The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] We saw yesterday how the facts of the Cosmos proceed from the spiritual life of Beings who stand above man. Especially such a phenomenon as the one we introduced towards the end of our last lecture, the fight in heaven, which has left, so to speak, so many ‘corpses’ on the field of battle between Jupiter and Mars, which as planetoids are still being discovered by physical science in ever-increasing numbers; such a phenomenon must be of particular importance to us, and we shall have to return to it again: We shall see how this event is also reflected in certain processes of the earth's evolution, and how precisely in the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita we find the earthly reflection of this fight in heaven.

[ 2 ] But to-day we shall continue our studies so as to describe, though in a sketchy way, those other beings of the spiritual Hierarchies, whom we have indicated already, but whom yesterday we omitted. These are the Beings who, counting upwards, stand nearest to man, and are called in Christian Esotericism: Angels, Archangels, Primeval Beginnings or Primeval Forces; also Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai. In theosophical literature the Archangels are also called Spirits of Fire, and the primeval Beginnings, spirits of Personality.

[ 3 ] These Beings who stand, as it were, in between man and those others to whom we referred yesterday as reaching up to Jupiter, Mars, etc., naturally stand in a nearer relation to man on the earth itself. First we have the Angels or Angeloi. They passed through their human stage during the evolution of the ancient Moon, and are fundamentally speaking, only as far on during our present earth evolution as man will be during the Jupiter evolution. They stand one stage higher than man. What is the task of these Beings? Their task can be realised when we take into account the development of man upon earth.

[ 4 ] Man develops from incarnation to incarnation. Our human evolution as it is now, reaches back through the ancient Atlantean time, through the Lemurian time and really begins in the ancient Lemurian time. This evolution through all these incarnations will continue for a long time yet, till towards the end of earthly evolution when other forms of human development will have come in. Now you know that what we call the eternal nucleus or kernel of the human being, the individuality, continues from incarnation to incarnation. But you also know that the greater number of people have to-day no recollection, no consciousness, as yet of their incarnations, and men do not as yet remember what happened to them during their former incarnations. Only those who have developed a certain degree of clairvoyance can look at their past incarnations.

[ 5 ] What sequence would there be between a man's incarnations upon earth when he cannot remember his former incarnations, if certain beings were not there to connect the separate incarnations, and watch the progress of the individual from one incarnation to the other? We have to assign one of these Beings to each man, a being who, being one stage higher, can lead the individuality over from one incarnation to the other. These are not the beings who rule Karma [but] preserve the memory from one incarnation to the other, so long as the man is not himself aware of it. These Beings are the Angels. Each man is a personality in each incarnation, and over each man a being watches, who has a consciousness which passes from one incarnation to the other. This makes it possible that in certain inferior grades of initiation, man is able, even if he does not himself know anything about his past incarnations, to ask his Angel about them. This is quite possible for certain lower degrees of initiation. The Beings who, as Angels, are one stage higher than men, have to keep watch over the whole human thread of life, which is spun for each single individuality from one incarnation to another.

Now, we pass on to the next group of Beings, to the Archangels — Archangeloi or Fire Spirits. These do not occupy themselves with separate men, with the single individual, but have a wider task; they bring single lives into harmonious order with the life of larger human groups, as, for instance, nations, races, etc. Within our earth's evolution the Archangels’ task is to bring into certain harmonious relationship each single soul with the national or race-soul. For those who penetrate into spiritual knowledge, the souls of races are something quite different from what they are for the lovers of the abstract in the science of to-day, or for present day culture in general. On a certain territory, (let us take Germany, France or Italy) live so and so many people, and because the physical eye sees only so many external human forms, such lovers of the abstract can imagine what is called the Soul of a nation or Spirit of a nation only as a comprehensive general idea of a nation. For the lover of abstractions the separate man only is real, not the soul of the nation, not the spirit of the nation. For one who truly sees into the inner working of spiritual life, that which is called the nation's soul or spirit, is a reality. In the soul of a nation there lives and weaves what we call a fire-spirit or an Archangel; he regulates, so to speak, the relation between separate men and the nation or races as a whole

[ 6 ] Then we rise to those beings whom we designate the Spirits of Personality, primeval beginnings, primeval forces, or Archai. These are still loftier Beings, who have a still higher task in the continuity of human existence. Fundamentally speaking, they regulate the earthly relations of whole human generations on earth, and they live in such a way that, on the waves of time, from epoch to epoch, they transform themselves at certain definite periods, they assume other spiritual bodies. Here again, you all know something of that which for the lovers of the abstract, is merely an idea, but which is a reality for those who can look into actual spiritual existence; it is that which is given a truly ugly name — the spirit of the time. You have here to do with that which represents the meaning and the mission of an epoch of humanity; picture to yourselves that we could describe the meaning and the mission of, for instance, the first thousands of years immediately after the Atlantean catastrophe. This ‘Spirit of the Age’ comprises something which reaches beyond single nations, beyond single races. Such a spirit is not limited to this or that nation, it goes beyond the limits of nations. That which one really calls a ‘Zeitgeist’ or Spirit of an epoch is the spiritual body of the Archai or the Primeval Beginnings or Spirits of Personality. It is to these Spirits of Personality that one has to ascribe the fact that within certain epochs, certain definite personalities appear on our earth. You understand, do you not, that earthly tasks have to be solved by earthly personalities; in a definite epoch, some epoch-making personality has had to appear. A strange muddle would come into the evolution of the earth if it were all left to chance, and Luther or Charlemagne were placed within any epoch, no matter which. This must be thought out first, the connexion with the whole evolution of humanity over the whole earth, has to be thought out; the right soul has to appear in harmony with the meaning of the whole earth's development. This is regulated by the Spirits of Personality, the Archai or primeval origins.

[ 7 ] And when we get beyond the Archai, we reach to those Beings whom we touched on yesterday, the so called Powers, — Exusiai, whom we also call the Spirits of Form. Here we have to do with tasks that reach beyond the earth. We differentiate in the course of human development a Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan evolution. We have now seen how all that happens within the earth itself is regulated by the Angels as regards the individual men, by Archangels as regards the relation between individuals and the large masses of humanity, and by the Spirits of Personality for the whole development of man, from the Lemurian period up to the period when man will again be so largely spiritualised that he will hardly belong to the earth. But something else has yet to be regulated. Humanity will have to be guided from one planetary condition to another. Spiritual Beings must also exist, whose care it is during the whole earth evolution to see that when that evolution will have come to an end, humanity may pass in the right manner through a Pralaya and find its way to the next goal, to the Jupiter goal. These are the Powers or Spirits of Form; yesterday we characterised their task from above downwards, now we characterise them from below upwards. The spirits whose care it is to see that the whole of humanity should be led from one planetary condition to another, are the Powers, Exusiai or Spirits of Form.

[ 8 ] We must now make a certain disclosure about the Cosmic position of these Beings. In spiritual science, in that which it is desired to continue to-day in Anthroposophy, and which is at bottom [of] the Wisdom of the Mysteries, these different Beings of the heavenly Hierarchies have always been spoken of as we have spoken of them to-day. We heard yesterday that the present Saturn represents the limit up to which reached the action of the Thrones or Spirits of Will; Jupiter, the limit up to which the Dominions, Spirits of Wisdom, acted; and Mars, the boundary line up to which reached the influence of the Mights, Dynamis or Virtutes, or Spirits of Motion.

[ 9 ] We may now characterise in a similar way how the Beings we named to-day divided specially the realms over which they held sway within our solar system. We must here touch on something which will perhaps call forth a certain amazement, even in you, who are already in a certain way schooled Anthroposophists, but which is absolutely in accordance with the truth. In the school curriculum of the present day, it is indicated that once upon a time, in grey antiquity, before Copernicus, there had been a conception of our Solar system which is known as the Ptolemaic System. People then believed that the earth stood in the centre of our system, and that the planets coursed round it, as they appear to do to our ordinary physical sight. Since Copernicus one knows — at least so people say — what people did not know formerly, that the Sun stands in the middle and that the planets circle around it, in their respective ellipses. But that which ought to be made quite clear and precise to people by such a description of our solar system, if one sincerely and honestly expounds it in the present day sense, is still something quite different. One ought to say: up to Copernicus, people knew only certain forms of movement in Universal space, and according to these, they judged how it could be with our solar system. What Copernicus did is not that he, so to speak, took a chair and gazed into space to see how the sun stands in some point of a circle or ellipse and how the planets turn around it; but he made a calculation, and this calculation explains what is seen in a simpler way than the former calculation did. The Copernican world system is nothing but the result, the product, of thought. [ 10 ] Let us look at it once from the point of view of the Ptolemaic. Let us consider that the Sun stands in the middle, let us calculate where the places of the planets must be, and then search whether it coincides with experience. Certainly, for mere physical observation, it coincides at first completely. Certainly one has built upon it all sorts of world systems, the Kant-Laplace system, for instance; but there one reaches a point where there were continual discoveries, a point which is no more scientifically quite honest. For later on, by purely physical observation, two planets have been added to it — we have not touched on them yet, but later we will show what they signify for our system — these are Uranus and Neptune. When one describes this world system one certainly should turn people's attention to the fact that in reality these two planets Uranus and Neptune, very much impair the truth of the calculation. [ 11 ] If one accepts the Kant-Laplace system, then, according to it, Uranus and Neptune should move with their moons as the other moons move around the other planets. But they do not; we even have among those outer planets, these two lately discovered planets, one which behaves in a very strange way. In reality, if the Kant-Laplace system is correct, somebody must, after having split off the rest of the planets, [have] turned the axis in such a way that it revolved at 90°, for its course is different from that of the other planets. These two differ greatly from the other planets of our solar systems. We shall see later how it is with them, but now we simply call attention to the fact that with the Copernican system we have only to do with a calculation, with something established as an hypothesis, as an assumption, at a time when man had gone completely adrift from the perception of spiritual co-relations and of what lies spiritually at the foundation of external happenings. But the old Ptolemaic system is not merely a physical system, it is one which was still derived from spiritual observation, when one knew that planets are boundary marks for certain realms where the higher Beings held sway. We must design our whole solar planetary system in a different way if we are to characterise these realms of control correctly. I shall draw this planetary system for you as it was expounded in the Mystery Schools of Zarathustra. We could just as well turn to other Mysteries for counsel, but we shall specially select this system for the explanation of our solar system with its planets, in respect of the spiritual Beings who are active within.

[ 12 ] In the System of Zarathustra something was accepted which differs from our observation of the heavens. You know that one can observe a certain progress of the Sun—call it apparent or otherwise: through the Zodiac during the course of long years. It is generally said—and it is correct—that from about the year 270 B.C. the sun in spring rose at the first point of spring in the Zodiacal sign of Pisces. But every year the sun advanced a little further, so that in the course of long, long epochs of time, it traverses, as regards its point of rising through the whole of one Zodiacal sign. Before 270 B.C. it did not rise in Pisces but in Aries, with its rising point in spring-time, it travelled through the whole sign of Aries during 2150 years. Before that, Taurus had been the Zodiacal constellation in the spring during the previous period of 2150 years. So, if we go back to five or six thousand years B.C., we find the spring-point in the Zodiacal sign of Gemini. That was the time in which the Mystery Schools of Zarathustra flourished.¹

Far back into hoary antiquity these Schools flourished and, when speaking of the appearance of the heavens, they calculated everything according to the constellation of Gemini, so that if we wanted to draw the Zodiac in the way we characterised it yesterday, we should have to place the constellation of Gemini here at the top. Then one would have to draw, in direct connection with the Zodiac, that which bounds the realm of the Thrones or Spirits of Will, the boundary of which is Saturn. Then we come to the boundary limit of the realm of those spiritual Beings whom we call the Spirits of Wisdom — the utmost boundary being Jupiter. Then we reach the limit of the realm of the Spirits of Motion of which the limit is Mars. We have seen that between these lies the battlefield which the fight in Heaven has left behind. Now if we want to divide the realms of power correctly, we must draw the boundary line of the Sun. Thus, just as we draw Mars as the boundary point up to which is the domain ruled by the Mights and Spirits of Motion, we must draw the Sun itself as marking the limit to which the Lordship of the Powers or the Spirits of Form extends. And then we come to the boundary which we designate with the sign of Venus. The realm of the Spirits of Personality or Archai reaches to Venus. Next we come to the boundary of the realm, the limit of which is marked by the sign of Mercury, and is the realm of those Beings, whom we call Archangels or Fire Spirits. And now we come very near the earth. We can now designate the realm which has the Moon for a landmark, and here we draw the earth.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

[ 13 ] You must look on the earth as the Starting Point surrounded by a region under the dominion of certain Beings which reaches to the Moon. Then comes a region extending as far as Mercury, then one extending to Venus, and then one to the Sun.

You may be astonished at the sequence in which I have placed the planets. When the earth is here, and the Sun there, you would have thought that I should draw Mercury in the vicinity of the Sun, and Venus here. But no! For these Planets have had their names interchanged, in later Astronomy. That which is called Mercury to-day was called Venus in all ancient teachings, and that which is called Venus was called Mercury. Thus, note it well, one does not understand the ancient writings when one takes that which in them is called Venus or Mercury for the Venus or Mercury of the present day. That which is said about Venus has to be applied to the Mercury of to-day, and what is said about Mercury to Venus. For those two designations were later interchanged. On the occasion when man turned the world system topsy-turvy, when the earth was deprived of its central position, the perspective was not only changed, but the designations of Mercury and Venus were also changed.

[ 14 ] Now you will very easily bring into harmony what is drawn here with the physical or Copernican theory. You need only think: here is

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

This is what I have drawn, and nothing else. Here are Earth, Mercury, Venus, on the one side, and on the other side, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Thus, we have to do only with a change of perspective. This system is quite possible but only when this constellation was there. It is a fact that it was there at a certain epoch, when Gemini was above Saturn. Then one could observe clairvoyantly with particular exactness the connections between the regions in which the Spiritual Hierarchies hold sway. It was then revealed that around the Earth, up to the Moon, was the sphere of the Angels. In fact when one does not use the physical system as a foundation, one gets around the earth up to the Moon, the sphere of the Angels, up to Mercury the sphere of the Archangels, up to Venus that of the Archai or Spirits of Personality, and lastly up to the Sun is the realm of the Exusiai or Spirits of Form. Then comes the sphere — as I characterised it yesterday — of the Virtutes or Mights, then the sphere of the Dominions, and then that of the Thrones.

[ 15 ] When one speaks of the Copernican and of the Ptolemaic systems, one must have it clear in one's mind that in the Ptolemaic system something still remains of the constellation of ruling Spirits, and there the Earth must be taken as the starting point of the perspective. A future will come when this world system will again be the correct one; because Man will again know about the Spiritual World. It is to be hoped that men will be then less fanatical than they are to-day

To day, it is said: ‘Before Copernicus, people all talked nonsense, they all had a primitive world system. Since Copernicus we at last know what is right. All else is false, and because the Copernican system is the right one it will be taught in all ages, even if it were for millions of years.’ This is more or less the talk of the day. There hardly ever existed such superstitious folk as are the modern astronomical theorists; and there hardly ever was such fanaticism as there is in this domain of science. It is to be hoped that future generations will be more tolerant and that they will say: ‘From the fifteenth or sixteenth century men ceased to be conscious of the existence of the spiritual world, and that one must have other perspectives in the spiritual worlds, that there, one must arrange the heavenly bodies into a different order than when one observes in a merely physical way.’ Formerly that was done, but the time came when men considered the order and regulation of the heavenly bodies only from the physical point of view. ‘We can do this also,’ will cry the men of the future, and from the sixteenth century onwards it was quite correct. ‘Men had for a time to overlook the spiritual world but then people bethought themselves again and recollected that there was a spiritual world, they then returned to the original spiritual perspective.’ It is to be hoped that the men of the future will comprehend that there also was once an astronomical Mythology, and will not look upon our times with the same disdain with which the men of the modern superstitions look upon their forefathers.

[ 16 ] We see that the Copernican system became different, simply because merely physical standpoints were taken into account in relation to it. Before that, in the Ptolemaic system, there were still remnants of a spiritual point of view. Only through taking into consideration the other system, can one form any idea of the rulership and the action of the spiritual Beings within our solar-planetary-system. We keep to physical conditions when we say: Up to the Moon the Angels exercise their power, up to Mercury the Archangels, to Venus the Spirits of Personality, up to the Sun the Powers, as far as to Mars the Mights. Then come the Beings we call the Dominions, and here lastly the Thrones. We need only draw in other lines to designate the physical system, then we have in these lines the limits of the realms of power of the Hierarchies. As regards spiritual activities it is not our Sun at all which stands in the centre of the system, but the earth. Therefore, all the ages which have regarded spiritual development as the most essential part, have said: Certainly the Sun is a far nobler heavenly body, Beings have evolved upon it who stand higher than man; but that with which evolution is concerned is man, who lives upon the earth. And when the Sun withdrew from the Earth, it did so in order that man should develop in the right way. If the Sun had remained united to the earth man could never have been able to progress at the right tempo. This was possible only because the Sun withdrew along with those Beings who could bear quite different conditions. It left the earth to itself, so to speak, so that man might find his tempo for his own development. [ 17 ] A world system grows into this or that according to the point of departure — the perspective chosen. If one asks, where is the centre of our world system, seeing in it only what the purely physical senses can observe, then it is found in the Copernican system. If one asks about the arrangement of our solar system as it depends on the regions ruled over by the spiritual Hierarchies, we must place the earth as its centre, we then get other boundary lines; the planets then become something quite different, they become limits for the region over which each spiritual Hierarchy holds sway.

[ 18 ] And now you will easily be able to see the correspondence between what has been just said about the spacial distribution of each sphere of influence, with that which has been said about the task and mission of each group of Beings.

The Beings who are nearest to the earth, who hold sway in the immediate surroundings of the earth up to the Moon, are the Angels. From that region they guide the life of each single Individual as it progresses from incarnation to incarnation.

But something more is needed in order that whole masses of nations may be distributed in accordance with their mission upon earth. A little thought will reveal that co-operation with the cosmos is here necessary. It really depends on cosmic, not earthly conditions, whether a nation has one sort of character or another. Only think how a race with different qualities, for instance in hair and in skin, acts otherwise than another race would do; here we have the interactions of conditions which must be regulated from heavenly spaces. This is done from a region whose lordship extends up to Mercury, to the boundary of the Archangel's sphere of action.

Further, when the whole of humanity as it develops upon earth has to be guided and led, this has to be effected from still wider heavenly spaces, from that which extends as far as to Venus by the Archai.

When further, the task of the earth itself has to be led and guided, this must be done from the centre of the whole system. [ 19 ] I have said that our humanity evolves through Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. The Beings of the spiritual Hierarchies, who direct the mission of humanity carrying it on from one planet to another, are the Powers, the Spirits of Form. They must dwell in a very special place, they are of such a nature that their sphere of power reaches up to the Sun. The Sun already existed as a special, a particular globe alongside the ancient Moon; it is now near the earth, in the future it will be near Jupiter. Its realm of power extends beyond the single planets. Therefore the existence of the Sun must be bound up with those spiritual Beings whose realm of action also extends beyond the single planets. The Sun is a very special and perfect globe for this reason, that up to it extends that realm of power which stretches beyond the single planets.

Thus you see that in reality we do not find the outer spheres or dwelling places of the Hierarchies so much on the single planets as in the regions which are limited by the orbits of the planets. If you think of the whole surrounding space from the earth up to the Moon, it is filled with Angel-activities; and if you think of the spheres from the earth to Mercury, it is filled by the activities of the Archangels, and so on.

[ 20 ] Thus we have to do with the spheres of space; and the planets are the landmarks for realms of the spacial activities of the higher Beings. We see that a continual, progressive line of perfection is to be sought from man upwards. Man himself is chained to the earth. That eternal part of him which goes from incarnation to incarnation is guided by Beings who are not bound only to the earth, but who traverse the surrounding air and that which lies beyond it up to the Moon. And so on further.

[ 21 ] Now, man has been engaged on his evolution upon earth since primeval times, and his relationship towards his whole evolution upon earth, is exactly similar to the relationship between the small child and the grown-up person. The latter teaches the small child. It is the same as regards the Hierarchies in the cosmos. Man, who is chained to the earth, only gradually struggles through to the knowledge he needs, to the cleverness which is necessary to him upon earth. Higher Beings must teach him. What must happen so that this object can be gained? In the beginnings of the earth's existence, Beings who were otherwise not bound to the earth, had to come down from higher spheres. And that really happened. Beings who otherwise needed only to live in the surroundings of the earth had to come down so as to communicate to men what they already knew as the older, more perfect members of the Hierarchies. They had to incarnate into human bodies, not for their own development, for they did not need it, just as a grown-up man does not study the A.B.C. for his own progress, but so as to teach it to these small children. Hence, we look back into old Atlantean and old Lemurian times, when Beings descended from the surrounding realms of the earth to which they belonged and incarnated in human bodies and became the teachers of mankind. These are Beings who belonged to higher Hierarchies, to Mercury and Venus. The sons of Venus and of Mercury descended from above and became the teachers of young humanity, so that these men, wandering in the midst of that young humanity, really represented Maya or illusion. There have been such men. Let us suppose, in order to explain it more precisely: some normally developed man of the Lemurian times met such a man. Externally he did not appear very different from others, but a spirit had entered into him whose realm extended as far as Mercury or Venus. Thus, the exterior of such a man represented in reality Maya, an illusion. He looked like other men, but he was something quite different: he was a son of Mercury, or of Venus. In the early dawn of humanity there were such apparitions. The sons of Mercury or of Venus came down and wandered among men, so that they now received within them the character of the Beings of Mercury and Venus. We have said that the Beings of Venus are the Spirits of Personality. Such Beings walked the earth as men, being outwardly limited to narrow human personalities, but who with their mighty power guided humanity. These were the great conditions of lordship in Lemurian times, when sons of Venus guided the whole of humanity. The sons of Mercury guided parts of humanity. They were as powerful as those are now whom we call spirits of nations or of race.

[ 22 ] Maya or illusion does not only exist in the world but also as regards men. A man as he stands before us can have an external appearance which is a truth, which corresponds precisely to his soul; or else it may be a Maya; he has in reality a task, which corresponds to the task of the sons of Mercury or of the sons of Venus. This is what is meant, when it is said, that fundamentally the great guiding individualities of ancient times as they walked the earth with their ordinary names, represented a Maya, and that was what H. P. Blavatsky meant when she pointed out that the Buddhas represented Maya. You can find this very word in the Secret Doctrine. These things are derived in every respect from the teachings of the holy Mysteries: we have only to understand them.

[ 23 ] We are now obliged to ask: How does it happen then that such a son of Venus descends to us? How does it happen that a Bodhisattva can live upon earth? The Being of a Bodhisattva, the Being of a son of Mercury, forms an important chapter in the evolution of our earth which has to do with its connexion to the Cosmos itself. Therefore, tomorrow we shall have to consider the nature of the sons of Mercury and of Venus, of the Bodhisattva or Dhyani-buddhas.

• 1. The following tabulation is not Steiner’s chronology, but common chronology as accepted by the astrologers.
  In order to make this paragraph of use to the ordinary student it has been necessary to depart from the version as it stood in the reported text. The difference lies in the calculation of the dates. The conclusion to be drawn is approximately the same. We know Christ came during Pisces, which began 270 B.C. Add 2150 years and we get the following:
  2420 B.C. as the beginning of Aries,
  4570 B.C. as the beginning of Taurus,
  6720 B C. as the beginning of Gemini.
  Since our year 1881 we are under Aquarius. In other words:
  Gemini begins 6720 B.C. down to 4570 B.C.
  Taurus begins 4570 B.C. down to 2420 B.C.
  Aries begins 2420 B.C. down to 270 B.C.
  Pisces begins 270 B.C. down to 1881 A.D.

The lectures I have now been giving under the impression of the presence of so many friends who have come here from different countries, have followed a certain main purpose. Out of karmic sources, I have tried to give a description which should lead, at any rate in a few broad outlines, to a spiritual understanding of the spiritual life of the present time. In a certain respect these lectures will after all form a totality, a single whole, which I will bring to a conclusion in my lecture next Tuesday.

To-day I will give an example to show how difficult it can be to carry into this present time a spiritual science which should really be suited to this time. I will not try to answer the question to-day by reference to external circumstances, but I will answer it by a karmic example. The individuality to whom this example will refer is not exactly typical. It is indeed a very peculiar individuality. Nevertheless this example will serve to show how difficult it is to carry into an earthly life in the present time, what every human being does after all bring with him from his former lives on earth. I mean what he brings with him in the sense that with the possible exception of his very last incarnation, he did after all still stand in original relationship of one kind or another to the spiritual world, or if not in reality, then at least by tradition. And yet in spite of this it is so difficult to carry into the bodily nature of the human being of to-day, into the conditions of present-day education and culture, anything spiritual that was received and absorbed in former time.

To this end I will now unfold before you a succession of earthly lives of an individuality which will reveal to you all manner of hindrances that can indeed arise to prevent the carrying of spiritual contents into the present time. This example will also show you how such difficulties were already prepared in many cases during former earthly lives.

To begin with, we will consider a human individuality incarnated in the 6th century B.C. It was the time when the Jews were led into the Babylonian captivity, and a little after that. In studying that period I was struck by an individuality who was incarnated as a woman belonging to the Jewish race. When the Jews were led into captivity, however, that is to say, before they actually arrived in the Babylonian captivity, this woman made her escape. And in the time that followed (she attained a considerable age in that incarnation) she received in Asia Minor all manner of teachings which could be received there at that time. She received among other things what was then living with great intensity, with great impressiveness, even in Asia Minor, elaborating in various directions what we may call the Zarathustrian world-conception with its intense dualism. You remember the description in a chapter of my Occult Science: the dualism recognising on the one hand Ahura Mazdao, the great Spirit of Light, who sends his impulses into the evolution of mankind, so as to be the source of the good and great and beautiful, who is surrounded by his ministering spirits, the Amschaspands, even as the sun is surrounded in the glory of the manifestation of the countenance of heaven by the twelve signs of the zodiacal circle. These then are the light aspects in the dualism which originated in ancient Persia. On the other hand there was the Ahrimanic opposing power, bearing into the world-evolution of mankind all that is dark, and not only dark but all that is evil, all that hinders and creates disharmony.

This teaching was bound up with the deep and impressive knowledge of the constellation of the stars in the sense of the astrology or astrosophy of ancient times.

All these things, the individuality of whom I am speaking, in her incarnation as a woman in that time, was able to receive because she had as her teacher in a sense, and as her friend, a man who was initiated into many of these doctrines of Asia Minor, and especially also into the Chaldean knowledge of the stars.

Thus we have to begin with a lively interchange of thought between these two, in the period following the abduction of the Jews into captivity. And we have the following remarkable phenomenon. Through the powerful impressions she received, through all the teachings which she absorbed with extraordinary interest and receptivity, powers of seership were awakened in the woman's inner life. She became able to behold the universe in visions which portrayed in a very real sense the cosmic order.

In this case we have to do with a really remarkable individuality. All that had been discovered and experienced between her and the semi-Initiate of Asia Minor who was her friend, all this sprang into life, as it were, within her. And a feeling came over her which we may express in these words: What were all the ideas I received during my instruction as against the mighty tableau of Imaginations that now stand before my soul? How great and mighty is the universe itself, how rich in inner content!—For she realised this through her visionary Imaginations.

This mood gave rise to a certain feeling of estrangement between the two, for the man was more inclined to value the tracing of world-conceptions along the lines of thought, while the woman tended more and more to the pictorial element. Then the two personalities went through the gate of death almost simultaneously, but with a certain feeling of estrangement between them.

Now the results of these two earthly lives became in a strange way fused together. The two individualities went through the most intense experiences in looking backward over their life, in passing backward through their life after their death, and in elaborating their karma between death and a new birth. The result of their life together upon earth was an intense life in community with one another after death.

In the one who had been a woman we find the feeling of preponderance of visionary Imaginations which she had had towards the end of her life no longer present so intensely after her death. Indeed there springs forth in her a kind of longing that in her next earthly life she may comprehend these things more in the form of thought. For in her past life which I have just described she had comprehended them more in the form of speech. From having been livingly experienced in speech they had passed over into the life of visionary Imaginations.

The two individualities, intensely connected as they were with one another in their karma, were reborn in the first Christian centuries at a time when the spiritual substance of Christianity was gradually becoming informed with a certain scholarship and scholarly activity. I have mentioned once before that many of the souls who out of a sincere impulse have since found their way into Anthroposophy, partook in the Christianity of those early Christian centuries. But at that time they could experience Christianity in a far more living form than it afterwards assumed.

Now in this case a peculiar thing appears. There comes before us a man who, as far as karma was concerned, has nothing directly to do with the two individualities of whom I am speaking. But he has to do with them through the history of the time in which they were now living. I refer to Martianus Capella, a dominant personality in the spiritual life of that time. It was he who first wrote the fundamental work on the Seven Liberal Arts, which were to play so great a part in all teaching and education throughout the Middle Ages. The Seven Liberal Arts were: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music. In their combined activity and influence they provided what was then felt as knowledge both of Nature and of the Universe.

Martianus Capella's work appears at first sight somewhat dry and matter-of-fact. But we must know that such books, especially in the early Middle Ages, none the less proceeded from spiritual foundations. Indeed this was the case even with those later descriptions which went forth from the School of Chartres, whose apparent character is also dry, enumerating things in categories and the like. In Martianus Capella's descriptions concerning the Seven Liberal Arts and Nature that works behind them, matter-of-fact as they appear to us, we must be able to recognise the outpouring of certain instructive conceptions about higher things. For the Seven Liberal Arts were indeed conceived as real living Being, even as Nature herself was described as a living Being. However apparently dry in their writing, such personalities as Martianus Capella were, none the less, well aware that all these things can be seen in the spirit. Dialectic, Rhetoric, etc. are living Beings, inspirers of human skill, of human spiritual activity. Moreover, as I have explained in these lectures, Nature in her reality, the goddess Natura, was conceived in a similar way to the Proserpina of antiquity.

Now the woman of whom I have just spoken was reincarnated in this time and stood within this stream—within all that arose for mankind under the influence of what was contained in the Seven Liberal Arts, and in the conception of Nature that held sway over them. This time, however, she became a man, who, though in a man's body and a man's intellect, bore within him from the outset the tendency to elaborate whatever was to become his knowledge, not so much in thought, but once more in visionary conceptions.

It may perhaps be said that there were very few at that time, in the beginning of the 6th or at the end of the 5th century A.D.—there were few among those who might be called the pupils of Martianus Capella, in whom the spiritual content of that time lived in a fully vivid, pictorial and living way. But the personality to whom I refer, living now in a male incarnation, could actually speak of his intercourse with the inspiring powers, Dialectic, Rhetoric, and so forth. He was filled with the perception of living, spiritual activities.

And now once more he met the other individuality who had been a man in his former incarnation and who was now a woman, gifted with great intelligence. And once again (we can well imagine how this was karmically conditioned for we witness here the working of karma)—once again there arose an intense spiritual intercourse between them, an interchange, I cannot say of ideas, but of perceptions, a living and powerful assimilation.

But a strange thing arose in that personality who in the pre-Christian centuries had been a woman and was now a man. Because his perceptions and ideas were so vivid, there arose in the man an intense knowledge of how that visionary life which he possessed was connected altogether with the feminine nature. I do not mean to say that the visionary life is in general connected with a woman's personality, but in this case, the whole fundamental character of the visionary life had come over from the former incarnation of the individual as a woman. Thus innumerable secrets were revealed to this man, secrets relating especially to the mutual interaction of Earth and Moon, secrets relating, for instance, to the life of reproduction. The individuality living in this incarnation as a man became remarkably well versed especially in these domains.

Now we see the two individualities passing once more through the gate of death, undergoing the life between death and a new birth, and in their life approaching, in super-sensible regions to begin with, the dawn of the Age of Consciousness. For they were still in the super-sensible worlds when they experienced the first dawn of the age of the Spiritual Soul. Then the one whom I first described as a woman and in her subsequent incarnation as a man, was reborn as a man once more. It is very interesting that both of them were born once more together, but the other one, who in the former incarnation, i.e., in the second, had been a woman, was now once more a man. Thus both of them were now incarnated simultaneously as men. The one who will interest us especially, who was a woman in ancient time, and a man during the early Christian centuries, who on the first occasion had been of the Jewish race, and on the second had been of extraordinarily mixed blood according to his physical descent, this one was born again in the 16th century as the Italian Utopianist, Thomas Campanella, a very remarkable personality.

Let us now look closely at the life of Thomas Campanella in so far as is necessary for an understanding of his karma. He was born with a truly remarkable receptivity for the Christian education which he received. Thus at an early age he began to study the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas. Out of the very moods and feelings which he had acquired through his former visionary life, which became transformed ever more and more into their counterpart—into the impulse to learn to know things in their very forms of thought—he entered with full life into the strong element of thought which is to be found in the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas. Thus he studied with enthusiasm and so became a Dominican in the 16th century.

But into his thinking life which he tries to hold most strictly in the direction in which thought is held in the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, there enters continually a certain restlessness of that atavistic visionary spiritual life which he had lived before. Thus it is remarkable to see how Campanella actually looked for supports and points of contact in order to bring some inner order and connection into that element which he had once commanded when he had been a visionary in his perceptions of the world. It is remarkable to see how on the one hand Thomas Campanella became a Dominican with full inner enthusiasm. And yet even in the monastery at Cozenza he makes the acquaintance of a very brilliant Jewish Cabbalist. He now combines the study of the Jewish Cabbala with that which emerges as an echo of his former visionary life, and combines it on the other hand with the Thomism which had evolved in the Dominican Order. All these things were living in him with a kind of visionary longing. He wants to do something to bring to appearance outwardly the full inner light of all his spiritual life. You will not find it in the biographies, but so it appears to spiritual vision. There is a perpetual feeling in his soul: Verily the spirit is everywhere behind all things. Surely then in the human life as well there must be a spirit, the same spirit that is in the universal All.

And these things influenced the sphere of his emotions. He lived in Southern Italy. The country was oppressed by the Spaniards. He took part in a conspiracy for the liberation of Southern Italy. For this conspiracy he was taken prisoner by the Spaniards and pined away in the dungeon from the year 1599 till 1626, thus living a life excluded from the world, a life of which one may really say that for twenty-seven years his earthly existence was blotted out.

Now let us place the two facts together.—When he was imprisoned, Thomas Campanella was at the beginning of the thirties of his life, at the very beginning of the thirties. He spent the ensuing time in prison. That is the one thing. But what kind of a spirit was he? What kind of a personality? He set up the idea of a Sun-State, a Solar State. Can you not see shining through from former incarnations into the soul of Thomas Campanella all those astrological conceptions, those visions of the spiritual world? In his work on the Solar State, he conceives and describes a social Utopia, wherein he imagines that by a rational configuration of the social life, all men may become happy. What he thus described as the City of the Sun, or as the Solar State, has about it a certain monastic severity. A good deal of what he has absorbed from the Dominican Order enters into the way he conceives the structure of the State. And extraordinarily much of his former spirituality finds its way through. At the head of this would-be ideal State, there is to be a single leader, a kind of head Metaphysicus who shall discover out of the spirit the guiding lines for the configuration and administration of the State. Other officials shall stand at the side of this Prime Minister, officials who should carry out even to the smallest detail the rules and regulations which a man of that time could only have had in mind if they arose out of his soul through karmic forces as reminiscences of far earlier conceptions of the earth. But in him all these things arose. In effect he wanted to have his Sun-State administered according to astrological principles. The constellations of the stars were to be carefully observed. Marriages were to take place according to the constellations. The acts of conception were to take place in such a way that births might coincide with certain constellations, which were to be calculated. Thus according to the constellations of the heavens the human race with all its destiny should as it were be born on to the earth.

Certainly the man of the 19th or 20th century, the neurologist or psychiatrist of the 19th or 20th century, coming across such a work would say: It is fit for the bibliography of lunatic asylums. Indeed, as we shall presently see, the psychiatrist of the 20th century did in a certain respect pronounce a very similar judgment.

Place the two things before your minds. Here is a personality with all the antecedents, the pre-disposing conditions from former earthly lives which I have now described. Out of the power of the sun and stars he wants to bring down and find on earth the guiding lines of the administration of the State. He wants to bring the sun itself into the earthly life, while he himself for more than twenty years pines away in the dark dungeon, and is only able to look out through narrow slits into the sunshine of nature, while in his soul, in very painful feelings and emotions, all manner of things which entered into him in former earthly lives come forth and find expression.—But at length he was set free from prison by Pope Urban. He went to Paris and found favour with Richelieu. He received a pension and lived for the rest of his life in Paris.

And this is the strange thing. The Jewish Rabbi whose acquaintance he had made at Cozenza, through whom his thinking had been coloured in a Cabbalistic way, so that far more became living in him than could otherwise have come to life—this Jewish Cabbalist was the other individuality reborn, the one who had been a man in the first incarnation I described, and in the second a woman.

Thus we see the co-operation of the two individuals, Thomas Campanella and his friend the Jewish Rabbi. And when they have both gone through the gate of death once more, there rises in the individuality who was Campanella in his last life, an extraordinary opposition to what he received in his former lives on earth. His feeling is somewhat as follows. He says to himself: What might not have become of all that if only I had not pined away in the dark dungeon through all those years, looking out through narrow slits into the sunlight of nature? Yet accordingly there comes over him a kind of antipathy and rejection of what he had before as a spiritual vision, a spiritual conception in the pre-Christian times and in the early Christian centuries. This is the strange thing. While the age of the Spiritual Soul approaches, an individuality goes on evolving in the super-sensible, becoming really hostile to the former spirituality which he possessed. Now it happened thus with very many souls. Even before their earthly life, while they lived through the age of the Spiritual Soul in super-sensible worlds, they became hostile to their former spiritual experience. For in effect it is really difficult to carry into a present earthly body what was experienced spiritually in former ages. The present earthly body, the present earthly education, lead the human being into rationalism and intellectuality.

Now this individuality, living on after his life as Campanella, could see no other possibility of creating a true balance than by returning, more or less prematurely, into a new life on earth. Yet the given conditions did not make this easy, for on the one hand even within the super-sensible he grew with extraordinary intensity into the element of the Spiritual Soul—I mean the rationalism and intellectualism of the first period in the epoch of the Spiritual Soul. On the other hand, especially when living through again the time of his captivity, his former visionary life and spiritual conception forced its way through ever and again.

Thus the soul of this individuality was laden, as it were, on the one hand with the strong tendency to intellectual enlightenment, repudiating his former spiritual life. Moreover this repudiation gradually assumed a peculiarly personal and individual form. For there arose in him an antipathy to his pre-Christian incarnation as a woman and withal an antipathy to women in general. This antipathy to women found its way into his personality, into his individual life. For so it is with karma. Instead of its being theoretical it becomes a personal concern, personal temperament, personal sympathy and antipathy—in this case, antipathy.

And now the possibility arose for him to live over again in free and open intercourse with the world that earthly life which in his former life on earth as Campanella he had spent in captivity.

Please understand this clearly. On this occasion the other individuality did not accompany him, for the other had no cause to come to earth. In the three preceding earthly lives the Campanella individuality had always had the other one with him to help him to support and guide his life. Now the opportunity arose for him to live once more in an earthly life through all that he had missed by his long years of imprisonment in the life as Campanella. What he had lived through in the darkness of imprisonment gave rise to the possibility of being lived through again in a new life on earth.

What was the consequence, after all the other things had gone before? Imagine for a moment, when Campanella was thirty years old, or thereabouts, this imprisonment came over him. Imagine the relative maturity of a man in the age of the Renaissance in the thirties of his life. Imagine that what he missed at that time is working again. And at the same time all the other elements, spiritual and rationalistic, are shining in, are raying in from without. Everywhere else and all around is light, only these years of imprisonment are darkness. All these influences are raying in and intermingling: clairvoyance, misogyny, born of the experiences which I described, and in addition, very great cleverness. All these things work into one another in the way they would do as a result of the stage of maturity of a man of the Renaissance in the thirties of his life.

All this is then reborn in the last decade but one of the 19th century or just a little earlier. In the childlike body there is born what is really predestined for a later epoch in man's life. No wonder that the boy—this time it is a male incarnation, for it is indeed only a repetition of the time of his imprisonment; such is the language of karma in this instance—no wonder that the boy is reborn with extraordinary precocity. Of course it is only the forces of growth of a child but working precociously, with the maturity of the thirties of life.—Such is the play of karma, working with all that was missed out of the time of his imprisonment.

And a peculiar inclination arises in this belated recapitulation of life, if I may call it so. The old astrological conceptions begin to dawn again, the old conceptions of spiritual life in all Nature which was so wonderful in him in the first Christian centuries. True, these things arise in a childlike way but they live in him so strongly that he has a veritable antipathy to the modern mathematical form of science. In the eighteen nineties he enters the Gymnasium or Grammar School. He learns languages and literature magnificently; he does not learn the sciences or mathematics. But the very curious thing is this, so curious as to overwhelm with surprise and joy one who can understand the karmic connections when he sees it—in the twinkling of an eye, beside the other modern languages, French and Italian, he learns Spanish so as to bring into his mentality all that roused his opposition and rebellion against the Spanish dominion in his former life, so as to refresh all this.

See how strangely karma works, how it works into this individuality! It is indeed striking how rapidly the boy learns Spanish, a language remote, outside of his school work, merely because his father happens to have a liking for it. This again is a working of karma. And it signifies a deep influence on the whole mood and attunement of his soul. The fundamental note of imprisonment when anger and indignation against the Spaniards fill his soul emerges in his soul once again now that the Spanish language becomes alive in him and permeates his thoughts and ideas. The very thing that was most bitter for him during his imprisonment now enters the subconscious region where language does in fact hold sway.

Only when he comes to the University does he begin to work at natural science because, in fact, the age demands it. If you would be an educated man in our age you must know something of natural science.

Now I must tell you who it is, for I must relate what happened afterwards. It is none other, then, than the unhappy Otto Weiniger. [Otto Weiniger, 1880–1903.] He makes up for lost time by studying natural science at the University. He studies philosophy at the University of Vienna and takes the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. And in his dissertation he brings forth all that is fermenting in him, fermenting in a way that is only possible when an earthly life is the repetition of an actual gap in the former one. So he writes his dissertation which after attaining his degree he elaborates into a big volume Sex and Character.

In this book Sex and Character, all that was there before is boiling and fermenting. Occasionally we see Campanellean utopianism flashing out with ancient primeval conceptions expressed in a most wonderful way.—What is morality? Weiniger answers the question thus. The light that shines forth in Nature is the manifestation of morality. He who knows light knows true morality. Hence in the deep-sea fauna and flora which lives without the light we must seek the source of all immorality on earth. And you find wonderful intuitions in his work. For example, he says: Look at the dog, look at its extraordinary physiognomy. What does it show? It shows that the dog has lost something, something is lacking to him; in effect he has lost freedom.

Thus in Weiniger you do indeed find something of spiritual vision combined with the extremest rationalism and hatred of what came to him in a former incarnation. Only this hatred now comes forth not as a hatred of his former knowledge but as a hatred of his incarnation as a woman which finds vent in the misogyny carried to a point of absurdity in the book, Sex and Character.

All this will show you how much spirituality can be latent in a soul, how much can have come together with intellectualism in the super-sensible world towards the age of the Spiritual Soul and yet it cannot come forth in the present age. It wants to come forth but cannot, even when the present life is no more than the repetition of a period of life that was lost, as it were, in former times.

Strange inclinations arise in Weiniger, extraordinarily significant once more for him who can grasp the karmic threads. His biographer tells us that he acquired the habit towards the end of his life of looking out through very narrow slits which he made for himself from a dark space on to a lighted surface. He took a special delight in doing so. Here you have the time spent in the dungeon, raying in once more into the inmost and most immediate habits of his life.

Think again how Southern Italy was connected with this life, for it was in Southern Italy that all these things had taken place which led him into the present life on earth.

But there is another item which I must mention which is always very important for the student of karma. Needless to say, Weiniger too was among the readers of Nietzsche. Imagine the mood and feeling that lived in his soul as he read Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and like a bombshell there fell into his soul Nietzsche's statement and further explanation that Truth is a woman. Here indeed what I described to you before comes together coloured by his misogyny.

And now he is twenty-two years old, in the twenty-third year of his life. All these things have worked upon him. Strange habits are evolving in his soul. Is it to be wondered at that a life which is recapitulating a long time of imprisonment is painfully affected by the sunset which reminds him of the oncoming darkness? Thus Weiniger always feels sunsets quite unbearable. And all the time, in his youthful body he has the maturity of the thirties of man's life. I admit that when less talented men are arrogant and vain, it is not beautiful. But here the whole karma can make us understand that he thought much of himself. He had of course various abnormalities, for this life was the repetition of a life of imprisonment when one does not always do the ordinary, normal things, and when one finds karma being fulfilled one may well make the impression of an epileptic on an ordinary psychiatrist. Weiniger did make this impression, but his epilepsy was the repetition of the life of imprisonment. His attacks were acts of repulsion and defence. Without meaning in his present life of freedom, they were the karmic repetitions of a life of imprisonment. He was no ordinary epileptic.

Nor need we wonder that in the beginning of the twenties of his life he suddenly and quickly felt impelled all at once and for no reason, to go to Italy. During this journey he writes a wonderful little book, Über die letzten Dinge, containing descriptions of elemental Nature which seem almost like an attempt to caricature the descriptions of Atlantis, magnificent, but of course entirely mad from the standpoint of the psychiatrist.

Yet these things must be considered karmically. He suddenly rushes off to Italy, then he returns and spends a short time in the Brunner mountains near Vienna. Having returned from Italy he still writes down a few thoughts that came to him during his journey, magnificent ideas about the harmonies of the moral and the natural world. Then he takes a room in the house where Beethoven died. He lives on for a few days longer in Beethoven's death chamber and now he has finished living through his former imprisonment. He shoots himself. His karma is fulfilled. He shoots himself out of a deep inner impulse, having the idea that if he were to live on he would become a thoroughly bad man. There is no more possibility for him to live, for his karma is fulfilled.

From the point of view which is thus opened out, look at the world of Otto Weiniger, my dear friends. You will see all the hindrances in a soul who is placed so abnormally from the Renaissance age into the present time. You will see all the hindrances that stand in the way and prevent his finding the spiritual, though in the unconscious foundations of the soul he has so much. Now you may draw the conclusion, how many hindrances there are in the Age of Michael to hinder a man from doing full justice to this Age.

For of course it is by no means unthinkable that if the soul of Weiniger had been able to receive a spiritual world-conception he would have been able to continue in his evolution. He need not have put an end to his life by suicide, thus closing the repetition of his life of imprisonment. It is indeed significant to trace in this way how ancient spirituality evolves in souls of men down into modern time and then comes to a standstill. It is just in such interesting phenomena as this that we can see how it is brought to a standstill.

I think indeed that this will illumine certain karmic connections in the spiritual and intellectual life of the present time. It will enable us to look more deeply into the karmic relationships, now that we have placed before us these four successive incarnations of an extraordinarily interesting individuality, incarnations extending from the 6th century before the Mystery of Golgotha until to-day. That indeed is the span of time including all that we must study if we would understand the life of our own time.

To-day we have taken a case which teaches us how many things a soul can undergo during this age. I would far rather describe these things by the concrete experiences of the soul than by abstract explanations.

I will close the present cycle of lectures next Tuesday evening which will indeed be the last of these lectures to Members.

By Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, M.D. (HON.)^*

In 1922/23 Ernst Stegemann and a group of other farmers went to ask Rudolf Steiner's advice about the increasing degeneration they had noticed in seed-strains and in many cultivated plants. What can be done to check this decline and to improve the quality of seed and nutrition? That was their question.

They brought to his attention such salient facts as the following: Crops of lucerne used commonly to be grown in the same field for as many as thirty years on end. The thirty years dwindled to nine, then to seven. Then the day came when it was considered quite an achievement to keep this crop growing in the same spot for even four or five years. Farmers used to be able to seed new crops year after year from their own rye, wheat, oats and barley. Now they were finding that they had to resort to new strains of seed every few years. New strains were being produced in bewildering profusion, only to disappear from the scene again in short order.

A second group went to Dr. Steiner in concern at the increase in animal diseases, with problems of sterility and the widespread foot-and-mouth disease high on the list. Among those in this group were the veterinarian Dr. Joseph Werr, the physician Dr. Eugen Kolisko, and members of the staff of the newly established Weleda, the pharmaceutical manufacturing enterprise.

Count Carl von Keyserlingk brought problems from still another quarter. Then Dr. Wachsmuth and the present writer went to Dr. Steiner with questions dealing particularly with the etheric nature of plants, and with formative forces in general. In reply to a question about plant diseases, Dr. Steiner told the writer that plants themselves could never be diseased in a primary sense, “since they are the products of a healthy etheric world.” They suffer rather from diseased conditions in their environment, especially in the soil; the causes of so-called plant diseases should be sought there. Ernst Stegemann was given special indications as to the point of view from which a farmer could approach his task, and was shown some first steps in the breeding of new plant types as a first impetus towards the subsequent establishment of the biological-dynamic movement.

In 1923 Rudolf Steiner described for the first time how to make the bio-dynamic compost preparations, simply giving the recipe without any sort of explanation—just “do this and then that.” Dr. Wachsmuth and I then proceeded to make the first batch of preparation 500. This was then buried in the garden of the “Sonnenhof” in Arlesheim, Switzerland. The momentous day came in the early summer of 1924 when this first lot of 500 was dug up again in the presence of Dr. Steiner, Dr. Wegman, Dr. Wachsmuth, a few other co-workers and myself. It was a sunny afternoon. We began digging at the spot where memory, aided by a few landmarks, prompted us to search. We dug on and on. The realer will understand that a good deal more sweating was done over the waste of Dr. Steiner's time than over the strenuousness of the labour. Finally he became impatient and turned to leave for a five o'clock appointment at his studio. The spade grated on the first cowhorn in the very nick of time.

Dr. Steiner turned back, called for a pail of water, and proceeded to show us how to apportion the horn's contents to the water, and the correct way of stirring it. As the author's walking-stick was the only stirring implement at hand, it was pressed into service. Rudolf Steiner was particularly concerned with demonstrating the energetic stirring, the forming of a funnel or crater, and the rapid changing of direction to make a whirlpool. Nothing was said about the possibility of stirring with the hand or with a birch-whisk. Brief directions followed as to how the preparation was to be sprayed when the stirring was finished. Dr. Steiner then indicated with a motion of his hand over the garden how large an area the available spray would cover. Such was the momentous occasion marking the birth-hour of a world-wide agricultural movement.

What impressed me at the time, and still gives one much to think about, was how these step-by-step developments illustrate Dr. Steiner's practical way of working. He never proceeded from preconceived abstract dogma, but always dealt with the concrete given facts of the situation. There was such germinal potency in his indications that a few sentences or a short paragraph often sufficed to create the foundation for a farmer's or scientist's whole life-work; the agricultural course is full of such instances. A study of his indications can therefore scarcely be thorough enough. One does not have to try to puzzle them out, but can simply follow them to the letter.

Dr. Steiner once said, with an understanding smile, in another, very grave situation, that there were two types of people engaged in anthroposophical work: the older ones, who understood everything, but did nothing with it, and the younger ones, who understood only partially or not at all, but immediately put suggestions into practice. We obviously trod the younger path in the agricultural movement, which did all its learning in the hard school of experience. Only now does the total picture of the new impulse given by Rudolf Steiner to agriculture stand clearly before us, even though we still have far to go to exhaust all its possibilities. Accomplishments to date are merely the first step. Every day brings new experience and opens new perspectives.

Shortly before 1924, Count Keyserlingk set to work in deal earnest to persuade Dr. Steiner to give an agricultural course. As Dr. Steiner was already overwhelmed with work, tours and lectures, he put off his decision from week to week. The undaunted Count then dispatched his nephew to Dornach, with orders to camp on Dr. Steiner's doorstep and refuse to leave without a definite commitment for the course. This was finally given.

The agricultural course was held from June 7 to 16, 1924, in the hospitable home of Count and Countess Keyserlingk at Koberwitz, near Breslau. It was followed by further consultations and lectures in Breslau, among them the famous “Address to Youth.” I myself had to forgo attendance at the course, as Dr. Steiner had asked me to stay at home to help take care of someone who was seriously ill. “I'll write and tell you what goes on at the course,” Dr. Steiner said by way of solace. He never did get round to writing, no doubt because of the heavy demands on him; this was understood and regretfully accepted. On his return to Dornach, however, there was an opportunity for discussing the general situation. When I asked him whether the new methods should be started on an experimental basis, he replied: “The most important thing is to make the benefits of our agricultural preparations available to the largest possible areas over the entire earth, so that the earth may be healed and the nutritive quality of its produce improved in every respect. That should be our first objective. The experiments can come later.” He obviously thought that the proposed methods should be applied at once.

This can be understood against the background of a conversation I had with Dr. Steiner en route from Stuttgart to Dornach shortly before the agricultural course was given. He had been speaking of the need for a deepening of esoteric life, and in this connection mentioned certain faults typically found in spiritual movements. I then asked, “How can it happen that the spiritual impulse, and especially the inner schooling, for which you are constantly providing stimulus and guidance bear so little fruit? Why do the people concerned give so little evidence of spiritual experience, in spite of all their efforts? Why, worst of all, is the will for action, for the carrying out of these spiritual impulses, so weak?” I was particularly anxious to get an answer to the question as to how one could build a bridge to active participation and the carrying out of spiritual intentions without being pulled off the right path by personal ambition, illusions and petty jealousies; for, these were the negative qualities Rudolf Steiner had named as the main inner hindrances. Then came the thought-provoking and surprising answer: “This is a problem of nutrition. Nutrition as it is to-day does not supply the strength necessary for manifesting the spirit in physical life. A bridge can no longer be built from thinking to will and action. Food plants no longer contain the forces people need for this.”

A nutritional problem which, if solved, would enable the spirit to become manifest and realise itself in human beings! With this as a background, one can understand why Dr. Steiner said that “the benefits of the bio-dynamic compost preparations should be made available as quickly as possible to the largest possible areas of the entire earth, for the earth's healing.”

This puts the Koberwitz agricultural course in proper perspective as an introduction to understanding spiritual, cosmic forces and making them effective again in the plant world.

In discussing ways and means of propagating the methods, Dr. Steiner said also that the good effects of the preparations and of the whole method itself were “for everybody, for all farmers”—in other words, not intended to be the special privilege of a small, select group. This needs to be the more emphasised in view of the fact that admission to the course was limited to farmers, gardeners and scientists who had both practical experience and a spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical background. The latter is essential to understanding and evaluating what Rudolf Steiner set forth, but the bio-dynamic method can be applied by any farmer. It is important to point this out, for later on many people came to believe that only anthroposophists can practise the bio-dynamic method. On the other hand, it is certainly true that a grasp of bio-dynamic practices gradually opens up a wholly new perspective on the world, and that the practitioner acquires and applies a kind of judgment in dealing with biological—i.e. living—processes and facts which is different from that of a more materialistic chemical farmer; he follows nature's dynamic play of forces with a greater degree of interest and awareness. But it is also true that there is a considerable difference between mere application of the method and creative participation in the work. From the first, actual practice has been closely bound up with the work of the spiritual centre of the movement, the Natural Science Section of the Goetheanum at Dornach. This was to be the source, the creative, fructifying spiritual element; while the practical workers brought back their results and their questions.

The name, “Bio-Dynamic Agricultural Method,” did not originate with Dr. Steiner, but with the experimental circle concerned with the practical application of the new direction of thought.

In the Agricultural Course, which was attended by some sixty persons, Rudolf Steiner set forth the basic new way of thinking about the relationship of earth and soil to the formative forces of the etheric, astral and ego activity of nature. He pointed out particularly how the health of soil, plants and animals depends upon bringing nature into connection again with the cosmic creative, shaping forces. The practical method he gave for treating soil, manure and compost, and especially for making the bio-dynamic compost preparations, was intended above all to serve the purpose of reanimating the natural forces which in nature and in modern agriculture were on the wane. “This must be achieved in actual practice,” Rudolf Steiner told me. He showed how much it meant to him to have the School of Spiritual Science going hand in hand with real-life practicality when he spoke on another occasion of wanting to have teachers at the School alternate a few years of teaching (three years was the period mentioned) with a subsequent period of three years spent in work outside, so that by this alternation they would never get out of touch with the conditions and challenges of real life.

The circle of those who had been inspired by the agricultural course and were now working both practically and scientifically at this task kept on growing; one thinks at once of Guenther Wachsmuth, Count Keyserlingk, Ernst Stegemann, Erhard Bartsch, Franz Dreidax, Immanuel Vögele, M. K. Schwarz, Nikolaus Remer, Franz Rulni, Ernst Jakobi, Otto Eckstein, Hans Heinze, and of many others who came into the movement with the passing of time, including Dr. Werr, the first veterinarian. The bio-dynamic movement developed out of the co-operation of practical workers with the Natural Science Section of the Goetheanum. Before long it had spread to Austria, Switzerland, Italy, England, France, the north-European countries and the United States. To-day no part of the world is without active collaborators in this enterprise.

The bio-dynamic school of thought and a chemically-minded agricultural thinking confronted one another from opposite points of the compass at the time the agricultural course was held. The latter school is based essentially on the views of Justus von Liebig. It attributes the fact that plants take up substances from the soil solely to the so-called “nutrient-need” of the plant. The one-sided chemical fertiliser theory that thinks of plant needs in terms of nitrogen-phosphates-potassium-calcium, originated in this view, and the theory still dominates orthodox scientific agricultural thinking to-day. But it does Liebig an injustice. He himself expressed doubt as to whether the “N-P-K” theory should be applied to all soils. Deficiency symptoms were more apparent in soils poor in humus than in those amply supplied with it. The following quotation makes one suspect that Liebig was by no means the hardened materialist that his followers make him out to be. He wrote: “Inorganic forces breed only inorganic substances. Through a higher force at work in living bodies, of which inorganic forces are merely the servants, substances come into being which are endowed with vital qualities and totally different from the crystal.” And further: “The cosmic conditions necessary for the existence of plants are the warmth and light of the sun.” Rudolf Steiner gave the key to these “higher forces at work in living bodies and to these cosmic conditions.” He solved Liebig's problem by refusing to stop short at the purely material aspects of plant-life. He went on, with characteristic spiritual courage and a complete lack of bias, to take the next step.

And now an interesting situation developed. Devotees of the purely materialistic school of thought, who once felt impelled to reject the progressive thinking advanced by Rudolf Steiner, have been forced by facts brought to light during research into soil biology to go at least one step further. Facts recognised as early as 1924-34 in bio-dynamic circles—the significance of soil-life, the earth as a living organism, the role played by humus, the necessity of maintaining humus under all circumstances, and of building it up where it is lacking—all this has become common knowledge. Recognition of biological, organic laws has now been added to the earlier realisation of the undeniable dependence of plants upon soil nutrient-substances. It is not too much to say that the biological aspect of the bio-dynamic method is now generally accepted; the goal has perhaps even been overshot. But, important as are the biological factors governing plant inter-relationships, soil structure, biological pest-control, and the progress made in understanding the importance of humus, the whole question of energy sources and Formative forces—in other words, cosmic aspects of plant-life—remains unanswered. The biological way of thinking has been adopted, but with a materialistic bias, whereas an understanding of the dynamic side, made possible by Rudolf Steiner's pioneering indications, is still largely absent.

Since 1924 numerous scientific publications that might be regarded as a first groping in this direction have appeared. We refer to studies of growth-regulating factors, the so-called growth-inducers, enzymes, hormones, vitamins, trace elements and bio-catalysts. But this groping remains in the material realm. Science has progressed to the point where material effects produced by dilutions as high as 1:1 million, or even 1:100 million, no longer belong to the realm of the fantastic and incredible. They do not meet with the unbelieving smile that greeted rules for applying the bio-dynamic compost preparations, for these—with dilutions ranging from 1:10 to 1:100 million—are quite conceivable at the present stage of scientific thinking. Exploration of the process of photo-synthesis—i.e. of the building of substance in the cells of living plants—has opened up problems of the influence of energy (of the sun, of light, of warmth and of the moon); in other words, problems of the transformation of cosmic sources of energy into chemical-material conditions and energies.

In this connection we quote from the book Principles of Agriculture,¹ written in 1952 by W. R. Williams, Member of the Academy of Sciences, U.S.S.R.: “The task of agriculture is to transform kinetic solar energy, the energy of light, into the potential energy stored in human food. The light of the sun is the basic raw material of agricultural industry.” And further: “Light and warmth are the essential conditions for plant life, and consequently also for agriculture. Light is the raw material from which agricultural products are made, and warmth is the force which drives the machinery—the green plant. The provision of both raw material and energy must be maintained. The dynamic energy of the sun's rays is transformed by green plants into potential energy in the material form of organic matter. Thus our first concrete task is the continuous creation of organic matter, storing up the potential energy of human life.” And still further: “We can divide the four fundamental factors into two groups, according to their source: light and heat are cosmic factors, water and plant food terrestrial factors. The former group originates in interplanetary space...”

Or again: “The cosmic factors—light and heat—act directly on the plant, whereas the terrestrial factors act only through an intermediary (substance).”

We see that the author of this work rates knowledge of the interworking of cosmic and terrestrial factors as the first objective of agricultural science, while ranking organic substance (humus) second on the list of objectives of agricultural production. This is what was published in 1952. In 1924 Rudolf Steiner pointed out the necessity of consciously restoring cosmic forces to growth processes by both direct and indirect means, thereby freeing the present conception of plant nature from a material, purely terrestrial isolation; only through such restoration would it be possible to re-energise those healthful and constructive forces capable of halting degeneration. He said to me, “Spiritual scientific knowledge must have found its way into practical life by the middle of the century if untold damage to the health of man and nature is to be avoided.”

Our research work began with the attempt to find reagents to the etheric forces and to discover ways of demonstrating their existence. Suggestions were given which could only later be brought to realisation in the writer's crystallisation method. Then it was our intention to proceed to expose the weak points in the materialistic conception and to refute its findings by means of its own experimental methods. This meant applying exact analytical methods in experimentation with physical substances, and even developing them to a finer point. We proposed to work quantitatively as well as qualitatively. During my own years at the university, for example, it was my regular practice to lay my proposed course of studies for the new term before Rudolf Steiner for guidance in the choice of subjects. On one occasion he urged me to take simultaneously two—no, three—main subjects, chemistry, physics and botany, each requiring six hours a day. To the objection that there were not hours enough in the day for this, he replied simply, “Oh, you'll manage it somehow.”

Again and again, he steered things in the direction of practical activity and laboratory work, away from the merely theoretical.

Suggestions of this kind were constantly in my mind during the decades of work which arose from them. They led me not only to work in laboratories, but also to apply the fundamentals of this new outlook to the management of agricultural projects, both in a bio-dynamic and in an economic sense. Dr. Steiner had insisted on my taking courses and attending lectures in political economy as well as in science, saying, “One must work in a businesslike, profit-making way, or it won't come off.” Economics, commercial history, industrial science, even mass-psychology and other such subjects were proposed for study, and when the courses were completed, Dr. Steiner always wanted a report on them. On these occasions he not only showed astounding proficiency in the various special fields, but—what was more surprising—he seemed quite familiar with the methods and characteristics of the various professors. He would say, for example, “Professor X is an extremely brilliant man, with wide-ranging ideas, but he is weak in detailed knowledge. Professor Z is a silver-tongued orator of real elegance. You needn't believe everything he says, but you must get a thorough grasp of his method of presentation.”

From these and many other suggestions it was clear what had to be done to promote the bio-dynamic method. There was the big group of practising farmers, whose task it was to carry out the method in their farming enterprises, to discover the most favourable use of the preparations, to determine what crop rotations build up rather than deplete humus, to develop the best methods of plant and animal breeding. It took years to translate the basic ideas into actual practice. All this had to be tried out in the hard school of experience, until the complete picture of a teachable and learnable method, which any farmer could profitably use, was finally evolved. Problems of soil treatment, crop rotation, manure and compost handling, time-considerations in the proper care and breeding of cattle, fruit-tree management and many other matters could be worked out only in practice through the years.

Then there was the problem of coming to grips with agricultural science. Laboratories and field experiments had to provide facts and observational material. I was now able to profit from the technical and quantitative-chemical education urged upon me by Dr. Steiner. This was the sphere in which the shortcomings and weaknesses of the chemical soil-and-nutrient theory showed up most clearly, and where to-day—after more than thirty years—one can see possibilities of building a bridge between recognition of the existence of cosmic forces and exact science.

The first possibility of breaking through the hardened layer of current orthodox opinion came through discoveries that cluster around the concept of the so-called trace elements. Dr. Steiner had pointed out as early as 1924 the existence of these finely dispersed material elements in the atmosphere and elsewhere, and had stressed the importance of their contribution to healthy plant development. But it still remained an open question whether they were absorbed from the soil by roots or from the atmosphere by leaves and other plant organs. In the early thirties, spectrum analysis showed that almost all the trace elements are present in the atmosphere in a proportion of 10-6 to 10-9. The fact that trace-elements can be absorbed from the air was established in experiments with Tillandsia usneodis. It is now common practice in California and Florida to supply zinc and other trace elements, not via the roots, but by spraying the foliage, since leaves absorb these trace elements even more efficiently.

It was found that one-sided mineral fertilising lowers the trace-element content of soil and plants, and—most significantly—that to supply trace-elements by no means assures their absorption by plants. The presence (or absence) of zinc in a dilution of 1:100 million decides absolutely whether an orange tree will bear healthy fruit. But in the period from 1924-1930 the bio-dynamic preparations were ridiculed “because plants cannot possibly be influenced by high dilutions.”

Zinc is singled out for mention here not only because treatment with very high dilutions of this trace element is especially essential for both the health and the yield of many plants, but also because it is an element particularly abundant in mushrooms. A comment by Rudolf Steiner indicates an interesting connection which can be fully understood only in the light of the most recent research. We read in the Agricultural Course: “... Harmful parasites always consort with growths of the mushroom type, ... causing certain plant diseases and doing other still worse forms of damage. ... One should see to it that meadows are infested with fungi. Then one can have the interesting experience of finding that where there is even a small mushroom-infested meadow near a farm, the fungi, owing to their kinship with the bacteria and other parasites, keep them away from the farm. It is often possible, by infesting meadows in this way, to keep off all sorts of pests.”

Organisms of the fungus type include the so-called fungi imperfecti and a botanical transition-form, the family of actinomycetes and streptomycetes, from which certain antibiotic drugs are derived. I have found that these organisms play a very special rôle in humus formation and decay, and that they are abundantly present in the bio-dynamic manure and compost preparations. The preparations also contain an abundance of many of the most important trace elements, such as molybdenum, cobalt, zinc, and others whose importance has been experimentally demonstrated.

Now a peculiar situation was found to exist in regard to soils. Analyses of available plant nutrients showed that the same soil tested quite differently at different seasons. Indeed, tests showed not only seasonal but even daily variations. The same soil sample often disclosed periodic variations greater than those found in tests of soils from adjoining fields, one of which was good, the other poor. Seasonal and daily variations are influenced, however, by the earth's relative position in the planetary system; they are, in other words, of cosmic origin. It has actually been found that the time of day or the season of the year influences the solubility and availability of nutrient substances. Numerous phenomena to be observed in the physiology of plants and animals (e.g. glandular secretions, hormones) are subject to such influences. The concentration of oxalic acid in bryophyllum leaves rises and falls with the time of day with almost clock-like regularity. Although in this and many other test cases the nutrients on which the plants were fed were identical, the increase or decrease in the plant's substantial content varied very markedly in response to varying light-rhythms and cycles. Joachim Schultz, a research worker at the Goetheanum whose life was most unfortunately cut short, had begun to test Dr. Steiner's important indication that light activity acts with growth-stimulating effect in the morning and late afternoon hours, while at noon and midnight its influence is growth-inhibiting.

When I inspected Schultz's experiments, I was struck by the fact that plants grown on the same nutrient solution had a wholly different substantial composition according to the light-rhythms operative. This was true of nitrogen, for example. Plants exposed to light during the morning and evening hours grew strongly under the favourable influence of nitrogen activity, whereas if exposed during the noon hours, they declined and showed deficiency symptoms. The way was thus opened for experimental demonstration of the fact that the so-called “cosmic” activity of light, of warmth, of sun forces especially, but of other light-sources also, prevails over the material processes. These cosmic forces regulate the course of material change. When and in what direction this takes place, and the extent to which the total growth and the form of the plant are influenced, all depend upon the cosmic constellation and the origin of the forces concerned. Recent research in the field of photosynthesis has produced findings which can hardly fall to open the eyes even of materialistic observers to such processes. Here, too, Rudolf Steiner is shown to have been a pioneer who paved the way for a new direction of research. It is impossible in an article of this length to report on all the phenomena that have already been noted, for they would more than fill a book. But it is no longer possible to dismiss the influence of cosmic forces as “mere superstition” when the physiological and biochemical inter-relationships of metabolic functions in soil-life, the rise and fall of sap in the plant, and especially processes in the root-sphere are taken into consideration.

In an earlier view of nature, based partly on old mystery-tradition and partly on instinctive clairvoyance—a view originating in the times of Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus, and continuing on to the days of Albertus Magnus and the late mediaeval “doctrine of signatures”—it was recognised that relationships exist between certain cosmic constellations and the various plant species. These constellations are creative moments under whose influence species became differentiated and the various plant forms came into being. When one realises that cosmic rhythms have such a significant influence on the physiology of metabolism, of glandular functions, of the rise and fall of sap and of sap pressure (turgor), only a small step remains to be taken by conscious future research to the next realisation, which will achieve an experimental grasp of these creative constellations. Many of Rudolf Steiner's collaborators have already demonstrated the decisive effects of formative forces in such experiments as, the capillary tests on filter paper of L. Kolisko and the plant and crystallisation tests of Pfeiffer, Krüger, Bessenich, Selawry and others.

Rudolf Steiner's suggestions for plant breeding presented a special task. Research in this field was carried out by the author and other fellow-workers (Immanuel Vögele, Erika Riese, Martha Kuenzel and Martin Schmidt), either in collaboration or in independent work. Proceeding from the basic concept of creative cosmic constellations, one can assume that the original creative impetus in every species of sub-type slowly exhausts itself and ebbs away. The formative forces of this original impulse is passed on from plant to plant in hereditary descent by means of certain organs such as chromosomes. One-sided quantity-manuring gradually inhibits the activity of the primary forces, and results in a weakening of the plant. Seed quality degenerates. This was the initial problem laid before Rudolf Steiner, and the bio-dynamic movement came into being as an answer to it.

The task was to reunite the plant, viewed as a system of forces under the influence of cosmic activities, with nature as a whole. Rudolf Steiner pointed out that many plants which had been “violated,” in the sense of having been estranged from their cosmic origin, were already so far gone in degeneration that by the end of the century their propagation would be unreliable. Wheat and potatoes were among the plant types mentioned, but other such grains as oats, barley and lucerne belong to the same picture. Ways were sketched whereby new strains with strong seed-forces could be bred from “unexhausted” relatives of the cultivated plants. This work has begun to have success; the species of wheat have already been developed. Martin Schmidt carried on significant researches, not yet published, to determine the rhythm of seed placement in the ear, and to show in particular the difference between food plants and plants grown for seed. According to Rudolf Steiner, there is a basic difference between the two types, one of which is sown in autumn, nearer to the winter, and the other nearer to the summer. Biochemists will eventually be able to confirm these differences materially in the structure of protein substances, amino-acids, phosphorlipoids, enzyme-systems and so on by means of modern chromatographic methods.

The degeneration of wheat is already an established fact. Even where the soil is good, the protein content has declined; in the case of soft red wheat, protein content has sunk from 13% to 8% in some parts of the United States. Potato growers know how hard it is to produce healthy potatoes free from viruses and insects, not to mention the matter of flavour. Bio-dynamically grown wheat maintains its high protein level. Promising work in potato breeding was unfortunately interrupted by the last war and other disturbances.

Pests are one of the most interesting and instructive problems, looked at from the bio-dynamic viewpoint. When the biological balance is upset, degeneration follows; pests and diseases make their appearance. Nature herself liquidates weaklings. Pests are therefore to be regarded as nature's warning that the primary forces have been dissipated and the balance sinned against. According to official estimates, American agriculture pays a yearly bill of five thousand million dollars in crop losses for disregarding this warning, and another seven hundred and fifty million dollars on keeping down insect pests. People are beginning to realise that insect poisons fall short of solving the problem, especially since the destruction of some of the insects succeeds only in producing new, more resistant kinds. It has been established by the most advanced research (Albrecht of Missouri) that one-sided fertilising disturbs the protein-carbohydrates balance in plant cells, to the detriment of proteins and the layer of wax that coats plant leaves, and makes the plants “tastier” to insect depredators. It has been a bitter realisation that insect poisons merely “preserve” a part of moribund nature, but do not halt the general trend towards death. Experienced entomologists, who have witnessed the failure of chemical pest-control and the threats to health associated with it, are beginning to speak out and demand biological controls. But according to the findings of one of the American experimental stations, biological controls are feasible only when no poisons are used and an attempt is made to restore natural balance. In indications given in the Agriculture Course, Rudolf Steiner showed that health and resistance are functions of biological balance, coupled with cosmic factors. This is further evidence of how far in advance of its time was this spiritual-scientific, Goethean way of thought.

The author is thoroughly conscious of the fact that this exposition touches upon only a small part of the whole range of questions opened up by Rudolf Steiner's new agricultural method. He is also aware that other collaborators would have written quite differently, and about different aspects of the work. These pages should therefore be read in accordance with their intention: as the view from a single window in a house containing many rooms.

• *. Contributed by Dr. Pfeiffer to the German symposium, Wir erlebten Rudolf Steiner, of which a complete English translation, “Rudolf Steiner, by his pupils,” was published as a special number of The Golden Blade, 1958. This translation is used by permission of The Golden Blade and the Verlag Freies Geistesleben G.m.b.H., Stuttgart, publishers of the book, Wir erlebten Rudolf Steiner.
• 1. Translated from the Russian by G. V. Jacks, Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Soil Science (London, 1952).

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! Perhaps someone has a question?

Question: Why does lightning not come in a straight line?—instead of zigzag. Should it not take a straight line?

Dr. Steiner: So—the questioner thinks that when lightning is released from the air, as I described last time, it ought to come in a straight line. But it takes a zigzag form and can that be explained? Yes, one can indeed explain it.

Let us consider again the explanation I gave of how lightning actually comes about. I told you that lightning comes out of the overheated air, the overheated universe, the overheated cosmic gas. I said that there is no question of lightning arising from some sort of friction of the clouds. Clouds, of course, are wet, and if you want to produce miniature lightning with laboratory apparatus, everything must first be wiped absolutely dry. It must not be supposed, therefore, that lightning is a true electrical phenomenon that comes about from the friction of dry elements. It is known that when one rubs glass or sealing wax one produces electricity and so people think that if clouds rub together—well, then there'll be electricity there too. But that is not so. What happens is this: As a consequence of the inner overheating of the cosmic gas, the warmth living in the cosmic gas comes out in the way I have described. Through the fact that the air exerts less pressure toward one side or another, the radiation of the overheated force goes toward that side and lightning flashes.

Now let us imagine that we have this happening somewhere. In consequence of the greatly overheated cosmic gas—not clouds—the lightning flashes out. And it is quite correct to think that it should stream out in a straight line.

But you see, it is like this. Picture to yourselves: If an accumulation of heat is present somewhere, it is generally not alone; there are similar accumulations in the neighborhood. In fact, if the earth is here, let us say, and one looks up there and lightning begins where a concentration of heat exists, then in the neighborhood there are other accumulations: they are not all at one single place. You can imagine, of course, that these accumulations of heat are connected with the sun's radiations to the various places. Now there are these heat accumulations along the entire path of the lightning and while it is streaming out it snatches up these other accumulations in its course. So it shines here, then over there, and so on. It takes all the other accumulations with it, and so it moves quite irregularly, and gets this seemingly zigzag formation. The lower it descends, the more it does move in a straight line. There are no longer these heat accumulations; they were higher up. The zigzag of the lightning comes about because it does not arise in one single spot, but from where the heat accumulations are strongest and then it carries the others along on its way. That's similar to when you're out walking and you meet an acquaintance and take him along with you, then the two of you pick up another one, and so on. So that's the story of the lightning.

Now perhaps someone has another question?

Question: Could we hear something about the origin of volcanoes?

Dr. Steiner: That's a question that can't be answered quite so quickly. I will lead you to the point where you can find an answer to it. For if you read present-day books you can certainly find all sorts of ideas on the origin of volcanoes, but if you read older books, lying farther back in time, you find other views, and in still earlier books again other views. People have never inquired into the real origin of the earth and so views on volcanic phenomena have changed in the course of time. As a matter of fact, no one has been able to form a true idea of how these fire-erupting mountains originated.

One must go very far back if one wants to understand this. Otherwise one cannot grasp how it happens that at certain spots on the earth fiery, molten masses come out. One will be able to form an idea of it only if one first of all rejects the dictum that the earth was once a balloon of gas, that it became more and more solid, and that there is fire in the interior which for some reason or other comes out here or there. That is a convenient explanation, but it brings us no nearer to an understanding.

I'll tell you a little story. It's a long time ago, more than forty years, that we made a certain experiment in the laboratory of the geologist Hochstetter²⁶ of Vienna. He is long since dead. We produced a substance that contained—among other things—a little sulphur. We didn't put it all together, but this is what we did: here someone had a bit of the stuff, there someone had a bit, over there a bit, and so on, and we hurled, we shot the substance, all of us, toward a certain point. In this way there arose a little globe with all sorts of hills which was curiously like the moon seen through a telescope. Thus at that time in Hochstetter's geological laboratory an experiment was actually made by which a small moon was created. The surface of the moon as it is seen through a telescope had come out quite wonderfully. The whole thing looked just like a little moon. Above all one could realize that a cosmic body need not originate as gas, but can actually be flung together from all corners of the universe. Nor can we explain our earth in any other way than by its being thrown together out of the universe.

Now in connection with this I want to explain something that is little spoken of today but which is nevertheless true. You hear it said everywhere, don't you, that the earth is a globe, has formed itself as a globe. Now actually it is not true that the earth is a globe! I will explain to you what the earth really Is. It is only fantasy that the earth is a globe. If we picture the earth's true form as a regular solid, we come to what in science is called a tetrahedron. I will draw it for you, naturally only in perspective. A tetrahedron looks like this. [see diagram]

You see there are one, two, three triangles and here in front the fourth triangle. Can you picture it? It stands on a triangle, a triangle is underneath; and on that triangle, the base, are three other triangles; that forms a little pyramid. That is how we picture a tetrahedron. We must be clear that four triangles are joined to one another. We must stand it up on one triangle and the other three range upward like a pyramid. That is a perfectly regular solid.

But now imagine that I round out the surfaces of these triangles a little, then it becomes a little different. Now it stands on what has become rounded but yet is still free. And the sides of the triangles which formerly were straight lines are now rounded too. Can you picture that? So now there arises a form which is actually a tetrahedron become round! And you see, our earth is actually such a rounded tetrahedron.

This can even be established to the extent of finding the edges, the sides of this earth-tetrahedron. It is like this: suppose I draw the earth as it is often drawn, on a flat plane—then here would be North America, here South America, between them, Central America; over here we have Africa; here we have Europe. And there is Asia Minor, the Mediterranean, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, in fact Europe. Up here we have Scandinavia. There is England and over there is Asia. So we have Asia here, Africa here, Europe here and America here.

Now the South Pole is here, and around the South Pole in particular there are many volcanic mountains. There is the North Pole. And now it is like this: we can trace a line that goes from Central America, from the Colima volcano²⁷ down through the mountains that are called the Andes, down to the South Pole. It is rounded, but actually though rounded it is this edge of the earth. Then it goes on from the South Pole, goes over here past Africa to the volcanic mountains of the Caucasus. Then the same line comes over here, past Switzerland, over the Rhine and arrives here.

If you follow this line, which looks like a triangle, you can compare it with this triangle here. And so, if you take this portion of the earth, it is the base of a tetrahedron.

Just think, the base of a tetrahedron! Now: how do we come to that point there? Well, we have to go through to the other side of the earth. But I cannot draw that, I would have to make everything round. If I were to make it round, I would come to the point just over there in Japan. Thus if I mark the tetrahedron, here we have Central America, here the South Pole, here the Caucasus, and over there, which one cannot see, would be Japan.

If we picture the earth in this way, we have it existing in the universe as a rounded-out pyramid that sends its apex over there to Japan and has its base here, containing Africa, South America and the whole Southern Ocean. So the earth stands in the universe, curiously, as such a rounded-out tetrahedron, as a kind of pyramid. That, gentlemen, is actually still the form of the earth!

And now if you take these lines that I've drawn forming the tetrahedron, you find that most of the volcanic mountains are located along the lines. You have these frightful fire-belching mountains of which you've often heard, over in South America, in Chile and other places, then around the South Pole; and then you have the mighty ones in the Caucasus. And when you come over here, we don't have so many in our part of the continent, and yet it can be shown that the fiery mountains were once here, but are now extinct. For instance, when you drive along the stretch of road from northern Silesia to Breslau, you see a mountain standing conspicuously alone which is still feared by the people of today. If you examine its rocks, you find this dreaded mountain standing there is simply an extinct volcano. Similarly we have extinct volcanoes in many parts of Germany.

And now let us go further. We have only marked out the base. Then we have lines everywhere that go over toward Japan. Yes, and you see, along all these lines one would always be able to find volcanoes on the earth's surface! You can see that if someone would sit down and draw the most important volcanoes, not on a flat surface, but so that they formed a solid, he would get this shape of the earth. Strangely, the volcanic mountains give us the lines that make the earth into a tetrahedron.

So now, if you do not picture the earth as originally a ball of gas which then became condensed—that's the convenient opinion which people hold—if you explain it as having been formed by substance flung from all sides, then you must admit something else. If the earth is a tetrahedron, a regular solid, you'll have to explain it by imagining that a great master geometrician with plenty of knowledge had actually pushed the earth together from outside, along the lines which we still see today. Now imagine that I draw this tetrahedron, that I first fling this triangle in here from the periphery, then this triangle, then this, and then the one up above. I make it as small boys do: they cut out four triangles, tilt them together from outside and then glue them together to form a tetrahedron. And the earth too has originated like that, it has been flung together as triangles from outside.

Now watch the boys when they paste the triangles together: where they join the sides they must be careful to apply the paste or the glue evenly. As to the earth, at the places I've shown you—South America, then here toward the Caucasus and over here through the Alps, and so on—there the earth was originally “cemented” together! But one finds when one examines the mountains that there it has, so to say, been joined rather badly; the sides don't quite fit together. If in particular we trace the mountains that go over here from the Caucasus through our Carpathians and Alps, we can show from the form of the mountains that they have not yet quite grown together. The earth actually consists of four pieces flung out of cosmic space and joined together, four pieces which then form a tetrahedron, and along the edges there are still, as it were, places not tightly closed. At these leaky places it is possible for the cosmic heat from the sun to get into the earth more than at other places.

Now when the sun's power enters into these places beneath the surface of the earth, they become hotter and get soft—as is always the case when things, even metals, are consumed by fire—and they make an outlet for themselves in the direction of those places which are not properly fastened together. Then through the combined cosmic action of the sun and the “cemented” places of the earth there arise these regular volcanoes, the fire-belching mountains.

However, volcanoes are found at other places too. Etna, for instance, and Vesuvius do not, it is true, lie along these edges; where they are, no such line passes through. In fact, the very volcanoes that are not located along the principal lines are especially instructive, for one can learn from them what causes the eruptions to occur.

You see, it can always be shown that when things like fiery eruptions happen on the earth, they are connected with the constellations, the relation of the stars to the sun. An eruption can never occur unless at some particular place the sun is able to shine more strongly than usual because it is not covered by other stars. If it is covered by other stars as is generally the case, then the sunshine is normal. Starlight is everywhere; one must not think that the stars are not up there during the day, it is just that we don't see them. In the old city of Jena where people had time to do such things, where so many German philosophers taught, where Haeckel²⁸ lived too, there is a deep cellar with a tower²⁹ above it, open at the top. If you go down into this cellar in the daytime and look up through the tower it is all dark inside, but you see up above the most beautiful starry sky. When it is daytime, and clear and bright outside, you can see the most beautiful star-lit heavens, with stars everywhere.

But when the stars are in such a position that the sun can develop its heat to full strength, when they do not obstruct the sun, then the sun's forces of warmth shine down upon some special places. These are the places where, after the earth had been fastened together, later volcanoes arose. They came about later. On the other hand, those that lie along the edges of the tetrahedron are the original volcanoes.

Now sometimes a man who has no place in the ordinary life of science discovers quite useful things in this direction. Perhaps you've heard, or at least the older ones among you, of a certain Falb?³⁰ He was neither an astronomer nor a geologist nor geographer nor natural scientist, but a former priest who had given up his calling—run away from it! He devoted himself especially to a study of star constellations and whether they really have an influence on the earth. He came to the opinion that constellations are connected with volcanoes, that when the influence of the sun is supported by the stars in a certain way, a volcano erupts. He maintained further that floods also come about for the same reason, because the situation attracts water: beneath, the heated mass; above, the water.

And he contended still more: that in the mines the miners suffer most of all from so-called firedamp, that is, when the air in the mines catches fire of itself. He asked himself how this could happen. He decided that for this to happen the stars must aid the sun activity by giving it full play. Then the sun shines too strongly into the mine and the air in the mine ignites. Therefore, said Falb, if one knows about mining conditions, one ought to be able to say when firedamp may be expected in the course of the year. So he made a calendar and indicated when according to the constellations firedamp must occur somewhere. Those were the so-called critical days which he marked in his calendar.

This calendar has been printed many times and Falb's critical days are still there. Now what was to be expected when these days were reached? Either the eruption of a volcano, or an earthquake (an earthquake is a subterranean wave, subterranean overheating), or a flood, or firedamp. Now, gentlemen, I was present once at an amusing little incident. You see, this Falb was very clever, he had been able to light upon these facts, but he was also very conceited, frightfully conceited. As you know, to be learned is no protection from vanity. And the following happened. About forty years ago I was at a lecture given by Falb. He went with great pompousness and a well-pleased expression up to the podium and began his address. He said: Yes, this very day the stars are in a position from which one can expect the occurrence of considerable firedamp. At that moment the door opened and a messenger from the “New Free Press” entered and handed him a telegram. Falb stood up there with his long patriarchal beard and said: “It must be something important if they send it to me straight to the lecture room!” He took out his knife and cut the telegram open and read: “A terrible firedamp has occurred!” Now you can imagine the publicity he got! Falb had just said, “Firedamp could happen today” and the messenger brings the telegram! “You see”, he said, “one gets proofs laid on the table!” Those were his words. But the whole thing smelled of show business. Falb knew quite well that firedamp was due: that was correct. But he went early in the day to the office of the “New Free Press” and left word that if such a telegram came, they should send it immediately to the lecture hall.

That is one of the tricks to which bad speakers gladly resort—though usually in a milder form! I am quite pleased to relate the story so that audiences may be warned to be a little cautious and not simply to accept everything. The clientele that Falb had at that time rustled with silk dresses and tuxedos: it was a very distinguished one. But you should have seen how impressed they were by his performance! However strongly he might have voiced his opinion in words, the audience would never have been so convinced as they were by the entry at exactly the right moment of the messenger with the telegram. People would much rather be convinced through external events than by what can be put into words.

So one can say that at certain places, namely, at the edges of this tetrahedron, the earth is actually not quite joined together. It is exposed therefore to the cosmic warmth of sun and stars, and the consequence is that those lines showing active volcanoes can be drawn. Outbursts of volcanic fire can, of course, occur at other spots too.

But now does this imply that the interior of the earth must necessarily be molten fire? That is what is constantly maintained. Actually there is no other proof of it than the fact that it becomes warmer and warmer the deeper one sinks a shaft into the earth. Still one cannot go very deep. Moreover, with this increase of warmth as one descends into the earth there is likewise an increase of pressure. Whatever might be dissolved by the heat and become fluid is pressed together again by the pressure in the interior. If the earth were really molten inside then something else would not be in accord. One can consider, for instance, the weight of the earth. It is naturally hypothetical, since the earth floats freely in the universe and cannot be weighed. In order to weigh it, one would have to have it on top of another, gigantic earth, for if there is to be weight there must be something that attracts, that develops gravity. One could calculate how much it would weigh from how it attracts other bodies; in fact, such a calculation has been made. But if it were possible to weigh the earth one would find that it is far, far heavier than it would be if it were fluid inside. Goethe³¹ for this reason vigorously attacked the idea that the earth was molten fire inside.

Now when one knows how the earth has been created, when one sees that it is really an incompletely fastened tetrahedron, there is then no need to picture it as molten inside and to suppose that at certain times, one wouldn't know why or wherefore, it must suddenly erupt fire—like a moody, hysterical person! If the earth were molten inside, one would have to fancy that it is actually a little crazy—like a man who is insane and at any sudden moment begins to rage; one doesn't know when the moments will occur. But this is not true of the earth. You can always show where the warmth comes from: that it comes from outside, that at this moment such powerful heating occurs, not at all very deep in the earth, that it forces an outlet for itself.

So the fire when Vesuvius or any other volcano erupts originates only when the cosmic temperature has become fiery. It always takes a little time before the effect is seen. The particular constellation of stars, for instance, must first work upon the earth for a time.

But that also follows from certain facts which I have already related here in quite a different connection. Suppose here is a part of the earth, the sun's rays strike upon it powerfully, and underneath, something develops that later seeks an outlet through an eruption or an earthquake.

You see, what I drew first, the powerful warmth going down into the earth: people don't feel that because they don't pay attention. At most, a few people go about the place where as yet there is no hint of volcanic activity though the effects of the sun's activity are already present in the air, and these few have violent stomach aches, others have headaches, migraine, others find that their heart is disturbed. But people put up with all that in a vague fashion and take no notice. But the animals, as I have said in another connection, which have more delicate noses, finer organs in this respect, perceive what is happening and break away. The people, in spite of their stomach aches and headaches, don't know why the animals have become so restless and are running away. But after a few days the earthquake comes, or the volcanic eruption. The animals have fled because they already scented what was coming; human beings are so coarsely organized in this respect that they are not aware of the event until the whole business is on top of them.

You can see from this that something is already happening a long time in advance before the final event takes place. What is happening is the streaming in of a bit of cosmic heat. But you can still put a question. You can say, this cosmic heat only heats the ground, and where the earth contains substances that are easily inflammable, there could of course be ignition ... but why should it all flare up instantly? Here I'll tell you something else. When one goes to Italy, to the places between Rome and Naples, particularly to the neighborhood of Naples, and to the islands and peninsulas on the coast, the guides always delight in showing one the following experiment. They take a piece of paper and light it and hold it so—in a moment smoke begins to come out of the earth! The earth smokes—why? Because the air becomes warm from the burning paper and so becomes lighter and expands. The warmth caused by the sun's heat streams out of the earth as smoke. This is very interesting to see. One lights a piece of paper and instantly the earth smokes at that spot.

Now think of that enlarged to giant proportions: the sun heating not only the ground below, but also the air above—and you have Vesuvius. And when the latter has once established itself—well, then the beginning has been made, and the process continues in places that are especially favorable to it. It is interesting to realize that those very things that take place on earth irregularly are caused by the whole of cosmic space.

Now I told you that when we flung out that sulphur substance during those days in the geological laboratory, we produced something that really looked like a little moon. And so when one observes the real moon, whom our little moon actually resembled, one gets the idea that it too has been flung together out of the universe. That is one idea one gets.

The other idea is established through spiritual scientific investigation, namely, that the moon has actually been thrown together in the cosmos, mainly from the earth. What does that imply? Well, we did that too in the laboratory. First we threw together such a cosmic body out of substances. Then we attacked it from all sides, flinging material against it from outside, and lo and behold—it became more and more like a moon. And what has one got then? Well, one has the whole process. The main mass of the moon was cast out from the earth, and once it was there, fine matter from every part of space was flung against it. Fine matter is always present in the universe—it falls down in the meteors—it is always being flung out. And so one has the origin of the moon. These things are all connected.

The development of science, you know, is sometimes remarkable. A monument stands today in Heilbronn—certainly it is rather dreadful as a work of art, but still it stands there and represents Julius Robert Mayer.³² If you hear about him in science today, you learn that he was a pioneering genius through his researches in the 40's of the last century into the nature of the action of heat. Julius Robert Mayer was born in Heilbronn, practiced there as a doctor and went about without being particularly noticed. The scientists of the time paid no special attention to him. And although today he is described everywhere as a highly gifted pioneer in physics, at that time when he sat for his medical examination at Tubingen he failed it. If you made investigations, you would come on the remarkable fact that the majority of men who later became geniuses failed earlier in their examinations. And this was also the fate of Julius Robert Mayer. By the skin of his teeth, he managed to get through and become a doctor. But no one considered him remarkable during his lifetime—in fact, quite the contrary. He became so enthusiastic about his discovery that he talked of it everywhere. Then people said that his mind was wandering and put him in an asylum. His own generation put him in a madhouse while posterity looks upon him as a great genius and puts up a monument to him in his native town.

It was Julius Robert Mayer who as a result of thought and investigation asked how it was that the sun which gives us so much heat does not become cold. He said to himself that it does not become as cold as it ought to become after always giving out warmth. He thought therefore that comets, an immense number of comets, must continually rush into the sun, hurled toward it from the universe. They are very fine, tenuous bodies, but they rush into it. It is true that they rush into the sun. The sun is very different from what the physicists of today imagine. They would be very astonished if they were to approach it: they would not find fiery gas but they would find something that causes any earthly substance to be sucked in and disappear. The sun is an empty space that exerts suction. It is not a globe of gas. It resembles a pearl in the universe, a suction globe with nothing in it that one looks for, but which continuously absorbs this mass of comets. The fine etheric structures of the universe, which are almost spiritual, are continuously being sucked in by the sun as nourishment. We still see today, therefore, this dashing against the sun. This should draw our attention, gentlemen, to something important.

You see, when one arrives at the fact that the earth is really a tetrahedron,—well, if one has been obliged to study such forms and to note the number of sides and corners, one realizes that a certain knowledge of geometry is necessary to understand how to construct them. They don't come about so simply. Boys enjoy doing it, making these tetrahedrons, cubes, octahedrons, icosahedrons, dodecahedrons, the five regular solids. The boys like to put them together from sheets of cardboard, gluing the pieces together, but one needs geometry for it. Now the earth is formed in this very way out of the universe—formed from knowledge of geometry, in this sense, not formed through calculation, but with knowledge—for it is regular! You can infer from this that there is really geometry in the world, that everything is in accord with geometry. That is true. Real science shows us something that I have always stated, namely, that thoughts are spread out in the world, thoughts are everywhere and only those people don't find them who have none themselves!

It is very praiseworthy, is it not, to be a free and independently thinking person? And yet it is slightly ridiculous to find the expression “freethinker” which has appeared in modern times, in the 19th century. Thinking independently: that is very good, but many in their freedom have misused this expression “freethinker.” And the men who have felt themselves to be the freest thinkers were just those who had the fewest thoughts, who simply repeated what other people had said. An Englishman made a delightful remark: he said, “Free thought does not mean that people have thoughts, but that they are free from thought”—a remark that has been much quoted. What is a freethinker? A freethinker is one who is free from thinking! Well, in science one must endeavor not to develop such freedom from thought or else nothing will be achieved. The actual form of the earth could long ago have been discovered—the fact that it is not a completely spherical cabbage-head, but that it has something of the shape of a tetrahedron!

Knowledge of the earth is related to knowledge of man. Man imitates the universe in his own form. He copies the universe in his head, and so the head is round up above like the round universe. Below, where the jaws begin there are quite remarkable structures: they come from the triangular earth. In the jaw formation you find triangles everywhere, they come from below, from the triangular earth. With both, men copy the universe: they have more or less rounded heads above, and the earth-forces reach up from below.

Look for it sometime. You will find in most varied ways man's tendency (and animals) to triangular formation in the jaws; this comes from the earth. Forces work upward from the earth and imprint the triangle into him. And the universe works downward from above and molds the rounded form. It is very interesting!

That is knowledge that may be gained if one penetrates genuine science correctly. If one is free from thought, then one talks all sorts of nonsense. And in our time all sorts of nonsense is talked; that cannot lead to an understanding of what things are in their reality.

So, gentlemen, let us speak further about this next Saturday.

• 26. Ferdinand Hochstetter, 1829–1884. Geographer and geologist
• 27. Active volcano in Mexico.
• 28. Ernst Haeckel, 1834–1919. Biologist and philosopher.
• 29. The so-called “little Weigel house,” built in 1647, demolished in 1898 when Weigelstrasse was constructed. One of the “Seven Wonders of Jena”. It was 7 stories high and contained a circular staircase through which one could look up by day and see the stars shining in the heavens.
• 30. Rudolf Falb, 1838–1903. See “Grundzüge der Theorie der Erdbeben und Vulkanausbrüche,” Graz 1870; “Gedanken und Studien über den Vulkanismus,” Graz 1875.
• 31. Goethe fought vehemently the ideas on volcanoes held by Leopold von Buch and others, which were at that time becoming well-known, and which in his opinion lacked a central idea that could have illumined the individual facts. See his letter to Nees von Esenbeck, June 13, 1823.
• 32. Julius Robert Mayer, 1814 – 1878. See “Beiträge zur Dynamik des Himmels,” Heilbronn, 1848.

Many of the lectures I have given over the years in anthroposophical groups to friends—some of whom are sitting here today—have dealt with the gospels of John, Luke, and Matthew.¹ In those lectures, we have tried to recreate in our minds the great event in Palestine, the Mystery of Golgotha, from three different angles—in three different ways, so to speak. We hope these lectures could establish an ever-increasing appreciation of this unique event in our souls. I have already pointed out that we have four gospels because their authors were inspired occultists and each wanted to represent this great event from one perspective only, just as we take pictures or photograph external objects from only one point of view. When we then take the pictures from various angles and combine them, looking at all of them together, we can have the actual reality before our souls. Thus, each of the evangelists gives us the opportunity to consider the great event of Palestine from one particular standpoint.

The Gospel of Saint John gives us an insight into these events from a perspective we may call a revelation of the highest human and occult aims, as well as of the highest world principle. In Saint Luke's Gospel, on the other hand, we are given an insight into the secrets surrounding the personality of Jesus of Nazareth—the Solomon and Nathan Jesuses—up to the moment when his inspiration through the Christ took place. As you know from my lecture cycle on the Gospel of Saint Matthew—if you missed the lectures you can read them later—this gospel shows how the physical body in which Christ was to be incarnated for three years was prepared in the Hebrew people.

In a certain way, the Gospel of Saint Mark leads us to the highest summits of the spiritual-scientific, Christian world view. It gives us the opportunity to look into many things that are imparted to us through the gospels but are not touched upon in the same way by the other evangelists. Today, therefore, I have set myself the task to speak about this gospel.

We must be aware that it is necessary to consider many things that the superficial world of our time does not really want to look at. If we want to understand Saint Mark's Gospel in all its depth, we must familiarize ourselves with the different way of expressing things that prevailed at the time when Christ Jesus walked the earth. Do not take it amiss, then, if in order to convey what I have to tell you, I paint it in strong colors.

We express what we want to say in language, which is to bring out what lives in our souls. The expression of soul content in language differs from one epoch of human development to another. In the Hebraic epoch, the ancient Hebrew sacred language provided a wonderful way of expressing things. It was very different from our way of clothing the secrets of the soul into words. When a word was spoken in old Hebrew, it contained not merely an abstract idea, as it does today, but a whole world. The vowels were not written because the speaker expressed his innermost being through his way of vocalizing, whereas the consonants contained the description—the picture, so to speak—of what was outside. We can say that when the Hebrews wrote, for example, what corresponds to our B, they always felt something like a picture of outer conditions, something that formed a warm, hut-like enclosure. The letter B always evoked the image of something that can enclose a being like a house; the letter could not be pronounced without this image living in the speaker's soul. When A was vocalized, there was always something of strength and force, even of radiating power, living within it. That is how the soul lived on; the spiritual-psychological content flowed out with the words, soared into space, and touched other souls. Obviously, language was then a far more living affair and entered more fully into the secrets of existence than our contemporary language.

That is the light in the picture I mentioned. The shadows are in our having become, to a great extent, philistines. Our language expresses only abstractions and generalities, and we no longer even notice this—so our language at bottom expresses only the philistine. It could not be otherwise in an age when people begin to write literature long before they have any spiritual content to express, when an infinite amount of printed material goes to the general public, when everyone thinks he must write something, and when everything can be a subject to write about. I have even seen authors turning up at the founding of our society out of curiosity, hoping to find material for a novel in it and looking for protagonists that can be dished up in the popular style.

We must be aware, then, that our language has become abstract, empty, and philistine, in contrast to the way it was when people still thought of language as something holy, something that must be handled responsibly, and through which God would speak. That is why it is so infinitely difficult to squeeze the tremendous facts imparted to us by, and resounding in, the gospels into modern words. Why shouldn't people these days believe that everything can be expressed in contemporary language? They cannot understand that this language is empty of what even the Greeks expressed with one word. Furthermore, reading the Bible today, we find something that, compared to its original content, has been sifted once, twice, even thrice, but in such a way that not the best but only the worst remains. It is therefore rather cheap to refer to the modern wording of the Bible. We go most astray, however, when we turn to the Gospel of Mark as we have it in the Bible today.

In the translation by Weizsäcker, which is generally considered excellent—and because it is considered so excellent nowadays, we can assume that it is not all that good—the first lines of the Gospel of St. Mark are rendered as follows:

As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, behold, I send my messenger before thee, who shall prepare the way for thee; listen how it calls in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.

Honest people must really admit that if Weizsäcker begins the Gospel of Saint Mark like this, they do not understand a single word of it; those who claim to understand this are fooling themselves. People who work honestly will not be able to understand the lines, “Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” For they express either a triviality or something that cannot be understood. The concepts that make it possible to understand what Isaiah says here must first be acquired. For Isaiah pointed to the great, tremendous event that was to be the most significant event in human evolution. What was he really referring to?

Based upon what we already know, we can say what Isaiah prophesied. We can say that in ancient times humanity had a kind of clairvoyance that allowed people to grow into the divine-spiritual world with their soul forces. But what really happened when people grew thus into the spiritual world? They ceased to make use of the I, insofar as they had developed it at that time. Instead, they used their astral body, with its forces of vision and seership—whereas the forces rooted in the I were gradually awakened in the process of perceiving the physical world. It is the I that uses the senses as instruments. When the ancients sought enlightenment about the world, they employed their astral bodies. They saw and perceived in their astral bodies. Further evolution consisted in the transition from the use of the astral body to the use of the I. In regard to the I, the Christ impulse was the most intense impulse. If Christ is taken into the I in the sense of St. Paul's words, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” then the I will have the power to grow into the spiritual world through its own efforts. Formerly, only the astral body could do this.

Thus, we can say of human evolution that human beings formerly used their astral body as an organ of perception, but gradually lost the ability to develop organs of perception in the astral body. As humanity approached the time of the Christ event, it entered an evolutionary stage in which people had to realize that their astral body was less and less able to see into the spiritual world. The astral body's connection to the spiritual world came to nothing, and the I was not yet forceful enough to get any enlightenment from the outer world. That was the time when Christ drew near.

Now in the evolution of humanity, certain great steps forward are gradually prepared before they actually take place. This was the case with the Christ impulse, but there had to be a transition. The development I just described could not have gone so far that human beings would have seen their astral body gradually becoming dulled toward the spiritual world and would have felt an utter desolation and dreariness in themselves until the I would have been kindled later through the Christ impulse. Things were not to turn out that way. Rather, a few individuals developed so far that through a particular influence from the spiritual world they saw with the astral body something similar to what people were to see and know later through the I. In other words, the I was prepared in the astral body.

Indeed, it is through the I and its development that human beings have become earthly beings. The astral body really belonged to the ancient moon when the angels, the Angeloi, were at the human stage. The angels were human on the old moon; we are human beings on the earth. On the old moon, human beings appropriately used their astral body, and everything else was just preparation for the evolution of the I. The beginning of our earth evolution was a repetition of our moon evolution on a higher level. After all, had we remained limited to the astral body, we could never have become fully human. Only angels on the moon could become human in the astral body. Therefore, just as Christ lived in earthly human beings in order to inspire the I in them, so for the preparation of the I there had to be prophets from the angels of the moon, the moon-humans, to inspire the astral body so that the I-hood of human beings could be prepared. A prophet could have characterized it in the following way. “There will come a time in human evolution when humanity will be ripe for the development of the I. Only the angels of the moon were raised to the highest in their astral bodies, but for human beings to be prepared for this I-hood, certain people on earth had to be so inspired through grace and under exceptional conditions that they could work as angels even though they were humans. They were angels in human form.”

Here we arrive at an important occult concept that is indispensable to the occult understanding of human evolution. It is naturally easy to say that all is Maya, but that is an abstraction. We must really take it seriously and be able to say, “A human being stands before me, but he or she is Maya. Who knows, he or she may not really be human. Perhaps the humanness is only an outer veil employed by quite another being, not a human one, to bring about something that cannot yet be effected by humanity.” I have indicated something of this in my The Portal of Initiation.²

Such an event occurred when the individuality who lived in Elijah was reborn in John the Baptist. An angel entered his soul and used his body and soul to do what would have been impossible for a human being to accomplish. An angel lived in John who had to announce the true I that was to live in Jesus of Nazareth. It is extremely important to know that John the Baptist is only Maya and that an angelic messenger lived in him. This is found also in the Greek version of the Bible: “Behold, I send my messenger [i.e., Angeloi or angel].” Thus, a profound cosmic mystery connected with John the Baptist was prophesied by Isaiah. As we have seen, Isaiah characterized John as Maya or illusion, but in truth John encompassed the angel who had to announce what humanity really was to become through receiving the Christ impulse. Angels proclaim beforehand what humanity is to become later. So, this passage in the Bible should really read, “Behold, what gives I-hood to the world sends the angel before thee to whom I-hood will be given.”

Now we go on to the third sentence. What does it mean? Here we must call to mind the whole historical world situation. What happened after the astral body gradually lost the ability to extend its forces like tentacles to look clairvoyantly into the spiritual world? Formerly, when the astral body became active, it could see into the spiritual world. This possibility gradually disappeared, and it became dark within human beings. While they could spread their astral body over all the beings of the spiritual world in former times, now they were alone in themselves. Their souls now lived in solitude. That also is in the Greek text. “Behold, what speaks in the solitude—or, if you like, wilderness—of the soul when the astral body could no longer extend out to the divine spiritual world. Listen to what calls in the wilderness and loneliness of the soul.”

What is it that announces itself? Here, we must be clear about the meaning of one particular word when it is used in reference to spiritual or soul phenomena. This was true, above all, in Hebrew, but also in Greek. The word is Kyrios. To translate it as “the Lord,” as is usually done, produces absolute nonsense. What does this word mean? In ancient times everyone who spoke this word knew it meant something that was connected with the progress of the human soul. People knew that the word Kyrios referred to secrets of the soul.

Looking at the astral body, we see that our soul has three distinct forces we call thinking, feeling, and willing. The soul thinks, feels, and wills. These are the three forces working in the soul. They are the serving forces in the soul. Formerly, they had been the lords of humanity, and human beings had been subject to them and had to wait for their thinking, feeling, or willing to be called into action. As human beings evolved, however, these soul forces became subject to the Kyrios, the Lord of the soul forces, the I. When the term Kyrios referred to the soul, nothing else was understood by it than the I. This I no longer believed that the divine spiritual thinks, feels, and wills in it, but “I think, I feel, I will.” The Lord makes himself felt in the forces of the soul. “Prepare yourselves, you human souls, to follow paths that lead you to let the strong I—Kyrios, the Lord—awaken in your souls. Listen to the call in the solitude of the soul. Prepare the force or direction of the Lord of the soul—the I. Make open his forces!” That is roughly how this passage should be translated. “Open up, so that the I can enter and does not become the slave of thinking, feeling, and willing. Open up its forces!” When you translate these words, “Behold, the I sends its angel before you that is to give you the possibility of understanding the calls in the solitude of the astral soul: Prepare the directions of the I, and open the forces for it,” you then have a meaning in these significant words of the prophet Isaiah and a reference to the greatest event in human evolution. You then understand that Isaiah speaks of John the Baptist, that he points out that our soul solitude longs for the approach of the Lord in the soul, the approach of the I. The words have force and weight only when we understand them this way.

Why was John the Baptist able to be the bearer of the Angeloi? He could do this because he had had a certain initiation. Each initiation is specialized. Initiations are not just general, but specialized. Individuals who have a very special task need a particular kind of initiation. Now for everything that occurs in the spiritual world precautions have been taken so that the starry script in the heavens reveals spiritual facts. For example, people could have a sun-initiation and enter into the secrets of the spiritual world that is the realm of Ahura Mazdao, the world for which the sun is the external expression. There are, however, twelve different ways to be initiated into the secrets of the sun; each of these initiations was a “solar initiation,” yet different from the other eleven. Depending upon what a person has to accomplish for humanity, he or she receives an initiation that can be described as a solar initiation but, for example, one where the forces flow in as though the sun were standing in Cancer. This differs from the initiation where the forces flow in as though the sun were standing in Libra. This is how different specialized initiations were designated.

Individuals who have as important a mission as John the Baptist must be initiated in a very special way. Only then will they have the necessary strength to accomplish their mission in the world even in a rather single-minded way if circumstances require that. So, in order for John the Baptist to become the bearer of the Angeloi, he had to undergo the sun-initiation that can be called the initiation in the sign of Aquarius. The sun in Aquarius is a symbol for the initiation John the Baptist received to become the bearer of the angel. He received the force of the sun as it streams down when its relation to the other stars is characterized with the words, “The sun stands in the constellation of Aquarius.” That was the symbol. John had undergone the Aquarius initiation.

The constellation was given the name Aquarius because those who underwent this initiation had the power to do with human beings what John did as the Aquarian, the Baptist. Through immersion in water, he brought people to the point where their etheric bodies were freed sufficiently for them to gain the self-knowledge that allowed them to realize what was most important in their time. People were immersed and their etheric bodies were freed for a moment. Through baptism in the Jordan, people could feel the special importance of this epoch in the history of the world. Therefore, John underwent the baptism initiation. To express symbolically the flowing in of the rays from the constellation in which the sun stood, this sign was called Aquarius. In this way the name of the human capacity is carried over to the heavens.

Today many learned ignoramuses try to interpret spiritual events by bringing the heavens down to earth. They say, “Now, that indicates a forward movement of the sun.” These learned people, who really do not know anything, interpret human events from the heavens. However, it was the other way around. What lives in humanity spiritually was transferred to the heavens; the heavens were used as a means of expression. Thus, John the Baptist could say, “I have baptized you with water,” which was the same as saying, “I baptize you with water: I am endowed with the initiation of Aquarius.” That is what John could have said to his closest disciples. With our senses we see the constellation of Virgo opposite Aquarius, and from there the sun moves to Libra. However, in terms of initiation, the sun proceeds in the opposite direction, not as it appears to our senses. Thus, we have to look at the sun's path from Aquarius to Pisces. John could say, “Something will come that will no longer work in the way that corresponds to the sun's influence in Aquarius; instead, it will work in a way corresponding to the sun's effect in Pisces. One will come who will bring a higher baptism.”

When the spiritual sun rises higher, then the Aquarian baptism becomes a baptism with spiritual water. The sun ascends in the spiritual realm from Aquarius to Pisces, hence the well-known ancient fish symbol for the bearer of Christ. Through special spiritual influences, John had an Aquarian initiation. But the initiation that came about mysteriously through the Mysteries around Jesus, of which I have spoken several times, was a Pisces initiation. It resulted from the sun advancing to the next constellation, and Jesus of Nazareth was integrated into his time through being subjected first to a Pisces initiation.

This is sufficiently indicated in the Gospel of Saint Mark, but such things can only be shown in images. Christ Jesus draws together all those who are fishing, so his first apostles are all fishermen. The advancing of the sun from Aquarius to Pisces is obvious when John tells us, “I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” When Christ walked along the Sea of Galilee—which means, when the sun was so far advanced that one could see its counterpart coming up from Pisces—the fishermen Simon, Simon's brother, James, and James's brother, were inspired. This can be understood only when we look more closely at the way people expressed things at that time.

Our modern way of expressing ourselves is pedantic. If a person stands before us, we say there is a human being. If a second person stands before us, we again say there is a human being. A third, another, and so on, but we have merely Maya before us. If a being has two legs and a human countenance, then in our pedantic way of expressing ourselves we have only one term, “human being.” However, what is a human being to occultism? Nothing but Maya! He or she is about the same as a rainbow, which lasts only so long as the necessary relationships between rain and sunshine exist. When these relationships change, the rainbow disappears.

It is the same with human beings. A human being is only the streaming together of forces of the macrocosm, forces we find in the heavens, here or there in the macrocosm. Where we usually assume a human being somewhere on earth, there is nothing for the occultist. In fact, forces stream down from above and up from below and intersect. Then, just as the peculiar relationship of rain and sunshine produces the rainbow, so forces streaming out of the macrocosm from above and below result in the phenomenon that looks like a human being. People are nothing as they stand before us. In truth, they are a phantom, Maya, an illusion. It is the cosmic forces, intersecting where our eyes think they see a human being, that are real. Try to take the statement seriously that a human being is nothing as he or she stands before us. A human being is but the shadow of many forces. The being who reveals himself in a person can easily be elsewhere than at that point where the individual in question is walking around on two legs.

For example, consider three men, first, an ancient Persian whose work was plowing. He looked like an ordinary man but actually was one of the souls whose forces were nourished from this or that world, above or below. The second man was an ancient Persian official. He was formed by forces from another world that intersected in him. To know him, we must look at these forces. All of you sitting here are in your reality somewhere else, and only the forces of your real being radiate into this room. Our third example is a Persian of whom we have to say he was really a complete illusion, a phantom. What was there in reality? We must go all the way up to the sun to find the forces that nourished this phantom. There, among the mysteries of the sun, we find what can be called the Golden Star, Zarathustra. It radiates down, and here below stands a figure called Zarathustra. In truth, however, his being is not there at all. This is our third example.

Now, it is important to realize that in ancient times people were aware of the meaning of such designations. Names were not given as they are today. People were named according to what lived in them rather than on the basis of their external, illusory appearance. We must be quite clear about this. We can say that at the time of Christ people would have easily understood what was meant when John the Baptist was referred to as the angel of God. Such a statement would have taken account of what really happened there; it would have focused on the main thing and disregarded secondary considerations.

Let us assume people had spoken about Christ Jesus in the same way. How would they have had to speak of him if they had understood such things? They would not have dreamt of naming the physical body walking around among them Christ Jesus. Rather, the name was the sign that what was streaming down spiritually from the sun was received in a very special way at the point where this physical body was. As this body of Jesus wandered from one place to another, it made visible the sun force as it moves from place to place. This force could also move around alone, and at times it was said that Christ Jesus was in his “home,” that is, in his physical body, but what was in him moved on without his body. Particularly in Saint John's Gospel this expression is used in such a way that, at times, the writer speaks of this being moving purely spiritually exactly as though he were describing this sun force dwelling in a physical body.

It is therefore important that the deeds of Christ Jesus are always seen in relation to the physical sun, which is the external expression of the spiritual world that is received at the point where Christ's physical body is walking around. When Christ Jesus heals, for instance, it is the sun force that heals. However, the sun must be at the right place in the heavens: “That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons.” It is important to indicate that this healing power can flow down only when the external sun has set but still works spiritually. And when Christ again needed a certain force for his work, he had to take it from the spiritual rather than from the physical, visible sun. “And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed.” Here, the path of the sun and the solar force is expressly indicated. It is this solar force that is at work here, and fundamentally Jesus is only the external sign, making the path of the sun forces visible to the physical eye.

Whenever Christ is mentioned in Saint Mark's Gospel, the sun force is meant, which, in that epoch of human evolution, was especially active in Palestine. The sun force could be seen as Christ went from one place to another. We could just as well say that at that time, the spiritual force of the sun, as though focused in one point, went from one place to another. The body of Jesus was the external sign that made the movements of the sun force visible. The paths Jesus took in Palestine were those of the sun force come down to earth. If you trace his steps on a map, you have a diagram of a cosmic event: the influence of the sun force from the macrocosm on the land of Palestine. That macrocosmic aspect is what matters here. The writer of Saint Mark's Gospel points out this macrocosmic connection. He knew that the body serving as the vehicle of a principle such as that of Christ had to be overcome by its principle in a special way. Thus, this gospel points to the world whose existence behind the world of the senses Zarathustra had so powerfully announced; it points to that world as it works on our human world. Through Christ Jesus it was indicated how these forces now work on the earth. Therefore, a kind of repetition of the Zarathustra events had to occur in the body of the Nathan Jesus because it was in a certain way influenced by the individuality of Zarathustra.

Let us recall the beautiful legend about Zarathustra. At his birth, Zarathustra accomplished his first miracle when he showed his famous smile. Later, Duransarun, the king of the district where Zarathustra was born, resolved to murder him because of what some retrograde Magi had told him about the child. However, when the king attempted to stab the child, his arm was paralyzed. That was a second miracle. Then, because the king could not stab him, Zarathustra was left among the wild beasts of the desert. Thus, in earliest childhood Zarathustra experienced what we see when we look out into the world through our impurities. Instead of noble group-soul and higher spiritual beings, we see emanations of our wild fantasy. That is what is meant when we are told that Zarathustra was left among the wild beasts, but remained unharmed. That is the third miracle. The fourth occurred also among the wild animals, and so on. It was always the good spirit of Ahura Mazdao who served Zarathustra and ministered to him.

We find these miracles repeated in the Gospel of Saint Mark. “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness [Actually the word is solitude]. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him.” This shows us that the body was prepared that was to be the focal point to receive what transpired in the macrocosm. What had happened to Zarathustra had to be repeated, among other things, the time he spent among the wild beasts. This body took in what came from the macrocosm.

Even the first lines of Saint Mark's Gospel take us into the greatest cosmic context. I wanted to show you that if we understand the words in the right sense—not in the sense of our modern philistine language but in that of the ancient languages where living worlds were behind each word—then the Gospel of Saint Mark comes alive again and receives new force. With our modern language, however, it takes many circumlocutions to find again what was simply present in the words in ancient languages. When we say that human beings live on the earth and develop their I, and that they formerly lived on the moon where the angels went through the human stage, we are expressing what lies behind the words, “Behold, I send my angel before human beings.” These words cannot be understood without prior knowledge of what spiritual science offers. People in our time should be honest and admit that the words at the beginning of Saint Mark's Gospel are incomprehensible. Instead, in petty pride they declare spiritual science a fantasy that reads all kinds of things into what they supposedly just know. However, they do not really know it.

Today the principle of rewriting sacred documents for each epoch, as was done in ancient Persia, is no longer practiced. Thus, the divine spiritual word, as presented in the Zend-Avesta, was transformed again and again. The Persian bible was rewritten seven times and what exists today is the last form. Anthroposophy has to teach people how necessary it is to rewrite the books containing the holy secrets in each epoch. For especially if we want to preserve the grand old style, we should not try to stay as close as possible to the ancient wording. That can't be done; the old words are no longer understood. Instead, we must try to translate the ancient wording into the immediate understanding of our time. That is what we have tried to do this summer with the Book of Genesis. You saw that many of the words had to be changed. Perhaps today you have got an idea of how the words must also be changed in the Gospel of Saint Mark.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, The Gospel of St. John, vol. 103 in the Collected Works, repr. (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1988), The Gospel of St. John and Its Relation to the Other Gospels, The Gospel of St. John and Its Relation to the Other Gospels, vol. 112 in the Collected Works (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1982), The Gospel of St. Luke, vol. 114 in the Collected Works, repr. (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1988), and The Gospel of St. Matthew, vol. 123 in the Collected Works, repr. (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1985).
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, The Portal of Initiation: A Rosicrucian Mystery Drama (Blauvelt, NY: Steinerbooks, 1981).

Yesterday I told you how the great Initiate selected from the primal Semites, who were living in the neighbourhood of Ireland, a group of people whom he led towards the East and settled there. There Manu trained the chosen men to be the progenitors of the new civilisations. He taught them and gave them directions for a moral way of life, with everything laid down in the minutest detail. He taught them how to distribute their time and how to arrange their work from morning till evening. But even more than by his precepts he educated them by direct influence and by his thoughts. When he sent out his thoughts into the colony, his ideas and precepts acted by direct suggestion. This was the sort of influence needed by the men of that time for their training and re-moulding.

The following episode brings out the difference between the whole outlook of the Atlantean race and that of the new Root-race; it occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century. European colonists had induced some Red Indians—in whom we have to see the descendants of Atlanteans who had failed to make headway and had then become retrograde—to relinquish their lands on condition that new hunting-grounds were allotted to them. But the promise had not been kept and the Indian Chief could not understand this. Hence he addressed the Europeans as follows: “You pale-faces promised us that your Chief would give our brothers other lands in place of those you have taken from us. Your feet are now on our land and you are walking over the graves of our brothers. The White Man has not kept the promise he made to the Brown Man. You Pale-faces have your black instruments with all kinds of little magic signs”—he meant their books—“from which you learn the will of your God. Your's must be a bad God if he does not teach his people to keep their word. The Brown-man's God is not like that; the Brown-man hears the thunder and sees the lightning and this language he can understand; his God speaks to him in this language. He hears the rustling of the leaves and trees in the woods, and in them also his God speaks to him. He hears the water rippling in the brook, and the Brown-man can understand that speech also. He knows when a storm is brewing. Everywhere he can hear his God speaking, and the lesson his God teaches is very different from what your magical black signs say to you.”

This is really a very significant speech, for it contains a sort of confession of faith. The Atlantean did not raise himself to his God through concepts and ideas. He discerned something holy in nature as a keynote of the Divine; it was as though he breathed in and breathed out his God. If he wished to express what he heard in this way, he would embody it in a sound similar to the Chinese T-A-O. For the Atlantean this was the sound which pervaded the whole of nature. When he touched a leaf, or saw a flash of lightning, he was aware that part of the Godhead was displayed before him; it was as if he were touching the garment of the Divine. Just as we make contact with some element in a man's soul when we shake hands with him, so the Atlantean, when he took hold of a form in nature, felt that he was touching the body of the Godhead. He lived in a religious feeling quite different from our own. The Atlantean, too, was still clairvoyant and was thus in direct communication with the world of spirits.

But then the type of thinking associated with logic and mathematical calculation began to develop, and the more it did so, the more did clairvoyance fade away. People began to concern themselves more with what the senses could perceive externally, and so nature was increasingly divested of divinity. People acquired a new gift at the cost of an old one. In proportion as they achieved the gift of exact sense-observation, they ceased to understand nature as the body of the Godhead. Gradually they came to see before them only the body of the world, and not its soul. But as the result of this a yearning for the Divine arose once more in man. In his heart it was written: Behind nature there must be God. And he came to realise that he must seek for God with his spirit. That is in fact the meaning of the word ‘religion’: to try to re-establish a connection with the Godhead; religere means to re-unite.

Now there are various ways of finding the Godhead. The Indians, who were the first sub-race of the Aryan race, took the following way. Certain God-inspired messengers of Manu, called the holy Rishis, became the teachers of the ancient Indian culture. No poetry or tradition tells us about this it is known only through what has been handed down orally in the occult schools. Poems such as the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, wonderful as they are, are of much later origin. The ancient Indian felt in his heart that external nature as he saw it was unreal, and that behind it the Godhead was concealed. The name he gave to this Godhead was Brahman, the hidden God. The whole external world was thus for him an illusion, deception, Maya. Whereas the Atlantean could still discern the Godhead in every leaf, the Indian said: “The Godhead is no longer apparent in the outer world. I must sink into my inner being and seek for Him in my heart; I must follow after Him towards a higher spiritual condition.” In every approach to the Godhead there was still a dreamlike element. The Indian could find no Divinity in nature; it was in great and powerful thought-pictures, in visions and imaginations that the world of Brahman revealed itself to him. Yoga was the name of the training he had to undergo in order to penetrate through illusion to the spirit and the primal source of being. The profound Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, that sublime song of human perfection, are only echoes of that ancient divine wisdom.

This was the first stage along the path by which humanity sought to return to the Godhead; it is a stage which could not achieve much in terms of external civilisation. The Indian turned away from everything external and looked for the higher life only in world-renouncing ascent to the Spirit.

The second sub-race, that of the ancient Persians, had a very different mission, although its culture originated from the clear purpose of Manu. Long before the time of Zarathustra, Persia had an ancient culture, of which only an oral tradition survives. People were now coming to the thought that external reality was an image of the Divine, which must not be turned away from but shaped anew. The Persian wished to transform nature by work; he became a husbandman. He moved out of the quiet realm of world-renouncing thoughts and learnt from the resistance he encountered that the outer world was not wholly Maya. Side by side with the world of Spirit he found a real world in which work had to be done. The conviction gradually grew within him that there are two worlds: the world of the good Spirit in which a man can immerse himself and the world which has to be worked upon. And then he said: In the world of the Spirit I shall find the ideas and concepts through which I may transform the world of external reality, so that it may itself become an image of the eternal Spirit.

Thus the Persian saw himself placed in a struggle between two worlds; and presently this took more and more the form of a conflict between two powers—Ormuzd, representing the world of the good Spirit, and Ahriman, representing the world which has to be transformed. But he found himself still at a loss in one respect: the outer world confronted him as something he could not understand; he could not discover any laws in it. He failed to see that the spiritual can be found in nature; he was aware only of nature's resistance to his work.

The third sub-race, comprising the Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian people, and later the Semites who branched off from them, came to understand these laws. Men looked up to the stars and observed their movements and their influence on human life, and accordingly worked out a science which enabled them to understand these movements and influences. They brought the Heavens into connection with the Earth. We can see the character of this third sub-race from a particular example. The Egyptians observed that the flooding of the Nile, when it inundates the surrounding country, occurred at the time of the rising of a particular constellation, that of Sirius; and they connected the rising of the Nile with this constellation. Again, they observed the position of the Sun at the time of the arrival and departure of certain birds; they observed the rising and the setting of the stars, their relation to one another and to mankind, and so they gradually built up a science. It became clear to them that there was a great wisdom governing all natural processes; that everything happened in accordance with great laws, and these they tried to fathom. The ancient Chaldean priests, above all, were the custodians of profound wisdom, but for them these laws of nature were not merely abstract, nor were the stars merely physical globes. They looked on each planet as ensouled by a Being whose body it was. They had a quite concrete conception that behind every constellation was a divine Being which gave it life. Thus the Egyptians and Chaldeans discerned that they were spirits living among spirits in a world of spirits. They saw matter as filled with wisdom.

So humanity had gradually come by the path of knowledge to recognise the wisdom in external nature, and thus to rediscover something which the ancient Atlanteans had known through natural clairvoyance.

The fourth sub-race, the bearer of Graeco-Roman culture, was no longer directly influenced by Manu, but came under the influence of other cultures. It had a different mission—art. Little by little man had found the way to carry the spirit into nature. The Greek went further than the Egyptian: instead of taking the finished forms of nature, he took the still unformed substance of marble and impressed on it his own stamp. He formed his own gods, Zeus and the rest. The third sub-race had sought the spirit in the external world, the fourth impressed the spirit itself on the world. Art, the charming of spirit into matter, was the task reserved for the Graeco- Roman race.

The Egyptian studied the stars in their courses and in accordance with them he regulated his political institutions for centuries ahead. The Greek drew his ideas about the form of human society from his own inner life. The Roman went even further: he moulded the whole social life of human beings in accordance with his mind.

The Germans and Anglo-Saxons the fifth sub-race, to which we ourselves belong—go very much further in moulding the external world. They not only imprint on matter something from within themselves; they discover divinely-ordained laws of nature and use them to alter the world. They discover the laws of gravity, of heat, of steam and electricity, and with their aid they transform the whole visible world. The mission of this fifth sub-race is to study not only the laws which slumber within mankind, but those which permeate the whole world, and then to imprint them on the external world. The result is that humanity has become more material, indeed materialistic. In this age no Zeus could arise, but—the steam-engine!

We shall be succeeded by another race which will retrace the path to the spirit. The achievement of our race represents the highest point of man's power to transform the physical world. We have descended furthest into the physical plane and gone to the utmost limits in our conquest of it. This has been the mission of post-Atlantean humanity. The Indian turned away from the physical. The Persian saw it as a substance which resisted his efforts. The Chaldeans, Babylonians and Egyptians recognised the wisdom in nature. The Greeks and Romans went further in their conquest of the physical plane from within. Only our own culture has gone so far as to operate with the laws of nature on the physical plane. From now onwards mankind will become more spiritual again.

There is a great and powerful purpose in the course of human evolution. Each group of peoples has its own task. Present-day man knows nothing of what the third and fourth sub-races still had in their myths and legends as recollections of primal times and the world of the gods; he has only the physical plane. And through his descent to the physical plane he has lost his connection with the world of the gods. For him, only the physical world exists.

Theosophists are not reactionaries; they know that the age of materialism was necessary. Just as the organs of sight degenerate in animals when they go to live in dark caves, while other faculties develop more powerfully, so do we find the same thing happening in the world of the spirit and the world of the senses; if one faculty develops, another must fade away. The gift of clairvoyance and the power of memory had to withdraw in order that the power of physical sight could develop. When men learnt how to conquer the world by means of the laws of nature they had discovered, they had to sacrifice the power of seership.

How different earlier outlooks were! Copernicus,³⁵ for instance, freed men from the mistaken idea that the Earth stands still. It was an error, he taught, to believe that the Sun moved round the Earth. His doctrine was further developed by Kepler and Galileo. Yet Copernicus and Ptolemy³⁶ were both right. It all depends on the stand-point from which you are looking at Sun and Earth. If you study our solar system from the astral and not from the physical plane, Ptolemy's system is right—there is the Earth at the centre and the situation is as the ancients described it. We need only remind ourselves that on the astral plane everything appears reversed. The Ptolemaic system holds good for the astral plane, the Copernican for the physical. In future times yet another, quite different picture of the world will prevail. Generally we hear that Copernicus taught only two things: that the Earth revolves on its own axis and that the Earth moves round the Sun. It is seldom noticed that he taught also a third form of movement—that the whole solar system moves onward in a spiral. For the present this fact will be left aside, but in the future humanity will return to it. Copernicus stood on a frontier, and the old outlook was strongly present in him.

There is no absolute truth—each truth has its particular mission at a certain time. We talk of Theosophy today, but we know that when we come to reborn in the future we shall hear something very different and stand in quite a different relationship to one another.

Let us cast our gaze back to a time when we were perhaps even then assembled together in some region of Northern Europe, where people gathered round a Druid priest who imparted truth to them in the form of myths and legends. If we had not heeded what he then said and if he had not influenced our souls, we should not be able today to understand the truth which Theosophy now brings to us in a different form. When we are reborn, we shall hear the truth spoken in another and a higher form. Truth evolves, as does everything else in the world. It is the form of the divine Spirit, but the divine Spirit has many forms. If we thoroughly imbue ourselves with this characteristic of truth, we shall acquire a quite different relation to it. We shall say: Indeed we live in the truth, but it can take many forms. And we shall then look at modern humanity in a quite different light. We shall not say that we possess absolute truth; we shall say that these men, our brothers, are now at a point where we also stood in the past. It is our duty to enter into what another person says; we need only make it clear to him that we value him at that stage of truth where he now stands. Everyone has to learn for himself, and thus we shall become tolerant towards every form of truth. We come to a better understanding of things; we do not battle against people but seek to live with them. Modern humanity has cultivated individual freedom. From out of this fundamental view of truth, Theosophy will develop an inner tolerance.

Love is higher than opinion. If people love one another, the most varied opinions can be reconciled. Hence it is deeply significant that in Theosophy no religion is attacked and no religion is specially singled out, but all are understood, and so there can be brotherhood because the adherents of the most varied religions understand one another.

This is one of the most important tasks for mankind today and in the future: that men should learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of occult development is empty.

• 35. Nicholas Copernicus, 1473–1543, originator of the modern astronomical world-picture.
• 36. Ptolemy, 87–165, geographer and astronomer. For him the Earth was stationary at the centre of the Universe.

For esoteric development—the true path to knowledge—the individual must find the way to understanding what it means to live in a world in which the senses, the whole physical organization, in not a facilitator; that is, to live with the psychic-spiritual, which is man's true identity, in a spiritual world. In order to do so there are many different more or less meditative exercises, mental exertions meant to affect the soul.

And to give a picture of what a human soul can pass through on the way from experiencing the physical sensory world to experiencing the spiritual world is what will be provided in these class lessons by means of the various considerations and the summarizing of such considerations in individual verses, which may then be meditated upon according to each member's possibilities and needs.

Once a certain time has passed the communications given in these class lessons, which, as I have often stressed, are real communications from the spiritual world, will coalesce in such a way that those who have participated—it is also karma for those who could be here—will have a complete picture of the first stage of esoteric development.

As a result of the various indications which are given here we can gradually rise above our earthly existence to an experience of the cosmos, we can develop the feelings which carry us out into those distant reaches of the universe from which the spiritual comes to meet us. But as long as we confine ourselves to using our senses and reason only in connection with the sense-perceptible world which surrounds us, it will be impossible for us to grasp what the spiritual world reveals as the truth accessible to man.

You see my dear friends, as I have often stressed, human common sense can understand everything offered by anthroposophy, if it exerts itself sufficiently and is free of prejudice. But it is just in reference to this common sense where a touchstone exists concerning whether or not someone is really destined by their karma nowadays to participate in anthroposophy.

There are two possibilities. One is that the person hears about anthroposophical truths, lets them work on him and considers them to be self-evident. It is obvious that everyone sitting here today belongs to that group. For if someone who does not belong to that group wishes to participate in a lesson as a member, it would not be honest of them. And honesty is the most important aspect of esoteric life—complete truthfulness penetrating the human soul and spirit.

There is another group of people who find what is presented by anthroposophy to be fantastic, somehow belonging only to visionaries. These people show by their behavior that they are not able, according to their karma, to sufficiently separate common sense from physicality and the senses to be able to grasp sense-free truth, sense-free knowledge.

It is therefore the extent to which common sense is bound to corporeality or not which determines such a great divergence between people. For if you honestly consider that you possess a common sense which understands anthroposophy, then at the moment it grasps anthroposophy honestly, it does so independently of corporeality. And this healthy common sense which grasps anthroposophy honestly is the beginning of esoteric striving. And we should treasure the fact that healthy common sense which understands anthroposophy is the beginning of esoteric striving. It should not be overlooked. For when one starts with this understanding through healthy common sense and then follows the indications given in the appropriate schools, one proceeds farther and farther along the esoteric path. You can use whichever of the verses provided here which you consider appropriate for you. But you should apply them together with the indications as to how they relate to the inner life of man.

Today I would like to again provide an indication of how you can leave the body—if only by means of so slight a jolt that you don't even realize it.

We should develop the ability to observe and study the minerals and plants in our environment to the extent that we feel them within—if only by means of thinking—and become truly aware of how this earthly environment is related to us, that due to our wearing a physical body we are directly related to the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms around us. And then we ask the question in all honesty: Why? Why did I absorb the physical substances of the earth just by being born? Why do I drag myself through life from birth till death in order to end physical life once my organism is no longer able to process its physical elements? We must deeply feel our relationship to our physical environment starting from such a personal enigma. Then, however, we will also feel more and more what the starting point for esoteric life can be. Then we feel that in physical earthly life we are blindly groping in the dark.

And finally, my dear sisters and brothers, consider the people of today who have been placed in earthly life after birth and educated according to the usual methods and called to this or that work due to purely external circumstances. They do not understand the relationship of this work to the totality of human existence. Perhaps they do not know much more than that they work in order to eat. They do not realize that in the plants they eat cosmic forces from the distant boundaries of the universe are present which pass through the human organism and therefore in a certain sense undergo a cosmic evolution. Many people today cannot even begin to glimpse this process due to the materialism of the times. But to admit that by the mere consideration of earthly relationships one stands spiritually blind in life and lives in the dark—that is the starting point for true esoteric development.

And then change the direction of your gaze from what surrounds you on the earth to the star-studded heaven—either in thought, or if you really want to be affected by it, in reality. Behold the planets, behold the stars, fill yourselves with the infinite transcendence of what shines back to you from the universe, and say to yourself: as human beings we are related just as much to what radiates down from the universe as we are to what surrounds us in the physical environment.

Then by gazing up to the star-studded heaven, we really have the feeling that we do not live in darkness, but that we are freed from life in the darkness by rising with our soul-spiritual being to the stars, rise to what the stars represent as pictures in their constellations. And, you see, if we can really enter meditating into this vision of the star-filled sky it becomes a plenitude of imaginations. You know the old pictures in which not only the constellations have been painted, but in which they have been recapitulated symbolically as animals. Not only the star group that is in Aries, or in Taurus has been represented, but also the symbolic images of the ram and the bull are included.

Today people think: Well, it was arbitrary on the part of those ancient inhabitants of the earth that just because the constellations were so named that the corresponding pictures were added. But that was not the case at all. In reality in ancient times the shepherds in the fields did not merely gaze up at the star-studded sky with physical eyes, but also in dream-consciousness or sleep-consciousness out there with their flocks they turned their souls with closed eyes towards outer space. They did not see the constellations which physical eyes see. But they actually perceived those pictures, those imaginations which fill universal space—albeit somewhat differently from what was later painted.

We can no longer go back to what the simple shepherds experienced by instinctive clairvoyance. But we can do something else. With far greater thoughtfulness we can imagine ourselves into the star-filled sky. We can feel the depth and at the same time the awesome majesty of what radiates back to us. And gradually we can come to a sense of veneration for what is expanding out there in cosmic space. And the more ardent the veneration is the more clearly can the experience be that the outer sense-images of the stars disappear and the star-filled sky becomes an Imagination for us. But only then, when the star-filled sky becomes an Imagination for us, do we feel ourselves carried away by our soul's vision.

You see, still in Plato's time one felt something special about the physical eye when it is observing. Plato himself described seeing as follows: When I look at a person something leaves my eye and encompasses him. People in ancient times sensed that something streams out of the eye and encompasses the object. The etheric streams out. Just as when I stretch out my hand and grasp something I know that I am connected to my hand until reaching the grasped object, so in the times of instinctive clairvoyance people knew that something etheric goes out from the eye and encompasses the thing looked at. Today people think, well,the eye is here, the object seen is there. So the object sends out ether-waves which drum against the eye and the drumming is perceived by some kind of soul—about which even the materialist talks about here, but without having any idea of what it is. But that is not true. It is not a mere impact on the person emanating from the object, but really also an emanation of the person's inner etheric substance.

And we perceive our ether body as belonging to the universe when the star-filled sky becomes for us the grand open page of the universe on which the imaginative secrets of cosmic being are written—if we are able to read it.

And then the feeling comes to us: When you are here on earth you are in the robust sense-perceptible reality. But you are blind, you live in darkness. When you rise up with your sensibility then you live in what otherwise only shines down to you from the distant universe, and you live in the illusion of the distant universe. But at the same time you take your own etheric being out into the distant flooding stream of this illusionary world.

And the illusion ceases to be illusion. It cannot be a nothing if we immerse ourselves in it. When we have this feeling—I will draw it—.

We live as blind people in the darkness of earthly existence, (white arc); then we journey out into the distant universe (yellow rays), at the end of which we can feel the cosmic Imaginations by means of reverence for the brilliance of the stars (red waves).

So now that we have journeyed out we are together with our etheric being within the imaginative cosmic web. If we can accomplish this, then we are no longer in the physical body. We have traveled through the etheric emptiness to experiencing the cosmic Imaginations.

You see, it's like when in the physical world someone writes something down and, because we have learned to read, we read it. By being out in the cosmos—the gods have written the cosmic imaginations for us in the cosmos—when we arrive we see the imaginations from the other side (arrows). At first we live here on the earth (inner circle). Then we draw ourselves up to the cosmic imaginations (outer wave-circle).

Yes, my dear friends, my sisters and brothers, the zodiac speaks a meaningful language when we do not observe it from the earth—Arias, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo—but rather when we encircle it from without. And it is a task of our consciousness to encircle it from without. Then we begin to read the cosmic secrets, which are the deeds of the spiritual beings. In a novel we read of the deeds of men. When we look at the zodiac from the other side and read what from the earth we see virtually from behind, as Moses was told that he always had to look at God from behind, that is, from the earth. Initiation consists of seeing from the other side—not a matter of gawking, but of reading. And what we read are the spiritual deeds of the spiritual beings who brought it all about.

And when we have silently read long enough, when our souls have concentrated deeply on this reading, then we begin to hear in a spiritual way. Then the gods speak with us. When the gods speak with us we are within the spiritual world.

Now you see, my dear sisters and brothers, the initiate can tell you: the soul can rise up to the cosmic heights, receive the cosmic imaginations, read them from the other side, the spiritual deeds, become capable of hearing in a spiritual way the language of the gods.

But if you really immerse yourself in what the initiate relates with your whole heart, your whole feeling, if you don't just listen to it greedily and say: Well, if I also could do that I'd like it, it would be interesting—but I'm not going to bother. But you receive it as something which you can revere, which you can love, which you can repeatedly meditate on, then it is the path to enter esoteric life yourself.

And you will find this path by meditating profoundly on the words:¹

1. I live in the dark domain of the earth,
2. I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
3. I read in the deeds of the spirits,
4. I hear in the speech of the gods.

When experienced with the necessary deeply meditative feeling this works wonders in the human soul, transforms the human soul. It must rhythmically flow through the soul again and again, for it leads the human being through his own interior cosmic being.

But it is necessary that such a thing be deeply interiorized. And even though it still speaks more to the head, the heart should also participate in the whole process of going out into the etheric universe, then into the spiritual universe, that is, on the other side of the universe. It is necessary in such a process that we take our hearts with us in the experience and that it stimulate in you the feelings which can come quite naturally by this excursion into the outer universe. But these feelings must be really stimulated. It is therefore good to look deeply into what the words say:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
I wander in the brilliance of the stars
I read in the deeds of the spirits.
I hear in the speech of the gods.

Then you try to imagine that someone is speaking to you from a spiritual depth, as though you were not thinking it, but as though you were hearing it, as if another being were speaking. You really imagine that another being is speaking to you from an unknown depth. Then you try to develop the right feelings for what you have heard.

These feelings live in the second part of the verse:²

5. The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,
6. The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me

When I am aware that I live blindly in the darkness of the earth, I long to get out. Then the brilliance of the stars becomes the comforter which expands my being:

The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me.

Now from the other side:

7. The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,

—when I read them—

8. The speech of the gods is creating to me.

Only you must use it correctly. Imagine yourself vividly in this meditating which you are doing. As though someone were speaking to you from spiritual depths is how you hear the lines of the first verse. You bring the corresponding feeling to each verse, so that you experience in the meditation: first listen, then bring feeling; listen, then bring feeling; and so on.³

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me.

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me.

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods is creating for me.

It is a meditation in dialog in which you always objectify the first line, but the second you feel as though streaming out of your heart. Now you try again to visualize how one acts and weaves into the other, and then try to feel with your will what you can experience through the dialog.⁴

From depth of spirit resounds:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,

The heart replies:

The darkness of the earth creates longing in me.

The will senses the impulse in the dialog between lines 1 and 5:

9. The earth's darkness extinguishes me.

After this dialog has taken place we recall the connection of lines 2 and 6:

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me.

10. The brilliance of the stars awakens me.

Afterward we recall what resounds from spiritual depths and the heart's reply:

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me.

The will now senses:

11. The deeds of the spirits call to me.

into the spiritual world.

And now the most sublime, where we feel ourselves in dialog with the gods themselves, where the gods not only let us read, but speak:

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods is creating for me.

12. The speech of the gods engenders me.

—brings me forth, engenders me.

Now imagine the whole meditation. It runs as follows: dialog—line for line with a spiritual being present in the dim spiritual depths that always speaks the top line of the verse. And the heart always replies:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me,

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods is creating for me.

Now I recall each one and add the outpouring of will as a remembrance of what had just gone before:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,
The earth's darkness extinguishes me.

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me,
The brilliance of the stars awakens me.

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,
The deeds of the spirits call to me.

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods is creating for me,
The speech of the gods engenders me.

Conviction results from the dialog in meditation, from recalling the dialog and in strengthening the recollection by means of the will.

If, firstly, with inner devotional feeling, secondly with complete soul and interest we have done what I have just described, if we do it not as mechanical meditating but as a true experience of the soul, then this means of creating a relation to the spiritual world really does have an awakening effect on the soul.

Also in the case of the last verse, which in the way I have described should really be experienced as remembrance of speech and answering speech—speech of the spirit and answering speech of the heart, we must correctly feel how, firstly, consciousness, which we wish to achieve, is extinguished by the earth's darkness. We must sense how a moment of extinguishing sleep overcomes consciousness, and how upon awakening, at the second line, we hear the spirits calling us to them, how afterward we feel: the spirits have called us so that they can bring us forth, engender us in the spiritual world by their own cosmic word.

If these nuances of inner experience flow through the soul—and the representations of the spiritual being who speaks to us are included—and the heart reciprocates with its dedication to the spiritual being, then yes, then the stimulation exists in the soul which will gradually lead this soul onto the esoteric path. And we must be clear that as we experience these three verses in our souls in the way in which I have described as best we can, something powerful takes place in the subconscious mind. If we sincerely live in these three verses as I have described, then when the first line resounds, our soul unconsciously passes through the starting-point of earthly life when the etheric body was first formed.

If we can vividly imagine what from the spirit resounds:

I live in the dark domain of the earth,

then we approach—in the unconscious—with this hearing in spirit, the moment in which our etheric body was formed; and from pre-earthly existence, from life between death and a new birth, acts the force with which we sincerely reply from the heart:

The darkness of the earth creates longing in me;

because we have the longing for the spiritual as a heritage from pre-earthly existence.

And again we are transported to the beginning of earthly existence. And what acts from our hearts is inspired by the previous earthly existence.

I wander in the brilliance of the stars:

We are transported to the beginning of our earthly life. The real comfort the brilliance of the stars can give when we are transported back is in our heart's reply:

The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me.

And then:

I read in the deeds of the spirits:

We are transported back to the earth's beginning. Remember how we are taught by spiritual beings in pre-earthly existence.

The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,

Among whom I lived and wandered before I descended to the earth.

I hear in the speech of the gods:

We heard them during the period between death and a new birth. We sense that what the gods say is not mere information as is what men say; we realize that the speech of the Gods is creative:

The speech of the gods is creating for me.

But then, if we can see it so, lines 9, 10, 11, 12 also acquire the correct meaning:⁵

I live in the dark domain of the earth,
The earth's darkness extinguishes me,
The darkness of the earth creates longing in me,

—deletes me from my present earth life for I am led back, through the region between death and a new birth, to my earlier incarnation. I divine this; therefor my consciousness is extinguished, for my consciousness was, until now, that of my current incarnation. In this moment of sleep I am transported back so I can divine: I am wandering in my previous incarnation.⁶

I wander in the brilliance of the stars,
The brilliance of the stars awakens me
The brilliance of the stars is comfort to me,

I am brought back to what I was in the previous incarnation as though awakened in it. My karma arises before me, the connection of destiny arises before me, it arises before me from the other side.⁷

I read in the deeds of the spirits,
The deeds of the spirits call to me
The deeds of the spirits are teaching to me,

to fulfill my karma with the forces which derive from my previous earth-life.⁸

I hear in the speech of the gods,
The speech of the gods engenders me.
The speech of the gods is creating for me,

Everything I am becomes clear to me when my earlier earthly existence penetrates the present one and shines through it and wanders through it and pulses through it. For here I am. My present I is in a process, it is a seed which will have meaning once I have passed through the gates of death. What shines and works in me from the previous earthly existence into the present one makes me into a human being, engenders me as an existing human being.

If we have the conviction that it is so, that—although we believe only to be in the ordinary world of physical existence—our soul really makes the journey back to the previous earth-life, then we will be aware of the gravity of what we are experiencing. And through this awareness a warmer, luminous current streams through our thinking, feeling and willing. And with that inner magical feeling, which is necessary for the meditation to work in the right way, our meditation will prevail. We may call it a magical feeling for it cannot be compared with any feeling we have on earth, because it is completely independent of all corporeality. If we cannot yet leave the physical body behind with our thinking, this magical thinking which we experience through the gravity of our soul's activity is present in the purely spiritual world.

According to the way we experience these things, our esoteric striving is fulfilled. And that is what I was obliged to lay before your souls today, my dear sisters and brothers.

In conclusion I would like to say one more thing. It should not happen that someone passes on the verses and the information given here without first asking permission. Only with permission may these things be passed on from one to another or to a group. It is especially frowned upon, my dear friends, that these verses or their interpretation be sent by post. They may not be sent by post, and I ask that this be strictly observed.

• 1. The first part of the verse is written on the blackboard.
• 2. The second part is written on the blackboard.
• 3. An arc is drawn connecting lines 1 and 5; another connecting 2 and 6, another connecting 3 and 7, and another connecting lines 4 and 8
• 4. The third part of the verse is arranged in connection with the first and the second parts while lines 9, 10, 11 and 12 are written on the blackboard.
• 5. Line 9 is written again, this time on the arc connecting lines 1 and 5.
• 6. Line 10 is written again, this time at the arc connecting lines 2 and 6.
• 7. Line 11 is written again, at the arc connecting lines 3 and 7.
• 8. Line 12 is written again, at the arc connecting lines 4 and 8.

Today, we’ll consider the human form and we shall see how much this will add to our subject matter and deepen it. The first thing to remember is that taken in its widest sense, the human form is of course connected with the whole of human life, and this is what we have to consider if we want to gain real inner understanding of it. Human beings are part of the whole universe, the cosmos. If you take it that the form of the human head primarily reflects the sphere of the cosmic universe, you may say that with regard to the head, human beings relate to the whole universe. However, to understand how human beings relate to this when at the same time they are also an entity that is complete in itself, we have to consider the way human beings relate to the world around them.

Let us begin by saying that in all their thinking, in so far as it is connected with the head, human beings turn to the whole cosmos. When at birth we bring the head into this physical world from the world of the spirit, we are encased in a living physical body and in a way able to look back to our inner reality of soul and spirit, and to a time when we were not encased in a body. It may be easiest to see what I mean if we consider how human beings gain insight and knowledge by looking back inside themselves, as it were. We are looking back inside ourselves, for instance, when we do arithmetic or geometry. We recognize the laws of geometry simply because we are human beings and are able to find the laws of physical space in ourselves. We also know that these laws fill the whole universe. This, then, is something we inevitably see when we use our eyes; everything is arranged in geometrical order; even the design of our eyes, and the way we are able to focus, is based on geometry.

Thus we are able to say that when we relate to the world through thinking, which is connected with the head, we take back into ourselves what lies spread out in the universe. One way we relate to the universe may therefore be seen as follows: The universe is reaching into us, and we are, in a way, looking back on it. This would be the way in which human beings relate to the universe, out of which they have been built, at the most superficial level.

We progress a little more if we now consider, in second place, how human beings make everything they take in from outside come alive in them. You see, when a child is born everything it went through between death and rebirth is inside it. If the child were able to develop the right kind of awareness, it would be able to look back on life before birth. Those pre-birth experiences then begin to stir. Human beings do not merely look back inside themselves to find the universe, but also look around them and see their environment. We are thus able to say: Apart from taking in the universe, we also look out into the universe around us, taking its mobility into us. We become inwardly mobile.

Now to the third aspect: In the first two, human beings are not really quite inside themselves. Having the universe inside us, say as geometry, we live in something that is really outside us. When the child begins to be inwardly mobile as it imitates the movements of the universe, it lives in something that is outside it. How does the human being become inward and become aware of self?

Just take your left hand in your right hand, thoughtfully—all you have to do is take hold of yourself and you remain entirely inside yourself. You are using your right hand for an activity, but it is you yourself you take hold of. You may take hold of other objects at other times, but in this case you take hold of yourself. All self-awareness, all inwardness, essentially is a matter of thus taking hold of oneself. We do something similar with our eyes. When we focus on a particular point, the right visual axis intersects with the left visual axis, just as the right hand takes hold of the left. Animals have less inwardness because they do much less of this taking hold of self. The third thing, therefore, would be experiencing or touching ourselves. There we are actually in the outside world and take hold of ourselves, and we are not yet inside our skin.

Let us now consider the boundary between outside and inside. We indicate the process by letting the right hand move to and fro over the left hand which it is holding. This defines a surface area we actually have all over, the covering which encloses everything inside. The fourth thing, then, is to enclose oneself. Get a real feeling for the way the skin encloses your form, and there you have the closing-off principle.

1. The universe reaching in. Looking back
2. Looking out into the universe. Taking in the mobility of the universe
3. Experiencing self, touching self
4. Enclosing ourselves.

These four things show how the human being is gradually given form from outside in. First there is the whole universe and we are outside ourselves; then imitation of the universe, where we have not yet come to ourselves. Taking hold of ourselves we find ourselves outside ourselves. With the fourth element we enclose ourselves.

For the fifth we have to look for something that is inside us, fills us, actively pulses inside us.

As to the sixth, since we not only have a skin but also something that fills it we are now inside ourselves, but this is also where the form is dissolved again; we have something that not merely fills us inside, but makes us like a fruit when it grows ripe. Take a fruit when it is just on the point of being ripe; once it goes beyond this point it starts to dry up. The sixth thing, then, is ripening.

But visualize this ripening process. As we grow ripe we begin, in a way, to decay inwardly. We cease a little bit to develop further as human beings. We are human but we decay inwardly, turning to dust, as it were. We become mineral and thus part of the outside world again. That which fills us is wholly inside. But as we fall to dust we become part of the mineral world again. We become a body that has weight, as it were. The seventh thing, then, is to become part of the inorganic world.

I have shown, on another occasion, that if we weigh a human being who walks this earth, that human being is just like a mineral. There we have the process of becoming part of the forces of outer nature. Just think—if you walk properly you involve yourself in the forces of physical nature, and if you do not walk properly you fall over. The first step in finding our place in the outside world is therefore to find our balance.

The eighth thing: We find that we do not merely become part of the outside world but also take it into ourselves as we breathe and when we eat. Before, we essentially only fathomed things that were already inside ourselves; it is a matter of being alive inside. But we take the outside world into ourselves, and at this point it has to be clearly understood that everything we take in from outside is something that does not really belong inside us.

People have the wrong idea about the way we take in things from outside. In principle, everything we eat is a little bit poisonous. Life consists in taking in food and not letting it become entirely part of ourselves, resisting it. This resistance, defending ourselves, is in fact life. The point is, however, that the foods we eat are not very poisonous so that we are able to hold our own against them. If we take in real poison it will destroy us, for we’ll not be able to defend ourselves.

Thus we may say: With the outside world, a poison sting enters into us. I have to use words that have real meaning, but today’s language and understanding does not have them. You’ll have to understand what I mean when I put these things before you.

5. Something that fills us
6. Ripening
7. Becoming part of the inorganic world. Finding our balance
8. Poison sting.

The human being is now at the point where the outside world is taken in. First we considered the way the human being is given form out of the universe. Then came the way the human being is given form from inside, and this has taken us to where the inner human being gains form by resisting the outside world.

But human beings create their form, or at least shape their lives and a little bit also their actual human form, according to the way they relate to, and are active in, the outside world. Today our activities no longer relate entirely to our human nature; we have to go back to earlier times to see human beings relating to the world around them in a way that makes them act in a truly human way. We are then able to say that in the ninth place, one human activity is to involve oneself in the outside world here on earth, and not in the universe. In their outside life in civilization people were first of all hunters.

They progressed by developing another activity—breeding of animals. That is the tenth stage, and the eleventh stage of perfection is to be a tiller of the soil. Finally the twelfth stage is to be involved in trade. - You’ll see later why I do not include other activities that followed. They were secondary. Hunting, animal breeding, tilling the soil and trading are the primary human activities.—This, then, defines the human form in relation to the earth:

9. Hunter
10. Animal breeder
11. Tiller of the soil
12. Trader

We might also show this in a drawing. Let us say this is the earth, and here we have the human being on earth. With regard to the first four form principles, form is given from outside, from the cosmos surrounding the earth (Fig. 9, left). Let us leave the middle principle aside for the moment and consider where the human being is formed by the earth to be hunter, animal breeder; here the opposite would be the case. Here the constellations influence the human being; but the influence of the constellations which are down there has to pass through the earth to reach the human being. This would mean that the human being would have to take his orientation from the earth where these stars are concerned. And the four middle principles would give human beings the potential to develop inwardly.

Thus these four principles (Table below) take us out into the universe; the last four take us to the earth, with the stars involved covered by the earth. In the four middle principles, stars and earth are in balance, and we have human beings with an inner life.

People had a feeling for this in the past. They would say: One part of the starry heavens influences human beings by forming them from outside, out of the universe. Different stars had to be seen in that role through the ages, of course, for the constellations change. But let us take, broadly speaking, the age in which we live. An ancient Greek who had given some thought to these things would say: The stars that are in the region of the Ram are acting on us from outside, and so do those in the region of the Bull, the Twins and Cancer. Through them human beings have the principle in them that looks back, the one that is inwardly mobile, the one that takes hold of itself and the one that encloses itself. To the stars down there on the opposite side, which are covered by the earth, human beings owe their existence as hunters (Archer), animal breeders (Goat), tillers of the soil—walking across the field carrying urns to water the fields (Water Carrier), and we are traders thanks to the part of the starry heavens that takes us across the seas—in far distant times boats were built to look similar to fish, and two ships side by side that have sailed the seas in pursuit of trade are the symbol for trade. If we take the liberty and call the ships “fishes” we have the twelfth sign.

The human being formed out of the universe—head

1. Taking in the universe. Looking back—Ram
2. Looking out into the universe. Taking in the mobility of the universe—Bull
3. Taking hold of ourselves (touch)—Twins
4. Enclosing ourselves—Crab, Cancer

The human being formed from within—chest

5. That which fills—Lion
6. Ripening with ear of corn—Virgin
7. Becoming part of the inorganic world. Seeking balance—Scales
8. Poison sting Scorpion

Forms of Human activity on earth—limbs or earthly human being

9. Hunter—Archer
10. Animal breeder—Goat
11. Tiller of the soil—Water Carrier
12. Trader—Fishes

In the middle we have that which fills, that is, something which acts like the blood that fills human beings. The best animal to symbolize the blood is probably the Lion, because there we have the activity of the heart at its highest. Ripening—we only need to look at a field where the wheat or rye is getting ripe; the ear of com is exactly the stage at which fruiting becomes ripening—so we have the Virgin with the ear of corn, and it is the ear of com that matters. Human beings become part of the outside world again in seeking balance—Scales. And where we feel the poison sting, and feel that everything is slightly poisonous—Scorpion.

In the past, people really had a feeling for the way the human being is connected with the universe and the earth. In our time people say: Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion ... and draw those figures, but they no longer have any real idea as to their meaning.

It is important to see these things in the right way. If you look at an old illustration of the Ram, you’ll realize that it is not a naturalistic, materialistic image of a ram. The important characteristic is, again and again, the gesture of looking back. The way the Ram looks back is the way the human being looks back on himself as he looks back to the universe that lives in him. It is the gesture that counts.

If you look at old pictures of the Bull you’ll find that the Bull always looks sideways and makes a leap. It is the gesture of looking around you and letting the general, universal principle come alive in you. Looking at the Twins you have one person on the right and another on the left, and always the right hand of the one on the right holds the left hand of the one on the left. This is the gesture of touching, feeling oneself. Two individual persons are shown in order to indicate that in a way the human being is still outside himself, and takes his pre-birth human being into himself by touching himself.

Closing off, enclosing oneself—Crab. The people who chose the Crab as the symbol for this enclosing gesture did so because the crab puts its claws around its prey. The word “cancer” actually still holds the meaning of enclose. The Crab is the symbol of the individual closing himself off, not merely touching and feeling himself but closing himself off from the outside and creating an inside.

The Lion is the animal of the heart, for the obvious reason that its heart is particularly well developed. It represents the qualities that come in fifth place.

With the quality of ripening, it is the ear of corn the Virgin holds that represents the fruiting quality when it is just on the point of drying up. The Scales show the search for balance, and the Scorpion is of course the poison sting. The Archer is really an animal form, the front part of which is a human figure with bow and arrow, like a Centaur astride an animal body. This is the hunter.

Capricorn, the he-goat, is really a goat with a fish’s tail, something which does not exist in the natural world. But human beings breed animals and thus make them as tame as tame fish. This, then, is a made-up symbol.

Agriculture is represented by the Water Carrier. There is a certain spiritual justification for thinking in terms of water, but what matters is the way he walks across the field. He holds an urn in each hand and pours water from these. This is the gardener and the tiller of the soil.

I have already suggested that the Fishes represent trade. People used to have fishes' heads up on the front part of their ships, heads of dolphins, for instance—dolphins are not fish, of course, but the ancients thought them to be. This symbol clearly points to trading activity.

Rather than consider these things in a superficial, schematic way, which is so often the case today, we have to look at the way the human being is given form and then see how this gives us the relationship to the universe and to the earth. Basing ourselves on the form, we gradually perceive the human being as part, as a member, of the whole universe. Another approach is the following. Let us take the Ram, for instance. Considering Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes from the point of view of the ancient Greeks we may say: In the shape of the head, the human being is formed out of the universe. Then mobility develops inside and the potential for symmetry. Next, however, it will be necessary to see the influence of the last constellations in the list as having the opposite effect. In this case the influences come from the earth. Activities have an effect on human beings.

If we made the figure broad at the top (see Fig. 11), we’d best make it narrow (down) here, saying: When human beings want to be hunters the qualities we may take to be those of the Archer must be particularly well developed in them. To be animal breeders they have to bend their knees a lot. The tiller of the soil has to walk; he is therefore shown stepping out, and so on. Carrying on trade: If we want to look for a symbol in the human being, it has to be the feet. All these organs are also formed from outside in. The remaining part, where the human being develops himself, is in the middle.

This figure I am drawing really arises from the twelve signs as if of its own accord. We are able to say: There (in the middle) the universe with its stars is more active in the inner human being; there (at the top) the stars act from outside, and there (below) they compress the human being. You can see that the form I have drawn is the human embryo. Basing yourself on the laws of zodiac, you really have to draw the human embryo like this, just as you get a triangle if you draw a figure that encloses 180 degrees. It is therefore immediately apparent that the human embryo is created out of the whole universe.

As I said, we have to take the point of view of the ancient Greeks to do this, for today we can no longer start with the Ram; we have to start with the Fishes. We have been in the sign of the Fishes for centuries now, and this marks the time of transition to human intellectual development. But if you go back to the time when it was right to start with the Ram and the zodiac could be seen the way the ancients saw it, you have not much more than Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes, or the occupations of the hunter, animal breeder, tiller of the soil and trader. Today we live in the age of the Fishes, during which the whole of our modern industrialized civilization has developed. Going back to the time of the Ram, we still find the four honest occupations—through modified to some extent and more complex—which place human beings in the world of nature.

Going back through the ages of the Bull, the third, second and first post-Atlantean ages, the last Atlantean age, the last but one, and so on, we would come to an earlier age of the Fishes, when human beings were still completely etheric and had not yet descended into the physical world. And because human beings were completely etheric in the earlier age of the Fishes, they are today essentially repeating everything they went through at that earlier time when they were in the process of becoming human. They have been repeating this from the middle of the 15th century, but in an abstract way. Then they were truly evolving their humanity; now they are growing into things that have been abstracted from them, for a machine is something that has been abstracted. With the new age of the Fishes, human beings are placed in something that is actually dissolving them. And when humanity enters another Water Carrier age, the process of dissolution will go a great deal further. Above all humans beings will not be able to relate to the world in any way at all unless they hold to the world of the spirit. It is exactly because of this recapitulation that humanity must move on into the world of the spirit.

Again it is possible to see that human beings are really threefold by nature: formed out of the universe in so far as they are head; developing inwardly, merely in concord with the outside world, in so far as they are chest; developing limbs and metabolism in so far as they make themselves part of the physical world, i.e. are limb people, or earth people (see Table above).

Threefoldness exists also in another respect. When we arrive in the world, the first four powers or impulses are already in us, though we only develop them afterwards. Yet in a sense we are also full human beings, for the potential for the other eight principles is also there. The head person is a whole human being, but the other parts are only rudimentary. The chest person is a whole human being, but the first and last four impulses are rudimentary. The limb person is a whole human being, but chest and head are rudimentary. So we really have three people in every human being. The first, the head person, is a metamorphosis of the previous incarnation. The chest person is the human being of the present incarnation in the true sense. And everything we do in the world around us, which comes to expression in our limbs and in our metabolism, takes us forward into our next incarnation. In this way, too, human beings are threefold by nature, and it is another way of studying the human form as a whole. We really ought to say that to draw a human being we ought to draw the head. This would be a complete human being. You can see it like this: The lower jaw really represents legs, except that in the head they point backwards; this person is sitting on his legs.

The chest person is another whole human being, with the arms more or less the outer representatives of etheric eyes. And the limb person is another whole human being, with the kidneys the eyes, for example. Even in terms of form and shape, we have three human beings fitted into one another. In the human being who has vanished into the head and become a sphere we see the previous incarnation coming alive, in the chest we have the actual human being of the present time, and in the person who is walking about we may see what will enter into the next incarnation.

In a sense we are also able to say that the way people comport themselves today shows a threefold nature. Take the human being of the limbs and metabolism: he is capable of engendering a whole human being. All you need is the human embryo in the mother’s womb and you see how the limbs and metabolism person wants to become a whole human being.

As to the chest person, look at a small baby and you can see how at that stage the head and chest still form a whole. Threefoldness therefore shows itself also in the way we grow up. And when we are no longer babies we are brought up and educated. The human head is the educator of other human beings—a child’s head, or a childish person, teaching another childish person, for essentially we are for ever children in the head. We only grow old, that is to middle age, in the middle, or chest person, and really old in our limbs. People find out about this when they get old. As the old riddle goes: We walk on all fours in our youth, then on two and later on three legs. People grow old in their limbs. In their head they always remain somehow the outcome of their previous incarnation, and throughout life the head is really a child’s head. Education theory will have to solve the problem of how the child’s-head teacher can best treat the child’s-head pupil.

These things can be amusing, but behind them lies a deep truth which must be considered if human beings are to see themselves in the right light.

Essentially the human head is a passenger carried by the rest of the human being. The legs of the head are always in a sitting position and it does not even attempt to do its own walking. The head is carried around like a passenger sitting in a coach. The chest person is the carer, and the limb person is the worker, used as a slave, and the one who really works his way through life. This is also why we have a head, in so far as we are head as a whole human being; I have said so many times. All the way to where we enclose ourselves, using the Crab principle, we are head. This is the gift of heaven and we do not have to contribute. Here (in the middle) we must breathe and eat: this is the the carer, the wet-nurse. And the true worker belongs to the sphere of Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes.

We are thus able to evolve the human form in relation to the whole universe. You need to take these things very seriously, even if they are presented with a fairly light touch and not in a pedantic way. Taking them seriously you will see that on the one hand everything I have said today holds the potential for understanding the human form out of the whole universe, and on the other hand it is something to make us feel the greatest respect for the perceptiveness of people in the past; out of instinctive clairvoyance they were able to gain the most tremendous knowledge of man from the signs of the zodiac. Today our knowledge is such that people goggle at the Ram but fail to realize that the way it turns around is the important thing; they goggle at the Bull and do not know that it is the way it leaps and looks sideways is what matters; and with the Twins the way one hand holds the other, and so on. Everything in those signs of the zodiac, every single gesture, is truly profound, and if there is no gesture, as in the case of the Lion, the symbolic element has been chosen in such a way that the sign itself has the gesture in it, with the Lion having the strongest heart beat. The Lion represents that which fills us. We can find the wisdom of those ancient days again if we look for it in ourselves.

Today I have been considering the human form, tomorrow I intend to consider human life in relation to the universe. In the following lecture we’ll consider the human soul in relation to the universe.

Good morning, gentlemen. Today we will add to what we have heard on previous occasions so that we will be better able to understand the full dignity of the human being.

I have explained roughly how nutrition and breathing work in human beings. We also talked about how closely connected nutrition is with our life and that it is essentially a process of taking in substances that are then lifeless in our intestines. These substances are then re-enlivened by the lymph vessels, and in the process they are transmitted into the blood. There this living nourishment encounters the oxygen of the air. We take in air. The blood changes. This process occurs in the chest, and it is this process that gives us our feelings.

Thus, life actually originates between the processes in the intestines and those in the blood. In turn, in the blood processes, that is, between the activities of the blood and the air, our feelings come about. Now we have to deal with the human mind as well and try to understand how it developed.

You see, understanding the external aspect of the mind has become possible only in the last sixty years. Last year, in 1921, we could have celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of this possibility. We did not, because in our time people are not very interested in celebrating purely scientific anniversaries. The discovery made in 1861 we could have celebrated sixty years later, was an important scientific discovery. It is only in the last fifty or sixty years that this matter can really be talked about. I remember it because it is just as old as I am. The discovery I am speaking of is the following.

I told you the other day how we can observe human beings. We do not need to experiment; all we need to do is pay attention to how nature experiments with people whenever they have any kind of illness. If we know how to look at what happens to the physical body when a person becomes ill in any way, we discover that nature herself arranged such an experiment for us and that we can gain insights from it.

Well, in 1861, when Broca dissected brains of deceased people who had speech impairments, he discovered that they had had an injury in the third convolution on the left side of the brain.

You know, don't you, that when we remove the top of the skull, we can see the brain? This brain has convolutions. We call one of them the temple convolution because it is located near the temple. Well now, in every person suffering from speech impediments or. muteness, there is some damage in this left convolution of the brain. This injury happens when someone has a so-called brain stroke. What happens in that case? The blood, which normally flows only through the vessels, is forced out through their walls and enters the tissue surrounding the vessels, where it should not be. Such a hemorrhage produces the stroke, the paralysis. In other words, whenever blood flows into the wrong place, into this convolution of the brain, it ultimately disables this temple convolution completely and prevents the person from speaking.

This is an interesting connection: Human beings can speak because they have a healthy left convolution of the brain. We must now understand what it means when a person has a healthy left convolution of the brain. But in order to grasp this, we need to look at something else first.

When we examine this same area of the brain in small children who have passed away, we find that this portion constitutes a fairly uniform, mushlike substance, especially at the time before the child has learned to speak. As the infant gradually learns to speak, more and more small whorls develop here. They continue to form in an artful way. In other words, the left cerebral convolutions in the child who has learned to speak or in a fully grown adult are artfully structured.

Clearly, this means that something happened to the brain while the child learned to speak. And we should not think about this any differently than we think in ordinary life. You see, if I move a table from there to here, nobody would say the table moved itself this way. It would be just as wrong for me to say that the brain has formed these convolutions by itself. Instead, I must think about what has actually taken place and what caused it. In other words, I must ask why the left temple convolution developed this way.

You see, when children learn to speak, they move their body. In particular, they move their speech organs. Before that, when they could not yet talk, they were merely fidgety, cried, and so forth. As long as the child is only able to cry, its left convolution of the brain is still a “mush,” as I described it. The more the child learns not merely to cry but also to turn this crying into individual sounds, the more this convolution receives definite shape. As long as the infant simply cries, there is only brain mush in this area. When the child begins to utter sounds, this uniform mush is transformed into the artfully structured left portion of the brain we can see in healthy adults.

Now, gentlemen, the matter stands like this: When children cry, the sounds they utter are mainly vowels such as A (as in “father”) or E (as in “gate”). When they merely cry like this, they do not need a developed left cerebral convolution; the children utter these sounds out of themselves, without having anything artful developed in the brain. If we pay some attention, we will discover that children initially make A sounds; later on they add those of U (as in “shoe”) and I (“bee”). Gradually, as you know, they also learn to utter consonants. First they form the sound A; then they add M or W and say MA or WA. In other words, out of their crying children gradually manage to form words by adding consonants to the vowels.

And how do they form these consonants? All you need to do is to pay attention to how you pronounce, for example, an M. You'll see that you must move your lips. When you were a child, you had to learn this through imitation. If you say L, you must move your tongue. Thus, you must always move some organs. From mere fidgeting the child must progress to regular movements, carried out by the speech organs in imitation. The more the child moves beyond the vowels formed in mere crying and utters consonants such as L, M; N, R, the more the left cerebral convolution is structured in an artful way.

Now we could ask how children initially learn to speak. They learn to speak only through imitation. They learn to speak, to move their lips, by imitating out of their feelings the way other people move their lips. All of this is imitation. This means that children take in, see, perceive what happens around them. And this perceiving, this mental activity, forms the brain. Just as a carver shapes a piece of wood or a sculptor works on marble and bronze, so the child's movements “sculpt” the brain. The organs the child moves carry their movements right into the brain.

If I want to pronounce L, I have to use my tongue. The tongue is connected with the brain through nerves and through other organs. This L penetrates into my left cerebral convolution and produces a structure there. In other words, the L produces forms in which one section joins the next, resembling the intestines. The M produces spherical convolutions. So you see, these sounds work on the brain.

The movements of the organs the child activates through observation are at work here in the brain. It is very interesting that since it became known that a brain stroke damages the left cerebral convolution, thus destroying the ability to speak, it became possible to know that the formation of vowels and consonants by the child continuously works on this convolution. This in turn is based on the fact that the eyes and other sense organs perceive what takes place in the world around us.

And what happens in the world around us? Well, you see, whenever we speak we are also breathing. We breathe continuously. And in this process, every breath first enters the human body, moves up the spinal column and enters the brain. This means that even while the child is crying—though as yet unable to pronounce consonants—this breath moves up and enters the brain.

What is actually entering the brain in this process? Well, blood, of course. As I explained to you in the last few days, blood flows everywhere. Through our breathing, blood is constantly being pushed into the brain. This activity begins the very moment we are born and even before, except then it occurs in a different manner. Anyhow, when we are born, we begin to breathe. This intake of air begins, which then pushes blood into the brain.

Thus we can say that as long as the baby's breathing merely pushes blood into the brain, it can only cry. Children begin to speak when not only blood is forced into the brain, but when they also perceive something through their eyes or any other organ, especially the ears. In other words, whenever they see another person move, children inwardly repeat this movement. At this moment not only the bloodstream goes up to the head, but another stream goes there as well, for instance, from the ears—the stream of the nerves.

In the left cerebral convolution, like everywhere else in the human body, blood vessels and nerve fibers meet. The latter are affected by what we observe and perceive. The child's movements in uttering consonants reach the left convolution, that of speech, via the nerves. This area is structured by the combined effect of the breathing, which is carried there by the blood, and of whatever activity comes in through the ears and the eyes. In other words, blood and nerves together structure this brain mush beautifully. Thus we see that, at least in this particular region (and it will later be found to be the same way in others), our brain is actually structured through the combined activity of perception (via the nerves) and of the constant intake of breath, which pushes the blood into the brain.

At this point, we need to understand also that this is how the child learns to speak, that is, by developing the left cerebral convolution. But, gentlemen, when you dissect a corpse, you will find that the right convolution of the brain, though symmetrically placed, shows relatively little structuring. On the one hand, we have the left convolution, which is beautifully formed, as I said before. On the other, we have the right one, which throughout life usually remains the way it was in the young child, that is, unstructured. I could say, if we had only the right convolution, we would only be able to cry. It is only because we so artfully structure the left convolution that we are able to speak.

You see, it is only when a person is left-handed and habitually tends to do most of his work with the left hand that, strangely enough, he will not lose his capacity for speech even when his left side is affected by a stroke. Dissection will reveal that in the case of this left-handed person, the right convolution of the brain was structured in the same way as the left convolution of right-handed people normally is. Movements of arms and hands, then, have a strong bearing on the formation of the brain.

Why is that so? You see, this comes about because when a person is used to doing a lot of things with his right hand, he does not merely do them with this hand, but he also gets into the habit of breathing a bit more strongly on the right side, of exerting more of an effort there. He also gets into the habit of hearing more clearly on the right side, and so forth. All of this merely points to the fact that the person in the habit of using his right hand develops the tendency to be more active on that side than on the left.

When a person is right-handed, the left convolution of the brain is structured; when he is left-handed, the right convolution is structured. What is the reason for this? Well, gentlemen, when you look at the right arm and hand and the head and the left cerebral convolution and then examine where the nerves are, you will find that there are nerves everywhere in the human body. If you did not have nerves everywhere, you could not feel warm or cold. These sensations have to do with the nerves. You have nerves everywhere in your body.

They go up the spine and reach right into the brain. But the remarkable thing is that the nerves coming from the right hand lead into the left portion of the brain, and the ones in the other hand are connected with the right side of the brain. This is because the nerves cross. Yes, the nerves cross in the brain. For instance, if I do a gymnastics exercise or a eurythmic movement with my right hand or the right arm, I sense the activity through this nerve, but I become aware of it in the left half of the brain because the nerves cross.

Let us now imagine that a child prefers to do everything with the right hand. Then the child will also breathe a bit more strongly on the right side and will also hear and see a bit better on that side. The person will make greater efforts on that side and through his movements develop something that reaches into the left side of the brain. Now you only need to imagine that we have the habit of making certain gestures while speaking, such as Ah! (corresponding gesture); or if we reject something: Eh! These gestures are perceived by our nerves. Now, the movements we make with the right hand while speaking are experienced by the left side of the brain.

By the same token, those of us who are right-handed have the tendency of pronouncing vowels and consonants more strongly with the right half of the larynx. Again these activities are taken in more vividly with the left side of the brain. This is why the brain, originally more like mush, is now a lot more structured. In contrast, we use the left side of our body much less, and that is why the right half of the brain is less developed and remains mush. However, when someone is left-handed, the opposite process takes place.

These facts lead to important conclusions for education. Just think, when you have left-handed children (you will have a few of them), you must tell yourself that whereas all the others have a very artfully developed left convolution of the brain, in the left-handed children the right convolution is structured. When I teach writing, I use my right hand. In this activity, the right-handed children will merely reinforce what they have begun to develop in their left brain convolution when they began learning to speak. However, if I now force the left-handed children to write with their right hand, I will destroy the development that learning to speak has produced in their right cerebral convolution. Yes, this development will be destroyed.

Since left-handed children are not supposed to write with their left hand, my task is now to gradually direct everything previously carried out by the left hand to the right one. This way they will initially learn to do simple things with the right hand and get into writing much more slowly than the other children. But it does not matter if they learn to write a bit later. If I simply were to make left-handed children write as fast as the right-handed ones, I would make them less intelligent because I would ruin the development that has taken place in the right side of the brain. Therefore, I must make sure to treat left-handed children differently from right-handed ones when I teach them to write. This approach will not make them less intelligent in later life, but more so, because I gradually transform their left-handedness into right-handedness, instead of merely getting their entire brain confused through making them write with the right hand immediately. If you want to affect the entire human being through writing and force this change to the right hand, pedagogically speaking, you would achieve the very opposite of what you are striving for.

Nowadays we find a widespread tendency of teaching people to do everything with both hands. This is how we really get their brains mixed up. This tendency of making people do the same thing both with the right and the left hand merely proves how little we know. Mind you, we can strive for such an ideal, but before we could realize it, we would have to change something. Gentlemen, we would first have to change the entire human being! We would slowly have to shift activities from the left side to the right and then gradually reduce them on the right. What would happen then? You see, what would happen is that, below the surface, the left cerebral convolution would be more artfully formed; but on the outside, it would remain mush. The same would happen to the right convolution. Instead of distributing two activities between the left and the right sides, we would develop each convolution into an outer and an inner half.

The inner portion would be more suitable for speech; the outer one would exist merely in order to add the vowels and consonants in crying. However, speech is a combination of what happens in crying and in articulating. This remains the same throughout life.

You see, we cannot just tinker with human beings and their development. In education, even in the lower grades, we need an understanding of the entire human being. For with everything we do we change the human being. The really criminal thing is that nowadays people monkey around considering only superficial things and ignore the inner effects of what they do.

Actually, very few people have both sides of the brain fully developed. Usually the right convolution contains more blood vessels, whereas the left one has fewer and instead is more permeated with nerves. This holds true for the human brain generally; the right side carries more blood, and the left is more used for perceiving.

Once we realize that the brain is shaped under external influences, we can appreciate how important these influences from the outside are. We see that they are tremendously significant once we understand that they affect everything that takes place in the brain. Also, out of the understanding of what occurs in the brain when we speak, we can get an idea of how the human brain works.

You see, when we examine it further, we discover that there are always more blood vessels on the outside wall of the brain than inside it. Thus we can say that the exterior part of the brain contains more blood and the interior more nerves.

Let us now consider a child learning to speak in the ordinary way, a right-handed child. How is the brain of such a child being formed? First of all, the brain of a young child is surrounded by a layer or coat, so to speak, of blood vessels. Then nerve tracts begin to form. Because of this, gentlemen, because of these nerve tracts in there, the inner brain substance appears whitish when you take it out and look at it. However, when you take out the brain matter surrounding it, it looks reddish-grey because it contains so many blood vessels.

Now what happens in this region when the child learns to speak and consequently the left cerebral convolution is structured accordingly? What takes place, you see, is that the nerve bundles, as it were, gradually extend more toward the inside and less in the area where the blood system expands. In other words, in children who develop normally the inner part of the brain shifts more to the left and the remaining portion follows. The brain thus moves to the left side, where it turns ever more whitish. It shifts that way. All of human development is based on such artful details.

Now let us talk some more about speech. You see, there are languages that have many consonants and others that contain many vowels such as A, E, I and so forth. In some languages people squeeze out the sounds, like S, W, so that one barely hears the vowels. What lies behind all this?

We know that languages differ in different regions of the earth. What does it mean when someone lives in a certain area where people focus more on the consonants? It means that he or she experiences the outer world more, for the consonants are formed in the experience of the surroundings. Therefore, in people living more in the physical world the white portion of the brain shifts more to the left. In people experiencing life more inwardly, people living in a region where things are experienced more inwardly, the white brain matter does not move quite so far to the left. These people will tend to utter melodious vowels. This varies with the regions of the earth.

Let us now assume the following, gentlemen: Let's imagine the earth and people standing at various points on the earth. And one person, let us say, is given a language rich in vowels and another one a language rich in consonants. What must have happened in their respective regions? A lot may have happened, quite a lot, but I want to focus on one thing that may have taken place. Imagine that we have high mountains and a level area, a plain. Picture then steep mountains on one side and a plain on the other. Now, wherever there are flat regions, we perceive that the language people speak there is richer in vowels. Wherever there are steep mountains, the local language tends to be richer in consonants.

But you see, this matter is not so simple after all, because we must ask how the mountains and the plains came about. This is the way it is: We have the earth, and the sun shines upon it. At one time our entire earth was unformed mush. The mountains first had to be pulled out of this mush. All right then, the earth was basically mush and the mountains were pulled up out of this mush.

Well, gentlemen, what was it that pulled the mountains up? The cosmic forces that work out there did. We can say that there are certain forces of a cosmic nature that pulled up these mountains. In some places the forces were strong and developed mountains; in other places there were weaker forces coming in out of the universe that did not produce mountains. In this latter area the earth crust was not pulled up so strongly in primeval times. And the people born on those parts of the earth crust less affected by these cosmic forces use more vowels. Persons born in areas more strongly influenced by the cosmic forces use more consonants. We see now that the differences between languages are connected with the forces of the entire universe.

Now how can we support such a claim? Well, gentlemen, what we have claimed here must be considered in the same way we look at clocks to check the time. We look at the clock to see if we must start working or if it is time to leave. But we never say, “Now this is too much! This awful minute hand is a terrible fellow who whips me on to work.” We wouldn't dream of saying that. All the clock does is tell us when we have to go to work, and so we cannot blame it for having to work, can we? In this case, the clock is completely innocent.

Similarly, we can look up to the sun and say that when we stand here at a certain moment, the sun is between us and the constellation of Aries. That is the direction where these strong cosmic forces work from. It is not Aries itself, of course. This constellation merely indicates the direction where the strong forces come from. If a person is standing in a different place at that same time, he or she is affected as follows: When the sun has moved to that place, it is in Virgo, let us say. The forces coming from this direction are weaker. Instead of going through the entire process now, I can therefore say that when someone is born in an area where at a certain time, let's say at his birth, the sun is in Aries, that person will tend to use more consonants. However, when someone is born with the sun in Virgo, he will tend to use more vowels.

You see, I can read the entire zodiac like a clock from which I can see what happens on earth. But I must always keep in mind that it is not the constellations that cause these events; they are only indicators. From this you can see that the zodiac can tell us a lot, even about the reasons why the languages on earth differ.

Now, let us look at the earth and imagine that we put a chair out there into space and look back at the earth. Of course, this is only possible in our imagination and not in reality. When we look from our chair in space at the various languages on earth, as in a sort of language map, then we get a certain picture. When we then turn the chair around and look out into the universe, we get a picture of the stars. And the two pictures match.

If we study the Southern Hemisphere and the languages there and then turn the chair around and examine the southern firmament, our experience is entirely different from the one we would have if we did the same thing in the Northern Hemisphere. This means that we could draw a map of the starry skies above us, and from our study of the connection between the stars and language we would then be able to tell which language is spoken under a particular constellation.

You see now that as soon as we begin to observe human spiritual life, for example, the formation of our minds through speech, we must look up to the stars in order to understand anything. The earth alone does not give us an answer; you can think about why languages are different as long as you like, but based on the earth alone you won't find an explanation.

If you want to know what takes place in your stomach, you must examine the earth, the soil below. If a region grows mainly cabbages, you will understand that people there must constantly re-enliven in their metabolism the heads of cabbage pulled out of the soil. In other words, if you want to know what people in a certain area eat, you must examine the soil. If you are interested in how people breathe in a particular region, you have to study the atmosphere. And if you want to know what happens inside the skull, in this brain of ours, you must look at the position of the stars. You always have to see the human being as an integrated part of the entire universe.

You see now that it is indeed mere superstition to say, “Whenever the sun is in Aries, such and such takes place.” This kind of statement is not worth anything. However, if you understand the full context, the matter ceases to be superstition and becomes science instead. And that will lead us from understanding the transformation of substances to an understanding of what is really happening and its connection to the vast universe out there.

During my last visit here I spoke about man's life between death and rebirth and how that life is connected with the great realm of the cosmos. I wanted to show how the path traversed by the human being between death and a new birth actually leads through the cosmic spheres. Let us now briefly recapitulate what was said then.

The first period after a man's death is filled with experiences connected in some way with his recent life on earth. He is emerging from, growing away from, his last earthly life, and during the first period after death the emotions, passions and feelings that affected his astral body all continue to exist. Because during physical incarnation man is conscious of these feelings only when he is actually within his physical body, it is natural that his experiences of all these forces in the astral body is essentially different when he is passing through the region of existence between death and a new birth. In normal cases, although there are many exceptions, a sense of deprivation is present during the first period after death. This is due to the fact that man must live through the experiences in his astral body without having a physical body at his disposal. He still longs for his physical body, and in normal cases this longing holds him back in the sphere of the earth for a longer or shorter period. Life in kamaloca takes its course in the sphere between the earth and the orbit of the moon, but experiences in kamaloca that are of essential significance take place in a realm nearer the earth than, let us say, the orbit of the moon.

Souls who have unfolded only few feelings and sentiments transcending the affairs of earthly life remain bound to the earth sphere by their own cravings for a considerable time. Even outwardly it is easy to understand that a man who for a whole lifetime has cultivated only such feelings as can be satisfied by means of bodily organs and earthly conditions can but remain bound to the earth sphere for a certain time. Impulses and desires quite different from those ordinarily imagined can also cause a soul to remain bound to the earth sphere. Ambitious people, for instance, who cultivate an inordinate longing for certain things within earthly conditions and who depend on the appreciation of their fellow men, thereby develop an emotional disturbance in their astral body that will result in their being bound to the earth sphere for a longer time after death. There are many reasons for which human souls are held back in the earth sphere. By far the greater majority of communications from the spirit world made by mediums stem from such souls and consist essentially of what they are striving to cast off.

Although the motives binding these souls to the earth are mostly ignoble, it need not invariably be so. It may also be due to anxiety for those who have been left behind on earth. Concern for friends, relatives and children may also act as a kind of gravity that holds souls back in the earth sphere. It is important to pay attention to this because by taking it into account we can also help the dead. If, for instance, we realize that the departed soul feels anxiety for a living person—and much can come to our knowledge in this respect—it will help the dead person in his further development to relieve him of this anxiety. We ease the life of someone who has died by relieving him, for example, of anxiety about a child whom he has left behind unprovided for. By doing something for the child, we relieve the dead person of anxiety, and this is a true service of love. Let us picture such a situation. The dead person has not available the means to rid himself of anxiety. From his realm he may be unable to do anything that would ease the circumstances of a child, a relative or a friend. He is often condemned—and in many cases this weighs heavily upon the seer—to bear the anxiety until the situation of the one left behind improves of itself or by circumstances. Therefore, if we do something to better the situation we will have performed a real deed of love for the dead one.

It has frequently been observed that a person who had planned to do something definite in life died and then continued to cling to the plan after his death. We help him if we ourselves attempt to do what he would have liked to do. These situations are not difficult to grasp. We should take account of them because they tally with clairvoyant observation.

There are many other facts that may keep a soul in the etheric sphere of the earth. Eventually he grows beyond this sphere. This process has already partly been described. Our concepts must be recast if we wish to gain an understanding of the life between death and rebirth. It is not really incongruous to speak about the dead in words taken from the conditions of earthly existence because our language is adapted to these conditions. Although what can be expressed in words about life after death tallies only in a pictorial sense, it need not necessarily be incorrect.

Descriptions are never quite accurate that convey the idea that the dead are confined to a definite place like a being who is living in a physical body. What is experienced both after death and in initiation is that one is emerging from the body and one's whole soul-being is expanding. When we follow a soul who has reached the Moon sphere as we call it, the “body” denotes the expansion of the range of experience. In actual fact the human being grows, in a spiritual sense, to gigantic dimensions. He grows out into the spheres, but the spheres of the dead are not separate from each other as in the case of men on earth. They are spatially intermingled. A sense of separateness arises because consciousness is separate. Beings may be completely intermingled without knowing anything of one another.

The feeling of either isolation or community after death of which I spoke during my last visit is connected with the interrelationships of consciousness. It is not as if a dead person were on some isolated island in a spatial sense. He pervades the other being of whose existence he is totally unaware although they occupy the same space.

Let us now consider what comes about mainly when the period of kamaloca is over. When an individual enters upon his devachanic existence after passing through the Moon sphere, kamaloca is not yet entirely at an end. This does not preclude the fact that it is within the Moon sphere that adjustments take place that are of significance not only as kamaloca experiences, but also for the later life of the individual when he again enters existence through birth. We can characterize in the following way what is added to the kamaloca experiences. A man may be so active in life that he brings all his talents to expression. But there are many men of whom we have to say, when we observe them with the eyes of the soul, that according to their faculties and talents they could have achieved in life something quite different from what they have in fact achieved. Such people have lagged behind their talents.

Something else comes into consideration. There are people who nurture a great number of intentions in the course of their life. It need not be a question of talent, but of intentions connected either with trivial or important aims. How much in life merely remains at the stage of intention without being fulfilled!

There are things in this category that need not be considered blameworthy. In order to show how significant such things may be I will mention an instance already known to some friends. Goethe embarked in his Pandora upon a poetical work and at a certain point he came to a standstill. I once explained what happened to Goethe when writing Pandora in the following way. The very greatness that had conceived the plan of the poem prevented him from completing the work. He was incapable of unfolding the power whereby the plan could have turned into reality. It was not because of shortcomings but in a sense because of his greatness that Goethe was prevented from completing Pandora. This is the case with some of his other works, too. He left them unfinished. The fragment of Pandora shows that Goethe made such considerable artistic demands upon himself that his powers, even in respect of the outer form of the poem, were simply not able to carry out the entire mighty plan with the same ease as in the fragment with which he was successful. This is obviously an example of an unfulfilled intention.

Therefore, on the one hand, a man may lag behind his talents owing to laziness or to defects in character or intellect, but the other possibility is that he may not be able to carry out his intentions in small or important matters. Now there is something great in a poet who does not complete a work such as Pandora, but every imperfection in man is inscribed by him into the Akasha Chronicle in the Moon sphere, and thus an abundance of shortcomings and imperfections come before the eye of the seer in the realm between Earth and Moon. Human imperfections, be they noble or no, are faithfully recorded there. Instances can be found in which, through physical health, through a bodily constitution, providing a good foundation for intellectual gifts, a man would have been capable of achieving certain things, but failed to do so. What he could have become but had not become when he passed through the gate of death—this is inscribed in the Akasha Chronicle.

Do not imagine that the end of Pandora is in some way inscribed in the Moon sphere. What is inscribed has to do with Goethe's astral body, namely, that he had conceived a great, far-reaching plan and only fulfilled a part of it. All such things, including trivial matters, are inscribed between the spheres of Earth and Moon. A person who forms a resolution but has not carried it out before his death, inscribes the fact of non-fulfillment in this sphere. A fairly accurate characterization can be given of what is disclosed to the eye of seership in this realm. A promise that has not been kept, for example, is not inscribed until later, actually not until the Mercury sphere is reached. An unfulfilled resolution, however, is inscribed in the Moon sphere. Anything that affects not only ourselves but also others is not immediately inscribed in the Moon sphere, but only later. Anything that affects us as individuals, that keeps us behind our proper stage of evolution and thus denotes imperfection in our personal development, is inscribed in the Moon sphere.

It is important to realize that our imperfections, especially those that need not have been inevitable, are inscribed in the Moon sphere.

It should not be thought that in all circumstances such an inscription is a dreadful thing. In a certain sense it can be of the greatest value and significance. We will speak in a moment of the meaning and purpose of these inscriptions in the Akasha Chronicle. First it must be emphasized that as the person expands into other spheres, all his imperfections are there inscribed. He expands from the Moon sphere into the Mercury sphere; I am speaking entirely from the aspect of occultism, not from that of ordinary astronomy. Something is inscribed by him in all the spheres, in the Mercury sphere, the Venus sphere, the Sun sphere, the Mars sphere, the Jupiter sphere, the Saturn sphere and even beyond.

Most inscriptions, however, are made within the Sun sphere, for as we heard in the last lecture, outside the Sun sphere a man mainly has to adjust matters that are not just left to his own individual discretion.

Thus after having cast away more or less completely what still draws him to the earth, man journeys through the planetary spheres and even beyond them. The contact thus established with the corresponding forces provides what he needs in his evolution between death and a new birth. When I spoke in the last lecture of man coming into contact with the higher hierarchies and receiving the gifts they bestow, that was the same as saying that his being expands into the cosmos. When the expansion has been completed he contracts again until he has become minute enough to unite as a spirit-seed with what comes from the parents. This is indeed a wonderful mystery. When the human being passes through the gate of death he himself becomes an ever-expanding sphere. His potentialities of soul and spirit expand. He becomes a gigantic being and then again contracts. What we have within us has in fact contracted from the planetary universe. Quite literally we bear within us what we have lived through in a planetary world.

When I was here last I said certain things about the passage through the Mercury sphere, the Venus sphere and the Sun sphere. Today I wish to speak about certain aspects of the passage through the Mars sphere. When a man passes from the Sun sphere into the Mars sphere, the conditions of existence into which he enters are quite different in our present age from what they were a comparatively short time ago. To the eyes of the seer it is quite evident that there was good reason for the statements, originating from the clairvoyance once possessed by humanity, about the several bodies composing the planetary system. It was entirely in keeping with the facts that Mars was considered to be the member of our planetary system connected with all warlike, aggressive elements in the evolution of humanity. The fantastic theories advanced by physical astronomy today about a possible form of life on Mars are without foundation. The nature of the beings who may be called “Mars men,” if we wish to use such an expression, is altogether different from that of the men on earth, and no comparison is possible. Until the seventeenth century the character of the Mars beings had invariably been one of warlike aggressiveness. Belligerency, if one may use this word, was an inherent quality of the Mars “culture.” The basis of it was formed by the rivalries and clashes between souls perpetually battling with each other. As an individual was passing through the Mars sphere between death and rebirth, he came into contact with these forces of aggression and they made their way into his soul. If when he was born again his innate tendencies made him specially able to develop and give expression to these forces, it was to be attributed to his passage through the Mars sphere.

This subject is full of complications. On the earth we live among the beings of the three kingdoms of nature, and among men. By various means we come into contact with the souls who in their life after death still retain some connection with the earth but we also encounter beings who are utterly foreign to the earth. The more an initiate is able to widen his vision, the more souls are found who are strangers on the earth, and the more it is realized that wanderers are passing through the earth sphere. They are beings who are not connected with earthly life in the normal way. This is no different for us as men of earth than it is for the moon dwellers through whose sphere of life we also pass between death and a new birth. When we are passing through the Mars sphere, for example, we are ghosts, specters, for the Mars dwellers. We pass through their sphere as strangers, as alien beings. But the Mars beings, too, at a certain stage of their existence, are condemned to pass through our earth sphere and one who possesses certain initiate faculties encounters them when conditions are favorable.

Beings of our planetary system are continually streaming past each other. While we are living on earth, often imagining that we are surrounded only by the beings of the different kingdoms of nature, there are itinerants from all the other planets in our environment. During a certain period between death and a new birth we, too, are itinerants among the other planetary “men,” if one might speak in this way. We have to develop in our lives on earth the essentials of our particular mission in the present epoch of cosmic existence. Other beings are allotted to the other planetary worlds, and between death and rebirth we must contact these worlds, too. Therefore, when reference is made to one region or another of life in Devachan, it is actually the case, although it is not expressly stated, that the happenings are taking place in some sphere of our planetary system. This should be borne in mind. Thus at a certain time in life between death and a new birth we pass through the Mars sphere.

Just as the process of the earth evolution is a process of descent until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and of ascent from then onwards, so also do the other planets undergo an evolution in their own way. From the year 33 A.D. the date is approximately correct, the earth entered upon an ascending process of evolution. That year was the pivotal point in the earth's evolution. On Mars the pivotal point was at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Until then, the evolution of conditions on Mars had been a process of descent and from that time onwards a process of ascent has occurred because an event of the greatest significance for that planet then took place.

In connection with earth evolution we know of the remarkable personage Gautama Buddha. He was a Bodhisattva until in the twenty-ninth year of his life he rose to the rank of Buddhahood and was then destined never to be incarnated again in a physical body on earth. From other lectures you will have heard, however, that later on the Buddha still worked into the earth sphere from the spiritual world. He sent his forces into the astral body of Jesus child of the Gospel of St. Luke. But in another way, too, he influenced earthly life without incarnating into a physical body. In the seventh and eighth centuries there was a mystery school in the southeast of Europe for those who at that time were endowed with some degree of seership. The teachers in that school were not only individualities in physical incarnation but there were also those who work from spiritual heights only as far as the etheric body. It is possible for more highly developed men to receive instruction from individualities who no longer, or never, descend into a physical body. The Buddha himself was a teacher in the mystery school. Among his pupils at that time was the personality who was born later on in his next incarnation as Francis of Assisi. Many of the qualities so impressively displayed in that later life are to be traced to the fact that Francis of Assisi had been a pupil of Buddha.

Here we see how the Buddha continued to work from spiritual heights into the earth sphere after the Mystery of Golgotha, and how he was connected with the life of man between birth and death.

Then, in the seventeenth century, the Buddha withdrew from earthly existence and accomplished for Mars a deed that, although not of the magnitude of the Mystery of Golgotha, nevertheless resembled it and corresponded on Mars to the Mystery of Golgotha on earth. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Buddha became the redeemer, the savior of Mars. He was the individuality whose mission it was to inculcate peace and harmony into the aggressive nature of Mars. Since then the Buddha impulse is to be found on Mars, as the Christ impulse is to be found on the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha.

The destiny of the Buddha on Mars was not death as in the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet in a certain respect, it, too, was a kind of crucifixion inasmuch as this wonderful individuality, who in keeping with his life on earth radiated universal peace and love, was transferred into the midst of what was completely alien to him, into the aggressive, warlike element on Mars. It was Buddha's mission to exercise a pacifying influence on Mars. For the gaze of seership there is something tremendously impressive in the picture of two collateral events. The Buddha had risen to the highest point attainable in his earthly existence, to the rank of Buddhahood, and had lived on earth as the Buddha for fifty years. Then in his eightieth year, on October 13, 483 B.C, on a glorious moonlit night, he breathed out his being into the silvery radiance glimmering over the earth. This event, which even outwardly seems to be a manifestation of the breath of peace emanating from the Buddha, bears witness to the fact that he had attained the zenith of development within his earthly existence. It is deeply impressive to contemplate his wonderful happening in connection with that moment at the beginning of the seventeenth century when, with all his abounding powers of peace and love, the Buddha went to Mars in order that those powers might stream from him into the aggressiveness prevailing there to gradually inaugurate the process of Mars' ascending evolution.

When a soul passed through the Mars sphere in times before the Buddha Mystery, it was endowed primarily with forces of aggressiveness. Since the Buddha Mystery a soul undergoes essentially different experiences if it is fitted by nature to gain something from the Mars forces. To avoid any misunderstanding it must be emphasized that as little as the whole earth today is already Christianized, as little has Mars become entirely a planet of peace. That process will still take a long time so that if a soul has any aptitude for receiving elements of aggressiveness there is still ample opportunity for it. Nevertheless, we must not lose sight, spiritually, of the event of which we have spoken. The more deeply the earth enters into a phase of materialism, the less will anyone who really understands the evolutionary process admit that it would be natural for a man in his life between birth and death to follow Buddha in the way that men followed him in pre-Christian times. The development of natures such as that of Francis of Assisi will gradually become less and less possible on earth, less and less suitable for external civilization. Nevertheless, between death and rebirth the soul is able to pass through this experience. Grotesque as it may seem, yet it corresponds to the facts, for a certain period between death and a new birth, during the passage through the Mars sphere, every human soul has the opportunity of being a Franciscan or a Buddhist and of receiving all the forces that can flow from feeling and experience of this kind. The passage through the Mars sphere can therefore be of great importance for the human soul. Man, however, inscribes his perfections and imperfections into whatever sphere he enters according to their affinity with the characteristic qualities of that sphere.

Between death and rebirth our perfections and imperfections are faithfully recorded in the Akasha Chronicle. Certain attributes are inscribed in the Moon sphere, others in the Venus sphere, others in the Mars sphere, others in the Mercury sphere, others in the Jupiter sphere, and so on. When we are returning to an incarnation in a physical body and our being is slowly contracting, we encounter everything that was inscribed on the outward journey. In this way our karma is prepared. On the path of return we can inscribe into our own being the record of an imperfection we ourselves first inscribed into the Akasha Chronicle. Then we arrive on the earth. Because there is within us everything we inscribed into our being on the return journey, and we are obliged to inscribe a great deal even if not everything, because of this our karma unfolds. Up above, however, everything still remains inscribed.

Now these inscriptions work together in a remarkable way. They are engraved into the spheres, into the Moon sphere, Venus sphere, and so on. These spheres are involved in certain movements so that the following may happen. Let us say that a man has inscribed one of his imperfections into the Moon sphere. While passing through the Mars sphere he has inscribed there a quality of his character through the fact that he acquired in that sphere a certain element of aggressiveness that was not previously in him. Now on the return journey he passes through the Mars sphere again and comes back to the earth. He lives on the earth and has received into his karma what he has inscribed in the Mars sphere but at the same time it stands recorded above him. Up there is Mars, in a certain relationship to the Moon. (The outer planets indicate the relative positions of the spheres.) Because Mars stands in a certain relationship to the Moon, the inscription of the aggressive element and the man's imperfections are, as it were, in the same constellation. The consequence is that when the one planet stands behind the other they work in conjunction. This is the time when the individual in question will tackle his imperfections with the aggressive quality acquired from Mars. So the position of the planets really does indicate what the man himself has first inscribed into these spheres.

When in astrology we ascertain the positions of the planets and also their relative positions to those of the fixed stars, this gives some indication of what we ourselves have inscribed. The outer planets are in this case a less important factor. What actually has an effect upon us is what we ourselves have inscribed in the several spheres. Here is the real reason why the planetary constellations have an effect upon man's nature. It is because he actually passes through the several planetary spheres. When the Moon stands in a certain relationship to Mars, and to some fixed star, this constellation works as a whole. That is to say, the Mars quality, Moon and fixed star work in conjunction upon the man and bring about what this combined influence is able to achieve.

So it is really the moral inheritance deposited by us between death and rebirth that appears again in a new life as a stellar constellation in our karma. That is the deeper basis of the connection between the stellar constellation and man's karma. Thus if we study the life of a man between death and a new birth we perceive how significantly he is connected with the whole cosmos.

An element of necessity enters into a man's connection with the realms lying beyond the Sun sphere. Let us consider the Saturn sphere in particular. If during his present earth life a man has made efforts to master the concepts of spiritual science, the passage through the Saturn sphere is of special significance for his next life. It is in this sphere that the conditions are created that enable him to transmute the forces acquired through the knowledge of spiritual science or anthroposophy into forces that elaborate his bodily constitution in such a way that in his coming life he has a natural inclination towards the spiritual. A human being may grow up today and be educated as a materialist, Protestant or Catholic. Spiritual science approaches him. He is receptive to it and does not reject it. He inwardly accepts it. He now passes through the gate of death. He enters the Saturn sphere. In passing through it, he absorbs the forces that make him in his next life a spiritual man, who shows even as a child an inclination to the spiritual.

It is the function of every sphere through which we pass between death and rebirth to transform what our souls have assimilated during an incarnation into forces that can then become bodily forces and endow us with certain faculties. Yesterday I could only go as far as is possible in a public lecture when I said that the true Christian impulses were already in Raphael when he was born. This must not be taken to imply that Raphael brought with him some definite Christian concepts or ideas. I have said impulses, not concepts. What has been taken into the conceptual life in one incarnation is united with the human being in quite a different form. It appears as impulses or forces. The power that enabled Raphael to create those delicate, wonderful figures of Christianity in his paintings came from his earlier incarnations. We are justified in speaking of him as a “born Christian.” Most of you know that Raphael had been incarnated previously as John the Baptist, and it was then that the impulses that appeared in the Raphael existence as inborn Christian impulses had penetrated into his soul.

It must always be emphasized that conjectures and comparisons may lead far off the mark when speaking about successive incarnations. To the eyes of seership they present themselves in such a way that in most cases one would not take one life to be the cause of the next. In order that something assimilated in the life of the soul in one incarnation may be able to unfold forces in the next incarnation that work upon the bodily foundation of talents, we must pass through the period from death to rebirth. On earth and with terrestrial forces it is impossible to transform what our souls have experienced in earthly life into forces capable of working upon the bodily constitution itself. Man in his totality is not an earth being, and his physical form would have a grotesque appearance according to modern ideas if only those forces present in the earth sphere could be applied to his bodily development.

When an individual comes into existence through birth he must bear within him the forces of the cosmos, and these forces must continue to work within him if he is to assume human form. Forces that build up and give shape to such forms cannot be found within the earth sphere. This must be borne in mind. Thus in what he is man bears the image of the cosmos in himself, not merely that of the earth. It is a sin against the true nature of man to trace his source and origin to earthly forces, and to study only what can be observed externally in the kingdoms of the earth through natural science. Nor should we ignore the fact that everything a man receives from the earth is dominated by what he brings with him from those super-earthly spheres through which he passes between death and rebirth. Within these several spheres he becomes a servant of one or the other of the higher hierarchies.

What is inscribed in the Akasha Chronicle between the earth and the moon is of special importance because it is there that among other things all imperfections are recorded. It should be realized that the inscribing of these imperfections is governed by the view that every record there is of significance for the individual's own evolution, either furthering or hindering his progress. Because it is there inscribed in the Akasha Chronicle between earth and moon, it also becomes significant for the evolution of the earth as a whole. The imperfections of really great men are also recorded in that sphere. One example of tremendous interest for clairvoyant observation is Leonardo da Vinci. He is a spirit of greatness and universality equaled by few others on earth, but compared with what he intended, his actual achievements in the external world in many respects remained incomplete. As a matter of fact, no man of similar eminence left as much uncompleted as Leonardo da Vinci. The consequence of this was that a colossal amount was inscribed by him in the Moon sphere, so much indeed that one is often bound to exclaim, “How could all that is inscribed there possibly have reached perfection on the earth!”

At this point I want to tell you of something that seemed to me quite significant when I was studying Leonardo da Vinci. I was to give a lecture about him in Berlin and a particular observation made in connection with him seemed to be extremely important. It fills one with sadness today to see on the wall of the Church of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan the rapidly disappearing colors that now convey no more than a faint shadow of what the picture once was. If we remember that Leonardo took sixteen years to paint this picture, and think of how he painted it, we gain a definite impression. It is known that he would often go away for a long time. Then he would return to the picture, sit in front of it or many hours, make a few strokes with the brush and go off again. It is also known that many times he felt unable to express what he wished in the painting and suffered terrible fits of depression on this account. Now it happened that a new prior was appointed to the monastery at a time when Leonardo had already been working at the picture for many years. This prior was a pedantic and strict disciplinarian with little understanding of art. He asked impatiently why the painter could not finish the picture, reproached him for it and also complained to Duke Ludovico. The Duke repeated the complaint to Leonardo and he answered, “I do not know whether I shall ever be able to complete this picture. I have prototypes in life for all the figures except those of Judas and Christ. For them I have no models, although in the case of Judas, if no model turns up I can always take the prior. But for the Christ I have no prototype.” That, however, is digressing.

What I want to say is that when one looks today at the figure of Judas in the picture that has almost completely faded, a shadow is to be seen on this figure, a shadow that cannot be explained in any way, either by the instreaming light or by anything else. Occult investigation finds that the painting was never as Leonardo da Vinci really wanted it to be. With the exception of the figures of Judas and the Christ he wanted to portray everything through light and shadow, but Judas was to be portrayed in such a way as to give the impression that darkness dominated the countenance from within. This was not intended to be conveyed by external contrasts of light and shadows. In the figure of Christ the impression was to be that the light on His countenance was shining from within, radiating outwards from within. But at this point disharmony beset Leonardo's inner life, and the effect he desired was never produced. This affords a clue when one is observing the many remaining inscriptions made by Leonardo in the Moon sphere. It is an example of something that could not be brought to fulfillment in the earth sphere.

When the period following that of Leonardo da Vinci is investigated, it is found that Leonardo continued to work through a number of those who lived after him. Even externally there can be found in Leonardo's writings things that later on were demonstrated by scientists and also by artists. In fact, the whole subsequent period was under his influence. It is then discovered that the inscribed imperfections worked as inspirations into the souls of Leonardo's successors, into the souls of men who lived after him.

The imperfections of an earlier epoch are still more important for the following epoch than its perfections. The perfections are there to be studied, but what has been elaborated to a certain degree of perfection on the earth has, as it were, reached an end, has come to a conclusion in evolution. What has not been perfected is the seed of the following divine evolutionary process. Here we come to a remarkable, magnificent paradox. The greatest blessing for a subsequent period is the fruitful imperfection, the fruitful, justifiable imperfection of an earlier period. What has been perfected in an earlier epoch is there to be enjoyed. Imperfection, however, imperfection originating in great men whose influences have remained for posterity, helps to promote creative activity in the following period. Hence, there is obviously tremendous wisdom in the fact that imperfections remain in the neighborhood of the earth, inscribed in the records of the Akasha Chronicle between earth and moon.

This brings us to the point where we can begin to understand the principle that perfection signifies for the different epochs the end of a stream of evolution, and imperfection, the beginning of an evolutionary stream. For imperfection in this sense men should actually be thankful to the gods.

What is the purpose of studies such as are contained in this lecture? The purpose is to make man's connection with the macrocosm more and more comprehensible, to show how men bear the macrocosm compressed within them and also how they can be related to their spiritual environment. Realization of what these things mean can then be transformed into a feeling that pervades a man in such a way that he combines with this knowledge a concept of his dignity that does not make him arrogant, but fills him with a sense of responsibility, prompts him to believe not that he may squander his powers, but that he must use them.

It must, of course, be emphasized that it would be futile to say, “I had better leave imperfect such faculties as I possess.” Nothing whatever could be gained by such an attitude! If a man were deliberately to ignore his imperfections, he would, it is true, inscribe them as described, but they would have no light nor would they be capable of having any effect. Only those imperfections that are inscribed because they were due to necessity and not to result of laziness can work in the way that has been described.