The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] To-day we have reached a point in our description of the higher Beings and their relations to our world and solar system, which, to the men of the present day who have received their ideas about the world from ordinary popular science, would seem the most impossible of all; for we shall have to touch on things of which the modern scientist can have no idea. This is naturally not the result of any feeing of opposition; but if one is firmly grounded in Occultism one can survey from this standpoint the facts of modern science. In what has been said in these lectures you will nowhere find anything which contradicts the facts of modern science, but naturally the harmony is not always easy to establish. But if you have the patience to follow it all, you will gradually see how all the separate facts combine to form one stupendous and harmonious whole.

[ 2 ] Much that has been mentioned in these lectures has been also demonstrated from different standpoints, in lectures held in Stuttgart, and in Leipzig; and if you take those lectures and compare them superficially with each other, you may indeed find some contradiction between this or that expression. This happens only because it is my task to speak in these lectures not of speculative theories, but about the facts of clairvoyant consciousness, and because facts appear in a different way when they are considered from one side or from another. To use a comparison — a tree you are painting from one side will appear different when you paint it from the other side, yet it will still be the same tree. It is the same with descriptions of spiritual facts, when the light is turned on them from different sides. Certainly, if one starts with one or two ideas only, and builds a whole system upon them, it is easy to form an abstract system; but we are working from below upwards, and the unity of the whole will first be revealed in the crown. With each statement you must reflect in what sense, and in what direction it has been made.

[ 1 ] When it is said, for instance, in a popular work, that the air and gas on Jupiter are as thick as tar or honey, and that from the point of view of spiritual science this is a grotesque idea — the turn of phrase which I used was intended to convey its grotesqueness — one can from the standpoint of the science of the present day certainly answer: do you not know that modern physics can produce air of such thick condition that it will be as thick as tar or honey? Certainly, this is a self-understood fact in science; but this is not the point, for these studies do not move along these lines. That which science calls air can certainly be thickened to that extent; but for the observations of spiritual science it is nothing more nor less than that other fact, that water can be made to become as hard as a stone — to become ice. Ice is certainly water, but the point is whether one considers the things in their living functions or in the lifeless, inanimate sense of modern science. It is self-understood that ice is water; but if someone who is accustomed to have his mill turned by water throughout the whole year was advised to move it by the means of ice, what would he say? Thus, we have not to do with the abstract idea that ice is water, but what we have to do is to comprehend the universe in its activity. Here quite different standpoints have to govern as to what one entertains in the abstract about purely material metamorphoses in relation to density. Just as one cannot move a mill by means of ice, one also cannot inhale air which is as thick as honey. This is what we have to consider in the study of spiritual science. For we do not look on the world globes in the way they are considered to-day as lumps of matter of different sizes moving about out there in universal space; and in which the modern astronomical ‘mythology’ sees only material globes. We consider them in their living soul and spirit existence, in other words, we consider them in their completeness. Thus in this completeness we have to consider that which we call, in the spiritual scientific sense, the origin of each single globe.

As an example of the origin of a heavenly body, we shall choose that ancient Saturn from which, we know, our evolution started. I have already told you that ancient Saturn was, fundamentally speaking, as large as the whole of our solar system. We must imagine ancient Saturn not merely as a material globe, for we know that it had nothing as yet of the three conditions of matter which are called to-day solid, liquid and gaseous, but that it consisted only of warmth or fire. And now let us imagine that this primeval globe of warmth is the circle a, b, c, d.

You remember that we said: when the Saturn globe had evolved to the Sun globe, there distinctly appear encircling it, those Beings, who form the Animal circle or Zodiac, but I indicated at the time, that, even though they did not surround it so compactly as they did in the Sun existence, that they were already there on ancient Saturn. Thus, around ancient Saturn we must think of the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim wielding their power, and they are to us, in the spiritual sense, the Zodiacal circle. Thus the line A-B-C-D represents for us the Zodiacal circle, in a spiritual sense.

You will ask how this agrees with the modern definition of the Zodiac. We shall see that it agrees with it completely. But you must represent it to yourselves as follows. Imagine that you could place yourself on some definite spot of that ancient Saturn globe. If you now lift your hand and point upwards with your finger, over that place is the region of certain Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. If you move on, and point to some other place, it will be another region of other Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim; for these three groups of Beings form a circle around the ancient Saturn. Suppose that you wanted to indicate the direction in which certain Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim are to be found. They are not all alike; but each one is very distinctly different from the other, they are all individualised, so that one indicates different Beings when one points with the finger to different places. And to be able to indicate the right Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, one marks the spot by a certain constellation of stars. This is then a mark or sign. In this direction one would say are the Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, called Gemini, in another those called Leo, and so on. These are signs to show the direction in which certain Beings are. We must consider those separate constellations as such signs. They are something more, but we must first be clear, that when we speak of the ‘animal circle’ or Zodiac, we have to do with spiritual Beings

[ 3 ] The Thrones were the first to exercise their activity upon that fire formation which was ancient Saturn. The Thrones had progressed so far in their development, that they could let their own substance stream out. They let their warmth substance percolate, as it were, into that Saturn mass. Through this, those forms originated around it which we have called, somewhat grotesquely, eggs — but they really had that shape.

[ 4 ] You may now ask: How is it really with that substance? Did warm sub-stance exist from the beginning? What was there already, we can only describe as a kind of neutral universal fire, which is, fundamentally speaking, one with universal space, so that I might as well say: formerly there was only the space which had been separated off, and then on to its surface percolated that which can be called the warmth substance of ancient Saturn. In the moment when this warmth substance was infused into Saturn, the Beings with which we are concerned, came into action on both sides. We have shown that, in the interior of Saturn, we find the Exusiai, or Powers, or Spirits of Form; the Dynamis or Spirits of Motion or Mights; and the Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom. These are active in the interior; from outside, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are active; and the result is a conjoint action of the Beings inside, and outside Saturn. [ 5 ] It was said in an earlier lecture that we can distinguish the inner soul's fire, which is felt as an inner comfortable warmth, from the outwardly perceptible fire. This neutral warmth is really within the Egg forms. Opposed to it we find the soul warmth, spread around it, radiating into it from outside, but as if holding itself back. It is as if the soul's warmth radiated from outside, but held itself back from the neutral fire within. The really perceptible warmth is pushed back from within. So that the egg of warmth which is drawn in Diagram I is really shut in between two currents; an external (x) stream of soul-warmth, and a stream of inner (y) warmth, which could be perceived by external senses. Only that which is in the interior, is warmth, physically perceptible. And now through the action of the inner and outer warmth, each of these Saturn eggs begins to rotate. Each of them circles round, and comes in turn under the influence of each of the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim, which are out in space. And now something very strange happens.

Each egg in its wanderings, comes back to the point where it was first formed. When it reaches this point it remains stationary, it cannot go any further. Each egg has been formed on some definite spot, then wanders round the circle and is stopped when it returns to the place where it has been created.

The production of those eggs of warmth lasts, however, only up to a certain time; it then ceases and no more eggs are formed. Now when all those eggs are stopped at a certain place, they fall over each other. When they have covered each other up, they form, so to speak, one single egg. Thus on the point where the eggs were originally created, they come to rest. And, naturally, from the moment when no new ones are formed any more, they all meet and in the end, cover each other. Thus a globe is formed. This globe is naturally formed only by degrees. It is the densest part of the fire substance, and that which in a narrower sense is now called Saturn, (for it stands on the spot where the Saturn of to-day is). And as in a certain sense everything is a reflection, the whole process has been repeated in the origin of our own earth. Even the Saturn of to-day originated in such a way that it was actually stopped at a certain place — not exactly at the spot where the ancient Saturn was stopped, because for certain reasons things always shift a little, but the process of formation of the present day Saturn is the same. Thus a small Saturn-globe is born from the large all-embracing one, through the joint action of the universal powers who belong to the Hierarchies.

[ 6 ] Now let us consider that point at which all those globes came to a stand-still on primeval Saturn. About this the sages of primeval wisdom taught the following: On ancient Saturn the first foundation of the human physical body was formed. That first foundation was really formed of warmth, but in that body of warmth were already contained the germs of all the future organs. At the point where the first movements which had been produced were brought to a stop, was formed the germ of that organ of the human body which, when its movements were one adjusted, later changed the whole mechanism of the human body from rest to movement — this is the heart. Here, from the first stimulation to movement, arose the beginning of the heart; but this could only originate because at that same point the movement was brought to a standstill. Through this, the heart is that organ by which, when it ceases to beat, the whole physical body and its functions are brought to rest.

[ 7 ] Each member of the human body was given a distinct name in ancient speech. The heart was called the Lion within the body. Primeval wisdom said: to which direction of the Zodiac must one point, if one wishes to indicate the region out of which were laid the first foundations of the human heart? They pointed upwards, and named the Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim who acted from the region of Leo (Lion). Man received the first outline of his physical body projected from out [of] universal space, and the region of his body, which he was accustomed to call inwardly, Leo, was also called the region of Leo out in the Zodiac Thus are these things connected.

[ 8 ] Thus also have all the other foundations or germs of the human organs been formed by the Animal Circle or Zodiac. The heart was formed by Leo the Lion. Near the heart, the cage of the ribs, which is necessary for the protection of the heart, was called the breastplate. In the beginning a region had naturally to be formed before the inclusion of the heart. Another name for the breastplate arose, which was taken from an animal who had received such a breastplate from nature — Cancer, the Crab; that which is out in space is really called ‘breastplate,’ a protection which the Crab has from nature, hence that region was called ‘the Crab.’ It lies on one side of the Lion. [ 9 ] The other regions of the Zodiac were named according to the same principle. In fact, it is man projected outwards into universal space who has given these designations to the Zodiacal circle. But it is not always so easy to discover the original intention, in the transformed names, as for example, with the Crab. The name has not always been transmitted in a direct line, so that one has to return to the original sense if the meaning is to be made clear.

[ 10 ] We shall pass over the disappearance or dissolving of Saturn; we shall now describe how its evolution progressed after it had passed through the Pralaya. After the Saturn formation had dissolved, a new evolution, or new formation, began. What first took place was exactly the same as that which had formerly taken place on Saturn. When the whole formation of Saturn had been repeated in this way, a second formation began, after the centre had been reached. We are now advancing towards that stage of development which we generally designate as that of the primeval Sun. Just as, formerly, the Thrones sacrificed themselves, so now, another grade of the Hierarchies are making the sacrifice, namely, those Beings whom we call Spirits of Wisdom. The Thrones are Beings of greater power; they could let their own physical substance stream from them, their warmth substance. They could pour out the substance of Saturn from their own bodies — as has been described. The spirits of Wisdom were only able to give an etheric body, which is not so dense. Man already had the foundation of the physical body; the Spirits of Wisdom gave him now his etheric body. This happened, as it were, in a second circle. I shall now draw this in Diagram III. This represents the original size of the ancient Sun. It has shrunk in comparison to the former larger circumference. Because it has shrunk it has grown denser; inside the Sun there is not only warmth-substance, but also condensed warmth-substance, gaseous-air substance. Now, from the surrounding circumference, along with the previously mentioned Beings, the Spirits of Wisdom are working upon the Sun: together and within the globe of the Sun the Spirits of Form, and the Spirits of Motion are carrying on their activity. The following now happens, which is similar to what happened on Saturn. Certain currents are created by the surrounding spirits — the Spirits of Wisdom and the Thrones. These currents are somewhat denser than those which were produced by the Thrones alone. Inside, the mass contracts, and a ball of mist is now compressed between those two streams.

[ 11 ] This globe is different from the Saturn globe, because in reality Saturn with all its beings consisted only of warmth, but this globe is now interpenetrated by ether, by a body of ether. Although it is as dense as gas, it is interpenetrated by an ether-like body. Therefore, the whole of this globe is alive; it is a Being inwardly alive. Whilst Saturn was a being which was in motion inwardly, which was full of mobility, until its motion was brought to a standstill by the Lion, Jupiter, (one can also call it Jupiter, for the planet seen in the heavens as Jupiter is a reproduction of that which was formed at that time as part of the Sun) Jupiter is inwardly living. Such was the ancient Sun. The balls which now begin to circle round it, are living balls, living creatures.

[ 12 ] Now, instead of the Lion, imagine another region of the Zodiac where those balls were originally stimulated and called into being; I called this region that of the Eagle. In this region occurred the first stimulation into life of the Sun-globe, of that living being within cosmic space. Now, when this living globe had once completed its circle and returned to its starting point, to the region of the Eagle, something else comes into operation. Whilst the globe had first begun to be inwardly alive at this point, when it reaches the same point again it is killed through the same influence which originally called it to life. One ball after another was killed. When they all had been killed, and no new ones were produced, the life of the ancient Sun also came to an end. Its life consisted in the production of new balls, which, after circling round, covered each other at the point they started from and were killed by forces entering from universal spaces.

This ‘sting of death,’ which the life of the ancient Sun received from universal space, was felt as the sting of the scorpion. Therefore that region where they were killed is called the ‘region of the Scorpion.’ At this point the constellation can be seen which rouses dead matter to life: the Eagle and also that wherein work the forces which kill: the constellation of the Scorpion

[ 13 ] We can therefore say: in the region of the Lion are those forces of the Zodiac, which brought the original life of the germinal physical human body to rest; in the region of the Scorpion are these forces which had the power to kill life as such. We shall get to know the correspondence to modern conditions, which are differently constituted, but this can only be explained gradually. A thick veil or Maya has been drawn over the original conditions.

[ 14 ] Let us proceed. We need not describe the next conditions so much in detail, for the meaning of these designations and the whole procedure has now grown clearer. But one thing must yet be recalled to your mind which is the following.

When you consider Saturn, you would be quite mistaken if you imagined it to be a globe such as could be compared with any other world's globe, with Jupiter or Mars, for instance. What is there is nothing more than a space of warmth. And you can see it in the way you do only because you are looking at it through an illuminated space of light. Just think, how would a thing that is unilluminated appear if you looked at it through a space full of light? It would appear bluish to you. You can observe this with common candle-light; it looks blue in the middle and around it there is a kind of radiance. I say this, being conscious that I run the danger of appearing to be talking nonsense in the opinion of the whole school of mechanical optics of modern times. But it is a fact. Modern physics does not know why the whole space of heaven appears blue. It seems blue, because in reality it is dark, is black, and is seen through illuminated space. All that is dark, seen through light, appears blue. Therefore, Saturn seems a blue globe when you look at it. All that has been said agrees completely with the facts of science, but not with the fanciful theories which are imagined. It would lead us too far if I explained to you why the ring formations of Saturn also arise because of this, because with each Saturn we have to do with a neutral space of warmth, a stratum of soul's warmth, and with one of physically cognisable warmth. Thus the illusion arises, when one observes those different strata through illuminated space; it is as if one saw a globe of gas with a sort of ring of dust around it; it is but an optical delusion, for Saturn is to-day but a body made of the substance of warmth.

[ 15 ] These things can naturally only be said, when speaking to Anthroposophists, elsewhere they would be incomprehensible. Each Saturn must be regarded. as a being consisting of warmth substance, and everything connected with it is to be explained from that standpoint. Each Jupiter, which is nothing else than a Solar stage of development, is a form consisting of gas and warmth. So it is with the Jupiter of to-day which is a repetition of the former Jupiter, the ancient Sun. Certainly the conditions of space and motion do somewhat change. For the Jupiter of to-day is not on the same spot as the former one was, but essentially it is the same.

Now we go further and must explain Mars in the same way. We must explain it as a large globe cooled down to the density of waters, and we must also see in it a point, where a ball of compressed water has formed, and become differentiated from the surrounding much thinner water. It is formed by the same process, as Jupiter, all the single balls of water which are produced on its circumference are at a certain point again brought to a standstill. Just as the movement is hindered on Saturn by the Lion, on Jupiter or the Sun by the Scorpion, which brings death, so on Mars these balls of water are also stopped; only the details are a little different on Mars. The Mars of to-day is a repetition of the ancient Moon. It stands on the same place to which the boundary of the ancient Moon extended. It is the other part of the ancient Moon; one part is our own Moon, which is but a shell; but the living part of it, which represents its other pole is Mars. When speaking of Mars as the third condition of our planetary development, this condition corresponds to that of the ancient Moon. Mars was essentially a body of water. On Mars, or the ancient Moon — call it as you will — the astral body was organised into man, so that he received his first consciousness. The body of that man consisted of the moon substance or moon-water. Just as the body of the man of to-day is formed out of the substance of the Earth, so was the body of the man of that day formed of fire, air, and water. According to the densest substance in him, you might have called that man the water-man. He became this especially, because the astral body was infused into him. He was not yet a man with an Ego, but a man with astral endowments. This entrance of the astral took place because, at a certain place, the stimulus was again given. Then what was on the circumference moved round and returned to the place where it had started from. This was the region of the Zodiac which is designated as the Waterman. So that you have to see in the Waterman that sign of the Zodiac which gave consciousness to man on the ancient Moon or ancient Mars after he had circled once around its circumference..

[ 16 ] And now we pass on to the earth, this is the fourth evolutionary condition. The first three are a repetition one of the other; a Saturn is formed, then a Sun is formed, and leaves behind it a Jupiter; a Moon is formed, and leaves behind it a Mars; and last the earth appears, and all those things I have described; the departure from it of the Sun, and of that dross-like part which is our present Moon. You know that the first foundation for the Ego was prepared in old Lemuria, when the present Moon separated from the earth. This was only possible because once again from the surrounding circumference the impulse to rotation was given. Then, that which had received the stimulus, after having rotated once, was ripe to receive the earliest beginnings of the Ego germ. This happened in Lemurian times, and we here point to that part of the Zodiac which is called the Bull, the reason for this being, that man, during the time these names were given, had very concrete and very clear feelings. This name originated in the Mystery teachings of Egypt and Chaldea. It is there that the origin of this designation is to be found, and it is only in real Occultism that the consciousness of the true significance of the Word exists at the present day. The first stirring of ‘I am’ finds expression in speech, in tone; but all tone-formation is related in a certain way which cannot be touched on here, but which every Occultist knows, and which may be explained some time in more intimate lectures; all tone formation has a very definite relation to the processes of propagation, which you can perceive in the fact that the voice of the male changes when sex maturity is reached. There is here a hidden correspondence. All that is associated with these faculties and processes of the human being, was comprised, for ancient consciousness, in the bull nature of man. And. the name given to that particular constellation has its origin in the fact that it has now the same importance for the earth which Lion had for Saturn, Scorpion for the Sun, and Waterman for the Moon. With the Egyptian age, came the third post-Atlantean period of civilisation. The first was the old Indian, the second the old Persian, the third the Egyptian. These periods of civilisation are the corresponding repetitions — as we have often repeated — of the whole processes of development of the earth. The Lemurian epoch was the third epoch of the earth. Therefore Egyptian Occultism repeats in a spiritual reflection the essential parts of the occurrences of Lemurian times. That which happened in Lemurian tunes was best known by the Egyptian mystery priests, for it is reflected in the special features of the Egyptian civilisation. Therefore the culture of Egypt was closely related to the constellation of the Bull, and to the cult of the Bull generally.

[ 17 ] Thus you see, that it is not all so easy to indicate the real events which happened during the origin of our heavenly bodies, and all connected with them. For how do celestial bodies originate? Our Saturn, our Jupiter, our Mars have in fact originated thus, that at first spheres were formed on them. One after the other of these is killed, and when nothing more is called into life, all the spherical forms, which previously constituted the shells, finally mass together into a body, and this becomes the visible Planet. In fact, any such celestial body as Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, originated thus, that at first a kind of shell was formed. This shell, through the agglomeration of the special forms, was condensed to that formation which then is revealed visibly in space. You have here no mechanical process taken from the dreary Kant-Laplace theory about the world's creation, but you have the living origins of those formations springing from the spiritual interaction of the Hierarchies, as we see them to-day in the heavenly bodies, in Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.

My dear Friends,

We spoke yesterday of how the pupil in occultism meets with Lucifer and with death, and we pointed out that if the situation is to be rightly experienced, the pupil must still have left to him from ordinary life on Earth the memory of the I or of the thought of the I. We saw also that the man of the present day finds help at this point if within the Earth world he has been able to receive the Christ Impulse. And we went on to show how the Being we call the Christ Being is to be distinguished from other founders of religion in that we cannot speak of Him as of a person who underwent initiation on Earth, but that the Christ Being brought with Him all the forces with which He worked during the three years of His sojourn on Earth. This means that when the Christ Being became man, He was already in a position to make that great sacrifice—for it was for the Christ Being a great sacrifice—whereby He made use in a human body of specifically human forces alone. He manifested and expressed His connection with the divine entirely through human forces.

It is this feature of the life of Christ that marks it as absolutely without parallel. If you want to understand with the ordinary powers of the human soul—I do not say, to believe in, but to understand—the founder of any other religion, you will find it necessary first of all to learn about the stages of his initiation, for you will want to raise yourself to an understanding of the particular enlightenment that streamed forth from a higher world into this human personality. This is what you will have to do, for example, in the case of Buddha. You must study his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, and learn to have some understanding of how such a thing can come about that in a man's 29th year an inspiration enters into his life,—as it did into Buddha under the Bodhi tree. When you have made the effort to achieve this understanding, then, if you think it over, you will be able also to recognise something else that follows from it,—strange though it may at first appear. You will come to see that not only the great founders of religion are to be understood by becoming acquainted with the methods and stages of initiation, but also even the Evangelists and St. Paul.

If you want to understand the Evangelists, who wrote their Gospels out of inspiration, then you must first come to see how the great individualities hidden behind the names of Matthew, Mark or John were able to arrive at the things that stand written in the Gospels. With this end in view we have undertaken, as you know, a thoroughgoing study of the Gospels, and it has enabled us to perceive what had in reality long been lost,—namely, that the Evangelists spoke truth.

If, however, we want to understand the Christ, we do not need all this. The Christ can be understood by every single human being, He can be understood with the most ordinary human powers of understanding. It can never be that a man has too little culture or too little education to understand the Christ. And this is because the Christ brought into forces that are purely human and into all their working, what He was; whereas the communications of other founders of religions rest on what they have seen in the higher worlds. It can, therefore, be truly said, provided only the statement be not taken in a trivial spirit, that the Christ founded a religion for the simplest of human beings, a religion that is accessible to every intellect and every understanding.

The relationship of Christ to the higher worlds,—that can of course only be learned through initiation. And there is no need to learn it until one enters upon initiation. I endeavoured yesterday to make clear to you the immense service done by the Christ to the pupil in occultism. Christ gives him the means whereby he can remember his I when he is in the higher worlds. Without the Christ Impulse this cannot be done. Christ thus becomes a helper in the initiations of modern time and will be increasingly so for pupils in occultism. As man advances in wisdom, he will realise how deep is his need of the Christ. Christ is there for the simplest of men; on the other hand He is also there for those who need wisdom and again more wisdom, and yet again still more wisdom. That is the nature of the Christ, and it is connected with all those things of which we were speaking yesterday.

It follows from this that the further man's evolution goes, the more understanding will there be for the Christ. The understanding will grow and spread. There will be an increasing number of people who recognise that while there is complete justification for saying that Christ is there for everyone, even the simplest and humblest, and that everyone can find Him, He is at the same time also there for those who are under the necessity to seek wisdom, those who feel a deep inward obligation to follow after wisdom.

We will now leave this thought for a little and return to the meeting of which we spoke yesterday. First, man meets Lucifer. Lucifer, as we saw, shows us what we have become as we have gone from incarnation to incarnation, and we found yesterday that the form or figure that Lucifer shows us is positively ugly. We learn from Lucifer what we have become through him during Earth evolution It is important that the pupil learns this in the right way and does not remain at the point where Lucifer shows him what he has acquired through the Gods, saying to him: “There is your destructible form! What you have acquired through me is immortality! ”—and then this immortal form shows itself as unsightly! The pupil must not stop there. As one contemplates the path of initiation we have here in mind, the feeling comes over one that Christ can not only help in the way we described yesterday but can also help man to change the form. This requires, however, that man shall resolve to remain true to the Christ Impulse, never to lose it but strive always to understand it more and more. Hence it is that nothing can dissuade the followers of the modern Mysteries from their adherence to the Christ Impulse.

Let us now return to our study of threefold man and remind ourselves how we had to connect the upper man with the heaven of the stars. We went on to show that the figure known to the Old Testament under the name of Jahve or Jehovah gives something to the upper man as a kind of compensation for what man has lost on the Earth, and this gift of Jahve's can be reckoned as belonging to the Moon. Summing up our study of these connections, we may therefore say: The upper man is in a certain sense co-ordinated to the Moon, while the middle man, the breast man, that carries the heart in him, is in a sense co-ordinated, as we saw, to the Sun. We can accordingly form some idea of what occult Schools and Mysteries have always understood by the co-ordination of the middle man, the man that bears the heart in him, to the Sun, and of the man that carries the head, either to the whole starry heavens or to the Moon.

But now Lucifer has also had his influence on man. Even as we carry in our middle man the influence of the Sun, and in our head man the influence of the Moon—as I described it for ancient clairvoyance—so do we carry in us the influence of another star, and we have to think in a corresponding way of the forces that ray out from this other star.

You will readily imagine that the influence must needs be of a different kind from the influence of Sun or Moon. The Moon influences still worked in olden times with such effect that human clairvoyance took its course in a 28-day period. In the course of 28 days man felt himself now in a more, and now again in a less, clairvoyant condition. This was an influence that could be directly perceived. The Sun influences are of course obvious. We shall not need to waste many words over the fact that the whole of the middle man depends on the Sun; what was said in the last lecture should suffice. The influence of the third—which is to be found in the region that appears to us in initiation as the region of Lucifer—works on the other hand in a spiritual manner. Here we can no longer speak of an influence that is easily evident. Many an influence even of the Moon can be disbelieved on this account; nevertheless there are still people who speak of an influence of the moon on the nature of man. As for the Sun's influence, no one will deny that. It goes without saying, however, that influences of other stars are not admitted by the materialist. He must of necessity repudiate them, for they are spiritual and he cannot admit the influence of spiritual forces. None the less it is a fact that just as there is in the upper man the connection with the Moon, and in the middle man the connection with the Sun, so are the influences of Venus connected with the form of man that meets us when we cross the threshold of initiation. Note that we are speaking now of the star which the astronomers of today call “Venus.”

Venus is thus the kingdom of Lucifer. At first we learn through initiation that the lower man, the man we called the third seven-membered man, is that part of the whole nature of man which has been apportioned by the higher Gods to the kingdom of Lucifer. But Lucifer has, by a method of which we shall speak further, acquired mastery over the whole human being,—even as Jahve or Jehovah also took possession of the whole human being.

If you want to have a complete picture of the working of Jahve or Jehovah, then you will have to see it in the following way. Take first the head man, as you have learned to know it from the earlier lectures. Into the head man works the power of Jehovah which corresponds to New Moon, the Moon that is bereft of light, the Moon that does not ray back sunlight on to the Earth. The physical sunlight that is reflected from the Moon—that, on the other hand, is to be thought of as the influence of the Jehovah forces which proceeds from the Moon on to the lower man, the third man. So that, leaving out the breast man in the middle, we find, working upon the lower man, the Jehovah forces that correspond to Full Moon. The middle or breast man receives, as we know, the Sun forces; as we shall see, however, Moon forces work there, too. Jehovah forces have in this way obtained a kind of mastery of the entire human being. They work in alternating periods upon the head man and the lower man, the influence on the head man corresponding to New Moon, and the influence on the lower man to Full Moon.

I do not think anyone will doubt what I have just said, if he sets himself to consider the significance attached in the ancient Hebrew faith, in the ancient Hebrew ritual, to the festival of New Moon. Study the festivals of New Moon and investigate the feelings men had about them in Old Testament times; and you will be ready to meet what has been said with intelligence and understanding. The corresponding influences of the intermediate phases of the Moon—the waxing and the waning Moon—work upon the breast man. And now you must consider in addition that just as the Moon—that is to say, the Spirit of the Moon, Jahve or Jehovah—works upon the entire man in all his three members, so too does the Sun, but especially on the middle man; thence the Sun's influences ray out into the whole human being. We have accordingly two cosmic forces both working actively in the human being in an orderly and regular manner.

Of Lucifer we learn that his kingdom is Venus. The forces which find their physical symbol in the light of Venus shining down upon us as Morning or Evening Star, the physical rays of Venus that are sent out into cosmic space,—are the symbol of the influence of Lucifer upon man Lucifer has not confined himself to working upon the lower man. If he had, he would only have influence when Venus is shining with her full orb of light, as in Full Moon. For you know that Venus has phases like the Moon,—waxing Venus, full Venus and waning Venus. The “quarters” work on the breast man like the “quarters” of the Moon. The Venus that works spiritually, works on the head man. We can, therefore, behold in the working together in the heavens of Sun, Moon and Venus, an expression for what in respect of man are spiritual workings. Please note, an expression for what is in the spirit of man.

As the great Sun Spirit works in relation to the Moon Spirit, in relation, that is, to Jahve or Jehovah, so also Lucifer, who is always active in human nature, works in relation to these two. If we wanted to describe by means of a drawing the law of their co-operation we could not do better than look up at the constellations in the heavens of Sun, Moon and Venus. As is the relationship of these three to one another,—whether they are in opposition, or whether they strengthen or weaken one another, as when one stands in front of another and eclipses it—so is the relation between these three spiritual powers in man. The influence of the Sun can be more particularly developed in man when it is not impaired either by the Moon or by the Venus forces. It may, however, also happen that the Sun forces—the forces that are in the middle man, in the heart—are eclipsed by the Moon, the head forces, and eclipses can occur also by the action of Lucifer, that is, of Venus. As you know. there are times when Venus passes in front of the Sun in cosmic space. Thus the connection of the inner trinity in man—the Sun Spirit, the Moon Spirit and the Venus Spirit or Lucifer—is symbolised in cosmic space and expressed in the constellation of Sun, Moon and Venus.

Seeing that we were able to divide up the whole human form and connect its parts and members with certain fixed stars, certain Signs of the Zodiac, it will not now be difficult for you to understand that a relationship can exist between these three Stars in man—that is, the three great spiritual Powers in man—and the several members of the human form. We have to recognise, for instance, a particularly significant phase of this relationship when the heart in the middle man, or rather when the powers of the heart, the powers of the Sun Spirit in the middle man, exert their utmost influence. In the middle man, you will remember, we saw inscribed the Sign of Leo. We can, therefore, say that when the Sun exerts his forces especially on that member of the human form to which we give symbolically the Sign of Leo, then a remarkable constellation is present in man. Another remarkable constellation is present when the Jehovah forces are especially strongly developed in their spiritual character,—let us say, in the Sign of Aries, which signifies the upright posture, or in the Sign of Taurus which denotes, as you know, the forward direction of the organs for the purpose of producing speech. For these are the parts of the human form which necessarily have an original and peculiarly deep relationship to the Moon forces. When these members of man's form are very highly developed, then it denotes a particularly favourable constellation for the human being.

You will be able now to discern wherein the fundamental principle, the real essence of astrology consists. I have certainly not the intention of going fully into the subject of astrology in these lectures—there would not be time—but I want at this point to call your attention to its true nature. We can put it in a very few words. You see, man, as he stands before us with his threefold seven-membered form, is in connection and harmony with the spiritual Powers corresponding to the cosmic realms. For as the forces of the Sun Spirit that work in man correspond to the Spirit of the Sun, as the forces of the Moon correspond to the head man, and as we have corresponding to the third man the forces that are distributed over the whole human being, similarly is there a correspondence between the several members of the human form and the fixed stars, so that their Signs can be ascribed severally to these various members of man's form. And we have before us—man, complete in his physical form. But now the influence proceeding from the Powers that work from these directions was not active only when the human form first came into being, it has continued so right through time and is active still. And we see the working of this influence in the fact that man's external destiny can be brought into connection with the constellations of the Stars, just as we had to connect with the constellations of the Stars what man has already become. If it was auspicious for man's organisation that his Sun forces co-operated with those members of his form to which we ascribed the Sign of Leo, then it will also be auspicious today for certain qualities and characteristics in him if some important moment of his life, notably the moment of birth, falls when the Sun is in the Sign of Leo,—that is to say, when the Sun covers Leo, so that these two forces mutually strengthen one another or in some way influence one another. For as what man is today stands written in the heavenly spaces in the writing of the constellations of the Stars, so stands written there too what is yet to happen with him. This is the ground of true astrology. You will see at once from what we have been considering that you really only need to know occultism and you have at the same time the root principle of astrology. This will show itself all the more clearly as we now go on to describe the second stage of initiation.

We have seen that in order to attain to the first stage of initiation it is important for the pupil to take his start from the human form, from man as he presents himself to physical sight. For the next stage he has to choose something else as his starting-point,—namely, the inner movement of man. Note carefully the distinction:

First stage: Starting from the human form.
Second stage: Starting best from the inner movement of the human being.

Let us now consider for a little, as before we considered the form or figure of man, the movements that take place within him. We have first of all a movement which, although in later life man scarcely performs it any more has once been carried out by him with all his might, otherwise he would remain a fourfooted creature, obliged to crawl on the ground for the rest of his life. Man has to perform the movement which changes him from a crawling to an upright child. For man is not merely an upright being in his form, he is a being who during his life lifts himself upright. So that the first inner movement man performs—for it is an inner movement—is the movement of lifting himself into the upright position.

The second movement of an inner kind is again one that man must acquire for himself as a child, although this movement he continues to use throughout life. It is the movement of speaking, the movement of the inner life that has to be performed for the “word” to arise. You must realise that a whole sum of inner movements is necessary in order that the word may be brought to expression. There is, however, still another movement, a more hidden one, that has also to be learned in early childhood. We may say, man learns both movements together. As a matter of fact, he learns the “speaking” movement earlier than the other. (You will find a more exact and detailed account of all this in my little book The Education of the Child from the standpoint of Spiritual Science.) We have, then, these two inner movements that man learns and has to perform all his life long. Of the speech movement we are quite conscious. Everyone knows that he makes it. But not everyone knows that when he thinks, a delicate movement is taking place all the time in his brain. To discover this requires a rather fine and subtle power of observation. Do not infer that I am talking materialism when I talk about a “movement.” Movement there is, without a doubt; only, it is effect, not cause. We have therefore here two inner movements, the movements of thinking and of speaking.

If now we go further, we discover as the next important movement the movement of the blood. This is one of the movements which must necessarily take place for man to be man. (The sequence is apparently rather arbitrary, but that need not disturb you.) The fifth movement, which must already be there in order for the blood movement to take place, is the movement of the breath. This is a specific movement with an independent existence of its own,—distinct from the blood movement. As I said, the sequence is somewhat arbitrary. We could, for instance, as was hinted, interchange the second and the third—but that is beside the point; here again we could put the breath before the blood movement, and if we were considering more especially the lungs we would certainly have to do so. If, however, we are looking rather to the origin of the movements, then we must take them in the sequence I have given; because, especially in the case of the male human being, the real centre and origin of the breath movement is in the diaphragm, and that is underneath the heart. When, therefore, our object is to build up a sequence from the point of view of origin, we have no choice but to take the movements in the sequence I have given.

The sixth movement—we are still speaking of movements inside the body that are necessary to life—is one that certain inner organs have to perform; we may summarise it in a general term and call it glandular movement or movement of ducts or canals. The ducts in man's body must be in perpetual activity, perpetual inner movement, for man to be maintained in life. For certain reasons which it would take too long to explain, I prefer to call it simply movement of the glands.

For the seventh movement to come about, it is no longer a question merely of particular ducts or glands moving in order to secrete something the human being requires within himself. The seventh is a movement performed by the whole body as such, and it is carried out when Nature has set all in train for a new human being to be born. What we have here is really a sum-total of all the movements of the body. Whilst in other duct or gland movements we have the movement of a part only of the body, in the case of the movement of reproduction we have a kind of act of secretion performed by the whole human being. And the same is true whether we are speaking of male or female body. It is always a secretion performed by the whole human being. This movement then we call the movement of reproduction.

If the seven movements we have described are correctly understood, then with them are exhausted the inner movements of man. The others are outer movements. When man moves his feet or his hands, that is an external movement. The inner movements man brought with him when he came to Earth, though Earth has, it is true, changed them very much. And just as we had to refer the whole complete form of man to the fixed stars of the Zodiac, and connect the Signs of the Zodiac with the several members of the human form, so now we find that these several movements have their source in the entire planetary system. From our planetary system we have to derive these seven members of what we may call the man of inner movement. And since the relationship of these movements to one another corresponds to the relationship of the planets of our planetary system, we can also designate these several movements with the Signs that belong to the planets, thus:

• Movement into upright posture ♄
• Movement of thinking ♃
• Movement of speaking ♂
• Movement of the blood ☉
• Movement of the breath ☿
• Movement of the glands ♀
• Movement of reproduction ☽

A word must be said about the movement of the blood. This movement comes into contact with what we have earlier learned to recognise as the centre of the organs belonging to the middle man, the “plane of operations” as it were for the Sun Spirit. Thus the movement of the blood, which has its centre in the middle man, is to be brought into relation with the most important force in the middle man, and we have to designate this movement of the blood with the Sign of the Sun. In doing so we are thinking of the power and force of the Sun Spirit in so far as it is a force in movement. It is, we could say, as a fixed star that the Sun works upon the middle man as a whole on the other hand, it exerts its influences on the movements that depend on the middle man, on the movements of the blood, as one of the planets.

If I make use of the Sign which is also used by the astronomers of today employing therefore in this case not the old terminology which was altered by Kepler, but the names that are customary in the astronomy of today—then the movement of the breathing can be denoted by Mercury, the movement of the glands by Venus and the movement of reproduction by Moon. For this last movement, localised as it is in the lower man, is again a movement that comes into contact with the influence of the Spirit of the Moon. This influence here meets and combines with the inner moving of the human being.

We have, therefore, in the human being, as well as a threefold seven-membered man, another seven-membered man in the connections of the movements that take place within him. The pupil must take pains to distinguish the various movements within him, before he is able to take the next step on the path. He will not find it easy.

The human form we have as it were standing before our eyes,—not so the inner movements. A special effort has to be made to feel them. We must learn to discern each one for itself. We must be able to feel inwardly, first the movement of raising oneself upright, then the movement of thought, the movement of speech—this is easiest of all—then again the movement of the blood, and—which is also not difficult—the movement of the breath. We have to come to the point of sensing the various movements which as a rule we only sense in their result, as, for instance, when we experience ourselves first as lying down and then as standing up. We must learn to sense also in this way the movements of secretion.

The faculty of discrimination for the several movements that take place within him is an absolute necessity for the pupil if he would progress further on his path. And if he is to do with these movements what I said he had to do with the human form, then instead of looking at the human form from without, fixing it before him and awaiting the after-image, he must endeavour to feel himself inwardly, feel the movement and activity that goes on within him, and then, after he has, as it were, fixed himself inwardly in the bodily sense, hold fast this impression,—even as yesterday we tried to hold fast, purely in memory, the impression of the human form. The pupil will then actually come to the point of recognising seven forms, where yesterday we met with two. We encountered, as you will remember, the form of death and the form of Lucifer, and we learned that when we call to remembrance the thought of Christ, we have then something we can carry across into the other—the super-sensible—world. And now, when the pupil, as it were, steps forth out of his man of inner movement, he meets with seven forms. He makes the acquaintance of seven spiritual Beings, and he knows that these seven spiritual Beings correspond to his own inner movements in the very same way that Sun, Moon and Venus correspond to what we spoke of yesterday. He comes to understand that he himself has grown out of our planetary system, and that since the physical stars of the planets are directed by the Spirits of the planets, man is only able, for example, to lift himself upright through the fact that the Spirit of Saturn prevails in him, the Spirit who has his scene of action on Saturn as Lucifer has his on Venus. He knows too that his movement of thought has connection with the Regent or directing Spirit of Jupiter, the movement of speech with the directing Spirit of Mars, the movement of the blood with the directing Spirit of the Sun, the whole movement of the breath with the directing Spirit of Mercury, all the glandular movements with the directing Spirit of Venus, and finally the whole movement of reproduction with the directing Spirit of the Moon. He knows furthermore, that all these Spirits work with and through one another. They have their seat, their base of operations, in man, and one kind of movement works upon another. The Spirit of Saturn, for instance, while it works chiefly through the movement made by man in lifting himself upright, takes part indirectly in all other movements. A significant situation occurs when the guiding Spirit of Saturn manifests his forces with peculiar strength in the Sign of Aries or in the Sign of Taurus. This creates a very important situation.

Having thus come to the recognition of how the guiding Spirits of the planets are connected with the several members of the man of inner movement, you will be able to follow me when I say that in the allocation of the Signs to the several members we are already touching the fundamental principle of all genuine astrology. Recall the connections we have been considering, and you will recognise that there lies inherent within them the principle of true and genuine astrology, which has its source in nothing else than in the great and significant fact that man is born out of the World-AII, that man is in very truth an epitome, an extract of the whole World-All.

In order to understand the form of man we had, you will remember, to ascend to the fixed stars; and we found also how the form of man is influenced by the forces proceeding from Sun, Moon and Venus. How we have seen how the inner mobility in man is due to the working of the seven Spirits of the Planets. Seven spiritual Beings are thus brought to our knowledge. And here we discover something that is of peculiar importance. Among these seven Spirits is the Spirit of Venus, whom we have already come to know as Lucifer. And the pupil is now confronted with a strange and remarkable experience. When he takes the first step into initiation he encounters Lucifer; for it is Lucifer who shows man the “form” of which we spoke yesterday, the form or figure that man himself wears. The pupil encounters Lucifer as the Being who has made him look his ugliest; and now, when he meets the Spirit of Venus, he meets Lucifer again. But this time Lucifer looks entirely different. It is not the same figure as the pupil met before. He knows it is the same being, but Lucifer shows himself in two distinct forms. Thus the pupil acquires the knowledge that Lucifer can manifest in two forms. The first time he manifests is at the crossing of the Threshold (we spoke of it yesterday), when he calls man's attention to the fact that he owes to Lucifer his immortality, saying to him: “The Gods gave you a destructible body, but I have given you immortality.” And when the pupil turns to look,—lo, it is the dragon, of which we spoke yesterday. Therefore is this form also called the first form of the Guardian of the Threshold. But now at the second stage of initiation a new revelation comes to us. We are shown how Lucifer can unfold quite different forces from those we recognised in him before. If we were not able to develop in us the forces of secretion and excretion, the forces that proceed from the various canals and ducts in the body, we could not be human beings at all; it would be out of the question. The blood and breath movements alone could never maintain us as human beings. The movements of the juices in the body, the movements, that is, of the ducts and glands, must also be present. This can make plain to us the difference between all exoteric traditions—wheresoever they be found—and the understanding that is given here. The exoteric traditions do indeed speak of Lucifer and of the several Spirits of the Planets, but they can give no actual and genuine knowledge of the facts. The real knowledge is in very truth a knowledge that has to be received under a serious sense of responsibility. It reveals Lucifer to us in the first place as the one who distorts and makes unsightly the form of man, and on the other hand is the Spirit who is essential to man's being, who alone makes him man.

As we proceed further on the path of initiation we come to another striking and significant experience. If we succeeded in holding fast to the Christ, in linking ourselves inwardly with Him, so that He enabled us to carry over the thought of the I—the idea of the I, the self-consciousness of Earth—into the super-sensible world that we are entering, then a feeling took possession of us that this Christ Power has to do with the power of the Sun. We had as it were a presentiment of the connection. Now at the second stage something more is added. The Christ Power reveals itself to us as a form,—I may even, as a form or figure that we can grasp and perceive, that we can gradually learn to know more intimately, that grows clearer and clearer to us in the super-sensible world. At this second stage of initiation we are brought into a nearer knowledge of the super-sensible Christ. And then this Christ shows us that He calls the directing Spirit of Venus—who, as we have learned, is Lucifer—His brother, calls him His brother, accounting him a Planetary Spirit like the other Planetary Spirits. So that when Lucifer shows himself in the second stage of initiation, he at once reveals himself as a planetary Spirit taking his place among the seven Regents of the planets among his brothers. We enter thus into a world where we find what we might call a highly exalted College of seven planetary Spirits, who are in completely brotherly relation one with another. But here lurks a danger, and the pupil must needs possess himself of a great deal more knowledge if he is not to go under at this point. For he must on no account simply receive easily what here shows itself to him; he must earnestly endeavour to acquire an exact knowledge of what lies behind it.

When we come to enter into occult knowledge in detail, we can look in many directions for help to find our way. Although we have learned to recognise the seven brothers who are the seven Planetary Spirits, we are still a long way from any full knowledge of them. Seven brothers may be quite different one from another, and the difference does not perhaps show itself at first sight. We have to look a little nearer, we have to study them in detail, if we would gain a more intimate knowledge. At this point I want to bring forward something which, if you examine it carefully and test it by the side of what you know from exoteric myth, you will find to be well founded and reasonable even though it appear strange at first. It will prove to be authentic, for it is a direct outcome of occult research. Compare it with the religious and historical records from olden times, and the demands of your intelligence will be completely satisfied. The farther you look into it with your ordinary understanding, the more will you find yourself able to say “Yes” to what I am now going to tell you; for it is a result of occult investigation that is comparatively easy of approach to the man of the present day.

We must first of all find something to take as our starting-point; we must begin from some known fact. For the moment, let it be the fact that we have come to a kingdoms. We have, however, only learned to know the ruling Spirits with their kingdoms, the corresponding Planets. We must go further. We must investigate these kingdoms more closely, as far as occult research will allow. And the following is one among many ways that offer themselves to the pupil of our times who sets to work conscientiously with the means afforded in modern practical occultism. He can take his start, always under the guidance and counsel of an experienced occultist, from the study of the life of Gautama Buddha.

I have frequently emphasised and must here emphasise again that the life of Buddha is to be understood as the Buddhists understand it and not as it is interpreted by materialistic historians. We must first come ourselves to the recognition that Buddha became Buddha by passing through a great many incarnations; that he became first a Bodhisattva. And then having been born as the son of King Suddhodana, ascended in the 29th year of his life to the dignity of a Buddha. We must know that the ascension of the Bodhisattva to the stage of Buddha means in actual fact that such an individual has his very last incarnation on Earth in the life he lives as Buddha. When he has become a Buddha, he never returns again into an earthly body, but works in other than earthly worlds. This must be quite clear to us from the beginning. We must know for an absolute fact that the Buddha by his exaltation from Bodhisattva to Buddha rose to a cosmic dignity and does not require in the course of his further evolution ever to descend again into a physical earthly human being. Those of you who have followed my lectures will remember that I have alluded to one single occasion when the Buddha, so to speak, allows us to have a glimpse of his further evolution. When I was explaining how two Jesus children were born, the Matthew Jesus Child and the Luke Jesus Child, I said that at the birth of the Luke Jesus Child the Buddha sent down from the spiritual world astral forces that were incorporated into the astral body of Jesus. Mention was thus made of the Buddha sending down forces to Earth. In Norrköping¹ I told further how the initiates were able to meet with the Buddha in still another way. Nevertheless it is still true to say that since his life as Buddha he has lived no more on Earth. An occultist, however, who goes far on the occult path can follow also further the path of Buddha. It is, of course, now no Earth life that he follows. In the field of practical occultism the question arises: What has become of the Buddha, since he incarnates no longer in a physical human body? We can, as it were, go in search of the Buddha, we can look for him in the wide world. It may seem strange to you, but the initiated find the Buddha engaged on a great and mighty task, a task of deep significance. When the eye of the occultist has been opened and he looks out into the vast spaces of the world, he beholds a remarkable sight. He discovers that the Buddha has now for his scene of action that planet which in physical astronomy we call Mars; and he can do no other than relate in all seriousness how, since the time when the Buddha acquired the faculty which made it no longer necessary for him to appear again in Earth life, he has been given a new mission. This new mission of the Buddha we can discover by making occult observation of Mars.

As we enter upon this study, the true and original mission of the Buddha becomes clear to us. We find by occult investigation that the beings on Mars who correspond to men on Earth—they are of course of quite a different nature, but for the moment let us call them “Mars men”—at a certain time in their evolution were in a similar condition of need as were the Earth men in the Fourth Post-Atlantean period when the Christ had to come to them. And as Christ became a Saviour and an Awakener to Life, as that was a mission for the Christ in regard to Earth humanity, so is it a further mission for that Bodhisattva after he became the Buddha, to be a Saviour and Redeemer of Mars men. He has to accomplish on Mars an event similar to the event that the Christ had to bring to fulfilment on Earth.

When therefore we study the life of the Buddha, we find it falls into two parts. There is first the time when Buddha worked for the Earth men and brought them all that they were due to receive from him, including what he had already brought them during the time when he was a Bodhisattva. Then there is the later part of Buddha's life when he worked outside and beyond the Earth, when he rose to a higher power and strength for which his course on Earth was but a necessary preparation. For Buddha grew upwards into the power of one who is a Saviour and Redeemer. If it were possible for us to compare the influence of Buddha on Mars with the—not same, but similar influence of Christ Jesus on Earth and with the Mystery of Golgotha, then we would be bound to find a difference, because of the difference between Earth men and Mars men. If possible, I will tell you more another time about the feelings and response called forth in the Mars men by the working of Buddha.

As you see, tasks are set for the Beings who evolve in the Cosmos. The moment a Being rises from one state or rank to another, a new task is placed before him. And man, who has to fulfil his life's course on Earth, comes into touch during his time on Earth with Beings who, like the Christ, have from the beginning a cosmic task, and also with Beings who in their evolution upward leave the Earth and rise then to a cosmic task, as was the case with Buddha.

• 1. See Anthroposophical Ethics

This is the 19th of 22 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Berlin, and dates from October, 1905 through May of 1906. The title of these lectures are: Riddles of the World and Anthroposophy, in German the title is: Die Weltraetsel und die Anthroposophie. This lecture, which is also known as The Easter Festival, was translated from a shorthand report, unrevised by the lecturer, by an unknown translator.

Goethe has in various ways expressed a certain feeling he has often had, he says: When I observe the inconsequence of human passions, desires and actions, I experience the strongest impulse to turn to nature and seek support against the structure of her consequence and logic.—The arrangement of our festivals rests upon the endeavour of humanity since the earliest day to raise their eyes from the chaotic life of human desires, impulses and actions to the great consequential facts of all powerful nature. It is admirable, how well the big festivals are directly related to corresponding phenomena of nature. One such is the Easter festival, representing for the Christian a commemoration of his Redeemer's resurrection, and was earlier celebrated as the awakening of something of especial importance for mankind.

We look back to ancient Egypt with its Osiris-Isis-Horus cult expressing the uninterrupted rejuvenation of eternal nature. We then consider Greece, and find there a festival in honour of the God bacchus—a spring festival, connected in one way or another with the awakening of nature in spring. In India we have a spring festival dedicated to Vishnu. The Godhead of the Brahman is divided into three aspects—Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahman is rightly called the Great Architect of the universe bringing thereinto order and harmony. Vishnu is described as a kind of redeemer, awakener of slumbering life, rescuer, and Shiva is he who sanctifies and elevates the life awakened by Vishnu to the highest possible perfection. A sort of festival was also dedicated to Vishnu. It is said he falls into a sleep at the time of the year when we celebrate Christmas, to awake again at Easter. Those calling themselves his servants celebrate the entire intervening time in a most significant manner: they abstain from certain foods and drinks, and also meat. In that way they prepare themselves for gaining an understanding of the meaning involved when, at the Vishnu-festival, the resurrection is celebrated,—the awakening of entire Nature. The Christmas festival also has a significant relation to great natural phenomena—the power of the Sun becomes weaker, days shorter, and also that the Sun radiates more heat from Christmas onwards, so that Christmas becomes the festival of the reborn Sun. In this sense the Winter festival was felt by Christians. When Christianity, in the 6th and 7th centuries, wished to connect itself with ancient, holy events, the birth of Christ was transformed to the day on which the Sun again rose to a higher altitude. The spiritual significance of the World redeemer was brought into revelation with the physical Sun and awakening, resurrected life.

The Easter festival of spring also is brought into connection—as is usual with other festivals—certain solar phenomenon, one coming into expression even in common custom. During the first Christian century the symbol of Christianity was the Cross, at the foot of which is the lamb. Lamb and Ram are synonymous. During the time when Christianity was in preparation, the Sun appeared in the constellation of the Ram or Lamb. The Sun passes through the signs of the Zodiac; each year the Sun advances some distance. About 600-700 years before Christ the Sun had advanced into this zodiacal sign. For 2500 years it advances through it. Before that the sun was in the constellation Taurus—Bull. In those days the nations celebrated events which appeared significant to them in connection with human evolution through the Bull, because the Sun occupied that sign or constellation. As the Sun enters the sign of Aries—Ram or Lamb—the myths and legends the people contained references to the Ram as something significant. The Ram's skin brings Jason across from Kolchis. The Christ Jesus speaks of himself as the Lamb of God, and during the early period of Christianity is symbolised by the Lamb at the foot of the Cross. Thus can Easter be brought into relation with the constellation of the Ram or Lamb, and be considered the festival of the Redeemer's resurrection, because he summons everything to a new life after the death of Winter.

With these characteristics only in your mind, the two festivals Christmas and Easter seem rather similar, for the Sun has gained more power since its own festival of resurrection—the Christmas festival; therefore something more should be expressed by Easter. The festival of Easter in its deepest meaning will always be felt to be the greatest festival of the greatest mystery humanity—not merely as a sort of nature-festivity, related to the Sun, but essentially something more; It is indicated in the Christian meaning of resurrection after death. Also in the awakening of Vishnu the awakening after death is indicated. The awakening of Vishnu falls into the period in which the Sun in winter resumes its ascent, and the festival of Easter is a continuation of that ascending solar power which commenced at the festival of Christmas. We must look into the mysteries of human nature very deeply if we would understand the experiences of the old initiates when trying outwardly to express the essentials of the festival of Easter.

Man appears as a dual being, connecting a psycho-spiritual essentiality on one side with a physical substantiality on the other. The physical part is convergence of all other natural phenomena in the environment of man; they all appear as a delicate extract in human nature. Paracelsus significantly describes man as a confluence of all outside nature which is like letters of which man forms the word.

The sublimest wisdom lies in his organisation; physically he is a temple of the soul. All the laws we can observe in the lifeless stone, the living plant, the animal as subject of pleasure or pain, all these are compounded together in man: in wisdom they are there fused into a unity. When we contemplate the wonderful structure of the human brain with its countless number of cells working together so that all the thoughts and feelings of man may be expressed—everything that, in one way or another, affects the soul—we realise the all-ruling wisdom in the construction of his physical body. When we look out upon the entire outer world we perceive crystallised wisdom. And if we would penetrate all the laws of our surrounding world with our perceptive faculties and then look back upon man, we see concentrated in him the whole of nature, as a microcosm in a macrocosm. It was in this sense that Schiller said to Goethe: “You take into consideration the whole of nature in order to gain light concerning the detail. In the totality you seek the explanation for the individual. From the simple organism you pass step by step to the more complex, so to finally arrive at the most complex of all—man—and construct him genetically from the materials of the all-embracing structure or Nature.”

It is by means that marvel of construction the human body—that the soul can direct her eye upon her environment. Through the senses the psychic man observes the world around him, seeking slowly and laboriously—to fathom the wisdom by which it has been built.

Let us consider an as yet very undeveloped human being from the following point of view:—his body is the most reasonable creation possible; it is a concentration of the entire Divine reason. But in it resides a very immature soul incapable of developing even an initial thought for the comprehension of the mysterious power ruling in the heart, brain or blood. Very gradually this soul develops to an understanding of the forces which have worked in the construction of this human body. But upon it is impressed the soul of a remote past; man stands there as the crown of creation. Aeons had to pass away before cosmic wisdom was united within that human body.

But in the soul of the undeveloped man the cosmic wisdom first begins to grow. At first she barely dreams of the profound thoughts of the universal spirit—the architect of the human being.Yet, everything lying within man in a state of sleep—the psycho-spiritual constitution will in future be understood by man. Cosmic thought has worked through countless ages,—worked creatively in nature in order ultimately to build the crown of its agelong activity—the human body. In it slumbers the cosmic wisdom, so as to recognise itself in the human soul, to construct in the human being an eye with which to perceive itself. Cosmic wisdom without,—cosmic wisdom within—operative in the present as in the past—operative far into a future whose sublimity may only be surmised. The most profound human emotions are evoked when we thus ponder the past and future.

When the soul begins to understand the wonder constructed by the wisdom of the cosmos—when she attains thoughtful clarity and illumined knowledge then the sun may represent the most glorious symbol of this inner awakening which opens for the soul the outer world through the medium of the senses. Man receives the light because the sun illuminates objects. What man sees in the outer world is the reflected sunlight. The sun awakens in the soul the power to perceive the outer world. The awakening sun-soul in man, beginning to discover; cosmic thought in the seasons of the year, recognises in the rising sun her liberator.

When the sun again begins to ascend in the heavens and the days lengthen, the soul looks towards the sun, saying: To you I owe the possibility of seeing cosmic thought spread out in my environment—cosmic thought that sleeps in me as in all else.—Then man looks upon his earlier existence—the ages preceding his groping search for the cosmic thought.

Man is indeed very, very much older than his senses. Spiritual investigation enables us to arrive at the point of time when the senses are only beginning their development,—when they are at their weakest. At that time the senses were not yet the doors through which the soul could perceive her surroundings. Shopenhauer realised this fact and described the turning-point where man became able to use his sense perceptions in the world. That is his meaning, when he says:: The visible world came into being only when an eye existed with which to perceive it.—The sun formed the eye—light created light. Formerly, before any such outer vision existed, man possessed an inner light. In the remote past of human evolution no exterior object stimulated man to outer perception, but from his inner self arose imaginations, ideas, the primitive vision was a vision in the astral light. Humanity possessed a dull, dim clairvoyance.

In the Germanic world of the Gods man could also perceive the Gods through a sort of dim, misty astral light. But it gradually became more dim and dark and slowly vanished; It became extinguished by the fierce light or the physical sun which appeared in the heavens and the physical world it illuminated. So the astral vision of man receded, declined. When man looks to the future, it becomes clear that this astral sight must return upon a higher level; all that which has become extinguished by physical vision, must again live, so that a fully conscious clairvoyance may be developed in mankind. To the normal vision of day will be added a still brighter and more luminant human life in the light of the future. To physical vision will come vision in the astral light.

The leaders of humanity are those individualities whose renunciations during earth-life enabled them to experience—before death—the state of consciousness called “passing through the portals of death”. This contains all those experiences which later will be the possession of all humanity when they have evolved astral perception which makes visible the psychic and spiritual. This making visible of the psycho-spiritual environment was always called by the initiate the “awakening”, “resurrection”, “spiritual rebirth”—giving to man—a supplement to his gifts of the physical senses, the senses of the Spirit. He celebrates an inner Easter festival who discerns within him the awakening of the new astral vision.

So we can understand why this spring festival is related to symbolic ideas such as death and resurrection. In man, the astral light is “dead”. It sleeps. But it will again be resurrected in man. Easter is the festival indicating this future awakening of this astral light.

The sleep of Vishnu begins at the Christmas time when the astral light sank into sleep and physical light awoke. When man has advanced sufficiently far to renounce the personal, the astral light re-awakens in him; he can celebrate the feast of Easter,—Vishnu can again awaken in his soul.

In cosmic spiritual perception the Easter festival is not connected with the awakening of the sun only, but with the reappearance of the world of plant life in the spring also. As the seed is laid into the soil and there decays in order to awaken to a new life, so had the Astral light to sink into sleep in the human body so that it may be rejuvenated. The symbol of Easter is the seed which sacrifices itself so that a new plant may arise. It is the sacrifice of one phase of nature for the sake of creating a new one. Sacrifice and becoming (germination of the new)—these two are intimately linked together in the Easter festival. Richard Wagner felt this thought profoundly. When he lived in a villa on the banks of the lake at Zurich in 1887 and looked out upon awaking nature, his thoughts concerning it gave rise to others—the deceased and resurrected World saviour, the Christ Jesus, and the thought of Parzifal seeing the Holy of Holies in the soul.

All leaders of mankind, who were aware of how the higher spiritual life of man arises out of his lower nature, have comprehended the significance of Easter. Dante therefore described his awakening—in his Divine Comedia—as taking place on Good Friday. That is clear at the very beginning of the poem. Dante experienced his sublime vision in the 35th year of his life; that is the middle of a normal human life. So he reckons 35 years for the development of man's physical perceptive powers; till then he continues absorbing new physical experiences. After that, man is sufficiently matured for spiritual experience to augment the physical; he is ripe for spiritual perception. When the growing, evolving physical powers in man are united, the time is ripe for the awakening of the spiritual. For that rise Dante's vision falls into the period of the Easter festival.

A certain contradiction has been said to exist between the Christian conception of Easter and the idea of Karma inherent in Spiritual Science. Certainly, Karma and redemption through the Son of man do appear to oppose one another. This state of indecision is common with people who know little of the basic idea of this anthroposophical thought—a paradox seemingly existing in the simultaneous acceptance of salvation through Christ Jesus and the idea of Karma. Such people say: the ideas of a redeeming God contradicts self redemption through Karma. They fail to understand, in the true sense, the Easter of redemption, nor can they grasp the idea of Karmic justice. It would be wrong to withhold aid from someone suffering by saying: “You yourself are the cause of the trouble,” refuse him help because it must work itself out. That is a misunderstanding of Karma. Karma, to the contrary, says to you: “Help him, who suffers, for you exist to help”. You help to improve the credit balance of the Karmic account of necessity when aiding your fellow man. You give him the opportunity and the strength to carry his Karma; and you, to that extent, are a redeemer from evil .

In a similar way, instead of helping the single individual, one can come to the assistance of a whole group or nation of man.

When a mighty individuality like that of the Christ Jesus comes to the aid of entire humanity, it is his sacrifice in death which permeates the Karma of mankind. He helped to carry the Karma of the whole of humanity, and we may be quite sure that redemption through Christ Jesus was absorbed and assimilated by the totality of human Karma.

The fundamental significance of the resurrection and redemption-concept will be made really comprehensible only through Spiritual Science. A Christianity of the future will unite Karma with redemption. Because cause and effect are complementary in the spiritual world, this great act of sacrifice must also have its effect upon human life. Upon these thoughts of the Easter festival also does Spiritual Science have a deepening effect. The thought of Easter which appears to be written in the stars and which we believe to (we) read in them, is fundamentally deepened by Spiritual Science. We also see the profound meaning of the Easter-concept in the ascendance of the spirit about to be realised in the future.

At present, mankind exists amidst inharmonious, disordered conditions. But man knows how the world has emerged from chaos, and that out of his chaotic inner being harmony will ultimately arise. Like the regular paths of the planets round the sun, so will the inner saviour of mankind arise,—herald and creator of unity and harmony amid all disharmony. All humanity shall be reminded by the Easter festival of the resurrection of the spirit from the present obscurity of human nature.

Let me start by drawing your attention to a number of things which might be of interest to you, beginning with an article in yesterday's issue of Schweizerische Bauzeitung, reporting on the Johannesbau in Dornach, near Basel. This is the result of a recent visit of a group of Swiss engineers and architects. The article is most gratifying and fair. Indeed, it is like an oasis in the midst of other things which have recently appeared in print about our efforts which had their source in our very midst. It is most satisfying to find such a fair discussion that gives the building its due, especially since it comes from specialist, objective quarters outside our own circle. Do read it. Herr Englert, who acted as guide for that group of Swiss engineers and architects who showed such genuine interest in our building from the technical and also the aesthetic point of view, has just reported that the article is also due to be published in French in the Geneva journal Bulletin de technique.

Further, I should like to draw your attention to a book—you will excuse my inability to tell you the title in the original language—just published by our friend Bugaev under his pen-name of Andrei Belyi. The book is in Russian and gives a very detailed account in great depth of the relationship between spiritual science and Goethe's view of the world. In particular it goes into the connections between Goethe's views and what I said in Berlin in the lecture cycle Human and Cosmic Thought about various world views, but it also discusses a good deal that is contained in spiritual science. Its connections to Goethe's views are discussed in depth and in detail and it is much appreciated that our friend Bugaev has published a revelation of our spiritual-scientific view in Russian.

Herr Meebold, too, has just published a book in Munich to which I should also like to draw your attention. The title is The Path to the Spirit. Biography of a Soul. You will find it interesting because Herr Meebold describes in it a number of experiences he had in connection with the Theosophical Society.

These are the oases in the desert of attacks. It seems that another has just appeared, written by one of our long-standing older members. It is said to be particularly scandalous, but I have not yet seen it. These attacks from among our members are particularly unwelcome because we realize that it is precisely these long-standing older members who ought to know better.

Yesterday we spoke about aspects of the human being's connections with the super-sensible world, particularly with regard to the fact that our dead, and indeed all those who have left their bodies and gone through the gate of death, must be thought of as being in that world. In our present context it is particularly important to understand that in the world through which man passes between death and a new birth an evolution, a development is taking place just as much as is the case here on the physical plane.

Here on the physical plane, taking a shorter span to start with, such as the post-Atlantean time, we speak of the Indian, the Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, the Greco-Latin, the modern period, and so on. And we consider that during the course of these periods an evolutionary process takes place—in other words, that human souls and the manner in which these souls manifest in the world during this sequence of periods differ in characteristic ways.

Similarly, if only one can find sufficiently graphic concepts, one can speak of an evolution that takes place for these periods of time in the sphere through which the dead pass. There, too, an evolution takes place. On all kinds of occasions, where this has been possible, this evolution has been discussed in different ways. But relatively easy though it is to speak of evolution on the physical plane—and as you know it is not all that easy in this materialistic age—it is naturally less easy to do so with regard to the spiritual world, since for that world we lack sufficiently graphic concepts. Our language was created for the physical plane, and we are forced to use all kinds of paraphrases and graphic substitutes in order to describe the spiritual sphere in which the dead are living, especially with regard to evolution.

Naturally, of particular interest now is the fact that life between death and a new birth in our fifth post-Atlantean period is suitably different from what it was in earlier times. While the materialistic cultural period is running its course here on earth, a great deal is also taking place in the spiritual world. Since the dead have a far more intense experience of everything connected with evolution than is the case for people living on the physical plane, their destiny is most intensely dependent on the manner in which a certain evolution takes place in definite periods. The dead react far more intimately, far more subtly, to what lives in evolution than do the living—if we may use these expressions—and this is perhaps more noticeable in our materialistic age than has ever been the case before.

Now, to assist our understanding of a number of things we shall be discussing, I want to introduce into these lectures something that has emerged in relation to this, as a result of careful observation of the actual situation. To do this I shall have to widen our scope somewhat and speak today about various aspects in preparation for the statements towards which our train of thought is leading.

I have already pointed out that the right way to look at the human being in relation to the universe is to consider the individual parts of his being separately. From the spiritual point of view, what exists here on the physical plane is more a kind of image, a manifestation. Thus we may regard as fourfold the physical human being we see before us.

First we see the head. As you know from earlier discussions, the head as it appears in a particular incarnation is supposed to have reached its final stage in that incarnation. The head is the part most strongly exposed to death. For the way our head is formed is, for the most part, the consequence of our life in our previous incarnation. On the other hand, the formation of our next head in our next incarnation is the consequence of the life of our present body. A while ago I expressed this briefly by saying: Our body, apart from our head, metamorphoses itself into our head in our next incarnation, while our next body is growing towards us; whereas our present head is the metamorphosed body of our previous incarnation, the rest of our body has grown towards us more or less—there are varying degrees—out of what we have inherited.

This is how the metamorphosis takes place. Our head, as it were, falls away in one incarnation, having been the outcome of our body in our previous incarnation. And our body transforms itself, metamorphoses itself—as does leaf to petal in Goethe's theory of metamorphosis—into our head in our next incarnation. Now because our head is formed from the earthly body of our previous incarnation, the spiritual world has a great amount of work to do on this head between death and our new birth, for its archetypal form must be fashioned by the spiritual world in accordance with karma. That is why, even in the embryo, the head appears before anything else in its complete form, for more than any other part it has been influenced by the cosmos. The body, on the other hand, is influenced for the most part by the human organism. So this appears later than the head in the embryo. Apart from its physical substance, which has of course been gathered through heredity, our head, in its form, its archetypal form, is indeed shaped by the cosmos, by the sphere of the cosmos. It is not for nothing that your head is more or less spherical in shape, for it is an image of the sphere of the universe; the whole sphere of the universe works to form your head. Thus we can say that our head is formed from the sphere.

Just as here on earth people busily work to construct machines and build up trade and commerce, so in the spiritual world human beings are busy, though not exclusively, developing all the technical requirements, the spiritual technical requirements for building the head for their next incarnation from out of the sphere of the universe, the whole cosmos, in accordance with the karma of their earlier incarnations. We glimpse here a profound mystery of evolution.

The second aspect we must consider, if we want to view man as a revelation of the whole universe, comprises all the organs of his breast, centred around lung and heart. Let us look at them without the head. The head is an image of the whole spherical cosmos. Not so, the organs of the breast. These are a revelation of all that comes from the East. They are formed out of what might be called the hemisphere. (See diagram).

Imagine the cosmos like this. Then you can see the head as an image of the cosmos. And the organs of the breast can be seen as an image of what streams in from the East—the hemisphere I am shading green. This hemisphere alone works on the organs of the breast. Or, expressed as a paradox: The breast organs are half a head.

This is the basic form. The head is based on the sphere, the breast organs on part of a circle, a kind of semicircle, only it is bent in various ways so that you can no longer recognize it exactly. You would be able to see that your head really is a sphere had luciferic and ahrimanic forces never worked on man. And you would see that the organs of the breast are really a hemisphere, had these forces never exercised their influence. The direction in relation to the centre—one would have to say for ordinary earthly geometry, the infinitely distant centre—is eastwards. An eastward-facing hemisphere.

Now we come to the third part of the human being, excluding head and breast organs: the abdominal organs and the limbs attached to the abdomen. Although this is not an exact term, I shall call all this the abdominal organs. Everything I comprehensively call the abdominal organs can also be related, like the other parts, to forces which work and organize from without. In this realm they work, of course, on man from the outside via embryological development in the way they do because during pregnancy the mother is dependent on the forces which have to be gathered together to form the abdomen, just as forces have to be collected from the sphere to form the head and from the East, the hemisphere, to form the organs of the breast.

The forces that work on the organs of the abdomen must be imagined as coming from the centre of the earth, but differentiated, with all that this entails, according to the region inhabited by the parents or ancestors. The forces all come from the centre of the earth, but with differentiations depending on whether a person is born in North America, Australia, Asia or Europe. The organs of the abdomen are determined by forces from the centre of the earth with differentiations according to region.

Seen from the occult point of view, the complete human being also has a fourth aspect. You will say that we have already dealt with the whole human being, and this is so, but from the occult point of view a fourth aspect must be considered. We have examined three parts, so now all that is left is the total human being. This totality, too, is a part. Head, chest and abdomen all together form the fourth aspect, the totality, and this totality is in turn formed by certain forces. This totality is formed by forces that come from the whole circumference of the earth. They are not differentiated according to region. The total human being is formed by the total circumference of the earth.

Herewith I have described to you the physical human being as an image of the cosmos, an image of the forces of the cosmos working together. Other aspects, too, might be considered in connection with the cosmos. For this we would have to think of the spiritual cosmos in relation to the human being, not only the physical cosmos. We have just been examining the physical human being, so we were able to remain with the physical cosmos. Once we start to consider the discarnate human being between death and a new birth we cannot remain with the elements of space, for the three-dimensional space that we have—though it determines the measure of the physical human being living between birth and death—does not determine the measure of the spiritual human being living between death and a new birth. We have to realize that those who are dead have at their disposal a world that is different from the one which lives in three dimensions.

To turn now to the discarnate human being, the one we call a dead human being, perhaps we need a different kind of consideration. Our method of consideration must remain more mobile. Also there are various points of view from which we could conduct our considerations, for life between death and a new birth is just as complicated as life between birth and death. So let us start with the relationship between the human being here on earth and the human being who has entered the spiritual world through death.

Once again we have the first part, but it is temporal rather than spatial. We could call it the first phase of a development. The dead human being goes, you might say, out into the spiritual world in a certain way; he leaves the physical world but, especially during the first few days, is still very much connected with it. It is very significant that the dead person leaves the physical world in close connection with the constellation arising for his life from the positions of the planets. For as long as the dead person is still connected with his etheric body, the constellation of planetary forces resounds and vibrates in a wonderful way through this etheric body. Just as the territorial forces of the earth vibrate very strongly with the waters of the womb that contains a growing physical human being, so in a most marked way do the forces of the starry constellations vibrate in the dead person who is still in his etheric body at the moment—which is, of course, karmically determined—when he has just left the physical world.

Investigations are often made—unfortunately not always with the necessary respect and dignity, but out of egoistic reasons—into the starry constellation prevailing at birth. Much less selfish and much more beautiful would be a horoscope, a planetary horoscope made for the moment of death. This is most revealing for the whole soul of the human being, for the entry into death at a particular moment is most revealing in connection with karma.

Those who decide to conduct such investigations—the rules are the same as those applied to the birth horoscope—will make all kinds of interesting discoveries, especially if they have known the people for whom they do this fairly well in life. For several days the dead person bears within himself, in the etheric body he has not yet discarded, an echoing vibration of what comes from the planetary constellation. So the first phase is that of the direction in the starry constellation. It is meaningful as long as the human being remains connected with his etheric body.

The second phase in the relationship of the human being to the cosmos is the direction in which he leaves the physical world when he becomes truly spiritual, after discarding his etheric body. This is the last phase to which terms can be applied in their usual, rather than in a pictorial, meaning to describe what the dead person does, terms which are taken from the physical world. After this phase the terms used must be seen more or less as pictures.

So, in the second phase the human being goes in the direction of whatever is the East as seen from his starting point—here, direction is still used in a physical sense, even though it is away from the physical world. Through whatever is for him an easterly direction the dead person journeys at a certain moment into the purely spiritual world. The direction is to the East. It is important to be aware of this. Indeed, an old saying found in various secret brotherhoods, preserved from the better days of mankind's occult knowledge, still points to this. Various brotherhoods speak of one who has died as having ‘entered into the eternal East’. Such things, when they are not foolish trappings added later, correspond to ancient truths. Just as we had to say that the organs of the breast are formed out of the East, so must we imagine the departure of the dead as going through the East. By stepping out of the physical world through the East into the spiritual world, the dead person achieves the possibility of participating in the forces which operate, not centrifugally as here on earth, but centripetally towards the centre of the earth. He enters into the sphere out of which it is possible to work towards the earth.

The third phase may be described as the transition into the spiritual world; and the fourth as working or having an effect out of the spiritual world, working with the forces from the spiritual world.

Such ideas bring us intimately close to what here binds the human being to the spiritual worlds. The table below shows that the conclusion of number 4 meets up with the beginning of number 1, namely working on the head out of the realm of the sphere. This work is done by the human being himself after he has entered into the spiritual world by way of the East.

In our dealings with the dead we can perceive strongly that those who have died have to leave the physical world in an easterly direction. They are to be found in the world which they reach via the door of the East. They are beyond the door of the East. And in this connection the experiences we undergo now, in the fifth post-Atlantean period, in the sphere of development of materialism are very significant.

For you see, in this fifth post-Atlantean period, the dead now lack a great deal because of the materialistic culture prevalent in the world. Some aspects of this will be clear to you from what we said yesterday. When, by suitable means, we come to know the life of the dead today, we discover that they have a very strong urge to intervene in what human beings do here on earth. But in earlier times, when there was less materialism on the earth than there is today, it was easier for the dead to intervene in what took place on the earth. It was easier for them to influence the sphere of the earth through what those on earth felt and sensed of the after-effects of the dead.

Today it can be experienced very frequently—and this is always surprising in the actual case—that people who have been intensely involved in certain events during their life are unable, in their life after death, to have any interest in the events which take place after their death, because they lack any kind of link. Amongst us, too, there are souls who showed great interest for events on earth while they were here but who now, having gone to the spiritual world, find the events taking place since their death quite foreign to them. This is frequently the case, even with distinguished souls who here on earth were greatly gifted and filled with the liveliest interest.

This has been going on for a long time, indeed it has been on the increase during the whole of the fifth post-Atlantean period, ever since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Expressed in commonplace terms—which are unfortunately all we have in our language—our experience is that, because they are less and less able to intervene in what human beings do, the dead have instead to intervene in the way people manifest as individual personalities. So we see that since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the interest and the work of the dead has been concentrated increasingly on individual personalites rather than on the wider contexts concerning mankind. Since I have occupied myself closely with this very aspect, I have reached the conviction that it is connected with a certain phenomenon of modern times that is very noticeable to those who are interested in such things.

In recent history, unlike former times, we have the remarkable phenomenon of people being born with outstanding capacities. In general they work with tremendous idealism and distinguished endeavour but are incapable of gaining a broader view of life or of widening their horizons. In the whole of literature this has been expressing itself for some time. Individual ideas, concepts, and feelings, expressed either in literature or art, or even science, sometimes display strong promise. But an overall view is not achieved. This is also the reason why people find it so difficult to achieve the broader view needed in spiritual science. It happens chiefly because the dead approach individuals and work in them on capacities for which the foundations are laid during childhood and youth. The faculties which enable individuals to gain a broader view when they reach maturity are more or less untouched by the activities of the dead in this materialistic age. Incomplete talents, unfinished torsos—not only in the wide world, but also in individual situations—are therefore very prevalent because the dead can more readily approach individual souls rather than what lives socially in human evolution today. The dead have a strong urge to reach what lives socially in human evolution, but in our fifth post-Atlantean period this is exceedingly difficult for them.

There is another phenomenon today of which it is most important to become aware. There exist today many concepts and ideas which have to be very definite if they are to be of any use. Modern, more mercantile, life demands clearly defined concepts based on calculations. Science has become accustomed to this, but so has art. Think of the development art has undergone in this connection! It is not so long ago that art was concerned with great ideals on a wide scale, when, thank goodness, concepts were insufficient for an easy interpretation of great works which were full of meaning. This is no longer the case to the same extent. Today, art strives for naturalism, and concepts can easily encompass works of art because now they have often arisen merely from concepts instead of from an elemental, all-embracing world of feeling. Mankind is today filled to the brim with commonplace, naturalistic concepts which are determined by the fact that they have been conceived entirely in relation to the physical plane where it is in the nature of things to be sharply defined and individualized.

Now it is significant that the so-called dead do not appreciate such concepts. They do not appreciate sharply-defined concepts which are immobile and lifeless. One can learn some extraordinary things, some very interesting things in this connection—if I may be permitted to use such commonplace and banal expressions for these venerable circumstances. As you know, for we have gone through all this together here, I have recently been endeavouring to discuss, using lantern slides, all kinds of considerations about periods in the history of art. I have been endeavouring to find concepts for all kinds of artistic phenomena. To communicate through speech one has to find concepts. Yet I have constantly felt the need to avoid firm, clearly-defined concepts for artistic matters. Of course, for the lectures I had to attempt to define the concepts as far as possible, for they have to be defined if they are to be put into words. But while I was preparing the lectures and formulating the concepts I must say I had a certain aversion, if I may use this word, to expressing what had to be said in such meagre concepts as have to be used if things are to be expressed in words. Indeed, we shall only understand one another in these realms if you translate what has been expressed in close-textured concepts back into concepts of which the texture is less clearly defined.

If one comes up against this experience at a time when one is also concerned with the world of discarnate souls, the following can happen. One may be attempting to comprehend a phenomenon which gives one the feeling of being far too unintelligent to grasp it in concepts. One looks at the phenomenon but has insufficient understanding with which to bind it properly into concepts. This experience, which is particularly likely when one is contemplating a work of art, can bring one into especially intimate contact with discarnate souls, with the souls of the dead. For these souls prefer concepts which are not sharply defined, concepts which are more mobile and can mingle with the phenomena. Sharply defined concepts, concepts similar to those formed here on the physical plane under the influence of the physical conditions of the sense-perceptible world, give the dead the feeling of being nailed to one particular spot, whereas what they need for their life in the spiritual world is freedom of movement.

Therefore it is important that we occupy ourselves with spiritual science so that we may enter those intimate spheres of experience where, as was said yesterday, the living can encounter the dead; because the concepts of spiritual science cannot be as closely defined as can those of the physical plane. That is why malevolent or narrow-minded people can easily discover contradictions in the concepts of spiritual science. The concepts are alive, and what is alive is mobile, though it does not, in fact, harbour contradictions. We can achieve this by concerning ourselves with spiritual matters, and to do so we have to approach things from various sides. And approaching things from various sides really does bring us close to the spiritual world. That is why the dead feel comfortable when they enter a realm of human concepts which are mobile and not pedantically defined.

Indeed, the dead feel most ill at ease of all when they enter the realm of the most pedantic concepts. These are the ones that have recently come to be defined in relation to the spiritual world for those people who do not want to live in anything spiritual, but who want the concepts for sense-perceptible things to apply to the spiritual world as well. These people conduct spiritualistic experiments in order to imprison spiritual concepts in the world perceptible to the senses. They are, in fact, more materialistic than any others. They seek rigid concepts in order to hold commerce with the dead. Thus they torture the dead most of all, for if they want to approach they force them to enter the very realm most disliked by them. The dead love mobile concepts, not rigid ones.

These are experiences to which the fifth post-Atlantean period seems to be particularly prone, given the two circumstances of materialism here on earth and the peculiar situation of the dead as described. One and the same thing determines materialism here on earth and a certain kind of life in the spiritual world. In the Greco-Latin period the dead most definitely approached the living in a manner which differed from that of today. Nowadays, in the fifth post-Atlantean period, there is what I would like to call a more earthly element—but you must imagine this of course in a more pictorial sense—a more earthly composition in the substantiality of the dead than there used to be. The dead appear in a form that is much more like those of earthly conditions than used to be the case. They are more like human beings, if I may put it this way, than formerly. Because of this they have a somewhat paralysing effect on the living. It is nowadays so difficult to approach the dead because they bring about a numbness in us. Here on earth materialistic thoughts reign supreme. In the spiritual world, as a karmic result, the materialistic consequence reigns supreme, for there the spiritual corporeality of the dead has assumed earthly qualities. It is because the dead are super-strong, if I may put it thus, that they numb us. To overcome this numbness it is necessary to develop the strongest possible feelings for spiritual science. This is the difficulty today, or one of the difficulties, standing in the way of our relationship with the spiritual world.

For the earthly realm seen spiritually—indeed the earthly realm can be seen spiritually—things appear different from what might be assumed when they are not seen spiritually. It is correct to say, as we have done many a time, that we live in the age of materialism. Why? It is because human beings in this materialistic age—human beings in general, rather than those who understand these things—are too spiritual—paradoxical though this may sound. That is why they can be so easily approached by purely spiritual influences such as those of Lucifer and Ahriman. Human beings are too spiritual. Just because of this spirituality they easily become materialistic. It is so, is it not, that what the human being believes and thinks is something quite different from what he is. Those very people who are most spiritual are the ones most open to the whisperings of Ahriman, as a result of which they grow materialistic.

Strongly though one must combat materialistic views and materialistic ways of life, nevertheless one may not maintain that the most unspiritual people belong to the circles of materialists. I have personally met many spiritual people, that is, people who are themselves spiritual, not just in their views, among the monists and suchlike, and equally many coarse materialists especially among the spiritualists. Here, though they may speak of the spirit, are to be found the most coarsely materialistic characters. Haeckel, for instance, is a most spiritual person, regardless of what he often says. He is most spiritual, and just because of this can be approached by an ahrimanic world view. He is a most spiritual person, entirely permeated by the spirit. This once became clearly apparent to me in a cafe in Weimar. I have told this story before, perhaps more than once. Haeckel was sitting at the other end of the table with his beautiful, spiritual blue eyes and his marvellous head. Nearer to me sat the well-known bookseller Herz, a man who has done great service to the German book trade and who knew quite a bit about Haeckel in general. But he did not know that that was Haeckel sitting at the other end of the table. At one point Haeckel laughed heartily. Herz asked: Who is that man laughing so much down there? When I told him it was Haeckel he said: It can't be, evil people can't laugh like that!

Thus the concepts entertained by present-day materialists are so bare of spirituality that they are unable to discern the revelations of the spirit in the material world. So spiritual and material worlds fall apart and the spiritual world becomes no more than a set of concepts. Anyway, the biggest materialistic blockheads are often found today in societies and associations that call themselves spiritualistic. Here are the materialistic blockheads who on occasion have even succeeded in tracing mankind's descent from the apes, even from a particular ape, to the greater glory of the human race. These people were not satisfied with the descent of man from the apes in general, they even traced the lines back to particular apes. For those of you have not heard about this, let me explain. A few years ago a book appeared in which Mrs Besant and Mr Leadbeater described exactly which apes of ancient days they were descended from. They traced their family trees back to particular apes and you can read all about this. Such things are possible, even in much-read books today.

We need the concepts I have elaborated today in order to penetrate more deeply into certain aspects of the theme we are discussing. For our world is definitely dependent on the spiritual world in which the dead live; it is connected with the spiritual world. That is why I have endeavoured to unfold for you certain concepts which relate directly to observations of the immediate present. Everything that takes place here in the physical world has certain effects in the spiritual world. Conversely, the spiritual world with the deeds of the dead shows itself either in what the dead can do for the physical world or in what they cannot do because of the present materialistic age. I also described this present materialistic age in so far as it has been made excessively materialistic by certain secret brotherhoods, as I showed yesterday. The type of materialism that underlies all world events to a high degree today is what we might call the mercantile type.

I ask you to take good note for tomorrow of the concepts I have put before your souls today, concerning the life of the dead. But also please note how little the present age takes certain things for granted which were taken much more for granted in earlier times. We shall see tomorrow how all these things are linked. However, it is characteristic for our time that certain conceptual views are extended to mercantile life which would escape someone who fails to pay attention to such features of our time. We ought not to let them escape us. Mercantilism is all very well as long as it is put in the right light in the way it stands within social life. For this to happen it is necessary for us to have certain yardsticks for everything. Today, however, much conceptual chaos reigns. Yet within this conceptual chaos, concepts are given quite clear definitions, as is our way in the age of materialism in which concepts are fixed to ideas based on what the senses can experience. And when a chaos of concepts then results, as happens in today's materialism, this really does draw the sharpest possible line between the physical world in which human beings live between birth and death, and the super-sensible world in which they live between death and a new birth.

Only consider in this connection the fact that in Central Europe—in contrast to other regions where the inclination to philosophize is less pronounced—there is a tendency to philosophize about the mercantile system even though this is not at home in Central Europe. In Central Europe there is a tendency to make a philosophy of everything. Thus people also philosophize about what aspects of materialism are typical for our time. An interesting book by Jaroslav was published long before the war: Ideal and Business. Certain chapters interested me particularly because of their significance with regard to cultural history. It was not the content that interested me but their relation to cultural history; so, for instance, the chapter entitled ‘Plato and Retail Trade’. This deals with everything to do with commerce, with the mercantile system. Another interesting chapter is ‘The Astrological System Applied to the Price of Pepper’. Not uninteresting is also ‘Wholesale Trade as Described by Cicero’. Another chapter is entitled ‘Holbein's and Liebermann's Portraits of Merchants’. Not uninteresting, too, is the chapter ‘Jakob Böhme and the Problem of Quality’. Very interesting is ‘The Goddess Freya in Germanic Mythology in Relation to Free Competition’. And finally, especially interesting is ‘The Spirit of Commerce as Taught by Jesus’.

As you see, everything is thrown in the pot together. But by this very fact things gain that characteristic which makes for materialism. Let us take all this as a preparation for our considerations tomorrow.

In the gathering held here just after the Christmas Course we turned our attention to things that can deepen medicine in an esoteric sense. And we tried—to the extent to which this is possible in such brief meetings—to penetrate into the esotericism of medicine, in the way that is suitable for younger medical aspirants today. In formulae for further contemplation and elaboration, we received things that can quicken the sense for medicine and emphasis was laid upon the necessity of having this sense for medicine.

I picture to myself that you have worked upon these things for a time, my dear friends. Naturally, my idea of this work is not that people sit down and ponder about such things theoretically, but that from time to time, when the inner need is felt, they let these things work upon and develop the soul. It was inevitable, from the very way in which these things came before us, that one perfectly definite fact should emerge—a fact which I believe to be of importance for our gathering now. Because of the very concentrated form in which the esoteric things were given at the first gathering, one or another, to a greater or lesser degree, must have realized that it was necessary to face certain inner difficulties. The purpose of esoteric teachings is not always to make life as easy as possible for us. In a certain respect the opposite is certainly the case. They are also there in order to make life more difficult, to make us realize the difficulties of understanding the world, of really getting to know the world and human beings. So that when we become alive to these difficulties, we take the opposite path of development from that which is so often taken in our civilization today. We take the opposite to a superficial path of development. It is only by becoming alive to the difficulties existing as between the outside world and the human being that a person can be deepened in soul. I think, therefore, the best way now will be if, bearing these inner difficulties in mind, you will bring them forward in the form of questions and we will then make matters that can really promote the development of our subject into the theme of our discussions. I would ask you, to begin with, to tell me what inner and outer difficulties have arisen in your own circle. Difficulties will have arisen both for the practitioner and for the student. There are a number among you who are now approaching the end of their studies; they will have found quite specific difficulties and we will try to find their solution. All of you have received the first circular letter and you will have realized that in connection with definite questions there is a very great deal to say. I would like to ask if any question, definite or indefinite, has arisen, for such questions will surely lead us further. In this way we shall get away more from theoretical study and reach matters which lie in the realm of actual experience.

Question: A participant asked about the course of the year, the Calendar of the Soul, definite constellations of the stars and whether one must be consciously aware of these.

That is not essential. You mean observation of the constellations as they are at a particular time. It is, of course, a help if one is able to look at the visible constellations. But if I have understood you aright you mean: How are things, really, if we allow the formulae we have been given to work upon the soul? These things work through their own inherent mantric power; orientation in the outer world according to the stars can, of course, be a help but you must remember the following. Take the most striking example of a human-cosmic relationship that can still be observed today, namely the menses. It is obvious that they are determined cosmically yet they are not so determined in the present epoch. They were cosmically determined in a much earlier phase of cosmic evolution in which our earth was also involved. Then, in the course of time, they became independent, were emancipated from the external cosmos, so that nowadays there is no direct dependence. Therefore, one cannot say nowadays that the phases of the moon are coincident with menstruation. This cannot be said. But it is certainly true to say that there was once a time when the one coincided with the other; then they separated. The moon phases exist on their own. Menstruation takes its own independent course. Here is one example of separation. The other that I will mention is not governed by the phases of the moon but by the daily phases of the moon. Ebb and flow were once coincident with certain influences of the moon. Again there was separation. The moon is on its own, ebb and flow on their own.

These things also hold good in the working of mantric power. Mantric power is certainly of such a nature that what happens in the human being as a result of it was at one time coincident with cosmic processes, but separation has now taken place, so that a proper orientation is necessary. If we want this help from the outside world we must say to ourselves first of all: What is to happen in the inner being is inscribed in the cosmos. But in contemplating this we must make ourselves inwardly independent and be able to experience inwardly and quite on our own, emancipated from the cosmic happenings. Therefore it is not unconditionally necessary to reckon with the constellations of the stars in the working of a mantram. Equally it cannot be a question of the menses being regulated according to the external phases of the moon, because the menses have become a process of the world of nature. Today it is the case that the whole of our inner life that is to be influenced by mantrams must take place in emancipation from the outer cosmos.

In connection with other subjects I have often had to speak of this as the difference between Eastern and Western esotericism. The whole standpoint of the oriental is this: the human being has come forth from the cosmos, he must return there, he must be united with the cosmos again. Think of the posture of the Buddha. It is a return to earlier conditions. This is shown by the Buddha's whole posture, the crossing of the legs one over the other, the elimination of the limb structures. The position of the arms, too, is such that the whole relationship to the earth is paralyzed. We see how the human being again members himself into the cosmos. He goes back again. So it is, in reality, with the whole of Eastern esotericism. It is a going backwards. Our Western esotericism can only be a going forward, an ever-increasing emancipation. For this reason it is not so inwardly comfortable and when applied in certain domains particularly it does not make for inner ease.

Of course, if you have some specific, pathological condition before you, and when you look at the constellations you find, for example, that the condition definitely set in when Saturn was in opposition to the moon, this naturally has a certain significance. For if you now come as a healer with Saturn and moon, that is to say, in earthly terms, with lead and silver, saying: I will apply the lead cosmically and the silver in the earthly form, trying to pulverize it, to dissolve it; I will change it into the earthly form, thereby producing the same constellation that is expressed in the heavens in the opposition to the moon, then you can heal in the sense of the cosmic forces. But at the same time you bring the human being into a condition which throws him back into earlier stages of evolution. Whereas if you take your start directly from the given earthly state—the connection of the human being with lead, with silver—then you are working in something that is in a process of emancipating itself within the human being and you are looking not into the past but into the future. In this case you will certainly be doing something similar, but you get at it from within, by getting to know the nature of the lead and the silver, realizing that the lead works as substance, the silver through what it actually becomes when it is broken into pieces, dissolved, resolved into atoms. But you are comparing it with the human nature that is already emancipated, not with the cosmos. This is the way in which one must proceed. Therefore it may certainly be a help to think about the actual constellations of the stars. But to begin with, we shall have to use all our power to lend ourselves to the inner activation of soul by the mantric formulae we have been given, and seek for everything more from within.

Question: What must I do out of the ego when I am meditating?

From out of the ego? Meditation consists, does it not, in the following. As a modern person you feel that you must understand every sentence. This is emphatically an activity of the ego in the present incarnation. Everything you do intellectually is an activity of the ego. In the present incarnation the intellect predominates and everything else is overshadowed by the ego, works upwards at the most like a dream, and is unconscious. In contrast with this, meditation means elimination of this intellectual striving and, to begin with, taking the content of the meditation just as it is given—purely according to the sounds of the words. When you approach the content of the meditation intellectually you bring your ego into movement before you absorb the meditation, for you think about the content; it is outside you. If you let the meditation be present in your consciousness just exactly as it is given, not cogitating over it at all but simply letting it be in your consciousness, then your ego is working in you not from the present incarnation but from the past. You hold the intellect still, simply transporting yourself into the word-content which you hear inwardly, not outwardly; you transport yourself into this word-content and as you do so your inner being works within the content of the meditation—the inner being which is not that of the present incarnation. But thereby the content of meditation becomes—not something for you to understand merely—but something that works within you in reality; so that finally you become aware of: Now I have experienced something I was unaware of earlier.

Take a simple meditation which I have often given: “Wisdom lives in the Light.” If we think about this we can extract many very clever things but equally frightfully stupid things from it. “Wisdom lives in the Light” is there in order to be heard inwardly. When you hear this inwardly that within you which listens does not come from your present incarnation but what you have brought with you from former earthly lives. It is this that thinks and experiences, and after some time there lights up within you something you did not know before, that you cannot think out with your own intellect. Inwardly you are much further than your intellect. Your intellect contains only a tiny extract of what is really there.

After all, you must take what is given in Anthroposophy absolutely concretely and objectively. Just think about the following: With the change of teeth the human being really renews his whole physical body. This must be taken as a fundamental fact. That the human being gets second teeth is really only the most external symptom of all, merely, a fragment of what is going on. Just as the so-called milk teeth are replaced, so is the whole human organism replaced. After the change of teeth, so far as his physical substance is

concerned, the human being is entirely new in comparison to what he was when he was born. The modern view which jumbles everything together is that the human being is born, passes through a metamorphosis with the change of teeth and then goes on developing. It is not like this. The truth is that when the human being comes physically into the world he has, as well as the so-called milk teeth, a body that is a product of hereditary development. He has received a body that is the product of what is contained in the whole line of ancestry. The physical body of the first seven years—if we express it in figures—comes from here. From the seventh to the fourteenth year the human being has a body, too, but this body has not been produced from the first by transformation. What the human being has brought with him to the earth has intervened here.

Picture it as follows: the human being has had his body. This body which has come to him from the line of heredity is a model; he has it as a model. Into this body he takes earthly substance. If he were to work only with the forces he brings with him from pre-earthly existence he would elaborate this earthly substance which he takes into his body in the first seven years into quite a different form. He would call forth quite a different form. He does not come at birth with the tendency to give form to a being with eyes, ears, nose, like the being who stands on the earth. He enters with the tendency to structure the human being in such a way that very little is structured by way of the head through his pre-earthly being; it is especially upon everything else that the greatest care is expended. What is stunted in the embryonic life is developed in the astral, in the ego organization. Of the physical embryo, therefore, we must say: Physical nature in the embryo is developed in a wonderful way but the pre-earthly human being has very little indeed to do with it. On the other hand the pre-earthly human being plays the very greatest part in all that lies around the embryo. It lives in what is demolished in the physical world, amnion, chorion, and so on. Within this lives the pre-earthly man.

You can picture it rather like this. To begin with, the cosmos is copied. This is what the human being wants, in reality, to do when he has come down from the pre-earthly into earthly existence. Why does he not do it? Because a model is already provided. And in accordance with this model, with the substances received, he transforms the pre-earthly during the first seven years of life. His inherent tendency would be to form a more spherical being, a being organized into a sphere. This is transformed in accordance with the model and so the pre-earthly forces work out this second physical man who is there from the seventh to the fourteenth years, but to begin with, by adhering to the model which comes from the forces of heredity.

There, you see, you have two, actually distinguishable entities of forces in the human being. How can you understand these force entities? Take, with the outlook and feeling of the physician, the book Occult Science and read where the earth's evolution is spoken of. At first there is a Saturn evolution, then a Sun evolution. If you follow the description of the Earth evolution you will find that until the separation of the sun, sun, moon and earth were one, combined together in one. Afterwards there is a separation of earth and sun, earth and moon. Up to the middle of this evolution, therefore, the human being lives in the cosmos. He lives in sun and moon just as he lives in the earth. After the separation of the sun he lives outside the sun; after the separation of the moon, outside the moon. Until the separation of the sun, therefore, the cosmic forces were working upon man's nature; those forces, too, which are today outside the earth in the moon and in the sun were working in the human being because he belonged to the world in which the sun and moon were still present. There followed for the human being an evolution during which sun and moon were outside.

There was a phase of evolution which contained within it all that today is both earthly and of the nature of sun and moon; later on, the extra-earthly emancipated itself from the earthly. The earthly went on along its own path, it dried up, hardened, became physical—and you find this today in the stream of heredity; it has densified within the stream of heredity. What the human being has received since the separation of the moon and sun lies in the forces working in from the cosmos. That is the point. So that in the model that is received in order that the second man may be elaborated, you have a model that really represents a primeval, artistic principle given by father and mother, originating when sun and moon were still united with the earth. It was then that the forces which really give the human being his earthly configuration were developed. For you will readily understand that the configuration of the human being is an earthly one. Try to think of the being of man entirely removed from the earth. What could be done with it? You would be extremely unhappy if after death you were to make use of anything like legs. Legs have purpose only when the earth's forces of attraction pass through them, when the legs are within the sphere of the earth's forces of attraction. Legs—and arms and hands, too—have meaning and purpose only on the earth. So that a whole section of the human organism, in the way it is developed, has purpose only when we are earthly man. What we are as Earthly man has no meaning so far as the cosmos is concerned. Therefore when we come to the earth as beings of spirit and soul, our wish, to begin with, is to form quite a different organization. We want to build a sphere and to generate all kinds of configurations within this sphere, but we have no wish for this being with whom the cosmos itself can do nothing. This being is given us as a model and we build up the second man in accordance with this model.

In the first life-period, therefore, there is a perpetual struggle between what comes from us out of the previous incarnation and what comes from hereditary development; the two elements fight with each other. The illnesses of childhood are the expression of this fight. Just think how intimately the whole inner being of soul and spirit is bound up with the physical organization during early childhood. When the second teeth appear you can see how they push up against the first, how they still have tussles with each other, and in this same way the whole second man has tussles with the first. But within the second man there is the super-earthly being; in the first a foreign, earthly model. These two work into one another and if you observe this inter-working truly you can see how, if the inner man, who as a being of soul and spirit was present in pre-earthly existence, has too much the upper hand for a time, working into the physical very strongly and having, willy nilly, to adjust itself by dint of effort to the model, that it damages the model by striking up against it everywhere, saying: I want to get this particular form out of you—then the fight expresses itself as scarlet fever. If the inner man is tender, so that there is a continual shrinking back, a wish to mold the in-taken substances more in accordance with their own nature, and resistance is put up to the model, the struggle comes out as measles. What is, in reality, a mutual struggle expresses itself in the illnesses of childhood. Moreover, it is only possible to understand truly what comes later if these things can be properly reckoned with.

It is, of course, very easy for the materialists to say that all this is stupid, because children still retain a likeness to their parents after the change of teeth and not only up till that time. Such talk is nonsense. The fact is that one being is weaker, directs himself more in accordance with the forces of heredity, builds up the second man with a greater resemblance to the model. This naturally comes out in the appearance, but the same thing has been going on when the being has adjusted itself more in accordance with the model. On the other hand, there are human beings who after the change of teeth become very unlike what they were before. In such cases what comes from the pre-earthly life of soul and spirit is strong and they adhere less to the model. We have therefore simply to see these things in their right connection.

The following, too, must be remembered. Everything that has to be taken in must, in the first place, be taken in by the child and elaborated inwardly in such a way that the ego and astral body enter into intimate contact with the foodstuffs. Later on this need not be the case any longer. The human being is never afterwards in the position of being so strongly compelled to work out, according to a model, something that is independent as is the case during the first seven years of life. During those years he must work up in his ego and astral body everything he takes in; he must work it up in such a way that it can be molded in accordance with the model. This process must be helped; and the world has arranged for it, inasmuch as milk is able to bear a very great resemblance indeed to an etheric structure. Milk is a substance which really still has an etheric body and because this substance, when it is taken by the child, still works up into the etheric, the astral body is able at once to take hold of the milk and then there can arise the close inner contact between what is thus taken in and the astral body and ego organization. For this reason there is an inward, intimate connection in the child between the external foodstuffs and the inner organization of spirit and soul.

In the whole way in which the child drinks milk you can actually see how his astral body and his ego are taking hold of the milk you can see it with your very eyes. And now, as a physician, you must realize the remarkable process of working up what is going on. On the one side, meditate in mantrams, letting the mantram work upon you, freeing your forces of soul on the one hand; and on the other hand, meditate simply upon the child. Picture to yourself how the being of spirit and soul comes down and makes its way to the physical foodstuff, ignoring the model to begin with, and then picture what is going on between the being of spirit and soul and the foodstuff—a process that is now directed in accordance with the forms contained in the model. If you form a true picture of an excessively strong working of the spirit and soul, the picture crystallizes into that of scarlet fever. A picture of a too feeble working of the spirit and soul which wavers in the face of the model and becomes the picture of measles.If you picture these things in meditation you carry over ordinary meditation into medical meditation. It is dreadful that people today want to grasp everything with the intellect. In medicine really nothing can be grasped with the intellect. With the intellect one could at the very most grasp the diseases of the minerals—and there it is not a question of curing. Everything medical must be grasped by direct perception and the faculty for this has to be developed.

You cannot notice this process in a grown-up person. The digestive tract takes over the foodstuffs—it is a process transacted inwardly; whereas in the child, astral body and ego take over the foodstuffs. Unfinished forms of human nature have there to be directed and fashioned in accordance with the model. When you meditate upon the child, you see a mighty metamorphosis going on. You see the spirit and soul lighting up, as it were, and the in-taken foodstuffs cast into darkness and shadows; you see there how the second man is formed out of light and darkness, in colors, as it were. You see how the pre-earthly in man is a brightness and how the external foodstuffs are a darkening. In the child a brightness comes upon the darkness, a brightness that comes from the pre-earthly. The milk goes in as darkness. The brightness and the darkness together give rise to manifold colors. What is white in the physical is black in the spiritual; always the opposite.

These things make it possible for the ego to be active in quite another way than is usual in life. What a feeble effort it is that we make in the act of ordinary, intellectual thinking. Intellectual activity is man's greatest weakness. He simply carries one concept to another. But if you observe the child in the way now described you will meditate in such a manner that your ego organization is thoroughly involved in the effort.

These things, in their further course, must also be heeded in our pedagogy. In a school like the Waldorf School we have children between the ages of seven and fourteen. At this age things have changed. The second man has been developed. The child before us has been molded out of pre-earthly existence according to the model that has been cast off; forces of heredity, naturally, have remained in the child. They have been brought into the model, into the imitation of the model. The child is now much too unearthly. For now the forces that come from beyond the earth have worked on the child with special strength and the swing of the pendulum has gone to the opposite side. Formerly, this was externally visible in the human being; he was entirely the product of heredity. Now that which is to be seen externally has arisen entirely from within. It is the external world that has now to be mastered. What has hitherto worked without consideration for the earthly world, with consideration only for the human model, must direct itself to the outer world. Between the seventh and fourteenth years, astral body and ego organization must work in such a way that this super-earthly being is again adjusted to the external conditions of earth existence. This process has its culmination at puberty. At that age the human being is placed wholly within earthly conditions; he enters into his relationships with earthly conditions; the earthly is membered into his being. Therefore the element of greatest importance in the generation of the second man between the seventh and fourteenth years is what the human being brings with him from pre-earthly existence. For this reason his own specific karma only begins to work after puberty. Then the earthly works in. A culmination is reached at puberty and the third man now begins to develop.

The second man—so far as the substance is concerned—is thrown off and the third man is developed. The process does not reach so far as actual form, it only gets as far as life. If it were to get to form, we should get third teeth, because the human being is now governed by external conditions. Within these outer conditions it is the case that the human being again takes in what is extra-human. When he was being governed by the model he was directed entirely in accordance with the human. So long as he was governed by the model he was governed by something passed on by heredity. But in this there lies, in reality, something that is dried up. Since the separation of the sun it has really broken off from the root of his being and is dried up, withered. Therefore the forces of heredity contain the most pathological forces and when he is governed by the model the human being really absorbs innumerable causes of illness. He absorbs few such causes during the period after the change of teeth because then he is governed by the external world; climate, everything contained in the outer air, etc., are less harmful. Between the seventh and fourteenth years the human being is healthy; then again there begins a period when he is again susceptible.

All these conditions must be observed in such a way that you have the picture of man in your mind. If you have this picture of man in mind, then you also meditate rightly. Then you will be able to combine what you learn with what you meditate upon and what you have learned does not remain theory but becomes practice, because you uncover the power that enables you to perceive these things. This is what is so urgently needed today. It is impossible to achieve anything in medicine so long as we persist in thinking that evolution goes forward in a straight line. The human being is in reality constituted from separate streams of development which take their course in periods of seven years; what comes later is linked to what is earlier; it is not a one-sided continuation but different conditions are always intervening. Continuous evolution in this sense, where the earlier alone is the cause of the later, is only to be found in the mineral kingdom, less in the plant kingdom and least of all in the human kingdom.

Let us try to picture the plants. How do people proceed today when they picture the plants? There is the soil of the earth. The seed is pictured as being laid into the soil and then the plant grows out of this. People are naive enough to think as follows: Hydrogen is a very simple molecule, consisting of two atoms. All kinds of things are imagined to form combinations. Alcohol is certainly a very complicated molecule. Carbon is there combined with hydrogen and oxygen and then one has something more complex. And now there come still more complicated substances with more and more complicated molecules. There was a period during the eighties and nineties of the last century when the titles of these were very complicated, consisting of more than three lines in length. Yes, the molecule has become terribly complicated! And now still more so. Then it becomes a seed, and a seed is a most highly complicated combination. Then the plant grows out of the seed. But all this is nonsense. The basis of the seed formation is, in reality, that earthly matter tears itself away from the principle of structure and passes over into chaos, becomes chaotic, contains no more forces of matter in itself. Then, when no earthly structure is present, what is working out of the cosmos can assert itself. The cosmic declares its readiness to mirror the cosmic structure in the minute. In the seed formation the “nothingness” asserts itself over against the earthly and the cosmos works into the nothingness.

Frau Dr. Kolisko could tell you an interesting fact which entirely confirms this. During investigations into the function of the spleen we took small rabbits and excised the spleen. In spite of this the rabbits were quite well. They did not die of the operation, but a long time afterwards, from colds. It was quite possible to see how the rabbits live on without the spleen. When one of the rabbits died, we were able to see what had happened and in the place of the spleen there had appeared tissue which had assumed a decidedly spherical form. What had really happened? We had excised the physical spleen and by doing this had artificially driven earthly substance into chaos, made it accessible to the cosmic forces, and something resembling a seed formation had come into being. There had arisen, in an extremely primitive form, something that resembled the structure of a seed—an image of the cosmos. This quite harmless vivisection, therefore, confirmed a matter of great significance, for this is what appears to spiritual-scientific observation.

Take a quartz crystal. It is an earthly thing. Why? Why is the quartz crystal an earthly thing, retaining its form really in a very pedantic, rigid way? The quartz gets its form from an inner force and if you break it apart with a hammer the single parts always retain the tendency to be six-sided prisms, self-contained, six-sided pyramids. This tendency is present. You can as little rid the quartz of this tendency as you can get pedantry out of a man who is pedantic by nature. You may atomize a pedantic person, but he will still remain pedantic. The quartz does not allow itself to come to the point where the cosmos can do anything with its forces. Therefore the quartz has no life. If the quartz could be pulverized to such a degree that in the single fragments it no longer had the tendency to be governed, in the single fragment, by its own forces, something living and cosmic would grow out of the quartz. This is what happens in the formation of a seed. In the seed, matter is driven out to such a degree that the cosmos can intervene with its etheric forces. The world must be seen as a perpetual entering into chaos and again an emergence from chaos. What is contained in quartz also came at one time from the cosmos, but it remained at a standstill, has become Ahrimanic. It no longer exposes itself to the cosmic forces. As soon as anything enters into the realm of the living it must always pass through chaos.

This again is something which will help you to meditate in the sense of medicine. And you can also picture the developed plant—how it grows from leaf to leaf, and so on. You come to the formation of the seed in the fruit. Whereas you otherwise picture the seed plant as brightness it now becomes dark, quite dark. Then again comes the light, when the forces from outside take hold. In this way, too, you can make an imaginative picture from the being of the plant. When you are aware of an object which you call “plant”—then it is an imaginative meditation. You should not remain in the sphere of the intellectual but in the sphere of the concrete, inner picture. The intellectual element is merely there for the purpose of presenting what is known, in the form of thoughts.

Suppose you write down the word Menschenkind. This word is taken from something that has been perceived. Very well. The word Menschenkind reminds you of a Menschenkind (a human child). But suppose you take the word and say: I like the i, so I will put that first, I like the n, so I will put that next, then the sch and so on. You can put the word together in a different way but nothing that you can make anything of will come out of it. This is what people are doing with concepts all the time. The concept is only the spiritual term for the perception. People separate and combine concepts and think in acts of thinking. They do this, too, when they are observing the external world. They cover up observation with thinking and so they live today outside reality. This is possible as long as one is working with the science that stands outside reality, with geometry and arithmetic. But if we want to go in for medicine we cannot stand outside reality. If we do, then we also stand outside reality in medical practice itself.

It must be strictly remembered that there is no connection of kinship or other such relationship between Jesus, the son of Pandira, Jeschu ben Pandira, and the central figure in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, or any other Gospel. A hundred years before our era, that is to say a hundred years before the coming of Christ, Jeschu ben Pandira was stoned and then hanged on a tree, and he must not be confused with any figure in the Gospels. I want to emphasize, however, that to speak about the personality or existence of Jeschu ben Pandira requires no occult knowledge or clairvoyant faculty, because information about him can be obtained, if so desired, from Hebrew and Talmudist records. Confusion with the real Jesus has constantly occurred, for the first time actually as early as the second century A.D. Although Jesus, the son of Pandira, is not to be identified with Jesus of the Gospels there is a historical connection between the two personalities. This connection can be established to-day only through spiritual-scientific research and to understand it in all its depth we must again speak briefly of the evolution of humanity.

Looking up to those Beings who are the great Leaders of evolution, we come finally to lofty Individualities generally known by the name of Bodhisattvas—because it is in the East that the theory of their existence has been most firmly established. There are a number of Bodhisattvas. Their task as the great Teachers of humanity is to allow wisdom from, the spiritual worlds to flow through the Mystery Schools according to the maturity attained by men in a given epoch. The two Bodhisattvas—to whom reference has often been made when 'we have been speaking of the evolution of humanity—of primary interest for our own times arc the son of King Suddhodana who became Buddha, and he who as Gautama Buddha's successor in the office of Bodhisattva still holds this office to-day and—as Oriental wisdom and clairvoyant investigation agree—will do so for the next 2,500 years. This Bodhisattva will then become Maitreya Buddha, attaining the saint: rank as did his predecessor, Gautama Buddha.

The Bodhisattvas succeed one another in the evolution of humanity as great Teachers and must not be confused with the One who is the very source of their teachings, from whom they receive what it is their mission to impart to the several epochs. We must picture a 'college' of Bodhisattvas and at its centre the living source of the teachings. This living source is none other than He whom we are accustomed to call ‘Christ’. It is from Christ that all the Bodhisattvas receive what they have to impart to men in the course of the ages.

As long as a Bodhisattva holds this office he devotes himself first and foremost to the task of teaching; for, as we have heard, when he attains the rank of Buddhahood he does not again descend to incarnation in a physical body. Once more in agreement with all Oriental philosophy it can be said that Gautama Buddha, who as the son of King Suddhodana passed through his final incarnation in a physical body, has since assumed embodiment only as far as the etheric body. In the lectures on St. Luke's Gospel we heard of the next task of this Bodhisattva after becoming Buddha. When the so-called Nathan Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel was born (he is not the same as the Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel), the Buddha who was embodied at that time as far as the etheric body, penetrated into the astral body of this child. Hence we can say that since his incarnation as Gautama Buddha the function of that Being was no longer to give teaching but to work as a living power from the spiritual world into the physical world. To work through teaching and to work as a living, growth-promoting power arc entirely different matters. A Bodhisattva is a Teacher until he becomes Buddha; from then onwards he is a power, an organising, life-bestowing power. And the Buddha worked as such in the constitution of the Nathan Jesus.

Since the sixth century B.C., the successor of the Bodhisattva who then became Buddha has taken the latter's place in the series of great Teachers. This is the Bodhisattva who later on will become the Maitreya Buddha. Hence we have to look for teachings needed by mankind since the time of Gautama Buddha wheresoever the Bodhisattva who succeeded him has poured down his inspiration, inculcating into his disciples what it is their mission to communicate to the world.—I said in the lecture yesterday that the activities centred in the communities of the Therapeutae and Essenes were chosen to be an instrument for the work of this Bodhisattva, and that one of the very noblest, purest personalities in the Essene communities was Jesus, the son of Pandira. Thus it was through the Essenes that the teaching of the Bodhisattva sent its radiance into mankind on the Earth.

As hearers of the deeper teachings, the Essene communities disappeared comparatively soon after the Christ Event—this is evident from external history. It will therefore certainly not seem incredible when I say that fundamentally and essentially the communities of the Therapeutae and Essenes were instituted in order that they might be instrumental in bringing down from the spiritual realms, from the spheres of the Bodhisattvas, what was needed to enable men to comprehend the momentous event of the appearance of Christ. The most important teachings given to mankind with the object of promoting understanding of the Christ Event stemmed from the communities of the Therapeutae and the Essenes. Thus Jesus, the son of Pandira, inspired as it were by the Bodhisattva who will become the Maitreya Buddha and whose influence was at work in these communities, was chosen to give teachings whereby the Mystery of Palestine, the Mystery of Christ, could be brought within reach of man's understanding. More detailed information about the Therapeutae and Essenes can be discovered only by means of spiritual-scientific investigation. Very little is known about them in external history. And as we are among anthroposophists, we shall not hesitate to draw from the secrets possessed by the Therapeutae and Essenes what is necessary for a deeper understanding of St. Matthew's Gospel, as well as of the other Gospels. We shall speak of the secrets in a way that tallies with the picture a spiritual scientist must have of these communities which flourished a century before the Christ Event in order to prepare for it through special teachings.

The essential feature in these communities was the Initiation undergone by members of the sects. This Initiation was specially adapted to promote understanding, through clairvoyant vision, of the significance of the part played by the Hebrews and by Abraham in preparation for the coming of Christ. That was the mystery with which the communities of the Therapeutae and Essenes were specially concerned. The very purpose of the Initiation undergone by their disciples was to promote deeper and more exact clairvoyant insight into the connection just mentioned. In the first place, therefore, it was necessary that an Essene should learn to assess the full significance of what had come about for the Hebrew people through Abraham, and so be able to see in him the progenitor of that people. Through his own vision an Essene was to realise that there had been implanted into Abraham the faculty of which I have spoken in the preceding lectures, which had then to be filtered through many generations, flowing down through the blood.

To understand how something of importance for the whole evolution of humanity can be brought about through a personality such as Abraham, you must keep this very significant truth clearly in mind: that always, whenever a personality is chosen to be a special instrument in the great process of evolution, a divine-spiritual Being must have a direct hold in that personality.

(Those of you who were present at the performance in Munich of the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, or have read it, will know that one of the most important dramatic moments¹ is when the Hierophant indicates to Maria that she can fulfil her mission only when the influence of higher Beings has actually taken effect in her, when, in her case, this has caused what may be called a separation of the higher members of her nature from the lower, making it possible for the latter to be 'possessed' by an inferior spirit.—Everything in the Mystery Play, if you let it work upon your souls and do not take it superficially, can make you alive to great secrets of the evolution of humanity.)

As such a momentous role in evolution had been assigned to Abraham, it was necessary that the Spirit once perceptible to men in Atlantean times weaving through the external world should penetrate into his inner, organic constitution. Abraham was the first in whom this came to pass and therewith a fundamental change in man's faculty of spiritual perception was made possible. This could be brought about only through the influence of a divine-spiritual Being and such a Being did, in fact, lay into the organic constitution of Abraham the seed for the bodies that were to descend from him in the line of generations.

Thus an Essene would have said: The power that could actually bring the Hebrew people into existence, the power that enabled this people to become the bearers of the mission which prepares for Christ's coming, was established, in rudiment to begin with, by the mysterious Being who is only to be discovered when the soul ascends through the entire sequence of generations to Abraham, to the point where this Being entered into Abraham's bodily constitution, thereafter to work through the blood as a kind of Folk-Spirit in the Hebrew people. If, therefore, this secret of the evolution of humanity is to be understood, a man must rise in soul to the Spirit who implanted that power and seek for him in the realm where he was to be found before he had penetrated into Abraham.—The Essenes said: If a man desires to ascend in soul to the Spirit inspiring the Hebrew people and to know him in all purity, such a man, if he is an Essene or a Therapeut, must undergo a certain development whereby he purifies himself from everything that since the time of Abraham has approached the human soul from the physical world. The spiritual Being within man, and all the spiritual Beings who work together to bring about the evolution of humanity are to be experienced in their purity only in the spiritual world; in the state in which they exist within man they have been defiled by the forces of the physical world of sense.

According to the view held by the Essenes--and in a certain province of knowledge it is of course absolutely correct—every human being had within him whatever impurities had made their way into the soul in the past, clouding vision of the spiritual Being who had established in Abraham the power of which we have spoken. Accordingly it was essential that the soul of every Essene should be cleansed of everything that had penetrated into this power as a disturbing factor, dimming the vision of the Being indwelling the blood of the generations. The aim of all the methods of inner purification, all the exercises practised by the Essenes, was to liberate the soul from those inherited traits and influences which might obscure vision of the Being who was the Inspirer of Abraham. It was realised that the soul and spirit within man, this inmost core of his nature, had been clouded and sullied through the inherited traits.

There is a spiritual law which through their studies and clairvoyant perception the Essenes were well able to grasp, namely that the influence of heredity ceases only after 42 stages in the line of generations. Only after 42 stages have all traces of heredity been eliminated from a man's soul. He inherits something from his father and his mother, something from his grandfather and grandmother and so on, but the earlier the stages in the sequence of generations, the less are inherited impurities within him, and after 42 generations there are none; the influence of heredity no longer exists. Hence the aim of the methods of purification practised by the Essenes was to eliminate, through exercises and strict training of the inner life, whatever impurities had sullied the soul in the course of 42 generations. Every Essene was obliged to submit to severe discipline and to undergo difficult mystical experiences leading through 42 stages. There were 42 distinct stages on this mystical path to purification; when he had passed through them in actual experience an Essene knew that he was free from all influences of the world of the senses, from all the impurities in his inner nature resulting from heredity.

Thus an Essene rose in soul through 42 stages to the high level where he felt the inmost core of his own being to be related to the Divine-Spiritual. He said: By passing through these 42 stages I reach the God for whom I aspire !—The Essenes had clear perception of how a man could rise in soul to a Divine Being who had not yet descended into matter, for the path of ascent was known to them from their own experience. Among all who were living on the Earth at that time, the Therapeutae and the Essenes alone were cognizant of the truth about what had come to pass through Abraham. They knew the truth concerning heredity through the generations and they knew too that to ascend to a Being who has entered the stream of heredity and reach the stage where that Being had not yet descended into matter, a man must rise in soul through 42 stages, corresponding to the 42 generations; then the Being would be found. But they knew some-thing else as well, namely this.—Just as a man must ascend in soul through the 42 stages to reach this Divine Being, so must the Divine Being himself take the path in the opposite direction, descending through 42 stages if he is to penetrate into the blood of a man. Just as there are 42 stages on the path of ascent to the Divine Being, so must the Divine Being descend through 42 stages in order to become a man among men.

Such were the teachings given among the Essenes, above all by Jeschu ben Pandira, under the influence of the inspiring Bodhisattva. Thus it was a doctrine of the Essenes that the Being who had inspired Abraham to receive the Divine Seed into his own organism, needed 42 generations to descend to manhood.

When we know this we also know the source of the know-ledge that enabled the writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew to enumerate precisely these 42 generations. And it was Jesus, the son of Pandira, who drew the attention of the Essenes to one point in particular.—The 42 generations would not be completed until a further hundred years had elapsed after the century in which he was living. He therefore taught the Essenes that they could rise in soul through the 42 stages only so far as a link with historical events was still possible, and that from that point onwards any further advance could only be through grace from above. But, so he taught them, the time will come when, as a natural happening, a man will be born for whom it will be possible to rise through his own blood to such a lofty height that there can descend into him the Divine Power enabling him to bring to manifestation the Spirit of the Hebrew people, the Jahve-Spirit, in the blood of that people. Jeschu ben Pandira taught: If Zarathustra, the herald of Ahura Mazdao, is to incarnate in a human body, this body must have been prepared in such a way that the divine-spiritual Being indwelling it has descended through 42 generations.

The Essene communities, therefore, were the source of the teaching concerning the generations with which St. Matthew's Gospel begins. But to understand these facts thoroughly, reference must be made to an even deeper aspect of the subject.

Because man is a twofold being, everything connected with his development presents itself to us from two sides. During waking consciousness the four members of man's being are united and his twofold nature is not immediately apparent. But during sleep he is quite clearly twofold: his physical and etheric bodies remain in the physical world and his astral body and Ego have emerged from the other two members. As long as we are concerned with that which makes man part of the physical world, we can speak only of physical body and etheric body. In truth, all man-made institutions and affairs in the physical world concern the physical body and etheric body, although during waking life the activity of the other members is also involved. During the hours of waking consciousness man works from his Ego and astral body into the other two members; during sleep he leaves the latter to themselves. But in reality, the moment he goes to sleep, forces and beings begin to work from the Cosmos and to permeate the members he has temporarily abandoned; it is a fact, therefore, that a constant influence from the Cosmos is exercised upon his physical and etheric bodies. These bodies that re-main in the bed during sleep constitute the outer side of man's structure and their attributes are comprised within 42 generations, during which span these attributes are transmitted by heredity. If we take everything that belongs to the physical nature in the first generation and then pass on through 42 generations, when these have been completed, no trace at all will be found of the rudimental qualities that were the most fundamental in the first generation. In other words, the active characteristics and forces in the physical and etheric bodies of a human being arc comprised within 6 times 7 generations. Whatever the inherited traits in these two bodies may be, they must be sought among the ancestors, but only within the course of 42 generations. Beyond that, nothing is to be found; everything belonging to an earlier generation has vanished. The forces inherent in the outer constitution of a human being are therefore essentially connected with 42 generations.

In this sense the evolution or development of man in Time is based upon a principle of number. This must be studied more closely, for it has an important bearing upon the genealogy given in St. Matthew's Gospel.

Everything relating to the physical body is connected with 42 generations, because everything that has to do with development or evolution in Time is governed by the number 7. Evolution through the period during which physical attributes are inherited was known by the Essenes to be connected with this number. An Essene said to himself: You have to pass through 6 times 7 stages=42 stages; then you come to the next 7 stages which complete the multiples of 7 : 7 times 7 =49 stages. It is however the case that whatever lies beyond the 42 stages can no longer be attributed to the forces and beings working as active factors in the physical and etheric bodies. In accordance with the law governing the number 7, the whole evolution of the physical and etheric bodies is actually achieved only after 7 times 7 generations; but in the final 7 generations complete transformation has already taken place and nothing of the earlier generations is any longer present. The Essenes knew that what primarily concerned them was comprised within the 6 times 7 generations; but that when the multiples of 7 were complete, something new was there. In the sphere entered after the 42 generations, they realised that they no longer had to do with human but with superhuman existence. They said: 6 times 7 generations are connected with the Earth, and what lies beyond them to make 7 times 7 already leads beyond the Earth: this is the fruit for the spiritual world. After the 6 times 7 generations the fruit is produced which then, with the completion of the 7 times 7, emerges for the spiritual world.

Hence the thoughts of those among whom the Gospel of St. Matthew originated were somewhat to the following effect.—The physical body used by Zarathustra must be of such maturity that after the 42 generations it is already at the point of spiritualisation, therefore of deification. It is in existence at the beginning of the 43rd generation, but instead of passing into the further stages this body allows itself to be permeated by another Being—by the spirit of Zarathustra who incarnated on the Earth as Jesus of Nazareth.—Thus through the fulfillment of the mystery of numbers the most fitting body and the most fitting blood had been provided for the Zarathustra-soul in Jesus of Nazareth.—Such is the preparation of whatever relates to physical and etheric body in human evolution.

But now there are in man—hence also in him who was to be the bearer of the Christ Being—not only physical body and etheric body but astral body and Ego as well. Therefore the astral body and Ego too, not only the physical and etheric bodies, had to be adequately prepared. For an event of such stupendous importance this could not be accomplished in one personality, and two were necessary. The physical body and the etheric body were prepared in the personality with whom the Gospel of St. Matthew is primarily concerned; the astral body and Ego-principle were prepared in the personality of whom the Gospel of St. Luke tells and whom we know as the Nathan Jesus. During the early years this was a different personality. Whereas Jesus of St. Matthew's Gospel received the suitable physical and etheric bodies, Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel was to receive the suitable astral body and Ego-principle. How could this come to pass?

As I said before, it is a fallacy due to the assertions of an inferior kind of clairvoyance that the whole astral being and the Ego of a man are contained in the cloudlike formation hovering near the physical and etheric bodies of one who is asleep. The truth is that when, during sleep, man passes out of the physical and etheric bodies, his being expands into the whole Cosmos, into everything pertaining to the Cosmos. The mystery of our sleep is that We draw from the world of t he stars—hence we speak of ‘astral’ body—the purest cosmic forces We then bring these forces with us when, on waking, we descend into the physical and etheric bodies. We emerge from sleep strengthened and vitalized by everything we have been able to draw into ourselves from the Cosmos.

When a man develops clairvoyance in its higher form to-day—and this applies also to the time of Christ Jesus—what experiences must he undergo? In the conditions normal at the present time, man becomes unconscious when with his astral body and Ego he passes out of the physical and etheric bodies. Clairvoyant consciousness must, however, be brought to the stage where there can be vision through the astral body and Ego alone, to the entire exclusion of physical and etheric bodies. This clairvoyant consciousness then participates in and perceives the happenings of the world of the stars—not only gazes into that world but actually penetrates it. Just as the consciousness unfolded by the Essenes rose upwards through the chronological sequence of generations governed by the number 7, so must a man pass through the stages that make it possible for him to have clairvoyant vision of the Cosmos.

I have often spoken of where the danger lies for development either in the one direction or in the other. Among the Essenes it was fundamentally a matter of descent into the physical and etheric bodies in order that after traversing the 42 generations they might find the Divine. With them it was as if, on waking, instead of seeing the world around him, a man were to plunge into his physical and etheric bodies in order to observe their forces—in other words, to perceive his external nature from within. Normally, man does not descend consciously into these bodies on waking; lie is protected from doing so because at the moment of waking his consciousness is diverted to the environment and is not directed to the forces of the physical and etheric bodies. What was essential for the Essenes was to learn to perceive all the forces and capabilities originating from the 42 generations, to learn to disregard entirely what the eyes observe in the outer world and to plunge straightaway into their own physical and etheric bodies where they then beheld the living produce of the secret of 6 times 7=42 generations.

Man must raise his consciousness in a similar sense if his aim is to ascend into the Cosmos in order to learn of the mysteries underlying cosmic existence. This is a mightier task. When descending into his own inner nature the only danger facing him is that of being laid hold of by its forces, by desires, passions and other tendencies in the soul to which lie generally pays no heed or even has no inkling that they exist, because in ordinary circumstances his external interests keep him from direct knowledge of them. In normal circumstances there is no possibility that he will be overpowered by these forces, because at the very moment of waking his attention is diverted by the appearance of the outer world. Whereas, therefore, when descending into his inner nature the danger is that a man will be overwhelmed by his own lowest and most egotistical urges, a different danger confronts one who is living through the experience. of expanding over the Cosmos. This danger cannot be more exactly characterized than by saying: One who at the moment of going to sleep does not become unconscious but retains so much consciousness that in his astral body and Ego he has an instrument for perception of the spiritual world—for such a one the danger may be that he is utterly dazzled, as if he were facing the blinding rays of the sun. He is dazzled and bewildered by the stupendous grandeur of the impressions.

While it was necessary for the Essenes to recognize that all inherited attributes in the physical and etheric bodies were connected with the secret of the number 6 times 7, a certain secret of number was also connected with the attainment of knowledge of the mysteries of the Cosmos, of the Great World. Again, the best approach to this secret was to turn to movements and constellations in the Cosmos, to the manifestations of the stars themselves. As we have heard, 6 times 7 stages lead to the secrets of man's inner nature; the secrets of cosmic space are reached after 12 times 7=84 stages. A man who has passed 12 times 7 stages arrives at the point where the labyrinth of the spiritual forces of the Cosmos is no longer bewildering; he attains the state of calm in which he can find his bearings in this labyrinth and see through its intricacies. In a certain sense that too was a teaching given by the Essenes.

When a man who possesses the clairvoyant faculties here described goes to sleep, his being flows out into conditions expressed in the secret of the number 12 times 7. But at the last of these stages he is already in the super-sensible; for when he has completed the it times 7 stages he has reached the boundary of the conditions to which the numerical secrets apply. Just as the 7 times 7 stages have already led into the Spiritual, so too have the 12 times 7. To reach the Spiritual along this path a man must have passed through t times 7 stages in the astral body and Ego. This is indicated in the stellar script itself, 7 being the number of the planets and I 2 that of the constellations of the Zodiac which the soul must traverse in cosmic space. As the seven planets group them-selves within the twelve zodiacal constellations and pass in front of them, when a man is ascending in soul into the Cosmos he must pass through 7 times 12, or rather 7 times it stages to reach the Spiritual.

You can, if you like, picture the 12 constellations of the Zodiac as the spiritual periphery, with man himself in the centre. If he is to reach the Spiritual, he cannot begin by spreading as it were from the centre, but he must expand in spirals, gyrating in 7 spirals and passing all the 12 constellations in each complete circuit—therefore 7 times 12 stages. Man expands in spirals gradually into the Cosmos—all this is of course only a figurative description—and if, circling in this way, he were to have passed through the 12 constellations for the seventh time, he would have reached the Divine-Spiritual. Then, instead of looking into the Cosmos from the centre, he looks inwards from the spiritual periphery, from the twelve stations, and from these vantage-points he can behold the external world and all that is in it. There must be twelve such vantage-points; one alone does not suffice. Thus a man who aspired to reach the Divine-Spiritual must sublimate astral body and Ego through 11 times 7 stages; when 12 times 7 stages had been scaled, he was within the Spiritual.

Astral body and Ego had in this way to pass through 1 2 times 7, or rather t times 7 stages to reach the Divine. But if the Divine is to descend and a human Ego be made fit to be its vehicle, the descent must equally be through times 7 stages.

Therefore in setting out to describe these spiritual forces whereby astral body and Ego were rendered fit to be bearers of the Christ, it was natural that the Gospel of St. Luke should indicate how the Divine-Spiritual Power descended through 11 times 7 stages. And this the Gospel does. Because the Gospel of St. Luke is describing that other Personality for whom astral body and Ego-bearer were prepared, it does not—as the Gospel of St. Matthew—describe 6 times 7 generations, but a sequence of it times 7 stages through which the Power indwelling the Individuality of the Jesus of whom this Gospel is speaking, came down from God himself. This is expressly stated. Count the stages enumerated in St. Luke's Gospel as those through which the Divine Power descends, and you will find that there are 77.

Because the Gospel of St. Matthew is describing the secret of what is taking effect during the descent of the Divine Power working formatively in physical body and etheric body, the ruling number is 7 times 7. And in the Gospel of St. Luke the number 11 times 7 must necessarily appear, because this Gospel is describing the descent of the Divine Power by which the astral body and Ego are transformed. From this we can realise what deep foundations underlie these presentations and how in very truth the secrets of Initiation, the stages in the descent of the Divine-Spiritual into a human individuality and in the expansion into the Cosmos arc indicated in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke.

We will speak again tomorrow of the reasons why the Gospel of St. Luke enumerates a line of generations and why, in an age when the mystery of Christ Jesus was imparted to only a very few human beings, it was made known that from God and from Adam down to the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel there had been 77 generations.

• 1. Scene 3, pp. 1o7-8, in the translation by Adam Bittleston. The whole scene should be read.

We have now gained the most essential premises for a study of some aspects at least of celestial and also of earthly-physical phenomena. In human nature, once again, we have the very significant contrast (to ascertain which, as you will readily understand, we must leave the animal out of account to begin with)—the contrast between the organisation of the head and that of the metabolic system including the limbs. As we have seen, if we wish to relate Man to the Cosmos, we must assign the metabolic system to what is earthly,—what comes to man in a radial direction. Whereas we must assign the forming of the head to all that derives from the great Sphere,—that sends its lines of influence, as it were from the celestial Sphere towards the centre of the Earth, even as the radius reaches outward with its lines of influence to its surroundings. We saw this in the construction of the typical long bones or tubular bones by contrast to the skull-bones, the latter being sphere-like, or like a sector of a sphere.

Envisaging this difference, we must relate it, to begin with, to what appears to us in the relation of the Earth to the Celestial Sphere. You are of course aware, how the scientific consciousness of our time departs from what the naive human being, untouched by any learning, would judge of the appearance of the celestial sphere, the movements of the stars upon it, and so on. We speak of the ‘Apparent aspect’ of the celestial vault. In contrast to it, as you know, we have a picture—a World-picture—gained in a fairly complicated way by interpreting the apparent movements, and so on. Upon this picture—the form of picture which has evolved through the great changes in cosmology since the Copernican era—we are wont to base all our considerations of celestial phenomena.

Today I take it to be generally realised that this World-picture does not represent absolute reality. We can no longer maintain: What is presented to us by this picture, say, as the planetary movements or as the Sun's relation to the Planets, is the true form of the underlying reality, while what the eye beholds is mere appearance. I hardly think any competent person would adopt this standpoint nowadays. Yet he will still have a feeling that he at least gets nearer to a true conception when he proceeds from the apparent picture of the celestial movements—fraught, he will say with illusionary factors (yet after all, we must admit, objectively observed)—to the interpretation of it by mathematical Astronomy.

The question now is, do we really gain a comprehensive view of the phenomena in question if we only base our picture of the World on this, the customary kind of interpretation. As we have seen, when we do so we are in fact only basing it on what the head-man ascertains, so to speak. We base it on the aspect which emerges for man's powers of observation, aided perhaps by optical instruments. But as we saw, for a more comprehensive interpretation of the World-picture we must have recourse to all that is knowable by man, of man. We emphasised how to this end the form of man must be seen in the light of a true science of metamorphosis. Then too we must bring in the evolution of man and of mankind. In a word, concerning the celestial phenomena, or some of them at least, we cannot look for enlightenment till in our efforts to interpret them we go as far as this, calling to our aid whatever can be known of man.

Let us then presuppose what we arrived at in former lectures—the kind of qualitative mathematics, learned from the human form and growth and evolution. With this in the background let us take our start from what meets the eye—from what is said to be the mere appearance of the Heavens—asking ourselves how we may find the way to reality? Let us then ask, dear friends: What does the eye behold, what do we learn empirically, by simple observation? Then we can try to fill in the picture with what is given by the whole structure of man, both in morphology and evolution. First we will ask the question as regards those stars which are commonly described as fixed stars. I shall no doubt be repeating what is well-known to most of you, yet we must call it to mind for only by so doing, only from the facts as seen, taking them all together, shall we be able to advance to the ideas.

What then do we see as to the movement of the fixed stars, so-called? We must consider longer periods of time, since in short periods the Heaven of fixed stars presents practically the same picture year by year. Only when taking longer epochs do we find that it no longer presents the same uniform picture, but that the whole configuration changes. We can envisage it by taking one example; what we shall find in one region of the Heavens would be found in other regions too. Take then this constellation, which you know so well, the “Great Bear” or “Plough” in the Northern sky. Today it looks like this (Fig. 2). Acquaint yourselves with the minute displacements of the so-called fixed stars which have been ascertained, and which agree with what is shown by very ancient star-maps, although the latter are not always reliable. Sum up the minute displacements and calculate what the constellation will have looked like very long ago, and you get this appearance (Fig. 1). You see, the fixed stars, so-called, have undergone considerable displacements. About 50,000 years ago, if we may reckon it from the minute changes observed, the constellation will have looked like this. If we continue to sum up the ascertainable displacements for the future,—assuming, as we surely may do, that they will continue at least approximately in the same direction—we may conclude that 50,000 years from now the constellation will have this appearance (Fig. 3).

Just as this constellation changes in the course of years—for we have only chosen it as an example—so do the others. Thus when we make our drawings, of the Zodiac for instance in its present form, we must be clear that the form of it changes in the course of time—if we may thus include time in our calculations and in interpreting them.

We must therefore regard the celestial sphere as undergoing changes within itself, ever changing its configuration,—changing the aspect of the starry Heavens which we behold in the fixed stars,—though the perpetual change is scarcely perceptible in shorter periods. Naturally, our observations here cannot go very far, nor can we do very much by way of interpretation, though as some of you will know, modern experiments enable us to ascertain even those movements of the stars which are along the line of sight,—towards us or away from us. Yet it remains very difficult to interpret the ever-changing aspect of the starry heavens. In the further course we shall be asking, what human value and significance is to seek in the interpretation.

Having considered the movements of the fixed stars, let us now ask after the movements of the planetary stars. The movement of the planetary stars as we behold it is indeed complicated. The movement we observe is such that if we follow the path of a planet, in so far as it is visible, we see it moving in a curve of peculiar shape—different for the different planets and different too for the same planet at different times. From this we have to take our start. Take for example the planet Mercury. Precisely when it is nearest to us, its path is of peculiar form. In a certain direction it seems to move across the Heavens. Study it daily when visible, we see it moving thus; but them it turns and makes a loop, and then goes on as I am showing (Fig. 4).¹ It makes one such loop in a so-called synodical period of revolution. This then we may describe as the movement of Mercury—to begin with at least, so far as observation is concerned. The rest of the path is simple, only at certain places do the loops occur.

Passing to Venus we have a similar phenomenon, though somewhat different in shape and form. Venus moves onward thus, then turns and then moves on, thus (Fig. 5). Here as a rule there is only one loop in the course of a year, and, once again, when the planet—as we conclude from other astronomical data—is nearest to us. Now to Mars: Mars has a similar path, only flatter. We may draw it somewhat like this (Fig. 6). In this case, you see, the loop is more compressed, but the appearance is still that of a loop,—distinctly so. Often however the path (both of this and other planets) is so formed that the loop is completely dissolved, flattened away until it is no more. The path is loop-like, though not an actual loop. (Fig. 7) We will pass by the planetoids, interesting though they are, and look at Jupiter and Saturn. We find them too describing loops or loop-like paths. They again do it when nearest the Earth—and only once a year. As a general rule they make a single loop each year.

We have then to consider certain movements on the part of the fixed stars, and the movements of planets. The movements of fixed stars occupy gigantic periods, judged by our standards of time. The movements of the planets comprise a year or fractions of a year and reveal from time to time strange deviations from their ordinary path, loop-lines of movement, in effect. The question now is, what are we to make of these two kinds of movement? How to interpret the loop-movement for example? It is a very big question. Only the following reflection can lead towards any kind of interpretation of the loop-movements.

In all our human observation the fact is that we are quite differently related to our own conditions and to those things which are not our own;—which take place apart from us, outside us, so to speak. You need only recall how it is with objects: The enormous difference between your relation to any object of the so-called outer world and to an object inside yourself, which you, so to speak, are sharing-in with your own inner experience. If you have any object before you, you see it, you observe it. What you yourself are living in—your liver, your heart, even your sense-organs to begin with you can observe. There is the same contrast, though not quite so strongly marked, with regard to the conditions in which we are living in the outer world. If we ourselves are in movement and if it is possible for us to remain unconscious of how we bring about the movement, then we may well be unaware of our own movement and therefore leave it out of account in judging outer movements. That is to say, though we ourselves are in movement, we leave this out; we deem ourselves at rest and envisage only the external movement.

It is on this reflection, in the main, that the interpretation of movements amid the celestial phenomena has been based. You are aware, it has been argued: Man, at a certain point on Earth, shares of course in the spatial movement of his earthly habitation (eg the circling movement of his latitude) but knows it not and hence regards, what he sees happening in the Universe outside him, as a real movement in the opposite direction. The argument has been abundantly made use of! The question now is: How might this principle be modified if we take into account that in man's organized (if I may so express it) radially, whilst in our head-man we are oriented spherically. If it were then a fundamental feature of our own state of movement that we relate ourselves differently to the Radius and to the encompassing Sphere, this fact would somehow make itself felt in what appears to us in the outer Universe.

Imagine what I have said to be in some way true. Suppose for instance that you yourself were moving thus (Fig. 8),—you were describing a Lemniscate. Let us assume however that the Lemniscate you were describing was not exactly like this, but that by variation of the constants the form of Lemniscate were brought about in which the lower branch did not close (Fig. 9). Assume then that a Lemniscate arises which by a certain variation of the constants is open on one side. The curve is mathematically feasible, and if you find the right way, you can certainly draw it into the human form and figure.

Say now that this were the surface of the Earth (Fig. 10). We should have to draw, somehow in relation to the Earth, what passes through our limb-nature and then in some way turns, goes through our head-nature and then back again into the Earth. Say you could truly draw into the nature and organisation of man such an open Lemniscate; we should be justified in saying: There is an open Lemniscate of this kind in man's nature. The question is, is it of real significance to speak of such an open Lemniscate in human nature? It is indeed. You need only make a deeper morphological study; you will find the Lemniscate, either in this or in some modified form, in diverse ways inscribed in human nature. These things have not been gone into with due method. I advise you, try it. (As I said, we are only giving indications for further work; diligent research is needed.) Try it; investigate the curve that arises if you trace the middle line of a left-hand rib, then go past the junction into the vertebra, then turn and go back along the right rib (Fig. 11). Bear in mind what it must signify that as you go along this line—rib-vertebra-rib—various inner relationships of growth must play their part, not only quantitatively but qualitatively; then you will find in the Lemniscate with its loop-formation a morphological key to the whole system. Going upward from thence to the head-organisation, the farther you go upward, the more will you find it necessary to modify the form of Lemniscate. At a certain point you must imagine it transformed; the transformation is already indicated in the forming of the sternum, where the two come together. When you get up into the head there is a far-reaching metamorphosis of the lemniscatory principle. Study the whole human figure—the contrast above all of the nerves-and-senses organisation and the metabolic,—you get a Lemniscate tending to open out as you go downward and to close as you go upward. You also get Lemniscates—though highly modified, with the one loop extremely small—if you follow up the pathway of the centripetal nerves, through the nerve-centre and outward again to the termination of the centrifugal nerve. Follow it all in the right way: Again and again you will find this Lemniscate inscribed in man's nature,—man's above all. Then take the animal organisation with its manifestly horizontal spine. You will find it differing from the human, in that the Lemniscates, whether the downward loop be open or closed to some extent, are far less modified, less varied than they are in man. Moreover in the animal their planes are more parallel, whereas in man they are variedly inclined and askew to one another.

It is an immense and very promising field of work,—this ever-deepening elaboration of morphological study. And as you apprehend these tasks, you will appreciate the outlook of such men—of whom there have always been a few—as Moritz Benedikt for instance, whom I have mentioned before. Benedikt had many fruitful thoughts and good ideas. As you may read in his memoirs, he regretted how little possibility there is of speaking to doctors of medicine from a mathematical standpoint or with the help of mathematical notions. In principle he is quite right, only we have to go still farther. Ordinary mathematics, reckoning in the main on rigid forms of curve in a rigid Euclidean space, would help us little if we tried applying it to organic forms. Only by seeking, as it were, to carry life itself into the realms of mathematics and geometry as such, by thinking of the independent and the dependent variable in an equation as being subject to an organic and inherent variation, as illustrated yesterday for the Cassini curves (Variability of the first and of the second order), only thus shall we make progress. But if you do this immense possibilities will be opened up. It is indeed already indicated in the principles applied when constructing cardioid or cycloid curves; you must only not fall back again into rigidity of treatment.

Apply this principle—the inner mobility, as it were, of movement in itself—to Nature. Try to express in equations, this that ‘moves the moving’. You will then find it possible, mathematically to penetrate what is organic. You will come to say, for it can well be formulated thus: The axioms of rigid space—space immobile in itself—lead to an understanding of inorganic Nature. Conceive a space that is inherently mobile—or algebraic equations whose very functionality is in itself a function—and you will find the transition to a mathematical understanding of organic Nature. This incidentally is the method which should accompany the efforts now being made to investigate the transition-forms from inorganic Nature to organic, as regards shape and form at least. Valueless apart from this, they have a future if this method be applied.

Take now the presence of the loop-making tendency in the human body and compare it with what confronts us, admittedly in a more irrational form, in the forms of movement of the planets. You will then realise: The 'apparent movements’ of the planets, as we are wont to call them, in a most striking way inscribe, in forms of Movement in the Heavens, what in the human body is a Form as such—a characteristic, fundamental figure. Therefore, to say the least, we must in some way correlate this basic form in the human body and these phenomena in the Heavens. And we shall now be able to say: Behold the loop. It always appears when the planet is relatively near the Earth,—therefore when we, being on the Earth, are in a special relation to the planet. Consider the position of the Earth in its yearly course and our position on the Earth. (We must refer it back to our own formative period, the embryo-period of our life, needless to say.) Consider in effect how we are alternating between a position relative to the planet wherein we turn our head towards the planetary loop and a position where we take leave of the loop and at length turn our head away from it. We in our process of formation are thus related to the planet: We are exposed at one time to the planet's loop and at another to the remainder of its path. We can therefore relate, what lies nearer to our head, to the loop, and what belongs more to the remainder of our body, to the planetary path outside the loop.

Take in addition what I said before, I said, with regard to the morphological relation of the tubular or long bone to the skull-bone: Try how you would have to draw it. Here, throughout the long bone, is the radius; then as you pass to the skull-bone you will have to turn, like this (Fig. 12). Project this turn, in relation also to the Earth's movement, outward into the Heavens. It is the loop and the rest of the planet's path! If we develop a feeling for morphology in the higher sense, we can do no other than assign the human form and figure to the planetary system.

And now the movement of the fixed stars themselves:—The movements of the fixed stars will naturally be less concerned with the several movements of individual human beings. Think on the other hand of the whole evolution of mankind on Earth. Bear in mind all we have said in these days of the relation of the great Sphere to the human head-formation. You cannot but divine that there will be some relation between the metamorphoses of aspect of the starry Heavens, and of the evolution of mankind in soul and spirit. There is the vault of the great Sphere above us. It reveals only that part of the movements which would correspond to the loop among the planets (nay more, as it would seem, only to part of the loop; Fig. 13, dotted line). In the movements of fixed stars, the rest of the path is omitted. Our attention is drawn to this great differentiation: The planets must somehow correspond to the whole man; the fixed stars only to what forms the head of man. Now we begin to get some guidance, how to interpret the loop.

We human beings are in some way with the Earth. We are at some point on Earth and we move with it. We cannot but refer, what appears to us in projection on the vault of heaven, to the movements we ourselves are making with the Earth. For, as we move with the Earth (we ,must project this backward, once more, backward in time to the embryo-period of our life),—as we move with the Earth, what we have in us comes into being, formed as indeed it is by the very forces of movement. In the movements we see up yonder in their seeming forms and pictures, we have to recognise the cosmic movements we ourselves are making in the year's course. We realise it as we approach the true aspect of the loop-curve. (Downward of course we always see the loop still open. In the immediate aspect, it does not close at all. Looking at this alone, we should never get a complete path. We only get the complete path when contemplating the entire revolution.)

I am relating all this rather quickly. You must reflect on it in detail and try to see the different things together. The more minutely and scrupulously you do so, the more will you find that the planetary movements are, to begin with, images—images of—movements you yourself accomplish, with the Earth, in the year's course. (We shall see in time, how a synthesis arises from the different planetary movements.)

If then we see the human being as a whole and his projection to the Cosmos, we are led to recognise that the true form of movement of the Earth in the year's course will be the loop-curve or Lemniscate. We shall have to study it more closely during the next few days, but at this stage we are already led to conceive the path of the Earth itself as a loop-curve—quite apart now from its relation to the Sun or any other factor. What is projected then, for our perception, the planetary paths with the loops they make,—we must regard as the projection by the planets of the loop-path of the Earth on to the vault of Heaven, if we may formulate thus simply a very complicated set of facts. As to why, when the planet draws near the loop, we have to leave the rest of the path open during a relatively short space of time,—the reason lies in the fact that under certain conditions the projection of a closed curve may appear open. For example, if you were to make a Lemniscate, say of a flexible rod, and project the shadow of it on to a plane, you could easily make it so that the projection of the lower part appeared divergent and unclosed, whilst the upper part alone was closed; so the entire projection would become not unlike a planetary path. Quite simply in the shadow-figure, you could construct the likeness of a planet's path.

• 1. In Figures 4 to 7 only one of the many varieties of loop which actually occur is shown in each case.

The great transformation that I have characterized here from a variety of angles and that has taken place in the spiritual development of humanity over the course of the last centuries, not only has the intellectual, the theoretical character of knowledge changed, but what has changed also has an influence on the whole human soul life, and thus on the whole human life in general. In order to understand this, one can imagine the following. Of course, what is shown in individual symptoms, which emerge more or less clearly when one wants to understand the actual foundations of life, must be shown in characteristic forms of expression of life.

We have often referred to what were places of knowledge in ancient times of human development. They were the mystery centres. These mystery sites were, to a large extent, shrouded in human veneration. When speaking of mysteries and mystery beings, it was said that through what was practiced in the mysteries, something most important for humanity on earth was present. Everything meaningful in human life was thought to radiate from the mysteries. It was said, in a sense, that If there were no mysteries among people, people on earth would not be able to be what the gods wanted them to be!

So people looked at the mysteries with a feeling of the highest reverence and the most intimate respect, and at the same time they looked at them with a feeling of gratitude, knowing that they gave them what makes it possible to be on earth what the gods want to make of people. One need only compare this with the way in which people look at educational institutions today, and one will find nowhere that tremendous warm devotion. In many cases, one even finds a feeling that, once one has necessarily settled for what comes from the educational institutions, one is glad to be free of them. But in any case, even if one does not look at this extreme, one still knows that one does not actually get from the educational institutions what seems necessary to one inwardly as a human being for one's actual humanity, what makes one a human being. No matter how much theoretical reverence one may have for what is gained in chemical laboratories, biological institutes, legal educational institutions, and even philosophical schools, one will not have the feeling: You are aware of your humanity because there are chemical laboratories, biological institutes, legal educational institutions, and even philosophical seminars.

You cannot say that – even if these educational institutions are perhaps shrouded in a certain theoretical atmosphere – all the warm feelings of reverence of people in the widest sense gravitate towards these educational institutions.

In any case, it will not be all that often that a student, for example, who is preparing a paper for a university seminar and who then, in this way, gives of himself intellectually, feels that he is doing so imbued with his whole elementary humanity as a mystery schoolboy once felt when he had passed one of the stages of practice.

But on the other hand, man needs something that brings him into contact with something worthy of worship here on earth, from which he feels the divine emanating. But if we compare this nuance, which I would call more cultural-historical, with what actually underlies it, let us go back, say, to the times when, in the Near East, two or three millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, mystery-like educational institutions existed: In these mystery-like educational institutions, the natural science of the time was studied, if one can call it that. They studied the starry sky, the nature of the stars, the movements of the stars, the appearance of the stars at certain times, and so on. Today one imagines that this study of the starry sky in those days may have been somewhat fantastic. It was not. It was done with at least the same, if not much greater, methodical care as mineralogy, geology or biology are done today.

But what did they say to each other when they studied the nature of the starry sky? They said to each other: If you know the nature of the starry sky, then you know something about the nature and destiny of man on earth. The study of the starry sky culminated in the fact that knowledge about the fate of man and entire peoples on earth could be gained from the constellations of the stars.

One did not look up at the starry sky with a merely theoretical intention, but rather one said to oneself: If you know the relationship of Saturn to the sun or the relationship of Saturn to a sign of the zodiac at the moment when a man is bidden or where he accomplishes an important deed in life, then you know how the heavens have placed man on earth, you know to what extent man is a creature, a son of the heavens. You study what you study about heaven in order to understand what guides you in your life on earth. Everything that was acquired as knowledge about the nature of heaven was aimed at man. All knowledge was actually permeated by something thoroughly human. And whatever man did on earth, he felt it in connection with what he could study in the heavens. We can take an example from, say, a human artistic activity. When people in ancient times took up poetry or music, they drew on the inspiration that came to them from the heavens.

I have mentioned it often: Homer does not say, to use a poetic phrase “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of the Peleid Achilles,” but because he was aware that he was not speaking something that came to him from human arbitrariness, but he speaks something that the heavens whisper to him. And anyone who was in any way musically active on earth reproduced through the sound of earthly instruments what he believed he had heard in the spaces of heaven in the music of the spheres. Man felt quite distinctly in the way he was active on earth, in the way he cooperated with other people on earth, in the way he founded communities on earth, that he experienced the impulses of will that radiated from the vastness of the universe down to earth and which he explored according to his knowledge of the starry sky, that he acted as a human being here on earth according to these intentions of heaven.

One would like to say: everything that was science, art and religion in those ancient times flowed into human weaving and working. For religion, science and art were indeed a unity, a unity that ultimately radiated into man, so that man might feel himself on earth as the being the gods wanted him to be.

This mood lasted as long as man had a spiritual insight into the heavens, as long as he allowed a spiritual to be conveyed to him in the being, in the course of the stars and in the appearance of the stars, which, so to speak, flowed through the knowledge of the stars to him on earth so that he could realize it on earth.

Today, astrology is a word that does not have a good ring to it. However, if we imagine it in the old sense, it takes on a better sound. Man looked up at the stars, and from the stars the Logos revealed itself to him, which in turn worked through his thoughts, through his imagination, through his language here on earth. Man himself, when he set his speech organs in motion, practiced that which, in the formation of sounds, made the secrets of the heavens resound here on earth again. The Logos, which is the reason that prevails in the human race, appeared as the efflux of the starry world. Astrology: what happened here on earth appeared as an image of the archetype, which one experienced through astrology.

If we look at our insights today, we see how these insights are gained through sensory observation of the earthly. Even when studying astronomy today – I have already discussed this yesterday – it is only the reflection of earthly knowledge up into the heavens. Today's human being acquires sensory knowledge. He does indeed stand in the world differently than he used to. I have characterized this different standing in these lectures here recently. I said: Today's intellectual man, with his abstract concepts, but also with what his freedom is, which is only possible with the development of abstract-intellectual concepts that do not force man, that also give him moral imperatives that arise from his individuality, as I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom, as I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom, only comes into the evolution of mankind at the time when that consciousness, which originated in astrology and presented man as a being executing the intentions of the gods on earth, had ceased to exist. This human being, with his intellect and his sense of freedom, is a creature cut off from the heavens. He has truly become the earth's hermit and acquires his knowledge here on earth. And the way in which he acquires his knowledge also explains the interest with which he clings to these insights.

In ancient times, it would have been inconceivable to see a duality between religion and scientific knowledge. When scientific knowledge was acquired, it was such that it gave one an immediate religious feeling, that it showed one the way to the gods, that one could not help but be a religious person in the right sense if one had acquired knowledge.

Today one can acquire the whole wide range of popular knowledge: one does not become a religious person from it. I would like to know who becomes a religious person today by becoming a botanist, a zoologist, a chemist! If he wants to become a religious person, he seeks the religious in addition to knowledge. Therefore, we seek places of worship in addition to knowledge, and are often even convinced that knowledge leads us away from religious paths, that we must seek other paths that in turn lead us to the religious. And yet, here too, we have repeatedly had to emphasize the importance of newer insights. We had to point out that these newer insights are absolutely necessary for modern man and for the further development of humanity. But when man today places himself in the world with his intellectualism, with his sense of freedom, he is already developing here on earth that which the older man, who, if I may express it in this way, had a sense of heaven , only developed after death.

When we describe the moments after death for today's man, we describe how the person in the picture looks back at first on his life by separating his etheric body from himself. We then describe how he reviews his life in a subsequent period. For older times, life after death had to be described in such a way that people were told: That which you can only attain here through a higher revelation, an intellectualistic view of the world, will appear to you after death. That which you are to achieve here on earth can only exist as an ideal; you will be a free human being after death. — That is what they told older people. The true human being comes when one has passed from this physical world into the spiritual world. That is what they said in ancient times. But what people experienced only after death in ancient times, looking back on earthly life, intellectualism and a sense of freedom, for which all earthly life was preparation, has already been introduced into the life between birth and death by the modern human being. Here on earth, he becomes an intellectual being, here on earth he becomes a being with a sense of freedom.

But for this, he must acquire something on earth in sensory knowledge and in the combination of his sensory knowledge that is initially far removed from his interests. No matter how long we explore through the telescope that which we today explore of the starry worlds: humanly we do not feel inwardly warmed and inwardly enlightened by it. Expeditions are being organized by astronomers and naturalists to prove Einstein's ideas. But no one expects the observations that are being made to be as close to directly elementary human nature as one would have expected from the astronomers of the ancient Babylonian or Assyrian cultures. The modern insights give us a tremendous difference: the lack of interest in values. It may be extremely interesting when this or that biological discovery is made today, but one does not say: By making this or that biological discovery, man comes closer to the divine-spiritual being that he carries in his soul. It is to this divine spiritual being, which he bears within his soul, that man wants to come closer through a separate religious interest.

Nevertheless, today we do not have the right concept of the way in which an older humanity has come to knowledge, even in later times. One need only think of the momentous experience of fate when a man like Archimedes, while bathing, discovered the Archimedean principle and exclaimed, “I have found it!” Just such a single insight was something that one felt as if one had looked through a window into the secrets of the universe.

This warm-heartedness towards knowledge was certainly not present when the X-rays were discovered, for example. One could say that today's relationship to what knowledge provides is more that of gaping open one's mouth than of inward soul rejoicing. That makes a human difference! And this human difference must be borne in mind for the development of humanity.

Something very remarkable emerges from all this. For centuries now, modern people have been experiencing in their lives what they used to have only after death: intellectual comprehension of the world and the consciousness of freedom. But they have not even really noticed it. That is the remarkable thing, that modern humanity has not even really noticed something that it has received from heaven into earthly life. The emotional world has not grasped it at all, the elemental in the human world. One would almost say that it has a bitter aftertaste for humanity. Humanity does not look at the pure thought the way I have tried to look at it in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, where one would rather sing hymns to it than dissect it. And the consciousness of freedom has led people to all sorts of tumultuous things, but not to the realization that something has descended from heaven to earth. Not even the fundamental power of modern human development has been felt purely humanly. Where does that come from?

If you answer this question, then you also answer one of the most important questions of human existence in general. In ancient times, man acquired his knowledge by looking up at the sky, seeking the Logos there, that which the gods spoke to man through the starry sky and the nature of the stars. All that man did here on earth was illuminated by the content of the Logos, and this content was in turn fetched from the stars. Human life would have been meaningless if it could not be given a purpose through knowledge of the stars.

Now, in a very similar sense, everything we acquire internally as knowledge is actually nothing. We acquire it by allowing ourselves to be constrained to botany, zoology, biology, physiology, etc., and at most we allow ourselves to be moved by ambition, by an insight into the necessity of being able to eke out our lives on earth, to all of this. Again, this is a radical statement, but in a sense it borders on reality. For those who attach great ideals to things today, there is still a certain illusionary element through which they reinterpret the matter into an ideal. At least, people who could associate a meaning with the word: I pray a chemical formula. Yes, one must indeed express an important cultural-historical fact, even if it is negative, in such a form!

It takes a Novalis, with his deep and at the same time youthfully enthusiastic knowledge, to feel something like: I pray in the dissolution of a differential equation. Our ordinary mathematicians do not feel very prayerful when they reveal the secret of a differential equation. That which is self-evident, that with knowledge the whole person is engaged at the same time, the whole person feels their indebtedness to the divine, this self-evident fact is not at all self-evident to today's humanity. It is much more natural for those who are rising to the highest achievements of knowledge to be glad when they have the exams behind them so that they do not have to go through these things again. The joy of going through the stages of the mysteries: you don't notice much of that in modern people who go through the exams. At least it is extremely rare for someone today to speak with the full ancient mystery seriousness of that intimate divine deed that this or that professor has done by giving him a dissertation topic and putting him in the position to now pass through the waters of holiness while working on this dissertation topic! But this would be the normal, the obvious!

If you just think about it, you have to say: Yes, down there is the earth with its many things (see drawing page 70, white and green). These many things have been seen by the old cognizers. But they only believed they had grasped them in the right sense by looking up at the stars and bringing down the rays from the stars, which illuminated everything for them in the right way (red).

These ancient cognizers sought the reflection of the starry world in earthly life (lower red), otherwise all that I have indicated below would have seemed worthless to them. Today we pay no attention to what is above, but study what is below. We study it in countless details. When we have surrendered to some kind of knowledge oriented here or there, we have many details in our heads. But the evaluation of these details becomes somewhat indifferent to life, and with it also a certain lack of interest in the high, elementary human. Especially in the actual spiritual realm, this becomes conspicuously apparent.

Vöscher, the Swabian, has already ridiculed how indifferent to a universal human consciousness that becomes, which is to be overcome today, if one wants to struggle up to knowledge, by saying that one of the most “significant” treatises on the subject of modern literary history would be one on the connection between the chilblains of Frau Christiane von Goethe and the symbolic-allegorical figures in the second part of Faust! Why could a dissertation not be written about this connection, as is done about many other things? The methodology that is applied, the human interest that is involved, is, after all, no different in quality from when someone writes a treatise – and this does happen – about the thought lines in Homer's poetry! Yes, we really do acquire knowledge about what people only considered worthy of knowledge after they were able to illuminate it from the knowledge of heaven.

We do not have the knowledge of heaven. We do not look at the copper by looking up at Venus, we do not look at the lead by looking up at Saturn, we do not look at the primeval man by looking up at the constellation of Aquarius, and we do not look at that which passes over into certain inner impulses of human nature in the animal nature of the lion by looking up at the constellation of Leo, and the like. We bring down from the heavens nothing that can explain the earthly to us, but we turn our gaze to the wide-ranging, scattered details of the earth alone.

We need something that brings us valences into the individual, that leads us to see again what someone saw when he saw some earthly object illuminated from the heavens. We have knowledge of many things, but we need a unified knowledge that can radiate into all the individual fields of knowledge and give the individual fields of knowledge value. That is what anthroposophy wants to be.

Just as people once looked to the heavens in astrology to explain the earth, anthroposophy wants to see in people what they have to say about themselves, so that from there everything we about minerals, animals, plants, about man, about everything that can be known in addition to what is scattered, will be illuminated by anthroposophy.

And just as man once looked up at the heavens to understand his life on earth , so the intellectually liberated human being must learn to know himself, so that he can look beyond the moment of death, when he steps out into a spiritual world, and where the gods will look down on what he brings them, what radiates from him. For he should already have become human on earth, whereas before he only became human after death.

How he has become human will be shown through the power he has gained from pure human consciousness. And this pure human consciousness is to be given to him through that which radiates from anthroposophy to everything else, which man on earth can know, but also what man on earth can accomplish.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” thus in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. Man has brought down the Logos from the revelation of the gods in the heavens.

But the Word was made flesh, and not only dwelt among us, but continues to dwell among us. The Logos has become flesh. What was once sought in the heavens must now be sought in man. For the Logos was once rightly sought in the Father-God; in our time the Logos must be sought in the Son-God.

But man finds this Son-God in his elementary meaning when he makes Paul's word true: “Not I, but Christ in me,” when he comes to know himself. All anthroposophy aims to delve deep into the human being. When ancient times delved deep into the human being, what did they find? At the bottom of human nature, the luciferic powers. If modern man delves deep enough into himself, he will find the Christ. This is the other side of the turnaround from older to newer times. With intellectualism and the consciousness of freedom having descended from heaven to earth, and with the Christ having united with humanity on earth, man finds the Christ in the depths of his own being, if he descends deep enough; while older people have found the Luciferian spirituality precisely by going deep enough.

This was also the message that an older student body in the mysteries was to understand particularly clearly: delve down into the human being as it is on earth, and at the bottom of your own soul you will ultimately find that which you must recoil from in terror: the powers of Lucifer. Therefore, look up at the moment of death; only when you have passed through the gate of death do you become a true human being. There you will be saved from what you find at the bottom of your soul here on earth: the luciferic powers.

That was the experience of death in the ancient mysteries. That was why they had to look to the realization, to the depiction of the moment of death in the mysteries, these ancient mystery students.

The modern human being should take on that which has become his: intellectualism and the consciousness of freedom. If he accepts them worthily, so that he permeates all other earthly knowledge and all other deeds with what wells up out of pure human consciousness, as anthroposophy wills, then he finds the Christ-powers at the bottom of his soul. Then he says to himself: Once I looked up at the constellation of the stars to fathom human destiny on earth; now I look at the human being and thereby learn to recognize how this human being, having already on earth become imbued with the humanity of the Christ-substance , shines out to the universe, and how it shines up to the heavens as the star of humanity after passing through the portal of death.

This is spiritual humanistics, which can take the place of the old astrology. This is what instructs people to look in the same way at what the human being can also reveal in himself as Sophia - Anthroposophia - as the stars once revealed themselves as Logia. But this is also the consciousness with which one must imbue oneself. And there one then learns the world significance of the human being. From there one learns to recognize that world significance of the human being that first allows us to study the physical body, which then allows us to study the formative forces or etheric body. But I will mention just one example: If you study the human physical body in the right way, by looking at it from the point of view of anthroposophy, you learn how the human physical body can follow its own forces. When it follows its own forces, it is constantly striving to become ill. Yes, what exists down there in the human being as the physical body is actually in a constant effort to become ill. And if we look up from the physical body to the etheric body, we have in the etheric body the totality of those forces of the human being that are constantly in the effort to restore the sick person to health. The pendulum swing between the physical body and the etheric body is aimed at constantly maintaining the center between the pathological and the therapeutic. The etheric body is the cosmic therapist, and the physical body is the cosmic pathogen.

And we could speak just as well for other areas of human knowledge. And in speaking thus, we say to ourselves: When we are confronted with an illness, what must we do? We must somehow, through certain healing constellations, call upon the etheric body to heal. Ultimately, all medicine does this: somehow call upon the etheric body of the person to heal, because it is the healer. If we approach the ether body in the right way in a person who can be made healthy, if we seek what can come to him from the ether body in terms of healing powers according to his general human destiny, then we are on the way to healing him.

But I will talk about that tomorrow. I will speak about this latter chapter, which has been discussed in connection with today's discussion, tomorrow.

This lecture is the first of sixteen given between October and December 1922, eventually to be collected and published in one volume of the Complete Centenary Edition of Rudolf Steiner's works in the original German. (Vol. 218 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961.) The lecture series is entitled, Spiritual Relationships in the Human Organism.

In speaking of the life of the soul, a certain expression in common use today is made to cover a great deal. I refer to the expression: the ‘unconscious.’ On the one hand it admits that in respect of the soul we are obliged to speak of forces or the like which do not play into the ordinary consciousness; but on the other hand, by the very word itself we confess our inability to say anything about these forces. We merely label them the ‘unconscious.’

In setting out to describe what is the essential nature of human knowledge, we have to say that man's search for knowledge has to be pursued in the external world by means of observation and experiment, aided by the understanding with its power of combination. But then we can go on to show that when we investigate our consciousness, we find in it all manner of manifestations—thoughts, feelings, impulses of will, etc.—of which we are aware that they cannot be fathomed in their true nature by following the method of external scientific investigation and working with experiment, observation and the combining power of thought. Neither does such vision as we can gain by practising self-observation enable us to penetrate to the nature and being of what thus reveals itself in the life of the soul, so long as our self-observation is carried out purely with the ordinary forces of consciousness. We speak accordingly of the ‘unconscious,’ but while we do so, at the same time we renounce all claim to be able to penetrate into its world. This renunciation is entirely justified if we want to restrict ourselves to those means of attaining knowledge which are in common acceptance today. For as a matter of fact, no one who relies on these methods alone can ever carry his observation of the life of the soul any further than that during waking life, ideas, feelings, impulses of will-expressions, that is, of the inner nature and being of man—surge up from the depths; they are obviously closely bound up with the external bodily nature, and it is quite impossible to demonstrate conclusively that what shows itself to begin with in such close dependence on bodily conditions can have any existence of its own beyond these bodily conditions.

Now as you know very well, in Anthroposophy we take this as our starting-point. We fully accept the fact that with such means of acquiring knowledge as are recognised today, the depths of man's soul-nature can never be fathomed. We fully accept the fact that as far as these means go we can do no other than refer simply to an ‘unconscious.’ We do not even need to consider birth and death—the two boundaries of physical life on earth; we need look only at the condition of ordinary sleep as it occurs every day of a man's life, and we shall be obliged to admit that, taking what can be learned about the experiences of the soul with the ordinary means of attaining knowledge, it is impossible to raise any objection when a conclusion such as the following is reached. It is asserted, for example, from the point of view of ordinary knowledge, that all thinking, feeling and willing, as they are present in consciousness in ordinary day-to-day life, show so great a dependence upon bodily conditions that it may well be inferred that experiences of soul emerge out of the bodily conditions as out of a subconscious region, and that what happens during sleep is simply that the purely organic life predominates as such and during such time allows no ideas or feelings or acts of will to flow forth from it. When such a statement is made there is nothing to be said. At the most we can point to the dream and suggest how dreams appear to come out of the life of sleep and to be simply remembered in the waking life. From the way the dream plays through the life of sleep the conclusion might be drawn that the soul-nature does in some way or other persist during sleep. Here, however, we are on uncertain ground; and the fact is, no serious and open-minded person can, with no more than the ordinary means of knowledge at his disposal, be expected to speak in any other way about the soul than to say it exhibits phenomena which are to all appearances absolutely dependent on bodily conditions.

Anthroposophical knowledge, however, just because it accepts in all seriousness this capacity—or rather incapacity—of the ordinary means of knowledge, must, on the other hand, endeavour to find other means of knowing the world. And, as you are aware, such have been attained; they have often been explained and described here Imaginative, Inspired, Intuitive Knowledge. By means of these special ways of knowing—ways of knowing that by dint of strenuous effort have to be developed as new faculties from out of the ordinary life of the soul we are then in a position to bring clarity into a realm where with the ordinary means of knowledge clarity can never be attained.

And now, on the basis of these three stages of higher knowledge, I should like to give you a picture of a very important region of the subconscious or unconscious in man, namely the region of soul-life between going to sleep and waking. I have already described this region to you many times from various standpoints. Today I will do so again from one particular aspect.

Let me begin by picturing to you quite simply the condition of sleep as seen by Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive Knowledge. For ordinary consciousness all that we can say is that whereas from waking to going to sleep consciousness is filled with a content, on going to sleep this content first of all grows dim, is then gradually extinguished and a condition of unconsciousness ensues. During the consciousness of daytime man cannot, with ordinary means of knowledge, tell what his soul does during the time between going to sleep and waking. If the soul has any experience of this condition, the experience does not enter into ordinary consciousness. For ordinary consciousness darkness spreads over all that the soul undergoes—assuming, that is, that it undergoes any experience at all in sleep. But now, with the advent of Imaginative Knowledge, the condition of sleep begins to be lit up, the darkness begins to change into light, and it is possible to judge clearly of what is experienced by the soul during, at any rate, the early stages of sleep. And in Inspired and Intuitive Knowledge one can penetrate still farther into these experiences. Do not suppose that we can by this means look into sleep somewhat in the way we look into a peepshow; but through Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive Knowledge we can experience conditions of soul that resemble sleep inasmuch as our relation to our body at such times is similar to the relation during sleep; only it is experienced, not unconsciously, but in full consciousness. And through being able thus consciously during waking life to experience in a similar manner to the way one experiences in sleep, the possibility is opened for us to behold what the soul of man undergoes during sleep, and to describe it.

When a man goes to sleep, you know how in the moment of doing so the consciousness, already growing vague and indistinct, is often confused by dreams. This dream-world can, to begin with, help us very little indeed towards a knowledge of the life of the soul. For all we can know about dreams in daytime consciousness with the ordinary means of knowledge remains something that is quite external. Dreams are obviously not things upon which we can build in a sure and well-defined way, until we have a knowledge about sleep itself by some other means. He who truly acquires a knowledge of the condition of sleep knows very well that dreams are in reality misleading rather than enlightening. What the soul experiences in sleep it experiences unconsciously. But now, since I am going to place a picture of it before you arising from Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive Knowledge, I must portray it as if it were experienced consciously. I shall have to describe to you the experiences of the soul from going to sleep to waking as if they were experienced in consciousness. They are not; nevertheless, what I describe is truly experienced by the soul, although without knowing anything of it. It is present as an actual fact, and the effect of the experience is not limited to the time between going to sleep and waking. For it works into the physical organism of the human being, and it does so most of all during waking life. We carry within us during the day, from waking until going to sleep, the after-effects of the experiences of the night; and if it is true that for the civilization in which we live what we do with the instrumentality of consciousness is of great significance, it is no less true that all that goes on with our own selves depends very little indeed upon our consciousness, and very much upon what we experience unconsciously between going to sleep and waking.

When we have gone to sleep, and the sense-perceptions have been gradually paralysed and the will-impulses have ceased to work, we experience in the first place an undifferentiated condition of soul. In this undefined experience a strong sense of time is present, but all feeling of space is almost completely wiped out. It is an experience that is comparable with swimming; we are, so to speak, moving about in a general, indefinite world-substance. One has really to coin words to express what the soul goes through at this stage. One might say, the soul feels as if it were like a wave in a great sea, a wave that is organised within itself and yet feels itself surrounded on every hand by the sea and affected by the influences of the sea much as during the life of day the soul is affected by impressions of colour, tone or warmth, perceiving them in a quite definite and differentiated manner. In the life of day you feel yourself as a human being enclosed within your skin, and having a definite position in space. in the moment that follows the going to sleep, you feel—I say you ‘feel,’ I describe it all as if it were consciousness; the fact is there, it is only the consciousness of the fact that is lacking—you feel like a wave in a universal sea; you feel yourself now here, now there; as I said, the definite sense of space ceases. A general sense of time, however, persists.

But now this experience is united with another, namely, an experience of being forsaken and alone. It is like sinking into an abyss. If a man were to experience consciously this first stage of sleep without right preparation, he would in truth be exposed to great risk, for he would find it quite unbearable to lose in this way almost all sense of space and live merely in a general, universal feeling of time, to feel himself in this vague way merely a part of a universal sea of substance, where scarcely anything is distinguishable—where indeed the only thing one can distinguish is that one is a self within a universal world-existence. If consciousness were present, one would actually have the sensation of hovering over an abyss.

And now a still further experience is united with this one. A tremendous need for the support of the spiritual makes itself felt in the soul, a great need and longing to be united with the spiritual. In the universal sea in which one is swimming, one has, as it were, lost that feeling of security which comes from being in contact with the material things of the world of our waking hours. Hence one feels—one would feel, that is, if the condition were conscious—a deep yearning to be united with the divine and spiritual. And one may say too that this experience of movement in an undifferentiated world-substance carries with it the sense of being concealed and protected within divine-spiritual reality. Please observe the way I am describing all this. To repeat once more, I am describing it to you as if the soul experienced it consciously. It does not do so; but let me remind you that when you experience something consciously in waking life, a great deal is going on at the same time unconsciously in your organism. This is a simple fact. Let us say, for example, you feel joy. When you feel joy, your blood beats differently from the way it beats when you are sad. You experience the joy or sorrow in your consciousness, but not the difference in the pulsation of the blood. The pulsation of the blood is, notwithstanding, a fact. And it is the same here too. What I describe as swimming in an undifferentiated world-substance, and again what I describe as a need of God—there is a reality in the life of soul answering to each one of these descriptions. And Imaginative Knowledge does nothing else than lift this reality into consciousness, just as ordinary waking consciousness can lift into consciousness the pulsation of the blood which lies behind joy or sorrow. The facts are there, and they work on into our life of day; so that when we wake in the morning our whole organism is refreshed. The refreshment is due to the experience we have undergone during the night in our life of soul. What takes place in the soul when it is separated from the body during the time between going to sleep and waking is of great significance in its after-effects during waking life on the following day. We should not be able rightly to make use of our body on the following day if we had not raised ourselves up out of our connection with the external world of the physical senses and been immersed in this undefined experience which I have described. Nor would there rise up from the depths of our will during waking life something like a need and longing to relate all the differentiated world around us to a universal existence. The fact that we feel a need to relate the world of the senses to a divine existence is a direct result of this first stage of sleep.

The question may well be asked: Why is man not content merely to place the several objects of the world side by side? Why is he not content to go through the world accepting the existence of plants, animals, etc., without question? Why does he want to try to philosophize about it all? For the very simplest people do so; and incidentally, I may say they do it with far more understanding than the philosophers themselves! Why does man want to build up a philosophy of how the things hang together? Why does he relate the single example that meets his eye to a universal whole, and ask how the individual is rooted and grounded in the cosmos? He would not do so, if it were not that during sleep he enters in an intensely real and living way into the undefined existence I have described; nor would he ever in the waking state come to a feeling of God, were it not that he has experienced the corresponding fact in the first stage of sleep. We owe to sleep something that has untold significance for our deep inner nature as human beings.

As man continues asleep, he comes into other stages which are not accessible to Imaginative Knowledge, but require Inspired Knowledge for their perception. Something else now shows itself as a fact of the life of soul and is reflected for Inspired Knowledge in the way that the pulsation of the blood is reflected in joy and sorrow. To begin with, we find a disintegration of the soul into the greatest possible number of individual entities. The soul literally splits up its life into many parts, and this process is united with an experience which, when it lights up into consciousness, is felt as an experience of anxiety and fear. After the soul has passed through what we have described as a hovering over the abyss or as a swimming in a universal world-substance, and has experienced at the same time a longing for the divine-spiritual, it comes into this condition of anxiety—that is to say, into a condition that would be anxiety, if it were consciously experienced. The experience is due to the fact that the soul is no longer merely swimming in a general world-substance, but has, as it were, immersed itself in individual beings of soul-and-spirit. The soul comes into a certain relationship with these beings, and doing so severally, is now itself not one but manifold.

The anxiety of this stage of sleep has to be somehow met and overcome. In the time of the Earth's evolution that preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, teachings were given in the places of the Mysteries and found their way to the individual human beings; these teachings enabled the soul to experience other feelings in addition to those aroused by contact with the outer world of the senses. Such teachings were given in connection with the most varied religious practices, but they all awakened these feelings in the souls of men by giving them ideas and conceptions of God in such a way as was right for those ancient times. Men were then so constituted that even during waking life the spiritual world still shone into their consciousness. The farther we go back in the evolution of mankind on Earth, the more evident does it become that man had a kind of clairvoyance in very ancient times, traces of which remained on into later epochs; through this clairvoyance he perceived inwardly how he himself, before he began his life on Earth, had lived in pre-earthly existence as a being of soul-and-spirit. It was not something that he merely believed; it was for him a certainty; he experienced within himself something left over from a pre-earthly existence.

If I may be allowed to use a trivial comparison, I would remind you of how when someone has inherited a certain faculty from his parents, he is aware that this faculty has inserted itself into the course of his life through its own immediate existence; he has not acquired it, it has come over to him from his ancestors. In a similar way the men of an older time knew that certain experiences they had in their soul did not come to them from what they had seen with their eyes, but were an inheritance from a pre-earthly existence. They knew it from the experiences themselves. We have again and again to call attention to the fact that in the course of evolution man has grown free from such experiences, and that we live in an age when the ordinary consciousness has no experiences that are explicable as an inheritance from a pre-earthly existence. It was accordingly easier for the men of olden times to be taught by their spiritual leaders in the Mystery-centres how they should relate themselves in their feelings to what they already had in their soul as spiritual experience. Power came to them with the impulses they received from the Mystery-centres, and they were able to carry out of ordinary day life into the life of night, into the life of sleep, the strength to hold their own against the anxiety described above. The anxiety rose up out of the depths of the life of sleep. If a man was to have power to bring away with him out of this anxiety not general fatigue or exhaustion or the like, but instead a freshness of his whole organism, then he had to acquire that power on the previous day during the waking life.

Such is the connection between day and night. Night brings, at a certain stage of sleep, anxiety. Into this anxiety must flow power man has gained from religious or similar experience on the day before; and when these two things come together and unite—the power remaining over from the day before and the new and original experience of the night—then a reviving and refreshing force streams into the organism for the new day that follows.

A true spiritual science is not concerned to speak in general, abstract phrases and affirm the presence of a universal divine ordering in the world. It is not satisfied to describe the single objects of the world in their sense-aspect and then add: And now within this sense-appearance a general world-ordering holds sway. Spiritual science has to show in concrete detail how this divine ordering of the world works. If we would be adequate to the tasks of human evolution in the future, we cannot be content merely to say: I feel refreshed after a sound and healthy sleep; God has granted me refreshment. We should have to despair of science if we must insist upon a strict science for the world of the senses, and could not at the same time extend this strictness to what relates to the supersensible, but there had to remain content with phrases, such as the general statement that a divine ordering lies at the foundation of the world. No, on the contrary, we learn to be more and more definite; and we can show how the anxiety which occurs in the second stage of sleep, is as it were blended and intermingled with the power drawn from the religious experience of the previous day that works on into the night, and how these then give rise in their union to the power with which the physical organism is refreshed for the next day.

In this way we come to see more and more clearly how the spiritual lives in the physical. The means of knowledge that hold good today admit only a physical content of the world, supplemented by a way of speaking in general terms of how in, or above, this physical content lives something spiritual. Humanity will, however, sink lower and lower in civilization and culture if men will not learn to extend to the spiritual world the strict exactitude practised in the study of the external world.

When, with Inspired Consciousness, we follow up further the stages of sleep and pass from the first to the second stage, the inner experience of the soul becomes altogether different from what it is in the life of day.

Now it is quite possible to recognise by means of ordinary natural science—if we will only follow it out to the consequences—that our life of soul is intimately attached to the processes of breathing and of blood-circulation, and to the process of nutrition that permeates the circulation; we can feel that something is taking place when, for example, we exert ourselves strongly in movement. We feel how the soul-and-spirit within us is united with the activities of our body, and when we try to form a picture of the breathing process or of the circulatory process, we know that we are picturing something in which, during waking life, dwells the experience of the soul, in which it is, as it were, embedded. The experience of the soul during sleep is not attached in any way to the senses, nevertheless it too is a well-defined inner life that can also be referred to something, in the same way that the inner life of day can be referred to the life of breathing and the life of circulation. Inspired Knowledge leads us to see how this inner life of night-time is connected with an unfolding of inner forces, comparable with the unfolding of the forces of breathing and of circulation, and is in fact a copy of the planetary movements of our system. Note well, I do not say that every night from going to sleep until waking we are ourselves within, or united with, the movements of the planets, but that we are inserted into something which is a copy, so to speak in miniature, of our planetary cosmos or rather of its movements. As our life of soul by day has its dwelling-place in the circulation of the blood, so our life of soul by night is inserted into something which is a copy of the planetary movements of our solar system. If we must say for the day-time: the white corpuscles, the red corpuscles circulate in us, the breathing power revolves in us, enabling us to breathe in and breathe out—then we must say for the night-time: there revolves in us a copy of the movement of Mercury, of the movement of Venus, of the movement of Jupiter. Our life of soul from going to sleep to waking is, so to say, in a little planetary cosmos. From being personal and human our life becomes cosmic during sleep. And Inspired Knowledge can then discover how when we are tired in the evening, the forces which have held our blood in pulsation during the day are able to keep vitality going during the night through their own faculty of persistence, but that in order to be turned again into the day life of soul, these forces require the fresh impulse that comes from the experience of a copy of the planetary cosmos during the night. In the moment of waking the after-effects are implanted into us of the experience we have received from the copies of the planetary movements.

This it is which unites the cosmos with our individual life. When we wake in the morning, the forces we need would not be able to stream into us in the right way so that consciousness is properly present, if we had not this after-working of the experiences of the night.

You will be able to see from this how little justification there often is when people complain bitterly of sleeplessness. As a general rule, they are deeply self-deceived. I will not, however, enter into this subject now. Naturally, those who labour under the delusion have themselves no idea of it. They think they are not asleep, whereas in reality they are in an abnormal sleep. They think that their soul is not outside the body and cannot experience this planetary existence. The fact is, they are in a condition which is certainly dull, but which yet admits of their experiencing the very same that another human being experiences when he is in a healthy sleep. But as I have said, I will not at the present moment enter further into these exceptional cases.

Speaking generally, the description I am now giving is true for man, namely that in the second stage of sleep he lives a cosmic life. I have indicated to you how in olden times before the Mystery of Golgotha, impulses went forth from the places of the Mysteries which gave man the power to come out of this anxiety, the power to withstand the tendency to dispersion and pass through in a sound and healthy way what he had to pass through at this time. That is to say, he was imbued with a power that enabled him to enter into the experience of the planets and not stop short at the experience of being dismembered and scattered. The anxiety was due to this latter experience, while the experience of being in the planets came as a result of taking with one out of the experience of the previous day the power I have described. Since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it has been possible for men to possess themselves of the same power that was formerly given from the Mysteries, by directing their souls to the events of the Mystery of Golgotha. Whoever enters in a right and living way into an experience of the Mystery of Golgotha will have Christ for his strong guide in the moment when his soul comes into the realm of anxiety during the time between going to sleep and waking. Thus the humanity of modern times has through the Christ-experience what an older humanity had from the Mysteries.

Passing onward from the stage of sleep just described, man enters upon a stage which I may be permitted to name in plain terms; for after I have taken time to explain more fully the planetary experience, you will not take offence when I say at once that following on the planetary experience man has an experience of the fixed stars. Having lived during the second stage of sleep in the copy of the planetary movements, he now lives in the constellations, or rather in copies of the constellations, of the fixed stars of the zodiac. This experience is a very real fact during the third stage of the life of man by night. He begins then also to experience the difference between the Sun as a planet and as a fixed star. It is not at all clear to a man of the present day why in ancient astronomies the Sun counted at the same time as a planet and also in a sense as a fixed star. During the second stage of sleep the Sun has actually, in this experience, planetary qualities; we learn to know the conspicuous and distinct relation in which it stands to the whole life of man on Earth. In the third stage we learn to know the Sun in its constellation in relation to the other constellations of the stars, for example, of the zodiac.

In short, we live our way into the cosmos with far greater intensity than was the case in the previous stage of sleep. We have this experience of the fixed stars, and we retain from it deeper and still more important impulses for the life of the following day than we should be able to have from the planetary experiences alone. We owe it to the experience of the planets that our breathing process and circulatory process are, if I may so express it, ‘enfired;’ but in order for these processes to be permeated, as they need to be, with substance, in order that they may be continually carrying the means of nourishment to the whole of the organism, they require the stimulation that is given by the experience of the fixed stars. The activity that results is apparently a most material one; nevertheless it owes its origin to the working of higher forces than the mere movement of the blood in circulation. As physical human beings we are dependent in our soul-and-spirit on the way in which this or that substance circulates in us, and this dependence is connected, if I may so express it, with the highest heavens; it is connected with the fact that we, as beings of soul-and-spirit, feel within us during the third stage of sleep pictures of the constellations of the fixed stars, just as by day when we are awake we feel within us our stomach or our lung. We have already heard that, as by day our body is in movement inwardly, is filled with the movements of breathing and circulation, so by night our soul, the substance of our soul, is something that has within it copies of the planetary movements. And now we learn that as by day we have in us stomach and lung and heart, so by night we have in us the constellations of the fixed stars. They constitute our inner being. Thus during sleep man becomes in very truth a cosmic being. This third stage of sleep is the deepest of all. Out of it man emerges to return little by little to the waking life of day. Why does he return? He would not return into waking life, did not forces take hold in his soul which lead him again into his physical organism.

We have already approached these forces from many and varying points of view and described how they may be named. Today I want to describe them to you from their cosmic aspect. When through intuition we attain to a knowledge of the experience of the fixed stars, then we learn at the same time that the forces which lead man back again into the physical organism are Moon forces; that is to say, they are what corresponds in the realm of spirit to what appears in a physical picture as the Moon. The action of the forces does not, of course, depend on whether it is full Moon at the time or some other phase, for the Moon can shine through the Earth in a spiritual sense. The metamorphoses which come to expression in the visibility of the Moon do, it is true, enter into the working, but to explain how they enter in would take us to the consideration of much finer and subtler distinctions than we want to describe today. It is in general the forces of the Moon that lead man back.

We may express it in this way. Just as the soul of man is permeated from going to sleep to waking by the planetary forces and by the forces that reveal themselves in the constellations of the fixed stars, just as these forces permeate him through and through and remain with him—for the effects work on in the waking life of day—so is man permeated unceasingly with those spiritual forces which correspond in the cosmos to the physical Moon. It is in reality a marvellously complicated process, but if we want to find some way of expressing it, we might say it is like stretching out a piece of elastic. You know how if you stretch a piece of elastic, it goes a certain distance and then springs back. In a somewhat similar way we, as it were, stretch the Moon forces to a certain point and then are obliged to return. The point is reached in the third stage of sleep, and we are then led back stage by stage by the Moon forces, which are always intimately connected with the bringing into the physical world of soul-and-spirit. From the third, through the second and the first stage we are gradually led back.

It is a fact that the initiative man is able to carry in his powers of ideation and of feeling and thought during day-waking life, is an after-effect of the experience of the fixed stars during the night, whilst the powers of combination he is able to carry in them, the powers of wisdom and cleverness, are an after-effect of the planetary experience. That which rays into the life of day from the cosmos, coming from the experience of the night, is obliged however to enter by way of the body. The experience of the fixed stars shoots into our life of day by way of the metabolism of food. Our food would not enter our head in such a way as to enable us to unfold powers of initiative, were it not that the whole process of metabolism is fired by what we experience at night in connection with the stars. Nor would we be able to think intelligently unless we received into our breathing and blood-circulation during the day the after-effects of the planetary experience of the night.

Things like this are always correct only in a broad and general way; and when the facts appear to be contradictory, as in the case of people who suffer from sleeplessness, then it rests with us to explain the corresponding abnormalities. If such cases are looked into with real thoroughness, they will not be found to tell against these truths. On the contrary, these truths, which are correct in the main, open up for the first time the possibility of explaining the single instance in its real and essential nature.

A true understanding of the human being is alone possible when we become conscious in the widest sense of the fact that man lives not only in his physical body within his skin, but in the whole world. This life in the whole world is concealed from ordinary consciousness only because it is very much dulled and dimmed for the waking life of day. At most we can say that in the general sensation and experience of light we have something of an after-working of our share in the being of a universal cosmos. And there are perhaps other feelings, very dull and dim, wherein man has something left between waking and going to sleep of that sense of being within the cosmos. All such feelings, however, that are given to man remain silent within him by day in order that he may unfold his individual consciousness, in order that he may not be disturbed by whatever plays into his experience from the Cosmos. During the night the case is reversed. There man has a cosmic experience. True, it is a copy only, but it is a faithful copy, as I have indicated. By night man has in reality a cosmic experience and because he must pass through this cosmic experience, therefore is his day-consciousness darkened and paralysed.

The future evolution of mankind will consist in this, that man will more and more live his way into the Cosmos, and that the time will come when he will feel himself with his consciousness in Sun and Moon and Stars, in the same way as now he feels himself with his consciousness upon Earth. Then he will look from the Cosmos upon the Earth, just as now he gazes from the Earth into the Cosmos in his present waking condition. The looking, however, will be essentially different in kind.

If we want to take our stand for evolution in all sincerity and in a wide and comprehensive sense, we must recognise that human consciousness too is subject to evolution, that the body-consciousness man has today is a transition stage that leads over to another consciousness, which will also be a reflection in the soul of facts. Man already now experiences the facts every night. He has need of them; for through them alone in their after-effects can his life be maintained by day. Man's further evolution will consist in this, that he will be conscious in normal life of that which today constitutes for him the unconscious. For this, however, it is essential that he should find his way into Spiritual Science; for just as we need to bend our course in some direction or other when we are swimming, so do we need to give a direction to present-day ordinary consciousness. We cannot merely let ourselves be carried along, as is the case in the customary methods of obtaining knowledge. We need a clear direction. This guidance anthroposophical Spiritual Science alone is able to give, because it unveils, in so far as is necessary for present times, that which is living in man and of which he is not yet conscious. He must receive it into his consciousness, otherwise he can make no cosmic progress.

I have here portrayed for you one section of all that is commonly gathered up from the rubbish heap of modern knowledge and labelled the ‘unconscious.’ Having thus described man’s unconscious experiences during sleep, I will try in the next lecture to describe for you the experiences that lie beyond birth and death.

Our meditations should gradually bring it about that we press into higher worlds body-free and learn to know and see things there. It's not just a matter of getting into higher worlds but of how we do this—the attitude with which we enter higher worlds must be a good and moral one. Now to begin with it's the case that a man as a sensory-physical being on earth is abandoned by good. He doesn't feel the moral element, the good that could and should speak to him out of the whole of creation any more. To give man freedom Lucifer has as it were pulled the moral element out; a man must now awaken it in himself, find it again and then bring it back to the spiritual, divine worlds.

When a man looks at the sun rising and setting today he doesn't feel any moral impulses streaming to him from it. If it wasn't for Lucifer he would feel: forces flow from the sun that pulse through me in such a way that I know and feel that I'm an I. If a man looks at the moon with what astronomy gives him he then knows that in the time from new moon to full moon and back again there are certain equilibrium constellations, where one first sees a quarter, then a half and then a whole illumined surface. What a man no longer feels is that if the constellations were completely different, if the moon would change its position very slightly beings like men would no longer be able to live in their physical bodies; for reproductive forces flow from the moon. If a man stares at Mercury he can no longer see that without Mercury no connection between sun and moon forces, between ego and reproductive forces would be made. Likewise with Venus he does not feel that without its mild light none of the love relations that make him happy would exist.

Lucifer has completely permeated man's astral body with egoism. This is necessary for the sake of a development towards freedom and independence of the individual. But things should not go so far that a man becomes insensitive to moral things. However this is the case with respect to nature, to the elements, for instance. A man would have to feel from air, fire, water, earth that they're there to create a punishing adjustment for human sins, that living in elemental forces there's a sickening force that we should and must let work on us in order to purify ourselves.-The same words are true or false depending on whose mouth they come from. In Lucifer's mouth “nature is sin, spirit is devil” is mockery. But it's true in the sense developed above, that material nature is supposed to punish us for our sins and that we should feel the spirit in nature as something that makes us sick and brings us suffering. For pains, suffering is the God-given means to recognize egoism and to overcome it. In Lucifer's mouth the word “Ye shall be as Gods” is a lie, but understood correctly it's true. Christ says: “Ye are Gods”—sons of the Godhead. A man is called upon to become a God. What does a modern materialist who divides the world into physical, material atoms want to do? He wants to perpetuate forces of sin. For matter is condensed injustice. Matter must dissolve into spirit again through spiritual development. We must wrest the morality that's placed in nature by divine, world wisdom from it again. Rosicrucian wisdom saw this whole materialistic development coming and so it gave means and showed ways to a heightened morality without which one shouldn't enter higher worlds, for one's own good. Otherwise one might get in, but then one doesn't find Lucifer there as he should approach one as a guide in knowledge of higher worlds, but all the more as a seducer who shows and simulates all kinds of divine spiritual things to one that don't really exist.

We should say Ex Deo nascimur and look up to the moon with an elevated soul, as to the giver of the opportunity to incarnate repeatedly and to perfect oneself on earth in a physical body. In Christo morimur, while looking up to the sun in order to feel oneself as an ego-being, as a spiritual-divine being through Christ, the spirit who is connected with the sun. Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus, while looking up to Mercury and Venus that don't appear in physical copies but become manifest purely spiritually. Because the power of the spirit that teaches men about spiritual love is divided between them and the other planets. Plato still felt as an echo that man is abandoned by the good, that the good lives withdrawn in the deep lap of the Gods when he said: God is good. Christ Jesus said: No one is good except God.

We want to strive ceaselessly towards higher morality so that we become capable of feeling moral impulses out of nature, sun, moon, stars and of bringing the moral element back to the spiritual world, that was taken out of it by Lucifer for the sake of our freedom.