The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we wish to know the nature of the spiritual forces powers active in the different kingdoms of nature in the heavenly bodies, we must first become acquainted with these spiritual beings themselves, as we have already begun to do in the three lectures which have been given. We tried to characterise the so-called nature-spirits, and then ascended to the beings which stand immediately above man and which we can find in the higher world to our own. We will continue these considerations to-day, and must therefore link them to what has already been said on the way in which we can link ourselves to the beings of the Third Hierarchy. As shown in the last lecture, it is possible for man to rise above himself, to subdue all his own special ego interests in order, by that means, to rise into a sphere which he first of all finds his own guide, who can give him some idea of those beings called, in the sense of western esotericism, Angels, Angeloi.

We then pointed out how further progress along the path leads to knowledge of the Folk or Nation-Spirits, of whom we have spoken as Archangels, Archangeloi; and how, in the course of cultural civilisation we find the so-called Spirits of the Age, the Archai. If a man follows the path roughly indicated yesterday, he gains a certain feeling of what is meant by these beings of Third Hierarchy, but even if he goes through an occult development, he will for a long time only have a sort of feeling. Only if he goes in patience and persevere through all the feelings and perceptions mentioned yesterday, can he pass over to what may be called clairvoyant vision of the beings of the Third Hierarchy. If, therefore, we progress further along this way, we shall find that gradually we educate ourselves, developing in ourselves a different state of consciousness, and then we can begin to have a clairvoyant consciousness of the beings of the Third Hierarchy. When a man follows this way further he will find that he gradually trains himself to another condition of consciousness and that then a clairvoyant perception of the Third Hierarchy can begin.

This other condition of consciousness can be compared with the sleep of man, because in this condition a man with his ego and his astral body feels freed from his physical and etheric bodies. We must have a perception of this feeling of freedom. We must gradually learn what it means not to see with our eyes, hear with our ears, or think with our intellect, which is connected with the brain. Again, we must distinguish this condition from that of ordinary sleep, inasmuch as in it we are not unconscious, for we have perceptions of the spiritual beings in our environment;—at first, only dimly sensing them, and then, as has been described, clairvoyant consciousness lights up within us, and we get a living view of the beings of the Third Hierarchy and of their off-spring, the nature-spirits. If we wish to describe this condition more accurately, we may say that he who raises himself through occult development to this condition actually perceives a sort of demarcation between his ordinary consciousness and this new condition of consciousness. Just as we can distinguish between waking and sleeping, so to him who has gone through occult development, there is at first a distinction between the consciousness in which he sees with his ordinary eyes, hears with his ordinary ears, and thinks with the ordinary intellect—and that clairvoyant condition in which he has nothing at all around him of what he perceives in the normal consciousness, but has instead another world around him, the world of the Third Hierarchy and its offspring. The first achievement is learning to remember in ordinary consciousness what one has experienced in this other condition of consciousness. Thus we can accurately distinguish a certain stage in the occult development of man, when he can live alternately in his ordinary consciousness, when he sees, hears, and thinks like other men, and in the other condition of consciousness which he can, in a sense, produce voluntarily, and in which he perceives what is around him in the spiritual world of the Third Hierarchy. And then just as we remember a dream, so can he, in his ordinary consciousness, remember what he experienced in the other, the clairvoyant condition. He can talk about it, can translate into ordinary conceptions and ideas what he experiences in the clairvoyant state. Thus if a seer in his ordinary condition of consciousness, himself wishes to know something of the spiritual world, or to relate something about it, he must call to mind what he experienced in the other, the clairvoyant conditions of consciousness. A clairvoyant having reached this stage of development, can only know something of those beings whom we have described as the beings of the Third Hierarchy and their offspring; he can at first know nothing of higher worlds. If he wishes to know of these he must attain a still higher stage of clairvoyant vision

This higher stage is reached by continually practicing those exercises described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It and especially going through those exercises there described as the observation—let us say—of the plant, of the animal, etc. If a man continues his exercises in this way, he attains a higher stage of clairvoyance. This consists not only in his having two alternate conditions of consciousness and being able to remember his clairvoyant experiences in the normal condition; but having attained this higher stage of clairvoyance, he can also perceive spiritual worlds, spiritual beings and spiritual facts when in his ordinary condition of consciousness, looking at the things of the external world through his eyes. He can then, so to speak, carry his clairvoyant vision over into his ordinary consciousness, and can see behind the beings around him in the external world, the spiritual beings and forces everywhere more deeply concealed, as though behind a veil.

We may ask: “What has happened to a clairvoyant, who is able not merely to remember the experiences of another condition of consciousness, but who can have clairvoyant experiences in his own everyday consciousness?” If a man has only ascended to the first stage, he can only make use of his astral body in order to look into the spiritual world. Thus the body which a man makes use of at the first stage of clairvoyance is the astral body; at the second stage of clairvoyance which has just been described, he learns to make use of his etheric body. By means of this he can even in ordinary, normal consciousness, look into the spiritual world. If a man learns to use his etheric body in this way as an instrument for clairvoyance, he gradually learns to perceive everything in the spiritual world belonging to the beings of the Second Hierarchy.

Now, however, the clairvoyant must not stand still here, only perceiving his own etheric body, so to speak; but on attaining this second stage of clairvoyance he has a very definite experience. He has the experience of seeming to go out of himself, and as it were, of no longer feeling enclosed within his skin. When he—let us say—encounters a plant or an animal, or even another human being he feels as if a part of himself were within the other being; he feels as if immersed in the other being. In normal consciousness and even when we have reached the first stage of clairvoyance, we can still say, in a certain sense, “I am here; and that being which I see is there.” At the second stage of clairvoyance, we can no longer say this; we can only say, “Where that being is which I perceive, there am I myself.” It is as though our etheric body stretched out tentacles on all sides and drew us within the beings into which we, perceiving them, plunge our own being. There is a feeling belonging to our ordinary normal consciousness which can give us an idea of this clairvoyant experience; only, what the clairvoyant of the second stage experiences is infinitely more intense than a feeling; it amounts to a perception, an understanding of, an immersion in another being. The feeling to which I refer, which can be compared to this experience of the clairvoyant, is sympathy, love. What does it really imply when we feel sympathy and love in ordinary life? If we ponder more closely on the nature of sympathy and love—this was slightly touched upon yesterday—we find that sympathy and love cause us to detach ourselves from ourselves and to pass over into the life of the other being. It is truly a wonderful mystery of human life, that we are able to feel sympathy and love. There is scarcely anything among the ordinary phenomena of normal consciousness which can so convince man of the divinity of existence, as the possibility of developing love and sympathy. As human beings we experience our existence in our own selves; and we experience the world by perceiving it with our senses or grasping it with our reason. It is not possible for any intellect, for any eye, to look into the human heart, to gaze into the human soul; for the soul of another keeps enclosed in its innermost chamber what it has within it of joy or sorrow, and truly it should appear as a wonderful mystery to anyone, that he can, as it were, pour himself into the being of other souls—live in their life and share their joys and sorrows. So just as we with our normal consciousness can by means of sympathy and love plunge into the sorrows and joys of conscious beings, so does the clairvoyant learn, at the second stage of clairvoyance, not only to plunge into everything conscious, into everything that can suffer and rejoice in a human way or in a manner resembling the human; he learns to plunge into everything that is alive. Mark well, I say everything living;—for at this second stage one only learns to plunge into living things, not yet into that which is without life or which appears lifeless, dead, and which we see around as a mineral kingdom. But this immersing oneself into living things is connected with a view of what goes on in the inner nature of those beings. We feel ourselves there, within the living beings; we learn to live with the plants, the animals, and with other human beings, at this second stage of clairvoyance. But not only this; we also learn to recognize behind all living things a higher spiritual world, the beings of the Second Hierarchy. It is necessary that we should form a clear idea of these connections for if one only enumerated what sort of beings belonged to the various hierarchies that would seem but a dry theory. We can only gain a living idea of what lives and weaves behind the sense-world if we know the path by which clairvoyant consciousness penetrates it.

Now, beginning once more from man, we will try to describe the beings of the Second Hierarchy. We saw yesterday, that the beings of the Third Hierarchy are characterised by the fact that in place of human perception, they have manifestation of their own being, and instead of human inner life they have what we may call “being filled with the spirit.” In the beings of the Second Hierarchy we experience when we plunge into them, that not only is their perception a manifestation of their being, not only do they manifest their own being, but that this manifestation remains, as something independent, which separates from these beings themselves. We can gain an idea of what we thus perceive if we think of a snail, which separates off its own shell. The shell—so we understand—consists of a substance which is at first contained in the body of the snail. The snail then detaches it. Not only does the snail manifest its own being externally, but detaches something which then becomes objective and remains. So it is with the actual nature, with the selfhood of the beings of the Second Hierarchy. Not only do they manifest their self-hood as do the beings of the Third Hierarchy, but they detach it from themselves, so that it remains as an independent being. This will be clearer to us, if we picture on the one hand, a being of the Third Hierarchy, and on the other hand a being of the Second Hierarchy. Let us direct our occult vision to a being of the Third Hierarchy. We recognize this being as such because it manifests its selfhood, its inner life externally, and in this manifestation it has its perception; but if it were to change its inner perception, its inner experience, the outer manifestation would also be different. As the inner condition of these beings of the Third Hierarchy changes, and their experiences vary, so do the external manifestations continually change. But if you look at a being of the Second Hierarchy with occult vision, it is quite different. These beings also perceive and experience inwardly; but what they experience is detached from them like a sort of shell or skin; it acquires independent existence. If the being of the Second Hierarchy then passes on into another inner condition, has a different perception and manifests in a new way, the old manifestation of the being will still exist; it still remains and does not pass away, as in the case of a being of the Third Hierarchy. So then, what appears in the place of manifestation in a being of the Second Hierarchy, we can call a self-creation, a sort of shell or skin; it creates, as it were, an impression of itself, makes itself objective, in a sort of image. That is what distinguishes the beings of the Second Hierarchy. And if we ask ourselves what appears in these beings in the place of the “being filled with the spirit” of the beings of the Third Hierarchy, it is shown to occult vision that every time the being detaches such a picture, or image of itself, life is stimulated. The stimulation of life is always the result of such a self-creation.

Thus, in the beings of the Third Hierarchy we must distinguish their external life in their manifestation, and their inner life in their “being filled with spirit.” In the beings of the Second Hierarchy we must distinguish their external side as a creating of themselves, a making of themselves objective in images, in pictures; and their inner activity as the stimulation of life, as if fluidity continually rippled in itself and congealed as it detached its image externally. This approximately represents to occult vision the external and internal fulfilment of the beings of the Second Hierarchy. Whilst to occult vision the “being filled with the spirit” of the beings of the Third Hierarchy appears in picture and imagination, as a sort of spiritual light, so is the fluidic life, the stimulation of life which is connected with an external separation, perceived in such a way that occult perception hears something like spiritual tone, the Music of the Spheres. It is like spiritual sound, not spiritual light as in the case of the Third Hierarchy.

Now in these beings of the Second Hierarchy we can distinguish several categories just as we did among the beings of the Third Hierarchy. To distinguish between these categories will be more difficult, for the higher we ascend the more difficult it becomes. We must in the course of our ascent, first of all gain some idea of all that underlies the world surrounding us, in so far as the world around us has forms. I have already said that as regards this second stage of clairvoyance, we need only consider that which lives, not that which appears to us lifeless. What lives comes into consideration, but what lives has in the first place, form. Plants have forms, animals have forms, man has a form. If clairvoyant vision is directed with all the qualities described to-day, to everything around us in nature which has form, and if we look away from all the other parts of the being and only see the forms, considering among the plants the multiplicity of the forms, as also in the animals and in man, this clairvoyant vision then perceives from the totality of the beings of the Second Hierarchy those which we call the Spirits of Form— the Exusiai. We can, however, turn our attention to something besides the form in the beings around us in nature. We know indeed, that everything which lives changes its form, in a certain respect, as it grows. This change, this alteration of form, this metamorphosis, strikes us more particularly in the plant-world. Now if we direct, not the ordinary vision but the clairvoyant vision of the second stage, to the growing plant-world, we see how the plant gradually gains its form, how it passes from the form of the root to the form of the leaf, to the form of the flower, to the form of the fruit. If we look at the growing animal, at the growing man, we do not merely consider a form as it exists at a given moment, we see the growth of the living being. If we allow ourselves to be stimulated by this contemplation of the growth of the living being; reflecting how the forms change, how they are in active metamorphosis—then, the clairvoyant vision of the second stage becomes aware of what we call the category of the Spirits of Motion—Dynamis.

It is still more difficult to consider a third category of such beings of the Second Hierarchy. For we must consider neither the form as such, nor the changes of form, nor the movement; but that which is expressed in the form. We can describe how a man may train himself to this. Of course it does not suffice to train the ordinary normal consciousness in such a way as has just been described, he must he helped by the use of the other exercises which raise man to occult vision. He must perform these; and not educate himself by means of his ordinary consciousness but by clairvoyant consciousness. This must first train itself as to how man himself becomes, in his outer form, the expression of his inner being. As we have said, that can also be done by the normal consciousness, but in that way one would attain to nothing but conjecture, a supposition of what may lie behind the bearing, gestures, and the facial expression of the human being. But when the clairvoyant vision which has already been trained to the second stage of clairvoyance, allows the physiognomy, gestures, and facial expression in man to work upon him, it produces stimulations through which he can gradually train himself to observe the beings of the third category of the Second Hierarchy. But this cannot take place—please take note of this—if he merely observes the gestures, imitative expression, and physiognomy of man; if he remains at this stage very little can really be gained. He must pass on—occult education is carried on in this most rational way in this realm—he must pass over to the plants. The animals can be left out, it is not very important to study them, but after one has trained oneself a little, clairvoyantly, to learn the inner being of his soul from a man's physiognomy and gestures; it is important to turn to the plant-world and educate oneself further by means of this. Here someone clairvoyantly trained can have very remarkable experiences; he will feel profoundly the difference between the leaf of a plant which—let us say—runs to a point (diagram a.) and the leaf of a plant which has this form (diagram b.); between a blossom which grows upwards in this way (c.) and one which opens outwards. (d.) (See Figure 2) A whole world of difference appears in the inner experience if one directs the occult vision of the second stage to a lily or to a tulip, if one lets either a panicle of oats or a wheat or barley stalk work upon one.

You can realise from this that only to the occult vision of the second stage are those beings which we call the group-souls, actually perceptible. Only for those occultly developed individuals who can extend their own etheric body as tentacles, is it possible to know the beings of the Second Hierarchy and also the group-soul-beings which exist in the various kingdoms of Nature. Still more difficult is the ascent to the beings of the First Hierarchy, and to those beings which are their offspring in the kingdoms of nature. We shall speak further about these in the next lecture.

The name ‘Rosicrucian’ has an indefinite, vague air for anyone who studies the theosophical literature, as if there were a secret behind it. Many consider it to be a term for people who involved themselves in possible and impossible magic in the 18th century. Reading the works of people who want to study the Rosicrucians scientifically and historically one feels the kindly shrug of the shoulders when they write such things as: ‘There was a kind of brotherhood once that had noble ideals and ideas of moral progress.’ They may also refer to their symbolic formulas. But it is emphatically stated again and again in learned works that the Rosicrucians are degenerate. If the Rosicrucians had ever been what those people say they are, Rosicrucianism would be something that is utterly wrong. In reality it is one of the greatest treasures humanity has. Their secrets have never appeared in books. If something did come out, it was due to betrayal or the like, and such things might then easily be taken for foolishness or superstition. Such a view has nothing to do with what Rosicrucianism actually was. Rosicrucianism may be found encompassed in a book published in 1616. The author was called Johann Valentin Andreae. The title of the book was The chymical wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.¹⁶² It describes the progress of someone who was becoming a Rosicrucian. Later Andreae published a book where it was impossible to tell if it was meant to be serious, a joke or a retraction.¹⁶³

Today we shall discover the things that may be said in public about the true nature of Rosicrucianism. There has always been initiation. People are at different stages of development. Some are far advanced and initiated into the most profound secrets of the world, people who know something about the way worlds evolve, how the earth evolved, and how human beings gradually reach higher and higher levels of development. When it is said that an initiate ‘has the knowledge’, this is often taken too lightly. To know the real secret of man, to know the future of man, is the greatest thing anyone can learn. Yes, there is a knowledge that actually has a deadly effect on someone who is unprepared. If it were simply told today, humanity would be lost. It would be split, with the greatest part destroyed, whilst a smaller part would benefit from the knowledge. The secret can never be elicited from initiates by anyone who does not have the right to know; not even if you were to torture them and make them into martyrs. No initiate would ever reveal the ultimate secret of the world to anyone who does not have the right to know. The very thought of having to reveal the secret would drive him mad or kill him. Let me give you a picture that gives the whole development connected with this secret in perspective—it is of an avenue that gets narrower and narrower, seemingly, though one day the great secret will be revealed to all humanity.

Rosicrucianism is one way of gaining initiation. It was established by Christian Rosenkreutz.¹⁶⁴ There are different ways of initiation. One was taught by the ancient Rishis in India; it is the Oriental yoga way. Then there was the gnostic Christian way, and the Rosicrucian way is the third. All three ways take people to the summit of initiation. But it is not usually taken into account that the mental and physical constitution of Indians and Europeans is utterly different. It would in fact be impossible for a European body to take the Indian way. People also fail to realize the difference in external influences. It is possible to see that in India, for example, some diseases—cholera, smallpox—take a very different course; they are different in hot compared to cold countries. The environment is completely different and therefore has a different influence on all the enveloping bodies of man. It was peculiar to think, therefore, to say that Europeans could go through yoga training. It was an error. People did not know, however, that the Rosicrucians had followed a way of development from the 14th century.

The Rosicrucian way is certainly not un-Christian. For many people who are firm and ardent Christians the gnostic Christian way is the right one they will reach the highest peaks by this route. But the number of such people is getting less. Rosicrucianism holds the most profound secrets of Christianity but also makes it possible to remove all the doubts raised in human minds today by popular or also less popular views. No one is protected from the most dreadful doubts today, which are coming to people from every direction. Christian training would not enable them to meet these doubts in the right way, protect and defend themselves from them. Do not take this lightly. If someone were to say, for instance, that he does not read Haeckel but stays firmly in the confines of his Christian view of the world, this would not achieve anything. We live in a world where people are full of our civilization. We are using natural laws when we go by train or use the newly developed sources of light.¹⁶⁵ However much a person may shut himself off—the thoughts that live in the spiritual environment come to him from every railway engine, every artificial flame. If someone were to limit himself entirely to reading the Bible, his astral body, his soul body, would nevertheless be surrounded by all kinds of destructive inner feelings during the night. You would not know what was making you nervous. Someone who knows the thoughts that reach us at an unconscious level does know. It is not a matter of materialistic science as such, but the whole atmosphere of mind and spirit in which we live. In the 12th century people still felt religious ardour, with the Church the spiritual and external focus of their lives. Having laboured hard, people would seek refuge in the house of the spiritual powers and find peace there. This has now changed. Rosicrucian training takes account of these facts, of everything modern man has to face.

What does Rosicrucian training consist in? You will meet high ideals in it. Anyone wishing to take up this training must turn to someone who has the requisite knowledge. Even as he takes the first steps the pupil will realize what really matters. Rosicrucian training completely transforms the human being. It is only by gaining the faculties for the higher world that he can be a citizen of it.

Seven elements, activities, are part of Rosicrucian occult training: 1) proper study; 2) acquiring imagination; 3) learning the occult script; 4) finding the philosopher's stone; 5) gaining knowledge of man himself, the small world or microcosm; 6) gaining knowledge of the macrocosm; 7) knowing godliness. The sequence may vary, with a teacher perhaps taking 5) as the fourth step, for instance, to suit the pupil's individual nature. You will ask if genuine Rosicrucianism still exists today. Yes, it does, and it will achieve its greatest significance in the future. The Rosicrucian brothers also have signs of identification. Not many of them are able to present themselves in public; some work entirely in secret. Anyone who seeks them will find them; and if someone does not find them he may assume that the time is not yet right for him. It [the meeting] will inevitably happen, however. It may often seem to be pure chance. It may happen, for instance, that you have to sit in a railway waiting room for 3 hours because snow is blocking the line. A stranger approaches you seemingly quite by chance. You have found your teacher. This is just one instance which I mention to you.

1) Proper study. What does this involve? You will be taken into worlds of which ordinary people have no idea. It will be necessary to gain your bearings in those worlds. It is not for people who are divorced from reality, lacking a firm basis to their thinking. Absolute certainty in one's thinking is a precondition. The individual has to look around, endeavouring to look about him with sound eyes, and must also be able to shut off his senses. This is something not everyone appreciates, not even the greatest philosophers. Eduard von Hartmann, for example, said over and over again: ‘Something coming from the senses is always present when we think; thinking without anything relating to the senses is impossible.’¹⁶⁶ It is unbelievably arrogant to say that thinking without anything relating to the senses is impossible. Methods of developing a way of thinking free from sensory elements are now presented in the spiritual scientific literature and in lectures.

People who are found to be suitable are guided towards deeper knowledge. The elementary part of this knowledge is in fact open to many people. The way of study presented today, leaving aside the sense-related aspects of the world, consists in training one's thoughts. These then have nothing to do with the world we perceive around us through the senses. Wanting to enter even more deeply, one must put one's mind to more powerful thought training. I have endeavoured to give directions for such a way of thinking in the two books The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity - A Philosophy of Freedom and Truth and Knowledge. It is like this—when he begins to study these books at some depth, the reader will find that one thought follows another in a sequence that is determined by necessity. All people seeking to gain higher things are thus given the means for genuine growth in the spirit.

2) Developing powers of imagination. Here the way ideas are formed differs from ordinary thinking. Think of Goethe's words ‘All things corruptible are but a parable’. When you see someone with a smiling or worried face you'll not say ‘a crease is developing in that face’, or ‘a tear runs down his cheek’. What you'll say is that this shows a cheerful and this a sorrowful soul. The outer reveals the inner aspect; it is a simile, a likeness of what lives in the soul. Anyone will accept this in the case of human beings. Everyone knows the difference between a human head and a picture of it. A geologist may describe the earth for you, concerning himself only with its purely physical structure. People do not know that the earth's body is the body of a living entity, and that particular plants reflect the happy and the sad earth spirit. Goethe knew to tell of this; he knew how to see the earth as a body and knew what lived in it. In his Faust, he made the earth spirit say:

In life like a flood, in deeds like a storm
I surge to and fro,
Up and down I flow!
Birth and the grave,
an eternal wave,
Turning, returning,
A life ever burning.
And thus I work at Time's whirring wheel,
God's living garment I weave and reveal.

Everything on earth is a likeness of what is happening in the inner earth. People walk about on the earth's body. From my body, the earth may say, grows the seed that gives human beings their bread. The words in John's gospel, ‘He who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me’, speak of one of the most profound mysteries in the way we look at the world.

Imagination is gained by seeing everything as a likeness. It is, however, necessary to learn logical thinking first. But in Rosicrucian training no one will choose a different image. Each feels that everything is in the image of the eternal. Here I must use dialogue to speak of something that lies behind an image that was taught in medieval temples and then in the Rosicrucian schools. The teacher would say to the pupil: ‘Look at the plant putting its root down in the soil and turning its flower, the seat of its organs of fertilization, to the light of the sun. The calyx is given a chaste kiss by the sunbeam and a new entity comes into existence.’ Even Darwin said that the root of a plant may be compared with the head.¹⁶⁷ Man is an inverted plant. His organs of reproduction are turned towards the centre of the earth in shame. The animal is between man and plant. These three realms of nature are shown in the image of a cross (Fig. 5).¹⁶⁸

Plato said: ‘The world's soul has been crucified on the cross of the world's body.’/p>

The Rosicrucian teacher would then ask his pupil to compare matter as it exists in flesh with the chaste matter of a plant, telling him that a time would come when human beings would be cleansed of their passions and desires, maturing to a stage and shining out towards the sun of the spirit where they will be as chaste and without desire as the chaste plant. With this ideal they will cleanse their flesh, so that fertilization becomes chaste and pure. Medieval schooling represented this ideal in the holy grail. The chalice is a sacred symbol of what human sensuality must become if it is to be like the calyx of a plant. It will then receive the kiss of the white dove—the chalice is shown with the dove above it.

To make the world thus spiritual, seeing man's environment in such images, raises him to the point of vision in astral images. Imagination is developed out of heart and mind and out of feeling.

3) Learning the occult script. The occult script reflects the inner currents in nature. One such sign is the vortex. If you were able to see the whole of the Orion nebula you would have two sixes intertwined. You see a world that is dying and one that is becoming in the nebula. Things are like this everywhere. When a plant sheds a new fruit, nothing from the old plant passes on to the new one. Nothing but powers cause a new plant to develop. And once again you would only see the vortex swirling inwards and out. In the same way you might see an old civilization spiralling into itself and a new one snaking out. This spiritual process can help us understand such a sign that is part of the script (Fig. 6).

800 years before Christ was born the sun entered into the sign of the Ram or lamb. Every spring it moves on a distance. The spring equinox is now in the constellation of the Fishes. At that earlier time people thought the Ram brought all that was good, new strength and power in spring. They even connected the redeemer with this. In early Christian times, the cross and the lamb were their symbol for this. Before the sun was in the sign of the Ram in spring, it was in the sign of the Bull. The Egyptians venerated the sacred bull Apis at that time, the Persians the Mythras bull. After the Flood, the sun was in the sign of Cancer. Cancer was given this occult sign: (Fig. 6).

And so there are many such lines, and also colours. And so one learns the signs that take us into the forces and powers of nature. One learns to develop the will in the occult script.

4) Finding the philosopher's stone. This was felt to be a secret in the 18th century. Someone then also published something about it. It is something everyone knows. The philosopher's stone is at the same time the noblest thing man can attain to, can make of his organism in order to achieve higher development.

Let me give you a story from Vedanta philosophy for this.¹⁶⁹ People once wanted to see if man could also live without eyes. After a year the individual concerned said: ‘Yes, I have lived, but as a blind person? He then tried to live without ears and a year later reported: 'Yes I have lived without ears, but as a deaf person.’ The voice was taken away and he lived as a mute person. Then his breath was to be taken away as well and that proved impossible. He could not live without breathing. Our breathing gives us the air we need to live. ‘And god breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’¹⁷⁰ We take in oxygen with every breath and release carbon dioxide. In the plant, the cycle goes the other way round. The plant uses carbon to build its body. This is why we find fossilized plants in coal after thousands of years. Man has carbon in him; he breathes in oxygen, and the carbon dioxide which is produced is removed. Animals do the same. The Rosicrucian school teaches a special way of breathing, so that the person learns the process which the plant carries out in itself. One day man will be able to transform his carbon himself; he himself will transform the blue blood that is streaming back into red blood. Now he takes in plant nature; one day he himself will do what the plant does today. The Rosicrucian says: ‘Today your body is made of flesh; one day you will create it yourself through the breath. Plant nature will appear in you, but you'll not sleep the way plants do but will be clairvoyant with it.’

This is the ideal man is moving towards—to build his body of carbon. Ordinary coal is the philosopher's stone. When man's body has become star-like it will not be black coal but transparent carbon, clear as water. These are not just chemical processes but sublime ideals. The Rosicrucian goes through it in stages, and later the whole of humanity will ascend to this level.

5) Knowing the human being as microcosm. In all the rest of nature, the world is spread out; man is an extract of it. Everything is spread out in the world in letters, and man is the word. In the early 19th century Oken¹⁷¹ and Schelling¹⁷² presented the basic ideas of this, which were quite correct. They sought to gain understanding of the essence that lies in an organ. Oken got a bit grotesque when he said the tongue was a cuttlefish. Goethe said: ‘The eye is created by the light for the light.’¹⁷³ We only come to recognize the true nature of light when we find the principle in man that corresponds to light.

The teacher gives his pupil a leitmotiv, asking him to concentrate on a point, the organ that lies behind the root of the nose, and he comes to know the nature of dream consciousness in addition to his wide-awake conscious awareness. The human being gets to know the whole world when he deeply considers the spleen, liver and other things. When he has expanded his conscious awareness by thus entering into himself—it is dangerous to go broody—he will become one with the whole world.

6) Coming to know the macrocosm. Having perceived what I have just described, he will also perceive the creator behind all creation.

7) Getting to know godliness. At the 7th stage the individual reaches a point that calls forth universal feeling from the depths of the human soul and something he only has a right to know at this stage—the feeling of blessedness. It is only by gaining insight into macrocosm that he learns to enter into universal feeling. Entering into every individual thing in a clear and living way is godliness. There he discovers the soul that lies at rest behind nature. Someone once said to me: ‘I never thought a stone would feel anything if I split it.’ The spirit of the mineral world feels the greatest voluptuousness when a stone is split, a feeling of bliss. It may seem to us that the marble quarry is going through martyrdom; yet for the spirit of the stone is it the greatest bliss. Now you might ask why people are not told such details. Someone once said it would be most useful for people to know them. My reply was: 'People would want to gain things for themselves from this, and this secret must only be used in utterly selfless service to humanity.’

The Rosicrucians knew this secret, as do those who now walk this earth and serve human progress. They tell the things that will serve progress, they who know how the ‘chymical wedding’ may proceed.

• 162. Andreae, Johann Valentin (1586–1654), German protestant theologian. ‘The chymical wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, Anno 1459’, written in 1603. was published anonymously in Strassburg in 1616. See Steiner R. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, essay written in 1917 (in GA 35); P. M. Allen compiler and editor. Blauvelt: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1968.
• 163. Andreae's later works, including the allegorical Die Christburg (1626), were more pietistic.
• 164. See lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Neuchatel on 27 and 28 October 1911. In Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz (in GA 130). Tr. P. Wehrle. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1984.
• 165. New York had the first electric street lighting in 1882.
• 166. von Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard (1842–1906). His Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869) was translated into English by Coupland , with a new edition in 1931. At the beginning of the second volume (1882) we read: ‘We think either in images, in which case we rake sensory impressions and transformations and combinations of them directly from memory, or we think in abstract terms. Abstract notions have, however, merely been abstracted from our sensory perceptions, and we may discard as much as we like in the process of abstraction, so long as something actually remains. This has thus been part of the whole before from which the abstraction was made. Abstract notions thus are merely residues of sensory impressions and therefore take sensory by nature.’
• 167. Darwin, Charles (1809–1882). ‘Surely it is no exaggeration to maintain that a root tip which has the capacity for achieving movements of adjacent parts performs a function similar to that of the brain of a lower animal.’ Darwin C., assisted by Darwin F. The Power of Movement of Plants. New York 1892.
• 168. Plato (c. 427–c. 347 BC) Greek philosopher. After living for a time at the Syracuse court, Plato founded the most influential school of the ancient world, the Academy, in Athens. The world's soul has been crucified on the cross of the world's body. Rudolf Steiner would frequently refer to these words from Timaeus (chapter 8), but always in the form given by the Viennese philosopher Vincenz Knauer, who was a personal acquaintance, in his Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie in ihrer Entwickelung und teilweisen Lösung von Thales bis Robert Hamerling. Vienna 1892, S. 96 (the passage is underlined in the copy of the work in Rudolf Steiner's library): ‘We know from mythology, in Timaeus, that god placed this world soul in the universe in the form of a cross and stretched the world's body upon it.’ The passage in Timaeus says that god split the world's soul in two halves, ‘brought the two parts together in the form of the Greek letter chi (Χ) and made each into a circle, so that the two met with their ends opposite to the middle, and each also met itself. He gave both parts the uniform movement of the circular orbit that took place in that same space, but made one of these circles the inner one, and the other the outer one’ (quoted from German translation by Otto Apelt, Der philosophischen Bibliothek Band 179. Leipzig 1919). See also Rudolf Steiner's discussion of this in Christianity as Mystical Fact (GA 8) (1902).
• 169. It has not so far been possible to trace this.
• 170. Genesis 2: 7.
• 171. Oken, Lorenz (1779–1851), German naturalist and natural philosopher, professor of medicine at Jena, later at Munich and then Zurich. The quote: ‘The tongue is a cuttlefish’ was freely rendered by Rudolf Steiner, basing on Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie. Jena 1831. Friedrich Frommann, 14. Buch: Zoologie, S. 424,466,496.
• 172. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854). German philosopher.
• 173. ‘The eye owes its existence to light. Light creates an organ for itself from indifferent accessory animal organs, an organ to be like unto itself Thus the eye is created in the light for the light, so that the inner light may come to meet the outer.’ From the introduction to Goethe's Theory of Colour, An Outline. See Rudolf Steiner's Goethe the Scientist (GA 1).

To consider just two ideas that are part of the Christian view—sinning against the holy spirit¹²⁰ and the idea of grace—and let them be illuminated for us from their depths, we have to know a little about the basic issues and movements of Christianity. You know from other lectures that behind the usual teaching about Christianity lies an esoteric Christianity. You also know that the gospels themselves give hints of such a Christianity, simply in the words: ‘When the Lord was speaking to the people he would speak in parables, but when he and the disciples were among themselves he would expound those parables to them.’¹²¹ There simply was the teaching given to people who were not yet able to understand so much, so that one could only hint at things, being unable as yet to go deeper with them, and the teaching that was meant for initiates. Paul, the great disseminator of Christianity, taught like this speaking to the people, as we know from his epistles. Apart from the teaching he gave for the people, in an external way, Paul also taught esoterically. External history does not know that Paul founded the esoteric school in Athens that was under the guidance of Dionysius. In this esoteric school of Christianity, intimate pupils were given the occult knowledge you are now getting to know through the science of the spirit.

Scholars do not know much about the teaching Paul's esoteric companions gave to intimate pupils in Athens at that time. People even speak of a false Dionysius, saying that it cannot be proved that anything he taught was ever written down. The individual who taught these things in the 6th century was therefore called pseudo-Dionysius. Only people who do not know how such intimate teachings were handled in those times can say such things. In our day and age everyone rushes things into print. In the old days, the most sacred truth would be preserved from publication. Teachers would first take a look at the individual to whom they would tell it. It was taught person to person, and to people who were truly able to know its value. The teachings of esoteric Christianity were thus also passed from one individual to another, with some written down later, in the 6th century. It was customary for the leader of such a school to bear the name Dionysius, and so the leader also had that name in the 6th century, which was the name of his great predecessor in Athens, who was Paul's friend.

Let us consider the two concepts—sinning against the holy spirit, or really blaspheming against the holy spirit, and the concept of grace—as they were truly taught in Athens.

To get to the original meaning of Christianity we must go far back in the history of human evolution and understand that the coming of Christ Jesus brought something completely new in the evolution of the human mind and spirit. Paul's own initiation shows this most clearly. The situation where someone like Saul had a sudden enlightenment and became completely convinced of the truth of Christianity would not have been possible before the coming of the Christ. We have spoken of the nature of initiation here on earth before the coming of the Christ on previous occasions. Let us do it again, so that we may know what the spirit of truth truly is in Christian terms. To understand what went on in the ancient initiation centres we must briefly call to mind the nature of the human being.

You know about man having seven aspects. The physical body is made of the same materials as the lifeless matter in the physical world. The ether body calls these powers to life, and at every moment in our lives actively counters the decomposition of the physical body. It is only at death that the ether or life body leaves the physical body. A crystal holds its substance together of its own accord; the living body decomposes as soon as it is left to itself. There truly is a fighter against death in him at all times. Death comes when he ceases to fight. The third member is the astral body, the conscious awareness body. The fourth is the I, and through it man is the crowning glory of creation. In all occult teachings the human being was seen to have these four members. In the Pythagorean school every pupil first had to be taught this, and he could only be introduced to the higher wisdom once it had become inner conviction. He thus had to make this vow: ‘I vow by all that has been deeply imprinted in our hearts—the sacred fourfoldness, the spiritually sublime symbol, the source and origin of all creativeness in nature and in spirit.’

Even the most undeveloped human being has these four members. Human beings evolve through different incarnations, becoming more and more perfect because the I works on these three members of human nature. In the astral body it first of all works on everything that advances civilization, all logical, scientific learning that serves to take us beyond the animal level. That is the work of the I in the astral body. In every human being who has developed, whose I has been working on the astral body, that body divides in two—the part that is given and the part which has only been made by the I. This latter part, which grows larger and larger as the human being advances, is called manas or spirit self. In Christian esotericism this part is called the holy spirit, in contrast to the spirit that is the unpurified and unhallowed part of the astral body. This, then, is the fifth principle.

The I can also work into the denser ether body. This also happens in the ordinary way, but unconsciously. It has been said on a number of occasions that distinction must be made between work on the astral body and the ether body. With regard to their rate of progress, the astral body may be said to be like the movement of the minute hand compared to the ether body's hour hand. When a person opens up to the impression of a sublime work of art, this will transform both the life body and the conscious awareness body. Every great impulse in the arts has this effect. The most powerful effect comes from the religious impulses which the founders of religions have given to the world; they give the I its orientation towards the eternal. The clairvoyant eye can see it when the ether body of a human being becomes increasingly more beautiful and pure.

The part of the human ether body made spiritual by the I is called the buddhi or life spirit; it is transformed life body. In Christian esoteric teaching this part, which has been transformed by the I, is called the Christos. The fifth principle of essential human nature is the holy spirit, the sixth principle the Christ, the inner Christos.

Reference has already been made to the fact that occult training has always been available and that people could become initiates and then gain direct insight into the world of the spirit. This results from a higher transformation of the ether or life body. You therefore also need to understand that higher training is not just a matter of taking in concepts and things that are taught. Occult training means to transform the qualities of the life body. Someone who has transformed his temperament has done a great deal more than he would have done by taking in an infinite amount of knowledge.

An even higher transformation comes only with advanced training. Here the individual purifies and cleanses his physical body. What do we know of the human physical body? Dissection in an anatomical institute does not reveal the laws that govern it, the inner control of it. There is, however, a way to look into oneself and understand the movements of nerve strands, of pulse beat and the flow of respiration, so that one can consciously influence them. When someone is also able to transform his physical body in occult training, as it is called, the transformed dense body is called atman, for one begins by regulating the breathing process.¹²² The seventh principle of essential human nature is atman, called the father in Christian esoteric teaching.

This is how one first comes to the holy spirit, which is the transformed astral body, then through the holy spirit to the Christ, which is conscious awareness of the ether body, and through the Christ to the father, conscious awareness of the physical body.

Once you have understood how these seven aspects of human nature are related, you will also understand the nature of initiation in early times, before the Christ, and how it was after Christ Jesus had come to earth. When a person is asleep, only the physical and the ether body lie in the bed, the astral body is outside. When a person dies, he leaves behind his physical body, and the part of the physical body he has already transformed is lifted out—powers, not matter. It is very little indeed which he takes with him, but it is the element which will serve to shape the new physical body when the individual incarnates again. Materialism calls this the ‘permanent atom’.¹²³ First of all the part of the physical body which the individual has transformed departs, the ether body departs, the conscious awareness body departs and the I. After some time the part of the ether on which the individual has not yet been working separates off. The human being then goes into kamaloka, the place of purification. After some time the part of the astral body on which the I has not yet been working also separates off. A time comes when the human being only retains the parts of the three bodies which the I itself has worked through. This goes through the realm of the spirit. It is the core of man's eternal essence, which will grow all the more the I has been working on the bodies.

The holy spirit is the eternal spirit in man. The Christ is the eternal part of the life body, the father the eternal aspect of the physical body. These three go with the human being through all time, being the part of him that is eternal.

Before Christian times, initiation was such that the pupil would first be prepared for everything occult science was able to offer, up to the point where he was familiar with all the concepts and ideas, all the habits and feelings that are needed for living in the higher worlds and be able to have perceptions in them. Then came the ‘resurrection’, as it was called, taking three and a half days and three nights. For this the temple priest used his arts to put the individual artificially into a death-like sleep for three and a half days. Normally the physical and the ether body remain connected in sleep, but the art of the priest who performed the initiation caused the ether body of the initiand to be lifted out of the physical body for this period, leaving only a loose connection between the physical body and the other bodies. It was a deep trance sleep. The initiand's I lived in the higher worlds during this time. The pupil knew his way about there because he had been given knowledge of the higher world. The priest would guide him. To begin with, the priest had to free the ether body of the lethargic physical body so that he might guide the pupil into the worlds of spirit. Human beings would not have been able to rise into those higher worlds in a fully conscious state. They had to be lifted out of that state.

The initiand would experience magnificent, tremendous things there, but he would be entirely in the hands of the priest. Another person had control over him, and that was the price that had to be paid for entering into the higher worlds. You can imagine what he would be afterwards, if you remember that he was able to know his eternal principle on this occasion. He was rid of the part of his finite nature, of his physical body, which was of no use to him when he wanted to move in higher worlds. Such an individual would be a ‘knower’ after this, able to bear witness from personal vision of life's victory over death. Those were the initiates who could bear witness. The ether body had to be lifted out of the physical body to meet the Christos in the human being. Those initiates were able to say: ‘I know from personal experience that there is a part of the human being that is eternal, continuing through all incarnations. I know this; I have had living experience of this eternal core of my self.’ To gain this prize, they had to enter into three days of total dream sleep.

Something else was connected with this. This form of initiation also involved something else. The further back we go, the more are we able to see it. I characterized it before by saying that in very early times they had close marriage compared to our distant marriage. In all nations there were small communities that were interrelated. People would marry within their community, and it was considered immoral to go outside your small community. Marriages were always between blood relations. Close marriage only changed gradually to become distant marriage. Special measures were actually needed for initiations, with a careful selection made on the basis of previous incarnations to get the best possible blood mixture. Out of such a tribe would be born the one who was able to go through high-level initiations. With blood relations it is particularly easy to lift the ether body out of the physical body. It is not at all easy with distant marriages. Whole generations of priests saw to it that the blood was preserved in a quite specific way.

Human life is complicated and does not always follow a straight path. We need to enter more deeply into the riddles of existence. The principle of close marriage was abandoned more and more, with the tribe gradually expanding to be a nation. With the Israelites we can see how the tribal principle was taken up completely and raised to become the community of a nation. The Christ opened up this prospect further, into a distant future: ‘Anyone who does not leave father and mother, wife, children, brother and sister and also his personal life cannot be my disciple.’

Harsh but true, these words indicate the way Christianity was going. Within a national community one would say: ‘That is my brother, born within this nation.’ In the brotherhood of humanity, which encompasses the whole of humanity, we say: ‘You are a human being, therefore you are my brother.’ That is the most profound principle of Christianity. All the narrow-mindedness of the other kind of relationship must be torn apart, with a common bond bringing together one human being with another. This also tore apart the ancient initiation principle which had been based on blood relationship.

The new initiation principle, which was no longer tied up with any physical property, can be seen in the case of Paul himself. He was initiated in the light, not in temple darkness. This could not have happened at an earlier time. If we consider this we can see the tremendous change that came with Christ Jesus. It had been prepared for by Moses, Zarathustra, Buddha and Pythagoras and was brought by Christ Jesus.

We thus see the principle applied for the first time also in Christian initiation schools that the human being was taken into higher worlds not by withdrawing him from the physical body but in full conscious awareness and in his physical body. This was the case in the Christian esoteric schools. Among the ancients, on the other hand, the strict authority of the initiating temple priest had to be accepted by the initiand. It was only possible to rise to those worlds by submitting wholly to the power of such an initiator.

The principle of compulsive authority also came to expression in the general social life. The priests were the rulers. All rules of government, all authority structures came from those who had the power to initiate. This was possible when community was blood-based in both tribe and nation. The ending of the old initiation principle meant the beginning of a completely different authority—independent authority based only on trust. ‘You must believe the one whom you trust’ is the highest Christian idea to which one rises, with each being a brother to the other, and someone in a higher position given recognition as someone one trusts.

‘Watch and pray’ is the Christian principle. The new initiation takes place in the waking state. ‘You will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free’¹²⁴ are profound Christian words. They signify a prospect opening out into the future of Christianity. Christianity is only at the beginning of its evolution.

Consider the intense relationship between the teacher who was the initiator in the old temple sleep and his pupil receiving his final initiation in three and a half days. The relationship was one we cannot even imagine today. The relationship between a hypnotist and his subject gives us a faint idea of the way in which the initiating temple priest would awaken first the holy spirit and then the Christos. The pupil would mirror the holy spirit and the Christos of the teacher; they had merged, a clairvoyant could observe the process. For those three days, teacher and pupil were identified with one another. The teacher's I lived on in all his pupils, deeply fused during those three days. Consider the social pyramid, with the people below, above them the initiates, above them the teachers of the initiates. One spirit flowed down through all levels. Much lives on in people who were initiated in this way, also alien things.

With the principle of Christianity, individual nature gained validity. Hence the principle of Christian initiation that pupils must never fuse with the teacher in this way. They must not become one person in the initiation process. The holy spirit must arise, be awakened, in the I of each individual. This has become the principle of Christian initiation. It is also shown in symbolic form in the miracle of Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles.¹²⁵ The possibility for initiation was given in that they all began to speak in different tongues. The teacher respects the individual nature of the other; he enters into the pupi's heart but does not take it out of his physical body.

Remember how it is above all important for present-day humanity that the holy spirit and the Christos are developed independently. There you can see that this human individual nature only came to be considered to be independent with this principle of Christianity. It was Christianity which finally and truly freed the human individual, and because of this, Christianity means that our relationship to truth and wisdom must be entirely different now.

In earlier times, the spirit of wisdom ruled because it was centralized. With humanity shattering it became decentralized, but egotism also arose. The more the principle of distant marriage came to apply, the greater had to be the power of the element that would bring human beings, who were now independent, together again. What is this element? Consider the things we learn today in the elementary parts of our science of the spirit and then go back in history, and you will find that this knowledge was possessed only by small groups, finally only the very summit, which then ruled on the principle of compulsive authority. We are approaching a time when wisdom will be more and more among the people. It will be a means of creating the great brotherhood of humanity.

Two individuals investigating the realm of the spirit will never have different opinions about one and the same thing. If they do, one opinion will be wrong. Wisdom is a single whole, and there can be no difference. The more individual people grow, the more must they be given wisdom; this will bring them together. Today we are in a state of transition. The principle of the point of view comes to an end as wisdom progressively develops. The more individual humanity becomes, the wiser must it grow. That is the spirit of wisdom which Christ Jesus promised to his people. The sun of wisdom draws all individual points of view to itself, as the sun does all plants.

The spirit that will make human beings free is the holy spirit. A Christian must never sin against it. Those who do, sin against Christianity itself, against the promised spirit who alone can bring individual human beings together.

In the gospels we read of Christ Jesus driving out demons.¹²⁶ Demons will only exist for as long as man is unfree, so long as he has not taken up this spirit of wisdom. Man is literally loaded with all kinds of spirits that flow in and out of his lower members. We call them apparitions, spectres, ghosts, demons.¹²⁷ To make a rather commonplace comparison—it is like maggots moving in and out of a cheese. When he stood there as the spirit who drives out demons, Christ Jesus showed himself to be the spirit of freedom. You can only drive out demons by pitting one spirit against another, the spirit of freedom against all other spirits.

Now let us briefly think of those earlier communities of tribe and nation. How could those people be brought together, not having become free individuals? Imagine everyone sitting in this room has become free, with the spirit of truth living in all of them. Will we ever be in dispute, ever be in discord? No, for when only the spirit unites us there are no points of view. In earlier times external laws had to prevail to keep people together. Two people who know the spirit of truth will feel drawn to one another of their own accord. And so we have the law at the beginning of human evolution, and in the end, peaceful, harmonious collaboration that comes from inside. In Christian esoteric teaching this is called ‘grace’, the opposite of ‘law’. Nothing but the ability to feel with another individual, being completely at peace in doing so—that is the most profound concept of Christianity.

The astral body filled with the holy spirit is the same for all. The spirit of truth is the same in all. Think of this spirit in an individual in whom the Christos has also been awakened, the principle active in the life body as life spirit. When every human being lets his ether body be filled with this feeling, every heart will have a feeling for the unified spirit, for individuals brought together in common wisdom. And what you then feel inside you is caritas, grace.

It was brought by the one who at the beginning of our era had the whole Christos in himself in the individual, the Christos who was the first to fulfil the whole principle of humanity. Christ Jesus made himself the principle that is to live in every single human being. Through him the spirit has come into the world that is freedom, independence, and peaceful cooperation. ‘Come to life again in Christ; let the spirit of discord die!’ Paul said.¹²⁸ Man may sin against everything that is not in this very spirit. If he were to sin against this spirit of common humanity, if he were to deny it, he would no longer be a Christian.

Man must progress to the point where he has conscious knowledge of the spirit. As he develops more and more, his conscious awareness body is transformed into the holy spirit. Because of this, sinning against the holy spirit is unforgivable.

The transformation of the ether body occurs unconsciously in the uninitiated. For as long as a human being is not initiated, he can only commit the sin that cannot be forgiven in his astral body. The initiate also must not sin against the physical and the ether body. These sins may be forgiven those who are not initiated. This is done with the help of those who guide the human race.

• 120. Matthew 13: 13 & 32; Mark 3: 28 & 29; Luke 12: 10.
• 121. Matthew 13: 10-13, 34-36; Mark 4: 33 & 34.
• 122. The German for breathing is Atmen. Translator
• 123. A theory established by the theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater. See Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater's Occult Chemistry.
• 124. John 8: 32
• 125. Acts 2: 4.
• 126. E.g. Luke 4: 33 & 34.
• 127. See Steiner R. Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (GA 99). 22 May–6 June 1907. Tr. M. Cotterell, D. Osmond. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1981.
• 128. Paraphrase. See Ephesians 2:4-6; 4:3.

Last time¹ we explored a theme that led us from our physical world to the higher worlds by means of what we call the elemental kingdoms. At that time we had the opportunity to look into the complicated nature of the human being and everything that is connected with it, how multiple threads lead upwards from the human being into the higher worlds. It is advisable to somewhat extend this topic today. This makes it necessary to make a brief comment beforehand.

If we would solely focus on the elemental facts, then we would not progress well in our theosophical contemplations. Many of the members would then have to refer back repeatedly to the same facts. Elemental things do not have to be understood solely in the way one hears about them when first encountering the theosophical world view. They can also be understood in a way that differs to a small extent from what a rational man nowadays would be able to accept. That is to say, a rational modern man would at most acknowledge a small amount of what rises above the physical world. There might be some people who would accept such things. But they say, “There can be no certainty about such things, although they are not completely inane.” However, this last remark will be thrown at what corresponds to “the higher planes” of theosophical illumination. This does not only mean that a higher grade of understanding is required to hear about and understand the higher regions, but all the feelings one can muster, after searching for knowledge for a long time during a life focussed on Theosophy, belong to it. In a way, more might be expected of people who have had Theosophy in their lives for a longer time. Those who are recent participants are asked to keep in mind that today’s topic is somewhat far from what is ordinarily being talked about. But it shouldn’t be too difficult to say to oneself, “Initially some of this will seem to me to be fantasy and dream-like, but after contemplating for longer along those lines, it will become less strange. It could be possible that a number of things only appear to me inane now, but once I have developed feelings about them, they will no longer appear to me to be so.

Afterwards and with objectiveness, we want to approach this topic which, for those who have advanced in their feelings, constitutes a higher chapter of the theosophical world view.

If we, with the open eyes of a clairvoyant, penetrate further and further into the higher worlds, into the astral world, the lower and higher Devachan, of which we have already talked often, we can see entities there who do not embody themselves into our physical world, who do not assume a physical body, but who are still complete entities like human beings here on our plane. If man ascends from the solid foundation of our physical world to the higher worlds, he has to distinguish between two different kinds of beings. One kind sends its revelations down into the physical plane. The other kind reveals itself either not at all on the physical plane, or so that this revelation is hardly comprehensible for ordinary observation.

Let us recall groups of animals that belong together, who are of similar shape and are related to each other. They have a group-soul—a group-Ego in the astral world. If we observe such a group-Ego on the astral plane, we will find that such a being is a self-contained entity, a personality, like the human being is a self-contained personality on the physical plane. The seer will meet the group-souls of animals there, just as he is meeting people here. They are individual, self-contained personalities on the astral plane, and only their revelations are sent down into the physical world. It is just as if I am separated from them by a wall with holes in it, so that fingers can be stuck through it. One could then say, “I see something belonging to a different entity.” This is just as if you are observing a lion, and the soul to which it belongs is as if it is behind a wall, and all lions are like fingers stretched through the wall. We meet these group-Egos as self-contained beings on the astral plane. They can be easily found in the physical world through their revelations, as one can see the organs that are stretched out into it.

But it is not the case with all astral beings that one can well observe what they reveal. If one’s senses are not heightened one would not even suspect the presence of these astral beings. Thus, man meets personalities on the astral plane, some of them he knows, but also some who appear unfamiliar to him, who he doesn’t know well from the physical plane, who, in a certain sense, are new to him. The astral plane is very populated and various entities live there that people would never have dreamed of. It is not proposed that these entities have no effect on the physical plane—on the contrary, they have a tremendous effect on human beings. We can only recognise the complexity of the inter-relationships when we look at all that impacts on these. We encounter beings who partly seem to be extraordinarily gentle, mild beings, who also live very peacefully amongst themselves. But we also meet others, who cannot really be characterised in this fashion, who have all sorts of mean characteristics and especially pose a danger when they are coming near humans.

The peculiar thing with these beings is that all our conceptions about spatial relationships that we have derived from the physical world, are being dismantled. If we do not want to live in a fantasy, we have to gradually immerse ourselves into concepts that are quite different from those that we usually have. What we encounter with these not very pleasant beings is, that they are not really present where we perceive them to be but are somewhere completely different. Their effects are in the astral world, but their home isn’t there.

A rough comparison would be like this; imagine a worker who lives in a suburb and every morning goes to work in the city. There he has his field of work, but he lives outside the city. This is a rough comparison. A better one would be the following, but this is also already quite fantasy-like; imagine the worker lives very far away from Munich, but has elastic arms, so that he can be hours away from his work and still can perform it. You will have to attain quite different spatial imaginations than those that you are familiar with from the physical plane. Any being of astral nature is able to live on another planet, and yet exert influence here on the astral plane. This is because the separation of spatial conditions no longer exists. The effects that it instigates, for example on other world bodies, are transmitted and appear on the Earth. We do not want to examine the spiritual world only with concepts that we have formed in the physical world, but we must force ourselves to form new concepts as well.

Those entities, about which I have said that they belong to the unappealing beings, are lunar beings. There they have their actual home. Clairvoyantly, you could observe the outstretched fingers here in Munich, but to observe the being itself you would have to travel for hours. You will find that such beings manipulate things here on Earth. But if you follow the ‘lines of force’ you will arrive at the Moon. That is where their homeland is. In fact, the Moon is populated in this way. Although these beings do not possess a dense corporeality such as our Earth beings have, they have a physicality, but it is so diluted, that on Earth it expresses itself as astral. They could be compared to dwarfish beings that will not grow taller than a six- to seven-year-old child. These beings have one characteristic that will appear to you as being very strange, but it is contingent upon the conditions of the Moon. However, if all worlds were alike, then there would be no need that so many of them should exist. This characteristic is that they can roar with infinite power. Their yelling instruments are extraordinarily well developed. At first, these beings make themselves known on the earthly astral plane. They are not always and everywhere present but are attracted by certain circumstances of our lives. The deeds of such beings can be found at certain locations, especially where mediums, somnambulists are, and where very specific things are present. There they penetrate with their effects and deeds and express themselves to the human being in a very unpleasant way. They can also be found where lower passions are unfolding.

On the other hand, the good-natured beings of the astral plane can be found where particularly humanitarian passions run free. In any charitable organisation, where real charity lives in the souls, there is stimulated that which draws such beings into the circle of humanity. In this way man really attracts certain beings by way of his deeds, and due to the characteristics that radiate out from him. Thus, he creates a connection to far away celestial bodies, that comes about through the manifestation of the deeds of the beings from other worlds and human souls.

The beings about whom I have talked last, which are gentle and mild, also have their home on a different planet, namely on Mars. From there they exert their influence onto the Earth. These beings work thus, so to speak, by striding across the vastness of space with their deeds. All real effects, except physical ones, from one planet to another, are based on the relationships between the inhabitants of those world bodies. So you can see that we will find very odd comrades when we are rising up in to the higher worlds. It doesn’t help to say, “Spiritual worlds exist ...” and so on, instead man must learn to know those beings.

If we now ascend to even higher worlds with clairvoyant ability, we will reach the lower Devachan plane, the lower spiritual world. This too penetrates our physical and astral world. There we will find the group-Egos of the plants. You already know that the plants that cover the Earth, are combined in large groups, that correspond to one group-Ego. These group-Egos can only be found on the Devachan plane, but they are at first located in the middle of the Earth, where all of the plant group-Egos have their centre. If you imagine in this way the whole Earth, where the different plant group-Egos permeate each other, you will see it as one vast organism. Like the human organism the sum of the plant group-Egos experiences joy and sadness, pleasure and pain. We can say exactly how pleasure and pain are present in this Earth-organism. We know that picking plants creates pleasure, yes sensuality, a feeling of well-being, of comfort—a comfort that can be compared to what a cow feels when the calf is suckling the milk. On the other hand, ripping out roots hurts the Earth-organism, causes it discomfort. You can see now, how one can tell in detail, how the beings in the Devachan world feel. Whatever we are doing here on Earth, these are not sober facts, but whenever we are doing this or that, we are causing pleasure or pain, joy or suffering, to some being. When the reaper cuts through the stalks, a whiff of pleasure drifts across the fields that the plant-soul feels. In this way, one who has a feel for these things walks across the Earth and learns to empathise with the spiritual beings, who live in the higher worlds, and who once again only send their organs into the physical world.

But once one reaches the Devachan regions, one will encounter other beings, who do not so openly affect the physical world, but who express themselves much more covertly. Once again one has to differentiate between two kinds of beings. On one side there are extraordinarily gentle, mild, harmony-emanating beings, and on the other one there are predatory-like beings, who are constantly fighting with each other. These too have their homeland on a different planet and only express their effects on the Devachan plane. They are rooted on Venus—they can be found there as inhabitants of this planet if one visits it with spiritual sight. Thus, one can make new acquaintances in each world, if one begins on the physical plane with what one perceives as dense matter, and then rises up to the origin of those beings. If you start from whole groups of plants, and groups of animals, you will arrive at the plant- and animal-souls—but then you will also be able to find other beings who do not express themselves in a dense sensory way on the physical plane.

Instead of starting with plants or animals, one could also begin with minerals or stones, and there one finds the beings in the higher Devachan. They also experience pleasure and pain, joy and suffering. If the clairvoyant observes a quarry, where workers crumble and chip away at the stones, then he can see how the mineral-soul experiences something. One must not come to conclusions by applying analogies and allegories. Smashing with hammers doesn’t cause hurt. A whiff of well-being emanates whilst the stones are smashed up. A feeling of pain exists, if you want to reassemble the separated rock masses to stones again. It will inflict pain if you want to crystallise a new whole from the scattered masses. One can learn to empathise with and share in the experience of the mineral kingdom together with the Ego of the minerals.

Once again, we learn to know entities, that in the physical world do not express themselves in such a rough and gross way. Again, we want to observe two different ‘species’ that appear to be the most noticeable ones. They are the ones who have a strange spiritual constitution. They are difficult to describe, but you will get an idea of them if you imagine an extraordinarily talented being who, to make an invention, wouldn’t have to think a lot but would simply through its perceptions be prompted to redesign an object in some ingenious way. These are beings who live, in a certain way, in percipience, without thinking as such playing a major role for them. They are very odd beings of extraordinary ingenuity, which is entirely based on perception, not on thinking. Opposite them are other beings, who are as unlikeable, as the former are likeable. These other beings can be characterised as also living in the world of percipience, also do not think a lot, but the especially seek out perceptions that are appalling and abhorrent for us humans. They derive enjoyment from rummaging around in such perceptions. These entities have their home on Saturn, just as the others, previously mentioned ones, are at home on Moon, Mars and Venus.

Here now we have a perspective of the higher beings. We could ask, what do we have to do with all those beings? It could seem like idle curiosity to concern ourselves with them. But they concern us a great deal. Because although in the physical world they do not announce themselves in an obvious way, they are expressing themselves through their work, in a way that is extremely important for man. These beings guide us as if automatically to one of their influences that is quite normal for us human beings. In a way what has been said about somnambulists etc., is an exception. However, these beings have also very normal effects on humans, on some more than on others. What type of effects they have, steps before our soul when we look, in a particular way, at a person’s constitution, on the juices streaming through him. Different kinds of juices are streaming through the human being.

Let us first look at the nutritive juice—the “chyle”. Food will be absorbed out of a variety of ingredients, gets digested, passes through the intestines and is forced through the intestinal walls by the organs located there, to then be used appropriately for the reconstruction of the body. This is one current permeating the human being. It has its source in the nutritional intake. Another type of juice is the lymph, a liquid that runs through those vessels that partly run together with the blood vessels collecting in the abdomen, but that also streams through the whole organism in a particular way. The lymphatic vessels have a characteristic at which we will look in detail another time, namely that all those lymphatic vessels that run from the left side of the trunk to the head, join together and pour into the left collarbone cavity. Only the streams coming from the right part of the body are separated from them. There is an underlying occult significance to this.

A third juice is the blood, that in turn streams through the human organism in the most diverse way. Someone who only looks at the human being with materialistic senses will see in these substances, blood and so on, bodies that can be chemically analysed and that consist of various chemical parts. But whoever looks with seeing eyes at the issue, knows that spirit is everywhere, and that all matter is based on spirit. Whatever you might see—gold that streams through the Earth in veins; mercury that settles itself in drops—is an expression of something spiritual. And so, one who looks at the three juices with spiritual eyes, knows that little can be said by examining the chemistry, and so on, of those juices. Spiritual entities stream through the organism with those juices. With the blood spiritual entities stream through the human body, likewise with lymph and chyle. Only someone who recognises these as an expression of spiritual entities, truly knows these juices. From all sides, from above and below, and so on, spirits that exist in the world and in the environment stream through us—only someone who knows this is able to correctly place the human being on this Earth organism, in this earthly setting.

Only one of the three juices mentioned is a more or less independent expression of the human I/self. This is the blood. The blood is the physical expression of the I, so that one can say; with the blood pulsating through the body, the human I streams through the body. But only to a certain extent, and this varies from one human to the other, is the human being master of his organism in relation to his blood.

This is not so with the lymph. Our own I does not live in the lymph, but other beings do, astral beings, who have their home on Moon and Mars. Whilst the lymph is being composed and decomposes, those beings penetrate into the human being, and when the lymph flows through him, the lines of force, the deeds of these beings, flow through him. Just imagine that the I has a purifying influence on the astral body. To the same extent to which the human being becomes master of the astral body, he also becomes master over the spirits or their effects, that flow with the lymph through the body. Thus, by reformation, by purification of his astral body, man increasingly restricts the arbitrariness of these beings. You see, what you are spiritually doing by ensuring that the intellectuality is developed, and that the ethic becomes purer and nobler, and the aesthetic feelings become purified—this changes the effects that emanate from those above-mentioned beings of the astral plane. They are losing the terrain within you. The higher development consists in man becoming progressively an expression of his own being.

Similarly to how astral beings pervade us and stream through us with the lymph, Venus beings penetrate the nutritional juices. These are not controlled by lower entities, but by higher beings. A higher power is necessary to make even the composition of the chyle an expression of one’s own personality. If you remember that these beings are the comrades of the plant-souls, the plant-Egos, then you will see that these beings essentially have their point of attack in the kind of food people are eating. Thus, people differ in regard to races and nations in the various areas of the globe, for the reason that they eat different kinds of food. And if the human being gradually learns to emancipate himself from the arbitrariness of nutrition, when he chooses the food based on the principles of spiritual knowledge, then he slowly gains control over the nutritional juice and thus emancipates himself from these beings that influence him from the outside. Therefore, so much importance is attached to the food products that affect the human being in various ways. What you are eating contains the power of certain beings, and by gaining influence over them, one will become the master of his own organism. Indeed, one expels spirits by whom one was possessed before, by consciously choosing what one eats.

In fact, the human being is in a certain way only master over his blood. But he could also reign over other juices. Try to recognise how man through this or other food attracts these beings, bad entities, then you will understand the importance of this for education, medicine and other sciences. To make progress it does not suffice to merely say, “The human being needs to perfect himself.” One also has to go into the details of how this perfection can be achieved.

Beings from Saturn are influencing another area of our existence. Because they live entirely within the outer perception, they have an influence on our outer perception. It is not irrelevant if a person focusses passionately with his eyes and senses onto something disgusting, something lowly, or if he, with a certain attraction, focusses his eyes on the beautiful and noble in this world. Depending on this, either good or evil Saturn beings win influence over this person.

As it is the case with the nutritional juice and the lymph, likewise beings sneak into him with the passions with which a human being soaks up sensory impressions. It is never without side-effects when you direct your gaze to sensory impressions. You are taking in deeds of spiritual beings with every glance. If you look at a beautiful, noble picture, then not only that which is visible streams into you, but also spiritual beings enter together with what you see. If you listen to sensual music, the spiritual power of saturnine beings also streams into you. This gives you a measure of how complicated life is, as soon as you are penetrating into the spiritual foundations.

Especially strong is the influence of those sense impressions that we call smell. With smells people absorb a vast number of effects of spiritual entities. You can consciously affect a human being by using odours to convey the workings of abominable beings. Many a perfume would not be used if one would be aware of the effect it has on one’s fellow human beings.

In the intrigues of some princely houses² not only words have played a part, but there have been times when personalities understood it well to beguile their fellow human beings through perfume and aromatic effects.

The most important things in life elude the senses, and man lives unconsciously, without suspecting the influence of spiritual beings to whom he is exposed at all times.

• 1. Refer to the lecture dated 4 December 1907—The Elemental Kingdoms of Nature
• 2. Presented in more detail in GA102-01, The influence of Spiritual Beings Upon Man. It concerns Draga Maschin, Queen of Serbia, who was killed together with her husband, Alexander I, in 1903.

It is natural, though it is usually ignored by science, that man as he is simply cannot know one part of his being. As he looks out upon the world it shows itself, roughly expressed, as an ascending scale from the mineral kingdom through the plant and animal kingdoms up to man. It goes without saying that man must assume some creative force behind all the forms he perceives around him in the kingdoms of nature. The point is, however, that man gains knowledge of the world he lives in just because the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms are outside him and he can observe them. As to all man has within himself, however, he can only gain knowledge of that insofar as the same forces are at work in him as are active in the three kingdoms of nature outside him. The forces active within him which transcend those three kingdoms he cannot know by the usual methods of knowing nature—not in the least. It is just what man has within himself over and above the kingdoms of nature that enables him to build up systematically a knowledge of those kingdoms outside him. Just as little as the eye, whose purpose it is to see outwardly, can see itself, just so little can man gain knowledge of what in himself is there in order that he may acquire knowledge. This is a very simple idea, but sound.

It is impossible for the eye to see itself because it is there to see out, and it is impossible for those forces in man that are there to acquire outer knowledge, to acquire knowledge of themselves. Further, it is these very forces that represent what it is in man that makes him something more than an animal. Materialistic Darwinism disposes of this fact easily by simply leaving out of account the fact that this special human power of acquiring knowledge itself cannot be known by man's usual instrument for knowledge. Recognizing that this power is unknowable, science denies its existence and accordingly considers man only insofar as he is still animal. You see on what the peculiar fallacy, the illusion of materialistic Darwinism rests. Man cannot know in himself those forces that are the actual means of knowledge. But the eye can see another eye, and for this reason, other things being equal, it can believe in itself. With the faculty of knowledge this is not the case. It would be logically possible for a man to confront another man and perceive in him the knowing faculty that raises him above animals. Logically, that is. But even that is actually impossible, for the very reasons implied in what we have described previously about the effects of thinking.

What does ordinary knowledge involve in the external world? We saw that it involves a perpetual destruction of the nerve structures in the brain. This is an actual external process. The creative forces on the other hand—those that really distinguish man from the animal—cannot develop at all in our waking life when we normally acquire knowledge. In this life they must behave so as not to interfere with the wearing away of the nerve structures. Therefore in waking life these forces are at rest. They sleep.

We have recognized a great truth if we can thoroughly enter into the thought that all that would have to be known to realize the full fallacy of materialistic Darwinism, even on the physical plane, is actually asleep in our waking life; that what raises man above the animal is at rest and a destructive process is taking place. The creative forces that bring forth the animal organism are not so far perfected as those at work in the organism of man. In our waking life the latter are inactive, and the process that takes their place is perpetually destroying just what in man transcends the animal. These very creative forces are destroyed during waking life. They are not present at all, but during sleep they appear and begin building up again what has been destroyed. These creative forces that raise man above the animal can really be perceived in a sleeping man. So we should have to say that whatever it is that repairs in sleeping man the forces he spends in his waking life, must be the forces that raise him above the animals.

These forces are still unknown to external natural science, which is only beginning to surmise them. Science, however, is on the way and one day will reveal these forces by purely external methods. Indeed, there are already exceptions to the statement that the forces leading man out beyond the animal nature are ordinarily unobservable in him. When science once learns to distinguish these forces in man it will discover in the sleeping human body the physical evidence of man's transcending the animal kingdom. When it distinguishes the regenerative forces in man from what is present in the animal kingdom also, it will recognize how the creative forces active in the earth's life to raise man beyond the animal are awake only when man sleeps. From all this we can gather that in self-knowledge man's creative forces, the real human forces, can only be perceived by man when he becomes clairvoyant during sleep; that is, when in a condition otherwise like sleep he awakes clairvoyantly. In the fifth lecture we already indicated this fact.

Today I have said that to some extent, from the processes observable in sleeping man, science will after a time find indications of the forces whereby man transcends the animal, but they will only be indications. These forces, when they appear to clairvoyant consciousness today, are seen to be of such a nature that they cannot be revealed externally to the senses in their true form. It will be possible to indicate their existence by deductions from scientific facts. Apart from their not being perceptible in their essence there is quite another reason why it will become possible to discover them if not to perceive them. These human creative forces have a very special relation to all the other forces of nature. We are here approaching a difficult subject, but it may be possible to make it clear in the following way.

Let us imagine we have here the receiver of an air-pump, say a glass bell-jar, and suppose we succeed in making a really perfect vacuum inside it. That is very nearly possible ordinarily. Everyone whose intellect is bound to the world of sense will now say, “Inside there is no air, only an empty space; we cannot go any farther, there cannot be less than no air inside.” Actually that is not true. We can pump until no air at all is left, then go on pumping until we get a space still more empty of air than a vacuum. People dependent on the material will find it difficult to imagine this “less than nothing.” Or, suppose you have ten shillings in your pocket. You can gradually spend them until you have nothing left. In this domain of life there is a real “less than nothing.” It is often one of the strongest realities—you can go into debt for a few shillings. In practical life less-than-nothing is often more intensely real than the reality of possession.

It is remarkable what things are sometimes accepted as axioms, as obvious truths. Thus, you can read in many Western philosophic books that there can nowhere be less than nothing, that there is no such thing. Even more, it is sometimes said that nothing itself cannot exist. Yet, what exists in our illustration about debt exists also in the universe. All philosophic dicta about “nothing,” however pretentious the form they take, are really rubbish. They are themselves a kind of ill-defined nothingness. It is true that the physical something that surrounds us can be reduced to nothing, and then still further to less than nothing. This “nothing” actually is a real factor on all sides. We must imagine the world that surrounds us, which we know in the forces of nature throughout the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, reduced down to nothing, then down to below nothing. Then it is that those forces arise that are creatively active in man when he sleeps. Natural science knows only the external side of these forces. In fact, it holds fast to a mere abstraction about them and therefore cannot enter into or appreciate them because ordinary science is to the reality in the forces of nature as the abstract number ten, for example, is to ten beans or ten apples. If we eliminate quality and say that all these are “ten” and nothing else, we are doing what natural science does, making no distinctions, touching only the surface of things. Suppose it gains the idea that regenerative forces must be present building up the organism again in sleep, then it will treat these forces as does a man who, when someone meets him saying, “I have fifteen shillings in my pocket,” replies, “Not so, you have fifteen.” The man leaves out of account the very thing that matters. Consequently science will confuse these forces with the ordinary natural laws, and will fail to recognize that higher laws are at work in them.

I mention all this to show what difficulties external science has and must have in getting to know the truth. It will draw certain conclusions and thus come near the truth. For some persons this will not be necessary, because science will gradually be supplemented by clairvoyant perception that does experience the difference between these forces and those active out in the three kingdoms of nature. At present I cannot deal fully with the superficial objection that animals also sleep. Such objections have little logical value but people do not notice it, nor their superficiality, for they judge according to concepts instead of the real nature of things. By introducing animal sleep into the argument one would speak the same fallacy as if someone were to say, “I sharpen my pencil with a knife and I also shave with a knife,” and another person replied, “That is impossible, knives are there to cut meat.” People are always making that kind of judgment. They think that a given thing must have the same function in different realms of nature. Sleep is an altogether different function in man from what it is in the animals.

I wanted to call your attention to forces at work in man's nature that we find at first in the regeneration of his organism as he sleeps. Now these forces are closely related to other forces, those that also develop in man with a certain unconsciousness. I mean the forces having to do with the propagation of the race. We know that up to a certain age man's consciousness is filled with a pure and straightforward unconsciousness of these forces; the innocence of childhood. Then at a certain age this consciousness awakens. From that time onward the human organism is permeated by an awareness of the forces afterward known as sensual sex-love.

What in earlier life lives as a sleeping force and only wakens with puberty, seen in its original and essential form is the very same as those forces that in sleep regenerate the outworn forces in man. Only they are hidden by the other parts of human nature in which they are mingled. Invisibly in man there are at work forces that can become capable of either good or evil only when they awaken, but that sleep, or at most dream, until the time of puberty. Since the forces that manifest themselves afterward must first be prepared, they are intermingled, though not yet awake, with the remaining forces in man even from birth onward. All this time his nature is permeated by these sleeping forces. This is what meets us in the child as such a wonderful mystery. It is the sleeping generative forces that only waken later on. One who is sensitive to these things feels something like a gentle breath of God in the activity of these forces withdrawn into reticence in childhood, whatever the naughtiness, obstinacy and other more or less unpleasant characteristics a child may have. These innocent qualities of the child are those of the grown-up person, but in childlike form. One who recognizes them as among the generative forces feels the breath of divine powers. While in later life they appear in man's lower nature, they are so wonderful because they really breathe the pure breath of God so long as they work in unconscious innocence. We must feel these things and be sensitive to them, then we shall perceive how wonderfully human nature is composed. The generative forces, sleeping during the most tender age of childhood, waken around the time of puberty, and from then on are still active in innocence when at night man sinks back into sleep.

Thus man's nature falls into two parts. In every human being two persons confront us—the one that we are from the time we waken until we go to sleep, the other, from going to sleep to waking again. In our waking state we are continually at pains to wear and worry our nature down to the animal level with all that is not pure knowledge, pure spiritual activity. What raises us above humanity holds sway like a pure, sublime force within the generative powers as they were during innocent childhood, and then in sleep it is awakened in the regeneration of what is worn away in waking life. So we have in ourselves one person who is related to the creative forces in man, and another who destroys them.

The deeply significant thing in the double nature of man is, that behind all that the senses perceive we have to surmise another man, one in whom the creative forces dwell. This second man is really never there in a pure, unmixed form; not during waking life nor even in sleep because in sleep the physical and etheric bodies still remain permeated by the after-effects of waking life, by the disturbing and destructive forces. When at last the latter have been removed altogether, we wake up again.

So it has been since what we call the Lemurian Age, the beginning, strictly speaking, of present-day mankind's evolution. At that time, as is described in greater detail in my Occult Science the Luciferic influence on man set in; and from this influence there came, among other things, what today compels man continually to wear and tear himself down to the animal nature. The other element that exists in human nature, which man as he is now does not yet know—the creative forces in him—all this came into play in the early Lemurian time before the Luciferic impulses entered. Thus we rise in thought from man ‘become’ to man ‘becoming;’ from man created to man being re-created. In so doing we have to look out into that distant Lemurian time when man was as yet wholly permeated by the creating forces. At that time man came into being as he is today. If we follow the human race from that epoch onward, we have this double nature of man continually before us in all that has happened since. Man then entered a kind of lower nature.

At the same time, as we can see clairvoyantly by looking back into the Akashic record, there appeared beside ordinary people, who themselves were permeated by the human creative forces, something like a brother- or sister-soul; a definite soul. It was as though this sister-soul was held back, not thrown into the current of human evolution. It remained permeated through and through by human creative forces only, and by nothing else. Thus, a brother- or sister-soul (in that ancient time there was no difference)—Adam's brother-soul—remained behind. It could not enter the physical process of mankind's development. It lived on, invisible to the physical world of man. It was not born as men are born, in the flowing stream of this life, because if it had entered into birth and death it would have been in the processes of physical human life. It could only be perceived by those who rose to the heights of clairvoyance, who developed those forces that awaken in the state we otherwise know as sleep. In that state man is near to the forces that live and work in purity in the sister-soul.

Man entered his evolution, but holding sway above this life there lived, in sacrifice, a soul that throughout all the processes of human life never came down in bodily form. It did not strive like ordinary human souls for birth and death in successive incarnations, and it could only show itself to them when in their sleep they attained clairvoyant vision. Yet it worked on mankind wherever they could meet it with special clairvoyant gifts. There were men who either by nature or special training in schools of initiation had this power and were able to recognize the creative forces. Wherever such schools are mentioned in history we can always find evidence that they were aware of a soul accompanying mankind. In most instances it was only recognizable in those special conditions of clairvoyance that expand man's spiritual vision into sleep consciousness.

When Arjuna stood on the battle-field with the Kurus and Pandus arrayed against each other, when he felt all that was going on around him and deeply realized the unique situation in which he was placed, it came about that this soul we have mentioned spoke to him through the soul of his charioteer. The manifestation of this special soul, speaking through a human soul, is none other than Krishna. For what soul was it that could instill into man the impulse to consciousness of self? It was the soul that had remained behind in the old Lemurian age when men entered his actual earthly evolution.

This soul had often been visible in manifestations before, but in a far more spiritual form. At the moment, however, of which the Bhagavad Gita tells us, we have to imagine a kind of embodiment, though much concealed in Maya of this soul of Krishna. Later on in history a definite incarnation takes place. This soul actually incarnated in the body of a child. Those of our friends to whom I have spoken of this before know that at the time when Christianity was founded two children were born in different families, both from the house of David. The one child is mentioned in St. Matthew's Gospel, the other in St. Luke's. This is the true reason for the external discrepancies between the two Gospels. Now this very Jesus Child of St. Luke's Gospel is an incarnation of that same soul that had never before lived in a human body but is nevertheless a human soul, having been one in the ancient Lemurian age. This is the same that revealed itself as Krishna.

Thus we have all that the Krishna impulse signifies incarnated in the body of the Luke Jesus child. What was there embodied is related to the forces that are asleep in every child in their sublime purity and innocence, until they awaken as the sex-forces. In this child they can manifest themselves and be active until the age of puberty when man ordinarily becomes sexually mature. But the body of this child that had been taken from common humanity would no longer have been adapted to the forces related to the innocent sex-forces in the child. Thus the soul in the other Jesus child, which was the soul of Zarathustra, that had passed through many incarnations and reached its eminence by hard work and special striving, passed over into the body of the Luke Jesus child, and from then on dwelt in that body.

We touch here upon a wonderful mystery. We see how into the body of the Luke Jesus child there enters the soul of man as he was before he descended into the course of earthly incarnations. We understand that this soul could hold sway in the human body only until the twelfth year of its life. After that another soul must take possession, the Zarathustra soul that had gone through all the transformations of mankind. This wonderful mystery is enacted, that the innermost essence and self of man, which we have seen hailed as Krishna, permeates the Jesus child of the Luke Gospel. In this child are the innermost forces of humanity, the Krishna forces, for indeed we know their origin. This Krishna root takes us back into the Lemurian time, the very primeval age of man. At that time it was one with humanity, before ever the physical evolution of mankind began. In later time this root, these Krishna forces, flowing together and uniting in the unknown and unseen, worked to bring about the unfolding of man's inner being from within. Concretely embodied, this root is present within a single being, the Luke Jesus child, and as the child grows up it remains active beneath the surface of life in this special body after the Zarathustra soul has entered it.

In the thirtieth year, in the moment the Bible describes as the Baptism in Jordan, there comes toward this special human body what now belongs to all mankind. This is the moment indicated in the words, “This is my well-beloved Son, this day have I begotten Him.” Christ now comes toward the physical body from the other side. In the body that stands before us there, we have in concrete form what yesterday we thought of abstractly. What belongs to all mankind comes to the body that contains what, through another impulse, has brought the inner being of man to the highest ideal of individual strength, and will carry it to yet greater heights.

I think when you consider all that has been said today, leading up as it does to a certain understanding of that great moment pictorially represented as the baptism by St. John, you will have to admit that our anthroposophical outlook takes nothing away from the sublime majesty of the Christ-Idea. On the contrary, by shedding the light of understanding upon it much is added to all that can be given -to mankind exoterically. Today I have endeavored to present the matter in such a way as to give it sense and meaning for those who can consider it with an open mind, in the light of external human history. That is not the way, however, by which this secret was found. Someone might ask, in view of the lectures about St. Luke's Gospel I delivered years ago in Basel, when for the first time I drew attention to the different genealogies of the two Jesus children, “Why did you not explain then all you have added to it now?” That depends on the whole way these things were discovered. Actually, this truth has never yet been found in one single and complete whole by the human understanding. It was not discovered in the form I have tried to convey it today. The truth itself was there first, as I indicated in a lecture a few days ago, and the rest followed of its own accord, adding itself to the main body of this piece of knowledge about the two Jesus-children. From this you may gather that in the Anthroposophical Movement for which I am permitted to stand before you, there is nothing of the nature of intellectual or logical construction. I do not mean to lay this down as a general rule for everybody, but I do regard it as my own personal task to say nothing that is given by the intellect as such but to take things in the way they are directly and immediately given to occult vision. Only afterward are they permeated with the power of understanding, The truth about the two Jesus-children was not discovered by external historical research, but from the beginning it was an occult fact. Afterward the connection with the Krishna mystery was revealed.

You see in this how the science of man will have to work into the occult realm in the age we are entering; how the fundamental impulses of earthly evolution will gradually be understood and realized by individual persons, and how this will throw more and more light on all that has happened in the past. True science will not only speak to the intellect, but will fill the whole soul of man. It is just when we make ourselves acquainted with occult facts that we have a feeling for the real majesty, the greatness and wonder of these facts. Truly, the more deeply we penetrate the world of reality the more we have this feeling of wonder. Not only our intellect and reason but our whole soul is illumined when we let the truth come to us in this way. Especially at such a point as this, that wondrous event when the whole inwardness of humanity lived in a human body; when a soul that had developed upward to this point through the whole course of earthly life took possession of this body; then from outside there came into this body during three years of its life something that was vouchsafed to all mankind from the great universe beyond. Truly this can stir our souls to their depths. The spiritual age that is dawning will in time make it possible to deepen points like this still more.

One thing is essential to the coming spiritual age. We must learn to take a different attitude toward the great riddles and secrets of the cosmos, to approach them not as in the past with reason and intellect alone, but with all the faculties of our soul. Then we shall ourselves become partakers in the whole of human evolution. It will be for us like a fountain of sublime, all-human consciousness. We shall have fullness of soul. We shall feel that we may belong to that humanity that over all the earth is to develop such impulses as have been the subject of our thoughts today.

From the manifold indications and details I have given concerning the Christ Mystery, you will be aware that we must differentiate between what had come to be present in the general course of human evolution at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and what came in through the Mystery of Golgotha. You know that in human evolution we have to do with a continuous stream of forces proceeding from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies who belong to man's original nature, and also with two side-streams, the Luciferic stream and the Ahrimanic stream.

Now the point is that the Luciferic and Ahrimanic streams reached a certain climax, the climax of the usefulness of their working within human evolution, just at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and—if one may put it like this—mankind was threatened by the danger of this climax being overstepped, so that the necessary equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic forces in the whole evolution of mankind might have been lost. If we look at mankind's evolution as progressing in a straight line (see diagram), we can say: To the course of this evolution belong the Lemurian age (we will start there), the Atlantean age, and our own age, the fifth, which we always refer to as the post-Atlantean age. If I draw in the strength of the Luciferic influence as a red line, we can say: In the Lemurian age a certain strength is there which first grows, then decreases, becomes very slight, and disappears entirely in the Atlantean age—to arise again in the post-Atlantean age. So that, strictly speaking, in the Atlantean epoch (I am talking not of the evolution of individuals but of mankind as a whole) very little of the direct influence of the Luciferic is there (see red line in diagram).

But in this Atlantean age the Ahrimanic development was there instead, where I have put in a yellow line. I have to show it as particularly strong in the Atlantean age, and later, in the post-Atlantean times, becoming weaker. I am referring now to historical evolution, and when we characterise anything in this way, we must always pay heed to what I said recently: when Lucifer is working particularly strongly, he calls up Ahriman in the subconscious. Thus, if in our fifth age the Luciferic curve is specially noticeable, this does not mean that because Lucifer is active, Ahriman is somewhat outside our sphere. On the contrary, it means that, because Lucifer is working strongly among the forces of history, Ahriman sets to work particularly in the subconscious regions of man.

You see, therefore, that in man's earthly evolution a kind of waving line is there in the case of Ahriman's activity, just as in that of Lucifer. These degrees of strength of the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic both have to be balanced. But in the course of history this state of equilibrium has never come to perfection. There have been times when the Luciferic was working with great strength, and times when the Ahrimanic was doing so.

If we look at the period of human evolution when mankind was approaching the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that the state of equilibrium between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic forces was extraordinarily fluctuating, vacillating—no real balance was there. We have on one hand the stream of mankind which is moving towards the Mystery of Golgotha and manifests historically in the evolution of the Semitic peoples. This stream is particularly susceptible to the Luciferic influence, whereby a strong Ahrimanic activity is brought about in the subconscious.

On the other hand, the Greek nature is highly susceptible to the forces of Ahriman, and this brings about great Luciferic activity in the subconscious. We can fully understand the Semitic and Greek cultures—polaric opposites of one another—only by keeping in mind this vacillation in human evolution between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha entered Earth evolution from without, the influence of Greece was of enormous importance for the people of the West. This influence, however, was already beginning to wane, or, more exactly, it had passed its peak. Greek culture was threatened with a decline which can be characterised in the following way. Precisely through the Ahrimanic intervention experienced by the Greeks, and manifest as a Luciferic element of their art, they had developed a lofty wisdom. And—as we have often said—this wisdom took on a very individual, humanly individual, character. But fundamentally it was at its greatest where there still shone into it out of primeval times the teachings received from actual spiritual Beings.

We know that in those times the Teachers of mankind were those who were inspired, initiated, directly from the spiritual world. But through them spiritual Beings spoke; and, if we look back into those remote ages of mankind's evolution at the beginning of the fifth epoch, we can see into a wonderful primeval wisdom. Among the Greeks it was so highly clarified in its concepts and ideas that in this way it had adapted itself to the nature of man. Whereas in earlier times it was given out through the great Initiates in a more pictorial, imaginative way, with the Greeks it was grasped in ideas, in concepts, and thereby was adapted to the human nature of that time. What is so admirable among the Greeks, however, is that resounding through the philosophy of Plato is an echo of that primeval wisdom which mankind may be said to have received from the very lips of the Gods. But men were threatened with the loss of this wisdom.

When we look back to the period of Greek spiritual development that Nietzsche has called the “tragic age,” we are looking back at the great figures of Greek philosophy, at Anaxagoras, at Heraclitus, and in them we can see the final bearers of a divine wisdom which, however, is already converted into ideas and concepts. Thales is to a certain extent the first to take his stand solely upon natural concepts; he is already at some distance from the directly living impression of the primeval wisdom of mankind which we can still discern in Anaxagoras. Mankind was threatened with the gradual loss of this wisdom. But out of this primeval wisdom there had flowed something which in ancient days gave men the capacity to gain some knowledge about man. Knowledge of man was indeed something in which the Greek and all primeval wisdom were destined to be steeped. The Mysteries were meant to give knowledge of man; from them came the aphorism, “Know thyself!” This ancient knowledge of man, however, was mediated by way of Lucifer, and men worked upon it with the aid of Ahrimanic forces. It was bound up with a state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers.

Now at the time when the ancient world was passing away and from the other side came the Mystery of Golgotha, the Ahrimanic forces began to gain a slight ascendancy; they were then particularly strong. And since the sixteenth century something similar is happening again—a kind of renaissance of the Ahrimanic forces. But at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the Ahrimanic forces were specially strong. And through them man's life of soul was driven in the direction of the abstract—towards that abstraction which meets us in the thoroughly abstract nature of the Romans. We have now to ask: What would have happened to mankind if the course of evolution had continued on these lines and there had been no Mystery of Golgotha? The result would have been that men would have no longer been able to have any concept, any idea, any perception, of the human personality itself.

This is a fact of extraordinary significance. Because it would no longer have been possible for anything to be said to man by way of the Gods, because even the tradition of this divine source of wisdom concerning human personality was being lost, man was threatened with finding himself ever more and more of a riddle. We must feel the full implications of this truth—without the Mystery of Golgotha, man would have been faced by the threat of becoming an ever-increasing riddle to himself. He would indeed have been able to wring forth wisdom, but only about nature, not about himself. And he would gradually have forgotten his divine origin; he would have had to lose all knowledge of it.

Then came the Mystery of Golgotha. And among all the diverse points of view from which the Mystery of Golgotha can be characterised, this one must be specially considered—that through the incursion of the Mystery of Golgotha men were given from spiritual heights, which were no longer within their reach on earth, a renewed capacity for grasping themselves as persons. The Christ Impulse brought men the possibility of once more grasping their personalities, but now of doing so through inner forces.

To-day it is extraordinarily difficult for human beings to conceive how men of old arrived at their consciousness of personality, because one thing people refuse to believe is how entirely different for men of old was their conception of the external world. It is impossible to understand such a figure as Julian the deserter, the apostate, in all his world-historic significance. if it is not known that he was one of the last who still saw the sun differently from the way in which it is seen to-day.¹ The man of to-day sees the sun as a physical body. The influence of the moon through its natural effects has stayed with him longer. In the moonlight lovers still stroll and sentimentally dream; in the moonlight imagination grows and flourishes; moonlight is like twilight—and poetry written in that key, both true and false, is still widespread. The same feelings that people still have in moonlight, the men of old had, but much more intensely, when on waking they first caught sight of the sun. They did not talk merely of the sunlight; they said something like this: “Out of this heavenly being there streams into us a radiance which permeates us with warmth and light, making of each one of us a personality.”

This was still felt by Julian the Apostate, and he believed it could be preserved. That was his mistake, and also his great tragedy, for man no longer experienced his personality through the physical rays of the sun. This knowledge of the personality was brought to man by a spiritual path. That which the sun out there in space could no longer give him, the experience that could no longer come to him from outside, now had to rise up from his own inner depths. Christ Himself had to unite His cosmic destiny with mankind, so that in the continual fluctuation of the balance between Ahriman and Lucifer men should not fall away from their onward path.

We must take fully and deeply in earnest that Christ had descended from spiritual heights and has united His destiny with that of men. What does this mean? When before the Mystery of Golgotha men looked into the world of the senses, they saw at the same time a spiritual element there; this I made clear when speaking to you about the perception of the sun. All this was lost to men. They had to receive something in place of it; they had to receive something of a spiritual nature, and at the same time gain from this spirituality an impression of reality in the sense-perceptible world. That is a salient point in the Mystery of Golgotha and its relation to human knowledge.

And this Mystery of Golgotha, which gave lo earth-evolution its real meaning, actually took place in a little corner of the earth, unnoticed by the Romans; and even Tacitus knew practically nothing of the Mystery of Golgotha, although he wrote his excellent work on Roman history a hundred years later. History says really nothing about the Mystery of Golgotha, for the Gospels are not to be reckoned as history. They were written in the way I have shown in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact; they are really Mystery-books applied to life. However much trouble the theologians may give themselves, the Mystery of Golgotha will never be part of the history that applies to other events. For this is exactly what is meant to be characteristic of the Mystery of Golgotha: that historically, by way of history founded on external facts, nothing about it is to be known. Those who wish to know anything about the Mystery of Golgotha must have faith in the supersensible. The Mystery of Golgotha does not admit of historical proof by the senses.

In the same way that men of old looked into the world of the senses and apprehended at the same time the supersensible, so must modern man, if he does not wish to lose his knowledge of the personality, look upon the Mystery of Golgotha as upon the supersensible; that is how he must come to the conviction that this historical event, for which there is no historical evidence, did indeed take place. Whoever does not keep in mind that there is no history concerning the most important historical event in the course of man's evolution, that no external account of this event can be called historical—whoever does not grasp this has no understanding of the whole relation to modern man of the Mystery of Golgotha. For concerning the Mystery of Golgotha modern man is meant to turn to an actuality of which history can tell him nothing. And this actuality is to have an operative effect. For what did we speak of yesterday as coming from Ahriman and Lucifer? We said that Lucifer turns men's hearts from interest in other men. Were only the Luciferic to work in mankind, we should increasingly lose interest in our fellow men. What one or other person was thinking would concern us very little. We can very well take the measure of the Luciferic in a man by asking: Is he interested objectively, tolerantly, in others, or is he interested only in himself? Luciferic natures take very little interest in their fellows; they grow stiff and hard, considering as right only what they themselves think and feel, and they are not accessible to the opinions of others. Had the Luciferic gone on working in human evolution in the same way that it worked up to the Mystery of Golgotha, mankind would have gradually entered on a way that we might characterise as follows: People would have become hard and detached in their souls, each thinking only of his own affairs, each holding his own ideas as conclusive, and having no inclination to look into the hearts of his fellows.

This, however, is merely the reverse side of the loss of personality. For by losing the possibility of recognising man as a personality, we lose also our understanding of the personality of those around us. Just at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching, there were very many people—more than is generally thought—in the Greek and Roman worlds, in Africa, in the West of Asia, who were in a certain sense spiritually proud, people who went through the world as—one cannot say peculiar people—but as proud, lonely men who hugged their loneliness. There were many such, and also those who made it a philosophy not to trouble about other people, but merely to follow the way of their own choice. This was brought about by the Luciferic falling out of balance.

And indeed the Ahrimanic was present in excess. This is best shown in the outlook of the first Roman Emperors, the Julians, of whom the very first, Augustus, was the only one to be initiated, though in a rather questionable way. Among the other Emperors there were some who at best obtained initiation by force, but they all regarded themselves as sons of God; that is, they considered themselves initiates by claiming divine descent.² For the Ahrimanic is particularly revealed by a man not being willing to live among other men as a personality among other personalities, but wanting to develop power in the way I referred to yesterday—wanting to rule by exploiting the weaknesses of others. The two great dangers threatening the world at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, dangers to which men would have succumbed if the Mystery of Golgotha had not come, were lack of interest in other men, and the lust for domination in every individual. The Christ, by uniting His destiny with that of mankind, implanted into humanity something of extraordinary depth. You may perhaps understand me best if I give you an outline of what this really was. As I have shown you, we men possess forces that we develop through our original being. You know that in a certain sense we become clever, through our original being, only in the second half of our life. I have spoken of this fully and repeatedly. But that is not quite all; what I was then referring to as the growth of cleverness in man between birth and death is, strictly speaking, valid only for earthly evolution; we are intended to become still cleverer during the evolutionary stages of Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. And the forces we are to develop in the course of the Jupiter and Venus stages are already latent in us.

Now the following has come about. You know that during the first half of life a man is unable to acquire self-knowledge through his original being; he has to acquire it through Lucifer, while his original being goes on developing further. The Luciferic infuses him with self-knowledge during the first half of life; in the second half of life this brilliant self-knowledge is clouded over by Ahriman. With the Christ Impulse, another stream enters man's evolution; it speaks to the very depths of the human being. And if man had to rely on his original forces for developing the faculty that would of itself lead him to those cosmic insights which come into Earth-evolution through Christ, then he would not acquire this faculty until the Venus stage of evolution. Thus, however clever a man might become during his life on earth, up to the time of his death he would never be able to reach the point that can be reached through the Christ Impulse having united its destiny with Earth-evolution.

We live through our earthly life, therefore, without being able to understand the Christ Impulse with the help of our original evolution. From this you can gather the following. There were contemporaries of Christ, His disciples; they went about with Him; through the traditional primeval wisdom they could acquire so much wisdom about Him that later they were able to produce the Gospels—but they could not really understand Him. Right up to their deaths they certainly never reached an understanding of the Christ Impulse. When was it, then, that they could achieve this? After their death, in the time after death. Given that Peter or James, let us say, were contemporaries of Christ, when were they ready to understand Christ? Only in the third century after the Mystery of Golgotha—for up to their deaths they were not sufficiently mature; they became mature only in the third century.

We are touching here on a very important secret which we must bring with all exactitude before our souls. The contemporaries of Christ had first to go through death, had to live in the spiritual world until the second or third century; and then, in the life after death, knowledge of Christ could dawn upon them, and they could inspire those who, towards the end of the second century, or from the third century on, wrote about the Christ Impulse. Hence the writings about the Christ Impulse from the third century onwards take on a special character, for through the Church Fathers they received inspiration, more or less clear or more or less clouded. Thus Augustine, whose authority prevailed throughout the Middle Ages, falls into this period. Hence we can see how the only way in which people could be given an understanding of the Christ Impulse was to be inspired on earth by the Venus wisdom, if I may so call it, which at present man can experience only after death and in subsequent centuries. And it was a piece of good fortune—a foolish expression but there is no better one—that in the second and third centuries this inspiration could begin. For had men been obliged to wait longer, beyond the year 333, they would have become increasingly hardened towards the spiritual world and would have been incapable of receiving any kind of inspiration.

You see, the working of the Christ Impulse into mankind during the centuries of Christian development was bound up with numerous mysteries. And anyone wishing to seek for it again to-day finds the most important elements in knowledge about the Christ Impulse only by achieving supersensible cognition. For the first actual teachers of mankind concerning the Christ Impulse were really the dead, as you have been able to see from what I have now been saying—persons who were contemporaries of Christ, and only in the third century became mature enough to gain a full understanding. This understanding was able to grow during the fourth century, but at the same time the difficulty of inspiring men increased. In the sixth century this difficulty went on increasing, until finally the time came when the inspiring of men through spiritual mysteries concerning the Christ Mystery, and the opposition to it caused by the hardening of mankind, were brought under regulation by Rome. This was done by Rome in the ninth century, in 869, at the Council of Constantinople, where the spirit was finally done away with. This whole matter of inspiration became too far-fetched for Rome, and the dogma was laid down that man possesses in his soul something of the nature of spirit, but that to believe in the spirit is heresy. Men had to be enticed away from the spirit. This in essentials is what is connected with the Eighth (Ecumenical Council held in Constantinople in 869, to which I have often referred. It is merely a consequence of this abolition of the spirit when Jesuits to-day—I have mentioned this recently—say: “In earlier times there was indeed such a thing as inspiration, but to-day inspiration is devilish; we may not venture to strive for supersensible knowledge, for then the devil comes in.”

These things, however, are connected with the deepest matters which must interest us if we wish truly to enter into Spiritual Science. They are connected particularly with a certain recognition of the character of wisdom which many so-called spiritual scientists, especially those who foregather in so-called secret societies, do not recognise. A certain deception, one might say, is constantly spread abroad among men—spread abroad by those who know spiritual secrets. This deception is veiled by a false contrast, a false polarity. Have you not heard people saying: “There is Lucifer and his opponent is Christ?” and setting up Christ-Lucifer as polaric opposites? I have shown you that even Goethe's Faust-concept suffers from a confusion between Ahriman and Lucifer; from Goethe's inability to distinguish between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. The second part of my little book, Goethes Geistesart, treats of this.

But behind this there is something extraordinarily significant. The real contrast, imparted by those who wish to speak the truth out of the spiritual world, is between Ahriman and Lucifer, and the Christ Impulse brings in something different. It has nothing to do with the Ahriman-Lucifer polarity, for it works in equilibrium. Something of tremendous importance rests on a recognition of this fact; we will speak of it further tomorrow.

• 1. See Planetary Spheres and Their Influence on Mans Life on Earth and in Spiritual Worlds, Lecture I, “The Threefold Sun and the Risen Christ.” This lecture was given in London, April 24th, 1922. See also Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies - Volume IV, Lecture VI, given in Dornach, September 16th, 1924.
• 2. See the lecture cycle: Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha (notably lectures 5–8) given in Berlin, March 27th to April 24th, 1917.

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.

Many of the things that have to be said on the subject of the connection of man's being with the universe must necessarily seem difficult and complicated. People may ask themselves: Whatever more is there to be said about the being of man? But the fact remains that the birth of the human being from the cosmos is an exceedingly complicated process and must in some way become intelligible to us.

In the present age above all, light must be thrown on this fact, because otherwise it would be too late. This is a grave statement but it must be made. At the present time human beings are living through incarnations in which they can get along without actually knowing very much about the complexities of the being of man. They can manage now without this knowledge but times will come when their souls will be incarnated again and when knowledge of these things will be absolutely essential. It will be a vital necessity for souls incarnated upon the earth to know in what sense the being of man is connected with the universe. Let me put it in this way: We ourselves are still living in an age when it is not as yet left entirely to the human being to hold together certain members of his being. In our time these members are held together without our intervention. Nowadays, easy-going minds can still speak with irritation about the complicated nature of anthroposophical wisdom. They can still keep reiterating that truth is always simple and that what is not simple is not the real ‘truth.’

On all sides we hear people saying this. But they say it under the influence of the Luciferic temptation and have no inkling of the fact that when they speak of this ‘simplicity of Truth’ they are clouding their minds and are altogether labouring under a delusion. Times will come when knowledge, and knowledge alone will enable man to hold together certain of the inner principles and members of his being. But the future has always to be prepared and it is the task of anthroposophical thought to prepare earthly culture and civilisation for that age in the future when the human being will have to know how to maintain the cohesion of the different parts of his being himself.

And now let us think of a fundamental truth to which reference has been made in recent lectures, namely, that man's being is essentially twofold. Man is a twofold being inasmuch as the structure and nature of his head differs essentially from the structure and nature of the rest of his organism. The head of a human being living at the present time is, in essentials, the product of the metaporphosis of the body of the preceding incarnation. The body of the present incarnation, that is to say, the body with the exclusion of the head, will become the head of the next incarnation, after we have lived through the period stretching from death to a new birth. We can therefore picture man's progress through incarnation as follows: He has his head, and the other part of his organism. After death we may say that the head disappears, and the rest of the body is then transformed into the head of the next incarnation. Once again he will receive the body of the next incarnation from the Earth. The head disappears, but when I say this, you must remember that it is the forces connected with the head that disappear. The substance of the head and of the rest of the body too also disappear, but the physical substance itself is not the essential. The substance is Maya in the real sense. The forces are the reality. The forces contained in the body of man, with the exclusion of those of the head, are transformed during the period between death and a new birth into the forces underlying the head of the new incarnation. In our present incarnation we have, in our head, the forces that were connected with our body in the previous incarnation. It is this basic idea which we have been considering in detail in recent lectures.

And now we will turn to certain other thoughts in order to understand these matters more fully.

To begin with, let us ask ourselves: By what means are the forces contained in our present body transformed in such a way that they can become a head in the next incarnation? At the outset it is difficult to conceive of the body being transformed into a head. What is it, exactly, that makes this transformation possible? That is the question we must ask ourselves.

In order to answer this question we must think about what has been said in many lectures on the subject of the nature of cognition, of knowledge, of truth, of wisdom. In the ordinary way we imagine that the only purpose of the knowledge we acquire is to enable us to have mental pictures of the external world, to know something about the external world. There are philosophical psychologists who are constantly bringing forward theories about the mysterious connection that exists between the nature of a concept or an idea and the object that is pictured by the idea. These theories all suffer from one common error. I can only make this error clear to you by means of a picture. Suppose a botanist or an horticulturist wished to make investigations into the nature of a grain of wheat. He would probably say to himself: ‘I will use chemistry and investigate the grain of wheat from the point of view of the food-value of wheatmeal. I will try to find out the constituents that are required for man's nourishment.’ He would, in other words, be investigating the nature of the grain of wheat from the point of view of wheat as a means of nourishment. He would be trying to discover the reason why certain constituents are contained in the wheat. Anyone who imagines that it is possible to find out something about the real nature of wheat by investigating to what extent it is valuable as a foodstuff, would be making a curious mistake. A grain of wheat comes into existence in the whole sphere of plant life as the fruit of the wheat-plant and we can only discover why the nature of the grain is as it is, by studying the process of the growth of a new wheat-plant out of the grain. The fact that a grain of wheat contains constituents of nutritive value for the human being, is an entirely secondary consideration so far as the real nature of the grain is concerned. Those who look at everything merely from the utilitarian standpoint and want to make this the essential aim of science will investigate the grain of wheat from the chemical point of view and find that here we have in Nature something that is of value as a foodstuff. But this has nothing whatever to do with the innermost purpose of the grain of wheat. If it were possible to ask the grain of wheat what its innermost and primary purpose is, it would not answer that it is there in order to nourish human beings but rather in order to make it possible for a new wheat plant to come into existence.

To those who have real knowledge of these things, the philosophers and theorists are exactly like men who investigate a grain of wheat from the point of view of its value in the nourishment of human beings. There is a fundamental error here. The primary purpose of what lives within us in the form of knowledge, idea, truth, wisdom, is not that of enabling us to form mental pictures of the things of the external world. The process of forming mental pictures of the external world is just as secondary a purpose of knowledge as it is a secondary purpose of the grain of wheat to nourish human beings. Knowledge lives within us for another purpose altogether. It is there primarily in order that it may work and weave in our being. During our life between birth and death we accumulate wisdom, little by little. And at the same time we apply the wisdom thus accumulated in such a way that it can mirror the external world, just as we use grains of wheat for the purpose of nourishment. But remember, every time we use grains of wheat for food, we are depriving them of their essential and original purpose, namely that of bringing forth a new plant. In the same way, the wisdom we apply to the grasping of the world outside is a deviation from the real task of wisdom. It is a deviation because the forces of the True, the forces of Knowledge are not primarily there for this purpose.

What, then, is the function and purpose of what we call the True?—I mean, in the sense in which the primary purpose of the grain of wheat is to bring a new plant into being? The primary purpose of the forces of Knowledge within us, of our efforts to get hold of truth, is to develop forces within us between birth and death whereby our organism will be transformed after death—that is to say, the forces underlying the body in this incarnation, for it is these forces that will be transformed into the head of the next incarnation. This is the remarkable connection which becomes clear to us when we study the existence of the human being on the one side between birth and death and on the other side between death and a new birth. The knowledge we acquire serves to make it possible for the body to be transformed into the head of the next incarnation. You will say: ‘Yes, but there are so many who acquire no knowledge at all, who remain simpletons all their life, only a very few have really learnt anything.’ And those who make this remark generally include themselves among these few! But remember, several thinkers have rightly said, quite independently of each other, that during the first three or four years of life the human being learns more, assimilates more wisdom than in the three years spent in later life at the university. This is literally true. In the first three years of life we learn a very great deal; we learn what can only be learnt on Earth, namely the knowledge that is essential in order to be able to speak, to understand what is spoken, and a great deal more besides. In those first three years we learn very much, and what we thus learn forms part of what is known as the substance or content of wisdom.

This wisdom that is innate in man and in respect to which human beings do not differ so very much from one another—this wisdom is the weaving force which transforms our organism into a head during the period lying between death and a new birth. It is, as a matter of fact, an exceedingly intricate complex of forces that we take into our being in our life of knowledge and cognition. It is only now and then in dreams that human beings have a fleeting vision of what is weaving and surging between the ideal and inner pictures of which they are fully conscious. The forces that are weaving and working in us in this realm of our being will begin to manifest in their essential form after death and to transform our organism. Everything that is acquired in the way of knowledge accumulates for the purpose of transforming our organism—everything, that is to say, with the exception of the knowledge we apply in order to grasp the external world. The forces of knowledge we apply in order to grasp and comprehend the external world are lost, in a certain respect, so far as our own evolution is concerned. They are diverted from the onward stream of evolution. Just as the grains of wheat that are used as food for human beings are diverted from the stream of wheat-development taken as a whole, so, during our present epoch of civilisation, when knowledge is so universally applied for the purpose of grasping the phenomena of the outer world, we divert from the stream of our evolution, many more forces than we retain.

And now think of the days of antiquity, when man's knowledge was acquired through faculties of inner clairvoyance. Man did not then expend his forces upon the outer world to anything like the same extent. The people of ancient Egypt and ancient Chaldea acquired their knowledge through atavistic clairvoyance and not nearly so much by observation of the external world. Our own age is, in a sense, exactly the opposite in this respect. Nowadays a very great deal of knowledge is absorbed from the world outside and very little is added from the inner being of man. The Greeks were the outstanding example of the ‘golden mean’ in this respect. That they were able to hold this ‘golden mean’ was not due alone to their special qualities. They did, of course, possess these special qualities, but the self-contained glory of their civilisation was also due to the fact that the area of the Earth inhabited by the Greek people was relatively small. Moreover they had comparatively little knowledge of the rest of the world. What knowledge had the Greeks of countries other than Asia Minor and a little further Eastwards into Asia? They knew little of Africa and of America, and of the rest of the Earth they knew absolutely nothing at all. Plato's knowledge concerning the inner nature of the Good and the function of certain inner parts of the human organism was very largely due to the limited area of the world to which Greek knowledge could be applied. For this reason it was possible in Greece to preserve man's spiritual forces for the purpose of his inner development. But even the Greeks applied less of their powers for the purpose of inner development than the ancient Egyptian and Chaldean peoples—not to speak of the ancient Persians and Indians. In our age, when practically the whole Earth has been explored, everyone is bent upon acquiring as much knowledge of the external world as he possibly can! If all this knowledge of the external world were as intensive as it extensive then people would have very few powers left over for the work of transforming the physical body into the head of the next incarnation. And the most learned would have far fewer powers than the simple peasants! One can only be thankful that when the majority of people travel about the world today, they are content with simply turning over the pages of Baedeker or some other book of travel, and really do not take in very much! So you see, they are not, after all, depriving themselves of very much inner power; If it were otherwise, those human beings who are always hunting for sensation, who only want to get their knowledge from the outside world, would be facing a grave danger. The danger would be that in their next incarnation they would return with a head produced from a body that had undergone very little transformation. The head would be exceedingly animal-like in appearance. This is bound to happen, when, in the previous incarnation, comparatively few formative forces were preserved for the work of transformation.

Analogies which are taken from the realm of Imagination, my dear friends, can be multiplied over and over again. And now let us ask ourselves a question. we have heard that the powers we apply in order to build up a science of the outer world, are diverted from their primary, original purpose—just as the grain of wheat that is used as substance for nourishment is diverted from its primary purpose as wheat. What analogy is there between the acquisition of knowledge of the outer world and the use of wheat as a foodstuff for human beings? There is an inner analogy here which we must try to discover.

Consider once more the curious fact that numbers and numbers of grains of wheat do not go to the producing of new wheat plants but are given over to the purpose of supplying human beings with food. These grains of wheat, as we have heard, are diverted from their direct line of evolution as grains of wheat. Some grains of wheat, on the other hand, bring forth other grains of wheat, and these again others. But numberless grains of wheat are split off, as it were, and diverted to another sphere of activity altogether. They are used for the purpose of food for human beings and this has nothing directly to do with the onward course of their own stream of evolution.

Nature herself will help us here to understand something which it is most essential to bear in mind if we wish to unfold a true picture of the world. Modern science has little by little instilled into us the dreadful maxim that the later is invariably to be regarded as a product of what has preceded it. Effect follows directly upon cause—so it is said. There is nothing more foolish than to generalise in this way about things in the world, saying that effect directly follows cause, and that cause gives rise to effect. There are always subsequent effects which have no direct connection whatever with a preceding cause. For how can it possibly be said that the cause of wheat being used as a foodstuff lies in the grain of wheat itself? It is true that during the 18th century a loose kind of thinking led people to explain the presence of certain cork-like substances for the ultimate purpose of producing corks for champagne bottles! It is impossible to imagine a more erroneous line of reasoning. The truth is that when wheat is used as a foodstuff, the grains of wheat pass over into another sphere of working altogether.

Now it is exactly the same with the knowledge we acquire about the things of the outer world, of outer Nature. The knowledge we thus acquire passes over into a different sphere of working. I beg you to take this truth in the deepest earnestness. In our efforts to understand the outer world it is possible for us to deprive ourselves of many of the forces that are necessary to the process of the transformation of our present body into the head of the next incarnation. As we acquire knowledge of the outer world, we deprive our being of a very great deal, and an adjustment must be brought about by providing that this knowledge passes over into another sphere. Just as the grains of wheat receive in a sense a nobler function when they are used as foodstuff for human beings, just as they receive compensation in this way for having been diverted from their original evolution, so too, knowledge of the outer world must be given over to a nobler purpose as compensation for having been deprived of its primary function. All the truth that a human being makes his own, all the knowledge he acquired of the outer world must be given into the hands of the Gods. We ought always to be inwardly conscious that the knowledge thus diverted from the onward stream of evolution must be placed in the service of the Gods, must, as it were, become an act of divine worship. All the knowledge we acquire without making it a holy offering to the evolutionary process of humanity, without consciously offering it to those Higher Spirits who receive their nourishment from it—all the knowledge we receive without thought of giving it over to this higher purpose, is like the grains of wheat which fall into the soil and decay—fulfilling neither their original purpose nor the other purpose of serving as nourishment for human beings.

At this point, my dear friends, we must surely realise how essential it is that a definite and absolutely practical result shall emerge from our strivings in the domain of Spiritual Science. It is not a question merely of learning the teachings of Spiritual Science, nor of making them into a body of knowledge, but of receiving them in such a way that a fundamental feeling is laid into the soul. We must associate with the acquisition of knowledge the realisation that this knowledge must be an act of divine worship and that it is a transgression against the divine purpose of evolution to profane knowledge, to divert it from its divine mission.

As I have said, the possibility of amassing a great deal of knowledge of the external world has arisen for the first time in the modern age. Among the Egyptians it was nearly all an inner and not an external form of knowledge. During the Graeco-Latin epoch of civilisation it became possible to acquire more knowledge of the outer world and at that very time it was also made possible for man to discover how they might place their knowledge in the service of the Divine, by the coming of Christ with His message to the Earth.

Here again is a connection which history makes clear to us. At the very moment in the evolution of humanity when knowledge became preeminently a knowledge of the external world—at that very moment the Christ came down from the spiritual world and enabled those men who directed their knowledge to Him in the true sense, to place it in the service of the Divine. It is quite true that this feeling has not as yet developed in humanity to any great extent, but as human beings begin to understand the sense in which Christ has made the Earth holy, they will also learn how to place their knowledge in the service of the Divine.

And so a small store of the forces connected with the head is preserved in order that our body may be transformed into the head of the next incarnation. And if the remaining forces are accompanied by the right kind of feeling, they can become the means of nourishing higher Spiritual Beings. Our concepts become food for these higher Spiritual Beings. In other words, we must try to acquire knowledge for the sake of the Gods, just as wheat also grows in order that human beings may find nourishment.

The substance which man receives as nourishment, however, must be for him. And in the same way, our knowledge must be rendered fit for the Gods by our attitude towards it. Indeed the healthy evolution of mankind depends very largely upon whether this kind of feeling is developed.

In the ancient Mysteries and Mystery Schools, knowledge was kept holy as a matter of course. One of the main reasons why everyone was not admitted to the Mysteries was that whoever sought admittance must prove that to him knowledge was really a holy thing, conceived as an offering to the Gods. Moreover this feeling was actually present. It was born from an atavistic instinct in man. In our own day this feeling is something that we must acquire once again. For good reason, human beings have been living through an age during which they have grown into materialism. But they must heal themselves of this materialism by associating their knowledge once again with the feelings that it must be offered up to the Gods. In the future ahead of us, however, this attitude will have to be acquired consciously and the only possibility of fulfillment will be if Spiritual Science grows and spreads among humanity. Knowledge must not be like a grain of wheat which falls into the Earth and decays. Knowledge that is placed only in the service of outer utility, in the service of mechanical, utilitarian purposes in the outer world—such knowledge is like the seeds which decay. Knowledge that is not placed in the service of the Divine, disappears and is lost. It can be used neither for the purpose of helping us in our next incarnation, nor for the nourishment of higher Spiritual Beings. The decay of a grain of wheat is a very real process. The dissipation of knowledge that is not made into an offering to the Gods is also a real process. It would lead too far afield to-day if I were to tell you what is really signified by the decay of the numberless grains of wheat that are sown in the soil. But Knowledge that is not placed in the service of the Divine is seized by Ahriman. It passes into his service and constitutes his power. Through the Spiritual Beings who are his servants, Ahriman then incorporates it into the world-process and sets up more hindrances to this world process than are justifiably and of necessity there. For Ahriman is the God of hindrances.

In this way, then, I have given you some idea of the significance of all that lives in our being in the form of knowledge and of truth.

The lecture yesterday will have shown you that if we are to acquire insight into the nature and evolution of humanity, we must be constantly mindful of the power and influence of Lucifer, of Christ, and of Ahriman.

These influences were, of course, already at work in earlier stages of cosmic evolution, but in spheres where it was unnecessary for people to have clear consciousness of their effects. On the other hand, the very purpose of our fifth post-Atlantean epoch is that human beings should become increasingly conscious of what takes effect through them in earthly existence. The unveiling of many more of the secrets of human life would be desirable at the present time if only there were greater willingness to face things frankly and objectively. For without the knowledge of certain facts of the kind indicated yesterday, it will not be possible for humanity to make progress either in the inner life or in the sphere of social life. Think only of something that is connected with the social problems we have recently been studying. It has been our aim to demonstrate the necessity for separating the spiritual life, and also the political life or life of rights, from the economic life. Our greatest concern is to create conditions throughout the world, or at least—for we cannot do more at present—to convince people of the necessity for conditions which would provide the foundation for a free spiritual life no longer dependent upon the other spheres of social life or as deeply entangled as it is today in the economic life on the one side and in the political life of the state on the other. Civilized humankind must either establish the independence of the spiritual life or face collapse—with the inevitable result of an Asiatic influence taking effect in the future.

Those who still do not recognize the gravity of the present situation in the world are also, in a certain respect, helping to prepare for Ahriman's incarnation. Many things in external life today bear witness to this. The ahrimanic incarnation will be greatly furthered if people fail to establish a free and independent spiritual life and allow it to remain entangled in the economic or political life. For the ahrimanic power has everything to gain by the spiritual life being even more closely intermingled with these other spheres. To the ahrimanic power a free spiritual life would denote a kind of darkness, and people's interest in it, a burning, raging fire. The establishment of this free spiritual life is essential in order that the right attitude, the right relationship, may be adopted to Ahriman's incarnation in the future.

But there is still a strong tendency today to conceal the facts of which we spoke yesterday. The vast majority of people cast a veil over these things; they refuse to see them as they really are and allow themselves to be deceived by words which have no connection with reality. And very often, endeavors to shirk reality are described as “honest” and “well-meaning.”

Take, for example, the recently published letter of Romain Rolland, in which he says that people should not allow themselves to be deluded by erstwhile proclamations of the victorious powers concerning justice and the upholding of political rights. The treatment which Russia is receiving from the Entente has led him to speak in these terms. He says: No matter whether it be on the part of monarchies or republics—what has been said about rights and justice is so much phrase mongering; the issue at bottom is one of power, and of power alone.

Now even the apparent approach to reality still betrays willingness to be deluded, for Romain Rolland is just as deluded as ever; the delusion is not one whit less. It could only be so if such people were to discard phrases and recognize that all these things for which they aspire are meaningless as long as they fail to realize that if the old unified state as such—whether a democracy, a republic or a monarchy—does not become threefold, this is simply a way of helping Ahriman's incarnation. Hence all these things, including this recent letter addressed to the world by Romain Rolland, amount to nothing more than rhetorical harangues. People do not grasp the reality, for reality can be grasped only when the necessity for spiritual knowledge and deep penetration into the nature of things is thoroughly understood.

You are all familiar with the much quoted verse: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God.” Do people really take these lines in earnest? They utter them, but so often as mere phrases! No particular emphasis is laid on the tense: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” “Word” here must obviously have the meaning it bore in ancient Greece. It is not “word” as understood today—word as mere sound—but it is the inner, spiritual reality. In either case, however, it is the imperfect tense that is employed. The implication therefore is: “In the beginning the Word was; but it is no longer.” Otherwise the sentence would run: “Now is the Word; and the Word is not with God; it was with God, and a God was the Word but is so no longer.” This, moreover, is what stands in the Gospel of St. John; otherwise what would be the meaning of the words immediately following: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” This indicates a further evolution of the Word. “Word” also means anything that human beings can acquire in the way of intellectual wisdom through their efforts and through their intelligence. But it must be quite clear to us that what “word” denotes here is not really the goal for which humanity must strive at the present time or in the immediate future. To express what is now the goal, we should have to say: “Let human beings seek for the Spirit that reveals itself in the Word; for the Spirit is with God, and the Spirit is a God.” Humankind must press on from the word to the spirit, to perception and knowledge of the spirit.

When I remind you of these first verses of the Gospel of St. John, you will realize what little inclination there is today to take such things in earnest and to surmount the arbitrary interpretations so often accepted in matters of the greatest moment. Human intelligence itself must be quickened and illumined by what is revealed in spiritual vision—not that actual seership is essential; what matters is that the fruits of spiritual vision shall be understood. I have repeatedly emphasized that today it is not the seer alone who can apprehend the truth of clairvoyant experience; this apprehension is within the power of everyone at the present time, because the spiritual capacities of human beings are sufficiently mature if they will but resolve to exercise them and are not too indolent to do so. But if the level befitting humanity is to be achieved, such things as were mentioned in the lecture yesterday must be taken in deep earnestness! I used a trivial example to show you how easy it is to be deluded by figures and numbers. Is there not a great deal of superstition where numbers are concerned? What can in some way be counted is accepted in science. Natural science loves to weigh, to compute, and social science loves statistics—again a matter of computation and reckoning. It will be difficult indeed for people to bring themselves to admit that all knowledge of the external world acquired through measure and number is so much delusion.

To measure—what does it mean, in reality? It means to compare something with a given dimension, be it length or volume. I can measure a line if I compare it with a line twice, three times, four times, etc., smaller:

In such measurements, no matter whether of lengths or surfaces or weights, the qualitative element is entirely lacking. The number three always remains the same, whether one is counting sheep, human beings, or politicians.

It is not a matter of the qualitative, but only of the quantum, the quantitative. The essential principle of volume and number is that the qualitative is left out of account. But for that very reason, all knowledge derived from the principles of volume and measure is illusion; and the fact which must be taken in all seriousness is that the moment we enter the world that can be weighed and measured, the world of space and time, we enter a world of illusion, a world that is nothing but a fata morgana as long as we take it to be reality. It is the ideal of present-day thinking to experience in connection with all the things of the external world of space and time, their spatial and temporal significance; whereas, in truth, what things signify in space and time is their external aspect only, and we must transcend space and time, penetrating to much deeper levels, if we are to reach the innermost truth, the innermost being of things. And so a future must come when people will be able to say: “Yes, with my intelligence I can apprehend the external world in the way that is the ideal of natural science. But the vista thus presented to me is wholly ahrimanic.” This does not mean that natural science is to be ignored or put aside; it is a matter of realizing that this natural science leads only to the ahrimanic illusion. Why, then, must people have natural science, in spite of the fact that it leads only to illusion? It is because in earth existence they are already on the descending curve of evolution. Of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin epoch, it may be said that with respect to knowledge, humanity was, relatively speaking, at the zenith. But now, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, human beings are on the path of decline, they are a being growing physically weaker, and to perceive the world in the way the Greeks perceived it would be too much for their strength.

That is something we are not told in history! Just imagine what modern historians would have to say about it—those worthy historians who describe Greece as if they were describing some region of their own time because they do not know that the Greeks looked out into nature with different eyes, listened with different ears from those of modern people. These historians do not tell us that modern human beings would suffer from constant headache or migraine if they were to see and hear in the outer world all that the Greeks saw and heard. The Greeks lived with infinitely greater intensity in the world of the senses. Our own apprehension of this world has already weakened. To be able to bear it, a fata morgana has to be and is presented to us. And not only what we perceive with the senses but on account of our scientific conceptions we “dream” about the external world—that, most emphatically of all, is a fata morgana. The greatest dreamers where the external world is concerned are precisely those who pride themselves on being realistic in their thinking. Darwin and John Stuart Mill are fundamentally dreamers. The dreamers are the very people who claim to be thoroughgoing realists.

But neither must we give ourselves up entirely to our own inner life and impulses. From the way things have developed in the movement represented by the “Theosophical Society,” many of you will have realized that cultivation of the inner life alone, as attempted by numbers of people today, does not lead to the goal befitting humanity in the present age. For the all too prevalent tendency is to make no free resolve to transcend ordinary life and attain higher vision but rather to bring into prominence that in us which is not free. All kinds of hallucinatory tendencies, all kinds of faculties fraught with illusion come into play.

It should be realized that just as external science becomes ahrimanic, the higher development of our inner nature becomes luciferic if we give ourselves up to mystical experiences. The luciferic tendency wakens and becomes especially powerful in everyone who, without the self-training described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, sets about any mystical deepening of the impulses already inherent in their nature. The luciferic tendency shows itself in everyone who begins to brood over experiences of their inner life, and it is extremely powerful in present-day humanity. It takes effect in egoism of which most people are entirely unaware. One comes across so many today who are quite satisfied when they can say of something they have done that they have no cause for self-reproach, that they did it to the best of their knowledge and according to their conscience. That is an entirely luciferic attitude. For in what we do in life the point is not whether or not we have cause to reproach ourselves; what really matters is that we shall take things objectively, with complete detachment, and in accordance with the course of objective facts. And the majority of people today make no effort to achieve this objective understanding or to acquire knowledge of what is necessary for world evolution.

Therefore spiritual science must emphasize the following: That Ahriman is actually preparing for his incarnation; where we can recognize how he is preparing for it; and with what attitude it must be confronted. In such questions the point is not to say: We do this or that in order that we may have no cause for self-reproach—but to learn to recognize the objective facts. We must come to know what is at work in the world, and act accordingly—for the world's sake.

It all amounts to this, that modern people only speak truly of themselves when they say that they hover perpetually between two extremes: between the ahrimanic on the one side, where they are presented with an outer delusion, a fata morgana, and, on the other, the luciferic element within them which induces the tendency to illusions, hallucinations and the like. The ahrimanic tendencies in people today live themselves out in science, the luciferic tendencies, in religion, while in art they swing between the one extreme and the other. In recent times the tendencies of some artists have been more luciferic—they are the expressionists; the tendencies of the others have been more ahrimanic—they are the impressionists. And then, vacillating between all this, there are the people who want to be neither the one nor the other, who do not rightly assess either the luciferic or the ahrimanic but want to avoid both. “Ahriman—no!—that I must not, will not do, for it would take me into the realm of the ahrimanic; that I must not, will not do, for it would take me into the realm of the luciferic!” They want to be virtuous, avoiding both the ahrimanic and the luciferic.

But the truth of the matter is that Lucifer and Ahriman must be regarded as two scales of a balance and it is we who must hold the beam in equipoise.

And how can we train ourselves to do this? By permeating what takes ahrimanic form within us with a strongly luciferic element. What is it that arises in modern people in an Ahrimanic form? It is his knowledge of the outer world. There is nothing more ahrimanic than this knowledge of the material world, for it is sheer illusion. Nevertheless if the fata morgana that arises out of chemistry, out of physics, out of astronomy and the like can fill us with fiery enthusiasm and interest, then through our interest—which is itself luciferic—we can wrest from Ahriman what is his own.

That, however, is just what human beings have no desire to do; they find it irksome. And many people who flee from external, materialistic knowledge are misconceiving their task and preparing the best possible incarnation for Ahriman in earth existence. Again, what wells up in our inmost being today is very strongly luciferic. How can we train ourselves rightly in this direction? By diving into it with our ahrimanic nature, that is to say, by trying to avoid all illusions about our own inner life and impulses and observing ourselves just as we observe the outer world. Modern people must realize how urgent it is to educate themselves in this way. Anyone who has an observant eye in these matters will often come across circumstances of which the following is an example.

A man tells someone how indignant he is with countless human beings. He describes minutely how this or that in a, in b, in c, and so on, angers him. He has not an inkling that he is simply talking about his own characteristics. This peculiarity in human beings was never so widespread as it is today. And those who believe they are free of it, are the greatest culprits. The essential is that people should approach their own inner nature with ahrimanic cold-bloodedness and dispassion. Their inner nature is still fiery enough even when cooled down in this way! There is no need to fear that it will be overcooled.

If the right stand is to be taken to Ahriman's future incarnation, people must become more objective where their own impulses are concerned, and far, far more subjective where the external world is concerned—not by introducing pictures of fantasy but by bringing interest, alert attention, and devotion to the things of immediate life.

When people find one thing or another in outer life tedious, possibly because of the education they have received or because of other circumstances, the path which Ahriman wants to take for the benefit of his incarnation is greatly smoothed. Tedium is so widespread nowadays! I have known numbers of people who find it irksome to acquaint themselves for example with banking procedure, or the stock exchange, or single or double entry bookkeeping. But that is never the right attitude. It simply means that the point has not been discovered where a thing burns with interest. Once this point is reached, even a dry cashbook can become just as interesting as Schiller's Maid of Orleans, or Shakespeare's Hamlet, or anything else—even Raphael's Sistine Madonna. It is only a question of finding the point at which every single thing in life becomes interesting.

What I have just said may make you think that all these matters are very paradoxical. But in reality they are not. It is we who are paradoxical in our relationship to truth. What we must realize—and this is a dire necessity today—is that we, not the world, are at fault. Nothing does more to prepare the path for Ahriman's incarnation than to find this or that tedious, to consider oneself superior to one thing or another and refuse to enter into it. Again it is the same question of finding the point where everything is of interest. It is never a matter of a subjective rejection or acceptance of things, but of an objective recognition of the extent to which things are either luciferic or ahrimanic, with the result that the scales are overweighted on the one side or the other.

To be interested in something does not mean that one considers it justifiable. It means simply that one develops an inner energy to get to grips with it and steer it into the right channel.

As some of you may know—it is a long time ago now—a number of friends bought themselves books on mathematics. A kind of “sporting spirit” had crept into them! They bought the works of Lubsen [Heinrich Borchert Lubsen (1801-64).] but it was not long before most of the volumes found their way to library shelves and the mathematical knowledge was not much in evidence! This, of course, is not meant as a hint to tackle the matter again—I am making no such suggestion. But to come to grips with something in which; to begin with, one is not interested at all, in order that .a new understanding of world existence may arise—that is of untold significance. For such things as I want to bring home to you in these lectures—how Lucifer and Ahriman intervene in the evolution of humankind side by side with the Christ impulse—these things must be taken in all earnestness and their consequences rightly assessed.

Had there been no luciferic wisdom, no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha could have been acquired through the gnosis in the early centuries of Christendom. Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha diminished with the fading of the luciferic wisdom. And where is there any evidence today of such understanding? The fact that understanding cannot be found through external, ahrimanic science is perceived by those who to some extent recognize its characteristics. Take, for example, a man like Cardinal Newman—a very significant figure in the sphere of religion during the second half of the nineteenth century. At his investiture as Cardinal in Rome, he declared that he could see no salvation for the religious development of humankind other than a new revelation! [See his speech in Rome, May 12, 1879, when he had been raised to the rank of Cardinal. “... Hitherto the civil power has been Christian. Even in countries separated from the Church, as in my own, the dictum was in force, when I was young, that ‘Christianity was the law of the land.’ Now, everywhere that goodly framework of society, which is the creation of Christianity, is throwing off Christianity. The dictum to which I have referred, with a hundred others which followed upon it, is gone, or is going everywhere; and by the end of the century, unless the Almighty interferes, it will be forgotten.” (The Life of John Henry Newman, by Wilfrid Ward, Vol. 2, p. 460.)] But there it remained. He himself showed no special inclination to receive anything of the new spiritual life that can now stream into humanity out of the spiritual worlds. What he said remained in the sphere of abstraction.

In very truth humanity needs a new revelation. Of this there is evidence on all sides. There have been discussions recently about the deterioration in morals and in the general attitude toward morality during the last four or five years. The conclusion reached is that denominational religious instruction must be introduced more intensively into the schools. But it cannot be emphasized often enough that this instruction was already being given and the times are supposed to have come under its influence. If the old denominational instruction is again to be introduced we shall simply be beginning the whole process over again. In a short time we shall be back where we were in 1914. It is in the highest degree important to realize that in the subconsciousness of human beings there are longings quite different in character from what comes to expression on the surface.

When we founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart earlier this year, we were obliged to arrange for the religious instruction to be divided among the various clergy. A particular hour is devoted to religious instruction, which is given by a Catholic priest for the Catholic children and by an Evangelical pastor for the Evangelicals. I shall not speak of the difficulties that came from the side of the priests—that is a chapter by itself. What I do want to say, however, is that an immediate desire was expressed for religious teaching apart from any denomination. At first I thought that the attendance would be insignificant in comparison with the numbers attending the denominational instruction. But in spite of the fact that soon there will not be a single pulpit in Stuttgart from which invectives are not poured on Anthroposophy, a large number of children—five times as many as we expected—have asked for a kind of anthroposophical instruction in religion, and the class has had to be divided into two. Subjectively this may not be altogether welcome, for it may prove to be a rod for our own backs. But of that I do not want to speak. I want only to show that there is a longing for progress in human beings but that they are asleep and do not perceive that forces are keeping these longings in subjection. And moreover the courage to bring these longings to the surface is very largely lacking.

Just think what the effect could be of knowledge such as that of the future incarnation of Ahriman, who is preparing for it by means I have been describing both yesterday and today. It is essential to inform ourselves objectively about these things in order that we may take the right stand toward what is going on around us in the way of preparation for the Ahriman incarnation. Only if you apply deep and mature reflection to what has been said in these lectures about the ahrimanic currents will you be able to apprehend the gravity of the present situation.

The lecture yesterday will have shown you that if we are to acquire insight into the nature and evolution of man, we must be constantly mindful of the power and influence of Lucifer, of Christ, and of Ahriman.

These influences were, of course, already at work in earlier stages of cosmic evolution, but in spheres where it was unnecessary for man to have clear consciousness of their effects. On the other hand, the very purpose of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is that man should become increasingly conscious of what takes effect through him in earthly existence. The unveiling of many more of the secrets of human life would be desirable at the present time if only there were greater willingness to face things frankly and objectively. For without the knowledge of certain facts of the kind indicated yesterday, it will not be possible for humanity to make progress either in the inner life or in the sphere of social life. Think only of something that is connected with the social problems we have recently been studying. It has been our aim to demonstrate the necessity for separating the spiritual life, and also the political life or life of rights, from the economic life. Our greatest concern is to create conditions throughout the world, or at least—for we cannot do more at present—to convince men of the necessity for conditions which would provide the foundation for a free spiritual life no longer dependent upon the other spheres of social life or as deeply entangled as it is to-day in the economic life on the one side and in the political life of the State on the other. Civilised mankind must either establish the independence of the spiritual life or face collapse—with the inevitable result of an Asiatic influence taking effect in the future.

Those who still do not recognise the gravity of the present situation in the world are also, in a certain respect, helping to prepare for Ahriman's incarnation. Many things in external life to-day bear witness to this. The Ahrimanic incarnation will be greatly furthered if men fail to establish a free and independent spiritual life and allow it to remain entangled in the economic or political life. For the Ahrimanic power has everything to gain by the spiritual life being even more closely intermingled with these other spheres. To the Ahrimanic power a free spiritual life would denote a kind of darkness, and men's interest in it, a burning, raging fire. The establishment of this free spiritual life is essential in order that the right attitude, the right relationship, may be adopted to Ahriman's incarnation in the future.

But there is still a strong tendency to-day to conceal the facts of which we spoke yesterday. The vast majority of people cast a veil over these things; they refuse to see them as they really are and allow themselves to be deceived by words which have no connection with reality. And very often, endeavours to shirk reality are described as “honest” and “well-meaning”.

Take, for example, the recently published letter of Romain Rolland, in which he says that men should not allow themselves to be deluded by erstwhile proclamations of the victorious powers concerning justice and the upholding of political rights. The treatment which Russia is receiving from the Entente has led him to speak in these terms. He says: No matter whether it be on the part of monarchies or republics—what has been said about rights and justice is so much phrase-mongering; the issue at bottom is one of power, and of power alone.

Now even this apparent approach to reality still betrays willingness to be deluded, for Romain Rolland is just as deluded as ever; the delusion is not one whit less. It could only be so if such men were to discard phrases and recognise that all these things for which they aspire are meaningless as long as they fail to realise that if the old unified State as such—whether a democracy, a republic or a monarchy—does not become threefold, this is simply a way of helping Ahriman's incarnation. Hence all these things, including this recent letter addressed to the world by Romain Rolland, amount to nothing more than rhetorical harangues. People do not grasp the reality, for reality can be grasped only when the necessity for spiritual knowledge and deep penetration into the nature of things is thoroughly understood.

You are all familiar with the much quoted verse: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God.” Do men really take these lines in earnest? They utter them, but so often as mere phrases! No particular emphasis is laid on the tense: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a God.” “ Word” here must obviously have the meaning it bore in ancient Greece. It is not “word” as understood to-day—word as mere sound—but it is the inner, spiritual reality. In either case, however, it is the imperfect tense that is employed. The implication therefore is: “In the beginning the Word was; but it is no longer.” Otherwise the sentence would run: “Now is the Word; and the Word is not with God; it was with God, and a God was the Word but is so no longer.” This, moreover, is what stands in the Gospel of St. John; otherwise what would be the meaning of the words immediately following: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” This indicates a further evolution of the Word. “Word” also means anything that man can acquire in the way of intellectual wisdom through his efforts and through his intelligence. But it must be quite clear to us that what “word” denotes here is not really the goal for which man must strive at the present time or in the immediate future. To express what is now the goal, we should have to say: “Let man seek for the Spirit that reveals itself in the Word; for the Spirit is with God, and the Spirit is a God.” Mankind must press on from the word to the spirit, to perception and knowledge of the spirit.

When I remind you of these first verses of the Gospel of St. John, you will realise what little inclination there is to-day to take such things in earnest and to surmount the arbitrary interpretations so often accepted in matters of the greatest moment. Human intelligence itself must be quickened and illumined by what is revealed in spiritual vision.—Not that actual seership is essential; what matters is that the fruits of spiritual vision shall be understood. I have repeatedly emphasised that to-day it is not the seer alone who can apprehend the truth of clairvoyant experience; this apprehension is within the power of everyone at the present time, because the spiritual capacities of men are sufficiently mature if they will but resolve to exercise them and are not too indolent to do so. But if the level befitting humanity is to be achieved, such things as were mentioned in the lecture yesterday must be taken in deep earnestness ! I used a trivial example to show you how easy it is to be deluded by figures and numbers. Is there not a great deal of superstition where numbers are concerned? What can in some way be counted is accepted in science. Natural science loves to weigh, to compute, and social science loves statistics—again a matter of computation and reckoning. It will be difficult indeed for men to bring themselves to admit that all knowledge of the external world acquired through measure and number is so much delusion.

To measure—what does it mean, in reality? It means to compare something with a given dimension, be it length or volume. I can measure a line if I compare it with a line twice, three times, four times, etc. smaller:

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In such measurements, no matter whether of lengths or surfaces or weights, the qualitative element is entirely lacking. The number 3 always remains the same, whether one is counting sheep, human beings or politicians ! It is not a matter of the qualitative, but only of the quantum, the quantitative. The essential principle of volume and number is that the qualitative is left out of account. But for that very reason, all knowledge derived from the principles of volume and measure is illusion; and the fact which must be taken in all seriousness is that the moment we enter the world that can be weighed and measured, the world of space and time, we enter a world of illusion, a world that is nothing but a Fata Morgana as long as we take it to be reality. It is the ideal of present-day thinking to experience in connection with all the things of the external world of space and time, their spatial and temporal significance; whereas, in truth, what things signify in space and time is their external aspect only, and we must transcend space and time, penetrating to much deeper levels, if we are to reach the innermost truth, the innermost being of things. And so a future must come when men will be able to say: “Yes, with my intelligence I can apprehend the external world in the way that is the ideal of natural science. But the vista thus presented to me is wholly Ahrimanic.”—This does not mean that natural science is to be ignored or put aside; it is a matter of realising that this natural science leads only to the Ahrimanic illusion. Why, then, must man have natural science, in spite of the fact that it leads only to illusion? It is because in his earth-existence he is already on the descending curve of evolution. Of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin epoch, it may be said that in respect of knowledge, man was relatively speaking at the zenith. But now, in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, he is on the path of decline, he is a being growing physically weaker, and to perceive the world in the way the Greek perceived it would be too much for his strength.

That is something we are not told in history! Just imagine what modern historians would have to say about it—those worthy historians who describe Greece as if they were describing some region of their own time because they do not know that the Greeks looked out into nature with different eyes, listened with different ears from those of modern men. These historians do not tell us that modern human beings would suffer from constant headache or migraine if they were to see and hear in the outer world all that the Greeks saw and heard. The Greeks lived with infinitely greater intensity in the world of the senses. Our own apprehension of this world has already weakened. To be able to bear it, a Fata Morgana has to be and is presented to us. And not only what we perceive with the senses but on account of our scientific conceptions we “dream” about the external world—that, most emphatically of all, is a Fata Morgana. The greatest dreamers where the external world is concerned are precisely those who pride themselves on being realistic in their thinking. Darwin and John Stuart Mill are fundamentally dreamers. The dreamers are the very men who claim to be thorough-going realists.

But neither must we give ourselves up entirely to our own inner life and impulses. From the way things have developed in the movement represented by the “Theosophical Society”, many of you will have realised that cultivation of the inner life alone, as attempted by numbers of people to-day, does not lead to the goal befitting man in the present age. For the all too prevalent tendency is to make no free resolve of his own to transcend ordinary life and attain higher vision but rather to bring into prominence that in him which is not free. All kinds of hallucinatory tendencies, all kinds of faculties fraught with illusion come into play.

It should be realised that just as external science becomes Ahrimanic, the higher development of a man's inner nature becomes Luciferic if he gives himself up to mystical experiences. The Luciferic tendency wakens and becomes especially powerful in everyone who, without the self-training described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, sets about any mystical deepening of the impulses already inherent in his nature. The Luciferic tendency shows itself in everyone who begins to brood over experiences of his inner life, and it is extremely powerful in present-day humanity. It takes effect in egoism of which most people are entirely unaware. One comes across so many to-day who are quite satisfied when they can say of something they have done, that they have no cause for self-reproach, that they did it to the best of their knowledge and according to their conscience. That is an entirely Luciferic attitude. For in what we do in life the point is not whether or not we have cause to reproach ourselves; what really matters is that we shall take things objectively, with complete detachment, and in accordance with the course of objective facts. And the majority of people to-day make no effort to achieve this objective understanding or to acquire knowledge of what is necessary for world-evolution.

Therefore spiritual science must emphasise the following:—That Ahriman is actually preparing for his incarnation; where we can recognise how he is preparing for it; and with what attitude it must be confronted.—In such questions the point is not to say: We do this or that in order that we may have no cause for self-reproach—but to learn to recognise the objective facts. We must come to know what is at work in the world, and act accordingly—for the world's sake.

It all amounts to this, that modern man only speaks truly of himself when he says that he hovers perpetually between two extremes: between the Ahrimanic on the one side, where he is presented with an outer delusion, a Fata Morgana, and, on the other, the Luciferic element within him which induces the tendency to illusions, hallucinations and the like. The Ahrimanic tendencies in man to-day live themselves out in science, the Luciferic tendencies, in religion, while in art he swings between the one extreme and the other. In recent times the tendencies of some artists have been more Luciferic—they are the expressionists; the tendencies of the others have been more Ahrimanic—they are the impressionists. And then, vacillating between all this, there are the people who want to be neither the one nor the other, who do not rightly assess either the Luciferic or the Ahrimanic but want to avoid both.—“Ahriman—no!—that I must not, will not do, for it would take me into the realm of the Ahrimanic; that I must not, will not do, for it would take me into the realm of the Luciferic!” They want to be virtuous, avoiding both the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic.

But the truth of the matter is that Lucifer and Ahriman must be regarded as two scales of a balance and it is we who must hold the beam in equipoise.

And how can we train ourselves to do this?—By permeating what takes Ahrimanic form within us with a strongly Luciferic element. What is it that arises in modern man in an Ahrimanic form? It is his knowledge of the outer world. There is nothing more Ahrimanic than this knowledge of the material world, for it is sheer illusion. Nevertheless if the Fata Morgana that arises out of chemistry, out of physics, out of astronomy and the like can fill us with fiery enthusiasm and interest, then through our interest—which is itself Luciferic—we can wrest from Ahriman what is his own.

That, however, is just what human beings have no desire to do; they find it irksome. And many people who flee from external, materialistic knowledge are misconceiving their task and preparing the best possible incarnation for Ahriman in earth-existence. Again, what wells up in man's inmost being to-day is very strongly Luciferic. How can we train ourselves rightly in this direction?—By diving into it with our Ahrimanic nature, that is to say, by trying to avoid all illusions about our own inner life and impulses and observing ourselves just as we observe the outer world. Modern man must realise how urgent it is to educate himself in this way. Anyone who has an observant eye in these matters will often come across circumstances of which the following is an example.

A man tells him how indignant he is with countless human beings. He describes minutely how this or that in a, in b, in c, and so on, angers him. He has not an inkling that he is simply talking about his own characteristics. This peculiarity in human beings was never so widespread as it is to-day. And those who believe they are free of it, are the greatest culprits. The essential is that man should approach his own inner nature with Ahrimanic cold-bloodedness and dispassion. His inner nature is still fiery enough even when cooled down in this way! There is no need to fear that it will be over-cooled.

If the right stand is to be taken to Ahriman's future incarnation, men must become more objective where their own impulses are concerned, and far, far more subjective where the external world is concerned—not by introducing pictures of phantasy but by bringing interest, alert attention and devotion to the things of immediate life.

When men find one thing or another in outer life tedious, possibly because of the education they have received or because of other circumstances, the path which Ahriman wants to take for the benefit of his incarnation is greatly smoothed. Tedium is so widespread nowadays! I have known numbers of people who find it irksome to acquaint themselves for example with banking procedure, or the Stock Exchange, or single or double entry in book-keeping. But that is never the right attitude. It simply means that the point has not been discovered where a thing burns with interest. Once this point is reached, even a dry cash-book can become just as interesting as Schiller's Maid of Orleans, or Shakespeare's Hamlet, or anything else—even Raphael's Sistine Madonna. It is only a question of finding the point at which every single thing in life becomes interesting.

What I have just said may make you think that all these matters are very paradoxical. But in reality they are not. It is man who is paradoxical in his relationship to truth. What he must realise—and this is a dire necessity to-day—is that he, not the world, is at fault. Nothing does more to prepare the path for Ahriman's incarnation than to find this or that tedious, to consider oneself superior to one thing or another and refuse to enter into it. Again it is the same question of finding the point where everything is of interest. It is never a matter of a subjective rejection or acceptance of things, but of an objective recognition of the extent to which things are either Luciferic or Ahrimanic, with the result that the scales are over-weighted on the one side or the other.

To be interested in something does not mean that one considers it justifiable. It means simply that one develops an inner energy to get to grips with it and steer it into the right channel.

As some of you may know—it is a long time ago now—a number of friends bought themselves books on mathematics. A kind of “sporting spirit” had crept into them! They bought the works of Lübsen¹ but it was not long before most of the volumes found their way to library shelves and the mathematical knowledge was not much in evidence! This, of course, is not meant as a hint to tackle the matter again—I am making no such suggestion. But to come to grips with something in which, to begin with, one is not interested at all, in order that a new understanding of world-existence may arise—that is of untold significance. For such things as I want to bring home to you in these lectures—how Lucifer and Ahriman intervene in the evolution of mankind side by side with the Christ Impulse—these things must be taken in all earnestness and their consequences rightly assessed.

Had there been no Luciferic wisdom, no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha could have been acquired through the Gnosis in the early centuries of Christendom. Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha diminished with the fading of the Luciferic wisdom. And where is there any evidence to-day of such understanding ? The fact that understanding cannot be found through external, Ahrimanic science is perceived by those who to some extent recognise its characteristics. Take, for example, a man like Cardinal Newman—a very significant figure in the sphere of religion during the second half of the nineteenth century. At his investiture as Cardinal in Rome, he declared that he could see no salvation for the religious development of mankind other than a new revelation!² But there it remained. He himself showed no special inclination to receive anything of the new spiritual life that can now stream into humanity out of the spiritual worlds. What he said remained in the sphere of abstraction.

In very truth humanity needs a new revelation. Of this there is evidence on all sides. There have been discussions recently about the deterioration in morals and in the general attitude to morality during the last four or five years. The conclusion reached is that denominational religious instruction must be introduced more intensively into the schools. But it cannot be emphasised often enough that this instruction was already being given and the times are supposed to have come under its influence. If the old denominational instruction is again to be introduced we shall simply be beginning the whole process over again. In a short time we shall be back where we were in 1914. It is in the highest degree important to realise that in the subconsciousness of human beings there are longings quite different in character from what comes to expression on the surface.

When we founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart earlier this year, we were obliged to arrange for the religious instruction to be divided among the various clergy. A particular hour is devoted to religious instruction, which is given by a Catholic priest for the Catholic children and by an Evangelical pastor for the Evangelicals. I shall not speak of the difficulties that came from the side of the priests—that is a chapter by itself. What I do want to say, however, is that an immediate desire was expressed for religious teaching apart from any denomination. At first I thought that the attendance would be insignificant in comparison with the numbers attending the denominational instruction. But in spite of the fact that soon there will not be a single pulpit in Stuttgart from which invectives are not poured on Anthroposophy, a large number of children—five times as many as we expected—have asked for a kind of anthroposophical instruction in religion, and the class has had to be divided into two. Subjectively this may not be altogether welcome, for it may prove to be a rod for our own backs. But of that I do not want to speak. I want only to show that there is a longing for progress in human beings but that they are asleep and do not perceive that forces are keeping these longings in subjection. And moreover the courage to bring these longings to the surface is very largely lacking.

Just think what the effect could be of knowledge such as that of the future incarnation of Ahriman, who is preparing for it by means I have been describing both yesterday and to-day. It is essential to inform ourselves objectively about these things in order that we may take the right stand towards what is going on around us in the way of preparation for the Ahriman-incarnation. Only if you apply deep and mature reflection to what has been said in these lectures about the Ahrimanic currents, will you be able to apprehend the gravity of the present situation.

• 1. Heinrich Borchert Lübsen (1801–64).
• 2. See his speech in Rome, May 12th, 1879, when he had been raised to the rank of Cardinal. “... Hitherto the civil power has been Christian. Even in countries separated from the Church, as in my own, the dictum was in force, when I was young, that ‘Christianity was the law of the land’. Now, everywhere that goodly framework of society, which is the creation of Christianity, is throwing off Christianity. The dictum to which I have referred, with a hundred others which followed upon it, is gone, or is going everywhere; and by the end of the century, unless the Almighty interferes, it will be forgotten.” (The Life of John Henry Newman, by Wilfrid Ward. Vol. 2, p. 460.)