The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we would deepen our thoughts at this time in a manner suitable for the present age, this will best be done in the way indicated yesterday, namely, by looking back over the process of human evolution in order to recognize from the spiritual guidance vouchsafed to mankind hitherto, what tasks devolve upon men today. It must not, of course, be forgotten that the point of salient importance in the Christmas thought is that in the night just beginning the Light of Christ shone into the evolution of humanity at the point of time when through this Event, through this integration, as it were, of the Mystery of Golgotha into earthly life, meaning was given to man's life on Earth, and therewith to the Earth herself.

Yesterday I spoke to you of how in the times before the Mystery of Golgotha an important rôle was played by the festivals that were celebrated in the Mysteries at Midsummer, when man, together with the Earth, opens his being to the Cosmos and when his soul can enter into union with Powers belonging to realms beyond the Earth. We heard how among certain peoples the leaders of the Mysteries, following the path along which, at Midsummer, at our St. John's tide, the human soul can be led into the divine-spiritual worlds, offered up their thoughts and feelings to the divine-spiritual Powers. They did this because they realized that whatever revealed itself to them in the course of the year was exposed to the temptations of the Luciferic powers unless at Midsummer, when the Earth spreads wide her wings into the cosmic expanse, these thoughts were felt to be Grace bestowed by the divine-spiritual Beings.

I went on to show how the evolutionary process brought it about that for a certain section of mankind, the Midwinter festival quite naturally replaced the Midsummer festival. Even in our present vapid Christmas thoughts something is still left of this Midwinter festival. The birth of the Saviour in the Midwinter night is either celebrated in religious communities, or, because a man feels that he must again find the way to the light of the Spirit, he celebrates Christmas in the stillness of his own heart, conscious that at this time of the year he is closest to the Earth and her life when he is alone with himself. For the Earth too, at this time, is shut off from the Cosmos; enveloped in her raiment of snow she lives in cosmic space as a being indrawn and isolated.

Christmas thoughts played a part even in the times when among certain peoples the Midsummer festival was still of paramount importance, but in the pre-Christian era the meaning of the Christmas thought was not the same as it is today. At that time the sublime Sun Spirit still belonged to the Cosmos, had not yet come down to the Earth. The whole condition of the human soul at Midwinter, when together with the Earth man felt himself to be in a kind of cosmic isolation, was different from what it is today. And we learn to know what this condition was if we turn our attention to certain Mysteries that were celebrated mainly in the South in times long, long before the Mystery of Golgotha. Initiation in those Mysteries was conferred upon candidates in the old way, the Initiation-Science of that day was imparted to them. And among certain ancient peoples this Initiation-Science consisted in the candidate learning to read the Book of the World—I do not mean anything that is conveyed by dead letters written on paper, but what the Beings of the universe themselves communicate. Those who have insight into the secrets of the Cosmos know that everything growing and thriving on the Earth is an image of what shines down from the stars out of the cosmic expanse.

A man who learnt this cosmic reading as we today learn the far simpler kind of reading by means of dead letters, knew that he must see in every plant a sign revealing to him something of the secrets of the Universe, and that when he let his gaze survey the world of plants or animals, this survey was itself a form of reading. And it was in such a way that the Initiates of certain ancient Mysteries taught their pupils. They did not read to them out of a book but communicated to them what they experienced under the inspiration of the so-called Year-God concerning the secrets of the course of the year and their significance for human life.

It was in this way that an ancient wisdom related world-beings and world-happenings to what concerned the life of man. When the sages of old communicated such things to their pupils, they were inspired by divine-spiritual Beings such as the Year-God.

Who was this Year-God who belonged to the rank of the Primal Powers, or Archai, in the Hierarchies? Who was this Year-God? He was a Being to whom certain of those who were versed in Initiation-Science lifted their hearts and in so doing were endowed by him with the power and inner light enabling them to read one thing from the budding plants in Spring, another from the ripening of the early fruits in Summer, another when the leaves redden in Autumn and the fruits ripen, and yet another when the trees glitter under the snowflakes and the Earth with her rocks is covered with a veil of snow. This ‘reading’ lasted for a whole year—through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter; and in this reading the secrets of Man himself were unveiled in the intercourse between teachers and pupils. And then the cycle of the year began anew.

Some idea of what these ancient Initiates taught to their pupils under the inspiration of the Year-God may be conveyed in the following way. The attention of the pupils was drawn, first of all, to what is revealed in Spring, when the snow is over and the Sun is gaining strength, when the first buds of the plants are appearing and the forces of the Earth are being renewed. The pupils were made aware of how a plant growing in the meadows and a plant growing in the shade of the trees in a forest, speak differently of the secrets of the universe. They were made aware of how in the various plants the warmth and light of the Sun speak differently from the cosmic expanse in the round or serrated leaves.

And what could be revealed in this way under the influence and inspiration of the Year-God through the the letters budding forth from the Earth herself, unveiled to the pupils of the teachers in the Mysteries, in the manner of that time, secrets of the physical body of man.

The teachers pointed to the physical productiveness of the Earth, to the force of the Earth shooting into the plant. At every single place on the Earth to which the pupil's attention was directed, there was a different ‘letter.’ These letters—which were living plant-beings, or living animal forms—were then combined as we today combine single letters into words. In sharing thus in the life of Spring, man was reading in Nature. The Initiations bestowed by the Year-God consisted in this reading. And when Spring came to an end, at about the time of the month of May, man had the impression: Now I understand how out of the womb of the universe the human physical body takes shape and is formed.

Then came the Summer. The same letters and words of the great cosmic Logos were used, but it was pointed out to the pupils how under the Sun's rays which stream differently now, under its light and warmth which now work in a different way, the letters change their forms, how the first buds, which had spoken of the secrets of the human physical body, open themselves to the Sun in the blossoms. These many-colored blossoms were now letters used by the pupil; each blossom made him feel how the Sun's ray lovingly kisses the plant-forces springing up from the Earth. And in the wonderfully delicate and tender process of the cosmic forces weaving over the Earth-forces in the blossoming plants, he read the words which conveyed to him how the Earth strives outwards into the cosmic expanse. Man lived in union with the Earth as she opened herself to the Cosmos, to the distant stars, lived with the Earth herself in the infinitudes.

What lay hidden in these infinitudes revealed itself to man as he gazed at the letters which were the blossoming plants. He read out of these letters what the conditions of life had been for the human being who has descended from the spiritual worlds to physical existence on the Earth; how he had gathered together etheric substance from every quarter of the heavens to form his own etheric body. Man was thus able to read the secrets enshrined in this etheric body from everything that was now coming to pass again between the Earth and the Cosmos. The signs of the Cosmic Word are inscribed upon the very surface of the Earth when the plants blossom and particular forms of life become manifest in the animal world at the time of Midsummer.

When Autumn approached, men saw how the letters of the Cosmic Word were again changing. At this time the warmth and light of the Sun are withdrawing and the plants are obliged to have recourse to what the Sun itself has conveyed to the Earth during Summer; in return, the Earth breathes out the blossoming life she has received during Summer but at the same time develops within herself the ripening fruit which brings the cycle of plant-life to completion, inasmuch as the plant bears within it the seed, the forces of germination. Again man was able to unveil what the Cosmic Word inscribes on the surface of the Earth herself in the ripening plants; again he was able to unriddle what the forms taken by animal life in the Autumn can reveal. He read very deep secrets of the universe in the flight of birds, in all the changes that take place in the lower animals and in the insect world as Autumn approaches. The way in which the insect world becomes silent and seeks refuge in the Earth, the changes of form it undergoes—all this conveyed to him that in Autumn the Earth is in process of withdrawing into herself, communing with herself.

This was brought to expression in certain festivals that were celebrated in the latter half of September and have still left traces in country districts in the form of the Michaelmas festival. Through these festivals man reminded himself that when all the paths in the Earth which led out into the Cosmos have failed, he must unite himself with something that is not bound up with the happenings of the physical and etheric worlds, he must turn his soul to the spiritual content of the Cosmos. And even in the kind of festival that is now celebrated at Michaelmas, there is still a reminiscence of humanity turning to that Spirit of the Hierarchies who will lead men in a spiritual way when external guidance through the Stars and through the Sun has lost its power.

Through everything that man read in this way in the Autumn—a reading that was also contemplation—he steeped himself in the secrets of the human astral body. Autumn was the season when those who were initiated and inspired by the Year-God read with him the secrets of the human astral body and contemplated them under his inspiration. It was at this Autumn season that the Initiates said to their pupils: “Hold fast to the Being who stands before the Face of the Sun! (The name Micha-el is still reminiscent of this.) Think of this Being, for you will need the power when you have passed through the gate of death into the supersensible worlds, when you have to go through again whatever has remained in your astral being from Earth-existence.” Secrets of the human astral body were thus drawn from what revealed itself not only in the ripening, but also in the withering plants, and in the insects creeping away into the Earth. Man already knew that if they wished to make the astral body worthy of true manhood, their gaze must be turned to the spiritual worlds. It was for this reason that the souls of those who were candidates for Initiation were directed to the Being whom we can commemorate under the name of Micha-el.

But then came the season at the middle of which is our present Christmas. This was the time when those who were inspired and initiated by the Year-God pointed out to their pupils the mysteries that are revealed when water covers the Earth in the beautiful forms of snowflakes. The reading which in Autumn had already become reflection and contemplation, now became inner, active life; what in earlier seasons of the year had been observation, running parallel with the outer physical world, now became inner spiritual effort and activity. Life was deepened inwardly. Man knew that he can only comprehend the deepest essence of his Ego when he listens to the secrets projected by the Cosmic Word, the Cosmic Logos, into everything that takes place in Nature at the time when the Earth is swathed in her mantle of snow and when life around and on the Earth is contracted by cold. It was incumbent upon those who were initiated and inspired by the Year-God to learn to understand his writing from the indications that were given in the season of Winter. Their observation was sharpened so that it could follow the processes at work in the seeds which had been laid into the Earth, and how the insects hibernate within the closely contracting forces of the Earth. Man's gaze was led from physical light into physical darkness.

There were certain Mysteries where the pupils were told: “Now you must gaze at the Midnight Sun! You must behold the Sun through the Earth. If the eyes of your soul are filled with the power which can follow the plants and the lower animals into the Earth, then the Earth herself will become transparent to your inmost soul.” It is at the time when the Earth's forces are most contracted that man can eventually see through the Earth and behold the Sun as the Midnight Sun, for the Earth is now inwardly spiritualized; whereas at Midsummer, he beholds the Sun with his physical senses when he turns his gaze from the Earth to the Cosmos. To behold the Sun at the Midnight Hour in a deep Winter night was something which the pupils of the Initiates of the Year-God must learn. And it was their duty to communicate the secrets revealed to them by the Midnight Sun to those who were faithful followers of the Mysteries but could not themselves become Initiates or actual pupils of the Mysteries.

And more and more it came about in those ancient times that when the Initiates pointed to the Sun at the Midnight Hour in the depth of Winter, they were obliged to make known to their pupils that man on Earth feels his Ego deserted and forsaken in a certain way. The festival of Midwinter became for those possessed of the greatest knowledge more and more a festival of sadness and mourning through which it was to be brought home to man that within earthly existence he cannot find the way to his Ego, that he must learn from what is to be read in the signs written by the Logos on the Earth in Midwinter, how he with his Ego had been forsaken by the Cosmos. For it was the Earth alone of which he was aware at this time, and that for which the Ego yearns—the power of the Sun—was covered by the Earth. The Sun did indeed appear at the Midnight Hour, but man felt that the strength which would enable him to reach the Sun-Being was continually waning. At the same time, the very fact that man was made aware in this way of the loneliness of the human Ego in the Cosmos, was the prophetic indication that the Sun Being would come to the Earth, would in the course of evolution permeate the being of man, would appear in order to heal a humanity ailing on account of its loneliness in the Cosmos.

Thus even in those ancient times, intimation was given of what was to come in the evolution of man, whereby the Winter festival of sorrow and mourning would be changed—especially among the people of the South—to a festival of inner joy through the appearance of Christ upon Earth. And when this revelation descended from the Cosmos into earthly existence, those who announced the Event declared how to all men on Earth the message had gone forth that the ancient festival of mourning was now transformed into a festival of rejoicing. In the inmost depths of the Shepherds' hearts, where their dreams were woven, the words resounded: “The Godhead is revealing Himself in the Heights of the Cosmos, and peace will spring forth on Earth in men who are of good will.” Such was the proclamation in the hearts of simple Shepherds.

And at the other pole, to those who were the most deeply imbued with magical knowledge, there could come from the surviving relics of ancient Star Wisdom, the message of the entry of the Cosmic Spirit into earthly matter.

Today, when we speak of the Christmas Mystery, we must think of all that is experienced through it against the background of the ancient festival of mourning; we must think of how there has entered into the course of human evolution the power by which man can wrest himself free from everything that fetters him to the Earth. We must be able to formulate the Christmas thought in such a way that we say to ourselves: The inspirations of the Year-God which revealed to the old Initiates how in the depths of Winter the Earth withdraws from the Universe and enters into a time of self-contemplation—those inspirations are still true; man can still understand how the secret of the human Ego is connected with this secret of the year. But out of his human insight, out of his discerning feeling, out of the wisdom of his heart, he can surround himself with pictures of Christ Jesus entering into the life of men on Earth, can learn to experience in all its depths the thought of the Holy Night.

But he will only be able to experience it truly if he also has the will to follow the Christ as He reveals Himself through all the ages. The task of the Initiates of the ancient Initiation-Science was to unveil the mysteries of human nature through a profound understanding of the course of the year. We too must understand what the year reveals but we must also be able to penetrate into the inner nature of Man. And when we do this, anthroposophical Spiritual Science shows us how the letters which are written in heart and lungs, in the brain and in every part of the human organism, unveil the secrets of the Cosmos, just as those secrets were unveiled to men inspired by the Year-God in the letters of the Logos which they read in the budding plants, in the animals, and their manner of life on the Earth. We in our time must learn to look into the inner being of Man—which must become for us a script from which we read the course of human evolution, and then devote ourselves to understanding the meaning and purpose of that evolution. Through deepened vision we must unite ourselves with the spiritual forces that weave through the evolution of humanity. And because this evolution is forever advancing, we must experience the Mystery of Golgotha, the Mystery of the Holy Night, anew in every epoch. We must realize the full depth of meaning contained in words spoken by the Spirit who sought out for Himself the body that was born in Bethlehem on Christmas night: “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the days of Earth.” We must also have a spiritual ear for the perpetual revelation of the Logos through the being of Man himself. Humanity must learn to listen to the inspirations of this God of mankind, who is Christ Himself, as men learned long ago to listen to the inspirations of the Year-God.

Humanity will then not confine itself to contemplation of what is transmitted in the Bible concerning the spiritual sojourn on Earth of Christ Jesus, but will understand that ever since then, Christ has united Himself with man in earthly life, and that He reveals Himself perpetually to those who are willing to listen. Humanity in our time will then learn to understand that just as the Christmas festival once followed the Michael festival of Autumn, so the Michael-revelation which began at a time in the Autumn in the last third of the 19th century, should be followed by a sacred Christmas festival through which men will come to understand the spirit-birth needed along their path on Earth, in order that the spiritualized Earth may eventually be able to pass into future forms and conditions of existence. We are now living in an age when there should not merely be a yearly Michaelmas festival followed by a yearly Christmas festival, but when we should understand in the depths of our souls, out of our own human nature, the Michael-revelation of the last third of the 19th century, and then seek for the path leading to the true Christmas festival—when with increasing knowledge of the Spirit we shall be permeated by that same spirit.

Then we shall understand the words in the Gospel: “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.” Humanity is so constituted that it is capable of bearing more and more of Christ's teaching. Humanity is not intended only to listen to those who want to hinder progress, who point to what was once written down in barren letters concerning the Mystery of Golgotha, and who do not want the power of that Mystery to reveal itself to men as a living reality through the ages. Today is not the time to listen to those who would like to remain at a standstill in the Springtime of the world, which reveals outer physical nature in its brightest glory, but cannot reveal the Spiritual. Today is the time when the path must be found from the Michael festival to the Midwinter festival, when there should come to pass a Sunrise of the Spirit. We shall never find this path if in the evolution of man on the Earth we surrender to the illusion that there is light in external life, in external civilization, in external culture today; we must realize that in those spheres there is darkness. But in this darkness we must seek for the light which it was Christ's will to bring into the world through Jesus.

Let us then follow, with the same devotion with which the Shepherds and the Magi from the East sought the way to the Manger on that Christmas night—with the same devotion let us follow the signs which can be read in the being of man himself, in letters that are still indistinct, but will become clearer and clearer. Then it will be granted to us to celebrate anew the Christ Mystery of the Holy Night ... but only if we have the will to seek in the darkness for the light.

Today we often call by the name of ‘science,’ not that which explains the world but which instead of bringing light, sheds darkness and obscurity. These darknesses must reach out and take hold of the light!

If men do but try with depth and tenderness of feeling and with strongest power of will to find in the darkness the light of the Spirit, then that light will shine as did the Stars of heaven when the birth of Jesus was announced to the Shepherds and the Magi.

We must learn to place the Christmas thought into the historic evolution of humanity. We have not to wait for a new Messiah, for a new Christ. Much has been revealed to humanity through Nature—which in the course of the last few centuries has been leading men deep into the darkness of matter—and we must wait for what can now be revealed to humanity through understanding of the ever-living Christ Jesus.

We must not fasten the Christmas thought in a conventional yearly festival, but make it fluid and radiant, so that it will shine for us as did the Star at Bethlehem.

It was of this Light, this radiant Star, that I wished to speak to you, my dear friends, on this Christmas Eve. I would like to have done something to ensure that with the will that is inspired in you by anthroposophical Spiritual Science, you will unite that other will to follow the Star which in very truth shines forth to man all through the Holy Night. In deep and intimate stillness to permeate oneself with this Light—that is the deepest and truest Christmas consecration for our time. Everything else is in reality no more than an outward sign for this true Christmas feeling which we can carry over from this Christmas evening to Christmas morning tomorrow. Then this Holy Night can be for us not merely a symbol but a symbol that can become a living force. And we shall also be mindful of how deeply we ought to unite with the spiritual striving that in all good men leads on into the future, and at the same time is the true Christmas striving—the striving towards that Spirit who willed to incarnate in the body born in Bethlehem on the historic Christmas Night.

It is essential, in life, that man's connections with his environment are properly regulated. Produce supplied by the outer world can be eaten and digested by us in a suitable way; but we would not be feeding ourselves properly if we were to imbibe produce that had already been partly digested by man. This shows you that the essential thing is that certain things should be taken in from outside in a particular form, and acquire their value for life by being worked on further by man himself.

The same thing applies at a higher level also, for example in the art of education. Here, the essential thing is to know what we ought to learn and what we ought to invent out of what we have learnt, when we are actually taking a lesson. If you study education as a science, consisting of all kinds of principles and formulated statements, that is roughly the same, in terms of education, as choosing to eat food already partly digested by man. But if you undertake a study of the being of man, and learn to understand the human being in this way, what you are then receiving corresponds to food in its natural form. And then, when we are giving the lesson, from out of this knowledge of man there will arise in us, in a very individual form, the art of education itself. This has actually to be invented by the teacher every moment of the time. I want to put this point as an introduction to today's talk.

In teaching and education two elements interweave in a remarkable way. I would like to call one of them the musical element, the element of sound that we hear, and the other one can be called the pictorial element, the element we see. Other sense qualities are intermingled with what we hear on the one hand and see on the other, of course, and in certain circumstances these can be of secondary importance for the lesson, but they are not as important as seeing and hearing.

Now is is essential that we really understand these processes right down to the point where we understand what is actually going on in the body. You will know that nowadays external science sees a difference between man's so-called sensory nerves, that apparently run from the senses to the brain or the central organ, conveying perception and mental imagery, and his motor nerves, that apparently run from the central organ to the organs of movement and set them in motion. You will realise that from the standpoint of initiation science we have to challenge this classification. There is absolutely no such difference between the so-called sensory nerves and the motor nerves. Both are one and the same, and the motor nerves do not really perform any function other than perceiving the moving limb and the actual process of movement the moment it happens; they have nothing to do with actually giving the impulse of will. So we can say that we have nerves that run from our periphery more towards the centre, and we also have nerves that run from the centre to the ends of the organs of movement. But they are basically the same nerve strands, .and the essential thing is only that there is an interruption between these uniform nerves; that is, the soul streaming through the sensory nerves to the centre for instance, undergoes a break, as it were, at the centre, and has to jump across, without however becoming any different, to the so-called motor nerve, which also does not alter in any respect, but is exactly the same as the sensory nerve—just like, say, an electric spark or an electric current that jumps across a switch-board when transmission is interrupted. It is just that the motor nerve has the capacity to perceive the process of movement and the moving limb. But there is something that gives us the possibility of looking very closely into this whole organic process where soul currents and bodily processes interwork.

Let us begin by supposing we are living in the perception of a picture, in the perception of something that is principally conveyed by the organ of sight, a drawing, a form of any kind living in our environment, that is, anything that becomes the property of our soul because we have eyes. We must now distinguish three very distinctly different inner activities. Firstly perception as such. This perception as such actually takes place within the organ of sight.

Secondly we have to distinguish understanding. And here we have to be clear about the fact that all understanding is conveyed by man's rhythmic system, not by his system of nerves and senses. Perception, alone, is conveyed by the nerve-senses system, and we only understand a picture process, for example, because the rhythmical process regulated by the heart and the lungs proceeds through the brain fluid to the brain. The vibrations going on in the brain receive their stimulus in man's rhythmic system, and it is these vibrations that are the actual bodily conveyers of understanding. We can understand, because we breathe.

You can see how frequently these things are misinterpreted by physiology today! The belief is that understanding has something to do with man's nervous system. Yet in reality it is due to the rhythmic system receiving and assimilating what we perceive and visualise. Through this fact though, that the rhythmic system is connected with understanding, understanding becomes intimately connected with man's feeling. And whoever looks at himself very closely will see the connections between understanding and actual feeling. Actually we have to see the truth of something we understand before we can agree with it. For it is our rhythmic system that supplies the meeting place for our understanding of knowledge and the soul's element of feeling.

Then there is a third element, which is the absorbing of information so that our memory can retain it. Thus with each process of this kind we have to distinguish perception, understanding, and sufficient assimilation for the memory to retain it. And this third element is connected with the metabolic system. Those very delicate inner processes of metabolism going on in the organism are connected with memory, and we should pay attention to these, for as teachers we have particular reason to know about them. Notice what a different kind of memory pale children have compared with children who have nice rosy cheeks, or how different with regard to memory the various human races are. Everything of this kind is dependent on the delicate organisation and processes of the metabolism. And we can, for example, strengthen the memory of a pale child if, as teachers, we are in the position to see that he gets some sound sleep, so that the delicate processes in his metabolism receive more stimulation. And another way of helping his memory would be to bring about a rhythm for him, in our teaching, between just listening and working on his own. Now supposing you let the child listen too much. He will manage to perceive, and he will also understand at a pinch, because he is breathing all the time and therefore keeping his brain fluid moving; but the will of the child will not be sufficiently exerted. The will, as you know, is connected with the metabolism. So if you let the child get too much into the habit of watching and listening do not let him do enough work by himself, you will not be able to educate and teach him well—because inner assimilation is connected with the metabolism and the will, and the will is not being active enough. Therefore you have to find the right rhythm between listening and watching and working individually. For retention will not be good unless the will works into the metabolism and stimulates the memory to assimilate. These are delicate physiological matters that spiritual science will gradually have to understand in great detail.

Whilst all this refers to experiencing the pictorial element conveyed by means of sight, it is different in the case of everything relating to the element of sound, to the more or less musical element; and I do not only mean the musical element that lives in music, which only serves as the clearest example, and applies par excellence, but I mean everything to do with what we hear, living more in language and so on. I am referring to all that, when 1 speak of the sounding element. And here—however paradoxical it may sound—it is exactly the opposite process of the one I have just described. The sense organisation in the ear is inwardly connected in a very delicate way with all the nerves that present-day physiology calls motor nerves, but which are in fact the same thing as sensory nerves; so that all we experience as audible is perceived by the nerve strands embedded in our limb organisation. Everything musical has to penetrate deep inside our organism first of all—and our ear nerves are organised for this—and in order to be perceived properly it has to seize hold of the nerves deep within our organism those nerves in which otherwise only the will is active. For those areas in the human organism that convey memory of pictorial expedience—convey the actual perception of musical experiences. So if you look for the area in the organism where the memory of visual perceptions is developed you will also find the nerves that convey the actual perception of sound. Here we see the reason why, for instance, Schopenhauer and others brought music into such intimate connection with the will. Musical perceptions are perceived in the same place as visual perceptions are remembered, namely in the realms of the will. The place where musical perceptions are understood is again the rhythmic system. That is what is so impressive about the human organism, that these things intertwine in such a remarkable way. Our perceptions of visual things meet with our perceptions of audible things and are interwoven in a common inner soul experience because they are both understood in the rhythmic system. Everything we perceive is understood in the rhythmic system. Visual perceptions are perceived by the separate head organism and audible perceptions by the whole limb organism. Visual perceptions stream into the organism; audible perceptions stream from the organism upwards. And you must now combine this with what I said in the first talk. You can do this very well if you feel it. Through the fact that both worlds meet in the rhythmic system something arises in our soul experience that is a combination of audible experiences and visual experiences. And the musical element, that is, everything we hear, is remembered in the same realm where visual things have their sense-nerve organs. These are at one and the same time the kind of organs that appear to be sense-nerve organs, and external physiology calls them that, yet in reality they are connected with the metabolism, and convey the delicate metabolism of the head realm and bring about musical memories. In the same realms in which perception of visual things take place musical memory, the remembering of everything audible, takes place. We remember what we hear in the same realm as we perceive what we see. We perceive what we hear in the same realm as we remember what we see. And both cross over like a lemniscate in the rhythmic system where they intermesh.

Anyone who has ever studied musical memory—and despite the fact that we all take it for granted, it is a wonderful and mysterious thing—will find how entirely different it is from the memory of visual perceptions. It is based on a particularly delicate organisation of the head metabolism, and although in its general character it is also related to the will, and therefore to the metabolism, it is situated in an entirely different realm of the body from the memory of visual perceptions, which is likewise connected with the will.

You see, if you reflect on these things, you will be impressed by how complicated the speech process is. Due to the rhythmic system being so intimately connected with the organs of speech, understanding only comes about when the speech process unfolds from within. But it comes about in a remarkable way, and to help you understand it fully perhaps I may remind you of Goethe's theory of colour. Quite apart from the fact that Goethe calls the red-yellow side of the spectrum warm and the blue-violet side cold, let us recall how he brings the perception of colour and the perception of sound closer together. According to him the red-yellow side of the spectrum 'sounds' different from the blue-violet side, as it were, and he connects it with major and minor, which is certainly a more inward aspect of tone experience. You can find this in those parts of his scientific works that were published in the Weimar edition, from his unprinted material, and which I included in the last volume of my Kuerschner edition. And we can certainly say that if we look into the inner man more in the style in which Goethe describes the theory of colour, we arrive at something remarkable. When we speak it is, as it were, the sound of speech that comes to life first within man. Indeed, the element of sound lives in speech, yet this sound is altered in a certain way. I would like to describe it by saying that the sound is mixed with something that 'dulls it down' when we speak. This is really not just a metaphor but something that has to do with real processes when we say that the actual tone is 'coloured' when we speak. The same thing happens within us as it does in the case ol external colour when we perceive it as having a 'tone'. We do not perceive the tone in the external colour either, but we hear something sounding forth from every colour, as it were. We do not see a colour when we say E or U any more than we hear the tones when we see yellow or blue. But we experience the same thing when we become aware of the sound of speech as we do when we experience the sound of colour. The world of sight and the world of sound overlap here. The colours we see in the world outside us have a pronounced visual nature and a subtle sound nature that enters into us in the way I described in a previous talk. Speech, coming from within us towards the surface, has a pronounced sound nature and a subtle colour nature in its various sounds, that comes to expression more in the child before the seventh year, as I told you previously. From this you see that colour is more pronounced in the outer world and sound more pronounced in man's inner world, and that cosmic music moves beneath the surface in the outer world, whereas beneath the surface of sound in man there hovers an astral element of hidden colour.

And if you properly understand the marvellous organism that comes forth from man as actual speech, you will feel, when you hear it, all the vibrations of the astral body within the colourful movements that pass directly into speech. They work in man in other ways, too, of course. But they get unusually excited, gather up in the area of the larynx where they receive impacts from the sun and the moon, and this brings about something like a play of forces in the astral body that come to external expression in the movements of the larynx. And now you have the possibility of having a picture of this at least: when you listen to any kind of language you are looking at the astral body which straight away passes its vibrations onto the etheric body, thus making the two bodies work more closely as one. Now if you draw this, you will get pure movement coming from the human organism, and you will obtain the kind of eurythmy that is always being carried out by the astral body and etheric body together, when a person speaks. Nothing is arbitrary, for you would solely be making visible what is continually happening invisibly.

Why do we do this nowadays? We do it because it lies within us that nowadays we have to do consciously what we used to do unconsciously; for man's whole evolution consists in gradually bringing down into the sense world what originally only existed spiritually in the supersensible. The Greeks, for instance, actually still thought with their souls; their thinking was still entirely of a soul nature, Modern man, especially since the middle of the fifteenth century, thinks with his brain. Materialism is actually a perfectly correct theory for modern man. For what was still soul experience for the Greeks has gradually imprinted itself into the brain. This is inherited in the brain from generation to generation, and modern man now thinks with imprints in the brain; he now thinks by means of material processes. This had to come. Only now we have to go up again; what has to be added to these processes is that man raises himself up to what comes from the supersensible world. Therefore we now have to do the opposite of the former imprinting of soul in the body, that is, we have to take hold, in freedom, of the spiritual supersensible element, through spiritual science. But this has to be consciously taken in hand, if human evolution is to continue. We have consciously to bring man's visible body into movement, just as it has been done for us up till now in the invisible realm, without our being conscious of it. Then we shall be consciously carrying on in the direction in which the gods worked when they imprinted thinking into the brain, if we make invisible eurythmy visible. If we did not do this, mankind would fall asleep. Although all kinds of things would flood into the human ego and astral body from the spiritual worlds, this would only happen during sleep, and on awakening these things would never get passed on to the physical body.

When people do eurythmy it does a service to both the audience and the eurythmists, for they all get something of importance from it. In the case of eurythmists, the eurythmic movements make their physical organisms receptive to the spiritual world, for the movements want to come down from there. By preparing themselves for this the eurythmists are, as it were, making themselves into organs for receiving processes from the spiritual world. In the case of the audience, the movements living in their astral body and ego are intensified, as it were. If after seeing a eurythmy performance you could wake up suddenly in the night you would see that you had got much more from it than if you had been to a concert and heard a sonata; eurythmy has an even stronger effect than that. It strengthens the soul by bringing it into living contact with the supersensible. But a certain healthy balance must be maintained. If you have too much of it, the soul has a restless night in the spiritual world when the person should be asleep, and this restlessness in the soul would be the counterpart of physical nervousness.

You can see these things as an indication that we should look at the marvellous construction of our human organisation and perceive more and more what it is really like. On the one hand our attention is drawn to the physical, where everything points to the fact that there is no part of our body without spirit in it, and on the other hand we see that the spiritual soul part has the urge not to remain separated from physical experience. And it is of special interest to let these things that I have spoken to you about again today work on you, and look to their educational value. Say for example you do a lively meditation on the whole life of the musical element in man in the will realm of things we see, and another one on the life of musical memories in the realm where we have perceptions of what we see—and vice versa, if you connect what is in the realm where we have perceptions of what we hear with what is in the realm where we remember what we see,—if you bring all these things together and meditate on them, you can be sure of one thing, and that is that the power of inventiveness you will need for teaching children will be sparked off in you.

Ideas like these on spiritual scientific education are all aimed at a better understanding of man. And if you meditate on them these things are bound to have an effect on you. You see, if for instance you eat a piece of bread and butter, it is in the first place a conscious process; but what happens after that, when the piece of bread and butter goes through the complicated process of digestion, you cannot have much influence on. The process takes place nevertheless, and is of great importance to your general well-being. Now if you work at the study of man like we have been doing, you experience it consciously to start with; yet if you subsequently meditate on it, an inner process of digestion goes on in your soul and spirit making a teacher and educator of you. Just as the metabolism makes you a living person, this meditative digesting of a true study of man makes you an educator. You simply encounter the child in an entirely different way when you experience the results of a real, anthroposophical study of man. What we become, what works in us and makes us teachers, comes into being through our working meditatively at this kind of study of man. And if we keep on returning to ideas like these, if only for five minutes a day, our whole inner life of soul will be brought into movement. We shall produce so many thoughts and feelings they will just pour out of us. If you meditate on the study of man in the evening, then next morning you will know in a flash 'Of course, you must now do this or that with Johnnie Smith'—or 'This girl lacks such and such,' and so on. That is, you will know what to do in any situation.

In our lives as human beings the important thing is to let inner and outer things work together in this way. You do not even need a lot of time for this. Once you have got the knack, in three seconds you can get an inner grasp of things that will often keep you going for a whole day's teaching. Time ceases to have any significance when it is a matter of bringing supersensible things to life. The spirit has different laws. Just as you can be thinking about something when you wake up that could have taken weeks to happen, yet it shot through your head in no time at all—what comes to you out of the spirit can stretch out in time. Just as everything contracts in a dream, things we receive from the spirit expand in time. So by doing a meditation like this, you can, if you are 40 or 45 years of age, carry out the whole inner transformation you need for your teaching, in five minutes, and you will be quite different in ordinary life than you were before.

Documents have been written about things of this kind of people who have experienced them. You have to understand these things. But you must also understand that the kind of thing experienced by a few individuals to a high degree, in a way that can throw light on the whole of life, must take place in miniature in the case of the teacher.

He must take in the study of man, understand the study of man through meditation, then remember the study of man, and the remembering will become vigorous life. It is not the usual kind of remembering, but a remembering that gives forth new, inner impulses. In this instance memory springs forth from the life of spirit, and what we call the third stage appears in our work; namely, following in the wake of meditative understanding comes a creative remembering which is at one and the same time a receiving from the spiritual world. Thus we start with a receiving or perceiving of the study of man, then comes an understanding, a meditative understanding of the study of man, that goes into its inner aspect where the study of man is received by the whole of our rhythmic system; and then comes a remembering of it out of the spirit. This means teaching creatively from out of the spirit; the art of education comes about. It must, be a conviction, a frame of mind.

You must see the human being in such a way that you constantly feel these three stages within you. And the more you come to the point of saying to yourself 'There is my external body, my skin, and that contains the power to receive the study of man, the power to understand the study of man in meditation, the power to be fructified by God in the remembering of the study of man'—the more you have this feeling within you, the more you will be a real teacher.

The day before yesterday we spoke of how humanity is confronted by difficult conditions. We will be better able to understand why this is so if we consider our times in terms of the whole of human evolution, and thus bring ourselves up to date regarding many things known and unknown.

You know that one of the most significant pronouncements made as the Christ event approached was, “Change the disposition of your souls, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” These are words of the deepest meaning. They indicate that something of a most essential nature took place in man's entire soul development at that time. When these words were spoken, more than three thousand years had passed since the beginning of Kali Yuga or Age of Darkness. What is the significance of this age? It was the era in which it was normal for man to depend solely upon what was accessible to his senses, and also upon his brain-bound intellect. Only such things as were experienced by these means could be known and understood in the dark age of Kali Yuga.

Kali Yuga was preceded by an age in which man was not dependent only upon his outer senses and intellect, but then he still retained a memory, more or less, of the ancient dream-like condition in which he was able to feel a connection with the spiritual world. It is of this primeval age that we wish to create a picture.

Man could see not only the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, as well as himself, within the physical realm, but he could also, in a condition between waking and sleeping, perceive a divine world. He saw himself as a member of the lowest kingdom in the hierarchical order, and above him he perceived the angels, archangels and so forth. He knew this from his own experience, so that it would have been absurd to deny the existence of the spiritual world, just as it would be absurd today to deny the existence of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. Not only did he possess a knowledge of what streamed toward him from spiritual realms, but he had the capacity to become completely permeated with those forces. Then he was in a state of ecstasy. His sense of ego was submerged, but the spiritual world with its forms flowed into him. Thus, he had not only a knowledge, an experience of the spiritual world, but could, if he were ill, for instance, derive healing and refreshment by means of this ecstatic state.

Oriental wisdom refers to the ages in which man still had a direct connection with the spiritual world as Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga and Dwaparu Yuga. In the latter age, however, it was no longer an actual seeing, but a remembering that took place, in the same way that an old man might remember his youth. Then the doors to the spiritual world closed. Man could no longer have converse with it in his normal state of consciousness, and the time came when only by means of a long and rigorous preparation in the mysteries could he turn again toward the spiritual.

During Kali Yuga, however, something did occasionally penetrate into the physical world from spiritual realms. As a rule, it did not come from the good powers, but was of demoniacal nature. All the strange illnesses described in the Gospels, where people are referred to as possessed, are attributable to demoniacal forces. In them we must recognize the work of evil spirits. This Little Kali Yuga began about the year 3,000 B.C. and is characterized by the fact that the spiritual world has gradually become completely closed to man's normal consciousness, so that all knowledge has had to be drawn from the world of the senses. If this process had continued unabated, all possible connection with the spiritual world would have been lost to him. Up until the time of Kali Yuga man remembered some things that had been retained by tradition, but in time even these connections gradually faded. Even the teacher, the preserver of tradition, could not speak to him about spiritual worlds because man no longer had the capacity to understand. His knowledge gradually became limited to the physical world.

If this process had continued, man would never again have been able to establish a connection with the spiritual world, try though he might, had not something occurred from another direction; that is, the embodiment on the physical plane of that divine Being to whom we refer as the Christ.

Formerly, man had been able to raise himself up to the spiritual beings, but now they had to descend into his realm, appear close to him, before he could recognize them with his ego consciousness. This moment had been foretold by the prophets of ancient times. It was said that man would be able to find his connection with God within, and this by means of his own ego. But when the promised time came it had to be brought forcefully to man's attention that that moment had actually arrived. The one who did this most powerfully was John the Baptist. He announced that the times had changed, that “the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.” Later, this was indicated in a similar way by Jesus Christ, but the most significant sign was given in advance through the many baptisms performed by John in the Jordan, and through his teaching.

Still, by these means alone the change would not have been possible. A number of men would have had to have a much greater experience of the spiritual world so that the conviction could be born in them that a divine being would reveal himself. This was achieved by submerging them in water. When a person is about to drown, the connection of the etheric body to the physical body is loosened, even partly withdrawn. Then he can experience a sign of the new impulse in world evolution. From this comes the powerful admonition: “Alter the disposition of your soul, for the Kingdoms of Heaven are near. The disposition of soul is come upon you through which you will enter a relationship with the descended Christ. The times have been fulfilled.”

Christ Jesus Himself expressed, in the most penetrating thoughts, the fulfillment of the times in the Sermon on the Mount, as it is called. This was by no means a sermon for the masses. The Gospels read, “When Christ saw the multitudes of people, He withdrew from them and revealed Himself to His disciples.” To them He disclosed that man, in ancient times, could become God-imbued during states of ecstasy. While outside his ego, he was blissful and had direct experience with the spiritual world from which he could draw spiritual and health-giving forces. But now—so said Christ Jesus to His disciples—a man can become God-imbued who becomes permeated within himself with the God and Christ impulse, and can unite himself as an ego with this impulse. In the past, he alone could ascend to spiritual spheres who was filled with divine streamings from them. Only he, as possessor of the spirit, could be called blessed. Such a man was a seer in the old sense and he was a rare personality. The majority of the people had become beggars in the spirit. Now, however, those who sought the Kingdom of Heaven could find it through their own egos.

What occurs in such an important epoch in world evolution always affects the whole of humanity. If only a single member of a man's being is affected, the others all respond. All the members of his being—the physical and etheric bodies, the sentient, rational and consciousness souls, the ego, and even the higher soul members—receive new life through the nearness of the Kingdom of Heaven. These teachings are in complete accord with the teachings of primeval wisdom.

In order for an individual to enter the spiritual world in earlier times, the etheric body had to be slightly separated from the physical body, which was thus formed in a special way. Christ Jesus therefore said in regard to the physical body, “Blessed are the beggars, the poor in spirit, for if they develop their ego-ruled bodies in the right way, they will find the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Of the etheric body He said, “Formerly, men could be healed of illnesses of the body and soul by ascending into the spiritual world in a state of ecstasy. Now those who suffer and are filled with the spirit of God can be healed and comforted by finding the source, the comfort, within themselves.”

Of the astral body He said, “In former times those whose astral bodies were beset by wild and tempestuous passions could only be subdued when equanimity, peace and purification streamed to them from divine spiritual beings.” Now men should find the strength within their own egos, through the in-dwelling Christ, to purify the astral body on earth. Thus, the new influence in the astral body had to be presented by saying, “Blessed and God-imbued in their astral bodies are those who foster calmness and equanimity within themselves; all comfort and well-being on earth shall be their reward.”

The fourth beatitude refers to the sentient soul. The ego of him who purifies himself in his sentient soul and seeks a higher development, will become permeated with the Christ. In his heart he will thirst for righteousness; he will become pervaded with godliness and his ego will become sufficient unto itself.

The next member is the rational soul. In the sentient soul the ego is in dull slumber; it only awakens in the rational soul. Because the ego sleeps in the sentient soul, we cannot find in another man the ego that truly makes him a human being. Before an individual has developed the ego within himself, he must allow his sentient soul to grow into higher worlds to be able to perceive something there. But when he has developed himself in his rational soul, he can perceive the person next to him. Where all those members previously referred to are concerned, we must bear in mind what was given them in earlier realms. It is only the rational soul that can fill itself with what flows from man to man.

In the fifth beatitude the sentence structure will have to take on a special form. The subject and the predicate must be alike, since it concerns what the ego develops within itself. The fifth beatitude says, “He who develops compassion and mercy shall find compassion in others.”

The next sentence of the Beatitudes refers to the consciousness soul. Through it the ego comes into being as pure ego and becomes capable of receiving God into itself. If man can elevate himself to such a degree, he can perceive within himself that drop of the divine, his ego; through his purified consciousness soul he can see God. The sixth sentence of the Beatitudes must, therefore, refer to God. The external physical expression for the ego and the consciousness soul is the blood, and where it brings itself most clearly to expression is in the heart, as expression of the purified ego. Christ said, therefore, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Thus, we are shown how in the most intimate sense the heart is the expression of the ego, the divine in man.

Now let us advance to what is higher than the consciousness soul, to manas, buddhi and atman, or spirit self, life spirit and spirit man. Contemporary man may well develop the three members of the soul but not until the distant future will he be able to develop the higher members, spirit self, life spirit and spirit man. These cannot as yet live in themselves in man; for this to occur he must look up to higher beings. His spirit self is not yet in him; only in the future will it suffuse him. Man is not yet sufficiently evolved to take the spirit self completely into himself. In this respect he is still at the beginning of his development and is like a vessel that is gradually receiving it. This is indicated in the seventh sentence of the Beatitudes. At first, the spirit self can only weave into man and fill him with its warmth. Only through the deed of Christ is it brought down to earth as the power of love and harmony. Therefore, Christ says, “Blessed are those who draw the spirit self down into themselves, for they shall become the children of God.” This points man upward to higher worlds.

Further on, mention is made of what will be brought about in the future, but it will encounter in ever-increasing measure the opposition of the present time and be fiercely rejected. It is said in the eighth sentence of the Beatitudes, “God-imbued or blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness sake, For they will be fulfilled in themselves with the Kingdom of Heaven, with life spirit or buddhi.” Connected with this we find references also to the special mission of Christ Himself, in the sentence that reads, “Christ's intimate disciples may consider themselves blessed if they have to suffer persecution for His sake.” This is a faint allusion to spirit man or atman, which will be imparted to us in the distant future.

Thus, in the Sermon on the Mount the great message that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand is proclaimed. In the course of these events the mystery of human evolution was fulfilled in Palestine. Man had reached a degree of maturity in all the members of his being so that he was able with his purified physical forces to receive the Christ impulse directly into himself. So it came to pass that the God-man Christ merged with the human being Jesus of Nazareth and these united forces permeated the earth for three years with their powers. This had to happen so that man would not lose completely his connection with the spiritual world during Kali Yuga.

Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, however, continued until the year 1899. That was a particularly important year in human evolution, for it marked the end of the five thousand year period of Kali Yuga and the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of mankind. Onto the old faculties present during Kali Yuga man would now develop new spiritual faculties. So we approach a period in which new natural capacities and possibilities for gaining access to divine spiritual worlds will awaken in man. Before the first half of the twentieth century has passed, some people will, with full ego consciousness, experience the penetration of the divine spiritual world into the physical sense world in the same way as did Saul during his transformation into Paul before Damascus. This will then become the normal condition for many people.

Christ will not incarnate again in a physical body as he did in Jesus; now nothing would be achieved by it. It was dictated then by profound cosmic-earthly laws of evolution; otherwise, people would not have been able to recognize Him. But now men have evolved further and possess soul powers with which they can penetrate into the etheric. Thus, in future, Christ will become visible to mankind in the etheric and not in a physical body. From the middle of the twentieth century on, and continuing for the next twenty-five hundred years, this will happen more and more often. Enough people will by then have experienced the event at Damascus that it will be taken to be a common occurrence all over the world.

We study spiritual science so that these faculties, which are at first barely perceptible, may not be overlooked and lost to mankind, and that those blessed with this new power of vision may not be considered dreamers and fools, but may instead have the support and understanding of a group of people who in their common purpose may prevent these delicate soul seeds and soul qualities from being roughly trampled to death for lack of understanding. Spiritual science shall indeed prepare the conditions whereby these faculties can flourish and thrive.

Recently, I explained that these new qualities give us an insight into the Land of Shamballa, so that we may learn to know the significance and true nature of Christ, whose second coming indicates a maturing of mankind's cognition.

Generally speaking, the ages of history repeat themselves, but always in a new form. In spiritual science the beginning of Kali Yuga is seen as the closing of the portals of the spiritual world. After the first thousand years had passed there was the first compensation for it. In the individuality of Abraham, after his initiation by Melchisedek, it became possible for a human being to recognize God in the surrounding world through true insight and a proper evaluation of the external world spread out, as it were, like a carpet before his senses. In Abraham we see the first dawning of a knowledge that enables man to comprehend the true essence of an Ego-God, a God related to man's ego nature. Abraham realized that behind the phenomena of the sense world was something that made it possible for the human ego to conceive itself as a drop of the infinite, unfathomable world ego.

A second stage of God revelation was experienced at the time of Moses, when God approached man through the elements. In the burning bush, in the thunder and lightning upon Sinai, He manifested himself to man's senses and appealed to his innermost being. In the third thousand years in which a knowledge of God was breaking through there followed the age of Solomon. God revealed Himself through the symbols of the Temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem.

Thus, the divine revelation proceeded in stages. God first appeared to Abraham as Ego-God, or the Jehovah God, then to Moses in the burning bush, in thunder, and then to Solomon in the symbols of the Temple.

What is representative of a particular age repeats itself later in reverse order. The turning point is the appearance of Christ Jesus in Palestine. What immediately preceded that time is the first to reappear. Consequently, the first thousand years after Christ are again a Solomon epoch; the spirit of Solomon is active in the best men of that time so that the Mystery of Golgotha may be inculcated. In those early centuries after Christ, Solomon's symbols could be interpreted most readily by those who were most deeply affected by the event of Golgotha.

In the second thousand years after Christ we can recognize a repetition of the Moses epoch. What Moses experienced outwardly, now appears in the mysticism of men such as Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and so on. The mystics experienced in their inner beings what Moses experienced outwardly in the burning bush, in the thunder and lightning. They spoke of how the Ego-God revealed Himself to them when they withdrew into themselves. When they perceived within their souls the spark of their egos, then the Ego-God, the One-God Jehovah appeared to them. This was the case with Tauler, who was a great preacher and made powerful revelations. To him came the layman who was called, “The Friend of God, of the Mountain,” of whom it was thought that he wished to become Tauler's pupil. But he soon became his teacher instead, after which Tauler was able to speak of God with such inner force that a number of pupils and listeners were reported to have fallen prostrate, lying as if dead, as he preached. This is reminiscent of the events that occurred when Moses received the Laws on Sinai.

The centuries up to our present time have been filled by this spirit. Now, however, we are entering an era that recalls and revives the age of Abraham, in the sense that men are being led away from the world perceptible to our physical senses. The spirit of Abraham will influence our knowledge so that men will renounce the old mentality that only laid store in the physical world. But in contrast to Abraham, for whom the spirit of God was only to be found in the world of the senses, we shall now grow beyond the sense world and into the spiritual world.

Even though men knew nothing of all this in the past, we may well say that it has not interfered with our development. In the era now approaching, however, we will be placed in circumstances that will require men consciously to take their destiny into their own hands. They must know how Christ will be perceivable in the future. It is truly related that after the event of Golgotha Christ descended to the dead in the spiritual world to bring them the Word of Salvation. The Christ event is active today in the same way. Therefore, it is the same whether a person lives in the physical world here on earth or has already passed through death. If he has gained an understanding for it here on earth, he can still experience the Christ event in the spiritual world, and that will indicate that man has not lived upon this, our earth, without reason. If, however, a person fails to acquire an understanding for the Christ event here on earth, the effects of the event of Golgotha will pass him by without a trace during the period between death and a new birth. He will then have to wait until his next return to the earth, until a new birth in order then to be able to prepare himself.

Man must not believe that Christ will reappear in the flesh, as some false teachings claim, for in that case it would be impossible to believe in the progressive development of man's faculties, and we would have to say that events repeat themselves in the same way. But this is not so. They do repeat themselves, but on ever higher levels.

In the next centuries it will often be proclaimed that Christ will return and again reveal Himself. False messiahs or Christs will appear. But those armed by the above explanations, with a true understanding of Christ's real coming, will reject such manifestations. The knowledgeable ones who can see the history of the last centuries in this light will be neither surprised nor exhalted that such messiahs appear. As an example, this happened just before the Crusades and also in the seventeenth century, when a false messiah. Shabattai Tzevi, appeared in Smyrna. Pilgrims flocked to him even from France and Spain.

At that time such a deceptive belief did not do so much damage. But now, when man with his more advanced faculties should be able to recognize that it is a mistake to believe in Christ's second coming in the flesh, and that it is in accordance with truth that He will reappear in the etheric body—now it is an absolute necessity to distinguish such things plainly. A confusion of these facts will have serious consequences. We cannot believe in an alleged Christ who reappears in the flesh, but only in a Christ who appears in the etheric body. This manifestation will take the form of a natural initiation, just as at present the initiate experiences this event in a special way.

Thus, we are approaching an age in which man will not only feel himself surrounded by a physical sense world, but also, according to the degree of his development, a spiritual world. The leader in this new world of the spirit will be the etheric Christ. No matter what religious community or faith people belong to, once they have recognized these facts in themselves, they will acknowledge and accept the Christ event. The Christians who have the experience of the etheric Christ are perhaps in a more difficult situation than those who belong to other religions, yet they should endeavor to accept this Christ event in just as neutral a way as the others. It will, in fact, be man's task to develop, especially through Christianity, an understanding for the possibility of entering the spiritual world independently of any special religious confession, but simply through the power of good will.

Anthroposophy should help us above all in this. It will lead us into that spiritual land, described in ancient Tibetan writings as a remote fairyland but meant to be the spiritual world, the Land of Shamballa. Not in a dreamy way but in full consciousness should man enter this land under the guidance of Christ. Even now the initiate can and must go often to the Land of Shamballa in order to acquire new forces. In future, other men, too, will enter the Land of Shamballa. They will see its radiant light, as Paul saw above him the light that streamed from Christ. This light will stream toward them, also. The portals of this realm of light will open to them and through them they will enter the holy Land of Shamballa.

A question was asked about the design that appeared on the cover of the Austrian journal, Anthroposophy, showing the heads of an eagle, a lion, a bull and a man.

Dr. Steiner. Gentlemen, I think we should first bring to a conclusion our explanation of the human being, and then next time consider the aspects of man that these four symbols—the eagle, lion, bull and man—represent. Before we can say anything about them we must build a foundation, and this is something I shall try to do before the end of today's lecture. These four creatures, including man, spring from an ancient knowledge of the human being. They cannot be explained as the ancient Egyptians, for instance, would have done, but today they must be explained differently. One can interpret them correctly, of course, but nowadays one must begin from slightly different suppositions.

I would like now to direct your attention again to the way the human being evolves from his embryonic stage. I would like you to look once more at the very first stage, the earliest period. Conception has occurred, and the embryo is developing in the mother's womb. At first, it is just one microscopic cell containing proteinaceous substance and a nucleus. This single cell, the fertilized egg, actually marks the beginning of man's physical life.

Let us look then at the processes that immediately follow. What does this tiny egg, placed within the body of the mother, do? It divides. The one cell becomes two, and each of these cells divides in turn, thus creating more and more cells like the first. Eventually, our whole body is made up of such cells. They do not remain completely round but assume all manner of shapes and forms.

We must now take into account something I have mentioned before, which is the fact that the whole universe acts upon this minute cell in the mother's body. Nowadays, of course, such matters generally cannot be met with the necessary understanding, but it is nonetheless true that the whole cosmos works upon this cell. It is not at all the same if the ovum divides when, say, the moon stands in front of, or at a distance from, the sun. The whole starry heavens shed an influence on this cell, whose interior forms itself accordingly.

I have said before that during the first few months only the head of the unborn child is developed. (Referring to a drawing.) The head is already formed to this extent, and the rest of the body is really only an appendage. There are tiny little stubs, the hands, and other small protrusions, the legs. As it develops, the human being will transform its little appendages into hands, arms and feet.

How does this come about? How does it occur? The reason lies in the fact that in the earlier embryonic stages the influence of the starry heavens is greater. As the embryo develops and grows during those months in the mother's womb, it becomes increasingly subject to the gravity of the earth. When the world of the stars acts upon man, the emphasis is always on the head. It is gravity that, in time, draws out the other parts. The farther back we go, examining the second or first months of pregnancy, the more do we find these cells exposed to the influence of the stars. As more and more cells appear and millions gradually develop, they become increasingly subject to the forces of the earth.

Here is convincing evidence that the human body is magnificently organized. I would like to make this evident by considering one of the sense organs. I could just as easily take the example of the eye, but today I shall speak about the ear. You see, one of these cells develops into the ear. The ear is set into one of the cavities of the skull bones, and if you examine it properly, you will find that it is quite a remarkable structure. I shall explain the ear so that you can get some idea of it. You will see how such a cell moulds itself while it is still partially under the influence of the stars and partially under the influence of the earth. The ear is formed in such a marvellous way so that man can actually make use of it.

Let us proceed from the outside inward. To begin with, each of you can take hold of your auricle, the outer ear. We have sketched it as seen from the side (1). It consists of gristle and is covered with skin. It is designed to receive the maximum amount of sound. If we had only a hole there, the ear would capture much less sound. You can feel the passage into your ear; it goes into the interior of the so-called tympanic cavity, the interior of the head's bony system. This passage or canal is closed off inside by the eardrum, the tympanic membrane. There is really a thin, delicate, tiny skin attached to this canal, which might be likened to that of a drumhead. The ear, then, is closed off on the inside by the eardrum (2).

I'll continue by drawing the cavity that one observes in a skeleton (3). Here are the skull bones; here are the bones going to the jaw. Inside is a cavity into which this canal leads that is closed off by the eardrum. Behind the outer ear, the auricle, you have a hollow space, which I shall now tell you about. Not only does this canal, this outer passage that you can put your little finger into, lead into the head cavity, but another canal also leads into this cavity from the mouth. In other words, two passages lead into this cavity: one from the exterior that extends inward to the eardrum, and one from the mouth that enters behind the eardrum, which is called the Eustachian tube, though the name does not matter.

Now we come to a strange-looking thing—a veritable snail shell, the cochlea. It consists of two parts. Here is a membrane, and here is a space, the vestibule. Over here is another space, the tympanic cavity. The whole thing is filled with fluid, a living fluid, which I have described to you in another lecture. So within all this fluid is something made of skin that looks like a snail shell. Inside this snail shell, called the cochlea, are myriad little fibres that make up the basilar membrane. This is quite interesting. If you could penetrate the eardrum and look beyond it, you would find this soft snail shell, which is covered on the inside with minute, protruding hair-like fringes.

What, actually, is inside the cochlea? When one approaches the question truly scientifically, one notices that this is really a small piece of intestine that has somehow been placed within the ear. Just as we have the intestines within our abdomen, so do we have a tiny piece of intestine-like skin within our ear. The ear's configuration, then, is such that it contains a little intestine, just as in another part of the body we have a larger intestine. The cochlear duct, which is surrounded by a living fluid called the endolymph, is filled with another called the perilymph. All this is extremely interesting. The cochlea is closed off here by a tiny membrane shaped like an oval window, and here, again, by another little membrane that looks like a round window. Just as we can beat on a drum and make it vibrate, so do the sound waves, coming in from both sides, set into motion this little membrane, the oval window.

The oval window is a membrane set in the middle of the cochlea, and it closes off the inside of the little snail shell, which is filled with the slightly thicker fluid, the perilymph. The fluid on the outside is thinner. Below the oval window is another little membrane called the round window. Here we now approach something marvellous. Two tiny delicate bones sit on the membrane of the oval window. They look like a stirrup and are called the stapes. People also refer to them as the stirrup. So the stirrup sits on the little membrane, protruding in such a way as to resemble an upper and a lower arm on the membrane. Picture such an upper and lower arm of the stirrup and then here, strangely enough, another independent bone, the incus or anvil. The first two bones of the stirrup are connected by a joint; the incus is independent. These tiny bones are all in the ear, and since materialistic science looks at everything superficially, it calls the bone that sits directly on the eardrum, the hammer, this other bit of bone in the middle, the anvil, and this other, the stirrup—or malleus, incus and stapes.

Ordinary science, however, doesn't really know what these bones are. What is found here in the two arms of the stirrup is only a little different from an arm bent at the elbow. See, an elbow joint is the same as this joint of the stirrup above the membrane. And there is a kind of hand, on which sits an independent bone. We don't have such a bone in our hand, but it is comparable to our kneecap. So we can rightfully say that this is also like a leg, a foot; then that would be the thigh, that the knee (sketching), there the foot stands on the membrane, and there is the kneecap.

You see, it is most interesting that in the cavity of the ear we have first a kind of intestine and then a real hand, arm or foot. What is the purpose of all this? Well, imagine that a sound strikes the eardrum and everything in there begins to vibrate. Without being aware of it, the person is determining within the ear what kind of vibration it is. Now think of this, which you may have experienced at some time. You are standing somewhere on a street when something explodes behind you. You feel the explosion inwardly and may feel sick to your stomach from the shock. But this delicate shock that vibrates through the cochlea's “intestine” is felt by the fluid within, which conveys the vibrations that are imparted by the “touching” of the eardrum with a “hand,” as it were.

Now I would like to point out something else to you. What is the purpose of this Eustachian tube leading from the mouth to the inner ear? If sounds simply passed into the ear from the auricle, we would not need it, but to comprehend another's speech we must first have learned to speak ourselves. When we listen to someone else and wish to comprehend him, the sounds we have learned to speak pass through the Eustachian tube. When another person is speaking to us, the sounds come in through the auricle and make the fluid vibrate. Because the air passes into the ear from the outside, and since we know how to set this air in motion with our own speech, we can understand the other person. In the ear, the element of our own speech that we are accustomed to meets the element of what the other person says; there the two meet.

You see, when I say, “house,” I am accustomed to having certain vibrations occur in my Eustachian tube; when I say, “powder,” I experience other vibrations. I am familiar with these vibrations. When I hear the word “house,” the vibration comes from outside, and because I am used to identifying this vibration when I say the word myself, and since my comprehension and the vibration from outside encounter each other in the ear, I am able to recognize its meaning. The tube that leads from the mouth into the ear was there when as a child I learned to speak. Thus, we learned to understand the other person simultaneously as we learned to talk. These matters are most interesting.

Now, things are really like this. Imagine that nothing but what I have just sketched here existed in the ear. Then you could at least understand another person's words and also listen to a piece of music, but you would not be able to remember what you had heard. You would have no memory for speech and sound if the ear had nothing more than these parts. There is another amazing structure in the ear that enables you to retain what you have heard. These are three hollow arches, which look like this (sketching). The second is vertical to the first, and the third, vertical to the second. Thus, they are vertical to each other in three dimensions. These so-called semi-circular canals are hollow and are also filled with a living, delicate fluid. The remarkable thing about it is that infinitely small crystals are constantly forming from it. If you hear the word, “house,” for example, or the tone C, tiny crystals are formed in there as a result. If you hear a different word—“man,” for instance—slightly different crystals are formed. In these three little canals, microscopically small crystals take shape, and these minute crystals enable us not only to understand but also to retain in our memory what we have comprehended. For what does the human being do unconsciously?

Imagine that you have heard someone say, “Five francs.” You want to remember what has been said, so with a pencil you write it into your notebook. What you have written with lead in your notebook has nothing to do with live francs except as a means of remembering them. Likewise, what one hears is inscribed into these delicate canals with the minute crystals that do, in fact, resemble letters, and a subconscious intelligence in us reads them whenever we need to recall something. So, indeed, we can say that the memory for tone and sound is located within these three semi-circular canals. Here where this arm is located is comprehension, intelligence. Here, within the cochlea is a portion of man's feeling. We feel the sounds in this part of the labyrinth, in the fluid within the little snail shell; there we feel the sounds. When we speak and produce the sounds ourselves, our will passes through the Eustachian tube. The whole configuration of the human soul is contained in the ear. In the Eustachian tube lives the will; here in the cochlea is feeling; intelligence is in the auditory ossicles, those little bones that look like an arm or leg; memory resides in the semi-circular canals. So that man can become aware of the complete process, a nerve passes from here (drawing) through this cavity and spreads out everywhere, penetrates everywhere. Through this auditory nerve, all these processes are brought to consciousness in our brain.

You see, gentlemen, this is something quite remarkable. Here in our skull we have a cavity. One enters the inner ear cavity by passing from the auricle through the auditory canal and eardrum. Everything I have described to you is contained therein. First, we stretch out the “hand” and touch the incoming tones to comprehend them. Then we transfer this sensation to the living fluid of the cochlea, where we feel the tone. We penetrate the Eustachian tube with our will, and because of the tiny crystal letters formed in the semi-circular canals, we can recall what has been said or sung, or whatever else has come to us as sound.

So we can say that within the ear we bear something like a little human being, because this little being has will, comprehension, feeling and memory. In this small cavity we carry a tiny man around with us. We really consist of many such minute human beings. The large human being is actually the sum of many little human beings. Later, I'll show you that the eye is also such a miniature man. The nose, too, is a little human being. All these “little men” that make up the total human being are held together by the nervous system.

These miniature men are created while man is still an embryo in the mother's body. All that is being formed and developed there is still under the influence of the stars. After all, these marvellous configurations—the canals that produce the crystals, the little auditory bones—cannot be moulded by the gravity and forces of the earth. They are organized in the womb of the mother by forces that descend from the stars. The cochlea and Eustachian tube are parts that belong to man as a being of earth and are developed later. They are shaped by the forces that originate from the earth, from the gravity that gives us our form and that enables the child to stand upright long after it is born.

You see, if initially one knows how the whole human being originates from one small cell, and how one cell is transformed into an eye while another becomes an ear and a third the nose, one understands how man is gradually built up. Actually, there are ten groups of cells that transform themselves, not just one, but we may still imagine there to be one cell in the beginning. So, at first, just one cell exists. This produces a second, which by being placed in a slightly different position comes under a different influence and develops into the ear. Another develops into the nose, a third into the eye, and so on. None of this proceeds from any influence of the earth. The forces of the earth can mould only those parts that are mostly round, just as in the abdomen the earth organizes the intestinal system. Everything else is formed by the influence of the stars.

We know of these matters today because we have microscopes. After all, the auditory bones are minute. Remarkably enough, these things were also known by men in ancient times, though the source of their knowledge was completely different from that of today. For example, 3,000 years ago the ancient Egyptians were also occupied with a knowledge of man's organization and knew in their way just how remarkable the inner functions of the human ear are. They said to themselves that man has ears, eyes and other organs belonging to the head. If we wish to explain them, we must ask how the ear, for instance, was moulded so differently from the other organs. The ancients said that those organs that are part of the head developed primarily from what comes down to the earth from above. They said, “High up in the air the eagle develops and matures. One must look up into that region if one wishes to observe the forces that form the organs in the human head.” So, these ancient people drew an eagle in place of the head when they were depicting the human being.

When we observe the heart or lungs, we find that they look completely different from the ear or eye. When we look at the lungs, we cannot turn to the stars, nor can we do so in the case of the heart. The force of the stars works strongly in the heart, but we cannot deduce the heart's configuration solely from the stars. The ancient Egyptians knew this; they knew that these organs could not be as closely linked to the stars as those of the head. They pondered these aspects and asked themselves which animal's constitution emphasized the organs similar to the human heart and lungs. The eagle particularly develops those organs that man has in his head.

The ancients thought that the animal that primarily develops the heart, that is all heart and therefore the most courageous, is the lion. So they named the section of man that contains the heart and lungs “lion.” For the head, they said “eagle,” and for the midsection, “lion.”

They realized that man's intestines were again organs of a different kind. You see, the lion has quite short intestines; their development is curtailed. The minute “intestine” in the human ear is formed most delicately, but man's abdominal intestines are by no means shaped so finely. In observing the intestines, you can compare their formation only with the nature of those animals that are mainly under their influence. The lion is under the influence of the heart, and the eagle is under the sway of the upper forces. When you observe cows after they have been grazing, you can sense how they and their kind are completely governed by their intestines. When they are digesting, they experience great well-being, so the ancients called the section of man that constitutes the digestive system, “bull.” That gives us the three members of human nature: Eagle—head; lion—breast; bull—abdomen.

Of course, the ancients knew when they studied the head that it was not an actual eagle, nor the midsection a lion, nor the lower part a bull. They knew that, and they said that if there were no other influence, we would all go about with something like an eagle for our head above, a lion in our chest region and a bull down below; we would all walk around like that. But something else comes into play that transforms what is above and moulds it into a human head, and likewise with the other parts. This agent is man himself; man combines these three aspects.

It is most remarkable how these ancient people expressed, in such symbols, certain truths that we acknowledge again today. Of course, they could form these images easier than we because, though we modern people may learn many things, the thoughts we normally acquire in school do not touch our hearts too deeply. It was quite different in the case of these ancient people. They were seized by the feeling emanating from thoughts and therefore dreamed of them. These people dreamed true dreams. The whole human being appeared as an image to them, and from his forehead they saw an eagle looking out, from the heart, a lion, and from the abdomen, a bull. They combined this into the beautiful image of the whole human being. One can truly say that long-ago people composed their concept of the human being from the elements of man, bull, eagle and lion.

This outlook continued in the description of the Gospels. One frequently proceeded from this point of view. One said that in the Gospel of Matthew the humanity of Jesus is truly described; hence, its author was called “man.” Then take the case of John, who depicts Jesus as if He hovered or flew over the earth. John actually describes what happens in the region of the head; he is the “eagle.” When one examines the Gospel of Mark, one will find that he presents Jesus as a fighter, the valiant one; hence, the “lion.” Mark writes like one who represents primarily those organs of man situated in the chest. How does Luke write? Luke is presented as a physician, as a man whose main goal is therapeutic, and the healing element can be recognized in his Gospel. Healing is accomplished by bringing remedial forces into the digestive organs. Consequently, Luke describes Jesus as the one who brings a healing element into the lower nature of man. Luke, then, is the “bull.” So one can picture the four Gospels like this: Matthew—man; Mark—lion; Luke—bull; John—eagle.

As for the journal whose cover depicts the four figures that you asked about, its purpose is to present something of value that can be communicated from one human spirit to another. So the true human being should be depicted in it. In rendering this drawing, the eagle is represented above, then the lion and bull, with man encompassing them all. This was done to show that the journal represents a serious concern with man. This is its aim. Not much of the human element is present in the bulk of what newspapers print these days. Here attention was to be drawn to the fact that this newspaper or journal could afford man the opportunity to express himself fully. What he says must not be stupid: the eagle. He must not be a coward: the lion. Nor should he lose himself in fanciful flights of thought but rather stand firmly on earth and be practical: the bull. The final result should be “man,” and it should speak to man. This is what one would like to see happen, that everything passed on from man to man be conducted on a human level.

Well, I did have time after all to get to your question after looking at those subjects I started with. I hope my answer was comprehensible. Were you interested in the description of the ear? One should know these things; one should be familiar with what is contained in the various organs that one carries around within the body.

Question: Is there time to say something about the “lotus flowers” that are sometimes mentioned?

Dr. Steiner: I'll get to that when I describe the individual organs to you.

Tomorrow I would like to briefly return to the spiritual side of the early days of Christianity and its lasting impact. This will lead to some deeper insights into the public lectures of the last few days. Today I would like to give a kind of philosophical introduction to this, to familiarize you with some history, because it is good if we, within the spiritual science movement, also know something of how people strive in the rest of the world to get to the bottom of the world's mysteries, how they think and feel about these mysteries in the world.

If you look at the history of philosophy from the beginning to the present day, you will basically only find certain philosophical currents discussed, philosophical currents that are close to most contemporary philosophers. However, one would be quite wrong to see everything that exists in the present in terms of such more philosophical research paths in what is usually found. For example, most of you are unaware that during the 19th century, particularly in the second half of the 19th century and especially towards the end of the 19th century, there was a lively philosophical life within the Catholic Church that continues to this day. that within the Catholic Church, a very peculiar philosophical direction, differing from the other philosophy of the world, was cultivated by the learned priesthood and is cultivated by many, so that in this field one has a rich literature, at least as rich a literature as on other directions of philosophical activity. And this literature is called the literature of Neuscholastik.

A curious circumstance has led to the fact that the school, which flourished in the middle of the Middle Ages, which basically began with Scotus Erigena and then continued through Thomas Aquinas to the times of Duns Scotus, reappeared in the 19th century, and indeed out of a very specific need for knowledge, albeit one colored by religious belief. Particularly from the second third of the 19th century onwards, we see this direction of neo-scholasticism emerging in Catholic circles. In all Central and Western European languages, books upon books are being written in an attempt to understand anew what was lived in scholasticism. And if one tries to explore the inner reason why scholasticism is reviving, one must actually open up a broad view. And this is what we want to point out today.

In the lectures I have given in the last few days, I have repeatedly emphasized that one way to spiritual-scientific knowledge is through a very special treatment of thinking, of concepts, of logic; that through the influence of the exercises that lead to this development of thinking, the human being no longer thinks in his physical body, but in his ether body. Thus he not only thinks dead conceptual logic, but he lives in the activity of thinking, that is, he lives and moves in his ether body, as we can express it technically. It is a living into the etheric body when logic itself comes to life, when — as I have put it in popular terms — the statue, through which one can visualize the logic at work in ordinary life, comes to life, when the human being becomes alive in his ether body, that is, the concepts are no longer dead concepts, but those living concepts begin, of which I have said for years that the concept gains life, as if one were with one's soul in a living being. For many centuries, humanity has basically known nothing of this liveliness as the truth of concepts and ideas in external philosophy. I have tried to point out this fact in the first chapter of my “Riddles of Philosophy” that was added to the new edition.

Even in the last philosophical periods of Greek civilization, humanity actually no longer knew anything philosophically about the possible liveliness of concepts and ideas. Let us keep that in mind. Initially, the Greeks — you can read about this in my “Riddles of Philosophy” — had concepts and ideas in the same way that people today have sensory perceptions, a color, a sound or a smell. The great Plato, up to Aristotle, and even more so the older philosophers, did not believe that they had formed the concept, the thought, internally, but that they received it from things, just as one receives red or blue, that is, the sensory perceptions.

Then came the time - and I have described how this continues in cycles - when one no longer felt inwardly that the things had given one the concept, but one only felt that the concept arose in the soul. And now one did not know what to do with the concept, with the inner idea, which the Greek had still believed he received from things. Hence arose those scholastic problems, those scholastic puzzles: What does the concept mean at all in relation to things? — The Greek could not ask it that way, because he had the consciousness that things give him the concepts, so the concepts belong to things as colors belong to things. — That ceased when the Middle Ages came. Then one had to ask: What kind of relationship does something that arises in our mind have to things? And besides: the things out there are many and varied and individual, but the concepts are general, a unity. We go through the world and encounter many horses; we form the unified concept of horse out of these many horses. Every horse coincides with the concept of horse.

Today, many people, who are even less familiar with the concept than the medieval philosophers, who saw it as a sharp problem, say: Well, the concept is just not in the things themselves.

I have repeatedly mentioned a comparison that my friend, the late Vincenz Knauer, a great connoisseur of medieval philosophy, often used for those people who say: Out there is only the material of the animal, the soul makes the concept. Old Knauer would always say: People claim: The lamb is outside, but what is really there is only matter. The wolf is outside, but what is really there is only matter. The soul creates the concept of the lamb, and the soul creates the concept of the wolf. And old Knauer said: If only matter were really present, and you locked up a wolf that ate nothing but lambs, then when it had discarded its old matter it would finally be only lamb, because it would have only lamb matter in itself. But one would notice with amazement that it would still have remained the wolf, that something else must therefore be present in addition to matter.

For medieval scholasticism, this presented a significant problem, a significant enigma. The scholastics said to themselves: the concepts are the universals because they encompass many individual things. And they could not say, as today's man likes to say, that these universals are only something that has arisen in the mind of man, that has nothing to do with things. These medieval philosophers distinguished three types of universals. First, they said, universals are ante rem, before the thing, before what you see out there, so the universal “horse” is thought of before all possible sensual horses, as a thought in the deity. So said medieval scholasticism.

Then there are universals in re, in things, and specifically as essence in things, precisely what matters. The universal “wolf” is what matters, and the universal “lamb” is what matters. They are what ensures that the wolf does not become a lamb, even if it eats nothing but lambs.

And then there is a third form in which the universals exist, that is: post rem, after the things as they are in our minds, when we have considered the world and subtracted them from the things. The medieval scholastics attached great importance to this distinction, and it was this distinction that protected them from that skepticism, from that dissection, which cannot get to the essence of things, for the reason that they consider the concepts and ideas that man in his soul gains from things to be only a product of the soul and do not imagine anything about them that could have any significance for things themselves.

The particular form of this skepticism can be found in one form with Hume and in another form with Cart. There, concepts and ideas are only that which the human mind forms as ideas. Through concepts and ideas, man can no longer approach things.

For theologians who want to be philosophers at the same time, who thus want to penetrate theology philosophically, a very special difficulty has arisen and will always arise. For the theologian is dependent not only on seeing the things in the world, but also on thinking them in a certain relationship to the divine essence, and he gets into difficulties when he and which form the content of the only ideal knowledge – if one does not ascend to spiritual science – cannot himself bring these into any relationship with the Godhead, that is, think as universals ante rem, as universal concepts before the things.

Now there is something very significant connected with what I have said. There will always be people who cannot see anything in the concept that has to do with things, who only see the material in things outside, and on the other hand, there are those who can see something real in the concepts that has to do with the things themselves, that is, what is in the things and what the human mind draws out of the things, what the human mind makes out of universals in re into universals post rem.

Those who recognize that the concepts have a reality outside the human mind were called realists in the Middle Ages and later, especially in Catholic philosophy. And the view that the concepts and ideas have a real significance in the world is called realism. The other view, which assumes that concepts and ideas are fabricated only in the human mind, as it were, as words, is called nominalism, and its representatives are called nominalists.

You will easily see that the nominalists can actually see the real only in the manifold, in the multitude. Only the realists can see something real in the comprehensive, in the universal. And here we come to the point where a particular difficulty arose for the philosophizing theologians. These Catholic theologians had to defend the dogma of the Trinity, of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the three persons in the Godhead. After the development of ecclesiastical theology, they could not help saying: the three persons are individual, complete entities, but at the same time they are supposed to be one unity! If they had been nominalists, the divinity would always have fallen apart into three persons for them. Only the realists could still think of the three persons under one universal. But for that, the universal concept had to have a reality; for that, one had to be a realist. Therefore, the realists got along better with the Trinity than the nominalists, who had great difficulties and who, in the end, when scholasticism was already coming to an end and had degenerated into skepticism, could only hide behind the fact that they said: You cannot understand how the three persons are to be one divinity; but that is precisely why you have to believe it, you have to give up understanding; something like that can only be revealed. The human mind can only lead to nominalism, it cannot lead to any kind of realism. And basically it is the Hume-Kantian doctrine that has become pure nominalism by way of phenomenalism.

The central dogma of the Trinity, of the three divine persons, thus depended on realism or nominalism, on one or the other conception of the essence of universals. You will therefore understand that when Kant's philosophy increasingly became the philosophy of Protestant circles in Europe, a reaction took hold in Catholic circles. And this reaction consisted in saying to oneself on this ground that one must now again take a close look at the old scholasticism, one must fathom what scholasticism actually meant. In short, because they could not arrive at a new way of understanding the spiritual world, they tried to reconstruct scholasticism. And a rich literature arose that set itself the sole task of making scholasticism accessible to people again.

Of course, this literature was only read by Catholic theologians, but on a large scale. And for those who are interested in everything that is going on in the intellectual culture of humanity, it is by no means useless to take a brief look at the extensive literature that has come to light. It is useful to take a look at this neoscholastic literature if only because it allows us to see how black and white can coexist in the world – please note that the word has no negative connotation here! The whole way of thinking, the whole way of looking at the world, is different in the progressive current of philosophy, which follows Kant, Fichte, Hegel, or earlier Cartesius, Malebranche, Hume, up to Mill and Spencer. It is a completely different kind of intellectual research, a completely different way of thinking about the world, than that which emerged, for example, in Gratry and the numerous neoscholastics who wrote everywhere, in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, England, and Germany; for there is a wealth of neoscholastic literature in all countries. And all the orders of the Catholic priesthood have taken part in the discussions. The study of scholasticism became particularly lively from 1879 onwards, when Pope Leo XIII's encyclical “Aeterni patris” was published. In this encyclical, Catholic theologians were made to study Thomas Aquinas as a matter of duty. Since that time, a rich literature has emerged in the tradition of Thomism, and the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas has been thoroughly studied and interpreted. However, the whole movement had already begun earlier, so that today libraries can be filled with the many brilliant works that have emerged from this renewal of Thomism.

You can educate yourself, for example, from a book like “The Origin of Human Reason” or from many French books or, if you prefer, from numerous works by Italian Jesuits and Dominicans, with which this philosophy has been driven again. Much ingenuity has been applied to the study of scholasticism in all countries – an ingenuity that people, even those who study philosophy today, usually have no idea of, because they do not have the necessary interest to pay attention to all sides of human endeavor. The need to take a stand against Kantianism arose from this side, which, by becoming pure nominalism, especially in the second half of the 19th century, removed the ground from under Catholic theology.

I am now speaking purely historically, not to evaluate anything, not even to refute anything, or to agree with anything, but purely historically. And then one can see that basically, to this day, people are still endeavoring to understand what the concept and the thinking are actually about. In the modern age, people can no longer achieve anything with the concept in its old sense. It must be revitalized if we are to make progress. Long-term attempts must be made to understand, theoretically, with the mere concept of the image, what significance thinking has for divinity.

Others have endeavored in other ways. For example, a very significant current has emerged that is even very close to Catholicism and has been pursued by priests within Catholicism, but it has not found the favor of Catholic authority to the extent that scholasticism did. In the encyclical “Aeterni patris”, Catholic theologians were even dutifully encouraged to renew the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, to resurrect it. Another direction has not received as much favor from the Catholic authorities: that is the direction of Rosmini-Serbati and Gioberti. Rosmini, who was born in Rovereto near Trento and died in nearby Stresa in 1855, expressed his aspirations particularly in works that were not actually published until after his death. And it is interesting to see how Rosmini wanted to work his way up by examining the real value of the concept. Rosmini came to understand that man has the concept present in his inner experience. A person who is only a nominalist stops at the fact that he experiences the concept internally and passes over the question of where the concept is present in reality. Rosmini, however, was ingenious enough to know that even if something reveals itself within the soul, this does not mean that it has reality only within the soul. And so he knew, in particular, by starting from the concept of being, that the soul, by experiencing the concepts, at the same time experiences the inner essence of things as they live in the concepts. And so Rosmini's philosophy consisted in seeking inner experiences, which for him were experiences of concepts, but in doing so he did not arrive at the liveliness of the concepts, only at the diversity of the concepts. And now he sought to specify how the concept lives simultaneously in the soul and in things. This is very clearly expressed in the work by Rosmini that was left behind and is entitled “Teosofia”. Within Catholicism, others also held a similar point of view, but Rosmini is one of the most ingenious.

Now, however, Catholic theology finds such a direction as Rosminian somewhat inconvenient and uncomfortable, because it is very difficult for this side to reconcile the concept of revelation with this theory of concepts. For the concept of revelation amounts to the fact that the highest truths must be revealed. They cannot be experienced inwardly in the soul, but must be revealed outwardly in the course of human history. Man can only approach reality with his concepts to a certain degree, and the sphere of revelations rises above this sphere of concepts. From this point of view, the scholastics had to stand. This is also compatible with what Catholicism still regards as its core today, better than the Rosminian experienced concepts. Because when you have experienced concepts, it is actually God who lives in you. And basically, Catholic theology is horrified when people claim that God lives in man. That is why Leo XIII declared Rosmini's philosophy heretical in the 1880s by a decree of his own and forbade Catholic theologians to study and teach Rosmini's philosophy unless they had permission from their superiors. For in this way, strict measures are taken within the operations of Catholic theologians. I do not know whether this is always the case without exception. In the publications of Catholic theologians of all camps, one will in any case always find the seal of the superior episcopal authority. This then means that Catholic theologians are allowed to study such a work. There are certain exceptions for those who are university teachers, but things are handled very strictly, at least in theory.

In this way, one also sees the attempt to work one's way into an understanding of the relationship between thinking and the world.

I would like to make an interjection here that is of a completely different nature. Such interjections are sometimes necessary. Many of our friends believe that they are doing our movement a great favor when they explain to Catholic theologians, for example, that we are not at all anti-Christian and that we are in fact seeking an honest concept of Christ. And in their good faith, our friends go so far as to tell this or that Catholic theologian about the way we characterize Christianity. For our friends then believe, in their – forgive me – naivety, that they can make these theologians see that we are good Christians. But they can never admit that as Catholic theologians! My dear friends, we will be much more agreeable to them if we do not seek the Christ, if we do not care about the Christ! For it is not a matter for them – this must always be borne in mind – that someone is seeking this or that concept of Christ, but for them it is a matter of the supremacy of the Church. And precisely if one had an equally good or better concept of Christ outside the Church, then one would be fought against most of all. Thus, those of our friends who are most gullible do us the greatest harm, who go to Catholic theologians and try to convince them that we are not anti-Christian. For they will say: It is even worse if a concept of Christ could take root outside the church. One must judge the things of life according to one's circumstances and not according to one's naive opinion. We will be fought against particularly sharply if the theologians should make the discovery that we understand something of the inner existence of Christianity that could make a convincing impression on a larger circle of humanity.

But it can be seen that it had become necessary to work one's way into an understanding of the concept and its relationship to reality. And here it must be said: what is contained in the writings of Rosminis is among the most brilliant things that have been accomplished in this direction in modern times. He has worked through this for all areas, and it could be of very special value if one studied Rosmini's concepts of beauty, his aesthetic concepts. Rosmini's theory of beauty, his aesthetics, is something particularly valuable that one should engage with in order to see how a modern mind works its way up to standing at the gateway to spiritual science and just not being able to enter into spiritual science. This can be studied to such an outstanding degree in Rosmini.

Thus we find that there are really spiritual currents that want to work towards an understanding of the concept, but do not come to realize that we are now living in a time when the concept must become alive if one wants to enter into reality.

So the concept has gone through a certain history. I have dealt with this history in part in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” in that first chapter of which I spoke. But here I would like to point out something further. We can say, then, that the concept continues to develop. There was a time when the concept was a perceived concept, as color or sound was perceived. This was the case with the Greeks. Plato is just the last one to speak so realistically about the concepts that one can see how something of the understanding for such a grasp of the concepts resonates in him. With Aristotle it is already different. Then comes the Middle Ages, where one has the concept purely rationally, and where one seeks how it relates to things as a universal, and where one reaches for bridges and comes to the structure: ante rem, in re, post rem – before, in, after things.

Then comes the time when the concept is fully understood in a nominalistic way. This extends into our time. But the reaction is asserting itself, the side currents that seek the concept as an inner experience, as with Rosmini. From here (see diagram: Rosmini) one would come to the life or experience of the concept. So the concept would be chained, so to speak, to the physical body in this time (see diagram: before Plato to the Middle Ages), and now pass over to the etheric body. The concept would lead to the clairvoyant experience of the concept. But then one would have to say that the entire earlier perceived concept and the nominalistic and rational concept have developed out of an atavistic clairvoyance of the concept, and that now the way in which the concept is to be experienced is a conscious one, whereas in earlier times it was more subconscious. And indeed, if you go from Plato, from the Greek philosophers, who had the concept as a perceived one, to the echoes of Zarathustrianism, you have this atavistically grasped – or perhaps one does not need to say “atavistic” because this expression is only valid today – so dream-like, clairvoyantly experienced concept.

Thus the Near Eastern philosophies presented the concept as something that they experienced pictorially. Persian philosophy sees in the “horse in general” a being in general that is specified and differentiated from the individual horse, still something living. The Persians called this “Feruer”. This is abstracted and becomes the Platonic idea. The Persians' Feruer becomes the Platonic idea.

Abstraction is gaining more and more ground because thinking is only experienced in the physical body. We must return to the consciously experienced concept. In this field you see a wonderful cycle taking place from the old clairvoyance of the concept through what the concept had to become in the age of physical experience: the merely rational concept, the merely conceptualized concept, the merely logical concept.

I have often emphasized that logic only came into being through Aristotle, when one had the concept only as a concept. Before that, for the experienced concept, one did not need logic. And now logic comes to life, the statue of logic comes to life.

This example of the concept shows once again what can be seen in general and on a large scale. We also have to work our way into the whole course of human development in the individual, because then we understand more and more clearly the meaning underlying the spiritual current to which we belong. And we really do become more and more objective through these things, but that is also necessary. Where would we end up if objectivity were not understood at all and our dear friends were to drag everything more and more into the personal sphere! Our task must be to work objectively, and the purely personal must recede more and more.

If one wants to understand the deeper meaning of such significant works as the Apocalypse, then one must gain a deep insight into the structure of the world and the entire development of the world. Therefore, for the time when I could not be present, I asked Miss von Sivers to discuss the theory of evolution, the theory of the development of the various worlds that are somehow related to our Earth, here for a few hours. It has become clear that the way in which the development has been presented here has been seen as something individual. (It has happened entirely in line with my intentions, in which I have conducted research into it myself.)

Before we can make any kind of useful progress in the Apocalypse - which we may approach again soon, where you will see what depths are contained in it, in esoteric Christianity in general - we must first become clear about certain concepts of our solar and planetary system. Therefore, I myself will make some insertions about the development of our planet and our solar system. We are now going to tackle some very difficult parts of theosophical or mystical teachings, and so I have to say a few words in advance about how you should approach such material.

Above all, be aware that the Apocalypse is one of the most important and profound works in the world, containing the greatest of secrets. And also be aware that explaining the Apocalypse is an extremely difficult task, because there can be so little preparation for such an understanding at the present time. Hardly any explanation of the Apocalypse was given in Europe during the nineteenth century. Only now, after a long time, are we able to speak of the Apocalypse again. Be aware that the explanation of the Apocalypse as we give it is related to the very deepest secrets, and that you are hearing something in our time that was closed to man through the course of spiritual development and through the general course of the world. One must be lenient with oneself if not everything can be clear and transparent from the beginning. It is not possible for the difficult to be clear from the start.

The final explanation of the Apocalypse is one of the deepest secrets of initiation, and the veil that can be lifted today is already extraordinarily deep. We could not move on if we did not include some information about the world system with which our Earth is connected.

In connection with the matters that have been discussed in my absence, I would like to send some advance information. Miss von Sivers has presented the development of the earth and the sun in a way that I am able to present. However, the views of the various occult researchers in this field are only seemingly opposed. You must not believe that if something seems to contradict itself, that is a real contradiction. So if Mr. Schouten believes he has found a contradiction between what has been presented here and what he knows from our esteemed comrade Leadbeater, then of course it requires a kind of illumination on the whole, how to understand such things; we will discuss this in detail. Above all, please note that no practical mystic claims to be presenting a universally valid dogma. Neither Leadbeater nor I make such a claim. Each presents what he is able to present as the results of his observations. And please do not interpret what is presented here as anything other than a story that someone tells about what he has experienced. It can be discussed, it makes no claim to dogmatic value, they are not tenets. At first one might object: If different researchers in this field contradict each other, how can one ever arrive at clarity? But that is not the case. If you read travel descriptions of the most diverse regions, you will see how different even these descriptions are. And the observations of occult researchers are just as varied as these observations. With some understanding, which is difficult in this area, one always, without exception, comes to exactly the same results. There is never any real contradiction between two occult researchers if they both proceed in the necessary objective manner, really working with all the means of occult research.

However, one might not even realize the way in which research in this field comes about at all. I would like to speak here first of all about the case that has been discussed here, namely the case that constitutes a point of difference - not in the rest of esotericism, but in the younger current that has found expression in the Theosophical movement [as in Sinnett, Leadbeater and Blavatsky]. The theosophical movement is actually a very young movement compared to the occult movement. It was founded in 1875. But occultism is thousands of years old. In Europe, there were the same teachings as those brought by Theosophy; Theosophy also existed in Europe, only in the eighteenth century it receded somewhat because materialism did not allow these things to be spoken of. Materialism is something that has a scaring effect on the sacred science of occultism.

Within the theosophical movement itself, an apparent contradiction arises with regard to this teaching of the development of our earth. When the great teachers of the theosophical movement, whom we call the masters, first shared some of the secret knowledge with European students, so-called lay chelas, it was actually this European lay student, our revered friend Sinnett, who wrote the first effective book, Esoteric Buddhism, based on the master's teachings. There was a great deal that was unclear to this lay disciple. This was to be expected, for all European thinking differs quite significantly from the way an actual occultist, an actual esoteric, thinks. A person who is equipped with European cultural concepts - and you must not forget that the modern human being grows up entirely in the prejudices of the present day - easily misunderstands what the esotericist is saying because he translates it into his concepts, which are derived from materialism. Thus there was a certain initial disparity when the exalted master gave the first teachings to Sinnett through the mediation of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky about the development of our earth.

Our Earth has reached our present state after having passed through a very different state, and it will change again into a different state when it has gone through this present state. We can express this by saying that the Earth is undergoing transformations. The first Theosophists illustrated these three metamorphoses - the state of our earth that preceded the present one, the present state and the one that follows - by drawing three spheres, which were also called globes.

The esotericist does not refer to what rock and metal complexes are as “earth”, but rather he also refers to what belongs to the earth: the mineral world, the plant world, the animal and human world. Then we have to imagine this earth as emerging from an earlier state. You don't have to imagine it like the present earth either, but rather imagine the earth at that time in a much finer matter, not at all in a physical matter, but in a matter that can be imagined something like what we call the human astral body, which envelops and permeates the human being in the form of a cloud. The Earth at that time consisted of such matter. This state has condensed to our present physical state. That is why it was called the astral globe preceding our Earth. The following one, into which our Earth will transform, is again similar to this state in terms of matter; it is also astral. In contrast to the astral globe, the third globe is called the plastic globe, because if you look at the earth in this astral state, it appears undifferentiated to you, a mass in which you can distinguish many fewer entities than in the third globe.

Above all, you will see the difference when you look at people. People are present on all three globes. On the first globe, people were in such a state that they were completely dependent on the external forces acting on them. People in our time, on our physical earth, have their hands, their legs, they can walk, can move, can move their mouths - today, all of this is at their own discretion. This was not yet present to the same extent on the astral globe; at that time, man was still much more of an automaton. He reproduced what external forces stimulated in him. He moved his hands because external stimuli affected him. He was at the mercy of external stimuli. This has changed, man has become more independent on the globe we call our earth. And that will be even more different when we will be on the third, the plastic globe. The physical body has disappeared, the earth is in dissolution, darkness has fallen. Then the human being will not only be able to move his limbs, but he will be able to shape his own form at will, so that the human being – while he has a permanent physiognomy today – will not be able to hide his feelings through his physiognomy. In his outer appearance, he will give an immediate impression of what lives within him. We will be able to extend our hands, not just move them. Man will be able to form himself plastically from within. His form will be the result of what lives within him. Life will express itself more in form.

These three stages of development are not the only ones that our earth goes through. This astral globe was preceded by another, and the plastic one will be followed by another. While here [on the astral globe] the entities we are dealing with – including human beings – are in a substance that is equivalent to our astral body, here [on the globe that preceded the astral one] the human being and all entities, in fact the whole earth, are in a matter that is equivalent to the mental aura, the thinking body of the human being. On this globe, everything is dependent on external stimuli. But that does not appear in our astral matter. What lives here can never be seen, not even with the senses of a clairvoyant. There is only sound, which the 'clairaudient' can perceive. Everything is spiritual sound. The spiritual sounds buzz around on this globe in confusion and are the same as the intermingling colors on the astral globe. It is a globe that is called the Rupa globe. This is the form that we know on our Earth in the physical state in the air waves. So is the infinitely fine matter of which our thoughts are formed. Only thought-matter was present on earth at that time when it was in that state. This globe gradually passed into the astral globe through condensation. 'Rupa' means form.

Man will be in a similar state again when he has gone through the plastic state. On the plastic globe, passions and feelings express themselves extremely vividly, while here [on the intellectual globe] in the higher state, everything is expressed in tones. This sound world in which the person will live will be quite different from the sound world of the descending line of the Rupa globe. When the clairvoyant moves within this globe and perceives the entire sound world, he perceives something similar to what you hear when you are sitting in a hall in which a symphony is being played, but it is purely spiritual and is not heard with physical ears. While you perceive something like a symphony descending [on the rupa globe], you perceive words ascending [on the intellectual globe], an articulated sound world with the expression of the world of thoughts and ideas living in man.

These two globes are each preceded by another – one descending, one ascending. These are the Arupa globes. They are formless. The people in those days were such that in this whole world, which is even finer than the Rupa world, nothing lived except individual sounds, with a very specific timbre. These individual tones, which did not yet harmonize, which did not yet form into melodies, but lived as individual tones, were very substantial. Among these beings were individual basic essences of plants and animals, and above all, every human being, as he is today, was already present as a tone. Each person at that time had a different tone. This makes the human being a being that is different from all others. This tone, with a very specific coloration, is the human being again when he arrives at the globe, which we will call the archetypal globe. There the human being is again a tone, but from this tone everything that he has experienced resounds. It is a tone [of great abundance] from which the whole rich experience of the human being resounds. It is difficult to visualize this, but as I said, it can be imagined in such a way that this [on the Rupa globe] is a poor tone, while [on the archetypal globe] this is a tone that speaks of everything that a person has gone through at the various stages of development.

If you follow this, you will have an idea of how the earth transforms into its various states. A group of related metamorphoses is called a planetary chain. The term is not entirely accurate because it is a schematic drawing. If I were to design the drawing in such a way that it better reflected the facts, I would have to draw all the spheres in a single place. We do not have a succession of new spheres appearing one after the other, but a transformation.

This first Arupa sphere condenses, and out of it arises the state of the Rupa sphere. From this arises the astral sphere, and this then condenses to such an extent that the earth is formed from it. And then the following would come, but in such a way that I would have to draw all of this on top of each other. You may only understand the drawing as a schematic one. So we are dealing with seven successive transformations that the planet undergoes.

Initially, it was mistakenly imagined that transformations do not take place, but that there are seven spheres distributed in space and that life passes from one globe to the next.

This is not a problem if that is how you imagine it at first, because it is difficult to get the ideas right at such a high level anyway. And so it does no harm to speak of a wave of life flowing from globe to globe.

It is different that the following idea has been created by the master's first message. It has been thought that the wave of life flows from one globe to the other. In relation to the globes - at least in relation to two of them - ideas have crept in as if the first and third globes correspond to Mars and Mercury.

The master explained after further inquiry that Mars and Mercury have nothing to do with the development of humanity on Earth. For the occultist, this is an absolute impossibility, because Mars and Mercury are physical globes, but the others are not physical. Mars and Mercury are in the same physical state as the Earth, so they also have the physical form of a planetary chain like the Earth.

So Mars is the physical representative of a planetary chain just like our Earth. It is the same with Mercury. Later, more and more researchers came to us who were not only able to follow these things from what the masters told them, but who also learned from their own observations. They learned the methods. This view can be somewhat misleading about the facts.

There are methods by which the clairvoyant can transport themselves back to the astral globe and also forward to the plastic globe, the globe “Three”. When you place yourself in the state of astral clairvoyance and direct your thoughts to the point where the astral globe must be found, then you can see what it was like when our animals, plants and minerals were in this position. You can see it clearly before you. When you place yourself in such a state, in the state of an astral clairvoyant, you are not only united with, not only in the astral world you have visited, but you are also in the astral worlds that are related to the one you have visited, that are therefore in the same state. One is present in all cosmic bodies that are in the same state. In this respect, clairvoyants perceive space and time in exactly the same way. They make no distinction at all. When one projects oneself back to the globe that preceded our Earth, when one is on the planet, one is also on all planets that resemble the state of the Earth at that time. The clairvoyant is then actually on those planets that today belong to the planets of our solar system and are in this state. Not all planets are in the same state. Mars is physically today, but it is only at the stage of development at which our Earth was at the time when it was going through the astral state. The Earth was then able to solidify, to become physical. Today's Mars is in this position. It is at the stage of the third globe, but not astral, but physical. Now one can perceive what is present in this state. If you place yourself in this state of Mars, then you are not only on our Earth, but also on Mars.

So now you can study the present state of Mars clairvoyantly, and you may make an interesting discovery. What you could otherwise only observe astrally, in cloud formations, you can observe on Mars today. It is as if it had suddenly turned to stone. So when we examine Mars, we may feel almost as if we had left this Mars some time ago. [A person today, here on our Earth, has never lived on Mars.] We were, however, in an astral form when we left it. Today's Mars looks as if man had left it and come over to Earth. This is the interesting problem, which can lead one to believe that one once lived on Mars. This astral globe “One” should not be confused with Mars.

Mercury is further advanced in its development than our Earth. It has already reached the state that people will have reached when we have astral plasticity. The beings of Mercury can endure the physical state. Earth people will undergo this state on an astral plastic globe. But Mercury gives us an idea of what man will become when he is on a plastic globe. For them, plasticity is compatible with the physical state. [So there is a relationship]. But the planets themselves have their chains, and only through their stages of evolution can it appear as if the development on Earth has something to do with them. The beings that live on Mercury and Mars are not human-like. They undergo completely different evolutions. People can only be physical on the physical Earth, while the Martians can be physical with the qualities of the astral human, and the Mercury beings are plastic on the physical globe, which people can only be on the plastic globe.

Thus we have completed what we call the planetary chain, namely the planetary chain of our earth. This planetary chain emerged from another planetary chain. Next time I will show how our earth developed out of another planet, just as we had the lunar epoch in the past. What remained of that epoch is contained in our present moon. Our present moon is not the earth's predecessor, it is only a condensed physical piece of it, a slag, so to speak. When we say that the beings of the earth developed from the moon, it is not entirely accurate, but within the limits of what I have said, it is quite correct. We will get to know a somewhat similar seven-part chain during this lunar epoch, so that we can say: Before the earth came into its sevenfold structure, it developed in the sevenfold structure of the lunar epoch. This sevenfold lunar epoch is characterized by the fact that people at that time did not yet have the bright consciousness of the mind that people have today, but rather a consciousness similar to a dream trance. This is the echo of the earlier dull consciousness.

Furthermore, we are dealing with a planet that can no longer be found in our space. This planet has become what the sun is today, through various intermediate phases. That is why the sun is a planet in the old esotericism. Esotericism does not mean the physical sun, but the father of our physical sun. Next time I will explain the sun predecessor of the earth.

Our Earth has therefore passed through one, two, three globes of seven links each and is now in the fourth globe of the chain, which also has seven links, making 28 links in total. In the future, it will pass through three more links that will be similar to Jupiter and Venus and so on. The next link in the chain, which will contain highly developed human beings, a planet that is not in a physical state, we will still get to know, and finally we will be able to pursue the actual goal of our earth development.

So there are still three globes to come, each with seven members, equal to 21 members, so that we have 7 x 7 members, that is 49 metamorphoses that we have to go through. These 49 metamorphoses are not written down by the esotericist in the same way as by the modern man. [Esotericism does not use the decimal system, but the system of seven.] 66 does not mean 66 to the esotericist, but [6 x 6 =] 36; according to the system of seven, that makes: 7 x 7 = 49. Thus you can understand what it means when the esoteric writes 77. For him, this does not mean 77, but 7 x 7 = 49 metamorphoses. On each planet there are seven root races. So we have seven chains, each with seven planets or globes, and each globe with seven root races, which makes a total of 343 states. This number plays a certain role in the Secret Doctrine. In the early days, the matter was very poorly understood. The relationship with the master is such that one solves the problem oneself, and then receives the answer from the master, whether it is right or not.

Further notes, presumably on a question-and-answer session regarding the lecture of January 30, 1905

When you look at the Earth from the outside, it appears to be a sphere with a green undertone. [The Earth has a green base color.] While it is relatively easy to examine the earlier stages, it is difficult to see the later ones. The Akashic Records do not speak to this, they only provide the intentions. In science, there are similar methods for looking back and for looking ahead. If a scientist has hydrogen and oxygen and an electric current, he knows that water will result.

The astral globe of our Earth is completely re-materialized astral globe – only more elaborate. The astral world has already prepared birth and death.

The Moon has a very dense physical body. It also has something similar to an astral body. It relates to the Earth as the negative photographic plate relates to the positive. Everything that appears joyful on Earth is a very sad thing when it appears on the Moon. Everything there means just the opposite. It is impossible for the psychic vision to see the astral matter. With the psychic power of the Earth, one does not see the astral sphere of the Moon. When one studies the operations performed during karmic investigations into the karma of people, one enters the region where one can perceive something of this moon itself.

The number 666 means 216 - 6x6x6. The most perfect state, the seventh, is missing from the Apocalypse.

[666 is the number of the beast, and this number is obtained by crossing out the two upper globes of each chain. These two upper globes are those of the deity. A chain is a round.]

It is difficult to say anything about the time of the next catastrophe, because the one who knows about it cannot say anything. Our fifth race will perish through the struggle of everyone against everyone. One cannot say anything about the timing. One must also not talk about numbers. Perhaps something can be said about this in the course of the lecture series. We are, after all, in a time when things are developing extremely quickly. The nineteenth century in the astral means as much as the previous millennium. It is progressing at an ever faster pace. This can also be observed in the root races. Towards the end of the cycles, life is greatly accelerated.

The Bible calls the seventh state on the intellectual globe bliss. In India it is called Devachan. The seventh state is always a state of bliss, only in quite different degrees on the different planets.

The theosophical worldview is not just intended to satisfy theoretical needs, but what is called the theosophical worldview is conceived as something comprehensive and universal. Even though the Theosophical movement has gained few followers in the last 30 years, it may be said that there is a growing understanding that it is supposed to provide something that sheds light on all branches of spiritual life.

Today, an attempt will be made to show how the personality of Richard Wagner can be understood in a special way from the point of view of the Theosophical worldview.

Today, mysticism is usually understood by people as something that cannot be connected to a clear concept. It has been completely forgotten today that there was a time - the first centuries of the Christian era - when mysticism was called mathesis, because mysticism is said to be the clearest, most vivid, brightest form of knowledge and can only be compared to the clearest, most vivid form, mathematics.

Mysticism is to the supersensible world what mathematics is to the physical world. If one speaks of the way in which one can arrive at the study of the supersensible, one calls it mysticism; if one means more the study without the methods, one calls it theosophy. Theosophy is not meant to be the study of a divine or the study of a god. For the theosophist, the Divine is the all-embracing, underlying principle of the most insignificant and the most comprehensive phenomena in the world. If a person is still at an undeveloped stage, he will recognize only a little of the world; if he is more developed, he will recognize more. However, theosophy will never presume to say that man can recognize the nature of God. We can never speak of a complete knowledge of God; we must be clear that we live, weave and are in God. Knowledge is in the divine, but the divine can never be encompassed by knowledge.

In a Berlin lecture in 1811, Johann Gottlieb Fichte characterized what underlies philosophical endeavor as an attitude, as a view. He said to his audience: “In these lectures I have something very special to tell you, nothing about what the five senses say, what the mind combines. The supersensible objects go beyond sensory perception. A new sense is necessary for this. What matters is that one has the faith that one can gain knowledge of the supersensible world. If someone does not know this spiritual world, then he is like a blind man who can see nothing of color and light. Not in the sense that theosophy and mysticism speak of the supernatural as something outside our world, but in the sense that the blind man who is operated on sees the colors and the world of light, in the sense that man awakens the powers and abilities that are in his soul and lie dormant. It is possible to awaken what are called the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. He is not immodest who says that one can know something, but he who claims that one cannot know anything. It is for the seeing person, not the blind, to decide about colors. It is for the spiritually seeing person to decide about the supersensible world.

There have always been people who were spiritually enlightened. They are called the initiated or the initiated. They were the missionaries for the world. All religions are based on the teachings of those who have looked into the spiritual worlds. The act of looking into the spiritual worlds is called mysticism or theosophy. There are ways to work out of the spiritual worlds without looking into them with one's own insight. Those who have looked into them without being able to describe the character of the same were the great artists. The great artists, such as Dante, Goethe and Richard Wagner, drew from the spiritual world.

It is not to be said that the ideas that Richard Wagner has drawn from the spiritual worlds would have been understood by him. This is not an objection to the truth of the matter. The plant is also unaware of the ideas that the botanist draws from it or that the poet has in mind. It is unaware of the ideas of the botanist and the poet, but it grows according to what the botanist subsequently thinks about it, it realizes these laws. Just as little as the plant, the poet needs to understand what he carries within him, which then makes him understandable. Just as it would be absurd to believe that a plant knows the laws by which it grows, it would be equally absurd to believe that Richard Wagner knew anything of what can be understood from him.

Richard Wagner was not just a poet and musician; he was the bearer of a new culture. He once said: All truly symphonic instrumental music is capable of making the laws and their interrelationships appear – sometimes the mind can be caught and cornered by the secrets that art reveals to us. – The musical instruments are the organs of nature itself. The artist does not merely depict reality, but truth.

At various times in his life, Richard Wagner searched very earnestly for a solution to the world's greatest problems. He wrote on his house:

This house shall be called Wahnfried,
because here my delusion found peace.

He really was a seeker. He sought throughout his entire life. In the mid-1840s, we find in Richard Wagner a purely Christian spirit, the kind of Christian worldview that has been propagated through the centuries. Then, in the 1840s, something took hold of him – it lasted until the 1850s – like a kind of atheism or materialism. During that period, strong, bold minds had come to realize that the same laws prevail up there in the world as in inorganic nature. This was a world view that the boldest minds of the time had developed. Richard Wagner was also more or less seized by it. But for him, material reality nevertheless took on an ethical or moral character. The true materialist believed that the world of the senses was the be-all and end-all. For Wagner, this belief was associated with a deep morality, like a great vision of the meaning of life. He said: “Man can only become selfless and loving when he says to himself, ‘It will all end with this existence’ — when he is capable of merging into the universe, of comprehending everything for the world, nothing for himself.” So he also wanted to ethically and morally transfigure materialism. But he soon came to a different view through Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer gave him something that was deeply satisfying to him as an artist and as a musician.

Schopenhauer stated that all other arts face the essence of the world much more alien than music. He gives music a very special position among the arts in general. Schopenhauer has basically taken the one guiding principle of his world view:

Life is an unfortunate thing, and I try to make it bearable by thinking about it.

Underlying everything is an unconscious, blind will. It forms the stone and then from the stone the plant and so ever higher forms, because it is always unsatisfied. In human life itself there are great differences. The “savage” living in dull consciousness feels the unsatisfaction of the will much less than the higher-standing man, who can feel the pain of existence much more clearly. Then Schopenhauer says: There is a second thing that man knows besides the will, and that is the idea. It is as if the waves of the sea ripple and reflect the forms of the will, the dark urge. In man, the will rises to the illusory image of the mirage. In it, man creates an image of what is outside of him. The idea is an illusion. Man suffers not only from the unsatisfied will, but also from the fact that he knows how to awaken the idea from the will. But there is a means by which man can come to a kind of release from the blind urge of the will. One means to this end is art. Through art, man is able to transport himself beyond what would otherwise arise from the will as dissatisfaction. When man creates a work of art, he creates out of imagination. While other imaginations are mere images, he looks at art as something different. The genuine artist does not create a copy of nature. When he creates works such as, for example, a Zeus, he has combined many impressions, retained all the merits in his memory and left out all the defects. From many people, he has formed an archetype that is not realized anywhere in nature, but is nevertheless distributed among many individual personalities.

According to Schopenhauer, a kind of essence confronts us in artistic works. By going to the depths of creative nature, as it were, man creates something that is reality. While other arts have to pass through the imagination, thus giving images of the will, for Schopenhauer, sound is an expression of the will itself. He hears the will of nature and reproduces it in tones.

Goethe sees intentions everywhere in nature. This is not a cliché, but rather the fact that Goethe was aware that nature only partially achieves its purpose in every being. There is much more to every being than it expresses. What does not come to light in it is released by the artist from nature; he creates something that goes beyond nature. When man, in creating after nature, creates a higher thing, he goes beyond nature. Goethe sees man as the highest link in the chain of development of beings.

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as a great, beautiful, dignified and worthy whole, when the harmonious comfort gives him a pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as it reached its goal and admire the summit of its own being and becoming. (On Winkelmann)

That which is elevated from nature to a work of art by man is such that in the work of art the divine foundation of nature shines towards man. The artist creates and the artistic is enjoyed by those who enjoy it in the Platonic ideas. The artists seek the common archetype of things. They create something higher than imagination, but live and work in the element of imagination. For Schopenhauer, music is something that sounds out of the essence of the world. The person who is artistically active in sound is, as it were, as if he were at the heart of nature with his ear; he perceives the will of nature and reproduces it in sounds. Thus, says Schopenhauer, man has an intimate relationship with the world, for he penetrates into the innermost essence of things. He had assigned music the role of directly representing the essence of the cosmos out of a kind of instinctive insight. He had a kind of instinctive idea of the real facts.

Schopenhauer's view was heartening for Richard Wagner. From this point of view he sought to establish his place in the world as a musician and as a poet. For him, music became a direct expression of the essence of the world.

Richard Wagner looked back to ancient Greece and said: In ancient Greek culture there was also an art. This art was not only music, not only poetry. In this primal art in Greece there was an interaction of dance, poetry and music. —- The movements in dance, those gestures in ancient dance, become for Wagner the expression of what can take place in the human soul. He imagined that the most intimate relationships between lovers, the most noble relationships, were expressed in gestures and movements. For Wagner, dance was originally a sensual reflection of the deepest experiences of love in the soul. What the poet spoke was only another expression of what is going on in the soul. The word is the other means of expression that must be added to the dance. The third means of expression is music. Richard Wagner looked at an original art that was neither music nor poetry nor dance in itself. He said to himself that originally all of humanity was more selfless; it was much more imbued with a sense of being absorbed in one another. Just as a finger, if it had consciousness, would have to feel itself as a limb of an organism, so the Greek citizen was a member of the whole state. Over the centuries, only egoism has emerged, that necessary egoism that has brought about independence. Its idea was that the future would necessarily bring about a reversal from egoism to love.

All people and all human achievements have also passed through the path of egoism. The arts used to belong together and only then separated. They must first come together again to form a whole.

Wagner saw Shakespeare as a role model as a poet and Beethoven as a musician. These were artists of whom he said: If you want to achieve something as an artist, you have to learn from them a musical and poetic creation. He saw in the earlier compositions that the libretto came between the feeling and the music; he wanted to change that. It was clear to him that music is connected to the human being. As an artist, he built on Shakespeare on the one hand and Beethoven on the other.

To understand this, we need to know what the mystical element is in the human being. He is a mystic who is able to see the spiritual in all the world, in all movement. It is possible for the human being to look at the whole cosmos in the same way as one looks at a single person, for example. Everything about a person becomes an expression of the soul within. Behind the veil of the physiognomy, one can see into every person. When the mystic looks at the plant and mineral world, he recognizes in every plant and every stone the expression of the common spirit of nature, one spirit in all entities. Some plants appear to him as the laughing expression of the rejoicing spirit of the earth, others as the tears that express the sorrow of the spirit of the earth. He really does see something moral in what the earth produces, the expression of a spiritual essence. Anyone who is able to live in the right way in the whole world, who feels that what is expressed in the world stands before man as uniformly as mathematics stand before him. The earth spirit of Faust was also a reality for Goethe. When we read the words:

Eminent spirit, thou gavest me, gave me all,
What I requested. Thou didst not in vain
Turn thy face to me in the fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature for a kingdom,
Strength to feel it, to enjoy it. Not
Coldly marveling visit thou only permit,
granting me to look into her deep breast,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
past me and teach me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
the giant spruce toppling, crushing neighboring branches
And neighboring trunks squashing down,
And the hill muffled hollow thunders,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Then myself, and my own chest
Secret deep wonders open up.

When we read these words of Goethe, we see how he realizes how man recognizes the divine-spiritual in nature and feels that it rises in his own heart.

In true mysticism, one is led to a real insight. When a person practices meditation and concentration, the time comes when he gains insight into the world of light and color in the astral realm. This world appears as if the colors were floating freely in space and became the expression of spiritual beings. Everything there is permeable, but we have light and we have colors, which are the expression of spiritual beings. The third world is the actual spiritual home of man. This is a world of spiritual sound, into which one soaks in such a way that everything around us appears as a world of flowing sounds.

We can distinguish three states of mind in today's man: first, everyday consciousness, waking consciousness; secondly, unconscious life in sleep; thirdly, in between, dream consciousness.

For the mystic, the awakened one, the soul is not merely there at night, but it is also aware then. It can then perceive a world of flowing tones at night. When he has reached this stage, he must make the transition from sleep consciousness to waking consciousness in such a way that he can also perceive the spiritual world in the waking state. When the practical mystic walks through streets and alleys, he sees not only the physical but also the spiritual everywhere. It is the world of Devachan in which the human being lives and moves during the entire state of sleep. There the soul lives in its true home, in a world of sound, in the world of the harmony of the spheres, the world that resounds and sings through him. For the mystically awakened, a sound becomes audible from the soul of all beings. Theosophy does not regard what the Pythagorean view of the world calls the harmony of the spheres as a dreamt-up construct, but as reality. When we hear music in the physical world of sounds, we are only hearing a shadow image of the spiritual world. The aesthetically appreciative person feels that music is akin to the home of the soul.

Richard Wagner said: If we want to express the soul of man, we can grasp a threefold way of expressing our inner being: in movement, in word and in music. Music is connected to the innermost core of the soul. Until now, music has only expressed the inner being of man, that which is hidden within him. But it is the greatest thing that this is transformed into action.

The symphony describes what a person can experience within themselves. But where the soul's experiences lead to action, where feelings lead to action, music has not been an appropriate expression of the soul. Only once has a symphony – Beethoven's Ninth – been able to express what lives within. There the composer gives in to the power that expresses the inner life in words. There the inner life pushes to become at least words, as an expression of the bubbling up of the inner life.

Shakespeare presents what a person can do when the soul itself has already come to terms with its inner being. The spoken drama has presented the external action, but has kept silent about what lives in the soul. Music has been the portrayal of what remains of the human being within the soul. Richard Wagner said: “Music must not merely compose the poetry, but must stand directly opposite the human being itself.” What overflows into action, he writes in words; what lives in the soul as the reason for action, that is expressed by music.

The mystic knows that man does not live here on earth merely as an individual personality, that the individual human being cannot be there without the other people either. The bond that connects them is spiritual. Those who look into the spiritual worlds can see how individual peoples are members of a whole natural organism. Just as a finger that has been cut off from a hand withers, so too is the individual human being, detached from the earthly organism, something that withers like a finger when separated from the organism.

The idea that one person can redeem another makes no sense if we do not take the mystical ideal into account; for example, we recognize a knowledge of this connection in Hartmann von der Aue's “Poor Henry”. Just as we can fill up the emptiness in a glass by pouring something into it from another vessel, just as we can let warmth flow over, so there is something in humanity that can be transferred from one person to another. All ideas of redemption are based on profound mysticism. Richard Wagner felt the spiritual in man, the ascent beyond man to the superman. In the superhuman figure, he shows how there is a connection within the whole human organism. Thus he brings redemption problems, for example, in the “Flying Dutchman”, where the Dutchman is redeemed by a sacrificing female being. - Tannhäuser is redeemed by Elisabeth.

In this way he weaves the fate of one human being into the fate of another. He shows this most magnificently in the 'Nibelungenring' and in 'Parsifal'. In the Nibelungenring we see how he presents the entire working of the world, how he points to an ancient human past, a humanity that has always been there. In the distant past, there was an ancient clairvoyance at the basis of all human development. Myths and legends arose out of ancient clairvoyance. There was once a clairvoyant consciousness that humanity will regain at a higher level. From the clairvoyant somnambulistic consciousness, humanity passes to the ordinary consciousness and then again to a consciousness where the human being still has the clairvoyant consciousness in addition to the ordinary consciousness. The whole transition from an originally less self-contained personality, which was still clairvoyant, to a sensual view, that is what the conquest of gold means: the conquest of sensual perception and human power. Love turns into selfishness; later it turns back into love. Those who want to bring out the ego must renounce love, and for that they acquire the gold. In his Ring of the Nibelung, Richard Wagner describes how the self develops, the selfish self, and how it emerges from the original state of clear-sightedness to become a loveless human being. As Alberich emerges, we feel the self arise. Richard Wagner wanted to depict the loveless ego in the pedal point in E-flat major in Das Rheingold, and in the subsequent chord we hear the wonderful way it comes to life.

We see how the gods emerge from a primordial consciousness, how it arises like a warning voice. It stands before Wotan in Erda. It stands there for humanity. Wotan calls upon her; he says:

You know
What the depths conceal,
What weaves through mountain and valley,
Air and water. Where there are beings
Your breath blows:
Where minds reflect
Your mind clings:
Everything, they say,
Is known to you.

Then Erda says:

My sleep is dreaming,
my dreaming is musing,
my musing is the rule of knowledge!

Brünhilde brings redemption through sacrifice. The idea of sacrifice, the idea of redemption carried out, is the most magnificent in Parsifal. It was on Good Friday 1857 in the Villa Wesendonck on Lake Zurich that Wagner looked out at the budding, burgeoning, blossoming nature. And in that moment, the connection between the burgeoning nature and the death of Christ on the cross became clear to him. This connection is the secret of the Holy Grail. From that moment on, the thought that he had to send the secret of the Holy Grail out into the world in musical form continued to permeate Richard Wagner's soul.

To understand these thoughts of Richard Wagner, we have to go back several hundred years in the development of mankind. At that time, there were also initiation sites in Europe. Through the wisdom that was imparted to man in the mysteries, he was brought into conscious contact with the gods. Such a person is called an initiate. Only the forms of such teachings change at different times. In the medieval mysteries of Europe, the secret that Richard Wagner sensed was brought to its highest development, namely, how nature's springtime blossoming is connected to the mystery of the cross. This was taught in a special way in the initiation schools of the Middle Ages, which are called Rosicrucian. We can best present this in the form of a conversation. Let us imagine the teacher saying something like the following to the student: Look at the plant, how it is rooted in the earth and holds its leaves and flowers towards the sun. In divine innocence and chastity, it holds its fruit organs towards the sun. And now look at people. Man is the reverse of the plant. He turns his head toward the sun, which corresponds to the root of the plant, and he turns the organs that the plant holds chastely toward the sun toward the earth. Through the soul of the disciple there had to pass the feeling of divine chastity as it is expressed in the plant. He was shown a future for humanity in which man, too, will become desireless and chaste. Then a spiritual chalice will open from above and look down upon man. And as now the sunbeam descends to the plant, so will man's purified power unite with the Divine Chalice. This inverted chalice, as it was presented to the disciple as a fact in the Mysteries, is the real ideal of the Holy Grail. The sunbeam is the holy lance of love.

Ernst Uehli speaks as an introduction on the topic “The Artist in the Threefold Social Organism”. This is followed by a discussion in the course of which Paul Baumann asks Rudolf Steiner the question:

Paul Baumann: What is the relationship between the artist or his work and the social cell? Does he not also have to do preparatory work?

Rudolf Steiner: When it is a question of art and social life, I actually always have a certain unsatisfactory feeling in a discussion concerning these two things, for the simple reason that the whole way of thinking, of soul-attitude, comes into question when one speaks of social organization, of social structure, must be somewhat different than that which one must have when one speaks of art, of its proper emergence from human nature and its assertion in life, before human beings.

In a certain respect, the two areas are not really comparable. And precisely because they are not comparable — not because they are comparable but because they are not comparable — it seems to me that the whole position of art in relation to the artist and to humanity can be illuminated from the point of view of the threefold social organism. When speaking of art in the social organism, we should never forget that art belongs to the highest blossoms of human life and that everything is harmful to art that makes it impossible to count it among the highest blossoms of the development of human life. And so we must say: If it becomes possible for a threefold social organism to shape life in general in such a way that artists and art can emerge from this life, this will be a certain test for the correctness, and also for the inner justification, of the threefold social organism. But the question will not be posed in this way: How should one or other thing be organized in the threefold social organism in order to arrive at a right fostering of art or a right assertion of the artist? Above all, the question will be: How will people live in the threefold social organism? One could say that if the idea of the threefold social order were some kind of utopian idea, then one could of course say what one says about utopias: people will live happily – as happily as can be. Now the idea of the threefold social order does not start from such utopian conditions, but simply asks: What is the natural structure, the self-evident structure of the social organism? One could well imagine that some person might have the idea that man as such could be much more beautiful than he is, and that nature has not actually done everything to make man beautiful enough. Yes, but the way the world is, man had to become as he is. It may be, of course, that some Lenin or Trotsky says: the social organism must be so and so. But that is not the point. It matters just as little whether someone imagines a different nature of man than can arise from the whole of nature. What matters is what inner laws the social organism must have. And if we understand the threefold social organism from this thoroughly practical point of view, we can then also gain ideas about what will be possible in this threefold social organism. Above all, a certain economic utilization of time will be possible in the threefold social organism, without the need for compulsion at work or similar fine things that would thoroughly eradicate all freedom. It will simply be impossible, due to the way things work out in the three-tiered social organism, for as many people as now to loiter around uselessly. I know that these words “loitering around uselessly” may cause misunderstandings, because people will say: Yes, the actual loiterers, the actual life-dawdlers, are very few. But that is not the point. The point is whether those people who do a lot, do something that is absolutely necessary for life, whether they do something that is rationally and fruitfully integrated into life.

If you consider any branch of life today – I will immediately highlight the one that is most fragile in this life today – if you consider journalism, for example, and see how much human labor is required, from the typesetter to all the others who are involved in producing newspapers. Take all the work that is done there – the majority of this work is done by people who are drifting through life, because the majority of this work is actually unnecessary work. All this can be done more rationally without employing so many people. The point is not to have as many people as possible doing something so that they can live, but rather to carry out those activities that are necessary for the fruitful development of this life, this social cycle, in the sense of a truly social life cycle. All the chaotic developments that are taking place today with regard to the utilization of human labor power are connected with the fact that we do not really have a social organism, but rather a social chaos caused by the deification of the unitary state. I have often emphasized examples of this social chaos. Just imagine how many books are printed today, of which fewer than fifty copies are sold. Now, take such a book – how many people are involved in its production! They make a living, but they do unnecessary work. If they did something else, it would be wiser and countless other people would be relieved in a certain way. But as it is, countless typesetters and bookbinders are working, making piles of books – mostly lyric poems, but other things are also considered – piles of books are being produced; almost all of them have to be pulped again. But there are many unnecessary things like this in today's life; countless things are absolutely unnecessary.

What does that mean? Imagine for a moment that our human organism were not properly structured into a nervous-sensory system, which is localized in the head, and a rhythmic and appendage system, which interact in a regular manner and thus function economically. Just imagine if we were a unified being that goes haywire everywhere, that produces useless things at a rapid rate: the amount of useless things that humans produce today would not even be enough. We must bear that in mind. We must realize that it is essential that this social organism be structured, that it be designed in accordance with inner laws; then it will also be economical. Then human labor will be in the right place everywhere, and, above all, no useless work will be done.

What follows from this? People will have time. And then, my dear audience, the basis will be given for free activities such as art and similar things. Time is part of this. And out of time will come that which must be there for art, and art will then work together with something else, it will work together with the free spiritual life. The aim of this free spiritual life is to develop the talents together with the time present in the threefold social organism, not in the perverse way it is done today, but in a way that is in keeping with nature. When the free spiritual organism is truly separated from the other organisms, the number of unrecognized geniuses will decrease considerably, because there will be a much more natural development. There will be much less pursuit of idle dreams of some kind or other. So the development of talent will simply be placed on a more natural footing by the development of the free spiritual life. And something else is necessary if art is to develop: an artistic sense, an artistic need, a natural human desire and aspiration for art is necessary. All this must arise out of the threefold social organism as something that comes into being when there is organized social life together, not chaotic social life as there is today. You see, above all, in recent times we have come into the chaos of artistic feeling. The original artistic feeling, which wells up with elemental power out of human knowledge, has completely disappeared under modern education. It would come again if we developed in the sense of the threefold social order. And so one must now think of the whole thing that is emerging.

If we speak from the point of view of the threefold social organism, we must speak only as practitioners and not as theorists. We must not ask about principles, but about facts, and then we must say that what I have now indicated can come much more quickly than one might think. And what happens then? Then associations arise for the most diverse things - partly from intellectual life, partly from economic life. And one should not imagine what these associations will do somehow boxed in paragraphs and principles. In these associations, there will again be people who will be able to make judgments out of the full warmth of human feeling and experience. People will emerge from the associations who, through what they otherwise do in life, will achieve a certain validity in life that is not guaranteed to them by the state, that is not guaranteed to them by a title. Whether people are privy councillors, works councillors, medical officers or the like, they will derive their worth from the threefold social organism, not from these abstract things, but from what they do, from what lives continually. It is not paragraphs that will live, but what the people who rightly hold sway in the associations negotiate with each other; it will result in what is now present in caricature as so-called public opinion. One must only imagine very concretely what can come about through the living interaction of the associations.

Associations also include those that come from free spiritual life. Yes, here again something will be given to the life experience in a person, which can establish things as justified judgment. And if you just take that in its full concrete meaning, the following will emerge: the artist will really be able to achieve something materially for his work of art out of this public judgment, but what will come into its own out of the associations. Out of these conditions, something will really be able to develop that will make it possible for an artist, even if it takes him thirty years to create a work of art, to still be able to receive enough for this work of art to satisfy his needs for the thirty years it takes him to create a new work of art – which, in any case, might no longer be an option if he is already sixty or seventy years old. That will work out. It will actually work out – if one does takes the whole thing in a philistine manner – that the artist can be compensated for his work of art from within such a tripartite social organism in the sense of the economic cell. He cannot be compensated today for the reason that there are such unnatural prices. In fact, people today cannot pay the artist what he would actually have to demand if he only thought about himself for a moment. But today he thinks: I have managed to create some picture or other, and yes, if I only get enough to last me for the next three months, then I'll take it – of course I won't be able to finish a decent work in three months, but people don't understand that either – and I'll just pump it up again in three months.

Now, I would like to say that these things will only arise as the highest extract; therefore, one cannot really discuss these things well from the outset. I always find it a little awkward to discuss these things. It is true that, according to the Pythagorean theorem, the square above the hypotenuse is always equal to the squares of the two legs, but once you have this theorem, it is impossible to talk in advance about all the possible degrees of application. It is the same with the threefold social organism. It is not possible to specify what will now develop as the highest flowering of social life. That is why a discussion of these matters is actually awkward, because they are too disparate areas – social life and artistic life. But if we now take things in detail, we have to say: something like this building in Dornach had to be built, it had to arise out of a certain cultural and civilizing task of the present, out of the recognition of this task. And I would like to say: if there were even fewer people who have a thorough knowledge of what has actually been built and sculpted and painted here, it would still have to be built in some way. Of course, this building could only come into being because the material means were there, but it will only be possible to complete it if further material means are provided. These questions cannot be discussed by saying, “Yes, something must be done,” because, when talking about these things, “must” has a fundamentally quite different meaning. And so I think: above all, it should be quite clear that the freedom of human movement necessary to give art its proper foundation will be brought about by the threefold social organism. And only when natural foundations for social life are in place will each person be able to take proper root in that social life. Ultimately, it is really more about the thing than the words.

You see, I remember, for example, the 1880s. We had just passed through that period in the external bourgeois development of art when the theater was dominated by the comedies of a Paul Lindau, a Blumenthal, in other words, by those who put all manner of farcical, tragic or dramatic straws on the stage. We had the last phase, hadn't we, of conventional painting and so on. At that time, a book was published by a boundlessly narrow-minded person - a person of whom, when you saw him, you really couldn't say anything other than: he can only be narrow-minded. - And this book, what did it demand? It demanded nothing more urgently than, yes, than this art that we have had, this theater art, this sculpture, this musical art, and so on. All of this has no social foundation; it is uprooted, and everything must be rebuilt from the social. They were terribly beautiful phrases, but it was actually terribly bleak stuff, because it was rooted nowhere in life. And so I would like to say: what matters today is not that we say the right things about such things, but that we feel in the right way out of the real necessity of life, and that means: we must feel the necessity of transformation, of the new formation of life. This makes it especially necessary in this area to draw attention to the fact that we must, above all, get away from the phrase. And so, when we speak of the threefold social order, it is important that we first understand this threefold social order ourselves; the other things will then follow.

I believe that basically one speaks about art incorrectly, if one speaks about it at all. In art one should paint, in art one should chisel, in art one should build, but one should actually talk about art as little as possible. Of course there are certain ways of talking about art, but that itself must then be something artistic. There is, of course, also a thought art. Something equally justified is constructed in works of thought art as in the other arts, the art of painting and so on. But when you look at the creative process, what is brought forth artistically is something that cannot be said to be produced in one way or another or to be received in one way or another. Rather, all the necessities of life must be transformed into a kind of matter-of-factness. It is necessary to familiarize oneself with the idea that if there is no genius, there can be no proper art. In this case, all the discussions about how the social organism should be organized in order to allow the artist to be properly appreciated are in vain. At best, one can say: in an otherwise well-functioning social organism, art will be present when there are as many geniuses as possible; then the right art will be there. But first these geniuses have to be there. And how they are to be realized – well, it is certainly true that the lives of many people of genius have been extraordinarily tragic. But for geniuses to be able to have a real effect on the world, for geniuses to be able to realize their potential in accordance with the gifts they have been given at birth, that can only happen in a free spiritual life, because only there will there be real spiritual life.

Then we will also go beyond what is most eminently inartistic today. No, something like the Renaissance and Gothic, these were categories that were basically taken from a fully living reality. It was life, and life is always universal. And so Mr. Uehli was absolutely right when he said that something like Gothic and Renaissance was born out of the whole social context of the time. The divisions that we have recently in the field of art have actually, I would say, arisen more and more purely artificially, and they have arisen because the principle of bourgeois life has continued into intellectual life. Isn't it true that bourgeois life has produced rentiers, that is, idlers who live on their property rents. I mean it like this: if they had just enough ambition, they became artists. But that's not the point, because the point is not to create something that is a kind of human necessity, but to create something out of human ambition, which, although it is usually denied, is still there. And that is where, as Mr. Uehli quite rightly said, the actual artistic endeavor becomes uprooted.

The inner artistic striving, which is completely honest and true, cannot be uprooted, but the artistic life can of course be uprooted from everything abstract in life – if life is uprooted at all. And in such an uprooted artistic life, things come that have their basis in the tendrils of life, not in life itself; the slogans 'Impressionism', 'Expressionism' and the like come. These are things that always have to be brought together again because they have been carved apart. When we talk about impressionism and expressionism, these are only templates, words. But when we talk about our eurythmy, then we have to — not because these things are there — but because these things are there, then we have to turn expressions into impressions and impressions into expressions again in eurythmy. It is extremely important to realize that such catchwords, such didactic abstractions as 'impressionism' and 'expressionism', always arise when the original life is not there. For such words can be applied to anything. What is not an expression? If someone writes a bad poem, that is also an expression; if someone sneezes, that is also an expression. And so, in the end, everything, even the Dornach building, can be called an expression. But that is not the point. The point is to characterize things out of a concrete life document. Then one will not resort to catchwords, but arrive at things that can somehow be seriously meant.

Let me make a comparison: in the Theosophical Society, people talk about the “equality of religions”. When someone starts talking in such abstract terms as the equality or unity of religions, then one also comes across such terrible abstractions in other areas, so that one might say, for example: Well, everything on the table is “food ingredient”. Just as you can find the same thing in Hinduism, in Persia, in Theosophy, in Judaism, so you can also find the same thing in pepper, salt, paprika and other things, namely “food ingredient”. But then you soon see that it depends on the specifics, otherwise you might add salt to coffee and sugar to soup. What is important is to have the will to go into the specifics. But then again, when it comes to the artistic, the categories that have emerged in recent times are basically perceived as something particularly tendril-like. I am certainly not of the opinion that everything that individuals who call themselves expressionists achieve should be condemned. On the contrary, I believe that I can have a very broad heart and that I can even have a heart for such expressionist achievements that other people see as something that has been stuck together. But the theorizing that is attached to such things really seems to me to lead people away from a healthy basis for life. And it is indeed the case today that many people actually only know life from the derived sources. There are people who do not know life but know Ibsen or know Tolstoy or know Rabindranath Tagore, who is now beginning to become a kind of fashion in circles that cannot acquire their own judgment. And when we look at all these things today, when we see how people are caught up in the tangles of life, then we feel it is indeed necessary to emphasize once again how, in a healthy social organism – and that should be the threefold social order – this sense of being uprooted must cease. From this point of view, many of Mr. Uehli's remarks seemed to me to be of particular importance.

Unfortunately, although I have spoken for long enough, I have not been able to add much in concrete terms, because anyone who talks about these things with artistic sensitivity - as was also evident from Mr. Baumann's speech - must talk in such a way that talking about all the questions that are floating around today about the position of the artist - for example, whether or not to exhibit or whether or not geniuses fail - is actually quite futile. I think people should realize this more; then it will lead to the right thing. If someone is an artist, then he can also starve, then he can also have a job that occupies him from morning to evening; he will still develop his artistic genius at night. This cannot be suppressed. If someone is an artist, then he will live his artistic life, even if he has to chop wood or shine boots for the rest of his days – he will live his artistic life, even if he only lives it for his own room, for his own closet. These are things that absolutely cannot be rationally treated, that should be treated, I would even say, a little artistically themselves. And being treated artistically basically precludes philistinism; it cannot be made to look sophisticated. And now it is actually the case, isn't it, that if you are to bring general humanity into a social order, then you cannot integrate that which depends only on personal genius into a paragraph or principle. Even when discussing the position of art in life, one must always have some artistic feeling, and then things will actually always flow into free speech, into free creation; one cannot circumscribe them. The things that are so necessary for life must not be circumscribed.

I would like to say that it is necessary to talk about art from an artistic point of view and that one should have at least a little philistinism in one's veins – one need not make it too bad – if one is to talk about what is universally human. Because, ladies and gentlemen, it would be a bad thing in life if there were only those who were artists, or if all those who believe that they should achieve recognition as artists actually did achieve it. I would like to know what would become of life then. What is necessary for life is genius, but what is also necessary for life is philistinism. And if there were no philistinism, there would probably soon be no more genius either. The categories of “good” and “bad” cannot be applied to life so easily, but life is multifaceted. You can talk a lot, but you should actually talk nothing but what is taken from life itself.

At the beginning of the study evening, Ludwig Graf Polzer-Hoditz will give a lecture “On foreign policy in the light of spiritual science and threefolding”. Rudolf Steiner will then take the floor.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I would like to say a few words, perhaps aphoristically, about some of the things that Count Polzer touched on today, since, after all, things that I have touched on here and there over the course of time have been repeatedly alluded to.

One can clearly see from various phenomena how the fact that Count Polzer wanted to point out, this rupture, I would say, which then led to the catastrophe, appears in the more recent political development of the 19th century. He spoke of these years of transition and of the complete bewilderment of the Central European peoples, of the 1870s and 1880s, when the battles over the occupation of Bosnia, the Slav question and so on took place in Austria. This was preceded by the 1860s, when there was still a certain after-effect of those European political moods that originated in 1848. These sentiments can be traced throughout Central Europe, both in the Austrian lands and in what later became the German Empire: it is what one might call the emergence of a certain abstract liberalism, an abstract-theoretical liberalism.

In Austria, at the end of the 1860s, the first so-called People's Ministry, Carlos Auersperg's, emerged from the Schmerling and Belcredi ministries. It had a distinctly liberal character, but a theoretical and abstract one. Then, after a very short interim government, in which the Slav question was brought to a certain height under Taaffe, Potocki, Hohenwart, the so-called second bourgeois ministry, the Adolf Auersperg Ministry, emerged in Austria in the 1870s, and with it a kind of bourgeois-liberal direction. These movements were paralleled by the struggles waged by the liberal parties of Prussia and the individual German states against the emerging imperialism of Bismarck and so forth. These liberal currents that emerged are extremely instructive, and it is actually a shame that today's generation remembers so little of what was said in Germany, in Prussia in the 1870s and 1880s, by men like Lasker and so on, and what was said in Austria by Giskra, mentioned today by Count Polzer, and other similar liberalizing statesmen. One would see how a certain liberal, good will arose, but which was basically abandoned by any kind of positive political insight. That is the characteristic feature: an abstract liberalism is emerging in Central Europe that has many fine liberal principles but that does not know how to reckon with historical facts, that talks of all possible human rights but knows little about history and is particularly unskilled at drawing conclusions from it. And it was perhaps the undoing of the whole of Central Europe – the World War began in Austria, or at least it started from Austria – it was the undoing that this liberalizing tendency in Austria was so terribly unpolitical towards the great problems that arose precisely in Austria and to which Count Polzer has pointed out in the most important parts.

Now we must study a little more closely what this liberalism in Austria actually represents. We can study it by listening to the speeches of the older and younger Plener today. You can study it by listening to the speeches of Herbst, that Herbst who wanted to be a great Austrian statesman of the liberalizing tendency. Bismarck, the realist, called Herbst's followers “die Herbstzeitlosen”, one of those bon mots that are deadly in public life. And this liberalism can be studied in another place, in Hungary, where Koloman Tisza repeatedly appeared in the Hungarian parliament with an extraordinarily strong sense of power, and in his outward demeanor, I would say, the true representative of a liberalism that is turned away from the world, that is unworldly, and which - without the historical facts - only reckons with what emerges from abstract, general principles. Tisza, the elder, the father of the man who played a role in the World War, showed this even in his outward behavior. He could never appear anywhere without a pencil in his hand, as if he were going to expound his principles, which are fixed in pencil notes, to those who represent a believing audience. In a sense, one can study a somewhat inferior edition in the person of Bismarck's opponent Eugen Richter, who, however, belongs to a later period in Prussia-Germany. These people can be used to analyse what has emerged as a thoroughly fruitless policy. In particular, all these people learned politics in the English political school. And the most important fact, the essential thing, was that everything that Plener, Giskra, Hausner, Berger, Lasker and Lasser put forward, everything that the Tisza put forward in Hungary, was something positive, concrete for the English; that it means something to the English because it refers to facts, because what is being pursued there as liberalizing principles, applied, can gradually lead to imperialism in the world. Yes, I would like to say that imperialism is strongly inherent in these things in the English representatives of these principles. When the same principles were advocated by the above-named personalities in their parliaments, they were like squeezed lemons; the same principles referred to nothing; they were abstractions. This is precisely where one can best study the difference between a reality and a phrase. The difference is not in the wording, but in whether one is in reality or not. If you say the same things in the Viennese or Berlin parliament as in the London parliament, it is something completely different. And that is why what came from England as a liberalizing trend and was a positive, concrete policy in England was just empty phrases and empty-phrase politics in Berlin and Vienna.

I cannot develop all these things here today, but just a few aphorisms, perhaps just images. But if one wants to see the contradictions that exist, it is interesting to hear or recall how speakers like Suess, Sturm or Plener spoke in the Austrian parliament of the time, or in the delegations, during the debate that followed on from the planned and then executed occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And then a man appeared who spoke from the perspective of the Slavic nation. I still vividly remember a speech that made a certain great impression at the time. It was the speech that Otto Hausner gave in the Austrian Parliament, which he then published under the title 'Germanness and the German Reich'. Unfortunately, I was unable to get hold of it again. I would very much like to have it again, but I don't know if it is completely out of print. If one reads this speech in connection with another that he gave when the Arlberg tunnel was being built, if one reads what he said there from the point of view of higher politics and what he threw into the Austrian parliament from the political podium when Andrássy set out to work for the occupation of Bosnia, then realities were spoken. Hausner was, on the surface, a kind of fop, a kind of faded, snobbish and masked fop who could constantly be seen with his monocle in the Viennese mansion, whom one always met at a certain hour in Café Central, an old fop, but thoroughly brilliant and speaking out of realities. If you take all these speeches together, then basically [the catastrophe of] 1914 to 1918 was predicted back then, even what we are experiencing now, the soul sleep that is descending on this Central Europe. And there you can see how anyone who looks at reality — and I could give you many more such examples — must indeed come to the second thesis that has been mentioned to you this evening, out of reality.

These things that are connected with the threefold social order are certainly not something that has been thought up theoretically, they are not something professorial, but they are taken entirely from reality. And anyone who experienced how, in Austria, Austrian Germanness – for that was essentially the mainstay of Austrian liberalism – clashed with the then emerging and pretentious Austrian Slavdom, had to crystallize the view that Pan-Slavism is a positive force. Pan-Slavism has truly come into its own as a positive force. And perhaps more important than what came from Czechism – from Palacki to Rieger – is what came from Polishness. The Poles played an exceptionally important role in Austria as a kind of advance element, as a vanguard for Slavdom, and they represented all-embracing political points of view. Hausner, who was of Polish origin, once said in a speech that “Rhaetian-Alemannic blood globules” - a strange chemistry - rolled in his veins; but he felt he was a primeval Pole. But there were other Poles speaking in the Viennese parliament during these important times: Grocholski, Goluchowski and Dzieduszycki and so on, and it must be said that they did come up with some great political points of view, while the liberal German element unfortunately degenerated into empty phrases. It could not hold its own, so that it finally merged into the party that Polzer-Hoditz also mentioned, the Christian Social Party, which among young people in Vienna who were involved in politics at the time, and I was one of them, was called the “Party of the foolish fellows of Vienna”; it then became the Lueger Party.

This contrast between a declining direction and a rising one is very interesting. And in a sense, the Poles were unscrupulous, so that all sorts of things came out, for example the following: In Austria, they wanted to return to the old school law, to the old, clerical school law – I say “Austria”, but, to express its concreteness, they spoke in the Austrian parliament, [the Reichsrat], not of “Austria” or something like that, but of the “Kingdoms and Countries represented in the Reichsrat”; Austria-Hungary had a dualistic form of government; one part was called “the Kingdoms and Countries represented in the Reichsrat”, the other “the representation of the countries of the Holy Crown of Stephen”. So when they wanted to go back to a clerical school law in Austria, a majority could not be formed by the Germans alone, but either the Poles or the Ruthenians had to join forces with them. Whenever the opinion went in a certain direction, a coalition was formed between Germans and Ruthenians, and when it went in a different direction, between Germans and Poles. At that time, the issue was to create a clerical school law. The Poles tipped the scales, but what did they do? They said: Yes, all right, we agree to this school law, but we exclude Galicia. So they excluded their own country. So at that time a school law was created by a majority that had Polish delegates in its bosom, but these Polish delegates excluded their own country and imposed a school law on the other Austrian countries. This ultimately resulted in one area ruling over the other and enacting something that it did not want applied in its own area. That was the situation. How could the huge political tasks that arose be tackled with such a background!

It so happened that after this second bourgeois ministry, the government finally passed to this Taaffe ministry, which itself issued the certificate: In Austria, if you want to govern properly, you can only muddle through – that is, juggle from one difficulty to another, save one thing by another, and so on. The ministry that Taaffe headed as prime minister was then also “wittily” led. Taaffe owed his position less to his intellectual capacities than to the fact that at the time at the Viennese court - the Viennese court was already in a state that sailed into the gruesome drama of Mayerling —, that at that time at the Viennese court there was a great receptivity for the special art of Count Taaffe, which consisted in his being able to make little rabbits and shadow puppets with a handkerchief and fingers. The Viennese courtiers were particularly fond of them at the time, and that is how Taaffe's position was consolidated. He was able to keep this Austrian chaos in a corresponding current for a decade. It was actually quite bleak when you saw it happening. I really talked to quite sensible people at the time. They knew that Taaffe was kept in power by the little men. But people like the poet Rollett, for example, said to me: Yes, but Taaffe is still the most intelligent of them. It was a bleak situation. And we must not forget how, little by little over the course of that half-century to which Count Polzer has referred, the stage was set for the situation in which, during the World War, the very witty but thoroughly frivolous Czernin was able to play a leading role at the most important moment. How could one hope that something like the idea of the threefold social order, which was born out of the inner forces of history and brought to the Central European powers in 1917, would be understood otherwise than through adversity? People just didn't understand it, and that's not surprising, because after all, the threefold order is not understood by making bunnies. Other arts will be needed to penetrate into these things.

Now, you see, I have presented all this as a kind of image. One could show in many similar images how this whole catastrophe has been in preparation for a long time and how [in Central Europe] what was and is a reality in the West has become a cliché. And that was mainly something that I always used as a way of putting things to people [such as Kühlmann] - you needed a way of putting things to Kühlmann -: the fact that English politics is part of the great historical perspective in reality. This English policy has been preparing for centuries what has happened out of historical events. I believe that, of course, to understand the whole thing, it is necessary to delve into what underlies the external development and presentation of history.

But, dear ladies and gentlemen, read the memoirs of people. You will see how, in fact, where people present themselves in a certain way, as they are, we are confronted with what can be called: Central Europe is gradually degenerating in terms of the greatness of ideas, and the ideas that are particularly fruitful for Central Europe are emerging in England. It is interesting to follow, for example, the figure of the predecessor of Andrássy, Count Beust, that remarkable minister who could represent every form of patriotism and serve everyone. I would also like to describe Count Beust to you figuratively – there are various accounts in memoirs of how he related to Western European personalities: he would fold up into his knees, very politely, but he would fold up into his knees. So that is the Central European statesman who is actually unable to keep up. I have to mention all this because I was immediately asked about it by Count Polzer: How does it show itself, what has been working from the West for centuries, namely as a conscious English policy working with the historical powers?

The actual external agent [of this English policy] is King James VI, and I would like to say that the gunpowder conspiracy is something quite different from what is presented in history. It is actually the outward sign, the outward symptom of the importance of what is going through Europe from England as an impulse. This is a policy of the great historical perspective. You can see quite clearly the thesis that Count Polzer mentioned today and which I put forward when I first advocated the threefold order: you cannot take some measures – which are foolishly called the League of Nations today – to eliminate from the world what is factually given and must continue to have a factual effect, namely the Central European-English-American economic struggle. This struggle exists, just as the struggle for existence exists within the animal kingdom. It must be there, it cannot be eliminated from the world, but it must be taken up because it is a fact. The supporters of this Anglo-American policy see through this very well. And there something comes to meet us that can be clearly demonstrated – I am not telling hypotheses, but I am telling you things that you could hear in speeches in England in the second half of the 19th century. It was said quite clearly there: a great world war must break out in Europe – as I said, I am only quoting from speeches from the second half of the 19th century – this world war will lead to Russia becoming the great *testing ground for socialism. There, [in Russia], experiments will be carried out for socialism that we in the Western countries would not dream of wanting to strive for, because the conditions there do not allow it. There you see great aspects, the greatness of which you recognize by the fact that they have largely come true and – you can be sure – will continue to come true. But these aspects are not from yesterday; the “minds” of today's people are from yesterday, but not these aspects – they are centuries old.

And what Count Polzer will show you in a week's time as the actual spirit of Peter the Great's testament was simply what was to be opposed [from the East] to the imperialism of the West. Western imperialism, the Anglo-American essence, wanted to found the Anglo-American empire from the standpoint of the universal producer, so to speak. In the East, it has truly been thought of for a long, long time to tie in with the principles of the testament of Peter the Great – you will hear more about whether the testament is true or a forgery; but these are things that are actually of very little importance. And this, what is there in the West, should have been countered, so to speak, by a universal empire of consumption – the latter has already taken on terrible forms today. But these two realms are confronting each other. One can say that basically the one is as evil as the other in its one-sidedness. And in between, what appears to be a foray by the West into the liberalizing politics of Beust, Andrässy, Tisza, Berger, Lasker, Lasser and so on, is rubbing up against what appears to be an advance of Western liberalism. What appears to be an offshoot of Western liberalism comes up against what comes from the East. In Prussia, this is only a form of undifferentiated Polishness, while in Austria it is the strong characters that are there. For in fact, all types of character are represented in this Slavdom: the short, stocky, broad-shouldered Rieger with the broad, almost square face, with the tremendously powerful gaze – I would say that his gaze was power; in Rieger lived something like an after-effect of Palacky, who in 1848 from Prague had Panslavism; the old fop Hausner, very witty, but with him another nuance of what is active in the East emerges; and then people like Dzieduszycki, who spoke as if he had dumplings in his mouth, but was thoroughly witty and thoroughly in control of the matter. There one could study how Austrian Germanism in particular preserved a great, wonderful character. When I was in Hermannstadt in 1889 and had to give a lecture, I was able to study the declining Germanism in the Transylvanian Saxons – Schröer wrote a grammar of the Zipser Germanism and that of the Gottschee region. I have emphasized some of the greatness of this declining Germanness in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man). There we find these remarkable figures, who still had something of the elemental greatness of Germanness in them, such as Hamerling and Fercher von Steinwand. But Fercher von Steinwand, for example, gave a speech in the 1850s that encapsulates the entire tragedy of Central Europe. He said: What should one actually think of when thinking of the future of Germanness? He describes the gypsies, the homelessness of the gypsies. It is remarkable how some things have prophetically dawned on the best people in Central Europe. And it is true, the best people have actually been oppressed, and those who were at the top were terrible people. And so this adversity has prepared the way, which should actually be the great teacher.

In this state, in Austria, where there were thirteen official languages before the war, it really showed how impossible this old state structure actually is in modern humanity, how impossible it is to call a unified state what one was accustomed to. These thirteen different peoples – there were actually more, but officially there were thirteen – demanded with all their might what then had to be expressed as the idea of threefold social order. And Austria could be a great school for this world-historical policy. Especially if one studied it in Austria in the 1880s – I had to take over the editorship of the “Deutsche Wochenschrift” at that time – in the 1880s, when Taaffe ruled externally, when Lueger was being prepared, one really had the opportunity to see the driving forces. At that time, the whole character of Vienna changed. Vienna changed from a city with a German character to a city with an international, almost cosmopolitan character, due to the influx of Slavs. You could study how things developed. Then you realized that there was something impotent about the outcome of liberalism. It was like the impotence when Herbst spoke. Then it finally came to the point that people thought: This policy is no longer good! But they did not come to this conclusion because they inwardly recognized the empty phrases of a policy like Herbst's, which only produced abstractions, but because the Viennese government was striving for prestige and imperialism and used the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. When someone like Herbst opposed it, people didn't see the emptiness of his words, they just saw that he couldn't identify with imperialist politics. In contrast to this, Plener, who basically spoke the same empty phrases, but who identified with and won over the people who were in favor of the occupation, because he was a bigger sycophant. It was at that time, under the impact of the Bosnian occupation, that Hausner delivered his great speeches, in which he prophetically predicted what basically came to pass. Even in what was said then, where the testament of Peter the Great played a role, there was something of the sheet lightning of what then came to pass in such a terrible way. Particularly in the speeches that Count Polzer mentioned today, in which the testament of Peter the Great and the grand perspectives of the Slavs were so often touched upon, a certain opportunity can be seen to see what one should have done, if one had been sensible, in the face of British policy and its grand historical perspectives.

Politics, ladies and gentlemen, must be studied as a reality and experienced as a reality. And again and again I have to say that it is actually extremely painful for me when the people who get hold of the “key points” do not look at them, that they are written out from a faithful observation of the European and other conditions of civilized modern life and with due consideration of all the relevant details. But, my dear audience, you really can't write all these things in detail in a book that is published as a kind of program book. Today I have only hinted at some things in pictures; but if you wanted to write about it, you would have to write fifty volumes. Of course, these fifty volumes cannot be written, but their content has been incorporated into the “Key Points”. And that is the great – or small – thing: it is the small characteristic of our time that one does not feel that there is a difference between the sentences that are spoken and written out of reality and all the gigantic nonsense that is going around the world today and that is actually treated today as having the same meaning as what is drawn from positive reality and what has been experienced. One should feel that this is included in the “key points” and does not need the proof of the fifty volumes. It is an indictment of humanity, this inability to feel whether a sentence, which may only be two lines long, is alive or just a journalistic phrase.

That is what is necessary and what we must and can arrive at: the ability to distinguish between journalism and empty phrases and content that has been experienced and born of blood. Without this, we will not make any progress. And precisely when an attempt is made to orient ourselves in terms of grand foreign policy, it becomes clear how necessary it is today for humanity to arrive at such a distinction.

That is what I wanted to suggest with a few rather inadequate sentences in response to Count Polzer's remarks.

After Rudolf Steiner's remarks, there will be an opportunity for discussion.

Tomorrow we will attempt to present the final scene of Goethe's “Faust” in eurythmy. It will be apparent that my reflections today and tomorrow will be linked to the end of the second part of Goethe's Faust. We are, of course, dealing with one of the greatest poetic attempts in world evolution, with regard to the entire second part of Goethe's Faust, but especially with regard to the final scene, which is based on the most significant spiritual truths. Nevertheless, as true as it is that Goethe's “Faust” allows for different degrees and levels of understanding, it is also true that one can always go further and further in terms of seeking out what has flowed from Goethe's infinitely rich spiritual life into “Faust” and especially into the second part of “Faust”.

Furthermore, we shall see that the very end of the second part has so many occult truths to reveal to us, if we go to the subtleties in the presentation of the same, as hardly any other writer in the world has tried to reveal so far. And we shall see that these truths are enshrined by Goethe in the second part of “Faust” with a wonderful—to use an apparently pedantic expression—occult-appropriate science.

Now I must frankly admit to you that I would not dare to speak about Faust in the way I want to, if I did not have a Faust and Goethe problem that has never been dormant since 1884. Therefore, perhaps I may be permitted to hint at many things in aphorisms, which would require much more detailed substantiation for anyone who does not start from spiritual science. Nevertheless, I must confess that I do not approach the subject without a certain shyness, especially when it comes to linking occult observations to Goethe's “Faust” or to any other work of literature. For then all the lamentable things that have been done by occultists and non-occultists in the interpretation of poetry arise before my eyes.

One must really be somewhat appalled at the occultistic discussion of poetry when one considers what has been done in the world with regard to such interpretations, whether from the side of science or from so-called theosophists! And so please allow me to send a kind of introduction in advance, from which you can see how little inclined I myself am to dream occult truths, occult insights, into any kind of poetry of the spiritual development of humanity, and how hard I try to present only what can really be considered absolutely established.

Now, it is my custom when I have to talk about a subject to first immerse myself in the subject in a broader sense. When taking occult considerations seriously, it is necessary to immerse oneself in the whole atmosphere in which the subject is placed. And so I endeavored to immerse myself in Goetheanism once again.

For this purpose, I had to procure a great deal of literary material that I had studied decades ago. So I took up Goethe's “Prophecies of Bakis” again. These are thirty-two sayings clothed in enigmatic form, so to speak thirty-two riddles. Now you can imagine that an enormous amount has been written about what Goethe called “prophecies” and over which he poured, so to speak, oriental wisdom – it is a particular food for literary historians. Thus, in the thirty-two riddle verses, the most diverse people have seen the most colossal secrets.

I will give you a characteristic example in a moment. It is the twenty-ninth and thirty-third riddle verse that Goethe coined. It is quite good that we delve into these types of riddle verses before we go to the last scene of “Faust”.

One thing I know and revere, even worship at its feet;
Placed on the crown of the head, it is cursed by everyone.
I know one thing, and it firmly presses the lip shut;
But in the next moment it is the loathing of the world.

It must be said: it sounds quite mysterious! And the thirtieth riddle is:

This is the highest, and at the same time the basest!
Now the most beautiful, and at once the most hideous too.
Drink it up, and taste no deeper:
Beneath the enticing foam the dregs sink to the bottom.

Before we imagine how a theosophist might “interpret” these mysterious verses, let us look at an exoteric. We will not be able to make sense of what he says, but that does not matter; it shows us what is meant by “science”: “A most remarkable turn! Goethe chose this form to conceal and at the same time reveal his meaning.” Another Goethe interpreter has referred to these verses as “Freedom and Love”. The good man is at a loss and now wants to point out an explanation himself. “The highest, and at the same time the most abominable.” That should be: youth. That is both the highest and the most abominable. He says: That solves the mystery by itself.

That is an exoteric! An esoteric could say: You have to go much deeper than that!

One I know and venerate, yes, worship at its feet;
Placed on the crown of the head, it is cursed by everyone.
One I know, and it firmly presses the lips together;
But in the next moment it is the loathing of the world.

This refers to the plant, one could say, which represents the inverted human being. It can be associated with the Logos and Lucifer, or with white and black magic, and so on! Such explanations are widespread in the theosophical literature by the thousands.

Now, the art of familiarizing oneself with spiritual science does not consist in knowing how to apply what one has absorbed in spiritual science to anything at all, but in knowing how to relate to it in the right way – in our case, for example, to Goethe. Spiritual science should not lead us to all kinds of craziness, but should take us to where truth flows. And then one finds that the first two lines of the first verse mean — a slipper, and the last two, a cigar. Goethe hated cigar smoke. Yes, that is the truth, it is not profound, but it is as Goethe meant it. And the solution of the second verse is: spirit. As the spirit it is the highest, in alcohol as intoxication it is the most abominable. It is quite good to demonstrate such a process once, because you really should not be blinded by the art of interpretation and all sorts of profound arts, but you should be guided to where the truth is.

Goethe has also been made into a national chauvinist. But he was not at all. Take the fifth verse:

Two I see! The great one! I see the greater one! The two
rubbing with hostile power, one upon the other. Here are rocks and land, there are rocks and waves!
Which is the greater one, the fate speaks only.

This was taken to refer to the struggle between France and England for control of the continent. However, the commentator quoted above rejects this and says that the French Revolution and the German people are meant. This is quite foolish! What is really meant is life and death!

Now, this matter must be taken very seriously indeed. Just because something can be proved, that is absolutely no proof that the matter is right.

I wanted to say this in advance so that you do not think that I want to fall into the same error when explaining the final scene of 'Faust'. This final scene presents us with what could be called 'Faust's Ascension'. As is well known, Faust has gone through severe aberration, and also through all the possible madness and confusion of the wider, larger world. This is how it should be shown: Faust is to be led under the influence of Ahriman-Mephistopheles through the aberrations of the world, but the deepest thing that is embodied as the eternal in the human breast should not be able to be corroded by that which comes from Mephisto-Ahriman. In the end, Faust should still be able to be absorbed by the good spiritual worlds. That is what Goethe set out to achieve with his Faust epic.

Anyone who has learned something about the spiritual worlds through spiritual science and has little artistic sense within them can generally form an idea of how they would imagine it. For Goethe, who was an artist in the most intimate and highest sense, it was not so easy. He could not simply depict how Faust ascends to heaven and turn it all into an abstract, allegorical construct. For him, that would have been symbolism, a straw he was not willing to use. He wanted art. He wanted something that would endure and be secure in the face of true reality. That is what he wanted to be there. And so it occurred to him: How should I now present this on the stage, so that Faust is led into heaven? One can only place objects of the physical plane into it, they can only hint at something symbolic, but that would be straw, that would be no art! Even with all kinds of machinery one could only represent straw. Goethe first had to seek the means through which Faust can penetrate as a soul into the spiritual worlds. One cannot penetrate into the spiritual worlds through the air, one cannot penetrate through the external physical elements. Where is something real that can provide the means by which Faust can penetrate? That can only be what the spiritual represents on earth. Yes, where is that on earth? That is the consciousness that receives the spiritual! That is, Goethe first had to create a reality of consciousness that would receive the spiritual. He does this by placing people in his scenes, people in whose consciousness the spiritual can be said to live: monks, anchorites, and he layers them on top of each other. And one can say that a soul's ascent into the spiritual worlds is a real process. To present a spiritual process before an ordinary parquet floor would not be real, it is not rooted there; but it is rooted in the souls that Goethe presents. So he first tried to depict the consciousnesses that observe the spiritual process. So he presents the choir and the echo, which can perceive the elementary world of the spirit in the sensual-physical. They have prepared themselves not only to see the outer physical nature, but also within the physical plan the spiritual world into which the soul of Faust must enter.

And now it is described in such a way that only these monks can feel it. For just take the words, they are really not descriptions of physical processes:

Forest, it sways along.

It is as if one feels the elemental world emerging from natural things.

Woods, they sway towards it.
Rocks, they press against it.
Roots, they cling to it.
Trunk close to trunk up to it.
Wave after wave splashes against it.
Cave, the deepest, protects it.
Lions, they slink silently –
friendly around us,
a place consecrated to honor,
a holy love-nest.

There is an echo to this chorus. This is not without significance. It is meant to suggest to us how truly all-encompassing that which comes from elementary nature is.

Now we are led at the same time to something that becomes a wonderful intensification in Goethe. We are presented with three advanced anchorites, the Pater ecstaticus, the Pater profundus and the Pater Seraphicus, three who have attained higher levels than the others, who as anchorites only describe the processes just described. But there is a wonderful progression from the Pater ecstaticus through the Pater profundus to the Pater Seraphicus.

The Pater Ecstaticus is concerned with the lower stages of perfection, with sensory experiences, with being within oneself. The Pater Profundus has already progressed to the point of going from within outwards, of experiencing that which nature lives through as spirit and which is at the same time human spirit. Seen from the spiritual point of view, he stands higher than the Pater Ecstaticus. We can say: the Pater Profundus sees the spirit in the cosmos, which for him simultaneously becomes spirit in man. The Pater Seraphicus sees directly into the world of the spirit; for him it does not reveal itself through nature, but he deals directly with the spirit.

Hence the mysticization of the Pater ecstaticus through inner development. What is said now means nothing but inner states:

Eternal bliss,
glowing bond of love,
boiling pain of the chest,
foaming divine joy.
Arrows, pierce me,
Lances, vanquish me,
Maces, crush me,
Lightning, batter me;
That the vain
All evaporate,
Shine the permanent star,
Eternal love's core.

We have already covered the Pater profundus, which leads to the stage of feeling the spirit through nature.

Like the rocky abyss at my feet
It weighs heavily on the deep abyss,
Like a thousand streams that flow radiantly
To the horror of the foam of the flood,
How straight, with its own powerful drive,
The trunk carries itself into the air:
So it is the almighty love
That forms and nurtures everything.
There is a wild roar around me,
As if the forest and rocky ground were surging!
And yet, lovingly in the roar,
The water rushes to the gorge,
Called to water the valley;
The lightning, which struck down in flames,
To improve the atmosphere,
Which carried poison and haze in its bosom:
Are messengers of love, they announce
What surrounds us eternally,
My innermost being may also ignite it,
Where the mind, confused, cold,
Tormented in dull senses,
A crowd of locked chains of pain.
Oh God! Soothe the thoughts,
Enlighten my needy heart.

Now, in the Pater Seraphicus, there comes an immediate grasp of the spiritual world into which Faust is to be accepted, that is, of the spirits in whose midst Faust is now to enter. For this, a consciousness must first be presented: that is the Pater Seraphicus; he provides the medium through which the blessed boys can appear. And now, again, wonderfully, I would say expertly and appropriately observed:

What a morning cloud floats
Through the firs' swaying hair!
Do I sense what lives within?
It is a young ghostly host.

Goethe has children appear who died immediately after they were born; in the vernacular, they are called midnight babies.

Faust is to join the company of such midnight babies first; they know nothing of the world, their consciousness of the past has been clouded by their birth, and they know nothing of the new world yet. This belongs together with the ascension of Faust. As in the physical world there is no lightning without thunder, so in the spiritual world such an ascension of Faust is not without the blessed boy's realization of himself.

That a lover is present,
Do you feel, so just approach;
But from rugged earthly ways,
Happy ones! you have no trace.

Spiritual beings can only see the physical plane through our eyes and ears, otherwise they see the spiritual. When a ghost sees a hand, it sees the will that moves the hand and the form; if it wants to see the physical of the hand, it must use a physical eye.

Descend into my eyes
world and earthy organ,
You can use them as yours,
Look at this area!
(He takes it in.)
These are trees, these are rocks,
waterfall that crashes
And with tremendous rolling
Shortens the steep path.

The blessed boys are now inside with Father Seraphicus. He gives them so much of his spiritual strength that they can ascend to higher spheres. This shows once again the connection between the spiritual and physical worlds. When we meditate, the spirits also benefit, which is why we should read to the dead. In this way, Pater Seraphicus gives the fruit of his meditation to the boys, and through this they ascend.

Rise to higher spheres,
Always grow unnoticed,
As, according to an eternally pure way,
Strengthen God's presence.
For that is the food of the spirits,
Which in the freest ether reign:
Eternal Love's revelation,
That to bliss unfolds.

To know the “Faust” as here in Goethe a deepest occult truth of a world poem has been incorporated, means to be closer to the occult than any number of “occult” explanations can give.

Now the boys are in their own territory. They have crossed over from the realm of the spirits of form into the realm of the spirits of movement.

Now come the angels, bringing Faust's entelechy, that is, his immortality. They have snatched this member of the spirit world from Mephistopheles and bring it up with the words:

The noble limb
Of the spirit world is saved from evil:
Whoever strives for it,
We can redeem him;
And if he has received love
From above,
The blessed host meets him
With a warm welcome.

The younger angels:

Those roses, from the hands
Of loving, holy penitents,
Helped us win the victory
And complete the great work,
To gain this treasure of souls.
Evil retreated when we scattered,
devils fled when we struck.
Instead of the usual punishments of hell
the spirits felt the torment of love;
even the old master of Satan
was permeated with acute pain.

It is an occult sentence: to Mephisto-Ahriman, love is a consuming fire and a terrible gift of darkness.

Rejoice! It is accomplished.

Now the more perfect angels:

We are left with a remnant of earth
to bear,
And if it were made of asbestos,
It is not clean.
When strong spiritual power
The elements
Gathered up in itself....

What kind of earthly remnant is this? Our soul, when it lives on earth, absorbs through its perceptions, ideas and feelings what is going on on earth, and in so doing, the soul, as it were, draws to itself what lives in the elements of the physical plane. This cannot be separated immediately. Just as corpses used to be wrapped in a fabric made of asbestos to hold the ashes together, Faust's soul has a remnant of the material world that is not pure, even if it is like the asbestos that withstands fire.

No angel parted
The united dual nature
Of the two intimate ones,
Only eternal love
Can separate them.

The angels cover their faces before the incarnation. This is a secret that can only be seen by those entities that can descend deeper than angels who have not experienced the incarnation. Only love can separate this.

Now the angels become aware of the blessed boys. The blessed boys receive what is being led up:

Release the flakes.

Here Goethe again draws on physical processes to characterize spiritual processes. When the Benedictine monks die, they are wrapped in a special garment, the “flocca”, which is brown in color; all Benedictines are buried in the same flocca, hence the word “flakes”.

Here I have tried to take a liberty with respect to what is actually there in Faust. I have said: all this must be revealed to us through consciousness. Up to now, everything passes through the consciousness of the choir, the anchorites. Now Faust himself must ascend through consciousness, but he must ascend through full consciousness, he must fill a new consciousness completely, a new consciousness that is, however, identical with him, for he ascends as a fully developed human being.

Much in Faust is still unfinished, and certainly unfinished is the Pater Marianus, whom Goethe later called Doctor Marianus. This Doctor Marianus is there so that Faust may appear through his consciousness, so I simply let Doctor Marianus be Faust himself. The anchorite Doctor Marianus is at the same time Doctor Marianus and Faust.

Now it is a matter of the profound mystery of love, as permeating the world in the fully Christian sense.

Faust, speaking in a profane sense, has seduced Gretchen, Gretchen has even been executed, she has become innocently guilty, in her there is that innocence which rests enclosed in the mystery of man, and her love is an “eternal, enduring star”. If one wants to express this in an image, one comes to the Mater Dolorosa Gloriosa. She brings with her three penitents, she does not look at the guilt of these three, but at what is innocently guilty in them. To Doctor Marianus this secret is revealed.

Here the view is unobstructed,
The spirit is uplifted.
There women pass by,
Floating upwards;
The glorious one in the middle
In a wreath of stars,
The Queen of Heaven,
I see it in the radiance.
(Enraptured)
Supreme ruler of the world!
Let me in the blue
Stretched out celestial vault
See your secret.
Appreciate what moves the man's chest
Seriously and tenderly
And with holy love
Towards you carry.

Our courage is unconquerable
When you command us,
Suddenly the heat subsides
As you pacify us.
Maiden, pure in the most beautiful sense,
Mother, worthy of honor,
Our chosen queen,
Equal to the gods.

Around her,
light clouds swirl.

Goethe quite appropriately allows the soul to emerge first from the nebulous clouds, and then to solidify into a finished form.

The chorus of penitents follows. It is magnificent that Goethe has taken, I would almost say, love in its sensual form and here has given it a religious transfiguration – for the second time; the Bible has already done so for the first time. Mary Magdalene has loved much in the real sense, but she has simply loved, and Christ sees only love, not sin, and so she also belongs to Christ. Then there is Maria Aegyptiaca and Una Poenitentium, otherwise known as Gretchen. It could also be called Doctor Marianus, otherwise known as Faust.

The blessed boys accept Faust into their circle. Faust seeks to find something of Mary in Gretchen through the Queen of Heaven, so a mystic choir may express what has taken place. This mystic choir contains great, succinct words:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable,
The inadequate,
Here it becomes reality;
The indescribable,
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
Draws us on.

With this skeleton, I wanted to show you that Goethe really did depict this last scene appropriately, based on spiritual insight, and that he knew how to create the real foundations everywhere: the foundations of consciousness.

As one who is familiar with the subject knows, really understands, so has Goethe described. However, one must immerse oneself in what Goethe wanted. One must be in his intentions, as it were, have the dead Goethe standing before you as a living being. Because some things are not so easy to understand.