergoes between going to sleep and waking.

Ordinary consciousness remains quite unconscious of what happens to the human soul in sleep. But we should not believe that these experiences have less meaning or are less decisive in a man's life than experiences of waking consciousness. Certainly, for external life, for our work and activities, for humanity's outer progress, the waking hours are of primary consideration. But for the configuration and the development of man's inner being, the rich experiences of the state of sleep are of the first importance. Even though man remains unconscious of them, these experiences are real, and their after-effects play into waking life. Man's general mood of soul during his waking hours is permeated by the after-effects of sleep. His physical and etheric organizations, which are worked upon by his astral organization and his actual spiritual organization, that is to say his ego organism, are permeated also. They too are influenced during waking life by the after-effects of sleep.

For ordinary consciousness the phenomena of sleep appear as follows: sense perception begins to dim down, in the end it is entirely extinguished; the same also happens in the case of thinking, feeling and willing. Except for the transitional state when we are dreaming, man sinks into an unconscious condition. But what happens to the soul then—and this must be strongly emphasized—is something absolutely real. What remains unconscious to ordinary consciousness in this respect can be illuminated by imaginative, inspired and intuitive cognition. Therefore, I will describe for you

the soul's experiences during sleep. At least sketchily, I will describe how imagination, inspiration and intuition can perceive what, for ordinary consciousness, is unconscious. I will outline the soul's experiences as if they were lived through consciously, for they are experienced consciously through higher cognition. It is not as if the soul were unconscious throughout the night, but what would otherwise have remained unconscious can be seen by means of imagination, inspiration and intuition. Light can in this way be cast upon it so that it becomes visible. The following then comes into view.

When man first enters into the state of sleep, the sense world around him ceases to exist for the soul. He goes into an inner experience that is undifferentiated, in a certain sense indefinite. The soul feels—I say feels but it does not feel; if it were conscious, it would feel—it feels enlarged as in a widespread fog. In this inward feeling and experiencing during this first stage of sleep subject and object cannot at first be distinguished. No separate phenomena and facts are distinguishable; it is a general sensing of a nebulous universality, which is sensed as one's own existence. But simultaneously there appears in the sleeping person what may be called a deep need to rest in the divine essence of the cosmos. With this outflowing of experience into an undifferentiated condition is mixed an indefinite longing—one must use such a word after all—“to rest in God. “ As I said, I describe it as if the events, experienced unconsciously, were passed through consciously. Thus, the external world of daytime, everything the soul receives through the senses, is swallowed up. All the stimuli through which the soul feels in the body are gone and, likewise, all the impulses by means of which the soul sends its will through the body are gone. The soul has at first a general, universal sensation accompanied by a longing for God.

In this condition, which arises initially after falling asleep, dreams can intervene. They are either symbolic pictures of outer experiences, memory pictures, symbolic images of inner bodily conditions, and so on, or they are dreams in which certain true facts of the spiritual world can be intermingled without the ordinary dreamer being able to acquire a definite knowledge of what the dreams really contain. Even for one who views this condition of soul with imaginative cognition—for by means of it one can do this already—dreams do not throw light upon the inner facts, rather do they veil the real truth. For this truth, in relation to what is meant here, can only be perceived by a person, if, out of his own free will, he prepares himself in an appropriate manner through soul exercises such as have been described here. Only as a result of these soul exercises can a clear view of this first stage of sleep be attained.

If you look with such cognitional faculties into this first stage of sleep, when you can divine it, it shows itself to be similar to, but not exactly the same as the unconscious experiences of earliest childhood. Indeed, if man were in a position to bring these experiences to consciousness and pour them into the concepts and ideas of ordinary consciousness, such as philosophy is occupied with, then these philosophical ideas would attain reality. The philosophy to which we should thus attain would be something real. So it can also be said that in the first stage of every sleep man becomes an unconscious philosopher. He attains to what in waking consciousness is cultivated in his soul as ideas, as dialectics and logical laws. If the flowing into the cosmic mists of the etheric world and the soul's longing to rest in God could be permeated with the experience of actuality, if man could bring these two soul experiences to consciousness and pour them into abstract philosophical ideas, then these ideas would come alive. Philosophy would then be as it was in Greece before Socrates, and in still earlier epochs of humanity. It would be an inwardly experienced reality.

We have now learned to know two stages of man's unfolding: that of his earliest childhood, which, if brought to consciousness, would represent the reality of philosophical ideas and the experience of the first stage of sleep, which, as we have noted, is quite similar to the unconscious experience of childhood, and which, when brought to consciousness, could in the same way give a living experience of reality to a philosophy worked out during waking life. That describes the first, somewhat brief stages that a human being undergoes from the time of falling asleep to waking up.

After the soul has been for a time in the state of sleep described above, another condition sets in. This second stage of sleep is such that instead of the experience of his own physical and etheric bodies, which he has when awake, man has a form of experience through which he feels inside himself the cosmos that in daytime surrounds him. While in the first stage the soul experiences no clear distinction between subject and object, this difference now becomes increasingly meaningful except that during sleep man has come into the reverse condition from that of being awake. He now feels and experiences himself in the cosmos and looks back on his physical and etheric organisms as upon an object. Just as he vaguely feels his organs—lungs, liver, heart, and so on—in day consciousness, now, in sleep, he experiences the cosmic content within himself; he himself becomes, as it were, cosmos in his soul. Not as if he extended out into the whole cosmos; rather, he experiences something like a reflection of the cosmos within him.

The first unconscious experience—which even so is wholly real—is, I might say, a fragmentation of this inner soul experience. The soul feels as if it were divided up into many separate parts of a manifoldness. It feels itself not as a unity but as a multiplicity; as if, when awake, we were to experience ourselves in the brain not as a homogeneous being but as a multiplicity of eyes, ears, lungs, liver and so on, and we were missing the sense of unity. Thus, during sleep, we experience, so to say, the cosmic ingredients without at first experiencing their unity. That brings about a condition of soul which, if we were conscious of it, we should have to describe as permeated by anxiety, even fear. The soul, however, really experiences the objective processes that cause this nightly anxiety, just as the organic processes of the physical and etheric organisms underlie what might be experienced here or there by the soul as anxiety coming from within. They are, in fact, fear-inspiring occurrences that the soul has to live through.

In this stage of sleep, occurrences of waking life now reveal their effects. For modern man living after the Mystery of Golgotha there appear the after-effects of what he experiences in waking life as inner religious devotion to Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha. The attention man gives to it, all reverence and worship that he develops for the Christ and that Mystery during his waking life, have after-effects in this second stage of sleep. It was otherwise for those who lived on earth before the Mystery of Golgotha. They received from their religious leaders appropriate measures, religious functions to carry out, whose effects they could carry over into sleep and that worked there in such a way that this anxiety could gradually be overcome. For a person living after the Mystery of Golgotha his inner bond with Christ, his feeling of belonging to Him, the religious rituals directed to Christ Jesus, his whole relation to Him and his actual conduct in reference to this relationship, all this now works into the life of sleep and helps to overcome that anxiety which oppresses the soul.

As I said, I describe things as they appear to inspired consciousness, but they certainly are experienced by the soul as reality. So, while I present concepts taken from conscious life, the actual corresponding processes are really present in the life of the soul. If, in daytime, we have developed a relation to the Christ, we actually meet His guiding power during this second stage of sleep. It is this guiding power of Christ through which we overcome the anxiety that oppresses the soul. Out of this anxiety there develops a cosmic relationship of the soul to the world. As a result of the development of this relationship, but in such a way that the soul experiences it as its inner life, the movements of the planetary system in our solar cosmos stand before the soul. It does not expand out into the planetary world during sleep, but an inner replica of it lives in the soul. It actually experiences the planetary cosmos in a replica. Even if what the soul experiences every night as a small, inner globe, a celestial globe, does not illuminate day consciousness, it does stream into the reality of daily life and continues on in the physical and etheric organizations in the systems of breathing and blood circulation, the whole rhythmic system, we find that these processes are accompanied by impulses and stimuli that live in the physical and the etheric body and work into waking life out of the inner planetary experience which the soul has in sleep. While we are awake, therefore, the planetary movements of our solar system pulse through our breathing and circulation as after-effects of sleep.

During sleep—supersensible vision shows us that astral and ego organizations are outside the physical and etheric bodies—the planetary movements do not work directly. They are experienced by the soul outside the physical and etheric organisms. But within the sleeping physical body the impulses from the previous night echo and reverberate, the same impulses that have pulsated through breathing and circulation during the day. During the following night an after-effect of these impulses is present, and they are renewed the next morning as a consequence of what the soul experienced in the night as an inner replica of the planetary cosmos.

Now in addition to this cosmic experience during the second stage of sleep something else happens. The soul receives distinct impressions of all the relationships it has ever entertained with human souls in its various lives on earth. We actually have within us, I might say, “markings” of all the relationships we have had with other human souls in successive earth lives. They now appear before the soul in a certain pictorial form. Although unconsciously, the soul really experiences everything that has been good or bad in its dealings with other people. Likewise, it experiences its developing relationships with spiritual beings who dwell in the cosmos and never live in a physical body, who always live in a super-sensible existence as opposed to the physical life of man. The human soul in sleep thus lives in a rich network of relations with those human souls with whom it has established such connections. These connections reappear, as does everything that has remained from them as after-effects of the right and wrong a person has done to others, the good and evil he may have caused. In short, the existing destiny of a person confronts his soul in this stage of sleep.

What an older philosophy has called karma appears at this stage every night before man's soul. Since the planetary experiences continue to work as stimuli in the breathing and blood circulation, and thus in man's physical and etheric organizations, it is possible for someone capable of perceiving such things through inspired cognition to observe that this experience of repeated earth lives also plays over into day consciousness, even though it is not directly present. It is clearly evident to inspired cognition, which perceives what the soul experiences, that repeated earth lives are a fact, for to the view of inspiration they present themselves directly together with the relationships established at any time with other people. Man's development through repeated earth lives presents itself because these relationships are beheld. One relationship points back to one certain earth life, another points to another life, and so on. In this way, karma appears before man's eyes as an established fact.

The experiences of the soul during sleep work in such a manner into day consciousness that man's general mood, making itself felt during the day in the form of a dull awareness of himself, depends on what we undergo in this second stage of sleep. Whether we feel happy or unhappy in our dimly perceived inner self, whether we feel lively or languid, is to a great extent the result of what is experienced in this stage of sleep. So, during this stage we find ourselves actually outside in the cosmos, even though what we experience within the soul is a copy of the cosmos; and what we experience of repeated earth lives and karma appears before the soul as images and reflections. These replicas of the cosmos and our destiny that stand before our soul contain what can be called man's inner existence in the cosmos. If you are able to formulate in concepts and ideas what has been attained through inspired cognition by letting it stream back into ordinary consciousness, you arrive at a true cosmology that encompasses the whole of man. Such a cosmology then is an experienced cosmology. We can say that when this stage of sleep is consciously reflected back, man learns to recognize himself as a member of the cosmic order—a cosmic order that is expressed in a planetary sense, as a cosmic ordering of nature.

But now, within this cosmic order, the moral world order arises. This is not as it is in earth life, where on the one side we find the order of nature with its own systems of laws but lacking morality, and on the other side a moral world order experienced as far as earthly existence is concerned only in the soul. Instead, we have a unified world before us. What we experience as a planetary cosmos is permeated and spiritually impregnated by a continuous stream of moral impulses. We live simultaneously in a natural and a moral cosmos.

You realize the full significance of these nightly events for waking life. So, we can say that what the soul experiences in the cosmos between going to sleep and waking is more real and full of meaning for man's outward configuration than what confronts him by day, for the life functions of the physical and etheric bodies, as well as our own moral condition, are results of our cosmic experience during sleep.

The third stage of sleep is characterized by a gradual transition from experiences within the planetary cosmos to an experience of the world of the fixed stars, so that this world is experienced by the soul as a kind of reflection. Yet these are not reflections of those outer sense pictures of the constellations such as we have in waking life. Instead, the soul becomes familiar with those beings of whom it was said in earlier lectures that intuition recognizes as the spiritual beings corresponding to the stars. Here in the sense world in our physical consciousness we experience the physical sense pictures of the stars. When, as I have described, we penetrate the spiritual world with intuition, we recognize that the sun and other fixed stars as perceived by ordinary sense perception are merely the reflected physical images of certain spiritual beings. The soul lives within these spiritual beings of the stars during the third stage of sleep. It feels after-images of the star constellations, that is to say, it feels the relationships that exist between the activities of the spiritual star-beings. The soul experiences such constellations.

Ancient dreamlike science specifically described how the life of the fixed star constellations and zodiac streamed into the soul. This is, after all, the main part of the soul's experience in sleep. In the sense world you arrive at a better correspondence to the single spiritual beings if you look at the constellations as a whole instead of gazing at single stars. In sleep, the soul, being free of the physical and etheric bodies, becomes so liberated that it confronts them both as objects, just as we usually have around us the objects of the external world as perceived by the senses. The soul really finds its way as a spiritual being into a cosmos consisting of other spiritual beings. What it unconsciously goes through there can be illuminated by intuitive knowledge. But the experiences there also have their after-effects in waking life; the general well-being, health and vigor of the human body—not of the soul as in the first stage of sleep—are after-effects of what the soul experiences during the night among star-beings. Especially there comes before the soul, even if unconsciously, the whole event of birth in its broadest sense; that is, the way the soul enters a physical body through conception and embryonic life. Again, there comes before the soul how the body is abandoned in death and how man's spirit being passes into the soul-spiritual world. Every night, the truth concerning the events of birth and death really confront the soul. It is also an after-effect of the night-time experiences that man has a dim feeling during the day that birth and death by no means signify for human life only what they appear to be to sense observation. It is simply not true that a man with sound common sense could believe that birth and death are nothing but the events they appear to be in outer material life. Man in fact does not believe this, but it is not true to say that the reason for his disbelief is only because in his fantasy he imagines that he is an eternal being whose existence persists beyond death. No, man cannot believe it because of the picture experienced every night by the soul of how man enters earth life from the spiritual world and withdraws again into the world of spirit. This picture streams into the soul by day and is experienced by it as a vague feeling about the world and human life.

What appears during waking life as religious longing, as religious awareness, is an after-effect of the soul's experience among the stars. What I have just described is the stage of man's deepest sleep. In actual fact, it is out of his sleep that man derives the religious feelings of his waking life.

Just as religious life can be founded today in knowledge by means of the experience resembling that of primordial humanity but permeated and formulated in intuitions by the fully developed consciousness, it can also be said that man can attain this religious knowledge if, through super-sensible intuition, he is able to perceive and illuminate the condition of deepest sleep. For what rests in the depths of sleep was also the source of what preserved man's knowledge of the divine. Our day-consciousness is only a reflection of the potentialities for consciousness open to man. Likewise, what man bears within him as a natural religious feeling appears as a reflection of the glory and sublimity experienced by his soul, even if unconsciously, in the third stage of sleep. Man sinks into the life of sleep not only to renew his tired body, or to gain the stimuli from sleep that his breathing and circulation need, or to acquire from the spiritual world the other impulses he needs. What permeates him with religious feeling penetrates to the soul's surface, to the region of day-consciousness from the profound depths through which human soul life streams during sleep.

One might say that as man lives a philosophical life during the first stage of sleep, similar to that of earliest childhood—however paradoxical that sounds to present-day consciousness—and as in the second stage he lives a cosmological life, so, in the third stage, he lives a life of being permeated with divinity. From this third stage of sleep, man must then return to daytime consciousness.

Having retraced the above-mentioned stages in backward sequence during the last stage of sleep, man returns again to waking consciousness. Since man's soul and spirit are outside his physical and etheric organizations in sleep, if this phenomenon of sleep is to be comprehended fully, intuitive knowledge must answer the question: Why is man drawn back into his physical and etheric bodies again? What impulse is at work there? If the intuitive perception of sleep is extended far enough, it is possible to recognize this impulse. As man cognizes these spiritual beings who correspond to the sun or the constellations of the other fixed stars, he then recognizes that the impulse comes from the spiritual beings whose reflection in our physical world is the moon. Indeed, the forces of the moon permeate our whole cosmos, and when, through intuition, we recognize not only the physical existence of the moon but also her spiritual correlations, we find that these spiritual beings, who correspond to the physical moon, are the entities who, in their working together, produce the impulses to bring us back into our physical and etheric bodies after we have reached the deepest stage of sleep. It is above all the moon forces that connect man's astral and ego organization with his physical and etheric organisms.

Every night, when out of the spiritual world the soul desires to re-enter its physical and etheric bodies, it must place itself within the streams of the moon forces. It is of no concern here—that will be obvious to you—whether it be new or full moon. For even when, as new moon, the moon is not visible to the senses, those forces are nevertheless active throughout the cosmos that bring the soul back into the etheric and physical bodies from the spiritual worlds. They are active even though the moon's phases appearing to the senses as half-moon, full moon, etc., are metamorphosed sense pictures that correspond to events in the soul being of the moon; these, to be sure, have something to do with man's spirit and soul in the physical and etheric bodies. Indeed, the particular configuration in which man's soul-spiritual and physical-etheric natures are linked is determined by those forces that rule and interweave in the cosmos and come to physical expression in the moon, the sense object, with her various phases that we perceive.

Thus, we can also look into the concealed aspects of man's life of waking and sleeping and inform ourselves concerning what it is that brings him back each morning into his daytime life. He returns through the same stages in reverse order, and while he passes through the last stage, which is permeated by a longing for God, the dreams mix again into his sleep life and he gradually submerges into his physical and etheric organizations.

Why is it that when man goes through the gate of death he is no longer subject to the moon forces? How does he withdraw from them when he spends a long time in the spiritual world? These questions as well as the secrets of birth, death and repeated earth lives will be considered in the next two lectures.

We will try to go more fundamentally into those matters connected with the question which has just been raised. The question was: What impulses of human life must enter especially into the consciousness of man today so that a counterweight may be created to the principle of heredity that prevails almost exclusively—whether in science or in general life? This extraordinarily important question, however, can only be approached slowly and gradually. It is, in fact, most deeply connected with the contrast that I wished to bring before your spiritual eyes in showing how one can look towards the old Egyptian inscription of Isis: ‘I am the All. I am the Past, the Present, the Future; no mortal has yet lifted my veil’—and how on the other hand one can take into one's consciousness the words which from the present on into the future must be the complementary saying: ‘I am Man. I am the Past, I am the Present, I am the Future. Every mortal should lift my veil.’

Now above all one must realize that in the age when that saying arose in the Egyptian culture, it was still plain and clear that when one spoke of ‘immortal’ one spoke actually of man himself. In the Egyptian culture, however, the mystery as a principle of the Mysteries, was a deeply rooted principle. The Egyptian who was acquainted with his civilization knew that what lives as ‘immortal’ within the soul, must be awakened. Yes, contrary to our custom of today, the Egyptian, as too the Greek, at least the Greek thinking in the sense of Plato, really only considered a man to be a partaker of immortality, who had consciously grasped the spiritual world. You can read the proof of this in my ‘Christianity as Mystical Fact’ where I quoted the often harsh-sounding expressions of Plato for the difference between men who seek to grasp in the soul the impulse of the immortal, the spiritual impulse, and those men who disdain this, who neglect to do so. If you think this over, you will easily see that the saying on the Statue at Sais actually meant: He who will never seek to grasp the spiritual life of the soul cannot lift the veil of Isis; he however can lift it, who grasps the spiritual life, who therefore (in the Egyptian sense, today it sounds rather different) as ‘mortal’ makes himself ‘immortal’. There was no intention of saying that the human being as such cannot lift the veil of Isis, but only that one who binds himself exclusively to the mortal element, one who will not approach the immortal element, cannot lift the veil. Later on when the Egyptian culture fell more into decadence the saying drifted into quite a wrong interpretation. As the priests transformed the Mystery-principle into a power-principle, they actually sought to instill into the laity—not the priesthood—that they, the priests, were the ‘immortals’ and those who were not priests were the ‘mortals’. That is to say, all those standing outside the priesthood cannot raise the veil of Isis. One might say that in the decadent age of Egyptian culture this was the interpretation: ‘I am the All; I am the Past, the Present, the Future; only a priest can lift my veil.’ And the priests moreover called themselves the ‘immortals’ in that age of decadence.

The use of this expression then came to an end for men living on the physical plane; it is only still in use in the French Academy where, following the Egyptian priest principle, specially important persons are made ‘immortals’. (One is reminded of it at this time because Bergson, the Schelling and Schopenhauer plagiarist, is about to be raised to the rank of Immortal by the French Academy. Such things are left over from ages in which they were understood, and flow into times where the words, concepts and ideas are far removed from their source.)

There are many things that must be said in the course of these observations and it might easily be thought that their purpose is merely to blame our times. I have often emphasized that that is not the case. What is said here is said to characterize the times not to criticize them. Where, however, truth is to be spoken it cannot be expected that no mention will be made of things that have simply got to be seen through, whether for their emptiness or for their harmfulness. In fact one is fully justified in saying: ought it then to deserve censure if one follows a certain example—naturally at a great distance—an example that cannot be sufficiently followed? It is not related in the Gospel that Christ-Jesus went into the Temple and flattered the merchants; it is something else that we are told—that he overthrew the tables and so on! In order really to promote what must be promoted it is essential to indicate what, in accordance with the facts, must be censured if the age is to progress. The sentimentality of painting everything in glowing colours must not find entry into the human soul, nor even be blazoned forth as universal human love.

If one takes this properly into consideration, it can be said on the one hand that we are now living in the materialistic age, to which is added abstraction in the sense we have come to know it, namely estrangement from reality; furthermore, all that must break into our age catastrophically is connected with this divorce from reality. On the other hand, however, it may also be said that compared with the various periods of post-Atlantean times—if we keep to these—our fifth period is in a certain respect and from certain aspects the greatest age, one that brings most of all to humanity, one that harbours within it immense possibilities for the evolution and existence of mankind. And precisely through what man develops very specially in this age as shadow-side of the spiritual life, he takes the way, and can, if he proceeds rightly, find the way into the spiritual world. In particular he can find the way to his true, his highest human goal. Evolutionary possibilities are in our time very great, greater from a certain aspect than they were in former phases of post-Atlantean evolution. In point of fact, something of immense significance occurred with the entry of this fifth post-Atlantean-period. We must transplant ourselves in a new way, my dear friends, into the connection of man with the whole universe, if we wish to give the right colouring, the right nuance of feeling to something we have often brought forward from various viewpoints. The clever ones in Philisterium, to be sure, call it ‘superstition’ if one speaks of a certain connection of man with concrete constellations of the cosmos. One must only understand this connection rightly. Superstition—what is superstition? The belief that the physical human being must in a certain way take his direction from the universe? We go by the clock, which we regulate from the position of the sun; every time we look at the clock we practise astrology. We have subconscious members of our human nature which take their direction from other constellations than those we go by when in physical life we set our clock by them. If things are understood rightly, talking of superstition has not the slightest sense, and so by way of illustration a portion of this World-Clock shall now be set before your soul. We will use it as a means of further studying the riddle that was first propounded.

Now when the time of the flooding of Atlantis, the submergence of Atlantis, which separates our post-Atlantean culture from the Atlantean culture, had passed by, the first post-Atlantean culture-epoch arose. This was a time which received its macrocosmic influence in such a way that the force which flowed through earthly life was the one which corresponds to the rising of the sun at the vernal equinox in the sign of Cancer. Thus we can say: when the sun entered the sign of Cancer at the vernal equinox the first post-Atlantean civilization began. We can actually call it the ‘Cancer-civilization’—if the expression is not misunderstood. If we grasp things in their true light then we can say: when the sun rose in the Spring it stood in the sign of Cancer.

We have spoken in these observations of how there is always something in man which corresponds to what is out in the macrocosm. Cancer, the Crab, corresponds in man to the thorax. So that, speaking macrocosmically one can characterize this first, ancient Indian culture by saying that it took its course while the vernal equinox of the Sun was in Cancer. If one would characterize it microcosmically one can say: it took its course when man for his knowledge, perception and view of the world stood under the influence of those forces which are connected with what comes to expression in the Crab, in the envelopment of his chest, in his chest-cuirass. As physical human beings today we are not able to enter into a perceptive and sensitive relation with the world through the forces that are in our ‘crab’. We have no possibilities of this today. If man can develop the forces that have an intimate relationship to his thorax, if, as regards the forces of his thorax he is sensitive to all that goes on in nature and in human life, then it is as if he came into direct touch with the outer world, with all that approaches him as elemental world. If we only take the relation of man to man—in this we touch upon what underlay the original Indian culture—in that early time a man who met another felt through the sensitivity of his thorax, as it were, what was the nature of the other. He felt how the other man could be sympathetic to him, or more or less antipathetic. He met the other man and learnt to know him. As he breathed the air in his neighbourhood, he learnt to know him. Yes, indeed, my dear friends, in many respects to its advantage, modern mankind knows nothing of this! But in the neighbourhood of every human being man naturally breathes differently. For in every man's neighbourhood one shares the air out-breathed by the other. Modern men have become very insusceptible to these things. During the first post-Atlantean culture, the Cancer-culture, this insensitivity did not exist. A human being could be sympathetic, antipathetic through his breathing. The thorax moved differently when the person was sympathetic or antipathetic. And the thorax was sensitive enough to be aware of its own movements.

Think, my dear friends, how one then actually perceived! One was aware of the others, but one was aware of them through something that took place in oneself. One perceived the inner nature through a process that one experienced inwardly as something bodily. That was during the ‘Cancer-culture’; I have used the illustration of one human being meeting with another. But the whole world was regarded in the same way. Thus arose the world-conception of this first post-Atlantean culture-epoch. A man breathed differently when he beheld the sun, when he beheld the dawn, the spring, the autumn, and he formed his concepts accordingly. And as modern humanity forms its abstract, its straw-like abstract, not even straw, but paper-abstract concepts of sun, moon and stars, growth and thriving, of everything imaginable, so, in the first post-Atlantean period, the Cancer-culture, mankind formed concepts which were felt in this direct way, as a co-vibrating of one's own ‘Cancer’, one's own thorax.

One can therefore say: if this represents the path of the sun and here the sun in spring stands in Cancer, then this is the

time when the human being too is in the Cancer-culture. In a special way every such Zodiacal constellation is related to a particular planet, is to be regarded as belonging to it. (This arises from reasons which we can perhaps mention presently but which are indeed known to most of you.) Cancer is to be regarded as belonging particularly to the moon. Since the forces of the moon work in quite a special way when it stands in Cancer, one says: the moon has its home, its house, in Cancer, its forces are there, and there they come to development very particularly.

Now just as in the human being the thorax corresponds to Cancer, so does the sexual sphere correspond to the planetary moon. In fact one can say that whereas on the one hand man was so susceptible, so receptive and sensitive in the first post-Atlantean epoch, all intimate concepts of the post-Atlantean world-conception which have come to light are concerned, precisely in the first post-Atlantean epoch, with the sexual sphere. At that time this was right, for a naïveté then existed which in later, corrupt ages was no longer there.

Then the sun entered the Sign of Gemini, the Twins, at the Vernal Equinox. And then as long as the Vernal Equinox continued to be in Gemini, we have to do with the second post-Atlantean culture-epoch, the original Persian. A relation with the macrocosmic Gemini is shown microcosmically in all that concerns man's symmetry, especially the symmetric relationship of the right hand and the left. There are of course other instances of our being symmetrical, for instance we see things only singly, with our two eyes. This state of symmetry, this co-operation of the left and the right, which is shown in particular in the two hands and arms, this corresponds in the macrocosm to the Twins, to Gemini.

Now, that which man takes into his life through the forces of the Gemini-sphere, the forces of his symmetry, to make into his world-conception—just as what I earlier characterized was taken in through the thorax in the first post-Atlantean time—is less closely connected with the immediate surroundings. The fact of being symmetrical connects man more with what lies distant from the earth, with what is not terrestrial, but celestial, cosmic. Hence in this second post-Atlantean age the close connection with the direct elemental surroundings of earth withdraws, there appears the Zarathustra culture. This Zarathustra culture turned towards the cosmos and what is to be found there of the Gemini nature—on the one hand to the Light-nature, on the other hand to the Darkness nature; the Twins-nature, this is connected with the forces which man expresses through his symmetry.

Just as the Moon has its house in Cancer, so has Mercury its house in Gemini (see Diagram 2). And just as in the first post-Atlantean epoch the force of the sex-sphere helped man, as it were, to reach that intimate relation with the surrounding world of which we have spoken, so in this second post-Atlantean epoch help was given from the Mercury-sphere, the sphere connected with the forces of the lower body. On the one hand man's forces pass away from the earth into the outer universe, but in this, as it were, man is helped by something still much tinged with atavistic forces, namely, by what is connected with the forces of his vascular, his digestive system. Man has not really a digestive system just for digesting, it is at the same time an instrument of knowledge. These things have only been forgotten. And real judgment—not the sagacity I have discussed lately—real discernment, the really deeper gift of combination which stands in connection with the objects, this does not proceed from the head, but from the lower body, and was of service to this second post-Atlantean period.

Then came the third; this was the age when the sun at the Vernal Equinox entered Taurus, the Bull. The forces which descend from the universe when the Sun at the Spring equinox stands in Taurus are connected microcosmically in man with all that concerns the region of the larynx, the forces of the larynx. Hence in this third post-Atlantean epoch the Egypto-Chaldean, the human being developed, as his special organ of knowledge, all that concerned the forces of the larynx. The feeling of relationship between the word and the object, particularly the things out in the universe, was an especially strong one in the third post-Atlantean time. Today in the age of abstractions one cannot form much idea of the intimate relation of what men knew of the cosmos through his larynx.

Again, the force which corresponds to Taurus was assisted through Venus, which has its house in the Bull (see Diagram 2). This corresponds in the microcosm, in man, to forces which lie between the regions of the heart and the stomach. In this way, however, what the third post-Atlantean epoch knew as the Cosmic-word, was intimately linked with man, inasmuch as he understood it through the Venus-forces which were in his own being.

Then came the Greco-Latin time, the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The sun entered Aries, the Ram, at the Vernal Equinox. This corresponds to the head-region in man, the region of the brow, the upper head, the actual head-region. The time began in which man mainly sought to grasp the world through understanding and this relationship to the world brought him thoughts. Head-knowing is quite different from the earlier forms of knowing. In this epoch head-knowledge came to especial prominence. But in spite of the fact that the human head is a true copy of the macrocosm, precisely because in a physical sense it is this true copy, in a spiritual sense it is really of very little value. Forgive the remark—as physical head, the human head is not of very much value. And when man depends upon his head, he can really arrive at nothing else than a Thought-Culture. And so the Greco-Latin time, which as we have seen from other aspects laid special stress on the head, and brought man thus into a special relation with the universe, gradually evolved into an actual Head- and Thought-Civilization which ran its course and came to its end. So that from the 15th century onwards, as I pointed out yesterday, people no longer knew how to connect thinking with reality. This head-civilization, this Aries-culture, however, meant that observation of the universe was taken into the human being. And as regards the physical world it was the most perfected and complete. It is only what developed from it as a decadent condition that became materialistic. Man in this Aries-civilization formed a special relation to the surrounding world precisely through his head. It is particularly difficult today to understand the Greek culture—that of the Romans became more philistine and commonplace—when one does not realize, for instance, that the Greek had a different perception of concepts and ideas. I have dealt with this in my >The Riddles of Philosophy.

It was full of significance for this age that Mars has its house in Aries. The forces of Mars are those again, but in a different way, that are connected with man's head-nature. So that Mars, who at the same time gives man aggressive forces, particularly offered support to all that he developed as a relation to the surrounding world through his head-nature. In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, which begins in the 8th century B.C. and ends in the 15th century A.D., those conditions were developed which one can describe as a Mars-civilization. The configuration of the different social structures spread over the earth arose in this age essentially through a Mars-culture, a warlike culture. Wars nowadays are behind the times. Although they may be more terrible than formerly, yet they are stragglers, out of date. We shall be speaking of this immediately.

Now the head of man with all its forces, purely as physical thinking-instrument, as instrument for physical thoughts, is an image of the starry heavens. Therefore thoughts in this fourth post-Atlantean time had still something macrocosmic in them, thoughts were not yet bound up with the earth. But think of the great revolution that now comes with the 15th century when the Aries-culture passes over to the Pisces (the Fishes) Culture. What the Pisces forces have become in the macrocosm are the forces in man that are connected with the feet. There is a transition from head to feet; the swing-over is an immense one. I was therefore able to say that if you went back with understanding into the time before the 14th century and read the alchemical and other writings so much despised today, you would see what deep, what vast insight there then existed into cosmic mysteries. But the whole human culture—human forces too—made a complete revolution. What man had formerly received from the heavens, he now received from the earth. This is what is shown us from the celestial constellations as the great swing-over that had been accomplished for man. And this is connected with the beginning of the material, the materialistic age. Thoughts lose their power, thoughts can easily become empty phrase in these times.

But now consider something else that is remarkable. As Venus has her house in Taurus, Mars his house in Aries, so in Pisces Jupiter has his house. And Jupiter is connected with the development of the human brow, forehead. Man can become great with this earth-culture in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, precisely because in an independent human manner he can ennoble and grasp through the forces of his head that which was brought to him from the opposite side in earlier post-Atlantean periods. Hence Jupiter has to perform the same service to man in the fifth epoch as Mars had to perform in the fourth. And one could say that in a certain respect Mars was the rightful King of this world in the fourth post-Atlantean age. In the fifth he is not the rightful king of this world because nothing can really be attained through his forces in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—in the sense of this fifth epoch. On the other hand what can make this epoch great must be brought about from the forces of the spiritual life, world-knowledge, world-conception. Man is shut off from the heavenly forces, he is confined in the materialistic period. But in this fifth post-Atlantean age he has the greatest possibility of making himself spiritual. No age has been so favourable to spirituality as this fifth epoch. Courage must only be found to drive the money-changers out of the Temple. Courage must be found to confront with the real, abstractions and things estranged from reality, to set against them full reality and therewith the spiritual reality.

Those who have read the constellations of the stars have also always known that certain help comes from particular planets for the various sections in the path of the sun. With a certain justification to each of these constellations—Moon-Cancer, Mercury-Gemini, Venus-Taurus, Mars-Aries, Jupiter-Pisces—have been assigned three decanates, as they are called. These three decanates represent those planets which have the mission, during a particular constellation, of very especially intervening in destiny, while the others are less active. Thus the decanates of the first post-Atlantean age, the Cancer-age, are Venus, Mercury, Moon; the decanates during the Gemini-age: Jupiter, Mars, Sun; the decanates during the Taurus-age: Mercury, Moon, Saturn; the decanates during the Aries-age: Mars, Sun, Venus. And the decanates during our age, the Pisces epoch, are very characteristically those forces which can serve us most, according to the celestial-clock: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars. Mars—here not in the same service as he had when he was in his house, when he went through Aries, but Mars now as representative power for human strength. But in the outer planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars you see what is connected with the human head, the human countenance, the human word-formation. Thus all that is connected with spirituality for this life between birth and death—we will speak next time of the other life between death and a new birth—is especially serviceable in this epoch. This epoch therefore is the one containing the greatest spiritual possibilities. In no age was it granted to men to do so much wrong as in this, since in none could one sin more deeply against the inner mission of the time. For if one lives with the age, then through the Jupiter force one transforms the force coming from the earth into a spiritually free humanity. And at one's disposal are the best, the finest powers of man which he develops between birth and death: the Saturn- Jupiter- and Mars-forces.

The World-Clock, my dear friends, stands favourably for this epoch, but this must give no occasion for fatalism.

This must not cause people to say: Well let's leave ourselves to World-destiny, everything is sure to be all right... rather is it to be the cause, if a man will—but he must will—of his finding endless possibilities just in our age. Only, meanwhile, men do not as yet will.

But it is always unfounded to say: Well, what can I do by myself? The world takes its course ... Certainly, my dear friends, such as we are now, the world does not pay much attention

to us today. But something else is the point. The point is that we are not to say, as the men of thirty-three years ago said—that they wouldn't bother themselves about anything! That is why things have become what they now are. The question in our time is that each for himself should begin to wish to escape from abstraction, to lay aside what is foreign to reality and so on, and to seek, each for himself, to approach the real and get beyond abstractions.

One must approach from such far-lying concepts, my dear friends, if one is to develop the important subject that is to occupy us—discussion of, so to speak, the becoming older of man, the going-towards-death, just as much as the originating-from birth, the coming-from-birth. Whereas today, pedagogy, practical education of children, proceeds entirely from recognizing that the child is born and develops as child, the time must come in which the child learns what it means to become older. But these things cannot be so simply elucidated, and so one must bring the ideas from far away. For one can say:

In order to overcome that estrangement from reality which today is the signature of the time, above all it is necessary for men to develop the will to attentiveness, the will to set Jupiter in motion. Jupiter is precisely the force that makes a perpetual call on our attentiveness. Men are so happy today if they need not be attentive, if they can resemble the sleeping Isis—I have purposely spoken of the sleeping Isis! The greatest part of mankind is sleeping through this present time and feels itself very, very well in so doing, for men hammer out concepts and stop short at these, and will not develop attention. The important thing to do is to examine the relationships of life. And the difficult years in which we are living must above all get us away from what has weakened human civilization for so long—inattentiveness, absence of will—and make us look into world conditions. It is not enough, my dear friends, merely to skim lightly over things.

It might easily seem, for instance, that I have spoken again and again from all possible aspects of the harmfulness of Wilsonianism from some subjective urge. It is from no subjective urging, but it is actually necessary today to point the way from countless illusionary ideas into the direction in which attention must be unfolded. We learn by the events of the time; if we sharpen our attentiveness we learn precisely from the events of today an immense amount of what we need in order to understand the great impulses which solely and alone can lead mankind out of the calamities into which it has brought itself. One must put certain questions to oneself if one is to be attentive to things. It is not the point to have some general view of something, but how one sees it, how one is able to put questions regarding the outer world. Spiritual Science has also this practical significance, that it gives us the impulse of questioning, of putting questions.

You see, my dear friends, that one reads nowadays of the so-called Peace negotiations of Brest-Litowsk. You know that various people are taking part in them. The chief people from Russia taking part—to single that out—are Lenin, Trotsky, a certain Herr Joffe and a certain Herr Kameneff, whose real name is Rosenfeld. Trotsky's name is Bronstein; Joffe is a rich trader from Cherson. Those are the principal negotiators. It is not uninteresting—but even important perhaps—to turn one's attention to the fact that for Herr Rosenfeld-Kameneff, it is only what the outer exoteric world calls pure chance that his head is still upon his shoulders. His head could long since have been sundered from his shoulders. For in November 1914, all sorts of delegates were arrested in Russia. One read about it at the time and knew of it in other ways. These delegates were imprisoned because they were accused of friendship with Lenin, who was abroad in a place not far from here. They believed at that time in Russia that Lenin had said ‘Of all evils that can happen to Russia in this war the fall of Czardom is the least.’ And so a number of delegates who were known to have communications with Lenin through letters and so on, were indicted. But at that time it was impossible to get hold of them. To be sure, all sorts of patriotic, Russian patriotic, words were spoken. Words like these were spoken: ‘Over the heads and mangled bodies of our fighters, there are traitors who are in connection with the shameful Lenin in Switzerland’—and so on. Then further proceedings took place in February 1915. Again a number of persons were accused, among them a certain Petrowski, among them also a certain Kameneff, alias Rosenfeld. Kameneff, in especial, counted among the accused at that time as the real Russian traitor-type, as a very particularly abominable fellow. And as the proceedings started, there was a general belief that it would not be long before his head ... would be off his shoulders. But Kameneff-Rosenfeld could bring forward proofs at that time that in all questions of the war, he had always taken a different stand from Lenin; so too, Petrowski; that they had no really serious friendship with Lenin. Kameneff-Rosenfeld could prove in particular that he had never wished for the victory of Germany, that a German victory could only be desired by un-Russian crafty comrades like Lenin with foreign interests, who, while they feel themselves too weak or too lazy, await the triumph of freedom from the sword of German generals. Those are the words that were spoken at these proceedings. And a certain Kerenski, who later played another role, was assigned to Messrs. Petrowski and Kameneff as counsel, advocate. He was the defender of Kameneff in that lawsuit, and he got him off. The charge against both Petrowski and Kameneff-Rosenfeld was of high-treason and treason against the country, but Kerenski could get them off and in his speech are to be found the fine words ‘The accused were very far from the plan to stab in the back those who are ready to die for the Fatherland, they resisted no other intrigue so strongly as the one proceeding from Lenin's secret confederacy.’ Owing to the fact that Kerenski's oratory and the other things that could be brought forward supplied proof that Petrowski and Kameneff had nothing in common with Lenin's views, they came out of it all with fairly sound skins. Petrowski is now the Minister of the Interior in the Government of Lenin and Kameneff is together with Herr Joffe the most important negotiator at Brest-Litowsk.

I am quoting these particular stories, my dear friends, and could relate hundreds and hundreds of similar ones! But it is very important to look at actualities; that is what I wished to say. And in order to get to know actualities one must observe the men who have to do with them—if indeed these things men are taking part in are actualities. It is vastly convenient to stand back and say: Yes, negotiations are going on at Brest-Litowsk between Russia and the Central Powers! That is abstraction, that is no actuality. One only approaches the real when one has the will to pay attention, to look really into the concrete. I wanted to bring the matter forward merely as an example to show that it is also necessary to study present-day history. Everyone today talks about current events, but how little is really known of the events of today, how little people actually know of what is going on, how little people even guess at what takes place; This is really astounding, and can only be understood through the unbelievable way in which our intelligence is trained. In fact our intelligence is trained in such a way that science misleads it on every hand to form judgments in the way I have described: If I have one coin, then I have one coin; if I have two coins, then I have none, I have nothing! If there is one tombstone of Till Eulenspiegel, then he can have lived; if, however, there are two tombstones with an owl and a looking-glass, then Till Eulenspiegel did not live! If I want to make an electricity experiment in the Physics classroom, I must carefully dry all the machines with warmed cloths so that nothing may be damp, for otherwise neither the ordinary electrical machine nor the inductive machine would obey me, nor anything else. But then immediately afterwards I relate: there out of the cloud—which in any case is thoroughly wet and which no Professor can have wiped with dry cloths—issues the lightning—and so could one go on. Have I not again and again given examples of how one person repeats what another says; no one examines it! Thus, for instance, one can very well hear: the fundamental principle of modern Physics is the conservation of energy, of force. That is to be traced back to Julius Robert Mayer. Although physicists and nature-researchers and other learned men proclaim him today a great hero, Julius Robert Mayer was once put in a lunatic asylum because he had published ‘absurd trash’, had claimed to have discovered a new principle. He was indeed really incarcerated in a lunatic asylum! The great credit due to Julius Robert Mayer has gone in particular to a University Rector, but I will not stress this further; it often comes up, as you know. What I will stress is this: again and again one sees ‘The Conservation of Energy—Julius Robert Mayer discovered it’. No one re-reads, but each one re-says what has been said. In Julius Robert Mayer's work nothing at all is stated in the form, in the definite form, in which the energy-principle is represented today, but it exists there in quite a different formulation, in fact in a reasonable formulation!

Another example may be considered which lies near our subject—Dr. Schmiedel has given me a magazine in which they support Goethe's ‘Farbenlehre’. Two learned gentlemen assert that Goethe knew nothing of the Fraunhofer lines: Dr. Schmiedel has put together four columns, purely of passages from Goethe in which he speaks of the Fraunhofer lines! But the learned gentry talk, pass judgment on the range of Goethe's optical knowledge, and let flow into such judgments—‘he knew nothing of the Fraunhofer Lines.’ They tell people impudent falsehoods, for naturally today in this ‘authority-free’ time, what a ‘learned’ man says is just as much a gospel for a large number of people as for many, many politicians what Mr. Woodrow Wilson says is a gospel. Thus in our present time it means a good deal if someone simply states: Goethe did not know of the Fraunhofer lines! Nor does it help much to prove it to people; for soon a third person says it and then a fourth. For the inattention, the thoughtlessness with which people live today is indeed great, while the will to look at the concrete truth is not forthcoming. Mankind moreover is much too much inclined to take a lively interest in abstractions, to become enthusiastic through abstractions.

With this I have only introduced what is yet to occupy us—the important principle which must enter into the culture of our time, and our pedagogy, the principle of man's becoming old, the becoming old of his physical body, which is linked with the becoming young of his etheric body. Of this then we will speak next time in all detail.

Good morning, gentlemen! Has anyone come up with anything today?

Mr. Pea: I would like to ask how it is that people today look at the starry sky the way they do, and yet the ancient Babylonians looked at it quite differently?

Dr. Steiner: Well, the question belongs there, to say something at all about the whole turnaround that has occurred in the way the world is viewed. You have this astronomy course here with Dr. Vreede, and you will see how difficult it actually is today to get through the computational and mathematical considerations.

You see, if you want to understand these things, you have to imagine, above all, that the ancients were indeed much, one might say, more spiritual than the present people. For a relatively long time, people were aware of those effects in nature that are actually quite unknown today. I would like to draw your attention to a few things in this regard. For one cannot understand what the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians wanted with their star science if one does not understand certain things that are actually quite unknown today.

For example, Rousseau still recounts the following: In Egypt, that is, in a warmer region, of which we have also heard such remarkable things in the last lesson, he had managed, by looking at them in a certain way, for example at toads that came towards him, by staring into their eyes, to make the toads stand still and unable to move at all. The toads were paralyzed. He always succeeded in doing this in warmer regions, in Egypt, for example. There he was able to paralyze the toads and later also kill them. But he wanted to do the same in Lyon. There a toad came towards him. He looked at it, stared at it, and lo and behold, he was paralyzed! He could no longer move his eye, was paralyzed, as if he were dead. It was only when people came and got a doctor, and he was given viper venom, snake venom, which just pulled him out of the cramp, that he came out of it. Then the story had turned. So you see, you just have to go from Egypt to Lyon for such effects, emanating from nature beings, to simply reverse themselves.

We can therefore say that there are indeed effects that are very closely related to human will, because it is an expression of human will. There are such effects. And these forces are also there. Because what was there a century ago is still there today, will always be there as long as the earth exists. But people today no longer want to know about such things and no longer care about them.

But, you see, gentlemen, this is still connected with a few other things. We have to take into account the place where they are made if we want to understand how certain things are. So in a sense we have to consult geography. But not the kind of geography that is valid today, because it does not talk about the difference between the effects of toads, starting from humans or towards humans, but it only talks about very external things.

Now I will tell you another example along these lines. You see, in the 17th century there was a scholar, van Helmont. This scholar still had much of what had been known earlier. For actually the things of earlier knowledge were only completely lost in the 19th century. In the 17th century they were still quite present, and in the 18th century they began to decline. But it was only in the 19th century that people became quite clever in their own opinion!

Van Helmont reflected on how one could know more than one can have through the ordinary human mind. Today, people do not think about how one could know more than one can know through the ordinary mind, because they believe that the human mind can know everything. But van Helmont, who was a doctor, did not think much of this human mind. He wanted spiritual knowledge.

But to gain spiritual knowledge in a spiritual way, as we try to do today in anthroposophy, was not yet possible at that time. Mankind had not progressed that far. So van Helmont used even older methods. He did the following, which I certainly do not recommend anyone imitate. It can't be done. And it wouldn't be as effective today as it was back then. But van Helmont did it.

You see, he took a certain plant that is a poisonous medicinal plant. It is prescribed for certain diseases. He took that. Of course, being a doctor, he knew that he could not eat this plant because it would kill him. But he licked the tip of the root, the lower part of the root. And now he describes the state he entered into in the following way. He says he felt as if his head had been switched off completely, as if he had become headless. He had become completely headless from it. Of course, his head had not fallen off, but he no longer felt it. So he could no longer know anything through his head. But now his abdominal area began to function like a head. And lo and behold, he received great revelations in the form of images, what we today in anthroposophy call imagination, in the form of images from the spiritual world. And that gave him a great jolt in life, a terrible jolt; because now he knew: you can not only say something about the spiritual world through the intellect, but you can also really see the spiritual world. He did not think through the nervous system, which is in the metabolic-limb system of man, but he looked at it and really saw the spiritual world. He thus received imaginations of the spiritual world.

This lasted two hours. After these two hours, he had a slight dizzy spell. Then he recovered. Now you can imagine that this, of course, gave his life a significant jolt; because from that moment on, he knew that one can see the spiritual world. But he knew something else as well. He knew that the head with its thinking is an obstacle to seeing the spiritual world.

Of course, we do not do it by licking a plant root like van Helmont – some people believe that, but it is nonsense – but through spiritual exercises, the thinking of the head itself is eliminated. The head is there only to grasp what is seen with the rest of the human organism. Thus the same process is evoked in a spiritual way that van Helmont evoked in an ancient way.

Now I am not telling you everything that would be necessary to refer you once more to spiritual training; that can be done on another occasion. But today, in answer to Mr. Erbsmehl's question, I am telling you that the two things I have told you are connected with the influence of the stars. And since the influence of the stars is denied altogether today, people no longer look at these things.

Van Helmont, on the other hand, had experienced this great shock in his life, and because he liked it, he wanted to repeat the experience more often, and he nibbled at the tip of the plant root again and again. But he did not achieve the same result.

Yes, but what does it mean that he did not achieve the same result? You see, it means that van Helmont did something later on that was no longer quite in accordance with the earlier thing. Van Helmont himself has no explanation for this. Of course I cannot tell you when van Helmont first nibbled on the tip of the plant root, because he does not give the date. But from what can otherwise be known from spiritual science, the following can be said.

You see, the first time van Helmont nibbled on the tip of the root, there was definitely a full moon. And he didn't pay attention to that. Later he didn't do it during a full moon anymore, and then he didn't succeed in the same way anymore. Something remained with him from the first time; he was always able to see something in the spiritual world. But he never managed to have such a jolt again as the first time.

Now, in the 17th century, he no longer knew that this was dependent on the moon and believed that it came from the plant root alone. But in older times, such things were known quite precisely. And therefore, in older times, this view was also very much alive everywhere, that the stars have a certain influence on the life of humans, animals and plants.

If one were to examine how such things happen, one would have to say: We do not eat poisonous plants, but we do eat plants, and we also eat the roots of plants. And while poisonous plants can only be used for healing, the other plants, which are not poisonous, are used as food. You see, gentlemen, the thing is this: When you eat a plant root, it is just as the poisonous plant root is under the influence of the moon. The moon has an influence on the growth of plant roots. Therefore, certain plant roots are very necessary for a certain human constitution. You know, for example, that there is also a population of the intestines, that is, the digestive organs, worms that are very troublesome. Now, for people who are prone to worms, beetroot is a good food. When the beetroot enters the intestines, the worms become angry, are paralyzed and then leave with the intestinal waste. So you can see that the root also has an influence on the life of these lower animals, the worms. The beetroot root does not poison us, but it poisons the worms. And again, you will find that the greatest effectiveness in expelling the worms comes from those plant roots that we eat during the full moon. Such things must be taken into account.

Now, you see, you can say: If you study the plant root, it turns out that the plants give us something that has a very strong effect on the metabolic limb system. You could even provide great help to people who have certain illnesses by giving them a root diet, by eating roots and by doing it in such a way that you give them at the time of the full moon and let them rest at the time of the new moon.

Now, you see, everything that can be observed in plants also has a meaning for humans, namely for human reproduction, for human growth. Children who have an addiction to staying small could also be nursed back to health with root food so that they would grow more easily; you just have to do it at the appropriate time in youth, between birth and the age of seven. The forces of the moon have a great influence on everything in the plant world and everything in the animal and human world that has to do with reproduction and growth. So you have to study the moon not only by pointing a telescope at it, but by studying what it causes on Earth. And with the Babylonians and Assyrians, those who were the scholars there, who were then called initiates, knew exactly: this plant is so under the influence of the moon, another so, and so on. They did not speak of the moon as a mere sphere, frozen up there in space, but they saw the effects of the moon everywhere. And these moon effects are mainly seen on the surface of the earth. They do not go deeper into the earth. They go just far enough to stimulate the roots of plants. They are not stuck in the earth at all.

You can find proof, for example, that the moon's forces do not go into the earth at all if you ask swimmers who swim in moonlight. They soon go out again because they always have the feeling that they are sinking. The water is pitch black. It does not go into the water, it does not go deeper at all, it does not connect with the earth, the moonlight. And so you see that the matter is such that the animals and plants are under the influence of the moonlight, which does not even come from the earth, but only from the very outermost surface to the roots of the plants. Now, this gives you a first insight into the starry sky.

Let us now turn to the example I gave you of Rousseau, who could paralyze, even kill, toads in the hot zone, but who himself became paralyzed in the temperate zone, in Lyon. What is the reason for this?

Yes, gentlemen, you just have to consider: when the Earth, which is a sphere, is almost a sphere, when it is illuminated by the sun, the sun's rays fall almost vertically in the hot zone. There they have a completely different effect than in the temperate zone, where they fall obliquely on the earth, at a completely different angle. And just as growth and reproduction in plants and in humans are influenced by the moon, so what its inner animal powers are, what is transmitted to the gaze, is influenced by the sun. These animalistic, bestial forces, which are indeed deeds, depend on the sun. So the sun, with its forces, causes humans in Egypt to be easily fascinated, paralyzed, even killed by toads, while in temperate zones they must yield to the influence of the toads themselves. So that depends on the sun again.

And then you will know that sometimes thinking itself, the whole inner life, is more difficult, sometimes easier. This again depends on Saturn, depending on where it is.

And so we have stellar effects for everything that occurs in human, animal, and plant life. Only the minerals are earthly effects. Therefore, with a science that is limited only to the earthly, one cannot possibly come to really understand the human being in any way. And one cannot know what the stars do if one does not look at the deeds of the stars.

Just imagine – today it's not so bad, but in the past it could still happen – that someone was a great statesman because of me. One could have asked those who lived with him in the house, who cooked for him, the cook, for example, who was not at all interested in statecraft, what the man does. She might have said: He has breakfast, lunch, and dinner; otherwise he does nothing at all, and during the rest of the time he goes out. Otherwise he does nothing. She would simply not have known what else he does.

Today's scholars only talk about the stars in terms of what they can calculate; they only know that. The others, the earlier people, were interested in what else the stars do. And that is why they had such a star science. They knew that the moon has a relationship to the plant in man, the sun to the animal in man, and Saturn has a relationship to the completely human in man. And so they went further.

Now they said to themselves: So the sun has a relationship to the animal in man. When the sun shines completely vertically, then man in the hot zone can have a strong effect on animals.

Now, you see, in Europe, for example, there is a strong effect of man on horses; but it will never be as intimately connected with the horse as it is with the Arabs, in the hot zone, because this relationship between man and animal cannot take place there. It depends on the vertical incidence of the sun's rays, on the effects of the sun.

Please continue, gentlemen. In Babylonia and Assyria, people knew that certain effects and forces emanated from the sun. But now people have observed the sun (it is being drawn). They said to themselves, there is the constellation of Leo, a group of stars out in the sky, and there is the constellation, let's say, of Scorpius. Now there is a certain time of the year when the sun is in the constellation of Leo, that is, it covers the lion, and you can see the lion behind the sun. At another time, the sun covers the constellation of Scorpius, or Sagittarius, or some other group of stars.

Now the Babylonians and Assyrians knew that these effects, which emanate from people onto animals, are strongest when the sun is in front of Leo; they become weaker when the sun moves on and is in Virgo or Scorpius. So they not only knew that there is a relationship between the planets and what people do, but they also knew that there is a relationship between the position of the sun and whether it covers Leo or covers Scorpio, because that is when these things change.

What do we do today? Today we simply calculate: the sun is in the zodiac in Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Pisces and so on; we calculate how long it will be in that constellation, when it will be in it and so on. We know that on March 21, the sun is in the constellation of Pisces, but that's all we know. The ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, for example, still knew that when Saturn is in a certain constellation, called the Pleiades, the human head is at its freest. They knew all this. They could easily judge this because they lived in a hotter area than we do and developed a certain science from which they understood the whole human being from the heavens.

If we can say that this science was such that it was applied to people – well, this science has gradually been forgotten. But in those days, the planetary system was understood, and the fixed starry sky was also understood. It was known that depending on whether a planet is here or there, it means this or that for human life. It was known that when the sun is in Leo, the sun exerts the strongest influence on the human heart.

The thing is this: people have now tried to see how it is with minerals. They have said to themselves: the stars affect plants, animals and humans; they do not affect minerals. Only the earth affects minerals. But the minerals in the earth did not just come into being today; they came into being much earlier and were also plants in ancient times. All minerals were plants. You know from the bituminous coal that it was a plant. But just like the bituminous coal, all other minerals were once plants. The moon had an influence on them, and in even earlier times, the sun also had an influence, and in still earlier times, Saturn also had an influence. And now they wanted to know which mineral, in much earlier times, when it was still a plant, had an influence from the sun. So they examined the effect of the mineral on humans and found out, for example, that when the sun is in front of Leo and has a strong influence on the heart, the same effect on the heart is produced as when gold is administered to humans. From this they concluded that the sun once had a great influence on gold. Or when Saturn is in the Pleiades constellation, then the strongest influence is on the human head. It becomes free. And then they tried to find out which mineral, when it was still an animal – because before they were plants, the minerals were animals – could have had the strongest influence from Saturn. Then they found that it was lead. And in this way one finds out that lead also has the effect of making the human head freer. Therefore, someone who gets a dull head and for whom this is caused by the fact that he carries out certain digestive processes, which should no longer take place in the head, through illness with the head, must be given lead.

And so we get a metal for each planet. And that is why the Babylonians and Assyrians wrote the sun with this sign:®. But they also wrote gold with this sign. They knew that the stars no longer have any influence on the minerals now that the earth is there, but they once had it. They wrote the sun and gold like this:®. We write the sun and the gold with the letters that are in our alphabet; but the ancients always made this sign:®. They also did not write “lead”, but they made this sign:, and that means both Saturn and lead. It would not have occurred to anyone in ancient times to write Saturn or lead with ordinary letters. If he wanted to write that, he wrote this sign Ahin. If he wanted to write “silver,” he wrote this sign: C. That means both the moon and silver. So that the Earth, insofar as it is metallic, was also related to the stars.

Yes, you see, gentlemen, you don't really know very much about man and his relationship to the universe if you can't go into such things.

Now, on to the next point. These things were generally known in ancient times. The fact of the matter is that when Christianity first spread, such knowledge was also spread throughout the more southern regions of Europe. For example, there is a book about nature from the first Christian centuries that contains much of this. Today, we need to know it again, otherwise we cannot find the confusing information there, because it is quite confusing; but it contains much of such ancient wisdom. But then came the time when Christianity limited itself only to the intellect, and gave up everything else for the dogma. That was the time when everything of such an ancient science was eradicated in Europe. Between the 5th and 11th or 12th centuries, work was actually done to eradicate this ancient science in Europe. And to a high degree, they succeeded. You see, it was like this: the people who practiced this ancient science in ancient Greece, in Rome, in Spain, that is, in southern regions, these people were at the same time already quite spiritually and physically depraved people. The history of Rome at that time is actually a terrible one; they were morally completely corrupt people. They still had the old science, but they could no longer maintain themselves as human beings, figures such as the autocrats Nero or Commodus.

The following story can be told about Commodus, for example, the Roman Caesar. This Commodus, like all Roman emperors, was an initiate. But what does “initiate” mean in this case? It is the same as if someone today bears some title by name. Every Roman emperor was considered an initiate from the outset because he was an emperor. This does, however, show that in those days science was held in very high esteem. Except for Augustus, the Roman emperors did not have this science. But they too were initiated into the mysteries; they were even able to initiate others themselves. Now there was a certain degree where the person being initiated had to be struck on the head. This is a symbolic act. The emperor Commodus gave this blow in such a way that the person concerned collapsed dead. You couldn't punish it because it was the emperor Commodus. Just as they were as “initiates”, they were as human beings.

Further north, there were still people who, although they later developed into the Central European culture, were still quite uncivilized at that time. But the Germanic peoples later conquered Italy, Greece and Spain. Only those who worked with pure logic, with pure thinking, were preserved there. That was to be only dogma. The other should not be understood. Thinking was limited only to the most external things. And so it has come about that what was old knowledge has been eradicated everywhere by schools and monasteries. And one can see how, in fact, only by devious means, I would say, through contraband, some of this Babylonian science has come to Europe. But as a rule it did not travel far. In Babylonia, such science was cultivated for a relatively long time.

But even into the Middle Ages there was a Greek empire in Constantinople. Yes, you see, gentlemen, they were strange figures! Just as the Polish Jews sometimes come to us with their caftans and their old scrolls, which are also not very well regarded sometimes, but are profoundly knowledgeable in Judaism, such figures also arrived in Constantinople again and again at a time when everything was being eradicated. They arrived with large, mighty parchment scrolls on which they had written many things. Now, you see, these parchment scrolls were taken from these strange figures in Constantinople and opened there. And so everything that came from Babylonia and Assyria was stored in Constantinople. And no one took care of it. And in Europe, everything was eradicated. It was only in the 12th and 13th centuries and later in the Middle Ages, with the decline of the empire, that these parchments were freed again, and many people stole them. They then traveled around Europe. All that was not yet deciphered by the learned but by the unlearned came from these parchment scroll.

And so a little knowledge was spread again in the Middle Ages. Such a little knowledge then had a stimulating effect on others again, otherwise there would not have been a van Helmont, Paracelsus and so on, if these people had not brought the parchment scrolls they had stolen to Europe and sold them there for a lot of money. As a result, a lot of things came to Europe again. And many secret societies still exist today because of all the knowledge that came to Europe. There are all kinds of orders, freemasons, odd fellows and so on; they would have no knowledge at all if it had not been brought to Europe from Constantinople in the parchment scrolls that were sold for a lot of money back then.

But this knowledge was not appreciated. If you were a learned canon like Copernicus, you did not go to the people who had such parchment scrolls. You were not allowed to do that. You would have lost all respect. Yes, but as a result, the old science also lost all respect. And a man like Copernicus first established the kind of science that we still have today, really still have today.

But then something very strange happened, gentlemen. The most beautiful thing about it is that Copernicus now founded a certain astronomical science, and it was already so that he no longer knew everything that had been known about it in the past, just as we no longer know it today. But the following period did not even understand what Copernicus said. Two sentences of Copernicus were understood; the third was no longer understood. Because if one understands the two sentences of Copernicus, then one believes that the sun is in the center, around the sun Venus, Mercury, Earth and so on revolve. That is taught today in all schools. But if you understand the whole of Copernicus, it is not at all like that. Copernicus himself still draws attention to the fact that the sun is stationary (it is drawn), with Mercury behind it, Venus behind it, the earth here and so on. In reality, all this revolves with the sun through space in such a spiral. You can read that from Copernicus if you want. So there is the strange fact that even Copernicus trampled on the old science, but that the more recent ones have not even understood Copernicus. Now people are beginning to understand Copernicus, that is, to see that he said three sentences, not just two; the third sentence was too difficult for people to understand. And so, little by little, astronomy has become what it is today: a mere calculation.

And now you can imagine: what remained of the old science was not achieved in the way we want to achieve something today. We have to achieve something today with the full clarity of mind. The ancients proceeded more instinctively. And so it is no longer understandable what the ancients meant by knowledge.

A few years ago there was a very interesting example of this. A Swedish scholar came across an old alchemical book that contained all sorts of information about lead and silver. It said that if you add lead to silver, this will happen, and if you add gold, that will happen, and so on. What did the scholar do? He said: Since we have written these things down, let's try to reproduce them! And he imitated them in his laboratory, took lead as it is available today, silver as it is available today, treated them in the fire as described there – nothing came of it!

Nothing could come of it, because what he read there were such signs. Now he believed that this sign © means gold; so I take gold and process it chemically. This sign r. means lead; so I take lead and process it chemically.

But the terrible thing was that the man with whom the Swedish scholar read this, the alchemist, did not mean the metals in this case, but the planets, and meant that if you mixing solar forces with Saturn forces and moon forces – what is described here actually refers to the human embryo – when solar and lunar forces act on the child in the womb, then this and that happens.

Now it happened to this Swedish scholar that he wanted to do in the retort with the outer metals what the old alchemist refers to as germination in the human womb. Of course that could not be right, because he should have seen the development in the human womb; then he could have figured it out. You see, so little is understood today of what was actually meant in this ancient science.

All of this will now show you how this question, which Mr. Erbsmehl asked, is actually to be answered. It is actually to be answered in such a way that one becomes aware: It is all well and good and right with modern science. Today, one can calculate exactly the position of a star; one can calculate the distance between it and another star, and one can also see through the spectroscope what color the light rays have, and from that one can deduce the material composition of the stars. But how the stars affect the earth is something that must first be researched again! And this must not be researched in the way that many people do today, by simply taking old books. Of course, it would be easy if one could simply take old books and find out what people no longer know today. But that is no longer of any use with Paracelsus, because people no longer understand him even when they read him with today's eyes. Rather, it is a matter of learning anew how to research what influence the stars have on people. And that can only be done with spiritual science, with anthroposophical spiritual science.

Then you come back to researching not only where the moon is, but how the moon is connected to the whole person. You realize that the child experiences the influence of the moon for ten lunar months, so ten times four weeks in the womb, and experiences the influence of the moon in such a way that during this time the full moon is experienced eight, nine, ten times. Now, the child swims in amniotic fluid and is therefore a completely different being before it is born, protected from the forces of the earth. That is the important thing, that it is protected from the forces of the earth, and since it also has the influence of the other stars, it has the influence of the moon.

You see, it should be the case that today at our universities and at our schools, and even at the elementary schools in a certain way, as far as that can be, things would be studied quite differently, that above all the human being would be studied, the human heart, the human head, and in connection with that the stars would be studied. And at the universities, there should first be a description of how the human germ develops from the very small human seed through the first, second, third, fourth, fifth week and so on. This description exists, but the other description, of what the moon does during the same period, does not exist. Therefore, one can only have a science of the physical development of man if, on the one hand, one describes what happens in the mother's womb and, on the other hand, one describes the actions of the moon.

And again, one can only truly understand how, for example, teeth change around the seventh year if one not only describes - as is done today - how the milk tooth is, the other grows in after it, and the milk tooth is pushed out, but if one again has a sun science; because this depends on the forces of the sun.

And likewise, when a person becomes sexually mature, today one describes the purely physical processes. But these depend on Saturn; one needs a Saturn science. So one cannot proceed as one does today, describing each thing separately. Because then, of course, it turns out as it did in a hospital in a large European city. A man came to the university hospital with a spleen disease, as he believed. He asked: “Which department should I go to with a spleen disease?” He was told that he should go to any department. Unfortunately, he mentioned in passing that he also had a liver disease. He was told: “You can't have anything from us, you have to go to a completely different hospital, that's for people with liver disease, and the ones we have here are only for people with spleen disease.” He was now “between two bundles of hay”, like the well-known donkey, between two bundles of hay that were the same size and looked exactly the same. It is a famous logical image of the freedom of will! They said: What does a donkey do when he is between two bundles of hay that are the same size and smell the same? If he wants to choose the left one, then he thinks: the right one tastes just as good; if he wants to choose the right one, he thinks: the left one is just as good. And then he goes back and forth and dies of hunger between these two haystacks! So it was with the two diseases, he did not know where to go, and actually could die between his decision inside whether he belonged to the department for liver diseases or to the department for spleen diseases!

I only mention this to show that today everyone only knows a very small part of the world. But you can't know anything like that today! Because if you want to know something about the moon today, you have to go to the observatory and ask the people there. But they don't know anything about the origin of man. So you have to ask a gynecologist, an obstetrician, a female professor. But he doesn't know anything about the stars. But the two things belong together.

This is the source of the misery of today's knowledge: that everyone knows a piece of the world, but no one the whole. That is why it is, and it is based on it, that science today, when it is presented in popular lectures, is so terribly boring. Of course, gentlemen, the subject must be boring if you only tell people what is just a small part of the subject.

Imagine you want to know what a chair looks like that is not here, and someone describes the wood to you; but you want to know how it is designed. Then you will be bored if the person only describes the wood of the chair to you. So today it is boring to learn, as it is called today, anthropology, the science of the physical human being, because what is important is not described. And if it is described, it has no relation to the matter at hand.

So star science will only come into its own when it is combined with human science. And that is what it is about; that is the way I can answer this question for you today in a way that is appropriate to the subject. It is really the case that one must understand such important things as those I have told you about Rousseau and van Helmont - which are there, and which cannot be understood from the earth at all. People have become materialistic even in terms of words. For example, what was it called when someone could paralyze animals with his gaze? It was called magnetism. Yes, but later on the word magnetism was only applied to iron, to the magnet. And when people talk about it in science today, they only talk about leaving it with iron and not abusing magnetism. Only quacks still talk about magnetizing a person; but they can no longer imagine what it means. To see through such talk, a spiritual science is needed.

Next time at nine o'clock on Wednesday.

We will now go on to consider the children of whom we had not time to speak yesterday.

There was a little girl of ten years old, who was suffering from loss of memory. She is only in the Second Class at school (where the children would be mostly about seven years old.) She has adenoids. The symptom is connected with an excess of etheric powers of growth in the region of the bladder, which condition is then reflected in the head. Thus we have here a case where the physical origin of the trouble is immediately patent. The girl is ten years old—that is to say, she is at the age when, as I have repeatedly pointed out, it is particularly important that the teacher shall have made the right relationship with the child.

The child herself has of course, so to speak, slept through the antecedent facts and processes that have led up to the present moment. The inflamed condition that shows itself in the neighbourhood of the bladder and has its reflection in the upper part of the organism is clear evidence of the fact that the ether body is not properly at home in the organism—the reason being that its co-operation with the astral body is not able to come about as it should. You must never lose sight of the fact that where a process of this kind occurs, which finds expression in the soul organism, then its source and origin has to be sought in the subtler, finer organisation of the body; for the coarser, cruder organisation cannot put us on the right track in our search. An irregularity in the higher organisation of man is, naturally, more easily noticed than in the lower organisation. In this child, owing to a defective astral body, the ether body does not function properly, with the result that what the child receives by way of impressions fails to penetrate into the organisation. What we have to do, therefore, if we are to help such a child, is to strengthen as much as ever possible the impressions we intend her to receive; in all our work with her, we must see to it that strong impressions are brought to bear on the child.

For consider how it is with memory. Memory is dependent on a right and proper organic relation between physical body and ether body; astral body and I have no part in the retention of impressions in memory. As you know very well, dreams make their appearance only when astral body and ego have begun to enter into the physical and ether body, not before. As far as astral body and ego are concerned, everything is forgotten between the times of falling asleep and awakening. The impressions are left lying in the part of the human being that remains in bed. But when, as in the child we are considering, this part is not properly organised, then what is left there of the impression of the day does not succeed in embodying itself into it. Our first task will be therefore to induce strong impressions, in order to bring it about that the higher organisation—I and astral body—shall be roused to an energetic activity within the lower organisation—ether body and physical body.

I do not know whether the experiment has yet been made of testing the little girl's memory for simple folk-melodies? (Frl. Dr. K.: “She finds that easier.”) So the capacity for receiving impressions of this nature is, you see, present. Starting from it, we should now try to work on further. We should, for example, take with the child little poems where a refrain is repeated—say, after every three lines. She will in this way receive a powerful impression of rhythm; and then later on, the moment will come when we can approach her with impressions that are without rhythm. Do not imagine that any substantial success can be looked for under three or four years—that is, not before puberty. Working on these lines, we must first reach the point where rhythmical impressions are able to act upon the child, and then go on to non rhythmical impressions. In this way we shall be able to achieve something in the educational sense. The therapy we have already indicated; the girl should have compresses with Berberis vulgaris 10 per cent, and Curative Eurythmy: L—M:S—U.

Note that an inner perception underlies the giving of these particular sounds in Curative Eurythmy. The formative, moulding influence will enter right into the mobile astral body. Then the M, as I have told you, is the sound that places the whole organism into the out-breathing, and so the astral organisation will there meet the etheric. With S, the aim is to bring the astral body into powerful and living activity—but it must be an activity that is restrained, held in check; and for this purpose the U is added. These are the measures that suggested themselves when we had the child immediately before us; here we are simply recalling them. Compresses of Berberis vulgaris are prescribed because the causes of inflammation require to be neutralised, and can be by this means.

And then we had a sixteen-year-old boy, a kleptomaniac of the very same type as the little fellow who was brought before you a few days ago, and in whom you could see a perfect example of kleptomania. Your boy at Lauenstein will have to be treated on exactly the same lines. You will need however to watch whether the impressions you bring to him link up with this or that. The results of our work with kleptomaniacs can differ quite considerably according to the education the children have already received.^E6

And now we must go on to speak of the child who is so restless and fidgety. A sleepy, backward little boy, who has not learned to speak and is behind-hand with all the education he should have received in the first epoch of life. You can see at once what is lacking; the child has entirely failed to get hold of the principle of imitation, he has never attempted to imitate. This means, in other words, that his I and astral body are incapable of bringing his organs into movement. He is a most lovable little fellow, but it is extraordinarily difficult for him to overcome the longing that he has in his physical body for rest and quiet. The first thing to be done is to give him Tone Eurythmy. That will be the way to help him on. (You will understand, I can do no more here than indicate the ideal.) If the boy does Tone Eurythmy properly, it can come about that he is so stirred and stimulated in his astral body that the rhythm begins to take hold also of the ether body.

Another thing you must do is to let him repeat after you rhythmical sentences, so that he plunges, as it were, right into sound as such. Take, for instance, the line: “Und es woget und woget und brauset und zischt.” [From Schiller's Der Taucher.] You must go through the sentence with the child rather slowly (you will discover for yourselves what is just the right pace), first forwards and then backwards. (For this particular case, I purposely say “woget” instead of “siedet”, since we are here using the line with a therapeutical end in view.) Go on doing this again and again, forwards and backwards. Wherever possible, the same method should also be followed with a sequence of vowels. In this way we can awaken the child, inwardly. Surprise, amazement, begin to rise up in him, as we get him to intone A (ah), then E (eh), I (ee); and then backwards, I, E, A; then again, A, E, I, and so on. The child gradually wakes up, and, despite all difficulties, the principle of imitation will begin at last to work. It will be necessary to take the child by himself, and to see to it that imitation has its place in everything you do with him; always stop after a few moments and get him to intone after you.

And then, in addition, some therapeutical treatment will be needed; and here you will have to ensure that two opposite influences work together. First, you must provide a dispersing influence that works centrifugally and drives the substantiality of the organism to the circumference. Hypophysis always works in this way. For the child we are considering, hypophysis must not however be used just in the way we use it for rickety children in whom we definitely want to induce dispersal. Here we have to call into action at the same time the opposite principle that works centripetally. You will accordingly need to find something which will have, while working together with hypophysis, the tendency to build up the human organism out of substance. Both Carbo Vegetabilis and Carbo Animalis are able to do this. You could therefore use Carbo Animalis, alternating it with the hypophysis. The Carbo Animalis will supply the form principle, and then in the hypophysis cerebri you will have the organising principle that tends to encourage organic growth.

One of the most important things to bear in mind, when you are starting a Home for Curative Education, is the necessity for constant observation. Each single person who is helping in the work must observe everything he or she takes in hand to do with the children. And it should really be so that we accompany—and in that way strengthen—all that we do with a certain inner trust and confidence.

In the case of this child, our worst trouble will be, not with the boy himself—you will soon be able to notice progress in him—but with the parents. The mother is firmly convinced it is for us to do wonders with him, and that quickly. I have heard that she even wants to come with the child. (One of the teachers interposed: “She is only bringing him to us.”) That is better, it is a relief to hear that you will not have the mother there with you. But with a child of this kind, it will, in any case, be imperative to hold your own—even with a certain obstinacy—in face of the demands and expectations of the parents. These demands are perfectly understandable, but sometimes terribly foolish and unwise. The parents of such a child do not, and cannot, know what is right and necessary for him.

Now it will be very good if you can bring such a child even physically also into the alternating conditions that can be induced by means of the A E I, I E A, etc. I will tell you an excellent way of doing this. First, put the child into a bath of moderately warm water, and then, comparatively quickly, give him instead a douche, also of a moderate temperature. You will by this means call to life that which needs to be roused to life and activity. As a matter of fact, wherever an abnormality expresses itself in laziness and inertia, this measure cannot fail to have good effect, so long as we are careful not to overdo it. Do not be anxious if, immediately after a bath treatment of this kind has been begun, the children get rather excited. That will pass. You will see, a reaction will come, and a more balanced condition gradually establish itself.

And now we must pass on to another boy who sees everything in colours. He is the boy, you remember, who never has any money! I can see him there before me as I speak. The fundamental fact about this child is that he is incapable of making the right approach to the external world; he remains rooted in himself. In order to render this phenomenon intelligible, I shall have to explain it for you in plastic terms. The boy cannot make his way out into the external world; consequently his I organisation is perpetually pushing at his astral body from within. This gives rise to an inner clumsiness—better expressed, an inner slovenliness. But along with this, in connection with the continual pressure on the astral body, there develops also a delicate sensitiveness; so that the boy has really something gentle and noble about him. And that goes together with the seeing in colour. He sees colours because he is able to be awake in his astral body.

Now, we cannot begin to do anything in the way of education for this boy until we have a clear perception of a state of affairs that is developing in him all the time in increasing measure—namely, a certain dim hankering after ideals, but at the same time a starting-back, a flinching from the world as from something he cannot get on with. The boy can be taught entirely on the lines of Waldorf School education, but everything will depend in his case on how you yourself feel and behave towards him; you must preserve all the time a natural trust and confidence in him. There is really hardly anything more than this to be said.

Take for example, writing. The boy writes something like this, does he not? Now it will be for you to set to work and take the utmost care and pains that he shall gradually change his handwriting and develop it into a finely formed script. And you will find that while he is doing this, there will be clear signs also of a transformation taking place in his whole inner constitution. When he shows a tendency to boast and talk big, then you must at once, on the basis of the trust he has learned to place in you, contrive some means to make his boasting ridiculous.^E7

I was speaking to you yesterday about the albinos, and I came to the point where I said we need to find the cosmic impulse that can have influence in such cases. Let us now first ask our expert on cosmic constellations whether she has noticed anything special in these or other horoscopes that albinos have in common. (To Dr. Vreede) Did you notice that among the outer planets, Uranus and Neptune were particularly prominent? (Dr. Vreede replied: “Yes, there are many such aspects. Apart from that, I should not have anything special to say about them.”) I address my question purposely to you, because you are frequently engaged in the contemplation of horoscopes and have probably often had such things in your mind. Up to now, I have from you only these two that we are considering. We are here treading new ground, and it will be best if we go forward entirely in the spirit of discovery. A great many factors in the case might well claim consideration, but I would like us to give our attention for the moment to the following.

Consider the human being. We divide him into certain members. In accordance with that memberment which arranges the whole nature and being of man rather from the etheric principle, we divide him, as you know, into physical body, etheric body, sentient body, which last we then bring into relation with sentient soul; after that we have intellectual or mind soul (which the Greeks call soul of force or power), and consciousness or spiritual soul. And then we come to spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man. And all these several members reveal themselves to us as forming together a single, relatively independent whole; taken all together, they compose man. But now, the way in which the members are put together to compose man, differs in each single human being. One person will have a little more power and strength in his ether body, and correspondingly less in his physical body; another a little more power in the consciousness soul; and so on. And right in the midst of all these members stands man in his very own individuality, which individuality goes through repeated earth lives and has the task of bringing under control this whole connection of various members, has the task of uniting them, on the principle of freedom, under one individual ordering.

And now let us see how that which comes to man from cosmic realms unites itself with these several members. The influence of the Sun, which works strongly on man as a whole, works strongest of all on the physical body. In connection with the etheric body we find that the strongest influences come from the Moon; in connection with the sentient body it is the influences of Mercury that work with special strength; and in the sentient soul we have the strongest influences of Venus. The strongest influences of Mars serve to help the development of the intellectual or mind soul, and of Jupiter the consciousness or spiritual soul, whilst Saturn brings its influences to bear especially on the spirit self. And the members that have not yet developed in man find their support in Uranus and Neptune—the vagrants, so to speak, among the planets, who attached themselves at a later time to our planetary system. In Uranus and Neptune therefore we shall expect to find planetary influences which, under normal conditions, exert no very strong influence upon the constellation at birth.

You know of course, from other anthroposophical lectures how strong is the influence of the Moon on man, via the ether body. I need not remind you of how the Moon is connected with the whole principle of heredity, of how it impresses all manner of forces and powers into the model of the physical body, which comes from the parents. Beginning with the earliest embryonic development, this Moon influence determines the whole direction that development shall take in the child.

Now it is possible for a constellation to occur where the impulse from the Moon is sufficiently strong for the human being descending to Earth to receive by way of heredity a disposition to be drawn down into the metabolic organisation. Or again, it can also happen that the Moon influences are to some extent wrested away, turned aside, whilst influences that come from quite another quarter and that refuse to tolerate the Moon influences, namely Uranus and Neptune, attract what should really be in the sphere of the Moon's influence: Other constellations are also possible. But in the case of the children we are considering, the latter is the constellation that we find; and we have here a clear instance of how by looking at what the horoscope shows we can see what is really the matter.

Take first this horoscope (of the elder sister). It will probably have struck you that you find here in this region, Uranus together with Venus and Mars. You will not really need to carry your considerations any further than this triangle. Here then are Mars, Venus and Uranus. Consider first Mars. For this child, who was born in 1909, Mars stands in complete opposition to the Moon. Mars, which has Venus and Uranus in its vicinity, stands—itself—in strong opposition to the Moon. Here is the Moon and here is Mars. And Mars pulls along with it Uranus and Venus.

And now I would ask you to pay careful attention also to the fact that the Moon is at the same time standing before Libra. This means, the Moon has comparatively little support from the Zodiac, it wavers and hesitates, it is even something of a weakling in this hour; and its influence is still further reduced through the fact that Mars (which pulls along with it the Luciferic influence) stands in opposition to it.

Now let us turn to the horoscope of the young child. Again, here are Venus and Uranus and Mars near together, the three of them covering between them no more than this section of the heavens. So you see, once again these three are found near to each other. In the case of the elder girl we saw that they were standing in opposition to the Moon, which was at the time standing in Libra. On this second horoscope, Mars, Venus and Uranus are in close proximity, exactly as before; but when we examine more nearly the position of Mars, we find it is not, as before, in complete opposition to the Moon. It is however very nearly so. Although the younger child does not come in for a complete opposition, there is an approximation to opposition.

But what strikes us as still more remarkable is that when we come to make our observation of the Moon, we discover she is again in Libra—while being at the same time, as we have seen, almost in opposition to Mars, which latter drags Uranus and Venus along with it. We have therefore again a background of Libra. I am not saying that it must have been so; we have, you see, no properly authorised records of the births. On the first horoscope the Moon is in Libra, and here on the second too. (Dr. Vreede said: “It is curious that in both there is also the same constellation between Moon and Neptune.”) That would have to be explained on its own account. Horoscopes require to be interpreted quite individually. It is not a matter for surprise that there is this similarity in the two horoscopes, considering that the girls are sisters. That we find in the elder child a stronger opposition than in the younger (who has been influenced by the elder) is also no cause for astonishment. What is important for us is that we find here a constellation that is perfectly intelligible, a constellation that, when interpreted, shows us the following.

Mars, who is the bearer of iron, makes himself independent of the principle of propagation—independent, that is, of the Moon. He brings away from its true mission that which comes to man through the Venus principle and is connected with love. Mars tears this out of its true path of action, does not allow it to be in connection with generation, nor afterwards with growth; with the result that that which rightly stands in connection with the growth forces and should live in the lower part of the body, presses up into the head organisation. Consequently we find that in the growth process that takes place within the child iron will be lacking, whereas everything that tends to be in conflict with iron, notably sulphur, will be present to excess.

We have therefore here to do with an extraordinarily strong predestination of the will, and our first concern must be to see that we treat the nerves-and-senses organisation of these two children with the utmost care and delicacy. Their nerves-and-senses organisation is, as a whole, slippery and unstable, unable to endure strong impressions; and we must be ready at every moment with the right thing to do, we must sense it in our finger-tips! A fine feeling and tact is needed in all one's dealings with the nerves-and-senses organisation of children of this kind; especially must we avoid straining the eyes in reading and such-like occupations. Try to impart your teaching without requiring the use of the eyes at all—I mean, without any reading. On the other hand, accustom the eyes to colour impressions where the colours shade off gently into one another. For instance, let the colours of the rainbow pass over from one into another, slowly, the child following all the time with her gaze. There you have, you see, measures that will be quite easy to carry out.

If you are also to treat the children therapeutically, there is just one thing I must tell you, and that is, that after puberty the remedies will no longer be very effective. And that can be an important indication for you, since the one child was born in 1909, and the other in I921; the effects of treatment can in their case be thoroughly observed and the difference noted.

What we want to do for a child of this kind is to introduce powerful radiations of iron, letting them stream up from the metabolism-and-limbs organisation. The way to bring this about is to take pyrites in very fine powder form and lay it on a surface that transmits iron radiations only very slightly. A glass surface would fulfil this condition, but naturally you cannot use glass. So you must try using a clean grease-saturated paper; best of all would be a very thin parchment-like paper, but it must be really thin so that it clings to the body. Ordinary paper that is made from linen rags is no good. You must rub resin or something of that sort over the paper and sift the pyrites powder finely on to it. By this means you can bring the iron radiation to enter right into the child. Lay the paper all along the legs and on the shoulder-blades, and then try the application of a “drawing” compress—say, of cochlearia—on the forehead.

If this treatment be applied to the organism at the time when the change of teeth is taking place—a time when particularly powerful streamings and counter-streamings (or radiations) are going on—much can be done towards overcoming the instability.

Such is then the result of our investigations so far. The problem must of course be the subject of further study. Up to now, the world has done nothing with albinos except expose them for show, getting them to tell their tale: “I am rather fat, I have white hair, I can see nothing by day, I can see better at night.” This is the kind of thing that actually goes on with albinos today, and there is on the whole very little knowledge about them; for the scientists of our day do not concern themselves with problems of this nature. But directly we turn our attention to striking facts such as those I have been putting before you here we begin to see how strongly the cosmic influence is working, wherever this complete irregularity is present in the mutual disposition of the members of the human being.

And now I should like you to bring forward any questions you are wanting to ask.

(Question: “That we find ourselves in the situation of having questions to ask has come about through Dr. L. approaching Frau Dr. Wegman on quite other grounds. He was of opinion that the mood of those attending the lectures was not as it should be.”)

It is surely quite unnecessary that we should waste time discussing what is after all a simple matter. Dr. L. came to me and explained that there was a deep feeling among the Lauenstein members of the importance of the task they were undertaking; they felt they were about to embark upon what would prove to be a new mission within the Anthroposophical Movement, and it would surely be good if the karmic connections between those who are engaging in the work could be thoroughly explained and understood. (l. shakes his head.) Well, anyway, let us concentrate our attention on the main point. What L. said amounted to this: The Lauenstein members believe that they have now set out upon a task that is entirely new and of fundamental importance; to which I replied that in that case what they will need before all else will be sincerely and faithfully to learn what is being given in this course. If it should prove that anyone is not satisfied with what is being given in this course of lectures and would rather remain in the realm of abstractions, would rather set to work, for example, to organise a completely new movement, then all I can say is that such an attitude would be no more than the natural result of practices that have been followed only too long among our members. Anyone taking such a path would find himself in danger of megalomania. Nevertheless, in order that the partly justified feelings in the background may have ample opportunity to find expression, I have asked you to put your questions. And so now our best plan will be to ask and consider together quite practical questions.

(S. asks, what connection has the Lauenstein Home with the fact that Trüper [Johannes Trüper, 1855-1921, Founder and for many years Leader of the Youth Sanatorium in Jena.] was the first to undertake the education of backward children.)

What do you mean? That Trüper was the first to concern himself with these children and do something for them? You are attaching too much importance to the work of this man. I do not think that the Educational Homes for backward children which were started in Hanover—very early, comparatively speaking, and not without success—can have been influenced by Trüper. In point of fact, the first step in this direction dates much farther back. But what has been lacking all along is just the very thing that can enable one to look right into the whole being of the child. For we have really no means of discovering the simplest facts without the help of anthroposophical knowledge. And the converse is no less true, that the human beings themselves are constantly affording us new and deeper insight into Anthroposophy.

Consider how it is, for instance, with regard to Goethe's Theory of Metamorphosis. In the form it was able to develop under Goethe himself, who was after all a clever man, it appears to us today, does it not, as an abstract theory? It abounds in statements and premises, but has to be content with showing how the leaf lives in the blossom, how a petal changes into a stamen, etc.—treating, that is, of no more than an elementary metamorphosis. When it goes on to speak of animal and man, all that the theory can do is to adduce—rather shyly—the transformation of the vertebrae into the bones of the skull. In no realm of nature does it get beyond the elementary stage. I myself was amazed and perplexed. Did it never dawn upon Goethe—so I kept asking myself all through the eighties—that the whole brain is a transformation of one single ganglion? Spiritually, I could see that it was so; it had dawned upon him. Then, later on, I made a discovery, which showed that it was only Goethe's discreet reserve which had restrained him all the time from giving expression to the truth he clearly perceived. When I came to Weimar, I found in a little note-book—which was written all in pencil—this note: The brain is a transformed main ganglion. It was not until the nineties of last century that that sentence of Goethe's found its way, through me, into print. Suddenly it was as though a new author made his appearance; Goethe became thenceforward the most fruitful of authors.

But now consider what a long way it is from the Theory of Metamorphosis as taught by Goethe to the Theory of Metamorphosis as demonstrated in the one-year-old little child who was lying there before you a few days ago—normal in other respects, but metamorphosed into a giant embryo. That was an instance of a metamorphosis of retardation, where the embryonic condition was retained after birth. And you will yourselves come to acquire a true insight into this kind of metamorphosis if you continue to practise again and again the meditation I gave you yesterday, when I told you: Here is a circle, here is a point; there the circle is a point, there the point of a circle, and so (see Figure 3.). Over and over again you must, in meditation, let the circle steal into the point, let the point expand to the circle. As you do this, you will find that something reveals itself to you, namely, how the metabolism-and-limbs organisation comes into being out of the head organisation. Continue with the meditation until, when you say to yourself: The point is a point, the circle is a circle, you are sensible of the head; and when you say to yourself: The point is a circle, the circle is a point—when, that is, you assert the converse—you discover that you are gliding right down into the metabolic system. You will then have before you the developed Theory of Metamorphosis, and you will see quite clearly that it is only through this kind of thinking that we can ever hope to attain insight into the nature of the defects in backward children. And this is what we have been attempting in these lectures.

Search for the impulses that are already there in the place where you are beginning your work; find what impulses are there that can inspire you with enthusiasm and so make for a continuity. Ask yourselves the question: What antecedents are there here which we can link onto?

Now, as you know, a remarkable historical figure is associated with Jena. Once, long ago, the German Abbot Hildebrand, feeling within him—exactly as do the youth of today—great gifts and capacities, moved too, as they also are, by religious and spiritual impulses (but in his case the spiritual was methodically conceived), went to Rome, became Pope Gregory VII, and strongly influenced the direction given from Rome to the course of affairs in European history. We have thus a powerful Roman impulse, spreading its activity out over Europe, mediated through an impulse that derives from the order of Cluny and has been transplanted into the Roman stream. You should study that passage of history. For the remarkable thing is that in his next life on Earth this individuality is drawn to Jena and appears there as Ernst Haeckel. The development is really just the same as happens in the human being when the disintegrating principle inserts itself, dovetails itself, in a regular manner into the upbuilding principle. So you have here in Jena a centre for currents of influence that are in direct and explicit opposition to the current of Roman activity. Jena is the meeting place of opposite streams.

Haeckel made a speech in Jena on his sixtieth birthday. He was speaking on that occasion at the Phylogenetic Institute. Listening to him, one could really have the feeling that the old Hildebrand was standing there before one. The same manner of expression, the very same kind of delivery—speaking slowly, with a good deal of “padding”, weighing the words carefully, like someone who has done quite a lot of speaking and yet never made himself quite master of the art. Another curious thing could be noticed. Abbot Hildebrand, who had of course always very much the air of being a strict Pope—he would stand there before you as the very mouthpiece of the Church—had, at the same time, this trait in his character: he was fond of relating stories that made the rest of the company smile—not overmuch, but with pleasure and enjoyment. And now with Haeckel, it was really quite delightful to watch how he would sometimes at dinner between the courses fall into the mood of telling funny anecdotes out of his own life, and loosening in this way the tongues of the rest of the company. This sixty-year-old man with his childlike smile would lead the others on, and by his whole manner and behaviour bring them right away from the subject in hand. I can still remember how amusing it was to see Oskar Hertwig sitting there in travail with his speech that could not be brought to birth, while Haeckel went on and on with one funny story after another.

You would, I believe, find yourselves well repaid if, now that I have laid for you this esoteric foundation, you were to get hold of this speech that Haeckel made on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. It is not long, but remarkable for being personal and at the same time extraordinarily objective. And then compare with it the speech delivered by Prof. Gärtner, who invariably manifested a disinclination to see in Haeckel a person of any particular historical significance. Indeed, he expressly states in his speech that this time he will leave out of account that Haeckel is the author of the “History of the Creation” and concentrate attention on the vast number of microscope slides that Haeckel has made; for we shall find, he says, that Haeckel has made more slides than all the rest of us put together—a most remarkable fact; actually the rest of us have made so few, that taken all together ours fail to reach the number made by Haeckel alone. A pedant, a regular pedant, this Gärtner! Really quite absurd! In Haeckel's speech you have something so alive, so quick with fresh, new life! Then the scaffold is brought in, and Gärtner comes forward and performs the execution, while the physiologist (a Catholic clerk in holy orders!) looks sadly on.^E8

But what a power Haeckel was amid all that company! What a rejuvenating influence he had upon them! Even the young students grew suddenly brilliantly clever, and showed quite remarkable powers of imagination. Look up the little book where all the songs are recorded which were sung that day. You will find a most witty account of how an archaeopteryx sharpened his bill on a church steeple. That book of songs will enable you to form some picture of the fresh young life that suddenly blossomed forth in Jena on that day.

This event too I would commend for your meditation. By entering meditatively into the event, you will come to have an intimate experience of the place occupied by Jena in the spiritual evolution of Europe.

• E6. At Lauenstein, Dr. Steiner said that the pathological symptoms which reveal themselves in this boy are due to some suffering he underwent in his previous incarnation. He had perhaps been alone for a long time—stranded maybe from a shipwreck and forced to spend long and tedious days in solitude. This experience was then transformed and shows itself today as weakness of the ego.
  
  For treatment, the boy should have sugar injections D 6, seven injections in fourteen days. Afterwards he should be sponged with starchy water, this treatment also to be continued for fourteen days. The body will have to change the starch into sugar, and that will provide another means of stimulating the ego.
  
  Dr. Steiner's advice for the education of the boy was as follows: He must keep a diary, recording all that he has done right through the day. That will strengthen his I. He should have stories told him with pedagogical purpose in them, stories in which it turns out that people who steal get the worst of it. The magpie is always thieving, and in consequence the other birds will have nothing to do with it. Then, the boy should be taught some practical job. He should learn how boots are made. “He could make boots for your whole family!” He could also learn gardening. And he should be encouraged to solve all manner of little practical problems. For example, how the door of a train might be so constructed that as soon as someone got on to the step, the door would open (and afterwards close again) automatically—and other things of that kind.
• E7. In reference to this boy, Dr. Steiner spoke of a “dwarfed or stunted pituitary body.”
  
  Therapy: Injections of hypophysis (pituitary body) and treatment with arsenic, as indicated in the lecture.
  
  Curative Eurythmy: L, M, S, R.
  
  Note 8.
• E8. The title of this booklet is Lieder zum Commers in Jena am 17 Februar 1894. The verse referred to, from the song 'Zoologischer Jubelgruss' by Edwin Bormann is as follows:
  
  Staunet nicht, O Festkumpane,
  Wenn ein Archaeopt'ryx jetzt
  Eben an der Rathausfahne
  Seinen werthen Schnabel wetzt;
  Wer heut' heimwärts sucht die Pfade
  Geh' voll Fürsicht Schritt für Schritt,
  Dass er auf der Promenade
  Nicht'nen Plesiosaurus tritt. :' :
  
  An English equivalent might read:
  
  On your homeward way, good people,
  Should you chance to find a sleek
  Pterodactyl, on the steeple
  Whetting of his noble beak,
  Do not be surprised or flustered,
  But turn the corner with some care,
  For you'll very, very likely
  Find a Dinosauros there.

In earlier lectures we have heard that the imperishable part of the human being which at death leaves the physical body and, to a considerable extent, the etheric body too, passes through a life between death and the new birth, and that during this period its forces are drawn from the world of the stars. We have also heard how the human being is able to draw these forces from the world of stars to the extent to which he developed moral and religious qualities during his life on Earth. It was said that, for example, from the region which receives forces radiated from the planet known in occult science as Mercury, a man will be able to draw the requisite forces if, during his life on Earth before death, he developed a genuinely moral disposition; from the Venus region he can draw the forces he needs for his further life in the spiritual worlds, also for his subsequent life on Earth, if he developed a truly religious attitude before his death. To sum up, we may say that as long as a human being is making use of his senses, as long as he lets himself be guided and directed by the intellect that is bound to the brain as its instrument, he is connected with the forces of the Earth; in the life between death and a new birth he is connected with the forces radiating from the worlds of the stars. In man of the present age, however, there is a certain difference between his connection with the forces of the Earth during his physical life and his connection with the forces of the stars between death and the new birth. The forces which man draws into his consciousness during his earthly life, that is to say, the forces he experiences consciously during earthly life, contribute nothing essential to what he needs for the up-building and vitalising of his own being; for they give rise to catabolic processes, processes of destruction. Evidence for this is the simple fact that during sleep the human being has no consciousness. Why not? The reason is that he is not meant to witness what happens to him during sleep. During sleep the forces used up during waking life are restored and man is not meant to witness this process, which is the antithesis of what is in operation during waking life and is concealed from human consciousness. The Bible uses profoundly significant words to express this fact. It is one of the passages in the Bible which, as is the case with all occult principles in religious records, is very little understood. In the story of the expulsion from Paradise it is said that the Divine Spirit resolved that when the human being had acquired certain characteristics, for instance, the faculty of distinguishing between good and evil, insight into the forces of life should be withheld from him. That is the passage in the Bible where it is announced that the human being was not to witness the revivification of his members either during sleep or during his entire existence on Earth. While man is awake the whole life-process is one of destruction, of wear and tear. During waking life nothing in man's being is restored. In the very earliest years of childhood, when any actual inflow of life can still be observed, the child's consciousness is still dim and the whole restorative process is concealed from the human being in his later years. Evidence for this is the fact that he does not remember his earliest childhood. We can therefore say that the whole life-giving, restorative process is concealed from man's conscious life on Earth. Processes of perception, of cognition, lie within the field of his consciousness; the life-giving process does not.

This is different during the period of existence between death and the new birth. The purpose of the whole of that period is to draw into the being of man the forces which can build up and fashion the next life, to draw these forces from the world of the stars. But this process is not as things are on Earth, when man does not really know his own being. What, after all, does he know about the processes working in his organism? He knows nothing of them through direct perception and what is learnt from anatomy or biology conveys no real knowledge of his being but is something quite different. In the life between death and rebirth, however, a man beholds how forces from the world of stars work upon his being, how they gradually rebuild it. From this you can gather how greatly perception between death and rebirth differs from perception on Earth. On Earth the human being stands at a particular point, directs his senses outwards and then his sight and hearing expand into space; from the centre where he is standing he faces the expanse of space. Exactly the opposite is the case during the life after death. There man feels as if his whole being were outspread and what he perceives is really the centre. He looks at a point. There comes a period between death and the new birth when the human being describes a circle which passes through the whole Zodiac. He looks out as it were from every point of the Zodiac, that is to say from different viewpoints, upon his own being, and he feels as if he were gathering from each particular section of the Zodiac the forces which he pours upon his being for the needs of the next incarnation. He looks from the circumference towards a centre. It is as if you could duplicate yourself, move around while leaving yourself at the centre, and could drink in the forces of the Universe, the life-giving ‘soma’ which, streaming as it does from different points of the Zodiac, assumes different characteristics as it pours into your being which you have left at the centre. Translated into terms of spiritual reality, this is actually how things are during the life between death and the new birth.

If we now think of the difference between a condition that is really very similar to life between death and rebirth, namely, the condition of sleep, this difference can be characterised very simply, although people who are not accustomed to these ideas will not be able to make much of it. Put simply, the condition of sleep can be characterised as follows.

When the human being sleeps during his earthly existence, that is to say when he has left his physical and etheric bodies and is living in his Ego and astral body which are then in the world of stars, he too is actually in that world. And it is a fact that our condition in sleep is objectively far more similar to the condition between death and rebirth than is usually imagined. Objectively, the two conditions are very similar. The only difference is that during sleep in normal life the human being has no consciousness of the world in which he is living, whereas between death and the new birth he is conscious of what is happening to him. That is the essential difference. If the human being were to awake in his Ego and astral body when these members are outside his physical body during sleep he would be in the same condition as he is between death and the new birth. The difference is actually only a state of consciousness. This is a matter of importance because as long as the human being lives on Earth, therefore also during sleep, he is bound to his physical body. Nor does he become free from the physical body until it passes into the lifeless condition and undergoes a change at death. As long as the physical body remains alive, the union is maintained between the spiritual man, that is to say, Ego and astral body and the physical and etheric bodies.

Our conception of the state of sleep is, as a rule, too simple; and that is quite comprehensible because usually we describe things from one point of view only, whereas when a human being passes into the higher worlds conditions are complicated. A complete picture becomes possible only as we progress patiently in Spiritual Science and learn to view things from all sides. We generally characterise the state of sleep—and rightly so—by saying that the physical and etheric bodies remain in the bed, while the Ego and astral body move outwards and unite with the forces of the stars. But correct as this is from one point of view, it nevertheless presents only one aspect of the matter, as we can realise if we consider from the standpoint of Spiritual Science the sleep that occurs at a more or less normal time. Objectively speaking, an afternoon nap is a quite different matter from ordinary sleep at night. What I have now said is concerned not so much with a man's ordinary state of health but rather with his whole relationship to the world. We will therefore not consider an afternoon nap but the sleep of a healthy human being, let us say at midnight, regarded from the standpoint of clairvoyant consciousness.

During the waking life of day there is a certain regulated connection between the four members of man's being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. This connection can be indicated if I make sketches to show how the so-called aura of the human being appears to clairvoyant consciousness—but of course the sketches are only very rough.

The important point is that what may be called the auric picture of the Ego when a human being is asleep, actually becomes twofold. During the waking state the Ego-aura holds together in the form of an oval (A) but during sleep divides into two parts (B), one of which turns downwards as the result of a kind of gravity and spreads out below. This part of the Ego-aura appears to clairvoyance as a very dark area tinged with dark red shades. The other, upper part streams upwards from the head and then expands into the infinitudes of the world of stars. The Ego-aura is thus divided—in appearance at all events; we cannot, however, speak of an actual division of the astral aura.

This occult spectacle is a kind of pictorial expression of the fact that the human being; with the Ego-forces that permeate him in the waking condition, goes forth into cosmic space in order to be united with the world of stars and draw its forces into himself.

(Note by translator. Dr. Steiner's drawings were probably made with coloured chalks which would have indicated the several members of man's being with greater clarity than is possible in the printed reproductions. Comments made in connection with the drawings have been abbreviated as follows:

Figure A. Waking state. The physical body is indicated by the innermost darker dotted outline, the etheric body by the fainter dotted outline, the astral body by the sloping lines; the Ego-aura seems to envelop the human form.

Figure B. Indicates the difference in the auric picture while a human being is asleep. The upper part of the Ego-aura radiates outwards and upwards without defined limit, and the lower part radiates downwards without defined limit.)

Now that part of the Ego-aura which streams downwards and becomes dark and more or less opaque while the part streaming up wards is luminous and radiant—all this lower part is particularly exposed to the influence of Ahrimanic powers. The adjacent part of the astral aura is, on the other hand, particularly exposed to the Luciferic forces. The account that has been given—quite rightly from a certain standpoint—that the Ego and astral body leave the human being during sleep is, however, strictly true only as regards the upper parts of the Ego-aura and astral aura. It is not correct as regards the parts of the Ego-aura and astral aura which correspond more to the lower areas of the human figure, particularly the lower parts of the trunk. Actually, during sleep, these parts of the astral aura and of the Ego-aura are more closely bound up with the physical and etheric bodies than is the case during the waking state, and below they are denser, more compact.

Now it is extremely important to know that in view of the evolution of our Earth and all the forces that have played their part in that evolution—which you will find described in the book Occult Science—an Outline,—it was ordained that man should not participate in this more lively activity of the lower aura during sleep, that is to say he was not to witness this activity. The reason for this was that the revitalising forces needed by man for the restoration of what has been used up during the waking hours, are kindled by the lower Ego-aura and lower astral aura. The vitalising forces must be drawn from these parts of the aura. That they work upwards and revitalise the whole man depends upon the upper aura developing powers of attraction drawn from the world of stars; it can therefore attract the forces which rising from below, act restoratively. That is the objective process.

Understanding of this fact is the best equipment for understanding certain information available to one who studies ancient records or records based on occultism. You have always heard—and from a certain standpoint the statement is quite correct—that man leaves his physical and etheric bodies in the bed and goes forth with his astral body and Ego; this is absolutely correct as regard the upper parts of the Ego-aura and astral aura, especially of the Ego-aura. But if you study Eastern writings, you will find a statement that is exactly the opposite. It is stated there that during sleep what is otherwise present in man's consciousness penetrates more deeply into the body. This is the opposite description of sleep. And especially in certain Vedanta writings you will find it stated that the part of man of which we say that during sleep it leaves the physical and etheric bodies, sinks more deeply into those bodies, and that what gives us the power of sight withdraws into deeper regions of the eye so that sight is no longer possible. Why is the process described in this way in Eastern writings? It is because the Oriental still has a different standpoint. With his kind of clairvoyance he pays more attention to what goes on within the human being; he pays less attention to the emergence of the upper aura and more to the permeation by the lower aura during sleep. Hence from his particular point of view he is right.

The processes which take place in the human being in the course of his evolution are very complicated and as evolution progresses it will become more and more possible for him to picture the whole range of these processes. But evolution consists in human beings having gradually acquired knowledge of particular processes, hence the differing statements in the different epochs. Although the statements seem to differ they are not for that reason false; they relate to the particular condition prevailing at the time. But the process of evolution as a whole becomes clear only when all the various processes are taken into account.

We ourselves have now reached the point when it is possible to survey a certain definite portion of the process of evolution. There is a most significant difference in the whole attitude and disposition of man's soul when we observe its development during incarnations, let us say in the Egypto-Chaldean period, then in the Graeco-Roman period and then again in our own. Even externally it is not difficult to discover what the soul is experiencing. I think that even in this enlightened audience there will be quite a number of individuals who when they look at a star-strewn sky cannot locate the particular constellations or perceive how their positions change in the heavens during the night. Speaking generally it can be said that the number of individuals who are still well-informed about the starry sky will steadily decrease. There will even be people, among town-dwellers for example, whom one might ask in vain: Is there now Full Moon or New Moon? This does not in any way imply reproach, for it lies in the natural course of development. What holds good for the soul now would have been utterly impossible during the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, particularly during its earlier periods. In those days men's insight into the heavens was very great. Our present age, however, has a definite advantage over the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, inasmuch as logical thinking—of which most people would be capable today if they were to make efforts—was quite beyond the men of that earlier epoch. They lived their lives and carried out their daily tasks more instinctively than we do today. It would be quite erroneous to imagine that when a building or, say, an aqueduct was to be constructed, engineers would sit in their offices and work out the project with the help of plans and the other methods employed nowadays. Engineers in those times no more worked from plans than the beaver does today when with such skill and accuracy he sets about building his den.

In those early times there was no logical, scientific thinking such as is general today; the activities of men during waking life were instinctive. They had acquired their knowledge—and stupendous knowledge has been preserved from the Egypto-Chaldean epoch—in a quite different way. They knew about the secrets of the stars in the night, about the heavens, although they had no Astronomy of the kind that is available for men of the present age. They watched the spectacle presented by the stars in the heavens on successive nights and the whole power of the astral forces in space worked upon them, not merely the sensory impressions made by what they observed. For example, the passage of the Great Bear or of the Pleiades was an actual experience within them and the experience continued while they were asleep, for they were sensitive to the spiritual reality connected with the passage of a constellation such as the Great Bear across the heavens; together with the spectacle perceived by the senses they were inwardly aware of the living spiritual reality in cosmic space. Something came into their consciousness which ours today is quite unable to experience. Nowadays man has eyes only for the material picture of the stars in the sky. And being very clever he looks at a chart of the heavens into which figures of animals are inscribed, and says: The ancients inscribed symbols here and there to represent their idea of the grouping of the stars, but we have now progressed sufficiently to be cognisant of the reality. A man of the modern age does not know that the ancients had actually seen what they inscribed into their charts; they drew something of which they had had direct vision. Some of them were more skilful draftsmen than others, but they drew what they had actually perceived. They did not, however, perceive in the way that is customary in physical life. When they experienced, for example, the passage of the Great Bear across the heavens at night they saw the physical stars implanted in a mighty spiritual Being whom they could actually perceive. But it would be childish to imagine that they saw an animal moving across the heavens in the way we should see a physical animal on the Earth. This experience of the passage of the constellation of the Pleiades, for example, across the heavens affected them intimately. They felt that the experience had an effect upon their astral bodies and caused changes there.

You can form an idea of this experience by picturing that there is a rose in front of you but you are not looking at it; you are merely holding it and what you experience is your own contact with it. You then form an idea of the rose. It was in this way that the ancients ‘contacted’ as it were with their astral bodies what they experienced about the constellation of the Great Bear; they ‘felt’ the astral reality and experienced their own contact with it. This brought about changes in their very being, changes which are still brought about today but are unnoticed.

Evolution leading into our modern scientific age with its power of rationalistic judgement consists in the fact that direct experience of spiritual processes has ceased and that we are left with the world of the senses and the brain-bound intellect. Thus when in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch men spoke of the spiritual Beings in space and drew figures of these Beings, inscribing physical stars as focal points, this was in keeping with the reality—which was an actual experience. Hence in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch men had a faculty of perception far more in line with the life between death and rebirth than is our present physical consciousness. When it is realised how the astral body and the Ego experience what is happening in the heavens it is also obvious that we are then living outside our physical and etheric bodies and there is not the slightest reason for believing that a life in which such experiences occur is impossible when the physical and etheric bodies are actually laid aside (at death). Thus in the men of old it was a matter of direct knowledge that between death and the new birth they would experience the happenings in the world of stars. A man living in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch would have thought it ridiculous if anyone set out to prove to him the immortality of the soul. He would have said: ‘But that needs no proof!’ He would not even have understood what a proof is in our meaning of the word, for logical thinking did not yet exist. If he had learnt in an occult school what in the future would be meant by ‘proof’, he would still have insisted that it is unnecessary to prove the immortality of the soul, because in experiencing the nocturnal starry heavens one is already experiencing something that is independent of the body. Immortality was thus an actual experience and the men of those times knew a great deal about what we today describe in connection with perception in the disembodied state.

And now, turning from the more remote worlds of stars to the planets, these men of old experienced the spiritual sphere that is connected, for instance, with Saturn. They were able to perceive—this is true especially of the earlier periods of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch—what remains of a human being during his life in the Saturn sphere between death and the new birth. People would have thought it very strange if it had been suggested to them that they should try to establish connection with Mars as is sometimes hinted at today, for they were quite conscious of being related to these worlds. If someone has knowledge of Saturn or Mars or other planetary sphere and can follow its functions in our planetary system, this leads to knowledge of the pre-earthly conditions of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon described in the book Occult Science—an Outline. This was once a matter of actual experience. There would have been no need to lecture about it. All that was necessary would have been to make men conscious that it was simply a matter of inducing in those no longer capable of perceiving such things conditions which made perception possible. This could not otherwise have been achieved.

By the time of the Graeco-Latin epoch this state of things had already changed. Men had lost their sensitivity for everything I have been describing and remembrance of it alone remained. In the Graeco-Latin epoch, among the leading peoples, for example of Southern Europe, there was no longer any equal possibility of direct vision of the spiritual Beings of the heavens, but remembrance of that vision remained. Just as a man remembers today what he experienced yesterday, so did souls in the Graeco-Latin epoch still remember what they had experienced of the Universe in earlier incarnations. This radiated into the souls of men and was a living experience. Plato speaks of it as ‘recollection’, but men do not always call it so. Progress in evolution consisted in the suppression of this direct experience and the development during the Graeco-Latin epoch of the faculty of judgement and the formation of concepts. Hence the earlier vision was bound to recede and could survive only as recollection, remembrance. This is exemplified most clearly of all in Aristotle who lived in the fourth century BC. and was the founder of logic, of the art of judgement; he himself was no longer able to perceive anything of the spiritual realities in the worlds of the stars, but in his writings he brings all the old theories back again. He does not speak of the physical heavenly bodies as we know them today but of the ‘Spirits of the Spheres’, of spiritual Beings. And a great many of his utterances were an enumeration of the individual planetary Spirits and of the fixed stars, finally leading to the one universal Godhead. The Spirits of the Spheres still play an important role in the works of Aristotle.

But even the remembrance in Graeco-Latin times of the Spiritual Beings in the Universe was gradually lost to humanity and it is interesting to watch how the ancient knowledge disappears gradually as later epochs approach. The more spiritually minded among men still drew from their remembrance the consciousness that spiritual Beings are connected with all physical bodies existing in space—as Anthroposophy describes today. A great deal in this connection was presented magnificently by Kepler. But the nearer we come to modern times, the more does the possibility fade of even a remembrance of what the soul experienced in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch from contemplation of the heavens. As the age of Copernicanism approached even the remembrance that still survived in the Graeco-Latin epoch faded, and men had eyes only for the physical globes moving through space. Occasionally something plays into the consciousness of more modern men that there is still a possibility of gleaning from the constellations in the heavens genuine knowledge of spiritual events. Kepler, for example, set out independently to calculate from the stars the date of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Such a calculation was possible because Kepler's whole being was still permeated through and through with spirituality. The same applies to his realisation that a certain constellation of stars in the year 1604 would be followed by further suppression of the ancient remembrances.

The nearer we come to the modern age the more is humanity dependent upon the physical senses and the brain-bound intellect, because what the souls of men experienced in ancient times has been thrust down into the deeper strata of consciousness. The souls of all of you once harboured the experiences known to men when they were still able to be aware of the spiritual life pervading cosmic spheres. This is everywhere present in the depths of your own souls. But it is not possible today to lead souls during the hours of darkness and guide their vision, let us say, to the constellation of the Great Bear and enable them to experience as realities the spiritual forces emanating from that group of stars. It is not possible because the powers of vision and perception lie in such depths of the soul. During sleep at night man experiences the heavens with the radiating upper part of the aura but is not conscious of it. Hence for souls of the present age the right procedure is to raise into consciousness by valid methods the forgotten impressions received in olden times. And how is this done? As we do it in Anthroposophy! Nothing new is imposed upon souls but what they experienced in earlier epochs is drawn forth. What souls could no longer actually experience in the Graeco-Latin epoch but had not yet entirely forgotten—today it is entirely forgotten but can be drawn forth again. Anthroposophy is the stimulus for drawing forth the forces of knowledge which lie deep in the souls of men. All human beings who have partaken in evolution up to the time of Western culture have in the depths of their souls the conceptions which should be kindled to life through Anthroposophy; and the methods used in Anthroposophy are the stimuli for achieving this.

We will now consider the difference between these two attitudes to the world, between that of a human soul incarnated in the Graeco-Latin epoch and one incarnated today. We have heard that during the Graeco-Latin epoch, in earthly life too, the soul had a certain connection with and capacity for perception of what is lived through in the period between death and the new birth. These experiences had not yet withdrawn into such deep strata of the soul. Hence in those very ancient times there was much less difference between men's consciousness on Earth and between death and rebirth than there is today. The ancient Greeks had some remembrance of what they had once experienced, but even so the difference was already great. Conditions today have reached the stage when between death and the new birth, consciousness can still be kindled in a human being in the Venus sphere if, on Earth, he has cultivated a moral and religious attitude of soul. But in and especially beyond the Sun sphere it is impossible for consciousness to be kindled if during his life on Earth a man has made no attempt to raise to the level of waking consciousness the concepts lying in the depths of the soul. Here, in earthly life, Anthroposophy seems to be a kind of theoretical world-conception which we master because it interests us. After death, however, it is a torch which from a certain point of time onwards between death and rebirth illumines the spiritual world for us. If Anthroposophy is disdained here in the physical world, no torch is available in that other world and consciousness is dimmed. To pursue Spiritual Science is not merely a matter of imbibing so many theories; it is a living force, a torch which can illumine life. The contents of the spiritual teachings here on Earth are concepts and ideas; after death they are living forces! But this applies to consciousness only. It will be clear to you from what I said at the beginning of the lecture that already in earthly existence the spiritual ideas we acquire are life-giving forces. But a man cannot witness the outcome of these life-giving forces because knowledge of the powers from which they originate is withheld from him. After death, however, he actually beholds them. Here on Earth, Anthroposophy seems to be so much theory and the human being in his waking state has no consciousness of what is spiritually life-giving but nevertheless objectively present. After death man is a direct witness of how the forces he took into himself together with the spiritual teachings received during his life on Earth have an organising, vitalising, strengthening effect upon what is within his being when he is preparing for a new incarnation.

In this way spiritual teaching actually becomes part of the evolution of humanity. But if this spiritual teaching were to be rejected—at the present time it suffices if only a few accept it but in the future more and more individuals must do so—then, as they return to incarnations on Earth, human beings will gradually find that they lack the life-giving forces they need. Decadence and atrophy would set in during the subsequent incarnation. Human beings would quickly wither, be prematurely wrinkled. Decadence of physical humanity would set in if the spiritual forces were not received. The forces that were once drawn by men from the worlds of stars must now be drawn from the depths of their own souls and used for furthering the evolution of humanity.

If you reflect about these matters you will be filled through and through with the thought that existence on Earth is of immense significance. It was necessary that the human being should be so inwardly deepened by his union with the worlds of stars that the forces he had otherwise always drawn from those worlds would become the inmost forces of his soul and be drawn up again from its depths. But that can be done only on Earth. One could say: in primeval times the soma-juice rained down from the heavens into individual souls, was preserved there and must now be drawn forth again from those souls. In this way we acquire a conception of the mission of the Earth. And having presented this conception today we will proceed to study the life between death and the new birth in even greater detail.