The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It is easy to see how the conceptions of spiritual science that have been voiced for some years within our circle, and in the German section generally, are spreading more and more in the world, that understanding of them is beginning to find its way into the hearts and souls of our contemporaries. It is naturally not possible, although it might be a help to present day understanding, to speak casually of introducing the ideas, feelings, and knowledge of our spiritual movement into the modern world. Many of you might be glad to know how the spiritual nourishment you have received has affected other souls at the present time. It is only on certain occasions that we can speak of the spread of our spiritual ideas, but it may fill you with a certain satisfaction to know that we can see again and again how in different countries and in different hemispheres the spirit which inspires us is gaining a footing—more in one place, less in another. When I was in Triest a short time ago trying to arouse some comprehension of our point of view, I could see how the ideas we hold were gaining ground. And when from that southern city I passed northwards to Copenhagen, where, in a recent course of lectures, I tried to arouse some interest in the hearts of my hearers, it could be seen there also how the spirit we cherish under the symbol of the Rosy Cross is entering into them more and more. Taking together these separate facts one sees that a need and a longing for what we call “spiritual science” does exist at the present time.

That we should not carry on any agitation or propaganda is a fundamental principle of our spiritual movement; we should rather listen attentively to what of the great wisdom of the world the hearts and souls of the men of to-day required, so that they may have both the possibility and the certainty of life. We may therefore add to the thoughts put forward in a general lecture like this, one more—that we consider it a kind of duty at the present time to make of these spiritual. thoughts nourishment for other souls. This depends upon the whole manner in which we enter into the life of our time.

You have doubtless already accepted sufficient of the great law of Karma to know that it is not a matter of chance when an individual feels constrained at a certain point of time to assume a physical body and come down in the physical world. All the souls gathered here have felt a longing to assume a physical body at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because they desired to experience in their own souls all that was being prepared and carried out in their physical environment at this time.

Let us now consider our own age as it appears spiritually to souls, which, like our own, are born in it. Things were very different in the spiritual world, as well as in the external world, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to what they were even fifty or sixty years earlier.

The person who is making progress—and you are all in this position—is trying to learn something of the spirit, and of the spiritual guidance of the world; of what fills surrounding space as the creatures of the different kingdoms of nature, and of what enters into our own souls. For the past half century souls longing for the spirit found extraordinarily little true spiritual nourishment where they hoped to find it. This longing for the spirit exists deep within the souls of all men, it is easily silenced for it does not speak loudly, but the longing is there, and each one whatever he is, or does in life, can receive true spiritual nourishment. Whatever department of science people take up to-day, they only learn from it external material facts which serve to further the progress of civilisation in a bright and clever way, but they learn nothing of what is revealed to man through the spirit. Whether he works as an artist or in some practical walk of life he finds little of what he has need, nothing that can enter his soul, his head, or his hands, to give him power and impulse for his work, and also assurance, solace, and power in life. At the beginning of the nineteenth century people had already come to the conclusion that in the near future little of this would be found. Many a one said to himself in the first half of the nineteenth century when some remnants of the old life still remained even if in another form:—“There seems to be something in the air; it is as if the ancient treasures of the spirit that have come down to us from olden times were disappearing. It is as if the expected advance in culture of the nineteenth century had entirely wiped out the spiritual communications that have been handed down to us from ancient times.” Many such voices were,heard,in the first half of the nineteenth century. To show what I mean I will mention but one example. There was a man living at that time who knew the old kind of Theosophy well; he knew also that this old form would completely disappear in the course of the nineteenth century, yet he was firmly convinced that a future was coming when the old Theosophy would surely return. The passage I am about to read was written in the year 1847, when the first half of the nineteenth century was drawing to a close. He who wrote it was a thinker such as is no longer met with to-day, for he was still conscious of the last echoes of those ancient communications which have long since been lost to us:—

What Theosophy really desires is often difficult to discover from the older theosophists, and this is even less clear to-day, because on its present path theosophy can attain to no scientific existence, and therefore cannot have any great results. It would be most premature to conclude from this that it is a passing phenomenon without scientific justification. History loudly proclaims the opposite. It tells how it can never get to the bottom of this mysterious phenomenon which breaks out unnoticed again and again, and whose changing forms are preserved by the links of a never-dying tradition. At all times there has really been little that has connected this vital, speculative need, with vital religious needs. It is only for these last that theosophy exists. The main thing is, if it might one day become really scientific, and produce clearly defined results, so that it would become popular and come to be accepted generally, and in this way bequeath these truths to others who are unable to travel the path on which alone they could discover them for themselves. But all this rests within the womb of the future which we have no wish to anticipate; for the present we are thankful for the beautiful writings of Oetinger, which can certainly reckon on a large circle of sympathisers.¹

From this we see how the theosophic spirit was regarded in 1847 by a man like Richard Rothe of Heidelberg.

What kind of spirit is the theosophic spirit really?

It is a spirit without which true culture would never have taken place. When we think of what is greatest in this, we think of the spirit without which there would have been no Homer, no Pindar, Raphael or Michelangelo, without which there would have been no deep religious feeling in man; neither spiritual life nor external culture. Everything a man creates must be created by the spirit; if he thinks he can produce anything without it, he is unaware that his whole spiritual endeavour would in that case fail for a certain time. The less spiritual the source from which anything comes the sooner it dies. Anything having enduring worth must have its source in spirit. The smallest creative act, even in everyday concerns, has an eternal value and connects us with what is eternal; for everything done by man is under the guidance of spiritual life. We know that theosophical life as cultivated by us is founded in Rosicrucianism, and it has often been explained that since the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Masters of Rosicrucian wisdom had been preparing what has come to pass since the end of the nineteenth century and will go on further into the twentieth. What was indicated by Rothe as a “future” he hoped and longed for, has already become “present” for us to-day, and will continue to become so more and more. This had long been in preparation by those who allowed this spiritual influence to pour, at first unconsciously, into mankind.

What in a special sense we have called the “Rosicrucian path” has been consciously accepted within our theosophical movement since the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and what the spirit has imprinted as science on the people of Europe, has since then flowed into our hearts.

Can we form an idea from what has taken place in our civilisation of how this spirit works?

I have said that since the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it has “worked” as the true Rosicrucian spirit, but it was always there, and has only assumed this last form since the dates mentioned. This spirit that is active at present as the Rosicrucian spirit goes back to very early ages of humanity. Its mysteries existed in Atlantis. The activity it has recently developed, becoming ever more and more conscious, streamed not so very long ago in an unconscious way into the hearts and souls of men. Let us try to form some idea of how this spirit entered man unconsciously.

We meet together here, and our studies show us how the human soul has developed in this or that, till it has gradually attained to a region where it understands spiritual life, where it may even perhaps see spiritual life. Many of you have striven for years to fill your souls with thoughts and ideas which can set the spiritual life before your eyes. You know the way we regard the secrets of the world. I have often explained the different stages of development the soul passes through, and how it rises to higher worlds. You know that we have to distinguish a higher from a lower part of the self; that man has come over from other planetary conditions and has experienced the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions. During these his physical body, etheric body and astral body were formed; he then entered on his earthly development. You know that something dwells within us that passes through its training here so as to rise to higher conditions. You have heard that certain Beings remained behind on the Moon as Luciferic Beings, and these later approached the human astral body as tempters, giving to humanity in this way what they had to give. Then we have often spoken of how man has to overcome certain things in his lower self, that he has to conquer them before he can enter those spheres to which his higher self belongs—that in order to reach these higher regions he has to fulfil the saying of Goethe:—

Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses Stirb und Werde,
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde.

“So long as thou hast not experienced death and becoming, thou art a gloomy (sorry) Guest upon a dark earth.”

We have also said that the human evolution possible to-day, and that can give us power, certainty, and real content in our lives, is only to be attained when we learn, for instance, of the manifold natures of man, and that this man is not put together in any chaotic manner, but consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. This must not be accepted merely as words, but by describing different temperaments, by studying the education of man, we have presented clear conceptions of these things, showing how up to his seventh year he is concerned with the development of the physical body, up to his fourteenth year with that of the etheric body, and up to his twenty-first year with the astral body. And we learnt from our studies dealing with the mission of truth, of devotion, of anger and so on that what we describe as physical body, etheric body, and astral body, feeling-soul, rational-soul and consciousness-soul are no abstract ideas, but that they impart life to our whole mental outlook, making everything around as clear and full of meaning.²

It is possible by such ideas to gain understanding of the secrets of the world. And if there are many who consciously or unconsciously persist in their materialistic opinions, there is also a certain number of souls who feel it as a necessity of existence to listen to such statements as we are able to give. Many of you would not have shared in what has been practised herefor years if it were not a necessity of your life. Why are there souls present to-day who understand the views and ideas evolved here, and who conduct their lives in accordance with them? Because, as you have been born into the world with longings such as I have described, so your forefathers (which means many souls present here to-day) were born in past centuries into other surroundings and into another world than that of the nineteenth century. Let us look backwards to the sixth and seventh, or to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when many who are here now were incarnated, and let us see what these souls experienced at that time.

There was no theosophical society in those days where people discussed things as we do here, but souls then heard something quite different from the people about them. Let me try to call up before you what these souls heard. They did not travel from place to place in order to hear lectures on spiritual science, but they heard rhapsodists who passed from village to village, from place to place, declaring things concerning the spirit. What did these people say? Let us recall a single instance of this. People did not then say:—“We have a Theosophy, a teaching concerning the lower and higher ego, that deals with the different members of man's Being and so on,” but rhapsodists travelled through the land, men who were called by the spirit to declare somewhat as follows:—(I am now repeating some of the things that were spread abroad through Middle and Eastern Europe at that time).

There was once a king's son. He rode forth and came presently to a deep ditch, he heard moaning proceedi.ng from it. He followed the course of the ditch to discover the cause of the moaning, and there he found an old woman. He left his horse, descended into the ditch, and helped the old woman out. He then saw that she could not walk for she had injured her leg, so he asked her how this accident had come about. She then told him:—I am an old woman and I must rise early soon after midnight in order to go to the town to sell eggs. On the way I fell into this ditch.” The king's son said:—“Thou canst” not now reach thine own dwelling. I will set thee on my horse and take thee there.” This he did. The old woman said:—“Although of noble birth thou art a kind and good man, and because thou hast helped me, thou shalt receive a reward from me.” He now guessed that she was something more than an old woman. Then she said:—“Because of the kindness thou hast shown me thou shalt receive the reward that thy good soul deserves. Dost thou desire to marry the daughter of the Flower-Queen?” “Yes,” he said. Then, she continued:—“To do so thou hast need of what I can easily give thee.” And she gave him a little bell, saying:—“When this is rung once the king-eagle will come with his hosts to help thee, whatever the position in which thou mayst be, when thou ringest twice the king of the foxes with his pack will come to help thee, wherever thou art, and if thou ringest thrice the king of the fishes will come with his hosts and will help thee wherever thou art.”

The king's son took the little bell and returned home and said that he was going to seek the daughter of the flower-queen, and rode forth. He rode a long, long time and no one could tell him where the daughter of the flower-queen dwelt. His horse was by this time worn out and broken down, so that he had to pursue his wanderings on foot. He met an old man and asked him where the dwelling of the flower-queen's daughter was. “I cannot tell thee,” said the old man, “go on further and ever further, and thou wilt find my father, and he will perhaps tell thee.” So the king's son went on further, and at last found a very ancient primeval man of whom he asked if he could tell him where the flower-queen dwelt with her daughter. Then the old man said to him:—“The flower-queen dwells afar in a mountain that thou canst see in the distance from here. She is, however, watched over by a savage dragon. Thou canst not reach her, for the dragon never sleeps in these days; there is only a certain time in which he sleeps, and this is his waking time. But thou must go still further to another mountain, there lives the dragon's mother. Through her thou will reach thy goal.” Courageously he went on. He reached the first mountain, then the second mountain; there he found the dragon's mother, the archetype of all ugliness. But he knew it depended on her whether he would find the daughter of the flower-queen or not. He then saw near the first, seven other dragons who all desired to watch over the flower-queen and her daughter, who had long been held prisoners and who were to be liberated by a king's son. He said to the dragon's mother:—“O, I know that I must be thy bondsman if I am to find the flower-queen!” “Yes,” she answered, “thou must be my bondsman,” and thou must do me a service that is not easy. Here is a horse, thou must lead him out to pasture the first day, the second and the third day. If thou bringst him home safe then on the third day perhaps thou mayst attain thy desire. But if thou doest not bring him safe home the dragon will eat thee—we shall all eat thee.” The next morning he was given the horse. He tried to lead it to the pasture, but soon the horse escaped from him. He sought it but could not find it, and was most unhappy. He remembered the little bell the old woman had given him. He drew it forth and rang it once. Then many eagles appeared led by the king-eagle. They found the horse, and he was able to lead it back to the mother dragon. She said:—“Because thou hast brought it back I will give thee a mantle of copper; with it thou canst take part in the ball that is to be given tonight in the circles of the flower-queen and her daughter.”

On the second day he was again to take the horse to the meadow. It was given to him, but soon it escaped again, and nowhere could he find it So he drew forth the little bell again and rang it twice. Immediately the king of the foxes appeared with a large following. They found the horse, and he was able to restore it to the dragon's mother. She then said to him:—“To-day thou shalt receive a silver mantle with which thou canst again attend the ball that takes place tonight in the circle of the flower-queen and her daughter.” At the ball the flower-queen's daughter said to him:—“Demand on the third day a number of these horses, with them thou canst rescue us and we shall be united.” On the third day the horse was again handed over to him so that he could take it to the pastures. At once it escaped again, for it was very wild. He drew forth his little bell and rang it three times. The fish-king then appeared with his following. They found the horse and he took it back a third time. He had successfully performed his task. The dragon mother then gave him as recompense a mantle of gold as his third covering; with it he could take part on the third day at the ball at the flower-queen's dwelling. Besides this he was able to bring as a fitting present to her those horses that he had taken care of. With them he could carry the flower-queen and her daughter to their own fortress. And round this fortress which all the others wished to steal from her they allowed a thick hedge of bushes to grow so that the fortress could not be taken.

Then the flower-queen said to the king's son:—“Thou bast won my daughter, thou shalt have her by and by, but only on one condition. Thou shalt only have her for half the year, the other half she must withdraw from the surface of the earth so that she may be with me; only thus is it possible for thee to be united with her.”

In this way he won the daughter of the flower-queen and lived with her always for half the year; during the other half she was with her mother. This and other stories entered into very many souls. They listened to them, but did not interpret them allegorically after the manner of the strange theosophists of recent times; for these things have no value as symbolic or allegoric statements. No! people accepted them because they found pleasure and joy in them, they felt warm life flow through their souls when they listened to such tales.

There are many souls living now who heard such tales and accepted them with joy. And when received in this way they continued to live within these souls, they turned into thought-forms, into feelings and perceptions, thus they became something different than they were before. This produced results, it imparted powers to such souls, and these powers were changed, they were transformed into something else. Into what were they changed?

They were changed into that which lives in men's souls to-day as longing for a higher elucidation of these same secrets, a longing for theosophy. The rhapsodist did not tell of people who strove towards their higher self, and to attain it must conquer the lower self which held them down, but they told of a king's son who, as he rode forth through the world, found an old woman in distress, and did a good and kindly deed! To-day, we say:—People must do good deeds, deeds of love and sacrifice. At that time men spoke in images. To-day we say:—Men must feel within such sympathy for the spirit that they divine something of the spiritual world, something that connects them with it, and enables them to develop forces that can put them in touch with it. In earlier times men were told in parables of the old woman who gave the king's son a bell. To-day they are told:—Man has taken all the other kingdoms of nature into himself, what lives scattered in them is united harmoniously in him. But he must understand how something lives in him which lives in all surrounding nature, that he can only overcome his lower nature when this is brought into right relationship with himself so that it can help him.

We have often spoken of the evolution of man through the Saturn, Sun and Moon epochs, how he left the other kingdoms of nature behind him, retaining the best out of each, so that he might rise to something higher. By what means has he evolved? By means of that which Plato uses as a symbol—the horse; on this he rides forward from incarnation to incarnation. At that time the image of the bell was used; it was rung to summon the kingdoms of nature through their representatives—the Eagle-king, Fox-king, and Fish-king—so that he who was to become the ruler of these kingdoms might be brought into right relationship with them.

The soul of man is untamed, and only when love and wisdom control it is it brought into the right relationship. At one time this was brought to man's notice in pictures; his soul was guided so that he could understand what to-day is told us differently. At that time he was told:—When you ring the bell once the Eagle-king comes, when you ring it twice the Fox-king comes, and when you ring it three times the Fish-king; these brought back the horse. This means the storms which rage in the human soul must be recognised, and when we recognise them we can free it from the lower disturbances and bring it into order.

Man must learn to know how his own passions, anger and so on, are connected with his development from one seven years to another seven; he must learn to know the threefold nature of the human sheaths. In former days we were presented with a wonderful picture. Every time the king's son rang the bell (that is when by his own power he had subdued one of the kingdoms) he acquired a covering, a sheath.

To-day we say:—We study the nature of the physical body; at that time an image was used, the dragon-mother gave the man a mantle of copper. To-day we say:—We study the nature of our etheric body; then it was said:—The dragon-mother gave him a silver mantle. Again we say:—We learn to know our astral body with all its surging passions. At that time they said:—The dragon-mother gave him on the third day a golden mantle.

What we learn to-day concerning the threefold sheath-nature of man was brought to people at an earlier day through the image of the copper, silver, and golden mantles. And to the souls that then received the thought-form of the copper, silver, and golden mantles, we say to-day:—What brings you understanding of the dense physical body, is related to the other bodies as copper ore is to silver and gold. To-day we say:—Backward Luciferic Beings of seven different kinds remained behind on the moon and worked upon the human astral body. The rhapsodists said:—When the king's son came to the mountain where he was to be united with the flower-queen's daughter, he met seven dragons who would have devoured him if he had not accomplished his day's task. We know that if our evolution is not carried out aright it is owing to the power of the seven different kinds of Luciferic Beings. To-day we say:—In carrying out our spiritual development we find our higher self. Formerly, people were presented with a picture. The king's son they were told united himself with the flower-queen's daughter. We say:—The human soul must attain to a certain rhythm.

In one of the earlier lectures in this course I said:—When an idea rises in a man's soul he must allow it time to mature, he will then observe a certain rhythm. After seven days the idea has entered deeply into his soul; after fourteen days, the idea now being more mature, is able to lay hold of the outer astral substance, and to allow itself to be “baptised by the universal spirit”; after twenty-one days it has matured still further, and only after four times seven days does it reach the stage where he can give it to the world as his own personal gift. What I have described is an inner rhythm of the soul.

A man can only create successfully when he has no desire to impart hurriedly to the world what has chanced to come to him, but knows that the orderliness of the external universe must enter in his soul. We must live so that we repeat the macrocosm microscopically in ourselves.

These pictures which were told everywhere—and hundreds of them could be cited—stimulated the powers of the human soul by means of thought-forms, so that such souls are to-day ripe enough to listen to the other form of instruction, the form cultivated in spiritual science. But the longing for this had first to become very strong. All the conscious striving of men's souls had first to disappear from the physical plane. Then with the coming of the second half of the nineteenth century materialistic culture arose, and all was desolation as regards spiritual life. But the longing, on the other hand, grew ever greater and greater, the more the ideal of a future spiritual movement grew. There were but few remaining in the first half of the nineteenth century who felt, as in a faint memory, and experienced in silent martyrdom, how the ideas which were once perceived, discussed, and developed, still existed; but were in decline.

In 1803 a man was born in whose soul some echo of the wisdom of an earlier day still remained. Something dwelt in him that was closely related to our theosophical ideas. His soul was filled with longing to solve the secrets of spiritual science—his name was Julius Mosen. His life could only be preserved by spending the greater part of it in bed. His soul no longer suited his body, for owing to the way he had grasped these things, yet was unable spiritually to enter further into them, he had drawn his etheric body out of his physical body, and consequently he had become an invalid. He had, however, risen spiritually to considerable heights. In the year 1831 he wrote a remarkable book called “Ritter Wahn.” He knew of a wonderful legend in Italy about the Knight Wahn, and when studying it he said to himself:—Something of the spirit of the universe lives in this legend, this saga has arisen in the way it has, these pictures have been formed as they are, because those who formed them were filled with the living spiritual guidance of the world. What was the result? In 1831 he wrote a most wonderful dramatic work. It has naturally been forgotten—as everything is that originates in this way from greatness of spirit. Ritter Wahn sets out to conquer death. On the way he meets with three old men. It occurred to Julius Mosen strangely enough to translate the name of one of the old men, it Mondo, as Ird (earth), for he knew something special lay in translating it thus into German. The name of tile three old men whom Ritter Wahn met when he set out to conquer death were Ird, Zeit, and Raum—earth, time and space. The three could not help him for they were subject to death. Ird (earth) is that which is subject to the laws of the physical body, and therefore to death; Zeit (time), the etheric body, is transient; and the third, the lower astral body, which gives us the impression of space, is also subject to death. Our individuality passes from incarnation to incarnation, but that by which we are fixed within our three sheaths according to this Italian legend is Ird, Zeit and Raum (earth, time and space). What is the Ritter Wahn?—Illusion.

We have often spoken of what enters us as Maya. We ourselves are it; we who go on from incarnation to incarnation look out on the world, and are confronted with the great illusion. Each one of us is a “Ritter Wahn” and each one goes forth, if we live in the spirit, to conquer death. In this life we meet the three old men, our sheaths. They are very old. The physical body has existed since the age of Saturn, the etheric body since the Sun-age, the Astral body since the Moon-age, and that which dwells in man as the “I” has been united with him since the coming of the Earth-age. Julius Mosen represents this in such a way that the soul, by which Ritter Wahn would conquer death, first storms out into the world as a rider, thus employing the Platonic image which was prevalent all over Central Europe and far beyond it. So Ritter Wahn rides forth, and would conquer heaven with the aid of materialistic thoughts—as people do who trust to the senses—thereby remaining entangled in delusion and Maya.

But when at death they enter the spiritual world, what happens is beautifully described by Julius Mosen—life is not exhausted, souls long to return to earth to carry out their further development. Ritter Wahn comes down to earth again. And as he sees the beautiful Morgana, the soul as it is stirred by everything earthly—just as was the flower-queen's daughter—and revealing its union with everything that can only come to man through earthly schooling, there when united with the beautiful Morgana, when again united with the earth, death falls away from him. This means he passes through death in order to raise his own soul (represented by Morgana) ever higher, to purify and develop it further in each incarnation.

From images like these, which bear the stamp of many centuries, ideas enter into man and are aided by artists like Julius Mosen. They sprang in his case from a soul too great to live healthily in a body belonging to the age of materialism that was approaching, therefore, owing to the greatness of his glowing soul, he suffered a silent martyrdom. This was in the year 1831. All these thoughts lived in the soul of a man in the first half of the nineteenth century. They must rise again, but now so that they will kindle human powers, human forces. Yes, they will rise again This gives us some understanding of what is meant when we speak of a theosophical spirit, the spirit of Rosicrucianism which must enter into mankind.

We now divine that what is cherished in our movement has existed always. We fall into the illusion of Ritter Wahn if we imagine anything can prosper without active co-operation of this spirit.

Whence came the Rhapsodists of the seventh to the twelfth century; the men wandered through the world giving rise to thought-forms so that souls might comprehend things somewhat differently.

From what centre did they come? Where had they learnt how to present such pictures to the souls of men They learnt this in those temples, which we recognise as the schools of the Rosicrucians. The Rhapsodists were pupils of the Rosicrucians. Their teachers told them:—You cannot go forth to-day and speak to mankind in ideas as will be done later; to-day you must speak to them of the king's son, of the flower-queen, of the three mantles. By this means thought-forms are built up which will live in men's souls, and when these souls return they will understand what is necessary for them for their further progress.

Spiritual centres are continually sending their messengers out into the world, so that in every age that which lives in the depths of the spirit may be brought near to the souls of men.

It is a trivial point of view when people think they can construct such tales as I have been describing from fancy. Ancient legends which express the spiritual secrets of the world arise because the men who compose them have harkened to and been purified by those who impart these secrets; the whole form of the legends is constructed in accordance with these spiritual secrets. The spirit of all humanity—both of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm—lives in them.

The Rhapsodists were sent to spread their meaningful legends through the world from the same temples whence originates the special knowledge of to-day; knowledge that entering into men's hearts and souls makes the culture they demand possible. In this way the spirit that is deeply implanted in humanity passes on from epoch to epoch. And in this way the great Beings, who in pre-Christian times instructed individualities within the holy temples concerning the things they had brought over with them from earlier planetary conditions, strengthened this teaching by introducing into it the Christ so that their work might continue in accordance with this superlative Being—the Christ who had now become the great leader and guide of mankind!

When I tell you that the tales which have endured for so many centuries and called forth thought-forms in Western culture came from the same source, and expressed the same things—only in pictures—that we tell the world to-day concerning the Christ; you will realise how in the time following the Mystery of Golgotha the spiritual guides of humanity did in fact further arid support the teaching of Christ in their centres of learning. All spiritual guidance is connected with the Christ. When we are aware of this connection we catch a glimpse of the light we must have, and must make use of, more especially in respect of the things our souls longed for when they came into incarnation in the nineteenth century. If we allow those forms to affect us which can inform us regarding the longings of earlier days, we feel we can rely upon our souls and can say—those others waited so that we might accomplish what they longed for. What spirits like Julius Mosen had longed for, because they felt within them all that the messengers of the Holy Temples had related in countless pictures, so as to prepare souls for times to come; what these souls longed for is set forth in the words of Richard Rothe, who, when speaking of theosophy in 1847 at Heidelberg, says:—“Would that one day it might become really scientific, and produce clearly defined results, so that it might become popular and be generally accepted; for only in this way can it bequeath those truths to others who are unable to travel the path on which alone they could discover them for themselves.”

In those days Rothe felt this longing—not only for himself but for his contemporaries—he found resignation in saying:—“All this lies as yet within the womb of the future which we have no wish to anticipate!” Those who knew the secrets of the Rosicrucians did not speak in 1847 so that these could be perceived in an external way. But what rests within the womb of the future comes to life when a sufficient number of souls are found who realise that knowledge is a duty. We dare not give back our souls unevolved to the Spirit of the Universe, for in that case we would have deprived the Spirit of something He had implanted in us. When souls are found who realise what they owe to the Spirit of the Universe because of their strivings to solve the secrets of the world, they will have fulfilled the hopes cherished by the best men of an earlier age. These men looked to us who were to come after them and said:—“Once this knowledge becomes scientific it must become popular and lay hold of men's hearts.”

But such hearts must first exist, they must be there I This depends on those who have joined our spiritual society realising:—“I must gain spiritual illumination, I must learn the secrets of existence I” It depends on each separate soul within our society, whether the longing I have described is to be but a vain dream of those who hoped for the best from us, or a worthy dream that we can realise for them.

When we perceive the emptiness in modern science, in art, and in social life, we feel there is no need to be lost in this desert, we can get out of it. An age has once more come round in which the Holy Temples speak, not now merely in images and parables, but in truths, which, though still regarded by many as theoretical, will become ever more and more a source of life, and will pour living sap into the souls of men.

Each one can determine with the best powers of his soul to receive this living sap into himself.

These are the thoughts we would impress on your souls at the present time, being the sum of all we have received concerning the true meaning of the spiritual guidance of mankind. When we allow such thoughts to work within our souls we have a lively stimulus for future endeavour, and we see how much of constructive force they contain that is quite independent of the actual words with which these thoughts have been expressed.

However imperfect my words may be, it is the reality that matters, not the way the thoughts are expressed, and this reality can live in every soul. For the sum of all truth dwells in each separate soul like a seed which can blossom when this soul accepts it.

• 1. From the introduction by Richard Rothe to “The Principles of Theosophy according to Frederick Cristopher Oetinger,” Tubingen, 1847.
• 2. “Metamorphoses of the Soul Volume One,” and “Metamorphoses of the Soul Volume Two,” (see Book Catalogue).

We shall encounter again and again, in the course of our reflections, the difficulty of keeping in our mind's eye ever more exactly the exterior organism of man, in order that we may learn to know the transitory, the perishable. But we shall also see that this very road will lead us to a knowledge of the imperishable, the eternal in human nature. Also it will be necessary, in order to attain this goal, to sustain the effort of looking upon the exterior human organism in all reverence, as a revelation of the spiritual world.

When once we have permeated ourselves in some measure with spiritual-scientific concepts and feelings, we shall come quite easily to the thought that the human organism in its stupendous complexity must be the most significant expression, the greatest and most important manifestation, of those forces which live and weave as Spirit throughout the world. We shall, indeed, have to find our way upward ever more and more from the outer to the inner.

We have already seen that external observations, both from the point of view of the layman and from that of the scientific inquirer, must lead us to look upon man in a certain sense as a duality. We have characterised this duality of the human being—only hastily yesterday, to be sure, for we shall have to go into this still more accurately—as being enclosed within the protecting bony sheath of the skull and the spinal vertebrae. We have seen that, if we ascend beyond the exterior form of this part of man, we may gain a preliminary view of the connection between the life which we call our waking life of day, and that other life, in the first place very full of uncertainty for us, which we call the life of dreams. And we have seen that the external forms of that portion of human nature which we have described give us a kind of image, signify in a way a revelation, on the one hand of dream-life, the chaotic life of pictures; and on the other hand the waking day life, which is endowed with the capacity to observe in sharp outlines.

To-day we shall first cast a fleeting glance over that part of the human duality which may be found outside the region we had in mind yesterday. Even the most superficial glance over this second portion of the human being can teach us that this portion really presents a picture in a certain respect the opposite of the other one. In the brain and the spinal cord we have the bony formation as the outer circumference, the covering. If we consider the other portion of man's nature, we are surely obliged to say that here we have the bony formation disposed rather more within the organs. And yet this would be only a very superficial observation. We shall be carried deeper into the construction of this other portion of man's nature if, for the moment, we keep the most important systems of organs apart one from another, and compare them, first, outwardly, with what we learned yesterday.

The systems of organs, or systems of instruments, of the human organism to be considered first in this connection, must be the apparatus of nutrition and all that lies between this apparatus and that wonderful structure the heart, which we readily experience as a sort of central point of the whole human organism... And here even a superficial glance shows us at once that these systems of instruments, especially the apparatus of nutrition as we may call it in everyday speech, are intended to take in the substances of our external, earthly world and prepare them for further digestive work in the physical organism of man. We know that this apparatus of digestion begins by extending downward from the mouth, in the form of a tube, to the organ which everyone knows as the stomach. And a superficial observation teaches us that, from those articles of food which are conveyed through this canal into the stomach, the portions which are to a certain extent unassimilated are simply excreted, whereas other portions are carried over by the remaining digestive organs into the organism of the human body.

It is also well known that, adjoining the actual digestive apparatus in the narrower sense of the term, and for the purpose of taking over from it in a transformed condition the nutritive substances with which it has been supplied, is what we may call the lymph-system. I shall at this point speak merely in outline. We may repeat accordingly that, adjoining the apparatus of nutrition in so far as this is attached chiefly to the stomach, there is this system of organs called the lymph-system, consisting of a number of canals, which in their turn spread over the whole body; and that this system takes over, in a certain way, what has been worked over by the rest of the digestive apparatus, and delivers it into the blood.

And then we have the third of these systems of organs, the blood-vessel system itself, with its larger and smaller tubes extending throughout the entire human organism and having the heart as the central point of all its work. We know also that, going out from the heart, those blood-vessels or blood-filled vessels which are called arteries, convey the blood to all parts of our organism; that the blood goes through a certain process in the separate parts of the human organism, and then is carried back to the heart by means of other similar vessels which bring it back, however, in a transformed condition as so called “blue blood” in contrast to its red state. We know that this transformed blood, no longer useful for our life, is conducted from the heart into the lungs; that it there comes into contact with the oxygen taken up from the outer air; and that, by means of this, it is renewed in the lungs and conducted back again to the heart, to go its way afresh throughout the whole human organism.

If we are to consider these systems in their completeness, in order to have in our external method of observation a foundation for the occult method, let us begin by holding to that system which must, at the very outset, obviously be for everyone the central system of the entire human organism, namely, the blood-and-heart system. Let us, moreover, keep in mind that after the stale blood has been freshened in the lungs, transformed from blue blood into red blood, it returns once more to the heart and then goes out again from the heart as red blood, to be used in the organism. Notice, that everything which I intend to draw will be in mere outline, so that we shall be dealing only with sketches.

Let us now briefly recall that the human heart is an organ which, properly speaking, consists in the first place of four parts or chambers, so separated by interior walls that one can distinguish between the two larger spaces lying below and the two smaller ones lying above, the two lower ones being the ventricles, as they are generally called, and the two upper ones the auricles. I shall not speak about the “valves” to-day, but shall rather call attention, quite sketchily, to the course of the most important organic activities. And here, to begin with, one thing is clear: after the blood has streamed out of the left auricle into the left ventricle, it flows off through a large artery and from this point is conducted through the entire remainder of the organism. Now, let us bear in mind that this blood is first distributed to every separate organ of the whole organism; that it is then used up in this organism so that it is changed into the so-called blue blood, and as such returns to the right auricle of the heart; and that from there it flows into the right ventricle in order that it may go out again from this into the lungs, there again to be renewed and take a fresh course throughout the organism.

When we begin to visualise all this it is important, as a basis for an occult method of study, that we also add the fact that what we may call a subsidiary stream branches out from the aorta very near the heart; that this subsidiary stream leads to the brain, thus providing for the upper organs, and from there leads back again in the form of stale blood into the right auricle; and that it is there transformed, as blood which has passed through the brain, so to speak, in the same way as that blood is transformed which comes from the remaining members of the organism. Thus we have a smaller, subsidiary circuit of the blood, in which the brain is inserted, separate from the other main circuit which provides for the entire remaining organism. Now, it is of extraordinary importance for us to bear this fact in mind. For we can only arrive at an important conception, affording us a basis for everything that will enable us to ascend to occult heights, if at this point we first ask ourselves the following question: In the same way in which the upper organs are inserted in the smaller circuit, is there something similar inserted within the circuit of the blood which provides for the rest of the organism. Here we come, as a matter of fact, to a conclusion which even the external, superficial method of study can supply, that is, that there is inserted in the large circuit of the blood the organ we call the spleen; that further on is inserted the liver; and, still further on, the organ which contains the gall prepared by the liver.

Now, when we ask about the functions of these organs, external science answers by saying that the liver prepares the gall; that the gall flows out into the digestive canal, and takes part in digesting the food in such a way that this may then be taken up by the lymph-system and conducted over into the blood. Much less, however, does external science tell us with regard to the spleen, the third of the organs here considered as inserted in the main circuit. When we reflect upon these organs, we must first give attention to the fact that they have to occupy themselves with the preparation of the nutritive matter for the human organism; but that, on the other hand, they are all three inserted as organs into the circulatory course of the blood. It is not without reason that they are thus inserted, for, in so far as nutritive matter is taken up into the blood, to be conveyed by means of the blood to the human organism in order to continuously supply this with substances for its up-building, these three organs take part in the whole process of working over this nutritive matter.

Now arises the question: Can we already draw some sort of conclusion, from an external aspect, as to just how these organs take part in the joint activity of the human organism? Let us first fix our attention on this one external fact, namely, that these organs are inserted into the lower circulatory course of the blood in the same way in which the brain is inserted into the upper course; and let us now see for a moment, while first actually holding to this external method of study, which must later be deepened, whether it is possible that these organs really have a task similar to that of the brain. At the same time, wherein may such a task consist?

Let us begin by considering the upper portions of the human organism. It is these that receive the sense-impressions through the organs of sense, and work over the material contained in our sense-perceptions. We may say, therefore, that what takes place in the human head, in the upper part of the organism, is a working over of those impressions which flow in from outside through the sense-organs; and that what we may describe as the cause of everything that takes place in these upper parts is to be found in its essence in the external impressions or imprints. And, since these external impressions send their influences, together with what results from these influences in the working over of the outer impressions, into the upper organs of the organism, they therefore change the blood, or contribute to its change, and in their own way send this blood back to the heart transformed, just as the blood is sent back to the heart transformed from the rest of the organism.

Is it not obvious that we should now ask ourselves this other question: Since this upper part of the human organism opens outward by means of the sense-organs, opens doors to the outside world in the form of sense- organs, is there not a certain sort of correspondence between the working-in of the external world through these sense-organs upon the upper part of the human organism and that which works out of the three interior organs, the spleen, the liver, and the gall-bladder? Whereas, accordingly, the upper part of the organism opens outward in order to receive the influences of the outside world; and whereas the blood flows upwards, so to speak, in order to capture these impressions of the outside world, it flows downwards in order to take up what comes from these three organs. Thus we may say that, when we look out upon the world round about us, this world exercises its influence through our senses upon our upper organisation. And what thus flows in from outside, through the world of sense, we may think of as pressed together, contracted, as if into one centre; so that what flows into our organism from all sides is seen to be the same thing as that which flows out from the liver, the gall-bladder and the spleen, namely, transformed outside world. If you go further into this matter you will see that it is not such a very strange reflection.

Imagine to yourselves the different sense-impressions that stream into us; imagine these contracted, thickened or condensed, formed into organs and placed inside us. Thus the blood presents itself inwardly to the liver, gallbladder and spleen, in the same way as the upper part of the human organism presents itself to the outside world. And so we have the outside world which surrounds our sense-organs above, condensed as it were into organs that are placed in the interior of man, so that we may say: At one moment the world is working from outside, streaming into us, coming into contact with our blood in the upper organs, acting upon our blood; and the next moment that which is in the macrocosm works mysteriously in those organs into which it has first contracted itself, and there, from the opposite direction, acts upon our blood, presenting itself again in the same way as it does in the upper organs.

If we were to draw a sketch of this, we could do it by imagining the world on the one hand, acting from all directions upon our senses, and the blood exposing itself like a tablet to the impressions of this world; that would be our upper organism. And now let us imagine that we could contract this whole outer world into single organs, thus forming an extract of this world; that we could then transfer this extract into our interior in such a way that what is working from all directions now acts upon the blood from the other side of the tablet. We should then have formed in a most extraordinary way a pictorial scheme of the exterior and the interior of the human organism. And we might already to a certain extent be able to say that the brain actually corresponds to our inner organism, in so far as this latter occupies the breast and the abdominal cavity. The world has, as it were been placed in our inner man.

Even in this organisation, which we distinguish as a subordinate one, and which serves primarily for the carrying forward of the process of nutrition, we have something so mysterious as the fusion of the whole outer cosmos into a number of inner organs, inner instruments. And, if we now observe these organs more closely for a moment, the liver, the gall-bladder, and the spleen, we shall be able to say that the spleen is the first of these to offer itself to the blood-stream. This spleen is a strange organisation, embedded in plethoric tissue, and in this tissue there is a great number of tiny little granules—something which, in contrast to the rest of the mass of tissue, has the appearance of little white granules.

When we observe the relation between the blood and the spleen, the latter appears to us like a sieve through which the blood passes in order that it may offer itself to an organ of the kind which, in a certain sense, is a shrivelled-up portion of the macrocosm. Again, the spleen stands in connection with the liver. At the next stage we see how the blood offers itself to the liver, and how the liver in its turn, as a third step, secretes the gall, which then goes over into the nutritive substances, and from there comes with the transformed nutritive substances into the blood.

This offering of itself on the part of the blood to these three organs we cannot think of in any but the following way: The organ which first meets the blood is the spleen, the second is the liver, and the third is the gallbladder, which has really a very complicated relation to the entire blood system, in that the gall is given over to the food and takes part in its digestion. On such grounds, the occultists of all times have given certain names to these organs. Now, I beg of you most earnestly not to think of anything special for the time being in connection with these names, but rather to think of them only as names that were originally given to these organs and to disregard the fact that the names signify also something else in connection with these organs. Later on we shall see why just these names were chosen. Because the spleen is the first of the three organs to present itself to the blood—we can say this by way of a purely external comparison—it appeared to the occultists of old to be best designated by the name belonging to that star which, to these ancient occultists and their observations, was the first within our solar system to show itself in cosmic space. For this reason they called the spleen “saturnine,” or an inner Saturn in man; and, similarly, the liver they called an inner Jupiter; and the gallbladder, an inner Mars. Let us begin by thinking of nothing in connection with these names, except that we have chosen them because we have arrived at the concept, at first hypothetical, that the external worlds, which otherwise are accessible rather to our senses, have been contracted into these organs and that in these organs inner worlds, so to speak, come to meet us, just as outer worlds meet us in the planets. We may now be able to say that, just as the external worlds show themselves to our senses in that they press in upon us from outside, so do these inner worlds show themselves as acting upon the blood-system in that they influence that for which the blood-system is there.

We shall find, to be sure, a significant difference between what we spoke of yesterday as the peculiarities of the human brain and that which here appears to us as a sort of inner cosmic system. This difference lies simply in the fact that man, to begin with, knows nothing about what takes place within his lower organism: that is, he knows nothing about the impressions which the inner worlds, or planets, as we may call them, make upon him, whereas the very characteristic of the other experience is that the outer worlds do make their impressions upon his consciousness. In a certain respect, therefore, we may call these inner worlds the realm of the unconscious, in contrast to the conscious realm we have learned to know in the life of the brain.

Now, precisely that which lies in this “conscious” and this “unconscious” is more clearly explained when we employ something else to assist us. We all know that external science states that the organ of consciousness is the nerve-system, together with all that pertains to it. Now we must bear in mind, as a basis for our occult study, a certain relationship which the nerve-system has to the blood-system, that is, to what we have to-day considered in a sketchy way. We then see that our nerve-system everywhere enters in certain ways into relation with our blood-system, that the blood everywhere presses upon our nerve-system. Moreover, we must here first take notice of something which external science in this connection holds to be already established. This science looks upon it as a settled matter that in the nerve-system is to be found the sole and entire regulator of all activity of consciousness, of everything, that is, which we characterise as “soul-life.” We cannot here refrain from recalling, although at first only by way of allusion for the purpose of authenticating this later on, that for the occultist the nerve-system exists only as a sort of basis for consciousness. For precisely in the same way that the nerve-system is a part of our organism and comes into contact with the blood-system, or at least bears a certain relation to it, so do the ego and that which we call the astral body make themselves a part of the whole human being. And even an external observation, which has frequently been employed in my lectures, can show us that the nerve-system is in a certain way a manifestation of the astral body. Through such an observation we can see that, in the case of ordinary inanimate beings in nature, we can ascribe only a physical body to that part of their being which they present to us. When, however, we ascend from inanimate, inorganic natural bodies to animate natural bodies, to organisms, we are obliged to suppose that these organisms are permeated by the so-called ether-body, or life-body, which contains in itself the causes of the phenomena of life. We shall see later on that anthroposophy, or occultism, does not speak of the ether-body, or life-body, in the same way that people in the past spoke of “life-force.” Rather does anthroposophy, when it speaks of the ether-body, speak of some thing which the spiritual eye actually sees, that is, of something real underlying the external physical body. When we consider the plants we are obliged to attribute to them an ether-body. And, if we ascend from the plants to sentient beings, to the animals, we find that it is this element of sentiency, of inner life, or, better still, of inner experience, which primarily differentiates the animal externally from the plant. If mere life-activity, which cannot yet sense itself inwardly, cannot yet attain to the kindling of feeling, is to be able to kindle feeling, to sense life inwardly, the astral body must become a part of the animal's organism. And in the nerve-system, which the plants do not yet have, we must recognise the external instrument of the astral body, which in turn is the spiritual prototype of the nerve-system. As the archetype is related to its manifestation, to its image, so is the astral body related to the nerve-system.

Now when we come to man—and I said yesterday that in occultism our task is not as simple as it is for the external scientific method in which everything can, so to speak, be jumbled together—we must always, when we study the human organs, be aware of the fact that these organs, or systems of organs, are capable of being put to certain uses for which the corresponding systems of organs in the animal organism, even when these appear similar, cannot be used. At this point we shall merely affirm in advance what will appear later as having a still more profound basis, that, in the case of man, we must designate the blood as an external instrument for the ego, for all that we denote as our innermost soul-centre, the ego; so that in the nerve-system we have an external instrument of the astral body, and in our blood an external instrument of the ego. Just as the nerve-system in our organism enters into certain relations with the blood, so do those inner regions of the soul which we experience in ourselves as concepts, feelings or sensations, etc., enter into a certain relation with our ego.

The nerve-system is differentiated in the human organism in manifold ways the inner nerve-fibres for example, at the points where these develop into nerves of hearing, of seeing, etc., show us how diverse are its differentiations. Thus the nerve-system is something that reaches out everywhere through the organism in such a way as to comprise the most manifold inner diversities. When we observe the blood as it streams through the organism it shows us, even taking into account the transformation from red into blue blood, that it is, nevertheless, a unity in the whole organism. Having this character of unity, it comes into contact with the differentiated nerve-system, just as does the ego with the differentiated soul-life, for it also is made up of conceptions, sensations, will-impulses, feelings and the like. The further you pursue this comparison—and it is given meanwhile only as a comparison—the more clearly you will be shown that a far-reaching similarity exists in the relations of the two archetypes, the ego and the astral body, to their respective images, the blood-system and the nerve-system. Now, of course, one may say at this point that blood is surely everywhere blood. At the same time, it undergoes a change in flowing through the organism; and consequently we can draw a parallel between these changes that take place in the blood and what goes on in the ego. But our ego is a unity. As far back as we can remember in our life between birth and death we can say: “This ego was always present, in our fifth year just as in our sixth year, yesterday just as to-day. It is the same ego.” And yet, if we now look into what this ego contains, we shall discover this fact: This ego that lives in me is filled with a sum-total of conceptions, sensations, feelings, etc., which are to be attributed to the astral body and which comes into contact with the ego. A year ago this ego was filled with a different content, yesterday it contained still another, and to-day its content is again different. Thus the ego, we see, comes into contact with the entire soul-content, streams through this entire soul-content. And, just as the blood streams through the whole organism and comes everywhere into contact with the differentiated nerve-system, so does the ego come together with the differentiated life of the soul, in conceptions, feelings, will-impulses and the like. Already, therefore, this merely comparative method of study shows us that there is a certain justification in looking upon the blood system as an image of the ego, and the nerve system as an image of the astral body, as higher, super-sensible members of the nature of man.

It is necessary for us to remember that the blood streams throughout the organism in the manner already indicated; that on the one side it presents itself to the outer world like a tablet facing the impressions of the outer world; on the other side, it faces what we have called the inner world. And so indeed it is with our ego also. We first direct this ego of ours toward the outside world and receive impressions from it. There results from this a great variety of content within the ego; it is filled with these impressions coming from outside. There are also such moments when the ego retires within itself and is given up to its pain and suffering, pleasure and happiness, inner feelings and so forth, when it permits to arise in the memory what it is not receiving at this moment directly through contact with the external world, but what it carries within itself. Thus, in this connection also, we find a parallel between the blood and the ego; for the blood, like a tablet, presents itself at one time to the outside world and at another time to the inner world; and we could accordingly represent this ego by a simple sketch [see earlier drawing] exactly as we have represented the blood. We can bring the external impressions which the ego receives, when we think of them as concepts, as soul-pictures in general, into the same sort of relation to the ego as that which we have brought about between our blood and the real external occurrences coming to us through the senses. That is, exactly as we have done in the case of the physical bodily life and the blood, so could we bring what is related to the soul-life into connection with the ego.

Let us now observe from this standpoint the cooperation, the mutual interaction, between the blood and the nerves. If we consider the eye, we see that outer impressions act upon this organ. The impressions of colour and light act upon the optic nerve. So long as they affect the optic nerve, having for themselves an active instrument in the nerve-system, we are able to affirm that they have an effect upon the astral body. We may state that, at the moment when a connection takes place between the nerves and the blood, the parallel process which takes place in the soul is, that the manifold conceptions within the life of the soul come into connection with the ego. When, therefore, we consider this relationship between the nerves and the blood, we may represent by another sketch how that which streams in from outside through the nerves when we see an object, forms a certain connection with those courses of the blood which come into the neighbourhood of the optic nerve.

This connection is something of extraordinary importance for us, if we wish to observe the human organism in such a way that our observation shall provide a basis for arriving at the occult foundations of human nature. In ordinary life the process that takes place is such that each influence transmitted by means of the nerves inscribes itself in the blood, as on a tablet, and in doing so records itself in the instrument of the ego. Let us suppose for a moment, however, that we should artificially interrupt the connection between the nerve and the circulation of the blood, that is, that we should artificially put a man in such a condition that the activity of the nerve should be severed from the circulation of the blood, so that they could no longer act upon each other. We can indicate this by a diagram in which the two parts are shown more widely separated, so that a reciprocal action between the nerves and the blood can no longer take place. In this case the condition may be such that no impression can be made upon the nerve. Something of this sort can be brought about if, for example, the nerve is cut. If, indeed, it should come to pass by some means that no impression is made upon the nerve, then it is also not strange if the man himself is unable to experience anything especial through this nerve. But let us suppose that in spite of the interrupting of the connection between the nerve and the blood a certain impression is made upon the nerve. This can be brought to pass through an external experiment by stimulating the nerve by means of an electric current. Such external influence on the nerve does not, however, concern us here. But there is still another way of affecting the nerve under conditions in which it cannot act upon the course of the blood normally connected with it.

It is possible to bring about such a condition of the human organism; and this is done in a particular way, by means of certain concepts, emotions and feelings which the human being has experienced and made a part of himself, and which, if this inner experiment is to be truly successful, ought, properly speaking, to be really lofty, moral or intellectual concepts. When a man practises a rigorous inner concentration of the soul on such imaginative concepts, forming these into symbols let us say, it then happens, if he does this in a state of waking consciousness, that he takes complete control of the nerve and, as a result of this inner concentration, draws it back to a certain extent from the course of the blood. For when man simply gives himself up to normal, external impressions, the natural connection between the nerve and the circulation is present; but if, in strict concentration upon his ego, he holds fast to what he obtains in a normal way, apart from all external impressions and apart from what the outside world brings about in the ego, he then has something in his soul which can have originated only in the consciousness and is the content of consciousness, and which makes a special demand upon the nerve and separates its activity then and there from its connection with the activity of the blood. The consequence of this is that, by means of such inner concentration, which actually breaks the connection between the nerve and the blood, that is, when it is so strong that the nerve is in a certain sense freed from its connection with the blood-system, the nerve is at the same time freed from that for which the blood is the external instrument, namely, from the ordinary experiences of the ego. And it is, indeed, a fact—this finds its complete experimental support through the inner experiences of that spiritual training designed to lead upward into the higher worlds—that as a result of such concentration the entire nerve-system is removed from the blood-system and from its ordinary tasks in connection with the ego. It then happens, as the particular consequence of this, that whereas the nerve-system had previously written its action upon the tablet of the blood, it now permits what it contains within itself as working power to return into itself, and does not permit it to reach the blood. It is, therefore, possible purely through processes of inner concentration, to separate the blood-system from the nerve-system, and thereby to cause that which, pictorially expressed, would otherwise have flowed into the ego, to course back again into the nerve-system.

Now, the peculiar thing is that once the human being actually brings this about through such inward exertion of the soul, he has then an entirely different sort of inner experience. He stands before a completely changed horizon of consciousness which may be described somewhat as follows: When the nerve and the blood have an appropriate connection with each other, as is the case in normal life, man brings into relation with the ego the impressions which come from within his inner being and those which come from the outer world. The ego then conserves those forces which reach out along the entire horizon of consciousness, and everything is related to the ego. But when, through inner concentration, he separates his nerve-system, lifts it, that is to say, through inner soul-forces out of his blood-system, he does not then live in his ordinary ego. He cannot then say “I” with respect to that which he calls his “Self,” in the same sense in which he had previously said “I” in his ordinary normal consciousness. It then seems to the man as if he had quite consciously lifted a portion of his real being out of himself, as if something which he does not ordinarily see, which is super-sensible and works in upon his nerves, does not now impress itself upon his blood-tablet or make any impression upon his ordinary ego. He feels himself lifted away from the entire blood-system, raised up, as it were, out of his organism; and he meets something different as a substitute for what he has experienced in the blood-system. Whereas the nerve-activity was previously imaged in the blood-system, it is now reflected back into itself. He is now living in something different; he feels himself in another ego, another Self, which before this could at best be merely divined. He feels a super-sensible world uplifted within him.

If once more we draw a sketch, showing the relation between the blood and the nerve, or the entire nerve-system, as this receives into itself the impressions from the outside world, this may be done in the following way.

The normal impressions would then image themselves in the blood-system, and thus be within it. If, however, we have removed the nerve-system, nothing goes as far as the tablet of the blood, nothing goes into the blood-system; everything flows back again into the nerve-system; and thus a world has opened to us of which we had previously no intimation. It has opened as far as the terminations of our nerve-system, and we feel the recoil. To be sure, only he can feel this recoil who goes through the necessary soul-exercises. In the case of the normal consciousness, man feels that he takes into himself whatever sort of world happens to face him, so that everything is inscribed upon the blood-system as on a tablet, and he then lives in his ego with these impressions. In the other case, however, he goes with these impressions only to that point where the terminations of the nerves offer him an inner resistance. Here, at the nerve-terminals, he rebounds as it were, and experiences himself in the outside world. Thus, when we have a colour impression, which we receive through the eye, it passes into the optic nerve, images itself upon the tablet of the blood, and we feel what we express as a fact when we say: “I see red.” But now, after we have made ourselves capable of doing so, let us suppose that we do not go with our impressions as far as the blood, but only to the terminations of the nerves; that at this point we rebound into our inner life, rebound before we reach the blood. In that case we live, as a matter of fact, only as far as our eye, our optic nerve. We recoil before the bodily expression of our blood, we live outside our Self and are actually within the light-rays which penetrate our eyes. Thus we have actually come out of ourselves; indeed, we have accomplished this by reason of the fact that we do not penetrate as deep down into our Self as we ordinarily do, but rather go only as far as the nerve-terminals. The effect on a soul-life such as this, if we have brought it to the stage where we turn back at the terminations of the nerves into our inner being, so that we do not go as far as our blood, is that we have in this case disconnected the blood; whereas otherwise the normal consciousness of the inner man ordinarily goes down into the blood, and the soul-life identifies itself with the physical man, feels itself at one with him.

As a result of these external observations we have to-day succeeded in disconnecting the entire blood-system, which we have thought of as a kind of tablet that presents itself on the one side to the external, on the other side to the internal impressions, from what we may call the higher man, the man we may become if we find release from our Selves and become free. Now, we shall best be able to study the whole inner nature of this blood-system if we do not make use of general phrases, but observe what exists as reality in man, namely, the super-sensible, invisible man to whom we can lift ourselves when we go only as far as the terminations of our nerves, and if we also observe man as he is when he goes all the way into the blood. For we can then advance further, to the thought that man can really live in the outside world, that he can pour himself out over the whole external world, can go forth into this world and view from the reverse standpoint, as it were, the inner man, or what is usually meant by that term. In short, we shall learn to know the functions of the blood, and of those organs which are inserted into the circulatory course of the blood, when we can answer the following questions: What does a more accurate knowledge show us, when that which comes from a higher world, to which man can raise himself, is portrayed upon the tablet of the blood? It shows us that everything connected with the life of the blood is the very central point of the human being, when, without coining phrases, but rather looking only at sensible as well as super-sensible realities, we consider carefully the relationship of this wonderful system to a higher world. For this is in truth to be our task: to learn to see clearly the whole visible physical Man as an image of that other “Man” who is rooted and lives in the spiritual world. We shall thereby come to find that the human organism is one of the truest images of that Spirit which lives in the universe, and we shall attain to a very special understanding of that Spirit.

Yesterday we tried to characterise the path to Christ that can still be taken today, as it could especially in earlier times, by exoteric means. We will now touch briefly on the esoteric path—the path which leads to Christ in such a way that he can be found within the super-sensible worlds.

First of all we must note that this esoteric path to Christ Jesus was also the way of the Evangelists, of those who wrote the Gospels. For although the writer of the John Gospel had himself witnessed many of the events he describes—as you can see from the lecture-cycle on this Gospel—his chief object was not merely to relate what he remembered, for this applies only to those minute, exact details which surprise us in his Gospel. The great, majestic, crowning features of the work of redemption, of the Mystery of Golgotha, were drawn by the writer of this Gospel from his clairvoyant consciousness also. Consequently, although the Gospels are really revived Mystery rituals—this is shown in my Christianity as Mystical Fact—they are so because the writers of the Gospels, following their esoteric path, could procure for themselves out of the super-sensible world a picture of the events in Palestine which led to the Mystery of Golgotha. Ever since the Mystery of Golgotha up to our own times, a person who desired to come to a super-sensible experience of the Christ-Event had to go through the stages which you will find described in earlier lecture-cycles as the seven stages of our Christian Initiation: The Washing of the Feet; The Scourging; The Crowning with Thorns; The Mystic Death; The Burial; the Resurrection; the Ascension. Today we will make clear to ourselves what the pupil can attain by going through this Christian Initiation.

First of all, one essential point. As you can convince yourselves by reading the lectures on this subject, Christian Initiation is very different from the incorrect method of Initiation described in the first lecture of this course. In Christian Initiation certain feelings which belong to humanity in general are first invoked, and they lead to an Imagination of the Washing of the Feet. Thus the picture of this in the John Gospel is not the first thing to be imagined; the aspirant begins by trying to live for a long time with certain feelings and perceptions. I have often characterised this by saying that the person concerned should gaze upon the plant, which grows out of the mineral ground, takes into itself the materials of the mineral kingdom, and yet raises itself above this kingdom as a higher being than the mineral. If the plant could speak and feel, it would bow down to the mineral kingdom and say: ‘Certainly I was destined within the economy of the Cosmos to attain a higher stage than you, Mineral, but you give me the possibility of existence. In the order of beings you are certainly a lower being than myself, but I have to thank you for my existence, and I bow myself in humility before you.’ In the same way the animal would have to bow down to the plant, although the plant is a lower being than the animal, and say: ‘I thank you for my existence; I acknowledge it in humility, and I bow myself before you.’ And so would each being that climbs upwards have to bow down to the other standing below, and also he who has risen by way of a spiritual ladder to a higher level must bow down to the beings who alone have made this possible for him.

A person who permeates himself with the feeling of humility in regard to the lower, who thoroughly incorporates this feeling in his own being and lets it live there for months, perhaps even for years, will see that it spreads itself out in his organism, and so pervades him that he experiences a transformation of this feeling into an Imagination. And this Imagination corresponds exactly to the scene represented in the John Gospel as the Washing of the Feet, where Christ Jesus, who is the Head of the Twelve, stoops to those who stand here below Him in the order of the physical world, and in humility acknowledges that He thanks those who are below Him for the possibility of his higher ascent. He acknowledges before the Twelve: ‘As the animal thanks the plant, so do I thank you for what I was able to become in the physical world!’ A person who permeates himself with this feeling comes not only to an Imagination of the Washing of the Feet, but also to a quite pronounced feeling, as though water were washing over his feet. This can be felt for weeks: it shows how deeply imbued our human nature is with such universal human feelings, which nevertheless can raise man above himself.

Further, we have seen that we can go through the experience which leads to the Imagination of the Scourging when we place the following vividly before us: ‘Much suffering and pain will meet me in the world; yes, from all sides suffering and pain may come; no one escapes them. But I will so steel my will that suffering and pain, the scourgings that come from the world, may do their worst; I will stand upright and bear my fate resignedly, as it comes to pass. For had it not come to pass as it has done, as I have experienced it, I should not have been able to reach the height I have attained.’ When the person in question makes this a matter of his perception, and lives within it, he actually feels something like sharp pains and woundings, like strokes of a scourge against his own skin, and the Imagination arises as if he were outside himself, and was watching himself scourged according to the example of Christ Jesus. In line with this example one can experience the Crowning of Thorns, the Mystic Death, and so on. This has often been described.

What is attained by a man who thus seeks within himself to experience first the four stages, and then, when his karma is favourable, the others also, making in all seven stages of Christian Initiation? From the foregoing description you can gather that the whole scale of feelings we go through ought to strengthen us and give us power, and ought to make us into quite another nature, so that in the world we feel ourselves standing strong, powerful and free, and also capable of every act of devoted love. In Christian Initiation, this ought in a deep sense to become a second nature to us. For what has to happen?

Perhaps it has not yet occurred to all those of you who have read the earlier elementary cycles, and so have met with Christian Initiation in its seven stages, that owing to the intensity of the experiences which must be undergone, the effects go right into the physical body. For through the strength and power with which we go through these feelings, it really is at first as if water were washing over our feet, and then as if we were transfixed with wounds. We actually feel as if thorns were pressing into our head; we feel all the pain and suffering of the Crucifixion. We have to feel this before we can experience the Mystical Death, the Burial, and the Resurrection, as these also have been described. Even if we have not gone through these feelings with sufficient intensity, they will certainly have the effect that we become strong and full of love in the right sense of the word. But what we then incorporate can go only as far as the etheric body.

When, however, we begin to feel that our feet are as though washed with water, our body as if covered with wounds, then we have succeeded in driving these feelings so deeply into our nature that they have penetrated as far as the physical body. They do indeed penetrate the physical body, and then the stigmata, the marks of the bleeding wounds of Christ Jesus, may appear. We drive the feelings inwards into the physical body and know that they develop their strength in the physical body itself. We consciously feel ourselves more in the grip of our whole being than if the impressions were merely in the astral body and etheric body. The essential thing is that through a process of mystical feeling we work right into our physical body; and when we do this we are doing nothing less than making ourselves ready in our physical body to receive the Phantom that went forth from the grave on Golgotha. Hence we work into our physical body in order to make it so living that it feels a relationship with, an attractive force towards, the Phantom that rose out of the grave on Golgotha.

And here I would make an incidental remark. In Spiritual Science one must accustom oneself to becoming acquainted with cosmic secrets and cosmic truths gradually. Anyone who is not prepared to wait for the relevant truths will not make good progress. Of course people would like to have Spiritual Science all at once, preferably in one book or in one course of lectures. But that cannot be so, as you will see from an example. How long is it since in earlier lectures Christian Initiation was first described? You heard that such and such takes place, and that the individual, through the feelings which affect his soul, works right into his physical body. Everything said in those earlier lectures was intended to provide some elements for understanding the Mystery of Golgotha, and now for the first time it is possible to describe how an individual, through the requisite exercises of feeling in the course of Christian Initiation, makes himself ripe to receive the Phantom which rose from the grave of Golgotha. We had to wait until the union of the subjective with the objective could be found; and for this many preparatory lectures were necessary. Even today there are many things that can be indicated only as ‘half truths’. Anyone who has patience to continue with us—whether in this or in another incarnation, each according to his karma—will have seen how he could advance from the description of the mystical path in the Christian sense to the description of the objective fact, and so to the real meaning of this Christian Initiation, and he will see also that still higher truths will be brought to light from out of Spiritual Science in the course of the coming years or the next age. Thus we see the aim, the goal, of Christian Initiation.

Through what has been characterised as Rosicrucian Initiation, i.e. what an individual can have of it as Initiation today, the same thing in a certain sense is also attained, only by somewhat different means. A bond of attraction is formed between the individual, in so far as he is incorporated in a physical body, and that which arose as the real prototype of the physical body from the grave of Golgotha. Now we know from previous lectures that we are at the starting-point of a world-epoch in which we must expect an event that will not take place on the physical plane, as did the Event of Golgotha, but in the super-sensible world; an event which nevertheless stands in a close and true connection with the Event of Golgotha. The latter was designed to give back to man his real physical force-body, the Phantom which had degenerated from the beginning of the Earth-evolution, and for the giving back of it a series of events on the physical plane had to occur; but for that which is now to happen an event on the physical plane is not necessary. An incarnation of the Christ-Being in a human body of flesh could take place only once in the course of the Earth-evolution. When people announce a repetition of the incarnation of this Being, it simply means that the Christ-Being is not understood.

The event now to come, which can be observed only in a super-sensible world, has been characterised in the words: ‘Christ becomes for men the Lord of Karma.’ This means that in future the ordering of karmic transactions will come about through Christ. Ever more and more will men of the future feel: ‘I am going through the gate of death with my karmic account. On one side stand my good, clever, and beautiful deeds, my clever, beautiful, good, and intelligent thoughts; on the other side stands everything evil, wicked, stupid, foolish and loathsome. But He who in the future will have the office of Judge for the incarnations which will follow in human evolution, in order to bring order into this karmic account of men, is the Christ!’ And truly we have to picture this in the following way:

After we have gone through the gate of death, we shall be incarnated again in a later period. We shall then have to encounter events through which our karma can be balanced, for every man must reap what he has sown. Karma is a just law. But what the karmic law has to fulfill is not there only for individual men. Karma does not only balance the accounts of each Ego, but in every case the balancing must be arranged so as to be in the best possible accord with the concerns of the whole world. It must enable us to give all possible help to the advancement of mankind on earth. For this we need enlightenment, not merely the knowledge that the karmic fulfillment of our deed must come about. The fulfillment can take a form which will be either less or more useful for the general progress of humanity. Hence we must choose those thoughts, feelings or perceptions which will pay off our karma and at the same time serve the collective progress of mankind. In the future it will fall to Christ to bring the balance of our karma into line with the general Earth-karma and the general progress of humanity. And this happens principally in the time between death and a new birth. But it will also be prepared for in the epoch of time we are now approaching, before whose door we stand, because men will more and more acquire the capacity for a special experience. Very few are capable of it now, but from the middle of this century onwards, through the next 1,000 years, more and more people will have the following experience.

A person has done this or that. He will feel constrained to reflect on his action, and something like a dream-picture, arising in his mind, will make a quite remarkable impression on him. He will say to himself: ‘I cannot identify this as a recollection of something I have done, yet it feels like an experience of my own.’ Like a dream-picture it will stand there before him, closely concerned with him; but he cannot recall that he has experienced or done it in the past. If he is an anthroposophist he will understand the matter; otherwise he will have to wait until he comes to Anthroposophy and learns to understand it. The anthroposophist will know: ‘What you see as an apparent consequence of your actions is a picture that will be fulfilled in the future; the balancing of your actions is shown to you in advance.’ We are at the beginning of an epoch in which men, directly after they have committed a deed, will have a premonition, a feeling, perhaps even a significant picture, of how this deed will be karmically balanced.

Thus, in closest connection with human experience, enhanced capabilities for humanity will arise during the coming epoch. These capabilities will give a powerful stimulus to human morality, and this will signify something quite different from the voice of conscience, which has been a preparation for it. The individual will no longer believe: ‘What I have done will die with me.’ He will know quite exactly: ‘My action will not die when I die; it will have a consequence which will live on with me.’ And there is much else that the individual will know. The time during which the doors of the spiritual world have been closed to men is nearly over. Men must again climb up into the spiritual world. Their awakening capacities will enable them to participate in the spiritual world. Clairvoyance will always be different from this participation. Just as there was an ancient dreamlike clairvoyance, so will there be a future clairvoyance that is not dreamlike, the clairvoyance of people who know what they are doing and what it signifies.

Something else, too, will come about. The individual will know: ‘I am not alone. Everywhere there are spiritual beings who stand in a relationship to me.’ Men will learn to communicate with these beings and to live with them. And in the next three thousand years the truth that Christ is acting as Karmic Judge will become apparent to a sufficiently large number of people. Christ Himself will be experienced by men as an etheric Form. Like Paul before Damascus, they will know quite intimately that Christ lives, and is the Source for the reawakening of the physical prototype we received at the beginning of our evolution, and need if the Ego is to attain full development.

If through the Mystery of Golgotha something happened which gave the greatest impetus to human evolution, on the other hand it came at the time when the human mind, the human soul, were in their darkest condition. There were indeed ancient periods of evolution when men could know with certainty, because they had an ancestral memory, that the human individuality goes through repeated earth-lives. In the Gospels the teaching of repeated earth-lives is apparent only when we understand the Gospels and can discern traces of it there. That was the time when men were least fitted to comprehend this teaching. In the later times when men sought for Christ along the path indicated yesterday, everything had to take the form of a childlike preparation. Men could not then be made acquainted with experiences concerning reincarnation; they were not ripe for it and it would only have led them into error. Christianity had to develop for nearly 2,000 years without being able to indicate the teaching of reincarnation.

We have shown in these lectures how different it was in Buddhism, and how in Western consciousness the thought of repeated earth-lives arises as something self-evident. Certainly, many misunderstandings still prevail; but whether we take this idea from Lessing or from the psychologist Drossbach, we become aware that for the European consciousness the teaching of reincarnation concerns humanity at large, whereas in Buddhism the individual regards the question of how he goes from life to life, how he can free himself from the thirst for existence, as concerning only his personal inner life. The Oriental makes what is given to him as teaching about reincarnation into a path of individual redemption, whereas for Lessing the essential question was: ‘How can the whole of humanity move forward?’ According to Lessing, we must distinguish successive periods of time within the progressive development of humanity. Something new is given to humanity in each epoch. We see from history that new civilising actions keep on emerging in the course of human development. How could one speak of the evolution of the whole of humanity, says Lessing, if a soul lived in only one epoch? Whence could the fruits of civilisation come if human beings were not born again, if what they had learnt in one epoch were not carried over into the next, and its fruits into the following epoch and so on?

Thus for Lessing the idea of repeated earth-lives is not only a concern of the individual soul. It concerns the whole course of earthly civilisation. And in order that an advanced civilisation may arise, a soul which lives in the nineteenth century must carry over into its present existence whatever it had previously gained. For the sake of the earth and its civilisation, human beings must be born again. That is Lessing's thought. But in this thought of reincarnation as concerning all mankind the Christ-Impulse has been at work, woven into it. For the Christ-Impulse makes everything a man does or can do into an action of universal relevance, not something that touches him only as an individual. He only can be Christ's disciple who says: ‘I do it for the least of the brethren, because I know Thou feelest as though I had done it for Thee.’ As the whole of humanity is bound up with Christ, so does he who confesses Christ feel that he belongs to all mankind. This thought has worked into the thinking, feeling, and perception of the whole human race. And when the idea of reincarnation reappeared in the eighteenth century, it appeared as a Christian thought. And although Widenmann treated reincarnation clumsily, in an embryonic way, yet in his prize essay of 1851 his thought of reincarnation is permeated by the Christian impulse. He devotes a special chapter to showing the connection between Christianity and the teaching of reincarnation.

It was necessary in human evolution that souls should first accept the other Christian impulses, so that the thought of reincarnation might come to our consciousness in a ripe form. And indeed this thought of reincarnation will so connect itself with Christianity that it will be felt as something that leads a person on through successive incarnations. We shall understand how individuality, which is completely lost according to the Buddhist view—as we saw from the conversation of King Milinda with the sage Nagasena—first receives its true content by becoming permeated with Christ. We can now understand why the Buddhist view, about 500 years before the appearance of Christ, lost the human Ego, while retaining the teaching of successive incarnations. We have reached a time in which the human organism must understand, accept, permeate itself with the thought of reincarnation. For the progress of human evolution does not depend on what teachings are promulgated or find a new foothold. Other laws come into consideration, and they do not depend upon ourselves.

In the future human nature will develop certain powers which will have the effect that the individual, as soon as he has reached a certain age and has become properly conscious of himself, will have the feeling: ‘There is something in me which I must understand.’ This feeling will take hold of men more and more. In past times, even when human beings were fully aware of themselves, the consciousness which is now to come did not exist. It will express itself somewhat as follows: ‘I feel something within me which is connected with my personal ego. Strangely, it will not fit in with all that I have come to know since birth.’ One man will understand what is at work here; another will not. A man will understand it if he has carried the teachings of Spiritual Science into his life. Then he will know: ‘What I am now feeling is foreign to me, because it is the ego that has come over from earlier lives.’ This will oppress the heart, will cause fear and anxiety, in those who cannot explain it by repeated earth-lives. These feelings, which are not merely a theoretical uncertainty but a starving, a cramping, of life, will disappear through the perceptions given to us by Spiritual Science, which tell us: ‘You must think of your life as extended over earlier earth-lives.’ Then men will see what it means for them to experience the connection with the Christ-Impulse. For it is the Christ-Impulse which will give life to the whole retrospective view, the whole perspective of the past. A man will feel: ‘Here was this incarnation; there, that one.’ Then he will come to a time beyond which he will be unable to go without clearly understanding: ‘The Christ-Impulse was then on earth!’ Incarnations will be followed further back to a time when the Christ-Event was not yet there. This illumination of the retrospective view through the Christ-Impulse will be needed by men for their assurance in the future, as a necessity and a help which can flow into later incarnations.

This transformation of the human soul will derive from the Event which begins in the twentieth century and may be called the second Christ-Event, so that those persons in whom higher faculties have awakened will look upon the Lord of Karma. Some of you may say that when the Christ-Event of the twentieth century takes place, many of those now living will be with those who have fallen asleep, will be in the time between death and a new birth. But whether a person is living in a physical body, or in the time between death and a new birth, if he has prepared himself for the Christ-Event, he will experience it. The vision of the Christ-Event does not depend on whether we are incarnated in a physical body, but the preparation for the Christ-Event does so depend. Just as it was necessary that the first Christ-Event should take place on the physical plane in order that the salvation of man could be accomplished, so must the preparation be made here in the physical world, the preparation to look with full understanding, with full illumination, upon the Christ-Event of the twentieth century. For a person who looks upon it unprepared, when his powers have been awakened, will not be able to understand it. The Lord of Karma will then appear to him as a fearful judgment. In order to have an illuminated understanding of this Event, the individual must be prepared. The spreading abroad of the anthroposophical world-conception has taken place in our time for this purpose, so that men can be prepared on the physical plane to perceive the Christ-Event either on the physical plane or on the higher planes. Those who are not sufficiently prepared on the physical plane, and then go unprepared through the life between death and a new birth, will have to wait until, in the next incarnation, they can be further prepared through Anthroposophy for the understanding of Christ. During the next 3,000 years the opportunity will be given to men of going through this preparation, and the purpose of all anthroposophical development will be to render men more and more capable of participating in that which is to come.

Thus we understand how the past flows over into the future. When, for example, we recall how the Buddha permeated the astral body of the Nathan Jesus-child, we see how the activity of the Buddha forces continued after he himself no longer needed to incarnate again on earth. And when we remember how influences not directly connected with the Buddha worked on in the West, we see how the spiritual world penetrates the physical.

All this preparation is connected with the fact that men are always drawing nearer to an ideal which dawned in ancient Greece, an ideal formulated by Socrates: that when a man grasps the idea of the good, the moral, the ethical, he feels this idea as so magical an impulse that he becomes capable of living in accordance with it as an ideal. Today we are not so far advanced that this ideal can be realised; we are only so far on that in certain circumstances a man may very well form a concept of the good; he may be very clever and wise, and yet he need not be morally good. The direction of inner evolution, however, is such that the ideas we hold of the good will immediately become moral impulses. That is the intent of the evolution we shall experience in the approaching times. And the teachings given on earth will increasingly be such that in the course of future centuries and millennia human speech will come to have an effect unimaginably greater than it has now or ever had in the past. Today in the higher worlds anyone can see clearly the connection between intellect and morality; but as yet there is no human speech which works so magically that when a moral principle is stated, it sinks down into a man as a new idea, so that he perceives it as directly moral, and cannot do otherwise than act upon it as a moral impulse. After the next 3,000 years it will be possible to use a form of speech that could not now be entrusted to our heads. It will be such that everything intellectual will at the same time be moral, and this moral element will penetrate into the hearts of men. During the next 3,000 years the human race must become as though permeated with magical morality. Otherwise men would not be able to bear such an evolution; they would only misuse it.

For the special preparation of an evolution of this kind we must look at a much slandered individuality who lived about a century before our era. He is mentioned, though certainly in a distorted form, in Hebrew writings as Jeschu Ben Pandira—Jesus the son of Pandira. From lectures once given in Berne, some of you will know that this Jeschu Ben Pandira worked in preparation for the Christ-Event by training pupils, among whom was one who became the teacher of the writer of the Gospel of Matthew. Jeschu Ben Pandira, a noble Essene figure, preceded Jesus of Nazareth by a century. Jesus of Nazareth Himself only went among the Essenes, whereas Jeschu Ben Pandira was altogether an Essene.

Who was Jeschu Ben Pandira?

The successor of that Bodhisattva who in his final earthly incarnation had risen in his twenty-ninth year to be Gautama Buddha was incorporated in the physical body of Jeschu Ben Pandira. Every Bodhisattva who rises to the rank of a Buddha has a successor. This oriental tradition corresponds exactly with occult research. The Bodhisattva who worked at that time in preparation for the Christ-Event was re-embodied again and again. One of his re-embodiments is fixed for the twentieth century. It is impossible to speak here more exactly concerning the re-embodiment of this Bodhisattva; something, however, can be said about the way in which such a Bodhisattva may be recognised.

Through a law which will be demonstrated and explained in future lectures, it is a peculiarity of this Bodhisattva that when he reappears in a new embodiment—and he always reappears thus in the course of the centuries—he is quite dissimilar in his youth from what he comes to be in his later activities. At a quite definite point of time in the life of this Bodhisattva, something like a revolution, a great transformation, always takes place. To express it more in detail, in some place or other there is a more or less gifted child, in whom it is not noticeable that he has to do anything special in preparation for the future evolution of humanity. Occult research confirms that no one during his childhood and youth gives so little sign of what he really is as he who is to incorporate a Bodhisattva. For at a certain point of time in his life a great change comes over him. If an individuality from the remote past—Moses, for example—is incorporated, it is not the same with him as it was with the Christ individuality, to whom Jesus of Nazareth left the sheaths. In the case of a Bodhisattva there certainly will be something like an exchange, but the individuality remains in a certain sense, and the individuality who comes from the remote past—as patriarch or another—and is to bring new forces for the evolution of humanity, descends, and the human being who receives him experiences an immense transformation. This transformation occurs particularly between the thirtieth and thirty-third years. It can never be known beforehand that this body will be taken possession of by the Bodhisattva. The change never shows itself in youth. The distinctive feature is precisely that the later years are so unlike the youthful ones.

He who was incorporated in Jeschu Ben Pandira—the Bodhisattva who was repeatedly reincarnated, and who succeeded Gautama Buddha—has prepared himself for his Bodhisattva-incarnation so that he can reappear and rise to the Buddha dignity exactly 5,000 years after the illumination of Gautama Buddha under the bodhi-tree. Here again occult investigation fully agrees with oriental tradition. So, 3,000 years from now, this Bodhisattva, looking back on all that has happened in the new epoch, and looking back on the Christ-Impulse and all that is connected with it, will speak in such a way that his speech will make into a reality what has just been characterised: intellectuality will become directly moral. The future Bodhisattva, who will place all that he has at the service of the Christ-Impulse, will be a Bringer of the Good through the Word, through the Logos. He will speak in a language as yet possessed by no man, but a language which is so holy that he who speaks it can be called a Bringer of the Good. This also will not show itself in his youth, but approximately in his thirty-first year he will appear as a new man, and will yield himself up as the one who can be filled with a higher individuality. The experience of one single incarnation in the flesh holds good only for Christ Jesus. All Bodhisattvas go through various successive incarnations on the physical plane. This Bodhisattva, 3,000 years hence, will have advanced so far that he will be a Bringer of the Good, a Maitreya Buddha, who will place his Words of Goodness at the service of the Christ-Impulse, which a sufficient number of men will by then have made part of their lives. The perspective of the future development of man tells us this today.

What was necessary so that human beings could come gradually to this epoch of evolution? This we can make clear as follows.

If we wish to make a graphic picture of what happened in ancient Lemuria for the earth-evolution of man, we can say: That was the time when man descended from Divine Heights: it was ordained for him that he should develop further in a certain way, but through the Luciferic influence he was cast down more deeply into matter than he would have been without that influence. Thereby his path in evolution became different.

When man had gone downwards to the lowest stage, a powerful impetus in the upward direction was required. This impetus could come about only because in the higher worlds the Being whom we designate as the Christ-Being had formed a resolution which He would not have needed to take for His own evolution. For the Christ-Being would also have attained His evolution if He had taken a path far, far above the path that men were pursuing. He could have passed by, so to speak, far above the evolution of humanity. But if the upward impulse had not been given, human evolution would have been compelled to continue on its downward path. The Christ would have had an ascent, but humanity a downfall. Only because the Christ-Being had taken the resolution to unite Himself at the time of the Events of Palestine with a man, to embody Himself in a man and to make the upward path possible for humanity—only this could bring about the Redemption of humanity, as we may now call it: redemption from the impulse brought by the Luciferic forces and designated symbolically in the Bible as ‘original sin’, the Temptation by the Serpent and the original sin that was its consequence. Christ accomplished something that was not necessary for Himself.

What kind of Act was this?

It was an act of Divine Love. We must be quite clear that no human feeling is capable of realising the intensity of love that was needed for a God to make a decision—a decision He had no need to make—to work upon earth in a human body. Thereby, through an act of love, the most important event in human evolution was brought about. And when men grasp this act of love by a God, when they try to grasp it as a great ideal in contrast with which every human act of love can be but small, then, through this feeling of utter disproportion between human love and the Divine Love needed for the Mystery of Golgotha, they will draw near to the building up, to the giving birth within them, of those Imaginations which place before our spiritual gaze the momentous Event of Golgotha. Yes, verily, it is possible to attain to the Imagination of the mount on which the Cross was raised, that Cross on which hung a God in human body, a God who out of his own free will, out of Love, accomplished the act whereby the earth and humanity could reach their goal.

If the God who is designated by the name of the Father had not at one time permitted the Luciferic influences to come to man, man would not have developed the free Ego. With the Luciferic influence, the conditions for the free Ego were established. That had to be permitted by the Father-God. But just as the Ego, for the sake of freedom, had to become entangled in matter, so then, in order that the Ego might be freed from this entanglement, the entire love of the Son had to lead to the Act of Golgotha. Through this alone the freedom of man, the complete dignity of man, first became possible. For the fact that we can be free beings, we have to thank a Divine Act of Love. As men we may feel free beings, but we may never forget that for this freedom we have to thank this Act of Love. Then, in the midst of our feeling, the thought will arise: ‘You can attain to the value, the dignity, of a man; but one thing you may not forget, that for being what you are you have to thank Him who has brought back to you your human prototype through the Redemption on Golgotha.’ Men should not be able to lay hold of the thought of freedom without the thought of Redemption through Christ: only then is the thought of freedom justified. If we will to be free, we must bring the offering of thanks to Christ for our freedom. Then only can we really perceive it. And those who consider that their dignity as men is restricted when they thank Christ for it, should recognise that human opinions have no significance in face of cosmic facts, and that one day they will very willingly acknowledge that their freedom was won by Christ.

What we have been able to do in these lectures is not very much for gaining a closer understanding of the Christ-Impulse, and of the whole course of human evolution on earth, from the standpoint of Spiritual Science. We can only bring together single building-stones. But if the effect upon our souls is something like a renewed stimulus to further effort, to further development along the path of knowledge, then these stones will have done their work for the great spiritual temple of humanity. And the best we can carry away from a spiritual-scientific study such as this is that once more we have learnt something towards a certain goal, that we have again somewhat enriched our knowledge. And our high goal is this: that we may know more exactly how much we still need to know. Then we shall be more and more permeated with the truth of the old Socratic saying: ‘The more a man learns, the more he knows how little he knows.’ But this conviction is good only when it is not a confession of passive, easy-going resignation, but testifies to a living will and effort towards an ever-extending knowledge. We ought not to acknowledge how little we know by saying, ‘Since we cannot know everything, we would rather learn nothing; so let us fold our hands in our lap.’ That would be a false result of spiritual-scientific study. The right result is to be more and more inspired to further striving; to regard every new thing learnt as a step towards the attainment of yet higher stages.

In these lectures we have perhaps had to say much about the Redemption-thought without often using the word. This Redemption-thought should be felt by a seeker after the spirit as it was felt by a great forerunner of our Spiritual Science: that it is related and entrusted to our souls only as a consequence of our striving after the highest goals of knowing, feeling and willing. And as this great forerunner connects the word ‘Redemption’ with the word ‘striving’ and has expressed it in the line, ‘Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen’—‘He who never gives up striving, he it is whom we can redeem’—so should the anthroposophist always feel. The true Redemption can be grasped and felt and willed in its own realm only by someone who never gives up.

May this lecture-cycle—which has been specially laid upon my heart, because so much has to be said in it concerning the Redemption-thought—be a stimulus to our further endeavours; may we find ourselves ever more and more united in our endeavours, during this incarnation and in later ones. May this be the fruit which comes from such studies. With this we will close, taking with us as a stimulus the thought that we must continually exert ourselves, in order that we may see what the Christ is, on the one hand, and on the other may draw nearer to Redemption, which is being set free not merely from the lower earth-path and earth-fate, but free also from everything that hinders man from attaining his dignity as man. But these things are written down truly only in the annals of the Spiritual. For the script that can be read in spiritual realms is the only true writing. Let us therefore strive to read the chapter concerning the dignity of man and the mission of man, in the script where these things stand written in the spiritual worlds.

In each of the Gospels light is thrown on the great Mystery of Golgotha from one particular aspect. I have drawn your attention to the fact that the secret of Golgotha, the secret of Christ Jesus, is presented by the Gospel of St. Mark from the aspect of the great Cosmological connections, while that of St. Matthew shows how this secret was developed out of one special people, the ancient Hebrews. We have seen how that people had to develop little by little, from generation to generation, from the time of Abraham, so as to bring forth later, as their flower, the Human Being in whom could be contained the individuality of Zarathustra or Zoroaster. We have seen how all the qualities peculiar to the Hebrew people—qualities which had to become more and more intensified in the course of their descent from one generation to the next—were based entirely on the principle of physical inheritance. We were thus able to describe how the character of the mission of the old Hebrew people differed from that of others in that it had to inherit certain qualities, which could only be attained by physical inheritance, and which had gained in intensity from the oldest generations of the time of Abraham down to Jesus. The Gospel of St. Matthew contains many other secrets, as indeed do all the Gospels. Although in the course of this Winter we shall open up a few aspects and perspective glimpses into the Gospels, these can at the most only stimulate the understanding. For in order to understand the Gospels completely a never-ending spiritual work is necessary. Light shall be thrown to-day from one particular side on the Gospel of St. Matthew and it will be shown how the lessons to be drawn there from can be usefully applied by those who now form part of the anthroposophical spiritual stream.

If we look back at much of what we have learnt as the years went by, we shall see that the development of humanity, as described by Spiritual Science, passes through various crises; it reaches an important point, then continues for a while along a more level road, then comes another important point, and so on. We have often emphasised that one such important point in the development of humanity on earth was reached when the Christ-Impulse was given at the beginning of our era, according to the modern reckoning of time. When we look back beyond the Atlantean into the Lemurian age, we come to that point in time when the first rudiment of the human ego was implanted in the human being. To understand such an event, the words must be taken very accurately. For instance, we must make a clear distinction between the statement that in the Lemurian epoch ‘the first rudiments of the ego were implanted in the human being,’ and that other, that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha began the period, the age, in which humanity became conscious of this ego. ‘There is a great difference between having the ego only in rudiment, as something working in man, and the knowledge that one possesses it. A sharp distinction must be made between these things, for otherwise it is impossible to understand the true laws of evolution.

We know that the implanting of the ego in man is part of the collective development of the earth. The earth passed through the Saturn, Sun and Moon ages, and then only did it become the structure it is to-day. On Saturn the germ of the physical body was laid, on the Sun that of the etheric body, on the Moon that of the astral body, and the germ of the ego was added on the earth; this germ was placed in the development of the earth in the Lemurian epoch. Now something else also took place in the Lemurian epoch, something that we have always called the ‘luciferic influence’. During that epoch man was endowed with the germ of the ego, which in the course of the subsequent earth-periods was destined to attain greater and greater perfection, and at the same time his astral body was ‘inoculated’ with the luciferic influence. The whole nature of man was altered by this influence, even to the forces and elements in his etheric and physical bodies. Thus in the Lemurian epoch man became an entirely different being from what he would have been if there had been no luciferic influence. We see him altering in two respects: we see him becoming an ego-being—and we see him becoming a being in whom the luciferic principle is hidden. Even if the luciferic principle had not set in, the ego-influence would still have entered man.

Now what took place in the human being as a result of the luciferic influence having made itself felt in the Lemurian epoch?

When such a circumstance is described from one aspect or another, I beg you not to consider that as all that can be said on the subject; for this may well be only one point of view, selected for the moment. In the course of years a great deal has been said as to what the luciferic influence brought about in the evolution of man; it is all part of the same, but we cannot repeat it all now. To-day we will select one point of view only, that describes one aspect; that is, that as a result of the luciferic influence man reached a certain point in evolution earlier than was intended, earlier than the wise guidance of the world had predestined for him. The luciferic influence caused him to descend more deeply into the three principles which came over from the former embodiments of the earth, (the astral body, etheric body and physical body) and he has become more entangled in them than would have been the case if no such influence had prevailed. Man, with his ego, would have remained nearer to the spiritual worlds, he would have continued for a longer time to feel himself, through his ego, a member of the spiritual world, if the luciferic influence had not caused that ego to descend more deeply into the three principles. We may say that as a result of the luciferic influence, man descended more deeply on to the earth in the Lemurian epoch. We can indicate the time when he would have descended thus far to the earth or into physical matter had there been no luciferic influence; it would have been in the middle of the Atlantean epoch. If no luciferic influence had come about man would have been obliged to wait till then for his descent to earth; but that influence caused him to descend earlier. It enabled him to become a free being, able to act in accordance with his own impulses. He would otherwise have remained entirely dependent upon the spiritual world until the middle of the Atlantis epoch; neither would he have been able before then to distinguish between good and evil, nor act from his own impulses. He could only have acted from psychic influences, that is to say, from forces implanted in his soul by Divine Spiritual Beings. The luciferic beings made it possible for him to begin at an earlier stage to decide between good and evil; not simply to allow himself to be guided by the laws of the divine-spiritual world Order, but to decide for himself, creating a kind of law and order for himself. This fact is expressed in a very profound way in the description of ‘the Fall’ which represents in a wonderful imaginative picture, what I have just stated. The Old Testament describes this by saying that Divine Spiritual Beings implanted into man a living soul. ‘Now if this living soul had merely remained as it was, man would have had to wait until later on, until the Divine Spiritual Beings had brought the living soul, or, in other words, the yet undeveloped ego, to the degree of maturity able to make distinctions. But now there came the luciferic influences, represented in the Bible as ‘the Serpent.’ Through these, man himself became able to distinguish between good and evil, instead of merely instinctively following the inpourings of Jehovah or the Elohim. From a being who till that time had been guided and led by Divine Spiritual Beings, man thus became a being able to decide for himself. The Bible clearly shows that self-decision was brought to man by the Serpent, or in other words, by the luciferic beings. We then hear the words ring forth, words spoken from the side of the gods: ‘Man has become as one of us!’ Or, if we wish to put this into plainer words:—‘Man has acquired something through the luciferic influence which has till now been reserved only for the gods. It was given to the gods to decide between good and evil, the beings dependent upon them had no such decisions to make.’

As a result of the luciferic influence man now became a being capable of making distinctions; that is, he became a being who developed divine qualities within him prematurely. In this way and through this influence, something entered human nature which would otherwise have been withheld from his evolution till the middle of the Atlantean epoch. As you can well imagine, man would have been quite different if this descent into matter had not taken place till then; his soul would have been more mature for the descent. He would have descended into matter as a better, a riper, man. He would have brought quite different qualities into his physical, etheric and astral bodies and would have possessed a very different power of distinguishing between good and evil. Because man was already a being able to distinguish between good and evil from the Lemurian epoch to the middle of the Atlantean epoch, he made himself worse than he would otherwise have been; he entered a state of lesser perfection. He would otherwise have spent all the intervening time in a much more spiritual way; but as it was, he passed through it more materially. The effect of this was that if he had received in the middle of the Atlantean epoch what the gods had intended him to have, he would have fallen utterly and completely.

What was it that would have been given to man at the middle of the Atlantean epoch, if he had continued to be guided and directed till that time, instinctively, as it were, by Divine Spiritual Beings?

He would have then received that which, the luciferic influence having in the meanwhile intervened, was afterwards given to him through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Christ-Impulse would have been given to man at the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Now, however, on account of the luciferic influence, man had to wait as long a time for the Christ-Impulse as had elapsed between the intervention of the luciferic influence and the middle of the Atlantean epoch. There was the same span of time between the entrance of Lucifer and the middle of the Atlantean epoch, as between that time and. the arrival of the Christ-Impulse. Thus, through man's having acquired a likeness to the gods before he was meant to do so, we have to describe a delay of the Christ-Impulse. For before that could come man had to go through the Earth-Karma due to him on account of the evil that had entered the earth through the luciferic impulse. He had to wait, not only till that influence had rendered him able to distinguish between good and evil, but until, in the course of the earth's development, all the consequences of the luciferic influence had come. He had to wait for these, for then only could the Christ-Impulse descend to the earth. In accordance with the wise guidance of the earth, man was not intended to escape for ever from what was to come to him through the luciferic influence, but it would not have come upon him till the middle of the Atlantean epoch. It must have come in any case; but it would certainly not have come in the same form. Not only did man acquire from Lucifer the power of free decision in everything connected with spiritual things, but also the capacity of enthusiasm for what is good and noble, wise and great. As human beings, we are not only able coldly to distinguish between good and evil, but also to feel a warm glow for the noble, good and wise. That is because something was carried into our astral body, which, if it had only reached man in the middle of the Atlantean epoch, would have been taken into the ego, that ego which is capable of judgment. All the feeling, the idealism and enthusiasm for what is good, for high ideals, we owe to the circumstance that something entered our astral body before we had acquired the likeness to God in our ego, before the acceptance of the Christ had taken place therein. The essential point is that this likeness to God, the possibility of finding the good within ourselves, had to come to man. If the luciferic influence had not come, this impulse would have come in the middle of the Atlantean period, but as things are it came in the age in which Christ Jesus Himself worked.

Thus through the Christ-Impulse the consciousness came to man that in his ego he had something of Divine substance and of Divine nature. The thought that man can take in the Divine in his Ego-being and that this Divine part can be active therein and distinguish between good and evil, underlies all the deeper sayings of the New Testament. We may therefore say that with the reception into the inner nature of man of the Christ-Impulse, it was made possible for man to say: ‘I must be my own guide for the knowledge of my existence and the distinction between good and evil.’

Now if we look back to the pre-Christian time, we must say that when the impulse enabling man to distinguish between good and evil was not yet present, such distinction, and the judgment of man as to the good, the beautiful and the true, was necessarily meagre; it did not actually proceed from his inner being. He could not, before the Christ-Impulse, have distinguished in his inner being between good and evil. In the pre-Christian time the decision as to the really Good, Beautiful and True could only be accomplished through certain beings—such as the Bodhisattvas—reaching up as time went on with a part of their being into the divine-spiritual worlds; the distinction between good and evil was therefore not made from out of man's inner being, but in the divine worlds. Through their companionship with divine spiritual beings these Guides acquired it and it flowed from them into the souls of men, as though by suggestion. Had it not been for those guides, men could only have made feeble distinctions between good and evil in those days. If these guides had depended on their own hearts alone, they could not have done this either; but because they descended into those depths of the soul which were not yet accessible to man and entered in their ego-being into the kingdoms of heaven, they received the impulse needed by man to help him to decide between good and evil at the time of his need, that the good might nevertheless be implanted in the earth by way of preparation. Thus, before the time of Christ, man was a being still insufficiently prepared to acquire the likeness to God. On this account, since the Lemurian epoch, everything done by man was done less well than would otherwise have been the case. This applies above all to what regards himself. His astral, etheric and physical bodies, which but for the luciferic influence would have remained more spiritual, were, through that influence, less well formed, made more material. That was the reason of all the evil which developed in the life of man as time went on. In the course of a very long time have these evils developed.

From the Lemurian epoch to the Mystery of Golgotha they developed in the physical, etheric and astral bodies. In the astral body a high degree of egotism was developed; in the etheric body the possibility of mistaken judgment and the possibility of lying. If man had remained under the influence of divine-spiritual beings, acting instinctively in accordance with their impulses, he would not to-day, when he desires knowledge of the world around him, be able to fall into error, nor could he be led into untruth. Thus did the tendency to lying and the danger of error find place in the development of man; and since the spiritual is always the origin of the physical, and because the luciferic influence and its consequences ate their way more and more deeply into the etheric body during incarnation after incarnation, the possibility of disease entered the physical body. Illness is the evil that entered the physical body through that development; but something of still greater significance has come. If man had not been subject to these influences, if he had not allowed them to work upon him, he would never have supposed that anything more than a change of life takes place when the physical body falls away from us; consciousness of death would not have come to him. If man had descended less deeply into matter and had kept hold of the threads uniting him with the divine-spiritual, he would have been aware that when the physical sheath is laid aside, a new form of existence begins; but he would never have looked upon that as a loss, as the end of an existence he had grown fond of. Everything in evolution would have taken on a different aspect.

Man descended more deeply into matter, he thus made himself more free and independent, but he also thereby made his own development more limited than it would have been.

Everything lacking in man will be made good by the Christ-Impulse; but one must not expect that to be done in a short time nor even in a comparatively short time. A very long time elapsed between the Lemurian epoch and the Mystery of Golgotha. Slowly and gradually, during incarnation after incarnation, came egotism, error and lying, disease and the realisation of death. Man is being led back into the spiritual world, so to speak, with the qualities he has acquired “from below.” The re-ascent will be a quicker progress than the descent; but it cannot be expected that in one or two incarnations man will be enabled, through what he can take in of the Christ-Impulse, to overcome selfishness and to heal his etheric body to such an extent that all danger of lying and error is at an end, still less can he be expected to be able to work healingly on his physical body. All this must go on slowly and gradually; but it is going on. Just as man has been led down into all those qualities by the luciferic impulse, so will he be led up out of them by the Christ-Impulse. Selfishness will be transmuted into selflessness, lying into truthfulness, the danger of error into absolute certainty and true judgment. Illness will become the foundation for more complete health; the illness we have overcome will be the germs of greater good-health; and when we have gradually learnt to understand death in such a way that the Death at Golgotha works as a prototype of death in our own soul, death will then have lost its sting. Man will then know why from time to time he must lay aside his physical covering, in order to rise higher and higher in the course of his embodiments. In particular, the Christ-Impulse brought with it the impulse to make good something connected with man's knowledge and observation, with his knowledge of the world.

We have said that man has become more entangled in matter, less perfect in his three bodies than he would have been if there had been no luciferic influence; this caused him to be possessed by an urge to sink more deeply into material existence, to soak himself more completely in mere matter. This refers more especially to his knowledge, but even that only came about slowly and gradually. Man did not, as soon as the luciferic influence made itself felt, immediately sink down so deeply as to close all the doors into the spiritual world behind him. He still remained, for a long time, in connection with the spiritual world from which he grew forth and with which he would have remained in connection with his whole being, if the luciferic influence had not come. He long remained a participator in it; for a long time he continued to feel that his finer, more spiritual instincts were guided by the threads from the divine-spiritual world. For a long time he still continued to feel that his impulse was not a merely human one, it was as though the Gods had been at work behind it. That was more particularly the case in more ancient times. Man was driven slowly into matter and he thus gradually lost the consciousness of the divine.

Those spiritual movements and world-conceptions of humanity which had knowledge of these things, have also hinted at this. They said: There was once upon a time an age in which man was driven some way into material existence by the luciferic influence—though not so far as to prevent the divine influence from still having a powerful effect upon him. In the early ages of man's development this was known as the ‘Golden Age.’ This is no fanciful conception: ‘Golden Age’ is simply the expression used by those men of olden times who still had an inkling that there had been something like a primeval age of humanity, such as has just been described. This Golden Age, known to Eastern philosophy as Krita-Yuga, lasted, comparatively speaking, much longer than the Ages we still have to describe. After the Golden Age came the so-called ‘Silver Age.’ Man was pushed further down into the physical world; but the process went on slowly and gradually. Even then the doors of the spiritual world were not yet completely closed. Man still had intense moments in which, in a dreamy sort of clairvoyance, he saw the Gods at work behind his instincts. Man could no longer be called a companion of the Gods in this Silver Age, but he could still perceive them standing behind him. Eastern philosophy calls this age, Treta-Yuga. Then came an Age which extends into our own Post-Atlantean period; its last stragglers extended into historical times when there still were people gifted with the old dream-like, twilight consciousness. The consciousness of a spiritual world from which man had come forth, still existed; though only as a kind of memory remaining over from former incarnations. It was just as when we now remember our own childhood, our youth, and our present age. In childhood we had direct experience of our childish happenings; in like manner man still experienced in Treta Yuga in a direct way, the impulse of a divine-spiritual world. In the Age following on that, known as the ‘Bronze Age,’ what man had was more like a memory. It might be compared with the way a grown man contemplates his childhood; for we say: ‘I experienced my childhood; it was not a dream!’ That was like the state of things in the Third Age. Men then knew: ‘In earlier ages we had experience of communion with the Gods; that is now nothing but a memory!’ I have explained at some length how in the Old-Indian period of civilisation the memory of the Atlantean epoch worked retrospectively, thus enabling the holy Rishis to reveal their great divine teachings. This Bronze Age is known in Eastern philosophy as Dvapara-Yuga. That is followed by an Age in which all memory of the divine-spiritual world is lost, when man, with his knowledge and perception, is entirely given up to the physical world. That age began about the year 3101 B.C. In Eastern philosophy it is known as Kali-Yuga, ‘the dark age’; because man had then lost all connection with the spiritual world and become completely one with the physical world. I wish expressly to note that I am now using these expressions for smaller divisions of time, but they can also be applied to larger spans. We are now speaking of the divisions of time corresponding to the smaller ages, and we make Kali-Yuga begin, as does Indian philosophy, with the year 3101 before our era. The Age was then being prepared in which men were taught only to see that which conceals the divine-spiritual world as by a veil, by a covering; when they only perceived the external physical. At the beginning of Kali-Yuga there were still many who could either see or recollect the divine-spiritual world, but for normal humanity the time set in when they could only see the physical world of nature.

That was the descent of man to Kali-Yuga. It was the time of deepest descent. Into that had to come the impulse for re-ascent. That is why this impulse, the Christ-Impulse, had to come during the Kali-Yuga, in the “dark” age.

This Christ-Impulse was prepared for by the religion of Jahve or Jehovah; for this religion taught man how little reliance could be placed on his former decisions. During the time which extended from the old Lemurian epoch to the Revelation on Mount Sinai, we have that age in which man was given the power to choose good or evil, while at the same time he became liable to err in judging between them, and became more and more likely to bring on earth that which is known as ‘Sin.’ Sin then ate its way into the life of the earth. Man became ‘like to the Gods,’ but in return for this he acquired qualities which were in nowise ripe for the likeness to God. What had to happen then? First of all man had to be shown what the Godhead expected from him if he was to become a self-conscious ego. This was shown to him by the announcement made on Mount Sinai in the ‘Ten Commandments.’ The people then heard proclaimed through Moses: ‘The good and evil thou hast already developed are not sufficient. I will show thee how these Commandments should sound if thou hadst not descended, and in return for thy defective qualities, received the power of judging between good and evil.’ The Decalogue, the law, given to man on Sinai, was given to man as he had then become; so that out of the spiritual worlds man heard sounding forth that which was right, in contrast to what he had insufficiently developed. The Ten Commandments stand forth as a law of iron, as a torch, showing man what he had not become. He had to submit himself to that law, with all he had become. Man could not at first have submitted to the Ten Commandments, because he had become lacking in decision, lacking in self-guidance. Therefore, they had to be given to him by one who was inspired,—by Moses—that is to say, they were given him from above by Divine administration. They were, however, given in such a way that they were intended for the ego. They told man how an ego must act, if it is to attain the goal of humanity.

In the lecture on The Ten Commandments of Moses (16th November, 1908) this is traced out in detail. Therein is first shown the right attitude of the ego to the spiritual worlds; this is contained in the first three Commandments. The next ones refer to man's conduct towards his fellow-men in act and deed, and the last Commandments refer to the control of his feelings and sensations. The Ten Commandments give instructions for the education of the ego. This was the preparation by means of which the ego was to learn in its most inward being how to give itself the impulse after having descended into Kali-Yuga, into the age of darkness. At first man was to be given the Law from above. The Law of one's own ego could however, only become what it was to be, when that ego takes into itself the great Prototype of Golgotha, saying: ‘If I take into my soul such thinking as was thought by the Being Who offered Himself in sacrifice on Golgotha,—if I take into myself such feelings as were felt by the Being Who offered Himself as sacrifice on Golgotha,—if I take into myself such willing as was willed by the Being Who offered Himself in sacrifice on Golgotha, then will my being come to a decision within itself to develop increasingly a likeness to God, it will then no longer have to follow the Outer Law, the Ten Commandments, but an inner impulse, its own Law.’

Thus Moses first put before mankind the Law, but Christ gave them the Prototype and the strength which the soul ought to take in, whereby to develop itself. Hence all the spiritual impulses were to be taken into the innermost of the soul, even into the ego itself; they were all to be deepened into inwardness through Christ Jesus. That could only take place if men thought as follows, and Christ Jesus radiated it forth as an impulse:—

Man has descended into the dark age, into Kali-Yuga. Before that dark age men saw into the spiritual world with a dim twilight consciousness. They were then able, not merely to make use of the instruments of the physical body, but when they observed the physical world through their eyes, ears and so on, they perceived the spiritual surrounding all things, flowers, plants, stones, etc. As regards this observation of the spiritual, men were rich in those days. In the older times the spirit was bestowed on them; whereas, in the dark age, as regards the spirit they were reduced to beggary; for the spirit was no longer bestowed upon them. They had become poor in spirit. Kali-Yuga came upon them more and more, that time when men had to say to themselves: In the old days things were different, the spirit was then bestowed on men; they were able to look up into a spiritual world, they were then rich in spirit; the kingdoms of heaven were then accessible to them. Now men are pressed down into the physical world. The gates of the spiritual world are closed to human senses, and no view of the kingdoms of heaven is open to the physical body. But Christ was able to say: ‘Lay hold of the ego, where it must now be apprehended! Then will the Kingdoms of Heaven draw near to you. They will arise within your own ego. Though the spiritual light may be concealed from your eyes behind the external light which is perceptible to the senses, though spiritual sound may be concealed from your ears behind physical sound; yet, when Christ Himself shall raise you, ye shall find the Kingdoms of Heaven within you! ‘Unhappy were those who had become poor in the dark age, who had become beggars as regard the spirit. They can now become blessed, the impulse having been given through which Christ is able, from the spiritual world, from the Kingdoms of Heaven, to penetrate into the very ego or ‘ I ’ of man. Therefore, with respect to man's poverty of spirit, the highest Christian proclamation is this: ‘From henceforward, blessed are they who are beggars in spirit, who no longer receive the spirit bestowed upon them according to the old conception. Henceforth, they can be blessed if they take in the Christ-Impulse; for, through the developing of their ego, the Kingdoms of Heaven will be within them.’

Let us pass on to the etheric body, which is the builder of the physical body. What has entered that? Illness only expresses itself in the physical body. The trouble itself is first in the etheric body; that then expresses itself in a subsequent incarnation as illness in the physical body. ‘Now, however, something has entered the world,’ so Christ Jesus had to say, ‘whereby an impulse may arise within gradually to clear away the auction from the etheric body. Blessed may those now be who have an affliction attached to their etheric bodies if they take up the Christ-Impulse; for they have something within them which lifts them above the suffering and teaches them to find inner comfort, the inner paraclete, the inner comforter!’

Now what had the astral body become through the luciferic influence? It had become less perfect than before. It had been given the possibility which we have described as a good quality: of being able to be aglow for what is great and good, to feel enthusiasm for the sublime treasures of the true, the beautiful and the good. On the other hand it has to purchase this at the price of feeling sympathy or antipathy for the treasures of the earth. But a man who takes up the Christ-Impulse learns to control the astral body, which stirs his physical body to opposition to the treasures of the earth, he learns to bring it under the power of the spirit; and in so doing he becomes happy or blessed. ‘Blessed will he be who makes his astral body indifferent to the things of earth; which will thereby fall to his share. For when he is all afire for the things of earth, feeling both emotion and sympathy or antipathy for them, he casts away that which they might become to him; but when the astral body is brought under the power of the spiritual and he grows indifferent to the things of earth, the Kingdom of Earth is added as a reward.’

Let us now ascend to that which works as sentient soul within the astral body. Herein we still possess in a dim sort of way, a ruling ego, an ego which has not yet wholly emerged and hence is still developing the most egotistical passions. As long as the ego is still really within the sentient soul, it develops the most selfish egoism. The wish that others should have the same as we have is lacking. Egoism dims the sense of justice, for the ego wants everything for itself. But if the ego transmutes itself in imitation of the Christ-Impulse, it will hunger and thirst after justice for all the beings around us. ‘Blessed will be those who hunger and thirst after the feeling of justice in their sentient-soul; for they shall be satisfied. ‘They will be able to bring about conditions all over the world corresponding to the proper new spirit of justice in the depths of the soul.

Let us further ascend to the intellectual or mind soul. This principle brings about to a still greater extent the consideration of one man for another, not merely as a feeling of justice such as is produced by the sentient soul, but as compassion, a true compassion for the sorrows of others and a sharing in their joy. One who takes in the Christ-Impulse grows to feel what others feel, not only what he feels himself; he immerses himself in the ego of others and in so doing feels bliss in his intellectual or mind soul. Blessed is he who develops fellow-feeling; for only by feeling himself within the soul of others, does he stimulate them to feel themselves in him. He will receive the sympathy of others when he himself radiates fellow-feeling for them. ‘Blessed are those who feel with others, for others shall feel with them.’

You will now see how, having gone a little further in our study of these connections, we are able to understand in a different way from the very depths of the nature and being of man, those words in St. Matthew's Gospel, generally known as the Sermon on the Mount. Each sentence of the Sermon on the Mount relates to one of the nine principles of man. In the next lectures we will go further into this. The Sermon on the Mount must become transparent to our spiritual eyes as that deed of Christ Jesus by means of which he turned what was contained in the Old Law of Moses into something quite inward, an inner impulse enabling man's ego to become active, as it must become in all the nine principles of man for if the ego takes up the Christ-Impulse, it affects all these.

Thus we see the profound truth of what I have already indicated here once before: that in Kali-Yuga Christ made the ego of man capable of discovering something in the physical world which can lead man up into the spiritual world, into the Kingdoms of Heaven. Christ has made the ego of man a participator in the spiritual world. On ancient Saturn the physical body was taken straight out of the spiritual world. It was still within that world, because the physical body was at that time much more spiritual and was not aware that it could separate from the spiritual worlds. The etheric body was added on the Sun and the astral body on the Moon, but only on the earth was it made possible—through the development of the ego—to set oneself free from the divine-spiritual. In consequence of this, as the ego must be led back again, God had to descend to the physical plane, and on that plane show man how to find the way back to the Kingdoms of Heaven.

A most important event was brought about through the Christ-Impulse. Now just ask yourselves this question: Did all those living at the time when Christ Jesus worked on earth know that such an important event was taking place? Just reflect that Tacitus—the great historian, mentions the Christians as an almost unknown sect. A hundred years after Christ he only mentions the Christians as a sect living in a side-street in Rome, whose teacher was a certain Jesus; they are simply mentioned as living there. For a long time after the Christ-Event many people in Rome believed Jesus was a contemporary of theirs, as though he had only just appeared. In short, important events can take place in the evolution of man, without contemporaries noticing that anything has happened. The most important things may come about and pass unobserved if people do not cultivate the understanding for them. They would then miss the experience, and as far as that was concerned they would be barren and dried up. ‘Change your hearts! The Kingdoms of Heaven have approached!’ That was the proclamation of John the Baptist and of Christ Jesus Himself. They hinted to those who had ears to hear that something most important was occurring. That nothing is known in the world of an important happening is no proof that it is not taking place. Those whose business it is to-day to point out the signs of the times, are aware of what is taking place to-day. They must point to an occurrence which, though not one of the most cogent, is yet important. True it is that just in our own time something of infinite significance is developing. Just as John pointed to Christ, and Christ Himself pointed to the approach of the Kingdoms of Heaven, to the ego; so must we to-day point to another important event.

Christ descended once to the earth in a body of flesh; He spent the first years of our era on earth, in the flesh. In accordance with the wise guidance of our world-evolution it is not ordained that men should again see Christ in the flesh, as a physically incarnated man; nor is it necessary that they should. For Christ will not return in the flesh. Why? Because what we call the dark age—the Kali-Yuga—was completed at the end of the nineteenth century, and because with the twentieth century began a new age, in which men must prepare to develop new capacities, those faculties which were lost in the dark age. Slowly and gradually these are being prepared. These faculties will develop so far that single individuals will be here who will possess them as natural tendencies. These faculties will be seen in a certain number of persons, particularly between the years of 1930 and 1940, and by means of these a number of people will enter into new relation with the Christ.

This indicates an important point in human development. Spiritual Science is here to open the understanding of men to these new faculties which will be developed in the world of men. Anthroposophy has not come into the world because a few people are in sympathy with it and would like to make it further known; it has come because it is wanted if people wish to understand what will take place in the first half of this century. For it is only by means of that which Spiritual Science can give mankind that it will become capable of understanding this. When people become capable of perceiving in the spirit that which will then occur, they will also be incapable of confusing that event with their mistaken representations. For as materialism spreads further, it will extend even to the spiritual conception of the world where it will have a particularly evil influence. In that realm it might tend to prevent men from understanding what should be spiritually comprehended. What should really be grasped in the spirit they will seek in the world of matter. Because we are to enter into a new relation to Christ in the course of the first half of our century, it must over and over again be emphasised during the next decades and until the event occurs, that false Messiahs, false Christs will arise who will knock at the doors of those who are only able to be materialists in the realms of Spiritual Science, and can only imagine a new relation to Christ if they see Him before them in the flesh. A number of false Messiahs will turn this to their own use, saying: ‘Christ has reappeared in the flesh!’

Anthroposophical wisdom has the duty of preparing the relation which can be attained during the first half of our century by purely human capacities. The responsibility of the Anthroposophical effort becomes ever greater and greater, for it has to prepare for a coming event which will only be understood if Anthroposophy makes its way into the souls of men and thus becomes fruitful for the further development of humanity. The alternative is that men will neglect to accept and make use of the instrument of Spiritual Science, through which this Event can be understood; in that case it will pass humanity by uncomprehended. For if men so entirely reject Spiritual Science that nothing of it should remain, they would not know that this event is there or would interpret it wrongly. The fruit of this event would then be lost to the future of humanity, and man would thus be thrust down into dreadful misery.

I have thus hinted at a new relation to the Christ which is germinating in the souls of men and which they will be able to evolve in a comparatively near future.

Dear Friends,Yesterday I began to speak about the path that has been sought to arrive at a baptismal ritual, and I introduced it by pointing out that in these rituals there must be a real connection between an insight into the supersensible worlds and what takes place here in the ceremony. We have perhaps seen from this that if we are to speak of a real ceremony, we have to relate to the world somewhat differently than we do today. You will perhaps understand me even better if I say the following.

Today, people strive in the outer world for knowledge of natural laws. They consider this knowledge to be something that they set as a goal and believe that it must be achieved unconditionally as a kind of last resort. Now, when anthroposophical spiritual science is more widely recognized, it will be something very surprising when people find that the natural laws they talk about today only apply — (it is drawn on the board) if this is the earth — a certain distance beyond the earth, but not beyond that. For example, at a certain height, the chemist would try in vain to carry out his laboratory experiments in the usual way, not only because what he imagines analogous to the laws of the earth does not prevail there, but because completely different laws prevail there. While, for example, a theory such as Einstein's theory of relativity, which he invented and which impresses the world, can be called an ingenious theory within the context of earthly existence, beyond earthly existence it is – forgive the trivial expression – simply nonsense, real rolled-out nonsense. And one can certainly not expect someone who has insight into the supersensible world to accept the visualizations that Einstein undertakes, not even if he only executes them as thoughts. I am merely drawing your attention to Einstein's comparison of the clocks, where he says that if a clock were to fly away at the speed of light and then return, it would — as he imagines — be on the same hand position as before. That is complete nonsense. Anyone who thinks realistically knows that such an image cannot be realized. He should just imagine, in line with the higher world, how this clock returns, which he lets walk out at the speed of light. Einstein also imagines that if a person were to move at the speed of light, he would gradually become as thin as a sheet of paper because the movement would also cause deformation. Ingenious thought up, but it is absolute nonsense, because the human organization is not something with which one can mathematize, but something with which one must reckon as a being, and which, by its own nature, precludes one from simply letting it become as thin as a sheet of paper. These are all very unrealistic ideas, and so are the rest; but, as I admit, for the earthly being they are extraordinarily ingenious ideas.

Now, the one who acts sacramentally must come to ideas that are quite different from those that one can have merely within earthly existence. On the one hand, St. Paul's saying must be taken quite seriously: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” It must be taken so seriously that it is connected with the other saying: “All power is given unto me, not only in the kingdoms of the earth, but also in the kingdoms of heaven.” That is, the actions that are carried out must be able to be imagined in the sense of eternal becoming, not just of earthly becoming. Now, for example, all the manipulations we carry out today with our several seventy elements of chemistry have no significance at all; other ideas that we have to form are of great importance. Without these ideas, one cannot achieve real imaginative knowledge at all, and it can be said that when imaginative knowledge becomes real, one gets such ideas as are needed for sacramentalism.

Now I will describe to you – as I said, all these things are of course in the process of becoming – how the baptismal act can be performed after I have tried to draw your attention to the fact that one must have a different relationship to the substances of the world than the current zeitgeist.

Now, for the baptismal act, one has to prepare three small vessels, which should actually have the following shape when seen from the side (it is drawn on the blackboard), so that they can be arranged on a small table. In these three vessels one has some water, salt and ash. Imagination suggests that one should actually use pure wood ash. The little table on which these vessels stand — I will have to talk about these things later — is best covered with a blue carpet or something similar. The three vessels then stand on a red doily and are arranged as I have drawn here. And now one prepares the thing so that one has water in this vessel here (see plate), salt in this vessel here, ash in this vessel here. I have been able to bring it out so far.

Now, in order to understand this, we must be clear about what real ideas must be associated with salt, water and ash if we are to relate to them through imagination. In the imagination, the idea of restoration connects with the water, the restoration of something or other that has lost its essential being in some ongoing process, whereby the water can thus reveal its mediating presence in the world process. This water is to be taken pure; distilled water is best used. The water dissolves the salt. In every salt process, that is, whenever salt settles somewhere – and we can certainly use the general term salt here for everything that settles in this way – so whenever salt settles, it means that the salt also releases a spiritual-ethereal content into the environment. So the salt that is dissolved in the liquid, in the water, that is, as one knows through the imagination, holds wisdom. The dissolved salt holds wisdom. As the salt coagulates, as the salt settles, the real wisdom evaporates into the environment and the salt becomes empty of wisdom. You have to think of all this as being more connected with the process than with the substance, because it is a process that takes place in the most eminent sense in one's own human organism; and when you think, when you develop thoughts, you are only filled with thoughts by the fact that salt is deposited in you. The denser the development of thoughts, the more salt is deposited.

A tremendous light falls from this truth on the whole physiology of the human body. It may well be that you do not subjectively participate with consciousness in this development of wisdom that is taking place. If, for example, you develop salt in a dream, even in a dull dream that is already perceived by the human consciousness as sleep, then this salt deposit definitely means fulfillment with wisdom, and at this level of knowledge, wisdom can be said to be everything that is the spiritual correlate of the growth phenomena. So when you look at the plant cover of the earth and let the growth of the plants take effect on you, from the point of view of the being of the earth it means a continuous salting or salinization process in the plant and an outpouring of wisdom. While the physical eye perceives the process of growth, the spiritual eye should see in this growth a process whereby the spiritual, as it were, is released, whereas it was formerly bound in the salt.

“You are the salt of the earth.” Such things are already to be found in religious documents, and I would ask you to pay close attention to the fact that any merely abstract explanation of “You are the salt of the earth” does not capture the meaning; originally, it was meant to be quite specific.

So it is a matter of understanding this salting process and now knowing that in the moment when one has salt and dissolves it again, the water substance is permeated by regenerative forces.

On the other hand, consider that which has now become pure ash; it has not emerged from a coagulation process, not from a deposition process, but it has emerged from the fire process; it is the opposite process. What comes from the material side as the material field of activity for the spiritual is also the result of the fire process.

You will understand this best if you imagine that you have some water, add salt on one side and ash on the other. What happens is a process from the extraterrestrial world, whereas our chemical processes only relate to the earthly world. If I add some salt on one side and some ash on the other, I create growth force, that is, active spirit. Through the ash that I let flow in, I add that which must always combine with the dissolution of the salt; this must always combine to give the spirit the possibility of being material.

Now, of course, the whole thing must not be carried out without the human being really making the whole cosmos consciously present within himself. Therefore, the baptismal act begins with a kind of monologue, after the child has first been brought in with the godparents.

Now one must be clear about what takes place in baptism. I have already said that anthroposophical activity can only be one that works and shapes out of the reality of the present. Therefore, when it comes to the act of baptism, we cannot today enter into a dialectical discussion about whether the act of baptism should be performed at the beginning of earthly life or whether it should perhaps only be performed in the course of life when one is conscious. Today we are dealing with the fact that we simply have to place ourselves in what is, and that is that the act of baptism is performed at the beginning of earthly life. Now it is important to always know that when one places oneself in the cosmic process in this way, one is actually not that chaotic whole that one is usually aware of, but rather one stands as the threefold being. This threefold nature is such that the actual thinking tends towards an understanding of what the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is, that the feeling tends towards an understanding of what the Son, the Christ, is, and that the all-willing tends towards an understanding of the Father. One must always feel connected, knowing oneself as a thinking, feeling and willing being through the triad of the soul with the Spirit, with the Son, with the Father. If one pronounces this in the sequence as I have now pronounced it, one is aware that one is pursuing one of the world currents, the current that goes from heaven to earth. If one pronounces it as it was originally pronounced: the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, then one places oneself in the world current that goes from the earth upwards.

So first a monologue is spoken:

To you world spirits
My will
My feeling and my thinking,
Through the power of the
All-pervading Water
Through the might of the
All-sustaining Salt
Through the weight of the
All-renewing Ashes
That I may lead
This soul into the community of Christ Jesus.

From this monologue, you can see the meaning that the act of baptism must have when it is performed at the beginning of life on earth, when it is thus aligned with present-day consciousness. The act of baptism must then signify that the person being baptized is accepted into the Christian community and considered a member of the Christian community. It is, so to speak, the vow that the Christian community, which baptizes the child, accepts him and, insofar as this can happen in the sense of Christian development, watches over his Christian development. So that, my dear friends, is what we have to bear in mind when we perform a baptism today. This is its meaning.

After this monologue has been spoken, the officiant of the baptismal ceremony turns to those present who have the child that was brought in before the aforementioned prayer. The officiant now speaks to those present:

Dear baptismal community:

This soul, which has been sent down
from the spiritual community into the earthly community
We are to receive it
and carry it into the
community of Christ Jesus.
It originates in the body
from divine cosmic power
It originates in the soul
from divine words of activity
It shall live in the spiritual sphere
From divine spiritual goal.

Now you also have all this in the baptismal act, in that one first points out what this soul is to the body, to the soul, and how life on earth is to take on a meaning that is given by the last lines:

It shall live the spiritual sphere
From divine spiritual goal.

To this one has just to contribute, about that one has, that one vows to watch.

Now the one who performs the baptismal act will extend his hand to the two godparents standing on his left and right and then speak:

As the guardians

— that is, the godparents —

order from the heart's sacrificial strength

— now the names of the godparents are mentioned. And then one speaks to the godparents:

That you lead this soul into the
community of Christ Jesus
This should tell you in this moment of celebration:
The power of sacrifice of your heart.

You see, the ceremony must be guided entirely by personal considerations. Now the leader of the baptismal ceremony steps in front of the child. He speaks:

Looking up to the spiritual world's powers of light
Feeling myself with the power of the Christian community I call you

— now the name of the person being baptized is pronounced first. Then the index and middle fingers are moistened with the water and spoken:

This is not common water
It is the Spirit's all-pervasive power
I baptize you (say the name of the person being baptized)
with the water of all-pervasive world-birthing

Now the A sign is made on the forehead of the person being baptized with the water. Now dip both fingers into the water again, then into the salt and say:

Let this not be common salt
Let it be the soul's all-preserving power
I baptize you (say the name of the person being baptized)
with the salt of all-preserving world powers.

This sign is made — these are still preparatory signs — on the chin of the person being baptized. Then wet the two fingers with water again, reach into the ashes and speak:

Let this not be common ashes
Let it be the goal that renews man
I baptize you (name of the child)
with the ashes of the goals of the world that renew.

And now the sign of the cross is made on the chest of the person being baptized. We will have more to say about these signs. Then one speaks to the child:

So live in the community of Christ Jesus (name of the person being baptized)
Through the power of water
Through the power of salt
Through the ash, power of renewal
In the Father's cosmic substance (the sign of the cross is made over the child).
In the stream of the Christ's word (the sign of the cross is made again).
In the splendor of the Spirit's light (the sign of the cross is made again).

The officiant of the baptismal ceremony now speaks to the community:

I have before and with
your thinking spirits
before and with
your feeling souls
before and with
your human will
this (or these) (name(s) of the person to be baptized)
guided from
spirit-light-worlds
into the community of Christ Jesus
. Guide this soul so that it
may grow in the community of Christ.
Amen.

The baptismal act is at an end. Now the Lord's Prayer can be prayed at the conclusion with the understanding of which we spoke. Then the baptismal act as such, as I can perform it in the present, would be at an end.

You see, when one seriously considers reintroducing ritual and symbolism, what is really at issue is, if I may say so, a fully human – is a word — a whole-human understanding of the world (the word “whole-human” is written on the board), an understanding that lives not only in thinking but also in feeling and willing. Otherwise, what we do in this way remains either a mere sign, which is also abstract, or it is performed as a mere magical act, which also does not really reach the human being. Something must live in the ceremonial act, where man grows together with the originality in the spirit. We must, so to speak, in the moments when we perform ceremonial acts, try to really experience the spirit within the material work in its immediate presence. It is, of course, always there, but it is not experienced when it is merely looked at with the eyes and done with the ordinary human will. But such ceremonial acts are those where it is done out of the spirit, and where the volition itself is sustained in the spirit, where therefore something actually happens that goes beyond earthly activity, and which basically, when it happens, gives meaning to our entire earthly existence, that we may divide our time into ordinary weekday moments and into holiday moments.

In such moments, when we perform things that are a living testimony to the fact that in an earth where man is supposed to be present, through man the divine is also truly present, there is something that must first be felt in the modern consciousness of time. For modern time consciousness tends towards two aberrations: First, the error that I have already characterized from a certain point of view, which we have in today's knowledge, that only recognizes that knowledge that wants to penetrate external nature in an external abstract way. That is the one error. The other error is when we mystically immerse ourselves only in our inner being and only deal with ourselves.

This is at the same time the spiritual battle that Luther fought, on the one hand sensing the devil in that natural scientific aberration, which he felt was approaching, and on the other hand sensing the great, the immense danger that arises when man merely loses himself in his inner being and egoistically cuts himself off from the world. This egotistical shutting out of the world is to be avoided, on the one hand, by not carrying out spiritual acts within oneself alone, but in such a way that one has contact with the outer world; and, on the other hand, overcome what is merely abstract and unmanageable, by not merely doing things that have such an abstract and unmanageable character, but doing things that are done out of the spirit itself.

Only when we again come to a proper concept of sacramentalism will we have overcome, on the one hand, the dangers of science and, on the other, the dangers of mysticism. Luther fought against the enemies of man, of whom he had an inward fear and who could approach him, on the one hand, as the emerging natural science and, on the other, as its necessary correlate, abstract mysticism within man, which is at the same time an egoistic mysticism. Anthroposophy must overcome both obstacles. It does this by not shying away from completely immersing itself in science, that is, by going through what is experienced in natural research and knowledge, so that the human being, so to speak, plunges into this abyss, in which, if he remains in it, he would absolutely lose himself. And on the other hand, anthroposophy does not shy away from the mystical abyss, which one must also get to know; one must really be able to experience mysticism, but one must also be able to overcome it. One will not have to fall into this abyss, into the abyss of egoism. Man can lose himself in egoism just as he can lose himself in nullity on the other side.

To stop at natural science means to be tempted by all the luciferic powers as a human being, even if one also wants to come to a spiritual one. To stop at mysticism means to be tempted by all the ahrimanic powers as a human being. One simply has to know this. It must be clearly understood that it is through the power of Christ that we can overcome natural science and mysticism. We must not be afraid to experience these two things, for these enemies of humanity are only dangerous when they rule in us unconsciously. They lose their power over man only when he consciously elevates them to full consciousness. I would particularly like to place this sentence in your hearts, my dear friends: that for our time consciousness, the only thing that can apply is what I tried to present scenically at the end of the final scene of my first mystery drama, “The Portal of Initiation”, that only by emerging into consciousness can the real enemies of humanity be overcome. So, in answer to Luther's soul-struggle, Anthroposophy simply says that one has to oppose the Luciferic power, one has to oppose the Ahrimanic power, and one has to overcome them both through the power of Christ; one has not to retreat from them, but one has to overcome them. One simply has to learn what it means when, on the one hand, the luciferic power says: you, follow me out into the vastness, where you, with your abstract knowledge, measure nature in all its vastness — then one has to have the answer: “I can do that, I can measure the vastness of nature in all its infinities with my intellect, but when I measure these infinities with my intellect, I have to leave love at the threshold. Love must then be left behind at the threshold. But if I leave love behind at the threshold, then the power of Christ does not remain with me in the expanses, but the luciferic forces of the world draw near to me in the expanses. And on the other hand, when I descend into my own inner being, I must know that the Ahrimanic power lurks at the threshold. I must know that when I descend into this interior, at the threshold the Ahrimanic forces present me with the illusion that everything I can strive for spiritually lies in my ego. And I must know how to say: If, in descending into this inner being, I do not have the strength to overcome egoism, if I develop an egoistic mysticism, then I can never find in its true form, in the form of Christ, that which prevails in myself.

The human being must find these two strengths, otherwise he is either tempted, through what has been brought forth by modern civilization, to dissolve as a soul in an infinite cosmic unconsciousness in space, or to contract into himself in an intense egoism and lose the I in his inner being. [Man must find both these strengths so that] his ego does not float through the cosmos like a hermit, but is connected with the power of Christ.

All these, my dear friends, are sentiments that must permeate us if the ceremony is to have meaning, and we will be able to find this meaning for the ceremony more and more truly ourselves if we know how to enter into what surrounds us in a deeper way. We must learn to combine the gospel, the teaching, the message with the ceremony. But to do that, we must first come to an understanding of the gospels; we must first learn to read them.

You see, it is not so easy to read the Testament at all. The strangest conflicts arise when something like this is not understood in the right light. Because it touches on a question that was asked during our meeting here, I would like to point to a certain experience that I once had with regard to the content of this question.

Someone had heard — someone who actually had the good will, the good eye to understand what comes from anthroposophical spiritual science —, he had heard or even read in a cycle that I said that both the Old and the New Testament should actually be taken quite literally. So basically, literal readings are not really wrong. He paid little attention to the fact that preparation is needed to understand the words [of the Old and New Testaments] in order to be able to read them, and so he simply said from his abstraction: “But man will go astray if you simply tell today's man that the Gospels are to be understood literally, and then modern man – and he identified himself with a modern man – reads in the Bible: ”And it And it came to pass, that they fled from before the people of Israel, and were at the descent of Beth-horon, and the Lord rained upon them great stones from heaven, even unto Azekah, and they died; and there were those that died by the hailstones, and they were more in number than those that fell by the sword of the children of Israel, the people of Joshua. And Joshua spoke to the Lord of Hosts at the time when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the eyes of the children of Israel, and he spoke as he did so that Israel's eyes might see: Sun at Gibeon, stand still, and Moon in the valley of Ajalon! And the sun stood still at Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, until the people had avenged themselves of their enemies.” — And now comes the most important sentence -: ”Is this not written in the book of those who see God? And the sun stood still in the midst of heaven at Gibeon, and hasted not to go down about a whole day. Never before has there been such a day for the people of the earth, when the Lord of Hosts allowed such a thing to happen at the voice of a single man; but that became the sign that the Lord was there with the people of Israel."

This passage must be read first. You will see how a true reading of the passage actually opens up the possibility of understanding the matter. Now this person said to me: If I read that, then of course it can only be meant symbolically; and I am disappointed in you, because it seems to me that you make judgments that are impossible to record in detail, as if you wanted to save the Bible by saying something like: the Bible must be taken literally. —

In this context, I have to say that it is of course not possible for me to give you a full explanation of this passage now. It requires a little more, a lot more preparation. But, as I said, we want to come back to this passage in the next few days because a question along these lines has been raised. But what I want to say now is that it is necessary to be able to read the Gospels. Now it is not possible to read the Gospels correctly without placing them in the context in which they were spoken. Today, my dear friends, much of what is written in the Gospels is simply taken in such a way that sentences are omitted that are important in the very least sense for understanding. For example, if something like this is written somewhere in the Gospels: And when the sun had set, Christ Jesus healed the sick here and there - today this is naturally understood as if a modern person were to say: When the sun had set, he said this or that. But nothing is unnecessary in the Gospels. If it were unnecessary, “when the sun had set,” then it would not be there. And it means that everything that is now being told is being accomplished by Christ Jesus after the sun has set; that means that if the sun were still there, it would be an obstacle to what is to be accomplished. — So the understanding of the Gospels must be drawn from what went into the writing of the Gospels. But first of all it is necessary to be clear about one thing, which I now want to discuss from a certain point of view.

We have received three religious festivals for the year from the most diverse Christian confessions; and before I want to continue saying anything else about rituals and ceremonies, I would like to talk about the festivals, because otherwise we will not be able to understand each other.

First of all, we have Christmas, we have Easter, and we have Pentecost. Christmas has been transferred from an old consciousness to the time when the sun draws its strength most powerfully from the earth, when the earth, with all its activity, and thus also with what it can be for man, is most dependent on itself. At Christmas time, we are dealing with the earth that is abandoned to itself, and in the face of this, human beings must remember to awaken in their souls that which can come to them from the earth that is abandoned to itself. Thus we have fixed the Christmas festival quite according to earthly conditions. Even in its fixing lies the fact that the human being who experiences the Christmas season in the right way, I would like to say, feels connected in warm fervor with that which the earth can give out of its own strength.

My dear friends, if you have lived in the countryside, you will have experienced how, in the fall, farmers dig large pits to a certain depth in the ground; they put their potatoes in them, and then they cover them up. These potatoes are kept in the right way by the warmth stored in the depths of the earth, so that they do not freeze. Why don't they freeze? Because the earth physically stores the warmth of the summer sun in its womb during the winter season. And if we were to observe everything that the earth stores from the summer season, not only in terms of warmth, but also in terms of light, mineral chemistry and life, then, my dear friends, we would be connected to the earth differently in our consciousness. Then, especially in the depths of winter, at the winter solstice, one would have to say to the earth: In you, everything that draws towards the earth in summer is revealed to me, in the warmth of the worlds, in the light of the worlds, in all that lives in the vastness of the world in terms of measure, number and weight, in all that lives in the vastness of the world in terms of life force. All of this is present in earthly existence during the winter season, and most strongly during the winter solstice. It is the inner substantiality of the earth to which we appeal when we set the Christmas festival in the season in which the sun most strongly withdraws its power from the earth. In a sense, we turn completely to the center of the earth by setting the Christmas season; in a sense, we are alone with the earth and its substantial existence; we are expelled from our heavenly context, but we see that we have given from this loneliness of the earth into the earth itself when we set the Christmas season on the calendar.

We then live our way out of this Christmas season, approaching Easter through various intermediate stages, which we will also discuss. And so, out of an ancient awareness that Easter was not determined according to earthly conditions, man is meant to turn outwards into the cosmos at Easter time. Man does not set the Easter season according to the substantial transformations of the earth; man sets it according to heavenly relationships, according to the relationships that exist between solar and lunar processes. Easter is on the first Sunday after the spring full moon. Why is Easter on the first Sunday after the spring full moon? For the reason that on Sunday we delve into that which is eternal, but because we want to celebrate this eternal in the sense of connecting our consciousness with the realm of the heavens, which is accessible from the outside. When the full moon appears, it radiates the light of the sun back to us with its full power. We thereby attune ourselves, not only to the mechanical movements of the outer universe, but we attune ourselves to the intensity of the universe. We attune ourselves to the light, but it is not the usual moonlight that reflects back to us, it is the moonlight that appears to us when the sun begins to send its power down to the earth ever stronger and stronger. There we are on earth, there we are not abandoned to the heavens and have to turn to earth, there we are as men so arranged in the cosmos that the light of the world stops in us, which does not go to the interior of the earth, which now stops in us men, and we turn to that what stops there, what is reflected back into us men. What is reflected back at the first full moon of spring is exactly the same power that is reflected back from the full moon itself at this time; it is the power of the sun that is held back. We set the date of Easter according to our connection with heaven. In a certain sense, we relate to earth and heaven in a different way at Easter than at Christmas, and it is a significant, profound immersion in the course of time when one becomes aware of what it means to set Christmas as an earthly festival and to set Easter as a heavenly festival.

Now, my dear friends, we do not yet penetrate this with spiritual consciousness, but we move within what lies within the Christmas and Easter seasons, basically at first in the sensual manifestation of the eternal world activity. For us human beings, we participate in this sensual world activity through warmth on the one hand and through light on the other; we do not go further. We come, by remaining in the sensual, to the point that is announced [in the Bible] with the words: You, the Lord of Hosts, Lord of the hosts localized in the stars, Lord of the stars, You have ordered everything according to measure, number and weight. - We can inwardly experience warmth, we can outwardly experience warmth, that is, warmth can be given to us in sensual observation. We can inwardly experience light, we can outwardly experience light, that is to say, light can be given to us in sensory perception. But that which we experience as measure, number and weight, that is missing, so that we are not aware that we know absolutely nothing about our own center of gravity, although we use it when walking and standing, that we know nothing about our equilibrium, although we live through it constantly, that we know nothing about our weight. We are so physically arranged that we know nothing of our weight, and we could not live on earth if we knew our weight, because we could only know of our weight through our brain making this weight conscious in us. If the brain, with its entire weight – that is about 1300 grams – were to rest on the blood vessels that are located under the brain in our head, my dear friends, these blood vessels would be crushed every moment. We do not live with the absolute weight of the brain, we live within this weight in such a way that the brain fluid constantly penetrates up and down through the arachnoid space and the spinal canal, and the brain floats in the brain fluid. You know that according to Archimedes' law, every floating body loses as much of its weight as the weight of the displaced water. Our brain displaces so much water that it weighs about 1200 to 1300 grams; but that is almost as much as the brain weight less 20 grams, so that the brain presses only with 20 grams instead of with 1300 grams on its base. But that is what we experience. In this upward striving, we experience ourselves.

This is something that can initially only be observed from the outside, something that is not fully appreciated by human beings in its inner significance. We do not experience what the ordering of the world is in terms of the divine principle, the order of measure, number and weight; but we have to change our inner being by experiencing the time [from Christmas to Easter] and to live spiritually into what changes outwardly in a sensory way. We must add to this an understanding of that which can only be experienced inwardly, an understanding of that which can only be present in our consciousness if we experience it inwardly. We must proceed to make arrangements that are now based neither on earthly observations nor on heavenly observations; we must proceed in such a way that we then only say: Whitsun falls so many days after Easter. So many days, that is, we no longer rely on anything that can be observed externally; we only set [the Pentecost] according to an internal process and thus step out of the sensual by developing from Easter to Pentecost.

Take what I have suggested in the abstract, my dear friends, as a fully human understanding – as I said, “fully human” written as one word: ganzmenschlich —, take this as a fully human understanding, for then it does not just take hold of thinking, but also of feeling and willing, and the powers of understanding are absorbed in feeling and willing. If you imbibe what I have said inwardly in relation to thinking alone, you will indeed have something, but it will be something through which the fruit of Christ will only sprout thirtyfold in the soul. If it penetrates to your feeling, you will have something through which the fruit of Christ will bear fruit sixtyfold in you. But if you permeate thinking, feeling and willing, then the Christ-fruit will bear a hundredfold fruit in you. Take this in with the whole human understanding, not with two-thirds thinking and feeling, not with one-third mere thinking, but take it in with the whole human understanding, then you will find the mood that must live in the Christian by living from Christmas to Pentecost. He then lives the year with, he lives it in a concrete way, and he is ready to live into the Johanni mood, which he can only experience if he does not become intoxicated by the ever stronger and stronger growing sun. If he becomes intoxicated, that is, if he does not live towards the summer solstice in such a way that he lives through it with all his powers, then he undergoes a certain world fainting; he fades, so to speak, powerlessly in the summer warmth and sunlight. But if he holds together through what he has developed from Easter to Pentecost, he remains aware of what has been placed in his soul by divine world powers, and he experiences what is there at the summer solstice, at the time of St. John, with the full power of his inner being, insofar as this full power of his inner being is meant to be there.

And then he can go on living, in that what he has, as it were, transplanted into himself as a human being, can mature more and more within him, so that his inner being ripens towards the Christmas season to such an extent that he is strong enough to draw from the earth what the earth itself can give him.

In this way, an understanding of the year is awakened in our soul. And it is out of such an understanding that the Gospels are written, and it is out of such an understanding that we must know how to distribute their content throughout the year. If we thus include the Gospels as messages in our religious services, they must be included in such a way that they are included out of our inner understanding. And if we want to advance to that which enables us to really place ourselves in all acts of consecration, then we must find the breviary. But we can never find this breviary if we do not know how to attach ourselves to that which can be achieved in such an understanding of the year, in a cosmic, whole-human understanding. Therefore, I will have to give you the principle of the secret of building up a breviary. This consists in the fact that we first have a prayer for each day, a prayer that is inwardly meditative in character, but which has something cognitive for each day of the week, that we are able to direct this prayer in four parts through the month to the east, west, south and north, and that we are able to carry it through the twelve months of the year, so that a real annual cycle emerges from it. A breviary must therefore be constructed in such a way that inner experiences are rhythmically repeated through the breviary, which will be structured like the seven days of the week, the four weeks of the month and the twelve months of the year. We will see how a breviary should be structured, beginning with that which is connected to the course of the year through the twelve, that which relates to space through the four, and that which relates to the day through its essential content. The content of the day will be the content, the guiding force will be that which relates to the weeks, and the mood will be that which relates to the twelve months of the year. No breviary has ever been different, and if you, my dear friends, have the will to move on to such things, then you must also be prepared to acquire an understanding of these things.

I had to assume that this would follow from the baptismal ritual before we move on to further discussions of rituals.

after eurythmy-dramatic presentations of the “Dedication” and the “Prologue in Heaven”

In the last few weeks, we have spoken of the three great, highest ideals of humanity and have described these three ideals as they have been described for a long time: the ideal of wisdom, the ideal of beauty and the ideal of kindness.

Now, in more recent times, these three highest ideals of humanity have always been associated with the three human soul powers that we know and have considered in the most diverse ways. The ideal of wisdom has been associated with thinking or imagining, the ideal of beauty with feeling, and the ideal of kindness with willing.

Wisdom can only be acquired by man through clear perceptions, through clear thinking. That which is the object of art, the beautiful, cannot be grasped in this way. Feeling is the soul power that is primarily concerned with beauty, as psychologists have long since discovered. And that which is realized as good in the world is connected with the will. It seems that what the psychologists and soul experts have said about the relationship between the three great ideals of humanity and the various soul powers is quite plausible. In a sense, we can add a kind of supplement: that Kant wrote three critiques, one of which, the “Critique of Pure Reason”, is supposed to serve wisdom because it seeks to criticize the power of imagination. Kant called another critique the “Critique of Judgment,” and it is divided into two parts: the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” and the “Critique of Teleological Judgment.” Basically, when Kant speaks of judgment here, he means what is contained in the knowledge of feeling, through which one affirms that something is beautiful or ugly, useful or harmful. So we could say – as a subsection, precisely in this Kantian sense, and others have retained the terminology – that the power of judgment, whereby we are thinking not only of the imaginative judgment, but also of the fact that the judgment comes from the heart, is related to the perception of beauty. And a third of Kant's criticisms is the “critique of practical reason,” which refers to the will, to the pursuit of the good.

Now, we can find what I have just said in all psychologists, except for one psychologist who emerged in the second half of the 19th century and found that this whole division of the human soul does not work, does not correspond to the unbiased observation of the human soul. And the assignment of humanity's great ideals to the various powers of the soul – imagination, feeling and will – is just as wrong. Imagination is assigned wisdom as its highest ideal, feeling is assigned beauty, and will is assigned goodness. The psychologist I am referring to, Franz Brentano, thought that he would have to overturn the whole doctrine that I have now outlined and, one might say, fundamentally change the way the human soul is structured. He assigns imagination to beauty, let us assume. You see, while everyone else assigns feeling, or rather judgment, aesthetic judgment, or judgment in general, to beauty, Brentano assigns imagination to beauty. Brentano assigns judgment to wisdom, insofar as it is something that man acquires; he does not say imagination, but judgment. And curiously enough, he even blunts the will by not focusing on the development of the will, on the impulse of the will, but on what underlies the impulse of the will: sympathy and antipathy. — There is much to be said for looking at things this way. Language itself sometimes leads us to associate the volitional impulse with sympathy and antipathy. For example, when we say: to have repugnance for something! We do not want anything, but we have an antipathy for something. And so Brentano, as it were, blunts the will to sympathy and antipathy and assigns to the will this sympathy and antipathy to say yes or no to something. He does not go as far as the volitional impulse, but only to what underlies the will: saying yes or no to something, affirming or denying a thing.

Through imagining, Brentano argues, one never arrives at a true, that is, a wisdom-filled, view, but only at a view. He says that one imagines, for example, a winged horse. There is nothing wrong with imagining a winged horse. But it is not — we must bear in mind that Brentano is living in the age of materialism — it is not full of wisdom to imagine a winged horse, because a winged horse has no reality. Something must be added when we form an idea. But that is, the recognition or non-recognition of the idea by the power of judgment must be added, and only then does wisdom come out.

We may ask ourselves, what is it, so to speak, that underlies such a complete reversal of the powers of the soul? What has led Brentano to distribute the soul powers quite differently from the other psychologists, namely, into beauty, goodness, and wisdom? If we inquire into the reason why Brentano has arrived at this different grouping of the soul life, we can get no answer except by taking into account Brentano's own personal development. The other psychologists of modern times are people who have mostly emerged from the more recent development of world views. It is a peculiarity of modern philosophers, of all philosophers, that they know Greek philosophy relatively well - in their own way, of course - and then philosophy basically begins with Kant. And the modern philosophers do not know much of what lies between Greek philosophy and Kant. Kant himself knew little more about the period between Greek philosophy and himself than what he had read in Aume and Berkeley; he knew nothing of the development of medieval philosophy. Kant was completely ignorant of what is called the scholasticism of the Middle Ages. And those who, in their complacency, exaggerate everything in their own way, find just that much cause, because Kant knew nothing of scholasticism, to regard scholasticism as a bundle of pedantic follies and not to study it further. The fact that Kant knew nothing of scholasticism does not prevent him from also knowing nothing of Greek philosophy. Others knew more than he did in this area. Brentano, on the other hand, was a profound expert on scholasticism, a profound expert on medieval philosophy and, in addition, a profound expert on Aristotle. As for those who see the world of philosophy as beginning with Kant, they are not scholars, not genuine scholars of Aristotle, for Aristotle, the great Greek, was most grievously mistreated in the developmental history of the newer intellectual life. Brentano was a profound scholar of Aristotle and scholasticism, but not in the merely historical sense, not in the sense of someone who knew what Aristotle wrote and what the scholastics wrote, for with regard to such knowledge one can . make one's own thoughts when going through the history of philosophy! Brentano was a man who had become familiar with the philosophy of Aristotle and with scholastic philosophy, with the solitary thinking that went on for centuries in the cells of monasteries, with the thinking that worked with a thorough technique of the conceptual world, with that thorough technique of the conceptual world that has been completely lost to more recent thinking. Those who therefore heard psychology in the seventies and eighties from Brentano, basically heard a completely different tone of human thinking than has been or is heard from other philosophers of modern times. Something really did live in Brentano as an undertone of what spoke from the soul of the scholastics. And that is significant because he made this different classification out of this different thinking. So that we can say: there is the peculiar fact that all the newer thinkers, for whom scholasticism was and is merely a web of concepts, present the human soul and its relationship to wisdom, beauty and goodness in this way:

Wisdom: Imagining
Beauty: Feeling
Goodness: Wanting.

In Brentano, all the feelings and inner impulses that were in a scholastic heart lived, as far as something like that is possible in the present. He had to think in this way, had to structure the human soul differently in its powers and relate it to the great ideals of humanity. Where does that come from?

If you had been able to ask the angels on the stage – and in particular the three archangels – how they organize the soul and how they relate it to the great ideals, they would have answered you, albeit in a much more perfect way than Brentano could, with an answer similar to the one Brentano gave. Raphael, Gabriel and Michael would not understand this classification, but they would easily find their way into it, only to transform it more completely into the classification that Brentano gave. We are touching here on a significant fact in the spiritual development of mankind. However far we may be today from the thinking of the scholastic Middle Ages, there was something underlying this way of thinking that can be presented in the following way. The scholastic did not try to stop when speaking of the highest things, with what is happening directly on the physical plane, but the scholastic first tried to prepare his soul so that the spiritual entities of the higher world could speak out of it. In many respects this will be a stammering of the human soul, because it is self-evident that the human soul will only ever be able to imperfectly express the language of the higher spirits that are superior to man. But that is how the scholastics wanted to speak to a certain extent about the spiritual affairs of man, as a soul must speak that surrenders to what supersensible spirits have to say.

We are getting used to forming our agreement or disagreement with what makes an idea a valid one, a wise one, according to the external physical world, here on the physical plane, since the time of materialism is the actual time of humanity. We say that a winged horse is not a valid concept because we have never seen a winged horse. Materialism regards a concept as a wise concept if it agrees with what the external world dictates.

Brentano, so to speak, provided the last abstract imitation of the language of angels. Angels would say: That which is in accordance with the context of the messages of the beings that are beyond the threshold of the spiritual worlds is full of wisdom. It is not enough to form a concept; rather, this concept must be in harmony with what the spiritual beings reveal beyond the threshold. So mere imagining cannot serve wisdom beyond the threshold. What then can it serve? It can serve appearance, in which beauty lives. If one applies imagination to reality without further ado, then one does not arrive at the right imagination. But one may apply it to the appearance in which beauty lives and works. Brentano was quite right when he related imagination to beauty. For the angels, when they want to imagine, will always ask themselves: What kind of images may we form? Never ugly ones, but always beautiful images. But these images, which they form and which they form according to the ideal of beauty, will not correspond to reality if they do not correspond to the revelations of other entities that they encounter in the spiritual world. Imagining is really only to be assigned to beauty. Angels have the ideal of imagining in such a way that their entire world of imagination is permeated and illuminated by the ideal of beauty. And you need only read the chapter of my Theosophy that deals with the soul world, and there study the two forces in the form in which they are found beyond the threshold to the spiritual world, the two forces of sympathy and antipathy, and you will find that the relationship between sympathy and antipathy underlies the impulses of will. So that coincides again to a certain extent. But it must be related to the life of the soul, as this life, from the subconscious, still arises from the soul world in today's human soul. There you see how a modern philosopher, because he has, so to speak, atavistically preserved the scholasticism of the Middle Ages in his heart, tries to speak in the terminology of angels, albeit in the imperfect language of modern materialism. It is an extraordinarily interesting fact. Otherwise, one cannot understand how Brentano opposed the whole of modern psychology in such a way that he distinguished the powers of the soul quite differently from other psychologists and assigned them to the highest ideals of humanity in a different way.

But take what is said in this way in all its consequences. Note all the consequences. When we cross the threshold to the spiritual world, then we live in a world of beings, I said, insofar as we speak of the real. So we cannot form abstract concepts in the same sense as we do here in the physical world when we speak of the real. We have to have entities. So when we speak of the real, we have to say: It cannot be that wisdom, beauty and goodness have the same meaning in the spiritual world over there as they do here in the physical world. There they would be abstract concepts again, as we can apply them here in the physical world. There must be entities over there. — So, as soon as we speak in terms of wisdom itself, that is, seek a reality, entities must exist over there, not just what is designated in abstracto by wisdom, beauty, goodness. When one speaks of beauty in the spiritual world, one cannot say: Beauty is there as maya, as appearance in the spiritual world. Just as beauty and wisdom are imprinted in the physical world, for example, when we depict wisdom-filled beauty in drama or in other works of art, or when we depict goodness in beauty in drama or in other works of art, and how all this is interrelated, so wisdom, beauty and goodness are at work in the realm of beauty beyond the threshold. But we must not speak of them as concepts; we must not apply what is over there as we apply it here. So let us assume that someone wants to speak from over there, and he wants to speak from over there with the power of the soul, which corresponds to our imagination, so he should not say: wisdom, beauty, strength, because these are abstract ideas, he would have to cite entities. Wisdom would have to appear as an entity on the other side.

In the language of the ancient mysteries, what I am now explaining was well known, and therefore terms were introduced that could express this, that did not point to mere abstract ideas, but to entities. On the other side, beyond the threshold, there must be a Being, which here is Wisdom, a Being. If you reflect a little, you will easily find that a Being, which we call God-vision, the God-visionary, could be such a Being, corresponding to Wisdom on the other side: God-vision.

A being that corresponds to beauty, our abstract idea of beauty for the physical plane, would have to reveal itself. Beauty reveals itself, it is the appearance, the appearing, that which appears. At the moment one crosses the threshold, that which is much more alive than here on the physical plane emerges. When the beautiful is spoken of, the essentially beautiful, something so mute or merely living in human, physical hearing or speech abstractions, it is not spoken of as it is here on the physical plane. It is all revelation, living revelation. And if you combine what I am saying now with what I said earlier, you will understand that the ancient mysteries coined a word for what corresponds to it on the other side, beyond the threshold of Beauty, which can be described as the proclamation of God. God's Word, God-proclaimer, for example. You could also say the Word of God.

Likewise, there must be a being for the volition: the God-willing. Not the abstract, as we have it in our soul as volition, but a being must be on the other side of the threshold for the will. God-willer - if we may form the word. Why should we only form words that are already in use, since we are entering realms for which words have not been coined at all! God's volition, as it were. If we take God as a collective name for the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies, then God has within Himself not only a volition, as we have in our souls, but a volitioner: this is essential. What in us are only the three soul powers: imagination, feeling, volition, are in God's being: the God-breather, the God-proclaimer, the God-willing. And if one takes the old Hebrew expressions, they correspond completely to the words that I have tried to coin here. Of course, you will not find the translation of these words in any Hebrew dictionary, but if you immerse yourself in what was meant, you would actually translate the old Hebrew words with these words today, and in such a way that Gottschauer means exactly the same in our language as Michael; Gottverkünder means exactly the same as Gabriel; Gottwoller means exactly the same as Raphael. While we work in the physical world through our three soul powers, the beings of the higher hierarchies work through their own entities. Just as we work through imagination, feeling and will, so a God works through Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. And that means the same for a God: I work through Michael, Gabriel, Raphael – which for our soul means: I work through thinking, feeling and willing. This translation: I work through thinking, feeling and willing - into: I work through Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, is simply the translation from the language of men into the language that should be spoken - if one speaks the real language that prevails there - beyond the threshold to the spiritual world. If you open yourself to some of the descriptions in the Bible, you will be able to feel everywhere – if you feel appropriately and not in a way that corresponds to today's interpretation of the Bible, which is a misinterpretation in many respects – you will be able to feel how this really must be intended for Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.

Wisdom: power of judgment – Godshower; Michael
Revelation of Essence

Beauty: imagination – God-announcer: Gabriel
Power of Judgment

Goodness: sympathy, affirmation / antipathy, negation –
God-willing: Raphael

Now, bearing this in mind, think back to the way Gabriel, Michael and Raphael speak in Goethe's “Prologue to Heaven”. One can only say that one is deeply shaken by the instinctive certainty with which this “Prologue in Heaven” suggests how the willing essence of the Godhead, through Raphael, the seeing essence of the Godhead, through Michael, and the beautifully revealing essence of the Godhead, the revealing, proclaiming essence of the Godhead, through Gabriel, is manifested. The volition of the Godhead lies in the harmony of the spheres, in that which expresses itself in the great movements of the heavenly bodies and in that which happens while the heavenly bodies move:

The sun sounds in the ancient manner
In the singing contest of the spheres,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.
The sight of it gives strength to the angels,

— one could also say: goodness, the strength of the super-moral life beyond the threshold. Therefore, some also refer to the three soul powers of wisdom, beauty, goodness as wisdom, beauty, strength.

When none can fathom them;

— you will bite your teeth out if you try to hold on to the Faust commentators on this line: “If no one can fathom it.” Most say: Oh yes, Goethe just meant, even though, or although, or although no one can fathom it. But that is not how a truly great poet speaks – I have often mentioned this to Goethe – that is not how a great poet speaks. Fathoming belongs to wisdom as it lives within the human physical world. Beyond the threshold, everything is a becoming acquainted with spiritual beings, whom one approaches as one approaches people here, who must also keep an inner being, who cannot be completely fathomed. This fathoming in the sense in which it occurs here on earth does not exist for the angels at all. They have the spiritual reality before them; they do not fathom; they look, because something of the power of Michael's vision has also been given to each one. Each has something of the other power, just as each soul power has something of the other, for example, imagining has something of wanting, because if we could not want when imagining, we would only dream and so on. So Raphael also has something of Michael and Gabriel in himself, of course.

The incomprehensibly high works

Are glorious as on the first day.

Try to feel these two lines with all the sensations that you can have from spiritual science!

The incomprehensibly high works

— which are described there

Are glorious as on the first day.

What does that mean? They are not glorious as on that day, glorious as on the first day. Just as they appeared glorious to the angels at that time, that is, expressing themselves, revealing themselves, they are still - luciferic. Because what has remained behind is, after all, luciferic. One must really apply the perceptions that one acquires through spiritual science. The stars shine as luciferically as on the first day. They have not progressed; they retain their original character – again a reason why the angels do not fathom them, but behold them. For angels, the luciferic is visible. It does not make the angels bad. I have often described the luciferic as a necessity in the evolution of the world. Here it is presented to you as something that the angels behold: Lucifer – not as he reigns for people – but as he gloriously maintains the indescribably high works as they were on the first day. And we are led to it in exalted language, so that we are shown how the Luciferic lives out in the universe, and the angels may look at it as on the first day. There it is justified. It should not descend into the physical world to man in the ordinary way, but live above in the world that is beyond the threshold. And the world that is pervaded and thundered through by the will of the world is first proclaimed on earth. Up there it should remain unfathomable, it should not be fathomed. Here on earth, with the powers that are given to man, it is there so that what is unfathomable for angels

be fathomed through human wisdom. But Gabriel, the proclaimer of God, the Word of God, can only hint at this as he sees it from outside the earth. Do you remember the profound Bible verse: “Before the mystery of the Incarnation they veiled their faces.” In this profound Bible verse lies the whole of the unfathomable for the angels of the worlds that are accessible to man through the wisdom that is developed on earth. And here angelic language is spoken in the 'Prologue to Heaven', which is why Gabriel, the proclaimer of God, characterizes from the outside that which reveals itself on earth as wisdom.

And fast and incomprehensibly fast
The earth's splendor revolves;
Paradise's brightness changes
With deep, shudder-filled night;

This is how it appears from the outside: the world in which we live here, which we try to unravel, and which affects us in the sphere of our senses. Out there it is the wonderful change of day and night.

The sea foams in broad rivers

Human weal and woe depend on it; out there it reveals itself only as that which, in its foaming, composes the spherical earth.

At the deep bottom of the rocks,
And rock and sea are torn away
In an eternally fast spherical course.

In which our whole earthly destiny, bound to our sensory life, is bound. The God-announcer draws it from outside the earth.

And how is the meaning of the earth revealed? By looking not only at that which is valid for the human sense realm, but also at that which sends its effect out into the universe. Gabriel describes the earth as it appears from the outside, but he describes what is significant for man in the sense realm. Michael, the God-shower, describes that which radiates out into the universe and also has its significance for the earth's surroundings, for the entire celestial sphere. Therefore, he begins with the surroundings, not below, where the sea flows, where the rivers flow, but with

the surroundings. He looks at the surroundings.

And storms roar in competition,

A deep word!

From sea to land, from land to sea,
And furiously form a chain
Of the deepest impact all around.

Just imagine, seen from the outside, let's say, the trade winds that blow out there in regular currents. Our limited natural science describes all this, what goes on in these atmospheric phenomena, but it is limited, this natural science. When one examines the regularities in atmospheric phenomena, one comes across a deep connection between these regular atmospheric phenomena and the phases of the moon, the phenomena of the moon, but not because the moon causes what happens in the atmosphere, but because, in the same measure, in parallel, the old lunar laws still govern the moon today, and the atmospheric phenomena also still remain from the old lunar laws. Not that the moon rules the atmospheric phenomena and the tides, but both are ruled by causes that go back much further, ruled in parallel. What happens in the atmosphere is therefore not only significant for that which affects people in the sphere of the senses, but it also has significance for that which happens out there in the universe. We look up at the lightning, we hear the thunder. But the Gods also see the lightning and hear the thunder from the other side. And for them it means something quite different - of which we can speak another time - than for us human beings here, who do not understand lightning and thunder. But the God-shower Michael understands from the earth precisely that which is lived out on the other side in lightning and thunder, which has been described here by me — remember the first lecture I gave here this summer — as the subterranean of the human soul, as the thunderstorms of the human soul, which I have described to you in terms of the character of Weininger, who died young. What corresponds to these thunderstorms in the human soul, in the atmosphere, has an effect. And just as the soul storms in us are harmonized and mitigated when we pour our higher soul forces over them, so for the world outside, what is stormy and thundering here in our atmosphere and is irregular in meteorology becomes regular and harmonious in the universe. Just as we, as we develop, do not remain in the storms, but progress to the harmony of the soul life. Down there, lightning and thunder

But your messengers,

- the angels -

Lord,
we honor the gentle walking of your day.

Everything falls into place, gently and harmoniously, as seen from the sphere of the angels outside.

The sight gives the angels strength,

- that is, it strengthens their volition

Since no one can fathom you,

– it is not a matter of fathoming, but of beholding!

And all your lofty works
Are glorious as on the first day.

That means: they are Luciferian, they are there for angels, they should only not have the same effect on people. Lucifer is the unjustified in the world of man, insofar as he transfers his justified sphere outside into the world of man for the spiritual world and applies the same laws there that he should only apply outside in the spiritual world.

And do you remember how I dealt with it in other lectures, based on Goethe's “Faust”, the ambiguity that still remained in Goethe when he wrote “Faust”. I told you at the time that Goethe did not yet properly distinguish between Lucifer and Ahriman. Mephistopheles is actually Ahriman, who has only been left behind in a different way than Lucifer. But this distinction is only given by the newer spiritual science. Goethe constantly confuses Lucifer and Ahriman, throws them together, so that his Mephistopheles is really a confused figure in this respect, has Luciferic and Ahrimanic traits. If Goethe had already had spiritual science, this terrible confusion with regard to the character of Mephistopheles would certainly not occur. I have already said at the time: I ask not to be accused of not sufficiently venerating Goethe or of criticizing him in a mean, philistine way because of what I say. By telling the truth, one's veneration of some genius is truly no less than if one merely praises it. I believe that no one can accuse me of having a low opinion of Goethe after what I have written and said about him. But I must always emphasize that his Mephistopheles is a confused spiritual character when I speak from the impulse of spiritual science. If Goethe had known exactly the right thing to say after the verse:

And all your lofty works
Are glorious as on the first day

first appeared Lucifer, the one who works through the appearance of the world of the spheres, through the beauty of the world of the spheres. Lucifer would stand there. And because Lucifer has as his companion Ahriman, Mephistopheles – which is the same as Ahriman – Mephistopheles would then step in, or Lucifer would step down and Mephistopheles would step up. That is what Goethe would have done if he had had spiritual science in its present form. We would have seen a red Lucifer first, and only then the gray-black Ahriman, the gray-black Mephistopheles. But Goethe did not get that far. Therefore, he only lets Mephistopheles appear, who in his own way also combines the retarded qualities that should work in the spiritual world and not work in a human way into human life. Goethe felt that, felt it correctly. That is why not everything about this Mephistopheles is quite right, although it is right. The feeling here seems much more certain than Goethe's intuition has already worked. Much of what Faust encounters as temptation really comes from Mephistopheles, but other things cannot properly be attributed to Mephistopheles. That Faust should be tempted by base passions cannot really come from Ahriman, it can only come from Lucifer. And when Ahriman-Mephistopheles says this, Goethe remembers, subconsciously, that it is not quite right. Mephistopheles should actually have Lucifer at his side. That is why Mephistopheles says: “Dust shall he eat,” that is, he shall live in lower passions, “like my aunt, the famous snake.” That is Lucifer. Then he reminds us of his aunt, the good Aunt Lucifer!' There you have the reminiscence of Lucifer, who is actually supposed to be there.

You see, there are tremendously deep secrets of the world in this “Prologue in Heaven”, by which I do not mean to say that Goethe wanted to present them as we feel them today in spiritual science. But instinctive wisdom is often much deeper than the apparent one. And in ancient times there was only instinctive wisdom, and that was truly a higher wisdom than that which is produced today by limited natural science.

Thus Mephistopheles-Ahriman entered the physical world, where he should not be. There is also a poor fit between what he has to say and the physical world and the intentions of the Deity in the physical world. He wants to rule in the world, but he finds everything “very bad”. He must be different from the others, from the genuine sons of the gods, for he is to be here in the physical world, where works are to be fathomed. Since Mephistopheles enters the physical world at all, the saying that he should not fathom the world does not apply to him; he must fathom it. He is only a half-nature on earth; as a spiritual being he does not really belong. He would have to fathom it, but cannot fathom it. That is why he finds everything “very bad”. We will talk about the extent to which he is here for creation tomorrow in connection with other teachings of spiritual science. Today we just want to say this.

So this Ahriman-Mephistopheles is different here in the physical world from the true sons of the gods. He really must be used for something else here. He must work on what is real in the physical world, unlike the true sons of the gods. They do not need to have the earthly real in their imaginations. They must delight in the “vividly rich beauty”, the beauty in their imaginations. There is a discrepancy between the angels, the true sons of the gods, and Ahriman, the Mephistopheles. For them, the angels cannot do it like Mephistopheles, they delight in the lively, rich beauty.

That which is becoming, that which is eternally working and living,
embraces you with the sweet barriers of love.

This is about as profound as the prologue gets. Remember what we said about the cosmos of wisdom and the cosmos of love? And remember the words: They veiled their faces from the mystery of the Incarnation. — Love does not live the same way for the Sons of God of Wisdom as it does for humans: they are beings within wisdom; there are limits for the true Sons of God. And by living in the great Maja, in the glory of the Luciferic world, they weave the “permanent thoughts” that are in turn beings, not abstract ideas, that are forces, not mere thoughts.

It is truly remarkable how this “Prologue in Heaven” was written in 1797, one might say, not in the language of men, but in the language of the gods, and how humanity will take a long time to fathom all the depths of this prologue. I think it is possible to get a sense of the feelings that lived in Goethe when, spurred on by Schiller, he set about continuing Faust in 1797, which he had started years ago. It began there: “Have now, alas, studied philosophy, law” and so on. Then the three parts are missing: “Dedication”, “Prelude to the Theater”, “Prologue in Heaven”. Then the whole Easter walk was missing. Some scenes were then written during the Italian journey in 1787, and under Schiller's encouragement, Goethe went back to it. He may well have thought back to the time when he had not taken Faust so deeply, when he had only taken it, albeit very deeply, as one who strives out of the world of physical reality, over the threshold, into the spiritual world, to the earth spirit and so on. But he could not take it then, he, the twenty-year-old Goethe, as he took it now at the end of the century, in 1797, when he himself felt that he really did not understand in an abstract way much of what he had to express in the “Prologue in Heaven”. For there the language of angels prevails. Those who heard the first songs of Faust would have had to develop with Goethe in the way that Goethe himself developed if they had wanted to understand what had become of the whole rich world of Faust in Goethe's soul by 1797. Something different had become of it. What he had created as a young man appeared to him in a higher sphere. He must have had some sense of the view from the spiritual sphere beyond the threshold down to the earthly world in which Faust also walked, who says: “Have now, alas, philosophy, jurisprudence...” and so on. “... studied with hot endeavor.” Goethe could say that he and his companions enjoyed something different back then than what has now become his. And he might have sensed something of how little he would be understood. For Goethe sensed already, from the end of the 1790s, that something must come like a spiritual science if what he instinctively sensed and felt as world-wisdom and world-beauty and world-strength was to be fully understood.

They will not hear the following songs,
The souls to whom I sang the first;
The friendly throng has been scattered,
Alas! the first echo has faded.

Echo from the souls to whom he read the first scenes of “Faust,” which he wrote when he was twenty years old: the first echo. But understanding at that time – for even that time is now already gone in the time of materialism – understanding, however, for crossing the threshold with a character like Faust, understanding for appealing to the earth spirit, which “weaves and lives in the tides of life, in the storm of deeds”. But a stopping at this understanding, an inability to ascend to what Goethe had to struggle to achieve. Therefore - now that the language of angels prevails and the whole is viewed from a different point of view - no longer the old resonance. Faded away, alas! - that old resonance! Scattered the souls for whom he sang the first songs. That suffering that everyone goes through who really wants to look at the spiritual world, Goethe knew it and knew that he was alone with this suffering in his time.

My suffering is heard by the unknown multitude.

This is not much different today, when one could be frightened by the applause that people give to “Faust”. For what do people today still hear of the deep wisdom that prevails in “Faust”, much more than external appearances!?

But Goethe might say, if he now felt that he had to lift up his song, the song of his suffering, into the realm of the spirit: What used to be reality to me floats far into the distance, and what used to disappear becomes reality — the silent, earnest spiritual kingdom, which one approaches with that awe that one feels when one has a presentiment of the completely different form that the world takes on the other side of the threshold and on this side of the threshold. This 'dedication' also arose from Goethe's deep sense of the possibilities of the future. If spiritual science could also deepen human hearts in such cases, so that they are really able to take what must be taken deeply, then spiritual science would fulfill one of its tasks. For the saying that I quoted here only recently is true, deeply true: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day conceived,” that is, than the day that shows us only the physical, sensual world. The world is deep as it is revealed to us by that night which, compared to physical day, is indeed night and darkness, but into which we carry that light which we kindle in our own soul as a lamp and which we then have to illuminate ourselves. The world is deep and must be fathomed by a light that we first kindle through our spiritual striving so that it may shine in the spiritual world. Then it will shine as the light does in the eternal becoming, which works and lives and in which the beings of the higher world have to dwell, so that it may be revealed to them what they need to fortify with lasting thoughts that which floats in fluctuating appearance.

From this point we will then continue our meditation tomorrow.

I would just like to ask our friends from Basel not to bring any children with them tomorrow. We have to make this exception because the presence of the personality from hell presented to you today makes this scene unsuitable for children's fantasies and dreams. So, as an exception, we ask that anyone under fifteen or sixteen years of age not be brought tomorrow.

Inner life changes along with the changing seasons of nature, as the two are intimately connected. The verses commence in the spring, at the time of the vernal equinox, the full moon, and Sunday, which by definition is Easter. This is when the sun’s path, the ecliptic, viewed from earth, crosses the heavenly extension of the Earth’s equator and so starts to leave Pisces and enter Ares. Similarly, summer begins when the sun starts to leave Gemini to enter Cancer, fall begins when the sun starts to leave Virgo to enter Libra, and winter begins when the sun starts to leave Sagittarius to enter Capricorn. The verses are paired 26 weeks apart, for spring in one hemisphere is autumn in the other. These verses are mantic, from the muse, with their own rhythm, beauty, and meaning. Although Christmas and Saint John’s Day are fixed by the solstices (Christmas being 4 days off since the correction of the Julian Calendar), both Easter and Michaelmas move, as they are connected not just with the earth-sun-stars axis, but also with moon rhythms and planetary human rhythms. Everything is in flux, moving always, and so each of us will have to fit the 52 verses of the year into the rhythms of the universe, which are actually our inner rhythms also. In some years, if Easter comes early after the equinox, verses will have to be doubled up. In other years, if Easter comes later after the equinox, verses will have to be held over for another week. And as always, the dating and significance of Easter and of Michaelmas create lots of discussion. “Human beings are able to develop the consciousness soul precisely through the exertion of energy required to penetrate such riddles”.¹ The celestial equator and the ecliptic:²

—Translation by John Riedel MD - 6 May 2023

• 1. Rudolf Steiner in Reading the Pictures of the Apocalypse, 5/23/09.
• 2. Tau’olunga https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we will try and get a clearer idea of the transition from the Logos to a new system, a new creation.

People usually ask first of all: How did it all come into existence? This is probably the hardest question, but one that is frequently asked. All one can do is to give an approximate idea. Above all we must be clear in our minds that it is our rational mind which asks how things came into existence, getting a more or less plausible notion of how one would have created the world if one had been the creator. The rational mind is, however, one of the things that originated in the Logos, and it is clear that the Logos has a far greater conscious awareness. We therefore cannot judge the Logos with our rational human minds and phrase the question like this: Why did the world have to arise out of the Logos? All we can ask is how the emergence of the world from the Logos proceeded, how things arose. We cannot ask why because why would imply compulsion. The process must be an act the Logos has done in freedom, not something done from necessity.

The creative principle of the Logos can only be given in image form.⁷⁸ We imagine an entity and its mirror image. We have to say to ourselves: The mirror image contains everything which is also to be found in this spirit. It looks exactly the same but is not alive; it does not include the principle of life. It will only be possible to understand how the mirror image can grow like the spirit if we consider that the spirit gives its life, its existence, to the mirror image. We have to consider, therefore, that a spirit gives its life to its mirror image. This is the idea of the first sacrifice. Giving up one’s own existence, transferring one’s own life to the mirror image—that is the original sacrifice.

This is exactly how it is with the Logos. The first Logos relates to the second as if we were standing in front of our mirror image and decided to give our own life to the mirror image. Giving one’s life is the original sacrifice made in freedom. It was the deed of the first Logos. The second Logos is exactly the same as the first Logos, except that it has been given existence through sacrifice. If we study the activity of the second Logos we find that its nature is such that it reflects the essential nature of the first Logos back to that first Logos. The second Logos is thus a reflection of the first Logos having been given the life that flowed from the first Logos.

The first Logos produces a reflection, and then gives its life to the mirror image. In the first Logos everything is directed towards the outside, with its existence an influence on the outside. The second Logos has 1) the existence it has received, and 2) the ability to let its content shine back on to the first Logos. We thus have duality in the second Logos. Its life and content are two things. The content is the same as for the first Logos, but its life is somewhat different from the first Logos (Fig. 17).

The line down the middle of the second circle indicates that in the second Logos life and content are two things, that they have been divided. Yet when it comes to content, image and mirror image are the same in either case, whilst life is two things.

This could not yet as such give a cosmic system, for all one would have, would be the relationship of one Logos to the other; there would be no multiplicity. This could only come with a further sacrifice. A further mirroring process had to come in which the relationship of the two was also reflected.

First, the first Logos was reflected once again, then the mirroring was mirrored. This created the third Logos as a reflection of the other two Logoi. The third Logos thus contains:

1. the mirror image of the first Logos
2. the mirror image of what the first Logos brought about in the second, which is its life
3. the mirror image of the content which the second Logos reflects back to the first.

Let us now visualize this (Fig. 18). The first Logos is reflected in a). If the first Logos is creative activity directed to the outside, its mirror image in the third Logos is the exact opposite of the action of the first Logos. In the first Logos, a) is the most sublime light of the world; in the third Logos it is the most extreme spiritual darkness.

b) in the second Logos is the life which the second Logos received from the first. It is not the life which gives itself in sacrifice but the life which has been accepted. The life which sacrifices itself in the first Logos is love. The opposite of this in the third Logos is absolute desire, longing, striving for Logos. In the third Logos, b) is thus absolute desire.

c) in the second Logos is the mirror image of the first Logos reflected by the second Logos.

In our own mirror image we distinguish

1. the image which shone out and comes back out of the darkness
2. what we have given returns as desire
3. the image itself, which we ourselves are

This corresponds to the three parts in the third Logos:

1. spiritual darkness = tamas
2. absolute desire = rajas
3. the simple mirror image of the first Logo = sattwa.

Tamas, rajas and sattwa are the three gunas, the three parts of the third Logos.⁷⁹

First there are a), b) and c). a) on its own is tamas. If a)—spiritual darkness or tamas—combines with b)—rajas, absolute desire—darkness combines with desire and we have a striving for the first Logos. If a) and c)—tamas and sattwa—are combined, we have the image of the first Logos, created out of the darkness. We can also combine b) and c). Each may occur on its own or be combined with one of the others. All three in combination are what the first Logos itself is. We have seven possible combinations of the three gunas (Fig. 19).

These are the seven different guna combinations. Think of these seven possible combinations as the next world-creative principle which may arise from the three gunas. These seven spirits do exist. They are the ‘seven creative spirits before the throne’, the seven creative powers that come after the three Logoi (Fig. 20).

These seven creative powers give rise to what we call the ‘prajapatis’. As each is able to repeat this exactly at subordinate levels of conscious awareness, life and form, we always have three: three times a, three times b, three times c, three times ab, three times ac, three times be, three times abc, making together three times seven = 21 prajapatis. Each of them acts like an original Logos. This gives us the 21 creators of a specific solar system.

The first concept we meet, therefore, is that of sacrifice made in perfect freedom. Once we have it, the question as to why ceases to have significance. Human progress consists in no longer asking this question but moving on to the concept of the creative Logos.

With a mechanical instrument, a watch, for instance, or a machine, we can predict how it will behave. This is somewhat less the case with natural processes, though to a degree it applies. Thus the time of a solar eclipse can be calculated. We may speak of ‘necessity’ in this case. With a plant it will also still be possible to say what it will do under specific conditions. However, the higher we go in the natural world, the more does it become impossible to say what an entity will do in a given situation. The higher a person is with regard to gifts and content, the less will it be possible to predict his actions, for we cannot grasp his reasons and motives. In that case all we can do is wait and see what he will do in a given situation.

In the same way we have to accept the creation of the world as an act done by the Logos in freedom. Progress consist in knowing that when it comes to the universe we do not ask as to the why, and that the question as to the ground or reason is not justifiable. All of those who understood this never spoke of a ground or reason. Jakob Boehme spoke of a ‘source and origin’ of the world.⁸⁰ To progress to insight into the world-creative power, we can only go to the point where we know that our own evolution must have been the goal, for that is where the creator must once have stood. The creator must have everything we possess, but in reverse. Atman is the lowest point within us. The creator has atman as numerous points in his periphery. When the solar system was in its inception, the world-creative Logos had the qualities we have found to be the goal of our evolution—atman, budhi, karana sharira or manas, kama, linga sharira, prana, sthula sharira—all as part of its essential nature.

We need to be clear in our minds as to where the activity of this creative Logos may lie. So we first of all investigate where the different metamorphoses take us. One form metamorphoses is physical, two are astral, two mental and two arupic, making a total of seven. When we have reached the height of the mental plane, we have become karana sharira from outside; we then become budhi and finally atman (Fig. 21, left). When the Earth has reached its goal we will be active on the higher mental plane. The transition then begins which takes us to the next planet. For this, we must have atman on the outside. This means that karana sharira and budhi must also vanish to the outside (Fig. 21, right).

The consequence is that we should not think that nothing happens in the transition to a new planet—pralaya is not inactivity and sleep—but karana sharira and budhi are shed. We must shed karana sharira on the budhi plane and budhi itself on the nirvana plane.

Evolution therefore becomes this (Fig. 22).

Pralaya is a very different kind of activity from that which occurs during a manvantara. To configure a new planetary chain, the spirit must have gone through the budhi and nirvana planes on the other side. The significance of these planes is that on them the spirits go through exactly the same process between planets as human beings do in devachan. There are also great pralayas—maha pralayas. If we follow the metamorphoses of conscious awareness from one planet to another, we get daytime conscious awareness on Earth, dream consciousness on Moon, and so on (Fig. 23).

It is necessary to go through the nirvana plane between one kind of conscious awareness and another. When the highest state of conscious awareness has been reached and atman has shed all vestments, having become truly all-embracing, it will be capable of creating a new solar system. For this, it must first go through two further planes of conscious awareness. By then it has gained a kind of all-vision, it will then be able to have a view of the whole cosmic system.

Our present daytime conscious awareness can have an overview of the mineral world, psychic consciousness can overview life, intellectual conscious awareness sentience, and spiritual conscious awareness of all that is. Atman has then reached its highest level. Atman is all-awareness.

If atman is to shine out, it must first develop the ability to give everything; it must be creative. It does so by vesting itself in budhi and manas. It can then start a new cosmic system on the arupa plane. When conscious awareness will have reached the final level, therefore, it will still have to go through two other planes. The first plane is the one where it does not peel off budhi but adds it; this is called the ‘para nirvana’ plane. The plane on which the entity descends again so that it may be active on the arupa plane, is called ‘mahapara nirvana plane’. Two planes that are in opposite positions correspond. The lowest is the physical, its opposite nirvana. (Fig. 24)

On the astral plane, desire rules, on the para nirvana plane love, budhi. On the mental plane, perception rules, taking in the thought; on the mahapara nirvana plane the creative thought rules. The budhi plane is absolute, loving dedication to the divine. Its opposite is a state of having completely turned away from all that is divine. Where the budhi plane is beatific, its opposite has absolute wretchedness. That is the eighth plane, the eighth sphere.

Imagine a particular entity has turned its back on evolution on some plane or other, going its own way. It would fall into the eighth sphere and would have to wait there until the whole of evolution has gone round. It could only be taken along again, as lowermost entity, in the next evolution. This cosmic ‘compass rose’ (Fig. 24) shows the opposites very well.

When we have arrived on the nirvana plane, the entity will have reached the point where its atman is completely on the outside. We are then dealing with the kind of Logos which we have called ‘the seven’. These are the seven creative spirits, which is also why we have seven different races [the ‘root races’, with seven sub-races each].

The seven different spirits belong to the nirvana plane. Going through the para nirvana plane and the manapara nirvana plane then, we come to the first and second Logos itself. The second arises on the para nirvana plane, the first on the mahapara nirvana plane. On the nirvana plane the cosmic system is brought to completion by the 7 times 3 = 21 prajapatis. The last of these is abc, the third Logos itself. Only the first Logos is able to take up again anything which has fallen into the eighth sphere. It takes it along with the cosmic dust. To be cast out from evolution is to link one’s life to something which inexorably remains behind, without fail, and to wait until evolution once again coincides with the state in question. A native of an uncilivilized wild place with the soul of such a native is relatively happy; but imagine a more highly developed spirit in the body of such a native or even a dog—that is banishment indeed. The higher soul has taken the road to a lower manifestation. To ‘go into the eighth sphere’ does indeed mean to be no longer progressing in accord with evolution, to be unable to participate in the evolution of the others, but to be cast back to a lower level.

Conscious awareness is perception up to the nirvana plane. From then on it is no longer mere perception but inner activity. On the para nirvana plane it is activity directed to the outside. On the mahapara nirvana plane it is the creative conscious mind of the Logos. This moves on from there through the eighth sphere and on to the physical plane, where it becomes the creative powers of nature. In reality these give expression to divine thoughts which appear to us as powers or forces because we do not have the overview.

• 78. See also part 2 in this volume. Also lecture given in Karlsruhe on 4 February 1907; The Structure of the Lord’s Prayer from GA 97; tr. A. H. Parker; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1971; also in The Christian Mystery, Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1998.
• 79. The teaching of the three gunas tamas, rajas and sattva is the foundation of the sankhya philosophy in the Vedanta system. See Rudolf Steiner’s lecture of 18 December 1912, in The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of Paul, GA 142; tr. L. D. Monges, D. M. Bugbey; New York: Anthroposophic Press 1971.
• 80. In ‘Aurora oder Morgenroete im Aufgang’, 23. Kapitel, Verse 1-6, in Sämtliche Werke, herausgegeben von K. W. Schibler, 6 Bde, Leipzig 1831–1846, Bd 2, S. 268.

This is the 8th of 17 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities, in 1911. The title of this series of lectures is: The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation. This address was given following a Concert at the Berlin Group of the Anthroposophical Society, at which Mendelssohn's Overture of the Hebrides had been played).

Through the tones and harmonies of this Overture we have been led in spirit to the shores of Scotland, and in our souls, we have thus followed again a path of travel which, during the course of human evolution, has been deeply influenced by the secrets of karma. For, from entirely different parts of the western hemisphere of our earth, as if through a karmic current of migration, various peoples were once transplanted into that region, and its vicinity, to which these tones now lead us. And many strange destinies are made known to us. We are told, both by what Occultism relates as well as by outer historical documents, of what these peoples experienced in very ancient times on this particular part of the earth.

A memory of the mysterious destinies of these peoples arose again, as if newly awakened, when about 1772 the cave on the Island of Staffa belonging to the Hebrides, known as Fingal's Cave, was rediscovered. Those who beheld it were reminded of mysterious ancient destinies when they saw how Nature herself seemed to have constructed something which may be likened to a wonderful cathedral. It is constructed with great symmetry in long aisles of countless pillars towering aloft: above there arches a ceiling of the same stonework, while below the bases of the pillars are washed by the inrushing foaming waves of the sea which ceaselessly beat and resound with a music which is like thunder within this mighty temple. Dropping water drips steadily from strange stone formations upon the stalactites beneath, making melodious magical music.

A spectacle of this kind actually exists there. And those who, upon discovering it, had a sense for the mysterious things which once took place in this region, must have been reminded of the hero who once upon a time, as one of the most famous individualities of the West, guided destiny here in such a strange way, and whose fame was sung by his son, the blind Ossian, who is like a western Homer—a blind singer.

If we look back and see how deeply people were impressed by what they heard about this place, we shall be able to understand how it was that Macpherson's revival of this ancient song in the 18^th Century made such a mighty impression upon Europe. There is nothing which may be compared with the impression made by this poem. Goethe, Herder, Napoleon harkened to it—and all believed to discern in its rhythms and sounds something of the magic of primeval days. Here we must understand that a spiritual world such as still existed at that time, arose within their hearts, and felt itself drawn to what sounded forth out of this song! And what was it that thus sounded forth?

We must now turn our gaze to those times which fall together with the first impulses of Christianity and the few centuries which followed. What happened up there in the vicinity of the Hebrides, in Ireland and Scotland—in ancient Erin, which included all the neighboring islands between Ireland and Scotland, as well as the northern part of Scotland itself. Here we must seek for the kernel of those peoples, of Celtic origin, who had most of all preserved the ancient Atlantian clairvoyance in its full purity. The others who had wandered farther to the East had developed further, and so no longer remained in connection with the ancient gods. The western peoples, however, had preserved for themselves the possibility of experiencing an ancient clairvoyance now entirely immersed in the personality, in the individuality. And they were led to this particular part of the earth, as if for a special mission, where a structure confronted them which mirrored their own music's inner depths and was itself architecturally formed entirely out of the spiritual world, a structure which I have just tried to characterize with a few words—Fingal's Cave. We shall imagine these events rightly if we realize that the cave acted as a focus point, mirroring what lived in the souls of these human beings who, through their karma, were sent hither as to a temple erected by the gods themselves. Here those human beings were prepared who should later receive the Christ Impulse with their full human being and were here to undergo something extremely strange by way of preparation.

Again we shall be able to imagine all this if we realize that here particularly those ancient folk customs were preserved whereby the tribe was divided into smaller groups based upon family. Those who were related by blood felt themselves closely connected, while all others were looked upon as strangers, as belong[ing] to another Group Ego. During the migrations from Atlantis toward the East, all that the Druid priests, who remained behind here in the West, were able to give to the people poured itself out over these individual groups as a harmonizing influence. And what they were able to give still lived on in the bards. We shall only rightly understand what worked through these bards, however, if we make clear to ourselves that here the most elemental passions met together with the ancient powers of sight into the spiritual world, and that those who, with powerful life forces, sometimes with rage and passion, fought as representatives of their clan against other clans, perceived at the same time impulses working out of the spiritual world which directed them in battle.

Such an active connection between the physical and the soul realms cannot be conceived of today. When a hero raised his sword he believed that a spirit out of the air guided it, and in the spirit he beheld an ancestor who had fought upon this same battlefield in former times and who had gone up yonder to help now from over there. In their battle ranks they felt their ancestors actively aiding them, their ancestors on both sides—and they did not only feel them ... they heard them clairaudiently! It was a wonderful conception which lived in these peoples, that the heroes had to fight upon the battlefields and to shed their blood, but that after death they ascended into the spiritual world, and that their spirits then vibrated as tone—sounding through the air as a spiritual reality.

Those who had proven themselves in battle, but had trained themselves at the same time so that they could listen to what sounded out of the winds as the voice of the past, who were blind for the physical world, who could no longer see the flashing of the swords but were blind for the physical plane—these were highly honoured! And one of these was Ossian. When the heroes swung their swords, they were conscious that their deeds would resound further into the spiritual world and that bards would appear who would preserve all this in their songs. This was perceived in living reality by these peoples.

But all this creates an altogether different conception of humanity. It creates the conception that the human being is united with spiritual powers which sound forth out of the whole of Nature. For he cannot look upon a storm or a flash of lightning, he cannot hear the thunder or the surging of the sea without sensing that out of all the activities of Nature spirits work who are connected with the souls of the past, with the souls of his own ancestors. Thus the activity of Nature was at that time something altogether different than for us today. And it is for this reason that the rhythms and sounds of this song are so important, which, after being handed down for centuries through tradition only, were revived by the Scotsman Macpherson so that they create for us again a consciousness of the connection of the human being with the souls of his ancestors and with the phenomena of Nature.

We can understand how this Scotsman had in a certain sense a congenial feeling when he described how a line of battle stormed into the field, sweeping darkness before it, even as did the spirits who took part in the battle. This song is in reality something which was able to make a great impression upon spiritual Europe. The whole character of the description, even though given in a rather free poetical form, awakes in us a feeling for the kind of perception which lived in these ancient peoples. There was active in them a living knowledge, a living wisdom, concerning their connection with the spiritual world and the world of Nature in which the spiritual world works.

Out of such wisdom the finest sons from the different tribes—that is, those who had the strongest connection with the spirits of the past, who more than others allowed these spirits of the past to live in their deeds—were chosen as a picked band. And those who had the strongest clairvoyant forces were placed at its head. This band had to defend the kernel of the Celtic peoples against the peoples of the surrounding world. And one of these leaders was the clairvoyant hero, who has come down to us under the name of Fingal. How Fingal was active in the defense of the ancient gods against those who wished to endanger them—all this was handed down in ancient songs, heard out of the spiritual world—the ancient songs of the bard Ossian, Fingal's son, so that it remained alive even into the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. What Fingal achieved, what his son Ossian heard when Fingal had ascended into the spiritual realm, what their descendants heard in the rhythms and sounds of Ossian's songs with which they ever and again ensouled their deeds, this it was which worked on so mightily even into the 18^th Century. And we shall win a conception of this if we realize how Ossian allowed the voice of his father, Fingal, to sound forth in his songs.

We are told how the heroes find themselves in a difficult position. They are almost overthrown ... when new life fills the band: “The king stood by the stone of Lubar. Thrice he reared his terrible voice. The deer started from the fountains of Cromia. The rocks shook on all their hills. Like the noise of a hundred mountain streams, that burst, and roar, and foam! Like the clouds, that gather to a tempest on the blue face of the sky! So met the sons of the desert round the terrible voice of Fingal. Pleasant was the voice of the king of Morven to the warriors of his land. Often had he led them to battle; often returned with the spoils of the foe.”

“‘Come to battle,’ said the king, ‘ye children of echoing Selma! Come to the death of thousands. Comhal's son will see the fight. My sword shall wave on the hill, the defense of my people in war. But never may you need it, warriors; while the son of Morni fights, the chief of mighty men! He shall lead my battle, that his fame may rise in song! O ye ghosts of heroes dead! Ye riders of the storm of Cromia! Receive my falling people with joy, and bear them to your hills. And may the blast of Lena carry them over my seas, that they may come to my silent dreams, and delight my soul in rest’ ...”

“Now like a dark and stormy cloud, edges round with the red lightning of heaven, flying westward from the morning's beam, the king of Selma removed. Terrible is the light of his armor; two spears are in his hand. His gray hair falls on the wind. He often looks back on the war. Three bards attend the son of fame, to bear his words to the chiefs. High on Cromia's side he sat, waving the lightning of his sword, and as he waved we moved ...”

“Fingal at once arose in arms. Thrice he reared his dreadful voice. Cromia answered around. The sons of the desert stood still. They bent their blushing faces to earth, ashamed at the presence of the king. He came like a cloud of rain in the day of the sun, when slow it rolls on the hill, and fields expect the shower. Silence attends its slow progress aloft: but the tempest is soon to arise. Swaran beheld the terrible kings of Morven. He stopped in the midst of his course. Dark he leaned on his spear, rolling his red eyes around. Silent and tall he seemed, as an oak on the banks of Lubar, which had its branches blasted of old by the lightning of heaven. It bends over the stream: the grey moss whistles in the wind: so stood the king. Then slowly he retired to the rising heath of Lena. His thousands pour around the hero. Darkness gathers on the hill!”

“Fingal, like a beam from heaven, shone in the midst of his people. His heroes gather around him. He sends forth the voice of his power: ‘Raise my standards on high, spread them on Lena's wind, like the flames of an hundred hills! Let them sound on the winds of Erin, and remind us of the fight. Ye sons of the roaring streams, that pour from a thousand hills, be near the king of Morven! Attend to the words of his power! Gaul, strongest arm of death! O! Oscar of the future fights! Connal, son of the blue shields of Sora! Dermid, of the dark brown hair! Ossian, king of many songs!—Be near your father's arm!’ We reared the sunbeam of battle; the standard of the king! Each hero exulted with joy, as, waving, it flew in the wind. It was studded with gold above, as the blue wide shell of the nightly sky. Each hero had his standard, too, and each his gloomy mien!”

Thus Fingal stormed into battle, thus he is described by his son Ossian.

No wonder that this life, this consciousness of a connection with the spiritual world which sank deep into these peoples, into the souls of the ancient Celts, is the best preparation whereby they could spread the personal divine element throughout the West in their own way and from their own soil. For what they had experienced in the form of passion and desire, what they had heard sounding forth in the melodies of the spiritual world, prepared them for a later time when they brought into the world sons who revealed these passions in their souls in a purified and milder form. And thus we may say—it seems to us as if Erin's finest sons were to hear again the voices of their ancient bards singing of what they once heard out of the spiritual world as the deeds of their forefathers, but as if in Erin's finest sons the ancient battle cries had now been formed and clarified, and had become words which could express the greatest impulse of mankind.

All this sounded forth out of olden times in the songs about the deeds of the ancient Celts who fought out many things in mighty battles in order to prepare themselves for further deeds of spiritual life in later times, as we recognize them again today in that which the finest sons of the West have achieved. These were the impulses which flowed into the souls of human beings in the 18^th Century, when these ancient songs were revived. And it is this which was remembered by those who saw again the wonderful cathedral, built as if by Nature herself, and which caused them to say to themselves—“Here is a site, a gathering place, given to man by karma, in order that what the bards were able to sing about the deeds of their ancestors, about all that the heroes did to steel their forces, might sound back to them as in an echo out of this temple which they themselves did not have to build—out of their holy temple which was built for them by the spirits of Nature and which could be an instrument of enthusiasm for all who beheld it.”

So the tones and harmonies of this Overture which we have just heard offer an opportunity which allows us to sense, in our own way at least, something of the deep and mysterious events which do indeed reign in the history of mankind, events which occurred long before our present era on almost the same soil upon which they now continue to live. As we must deepen ourselves in all that lives within us, and as all that lives within us is only a further resounding of what was there in the past, so this feeling, this sense, for what once was and now works further in mankind is of great significance for occult life.