The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday we saw that in a certain respect the question of Christianity is the question of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. In particular, we spoke of Paul, the proclaimer of Christianity, who from his knowledge of the essential nature of the Christ-Impulse recognised immediately that after and since the Event of Golgotha, Christ lives. We saw that for Paul, after his experience on the road to Damascus, a powerful, magnificent picture of human evolution opened up.

From this point we went on to build up a picture of what Christ Jesus was directly after the Baptism in Jordan by John. Our next task will be to inquire into the course of events from the Baptism to the Mystery of Golgotha. But if we are to rise to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, we must clear away certain hindrances. From all that has been said concerning the Gospels in the course of years, and also from what has been said already in these few lectures, you will have been able to gather that certain theosophical ideas, which in some quarters are esteemed sufficient, are really not sufficient to answer the question with which we are here concerned.

Before everything else we must take quite seriously what has been said about the three streams of human thought: the stream which has its source in ancient Greece; the stream which comes down from ancient Hebraism, and lastly the stream which found expression in Gautama Buddha half a millennium before our era. We have seen that this Buddha stream, especially as it developed among his followers, is least of all adapted to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. To the modern man, whose consciousness is filled with the intellectual culture of the present day, the stream of thought which finds expression in Buddhism certainly offers something very pleasant. Hardly any other form of thought suits so well the concepts of the present day, in so far as they prefer to remain silent in face of the greatest question that humanity has to grasp—the question of the Resurrection. For with this question the whole evolutionary history of mankind is connected. Now in Buddhist teaching the real being of the Ego, which in the true sense we can call the fourth member of human nature, has been lost. Certainly in these matters one can employ all kinds of interpretations, one can twist them in all sorts of ways, and plenty of people will find fault with what has been said here about Buddhist teaching, but that is not the point. For such things as I have quoted from the heart of Buddhism—for example, the conversation between King Milinda and the Buddhist sage Nagasena—testify clearly that the Ego-nature cannot be spoken of in Buddhism as we must speak of it. For a genuine follower of Buddhism it would indeed be heretical to speak of the Ego-nature as we must represent it. On this very account we must ourselves be clear regarding the Ego-nature.

The human Ego, which in the case of every human being, even of the highest Adept, passes from incarnation to incarnation, is a term which (as we saw yesterday) can be applied to Jesus of Nazareth only from his birth to the Baptism in Jordan. After the baptism, we still have before us the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth; but these external human sheaths are now indwelt not by a human Ego but by a Cosmic Being, the Christ-Being. Through years of endeavour we have tried by means of words to bring the Christ-Being nearer to our understanding. As soon as one comprehends the whole nature of Christ Jesus, it is obvious that for Him one must rule out any kind of physical or bodily reincarnation. The expression employed in my mystery drama, The Soul's Probation, about Christ having been present once only in a body of flesh, must be taken seriously and quite literally. Accordingly we must first concern ourselves with the being, the nature, of the ordinary human Ego. The Christ-Jesus-Being was completely independent of the human Ego from the Baptism to the Mystery of Golgotha.

In earlier lectures it was shown that the evolution of the earth was preceded by a Saturn existence, a Sun existence and a Moon existence, and these three planetary embodiments were followed by the fourth, our Earth-embodiment. You know from those lectures that only during the Earth-existence, the fourth of the planetary conditions which were necessary to bring into existence our Earth with all its creatures, could the human Ego enter into connection with human nature. Just as in the Ancient Saturn period we speak of the beginning of the physical body, so in the period of the ancient Sun we speak of the first development of the etheric body, in the Moon period of the first development of the astral body, and only in the Earth period of the unfolding of the Ego. In this way the whole matter is brought cosmically and historically into view. But how is it when we look at the history of peoples?

Through our former studies we know that although the seed-kernel of the Ego was laid down in human beings during the Lemurian time, the possibility of attaining to Ego-consciousness arose only towards the end of the Atlantean period, and that even then this Ego-consciousness was very dim and vague. Indeed, after the Atlantean time, through the various periods of civilisation which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, the Ego-consciousness was still dull, dream-like, dim. But if you turn your attention to the development of the Hebrew people, it will be clear to you that here the Ego-consciousness found expression in a very unusual way. A kind of Folk-Ego lived in each single member of the ancient Hebrew people; in fact, every member of this people traced his Ego back to his ancestor in the flesh, to Abraham. The Ego of the ancient Hebrew people was still such that we can designate it as a Group-Ego, a Folk-Group-Ego. Consciousness had not yet penetrated as far as the separate individuality in each man. Why was this so?

Each part of the four-membered human being we now regard as normal developed gradually in the course of the earth's evolution. It was only towards the end of the Atlantean Period that part of the etheric body, which until then had been external to the physical body, was gradually drawn into the body. This led towards the condition now recognised by clairvoyant consciousness as normal, namely that the physical body and the etheric body approximately coincide, and only then was it possible for man to develop his Ego-consciousness Let us slowly and gradually form an impression of the very peculiar way in which this Ego-consciousness meets us in man.

I described yesterday how people speak of the Resurrection when they approach it with all the intellectual preconceptions of the present day. If, they say, ‘I had to assent to the real Pauline teaching about the Resurrection, I would have to tear up my whole conception of the world.’ That is what they say, these up-to-date people who have at their command all the resources of modern intellectualism. To people who speak thus, what must now be said will seem very strange.

But is it not possible that such a person might reflect: ‘Yes, if I am to accept the Resurrection, I shall have to tear up all my intellectual concepts. But is that a reason for setting this question aside? Because we cannot understand the Resurrection and have to regard it as a miracle, must we assume that the only way out of this difficulty is to pass it by? Is there no other way?’

The other way is far from easy for a modern man, for he would have to admit to himself: ‘Perhaps it is not the fault of the Resurrection that I am unable to understand it. Perhaps the reason is that my intellect is unfitted to understand it.’

So little is this matter taken seriously in our day that we may say: Modern man is prevented by his pride—and just because he does not suspect that pride could come into it—from admitting that his intellect may be incompetent to fathom this question. For which is more reasonable: to say that I am setting aside something that shatters my intellectual outlook, or to admit that it may be beyond my understanding? Pride, however, forbids this admission.

Of course, an anthroposophist must have trained himself to rise above this kind of pride. It should not be far from the heart of a true anthroposophist to say: ‘Perhaps my intellect is not competent to form an opinion about the Resurrection.’ But then he has to face another difficulty: he now has to answer the question why the human mind is not adapted to comprehend the greatest fact in human evolution. To answer this question we must go somewhat more closely into the real nature of human understanding. Here I should like to remind you of my Munich lectures, Wonders of the World, of which I will now give a resume as far as we need one.

The elements that go to make up our soul life, our thoughts, feelings and perceptions, are not to be found in our present-day physical body; they penetrate only as far as the etheric body. In order to be clear about this, let us imagine our human nature, in so far as it consists of Ego, astral body and etheric body, enclosed in an ellipse:

We will take this diagram to represent schematically what we call our inward life and can experience in our souls; the diagram shows it coming to expression only in the streams and forces of the etheric body. If we experience a thought or perception, it has three lines of action in our soul-nature, as indicated in the following diagram.

Within our soul-nature there is nothing that is not present in this way. Now if a man's ordinary earthly consciousness were restricted to soul-experiences within the confines of the diagram, the experiences would occur, but he would not be conscious of them; they would remain unconscious. Our soul-experiences become conscious only through a process which an analogy will help us to understand. Imagine you are going in a certain direction, looking straight ahead. Your name is Smith. While you are going straight ahead you do not see Smith, yet you are he, you experience him, you are the person ‘Smith’. Imagine that someone puts a mirror in front of you. Now ‘Smith’ stands before you. What you had previously experienced you now see; it meets you in the mirror. So it is with the soul-life of man. A person has an experience, but he does not become conscious of it without a mirror. The mirror is the physical body. The perceptions, the thoughts, are thrown back by the sheath of the physical body. Thereby we become conscious of them. Hence in the diagram we can represent the physical body as the enclosing sheath. For us, as earthly men, the physical body is in truth a reflecting apparatus.

If in this way you go more and more deeply into the nature of the human soul and of human consciousness, it will be impossible for you to consider as in any way dangerous or significant all those things which are brought forward again and again by materialism in opposition to the spiritual conception of the world. If through any damage to the reflecting apparatus, the soul-experience is no longer perceived by the consciousness, it is absolute nonsense to conclude that the soul-experience itself is bound up with the mirror. If someone breaks a mirror in which you see yourself, he does not break you. You merely disappear from your own field of vision. So it is when the reflecting apparatus for the soul-life, the brain, is disturbed. Perception ceases, but the soul-life itself, in so far as it goes on in the etheric body and the astral body, is not in the least disturbed.

But have we not come to a point when we must consider closely the nature of the physical body? You will agree that without consciousness we could not be conscious of the Ego. In order to make Ego-consciousness our own during life on earth, our physical body, with its brain organisation, has to be a reflecting apparatus. We learn to become conscious of ourselves through our own mirrored reflection. If we had no mirror apparatus, we could not be conscious of our own selves. What is this mirror?

We are shown by occult investigations, which reach back through reading the Akashic record as far as the origin of our earth existence, that in the beginning of Earth-existence this reflecting apparatus, the external physical body, came under Luciferic influence and was changed. Yesterday we saw what this physical body has become for earthly man. It has become something that falls to pieces when he passes through the gate of death. We have said that the body which falls to pieces is not the body which Divine Spirits had prepared through four planetary evolutions so that it should become the physical body on earth. What the Divine Spirits prepared, which yesterday we called the Phantom, belongs to the physical body as a form-body which permeates, and at the same time holds together, the material parts that are woven into our physical body. If no Luciferic influence had intervened, then, at the beginning of his Earth-existence, man would have received this Phantom in full strength together with his physical body. But into the human organisation, in so far as it consists of physical body, etheric body, and astral body, the Luciferic influence penetrated, and the consequence was the disorganisation of the Phantom of the physical body. As we shall see, this is symbolically expressed in the Bible as the Fall, together with the fact, related in the Old Testament, that death followed the Fall. Death was indeed the result of the disorganisation of the Phantom of the physical body. The outcome is that, when man goes through the gate of death, he has to see the dissolution of his physical body. This crumbling physical body, lacking the strength of the Phantom, is indeed borne by man from birth to death. The crumbling away goes on all the time, and the decomposition, the death of the physical body, is only the final stage of a continuous process. For if the disintegration of the body—preceded by the disorganisation of the Phantom—is not countered by processes of reconstruction, death finally ensues.

If no Luciferic influence had come in, the destructive and reconstructive forces in the physical body would have remained in balance. But then everything in earthly human nature would have been different; there would, for example, have been no mind incapable of comprehending the Resurrection. For what kind of understanding is it that cannot grasp the Resurrection? It is the kind that is bound up with the decadence of the physical body, and is what it is because the individual has incurred, through the Luciferic influence, the progressive destruction of the Phantom of the physical body. In consequence the human understanding, the human intellect, has become so thin, so threadbare, that it cannot take in the great processes of cosmic evolution. It looks on them as miracles, or says it cannot comprehend them. If the Luciferic influence had not come, and the upbuilding forces in the human body had held the destructive forces in balance, then the human understanding, equipped with all that was intended for it, would have seen into the upbuilding forces, rather as one follows a laboratory experiment. But our understanding is now such that it remains on the surface of things and has no insight into the cosmic depths.

Anyone, therefore, who wishes to characterise these conditions correctly must say: In the beginning of our Earth-existence, the physical body was prevented by the Luciferic influence from becoming what it should have become according to the will of the Powers who worked through Saturn, Sun and Moon. Instead, it took into itself a destructive process. Since the beginning of the Earth-existence man has lived in a physical body which is subject to destruction; a body which cannot adequately counter the destructive forces with upbuilding forces.

So there is truth in something which appears to the modern man as such folly: that a hidden connection exists between what has come to pass through the working of Lucifer, and death. And now let us look at this working. What was the effect of this destruction of the real physical body? If we had the complete physical body, as was intended at the beginning of the earth-existence, our soul-powers would reflect themselves in quite another way: we should then know in truth what we are. As things are, we do not know what we are because the physical body is not given us in its completeness. We do certainly speak of the nature and being of the human Ego—but how far does man know the Ego? So problematic is the Ego that Buddhism can even deny that it goes from one incarnation to another. So problematic is it that Greece could fall into the tragic mood which found expression in those words of the Greek hero: ‘Better a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of shades.’ So it was that when a Greek saw the treasured physical body—the body shaped by the Phantom—given over to destruction, he felt a sadness in face of the darkening, the fading away, of the Ego, for he felt that it could exist only together with the Ego-consciousness. And when he saw the Form of the physical body falling into decadence, he shuddered at the thought that the Ego would grow dark and dim; this Ego which is reflected by the Form of the physical body. And when we follow human evolution from the beginning of the Earth to the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that the process we have just indicated shows itself in an ever-increasing degree.

In earlier times, for example, no one would have preached the annihilation of the physical body in so radical a fashion as did Gautama Buddha. For such teaching to be given, it was necessary that the decadence of the physical body, its complete annulment as regards its Form, should have become more and more nearly complete, so that the human mind no longer had any idea that the entity which becomes conscious through the physical body—that is, through the Form—can pass over from one incarnation to another. The truth is that man, in the course of the Earth-evolution, lost the Form of the physical body, so that he no longer has what the Divine Beings had intended for him from the beginning of the Earth. This is something he must regain; but it had first to be imparted to him once more. And we cannot comprehend Christianity unless we understand that at the time when the Events of Palestine took place, the human race on earth had reached a stage where the decadence of the physical body was at its peak, and where, because of this, the whole evolution of humanity was threatened with the danger that the Ego-consciousness—the specific achievement of the earth-evolution—would be lost. If this process had continued unchanged, the destructive element would have penetrated ever more deeply into the human bodily organism, and men born after the time when the events of Palestine were due would have had to live with an ever-duller feeling of the Ego. Everything that depends on perfect reflection from the physical body would have become increasingly worn out.

Then came the Mystery of Golgotha; it came as we have characterised it, and through it something happened which is so hard to grasp for an intellect bound up with the physical body only, a body in which the destructive forces preponderate. It came to pass that one man, who was the bearer of the Christ, had gone through such a death that after three days the specifically mortal part of the physical body had to disappear, and out of the grave there rose the body which is the force-bearer of the physical, material parts. The body that was really intended for man by the Rulers of Saturn, Sun, and Moon—the pure Phantom of the physical body with all the attributes of the physical body—this it was that rose out of the grave. So was given the possibility of that spiritual genealogy of which we have spoken.

Let us think of the body of Christ that rose out of the grave. Just as from the body of Adam the bodies of earth-men are descended, in so far as these men have the body that crumbles away, even so are the spiritual bodies, the Phantoms for all men, descended from that which rose out of the grave. And it is possible to establish a relationship with Christ through which an earthly human being can bring into his otherwise decaying physical body this Phantom which rose out of the grave of Golgotha. It is possible for man to receive into his organism those forces which then rose from the grave, just as through his physical organism at the beginning of the earth evolution, as a consequence of the Luciferic forces, he received the organism of Adam.

It is this that Paul wishes to say. Just as man, through his place in the stream of physical evolution, inherits the physical body in which the destruction of the Phantom, the force-bearer, is gradually taking place, so from the pure Phantom that rose out of the grave he can inherit what he has lost. He can inherit it, he can clothe himself with it, as he clothed himself with the first Adam; he can become one with it. Thereby he can go through a development by means of which he can climb upwards again, even as before the Mystery of Golgotha he had descended in evolution. In other words, that which had been taken from him through the Luciferic influence can be given back to him through its presence as the Risen Body of Christ. That is what Paul wishes to say.

Now, just as it is very easy, from the standpoint of modern anatomy or physiology, to refute what has been said in this lecture—apparently to refute it—so is it very easy to raise another objection. Some such question as this might be asked: If indeed Paul really believed that a spiritual body had risen, what has this spiritual body which had risen out of the grave to do with what every man now bears in himself? This is not hard to understand: we need only consider the analogy offered by the coming into existence of a human individual. As physical human being he begins from a single cell; a physical body consists entirely of cells which are all children of the original cell; all cells which compose a human body are traceable to the original cell. Now imagine that, through what we may call a mystical Christological process, man acquires a body quite other than the one he has gradually acquired in his downward evolution. Then think of each of these new bodies as having an intimate connection with the pure Phantom that rose from the grave, somewhat as the human cells of the physical body are connected with the original cell. That is, we must think of the Phantom as multiplying itself, as does the cell which gives rise to the physical body. So, in the evolution which follows the Event of Golgotha, every man can inwardly acquire something which is spiritually descended from the Phantom which rose from the grave, just as—to echo Paul—the ordinary body which falls into dissolution is descended from Adam.

Of course it is an insult to the human intellect, which thinks so arrogantly of itself at the present time, when one says that a process similar to the multiplication of the cell, which if need be can be seen, takes place in the invisible. This outcome of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, is an occult fact. To someone who contemplates evolution with occult sight it is apparent that the spiritual cell, the body which overcame death, the body of Christ Jesus, has risen from the grave and in the course of time imparts itself to anyone who enters into the corresponding relationship with the Christ. To anyone resolved to deny supersensible happenings altogether, this statement will naturally seem absurd. But to anyone who grants the supersensible, the event with which we are here concerned must be presented in the way described. The Phantom which rose from the grave communicates itself to those who make themselves fitted for it. This, then, is a fact that everyone who grants the supersensible can understand.

If we can inscribe upon our souls what is in very truth the Pauline teaching, we come to regard the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality that took place and had to take place in the evolution of the earth; for it signifies literally the rescue of the human Ego. We have seen that if the process of evolution had continued along the path it had followed up to the time of the Events of Palestine, the Ego-consciousness could not have been developed; it would not only have failed to advance, but would have gone down ever further into darkness. But the path turned upwards, and will continue to ascend in proportion as men find their relation to the Christ-Being.

Now we can understand Buddhism very well. About five hundred years before the Events of Palestine, a truth was proclaimed: ‘Everything that envelops a man as his physical body and makes him a being incarnated in the flesh—all this must be looked upon as worthless; it is fundamentally a left over from the past and must be cast off.’ Certainly up to that time conditions were such that humanity would have had to set its course towards this philosophy of life, if nothing else had intervened. But there came the Event of Golgotha, an Event which completely restored the lost principles of human evolution. In so far as man takes into himself the incorruptible body we spoke of yesterday, and have brought before our souls in closer detail today, if he clothes himself with this incorruptible body, he will become more and more clearly aware of his Ego-consciousness, and of that part of his nature which journeys on from one incarnation to another.

That which came into the world with Christianity must therefore not be regarded merely as a new teaching—this must be specially emphasised—and not as a new theory, but as something real, something factual. Hence when people insist that everything Christ taught had been known previously, this signifies nothing for a real understanding of Christianity. The important thing is not what Christ taught, but what he gave: his Body. For the Body that rose from the grave of Golgotha had never before entered into human evolution. Never before had there been present on earth, through the death of a man, that which came to be present as the Risen Body of Christ Jesus. Previously, after men had passed through the gate of death, and had gone through the period between death and a new birth, they had brought to earth with them the defective Phantom, given over to deterioration. No one had ever caused a perfect Phantom to arise.

Here we can refer to the Initiates and Adepts. They always had to receive initiation outside their physical bodies, by overcoming their physical bodies, but this overcoming never went as far as a resuscitation of the physical Phantom. No pre-Christian initiations went farther than the outermost limits of the physical body; they did not touch the forces of the physical body, except in so far as the inner organism impinges in a general way on the outer. No one, having gone through death, had ever overcome death as a human Phantom. Similar things had certainly occurred, but never this—that a man had gone through a complete human death and that the complete Phantom had then gained victory over death. Just as it is true that only this Phantom can give rise to a complete humanity in the course of human evolution, so is it true that this Phantom took its beginning from the grave of Golgotha.

That is the important fact in Christian evolution. Hence the commentators are not at fault when they say again and again that the teaching of Christ Jesus has been transformed into a teaching about Christ Jesus. It had to be so. For the important thing is not what Christ Jesus taught, but what He gave to humanity. His Resurrection is the coming to birth of a new member of human nature—an incorruptible body. But for this to happen, this rescue of the human Phantom through death, two things were necessary. It was necessary, first, that the Being of Christ Jesus should be such as we have described it—constituted of physical body, etheric body, and astral body, and—instead of a human ego—the Christ-Being. Secondly, it was necessary that the Christ-Being should have resolved to descend into a human body, to incarnate in a human body of flesh. For if we are to contemplate the Christ-Being in the right light, we must seek Him in the time before the beginning of man on earth. The Christ-Being was of course existent at that time. He did not enter into the course of human evolution; He dwelt in the spiritual world. Humanity continued along its ever-decreasing path. At a point in time when the crisis of human evolution had been reached, the Christ-Being incorporated Himself in the body of a man. That is the greatest sacrifice that could have been brought to the earth-evolution by the Christ-Being. And the second thing we must learn to understand is wherein this sacrifice consisted. Yesterday we dealt with one part of the question concerning the nature of Christ, confining our study to the time after the Baptism by John in Jordan. We must now go on to ask: What is the significance of the fact that at the Baptism the Christ-Being descended into a body of flesh, and how did death come about in the Mystery of Golgotha?

Animal forms—the physiognomical expression of human passions. The religion of Egypt—a remembrance of Lemurian times. Fish and serpent symbols. The remembrance of Atlantis in Europe. The Light of Christ.

In the last lecture it was shown how a differentiation had arisen in evolution generally, and particularly in human evolution, because human beings, and other beings also, could not await the right point in their evolution; they therefore fell behind and became hardened to a certain degree, while others retained the necessary softness and pliability until the right moment, and were thus able to carry out the changes that were fitting. It was also shown that it was only in the middle of the Atlantean epoch that the true human form appeared. In the previous epoch, and indeed at a very early period, the external form of man was very mobile; not only could he move his limbs as at present, but through inner powers he could elongate or shorten them, etc. To the ordinary consciousness of today it seems a kind of outrage to say such things about past conditions of the earth and of man. Even here among Anthroposophists you may have observed that we endeavour to develop certain truths step by step; we give them forth gradually, in small doses—they are then more easily digested.

Let us turn our attention once more to this early development. Even the Atlantean epoch had a beginning, and it came to an end through mighty water catastrophes of a very complicated kind. The Atlantean epoch lasted for a long, a very long, time. When we go back still further we come to other catastrophes in the course of evolution, these may be called volcanic in nature, when large tracts of land lying south of Asia, east of Africa, and north of Australia were demolished. On these tracts of land humanity had dwelt, and, to borrow a term from natural science, the land was called the Lemurian continent.

At that time humanity had a body much softer and more plastic than it is now; it was a period when man could assume many shapes; if we were to describe them they would seem very grotesque to the consciousness of the present day. We arrive here at a point of time before which no kind of feeling of personality, no feeling of selfhood, had as yet come to man. As he had no consciousness of self, and as the human shape was still very mobile and unfinished, something else happened. The shape which man presented outwardly—and which changed according to his emotions, being one thing at one time and something quite different at another—was in this way a kind of betrayer of his inner being; according as his thoughts and passions were good or bad his external shape assumed a different form. It was impossible at that time to entertain an evil thought and keep it hidden, for the external bodily form immediately expressed it, therefore man appeared in all kinds of shapes.

There were at this time very few of the higher kinds of animals; the earth was peopled by the lower animals and man. And if one were companionable—and such indeed we all were fundamentally—one could find one's fellowman through the expression they gave to this or that thought, or to this or that passion. What really are all such expressions? What are the physiognomical expressions of passions and thoughts? They are the shapes of animals. When we observe the form of animals we see in the higher orders of the animal kingdom nothing but thoughts and passions of all sorts worked into a great piece of tapestry. Everything that moves within the human astral body today, and remains hidden, was such a strong force at that time that it imparted at once to the soft body (which was really only formed out of fire-mist) the shape which was the expression of that passion. A large part of our present higher animals consists of human beings who were so entangled in their passions that they became hardened in these forms and fell behind in evolution. Anyone who looks with really occult perception on his environment can express his feeling approximately as follows: In the course of becoming an ego I have passed through that which I now see in lions and snakes; I lived in all these forms, for in my inner being I experienced the qualities which are expressed in these animal shapes.

Those human beings who were capable of rising, who maintained their inner centre, found a certain balance, so that they have within them only the possibility of these passions, which are, however, of a soul nature only, and take on no external form. This is what man's higher development means. In animals we see our own past, although these have not the same form as that in which they appeared in past ages, for millions of years have passed away since then. Let us suppose that passions such as are now found in lions were made manifest at that time in man's outward form, giving him the semblance of a lion, that this form then hardened, and the genus lion originated. Since that time, however, the genus lion has also passed through further development, and because of this the present lion has no longer the same form as at that time. The present lion is the descendant of a genus that branched off from the human long ages ago. In the various animals we have, in a certain sense, to see our degenerate descendants; this should help us to look with understanding into the world around us.

We must not, however, imagine that all the animal forms we see around us, and which represent certain conditions of hardening, are the result of evil human passions. Passions were necessary; man had to experience them in order that he might absorb from them into his own nature all that was useful; so that when we look back into such periods of the earth's evolution we find in our environment animal shapes that are in a state of material self-metamorphosis.

These are the expressions of passions, and working in them we find those Spiritual beings with whom we have become acquainted in previous lectures. We have to think of the earth as being still of a soft substance, and Spiritual beings working upon this substance, and forming the various animal-like shapes.

Let us now recall how it was said that the Egyptian religion repeated the facts of the third epoch of the earth, preserving the results of it as religious knowledge. The Egyptian form of religion contained as knowledge that which had taken place at one time on earth. You will now wonder no longer that so many animal and animal-headed shapes appeared in Egyptian art. This was a spiritual repetition of what had actually existed on the earth at one time, and was more than a mere simile. In a certain sense it is literally true when we say that the souls who principally incarnated in Egyptian bodies remembered the Lemurian epoch, and that their religion was spiritually a reborn memory of it.

Thus epoch after epoch of the earth is born again within the souls of men in the various religious conceptions through which the world passes. Even at a period later than this the environment of man was absolutely different from what it is now, and, of course, the conditions of consciousness were essentially different.

We must clearly understand that from the Lemurian epoch to the middle of the Atlantean epoch the present human form was only gradually constructed. By the middle of the Atlantean epoch it had reached, in a normal way, to a certain perfection through Jehovah and the Spirits of Form; the totality of what we find in man today was first formed throughout this period, viz., from the Lemurian epoch to the Atlantean epoch. The man of Lemuria, had we been able to see him clairvoyantly, would have presented still further problems, for functions which today are separate were still united in him in a certain way. For example, when the Lemurian evolution was in its prime neither such a breathing system nor such a system of alimentation existed as we have now. Substances were quite different; respiration and nutrition were in a certain sense connected; they performed one common function which was only divided later. Man absorbed a kind of watery, milky substance, and this supplied him at the one time with that which he now acquires separately in the processes of respiration and nutrition.

Another thing was also not as yet separated. We know that in the course of the period with which we are dealing the senses first opened to the outer world. Our present senses did not perceive external objects at that time man was limited to a picture-consciousness; vivid dream pictures rose within him, but there was no external objective consciousness. On the other hand, he received, as the first heralding of outer life—the first inkling of outer sense perception—the capacity to distinguish heat and cold in his environment. This was the very first beginning of sense perception on the earth, for the man of that time still moved within the fluidic element, but he now knew whether he was approaching a warm place or a cold one. This was made possible through an organ which he possessed at that time and which has since become atrophied.

You will have heard that within the human brain there is an organ called the pineal gland; today it is atrophied, but formerly it was open outwardly; it was an organ of force, and sent forth rays. Man moved about in the watery element with a kind of lantern which developed a certain light. This lantern, when the pineal gland was developed, projected from the head, enabling man to distinguish different degrees of warmth. It was the first universal sense organ. Natural science describes it as a degenerated eye. This it never was; it was an organ of warmth, and could in fact perceive not only in its immediate environment, but also at a distance. It had also another duty.

This organ, which closed when the other senses opened, was in certain ancient periods an organ of fertilization, so that sense-perception and fertilization were associated at one time. Through this organ man absorbed into himself from his environment the forces which made him capable of bringing forth his like. At one particular period, when the sun was in a certain position and the moon still one with the earth, the atmosphere of the earth was able to furnish the substance which caused this organ to shine. There actually were periods (and certain fishes which at times develop a light remind us of them) when there was a common fertilization of the human being, who was without sex at that time, and when, because of the sun being in a particular position, he was enabled to bring forth his like. Sense-perception and fertilization, nutrition and breathing, were intimately connected in the primeval past.

The various organs were differentiated gradually, and very gradually man acquired the form he now possesses. Through this he became more and more fitted to be his own master, and to develop what we call ego-consciousness. But all through the period when he moved through the earth's atmosphere guided by his perception of warmth he was under the influence of higher beings. It was principally the forces of the sun (which had already left the earth) working upon the earth's atmosphere that stimulated the organ of self-consciousness. On the other hand, there was another organ which was specially stimulated through the moon-forces (both before and after it withdrew from the earth). This is situated in another part of the brain, and is usually called the pituitary body. Today this organ has no particular duty, formerly it regulated the lower functions, those of nutrition and respiration, which originally were one. With this pituitary body were connected all the inner forces by which man inflated himself and was enabled to assume various shapes—everything by which he could voluntarily alter his form. Those alterations which were less voluntary depended on the other organ, the pineal gland.

From this we see how man has changed, and how, through obtaining a solid, definite shape, he has separated himself from the beings working on him from outside, who had made of him an instinctive being. All this gives us a clearer idea of the processes in human evolution which led at length to that condition when, in the middle of the Atlantean epoch he was sufficiently matured for the outer world to influence him through his sense organs, and he reached a position where he could form an opinion of the outer world. Up till that time judgment had flowed into him from without. What we might call a kind of thinking flowed into him, somewhat as is the case with animals today. We have to bear in mind that humanity progressed irregularly, one portion entered into a condition of hardening earlier, another later, and we have already seen the various kinds of human forms that developed. We saw how certain human beings became stunted in their development by allowing this hardening process to take place too soon, by assuming some particular shape too soon, and how through this different races developed. Only those people, who migrated from their homes in the neighbourhood of Ireland were really mature enough to be receptive of what the earth had to offer to their outward sight; and as they traveled from the West to the East they populated the various countries they passed through in which remnants of those people were found who had gone by other paths. With these they mingled, and from this union the various civilizations originated, while from those who were most backward when migration took place has sprung the European civilizations.

In order to complete our preliminary studies we must first glance into the mighty cosmos and then at the earth itself. We have explained man's evolution in connection with the animals, and shown how he thrust them from him and left them behind at an earlier stage of evolution. There is, of course, a great difference in animals; between the higher and the lower forms there is a certain boundary in development that is of importance.

Remember that as man evolved he gradually thrust aside the animal forms, and that he had only a very fine etheric form at the time when earth and sun were still united. When these separated he thrust from him certain animal forms, and these have remained behind at the stage in evolution which corresponds to the time when the sun was still within the earth. From these entirely different forms have naturally arisen in the course of time, for we are here concerned with a very long after-development. Were we to select a characteristic form which is still to be found today, and which may in some way be compared with those which remained behind when the earth was thrust away by the sun, we must select the form of the fish. This is the form which remained over when the earth was thrown, as it were, on its own resources; it is that which still has within it the last echo of the Sun-Forces. Let us keep this moment before us. There were quite other beings which were more of a plant-like nature, but with these we shall not deal at present.

The beings who represented the first material construction of the human form at the time of the sun's departure have undergone manifold changes, but in fishes is preserved that which reminds us of our separation from the sun; reminds us that at one time we belonged to the sun.

The sun departed from the earth and began to influence it from outside, and it also influenced the earth-man; gradually alternating conditions of consciousness developed—those of waking and sleeping. Gradually the condition developed in which man was more united with his ego and also with his higher principles (his etheric and astral body), and this condition alternated with another in which the astral body withdrew from the physical body. This condition is still preserved today in the alternation between waking and sleeping. Let us for a while study this alternating condition. We all know it, for it belongs to the most elementary teaching of Anthroposophy; we know that when man is awake there is a regular connection between his physical, etheric, and astral bodies, and his ego. When he is asleep the astral body and the ego withdraw from the physical and etheric body.

In the very early epoch with which we have been dealing the ego was not yet present, and in its place part of the etheric body withdrew; this condition may be compared with that of sleep. Now we must clearly understand that when man leaves the physical and etheric body behind on the bed he really bestows on them the value of a plant. Plants have a sleep-consciousness; so has man's physical and etheric body during sleep. But at the present time during sleep the astral body and ego of the normal man have also a kind of vegetable consciousness, for he is not aware of his environment. This was different in olden times, for then when the astral body and ego withdrew the man was dimly conscious of the spiritual world which was around him.

We can now form an idea of another important fact which came to pass through the sun separating from the earth. Before this took place the whole man, as regards his physical, etheric, and astral bodies, was under the influence and the control of the material and spiritual Sun-Forces, but after it depended upon the sun's position; it depended on whether the man in regard to his physical, etheric, and astral bodies came under the sun's influence, and whether it shone on him directly or not. We may now ask: Was there not at this epoch another influence coming from the sun?

Yes; at the time when no physical eye had as yet seen the sun, when the sun did not as yet penetrate the dense atmosphere of the earth, man's etheric and astral body (when outside the physical body) received important influences from the Spiritual Forces proceeding from the sun. He was unable to perceive these influences, for he was not mature enough, but later he became able to do so through receiving a force which enabled him to see that which came to him spiritually from the sun.

What was this event which made man capable of perceiving the forces which dwelt in the sun, those very exalted forces which had to leave the earth and unite themselves with the sun? When did this perception come to him? Gradually these forces streamed into the earth, and the most important point of time, that into which the whole thing resolves itself, was when man received full power to assimilate not only the physical forces, but also the spiritual forces of the sun in full consciousness. This was the moment of Christ's coming to the earth.

One might say therefore: There was a time when man was separated physically from the sun. Among animals the fish directs our thoughts to this time, for it recalls the condition of man before he was obliged to be separated from the sun. Then came the time when the higher forces whose leader is Christ—the great Sun-Spirit—left the earth; after which man gradually matured until able to receive these higher forces in the same way he received the physical Sun-Forces from outside. Inward spiritual power had to appear on earth as a fact, just as earlier the physical sun forces had appeared.

Of what was it the duty of Initiates to remind man when Christ appeared? They had to remind him of his ancient home on the Sun, and the symbol used for this was the symbol of the fish. This is why the fish appears in the catacombs as a true symbol connected with the evolution of humanity, and the disciples of the early centuries, seeing the fish symbol everywhere, received the words of the Initiates which rang in their ears with deep emotion, for spiritually it led them to the inward holiness of the story of Palestine, and at the same time led them forth cosmically into the mighty evolutionary phases of the earth.

Such things as these were studied in the schools of the Initiates, and in outward symbols like that of the fish, which were to be found in many places, we have an expression of these mysteries, just as geologists see in the fossils of plants tokens of a primeval past. But just as the impress of a fossil points to an original reality, so the symbol of the fish is a token of that which was cultivated within the mysteries.

This symbol did not appear suddenly. Long before the coming of Christ the Prophets of the Messiah had directed their pupils to His coming, and everywhere, back to the time of the Druidic Mysteries, the fish symbol played its part.

To proceed: a time came when the moon separated from the earth; previously the earth and the moon had formed one body. Then the threefold formation—sun, moon, and earth—came into being. Mighty were the natural catastrophes which then took place; events were of a very stormy nature. The physical part of man was not then at a very high stage of development, and he left it behind him as an ossified type.

In order to understand this we must keep one thing in mind: when the sun separated from the earth, the earth went back in development, it degenerated; and only after the moon withdrew with the worst constituents did improvement again take place. There was, therefore, for some time an ascending development until the departure of the sun; then a descending one, when everything became worse, more grotesque; then, after the moon withdrew, a re-ascending development again.

From this stage of evolution we have also a form which has degenerated, and which does not by any means appear now as it did then, but it exists; it is the form which belonged to man before the moon withdrew, before he had an ego. The animal form which recalls the lowest stage of earthly devilment, the time when man plunged most deeply into passions and when his astral body was susceptible to the worst external influences, is that of the serpent, a creature in which is preserved the shameful depths of our evolution on this planet, although what we see now has degenerated still further. The symbol of the serpent is also derived from evolution; it has not been thought out, but is rooted in the depth of things.

Fish and snake symbols are derived from the mysteries of our evolution. It is quite natural for a person to experience a feeling of pleasure when he sees the glistening body of a fish in the pure, chaste watery element; it gives him a feeling of peace; just as to those of a pure disposition it gives a feeling of horror to see a creeping snake. Such feelings are by no means meaningless memories of things once passed through. Man likes to see the wonderful living sunny form of a fish in water; he recalls his former innocence when as yet he possessed no ego, but was directed by the best Spirits in evolution; and it is a fact that he remembers the most horrible period in evolution, the time when he was near to falling out of evolution, when a crawling snake approaches him.

One can now understand the unconscious experiences of the human soul which are so puzzling to us, and which appear with such vividness when man is unaffected by culture, when we realize that the feelings we thus experience are connected with cosmic facts. Through this knowledge many things are made clear. Man can certainly overcome his fear of snakes, but this is by culture; but the fundamental feeling of repulsion is in his soul, and it points us back to the ancient times of which I am speaking. They were times when man was physically at the snake stage, when those elemental Beings set to work of whom we said that they prepared man for freedom, prepared him to receive the Christ in His full meaning and grandeur.

We now ask: Who were the elemental Beings who helped man not to sink into the depths? They are those mentioned in the last lecture, those who worked on him when he had descended to the depths, and who led him again to the heights—the Luciferic beings. The Sun-Spirits did not yet work upon him, but those beings did who sacrificed themselves. They moved among the people of the earth in a very remarkable way. Outwardly they had a certain human form, for even the highest spirits have to incarnate in forms which are to be found on earth, so these Beings took upon them the external shape that was man's at that time. They said: In form we are similar to man, but our true home is not on the earth; it is upon the two intermediate planets, Venus and Mercury. The best part of their souls were on these planets, but their outward form, which in fact was a kind of illusion, was on earth.

They gave to man what he needed, namely, guidance and teaching, for the reason that their home was not on earth, which was the first planet to be formed, but upon Venus and Mercury. These beings must be described as the first teachers, the first Initiates of humanity; outwardly they resembled the human beings of that time, but inwardly they possessed lofty and important qualities enabling them to work upon humanity as a whole, and also to work on the more advanced individuals in special schools, which were the first Mystery schools. There were always some of these more advanced individuals who had their home in the stars and who, although connected with the stars, had a human shape and walked among men.

Man himself continued to progress, and now passed on into the middle of the Atlantean epoch; the present human form only began to develop during the first half of that epoch; only then did man begin to feel fully at home in it.

Now, there were some beings in those ancient times who were very low down in the scale of humanity; these became the backward races; there were others who kept themselves plastic; and, again, others who only occasionally inhabited human bodies. What I am now about to describe happened very frequently in the first part of the Atlantean epoch. Imagine a man of that time who for an Atlantean was highly evolved; through certain procedures it frequently happened that such a man was caused to separate his physical body (which was then very plastic) and his etheric and astral bodies from his more spiritual parts, which then withdrew more into the spiritual world so as later to take on another body.

It very frequently happened that, long before the physical, etheric and astral bodies were ready to die, they were willingly vacated by their soul and spirit-principles. These, when they had belonged to especially exalted individuals, were pure and good bodies. Highly spiritual beings then let themselves descend into these bodies; and so it frequently happened during the ancient Atlantean epoch that beings who were otherwise unable to incarnate on earth made use of such advanced bodies in order to descend among men. These were the beings who acted as great teachers in the Atlantean schools of initiation. They worked powerfully with the means available at that time.

When at that time man left his physical body at night he had what may be called a dim clairvoyant consciousness; during the day the outline of objects was still indistinct, and there was no such clearly defined difference between the conditions of sleeping and waking as exists today. It happened, therefore, that the ordinary man beheld such an individual as I have described in an alternating manner—by day he saw him like a man, but at night he saw him quite otherwise, in a spiritual soul-like way, though he knew it was the same being who appeared to him by day in a physical body. These were beings belonging to Venus and Mercury who interposed into human existence and were with man day and night. The remembrance of these beings remained in the souls who incarnated again and again among the peoples of Europe, and they recalled them when they uttered the names Wotan, Thor, etc.

When the inhabitants of ancient Europe spoke of the Gods they were no imaginary figures to them, but memories of forms seen in Atlantis. In the same way, when the Greeks spoke of Zeus, Apollo, and Ares these were forms they had themselves perceived during the Atlantean epoch. Whereas in the Egyptian age memories of ancient Lemuria arose, in the Grecian age memories of the earthly experiences on Atlantis rose within the souls of the people.

We must clearly understand that if everything contained in later religions was a memory of facts connected with the earth at an earlier age some very important event would have to take place when the last of these memories had appeared; this was about the time when the Greeks and Romans recalled the Atlantean epoch. This was also the time when the Christ brought an essentially new Impulse into evolution. We indicated the nature of this Impulse when we spoke about the long intermediate period of evolution in which Luciferic beings were preparing mankind, making him capable of receiving the Christ Impulse, so that the sun should not merely send down its force externally, but that inner forces should also stream into man from it. This period has not nearly come to an end; it is still in its beginning, for with the coming of Christ only the first impulse was given for the inwardly spiritual part of the sun to stream to earth in addition to the physical sunlight. Ever stronger will that light become, which as Spiritual Sunlight, or Christ-light, will irradiate mankind from within as the physical sunlight illuminates him from without.

It will come to pass in the future that man will look upon the sun, not only with his external eyes perceiving its glory, but he will also experience the spiritual side of the sun in his inner being. Only when he is in a position to do this will he fully understand what really dwelt on earth as the Being whom we call Christ Jesus. Only slowly and gradually will man come to an understanding of this; and just as truly as in pre-Christian times he had to understand the pronouncements of those spiritual beings who guided man when he contracted in his descent into the physical world, so by a truly spiritual effort he must henceforth try to understand the Spiritual Power which at one time went forth from the earth with the sun. Man must be able to receive this Power again as an inner spiritual force; he must comprehend this Christ power—this Spiritual power which imparts to him the great impulse for the future.

The object of spiritual science, and of all that can be acquired as spiritual teaching, is to enable us to comprehend this Power of Christ. One cannot say that Anthroposophy is Christianity, but one can say that what has been given to man and to the earth by the Christ Principle will be gradually made comprehensible through the instrumentality of Anthroposophy. When that mighty Impulse is understood it will pour into humanity more and more, for man has need of it in order that, after having contracted and sunk most deeply into matter, he may once more tear himself free and turn again to his spiritual home.

The Reflection of Cosmic Events in the Religious Views of Men.

Yesterday we looked at certain connections in the spiritual relationships of the so-called post-Atlantean time. We saw how the first cultural epoch of this period will repeat itself in the last, the seventh; how the Persian culture will repeat itself in the sixth; and how the Egyptian culture, which will occupy us during the next few days, repeats itself in our own lives and destinies in the fifth period. Of the fourth culture, the Greco-Latin, we were able to say that it occupies an exceptional position in that it experiences no repetition. Thus we could point in a sketchy way to the mysterious connections in the cultures of the post-Atlantean time, which follows after the time of the Atlantis that perished through powerful water-catastrophes. This age that follows Atlantis will perish in turn. At the end of our fifth great epoch, the post-Atlantean, there will be catastrophes that will work in a way similar to those at the close of the Atlantean epoch. Through the War of All Against All, the seventh culture of the fifth epoch will find its conclusion. These are interesting connections that are indicated in certain repetitions, and when we follow them more closely they will throw light into the depths of our soul life.

In order to lay a proper foundation, we must today allow still other repetitions to pass before our mind's eye. We will let our glance rove far into the evolution of our earth, and we will see that these wide horizons must have an intimate interest for us.

But let us begin with an admonition, a warning against a mechanical approach to the repetitions. When in the realm of occultism we speak of such repetitions, saying that the first cultural epoch repeats itself in the seventh, the third in the fifth, etc., it is easy to let a certain gift for combinations get the upper hand, so that we try to apply such schemes or diagrams in other contexts also. It is easy to believe that we can do this, and many books on theosophy actually contain a good deal of rubbish of this sort. Hence there must be a strong warning that such combinations are not controlling, but only perception, spiritual vision, without which we go astray. Such combinations must be warned against. What we can read in the spiritual world may be understood, but not discovered, through logic. It can be discovered only through experience.

If we wish to understand the cultural epochs more clearly, we must achieve a general view of the evolution of the earth as it presents itself to the seer who can direct his spiritual gaze to the events of the most remote past. If we look far back into the evolution of the earth, we can say that our earth has not always appeared as it does today. It did not have the firm mineral base of today; the mineral kingdom was not as it is today; the earth did not bear the same plants and animals, and men were not in such a fleshly body as they have today; men had no bony system. All that was formed later. The farther we look back, the nearer we come to a condition which, if we could have observed it from cosmic distances, we would have seen as a mist, as a fine etheric cloud. This mist was much larger than our present earth, for it extended as far as the outermost planets of our solar system and even farther. It included a far-reaching nebular mass, wherein was contained all that went into the formation of the earth, and also of the planets and even of the sun.

If we could have examined this mass of mist closely, if an observer could have approached it, it would have seemed to be composed entirely of fine etheric points. When we see a swarm of gnats from a distance, it looks to us like a single cloud; close-up, however, we see the single insects. Thus, in the most remote past, the mass of our earth would have appeared, although then it was not material in our sense but was condensed only to an etheric condition. This earth-formation consisted of single ether-points, but something special was connected with these ether-points. Had the human eye been able to see these points, it would not have seen what the clairvoyant would have seen or what he actually sees now when he looks back. Let us make this clear by a comparison. Take the seed of a wild rose, a fully developed seed. What does one see who observes this? He sees a body that is very small, and if he did not know how a rose seed looked he would never imagine that a rose could grow from it. He would never derive this from the mere form of the seed. But a person who was endowed with a certain clairvoyant capacity would experience the following. The seed would gradually disappear from his sight, but to his clairvoyant eye would appear a flower-like form growing spiritually out of the seed. It would stand before his clairvoyant view, a real form, but one that could be seen only in the spirit. This form is the archetype of what later grows out of the seed. We would err if we believed that this form was exactly like the plant that grows from the seed. It is not at all like it. It is a wonderful light-form, containing streams and complicated formations. One could say that what later grows out of the seed is only a shadow of this wonderful spiritual light-form beheld by the clairvoyant.

Holding fast to this picture of how the clairvoyant sees the archetype of the plant, let us now return to the primeval earth and the single etheric points. If now, as in the previous example, the clairvoyant contemplated such an etheric point in the primeval substance, there would arise for him from the point (as from the seed in the previous example) a light-form, a beautiful form, which in reality is not there but rests slumbering in the point. What is this form that the seer perceives, looking back at the primal earth atom? What is it that arises? It is a form that is different from physical man, as different as is the archetype from the physical plant. It is the archetype of the present human form. At that time the human form slumbered spiritually in the etheric point, and the whole earth-evolution was necessary in order that what rested there might develop into present-day man. Many, many things were necessary for this, just as much is also necessary for the seed. This seed must be sunk in the earth, and the sun must send its warming rays, before it can develop itself into a plant. We will gradually understand how these points became men if we make clear to ourselves all that has happened in the meanwhile.

In the primeval past all the planets were connected with our earth. However, we will first consider the sun, moon, and earth because they are of special interest to us. At that time our sun, our moon, and our earth were not separate, but were all together. If we could stir these three bodies together like a broth in a great world-kettle, and if we thought of this as one cosmic body, we would have what the earth in its original condition was—sun plus earth plus moon. Naturally, man could live there only in a spiritual condition. He could live only in this condition because what is in the present sun was then united with the earth. For a long, long time the cosmic body contained our earth, sun, and moon within itself, as well as all the beings and forces connected with them. In those times man was still only present spiritually in the primal human atom. This changed only in a time when something important occurred in world-evolution, when the sun split off and became a separate body, leaving earth and moon behind. After this, what was formerly a unity appears as a duality, as two cosmic bodies, the sun and the earth-plus-moon. Why did this occur?

All that happens has, naturally, a deep meaning, and we understand this when, looking backward, we find that there dwelt on earth at that time not only men but also other beings of a spiritual nature who were connected with them. These were not perceptible to the physical eye but were nevertheless present, as truly present as men and the other physical beings. Thus, for example, there are connected with our earth, living in its environs, beings whom Christian esotericism calls angels, Angeloi. We can best conceive these beings if we reflect that they stand at the stage at which man will be when the earth completes its evolution. Today these beings are already as far along as man will be at the end of his evolution on earth. A still higher stage is occupied by the archangels, Archangeloi, or Spirits of Fire, beings whom we can perceive when we direct our glance to what concerns entire peoples. Such concerns are guided by the beings called archangels or Archangeloi. A still higher type of being is called the Primal Beginnings or Archai or Spirits of Personality. We find these when we look at whole epochs of time and at many peoples, with all their connections and contrasts, contemplating what is usually called the Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Time. When we examine our own time, for example, we find that it is guided by higher beings called Archai or Primal Beginnings. Then there are still higher beings called, in Christian esotericism, Powers or Exusiai or Spirits of Form. Thus there are innumerable beings connected with our earth who are related to man in a sort of ladder of successive stages.

If we begin with the mineral and rise from the mineral to the plant, from the plant to the animal, and then to man, man is the highest physical being, but the others are also there; they are among us and permeate us. In the beginning of things, when the earth emerged from the womb of eternity as a sort of primeval mist, all these beings were bound up with the earth, and the clairvoyant would have seen how other beings pervade this picture at the same time as the human form. These were the beings named above, and beings of still higher types such as the Virtues, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim, and finally the Seraphim. All of these beings were intimately connected with that powerful etheric dust, but they are at various stages of development. There are those whose sublimity man cannot fathom, but others are closer to him.

Since these beings were at different stages, they could not go through their evolution in the same way as man. A dwelling place had to be created for them. Among these high beings there were some who would have been greatly handicapped had they remained bound to lower beings. Therefore they split off. They took the finest substances out of the mist and built their dwelling in the sun. They created their heaven there, and there they found the proper tempo for their evolution. Had they remained in the inferior substances that they left behind in the earth, they would not have been able to continue their evolution. This would have hindered their development like a lead weight. This shows how material occurrences, such as the split in the cosmic substance, do not proceed from merely physical causes but rather from the forces of beings who need a site for their development. It happens because they must build their cosmic house. We must emphasize that spiritual causes lie at the foundation.

Man remained behind on the earth-plus-moon, and with him higher beings of the lowest hierarchy, such as angels and archangels, as well as beings who stood lower than man. But a single mighty being, who was already ripe enough to migrate to the sun, sacrificed himself and stayed with earth-plus-moon. This was the being who was later named Yahweh or Jehovah. He left the sun and became the leader of affairs on earth-plus-moon. Thus we have two dwelling-places: the sun and earth-plus-moon. On the sun were the most exalted beings, under the leadership of an especially high and sublime being whom the Gnostics attempted to conceive under the name Pleroma. We must picture this being as the regent of the sun. Yahweh is the leader of earth-plus-moon. We must make it especially clear that the noblest loftiest spirits went out with the sun, leaving the earth behind with the moon. The moon was not yet split off; it was still within the earth.

How should one conceive this cosmic event of the separation of the sun from the earth? Above all, one must feel the sun and its inhabitants to be the most august, pure, and sublime element that was formerly connected with the earth, whereas earth-plus-moon was the lower element. At that time its condition was still lower than that of our present earth. The latter stands higher because there came a later period during which the earth unburdened itself of the moon and its grosser substances, in the presence of which man could not have developed further. The earth had to expel the moon.

Just before this, however, was the darkest and most dreadful time for our earth. Everything with a noble evolutionary disposition came under the control of bad forces, so that man could progress further only by eliminating the worst conditions of existence along with the moon.

We must realize that a sublime light-principle, that of the sun, was opposed to the principle of darkness, that of the moon. Had one clairvoyantly observed the sun, which had already withdrawn, one would have seen the beings who wished to inhabit it, but also something else would have been perceived. What had withdrawn itself as the sun would have shown itself not only as a cluster of spiritual beings, nor would it have appeared as something etheric, for that belongs to a coarser realm; it would have appeared as something astral, as a mighty light-aura. What one would have sensed as a light-principle, one would have seen as a shining aura in cosmic space. The earth, through allowing this light to go forth, would suddenly have appeared densified, though not yet coming to a firm mineral consistency. A good and an evil, a bright and a dark principle, stood opposed to each other at that time.

Now let us see how the earth looked before it expelled the moon. It would be entirely wrong to think of it as resembling our present earth. The core of the earth was then a fiery seething mass. This core would have appeared as a nucleus of fire surrounded by powerful water-forces, although these would not have been like our water of today, for they contained the metals in fluid form. In the middle of all this was man, but in entirely different form.

Thus the earth appeared when it expelled the moon. Air was not to be found on the earth; it simply was not there. The beings then existing needed no air; they had an entirely different breathing system. Man had become a sort of fish-amphibian, but he consisted of soft fluid material. What he sucked into himself was not air but what was contained in the water. This is approximately the way the earth looked at that time. We must see that the earth at that time was in a lower condition than at present. It had to be so. Otherwise man could never have been able to find the right tempo and the means for his evolution, if the sun and moon had not separated themselves from the earth. Had the sun remained in the earth, everything would have gone too fast; whereas everything would have gone too slowly with the forces that now work on the moon. As the moon withdrew from the earth amid tremendous catastrophes, there prepared itself slowly what we may call the separation of an air-sheath from the water-element. Air was then entirely different from the air of today, for all kinds of vapors were still contained in it. But the being that was then gradually preparing itself was a sort of sketch of the man of today. We will describe all this more fully later.

We have learned to know man in three relationships. First, as he lived in earth-plus-sun-plus-moon with all the higher beings in a single cosmic body. Here he presented himself to the clairvoyant eye in the way described above. Next we see him under unfavorable conditions on earth-plus-moon. Had he remained in this condition, he would have become a malicious and savage being. When the sun had separated itself, there was the contrast of the sun on one side and moon-plus-earth on the other side. The sun, in all its streaming glory, glittered as a great sun-aura in space. On the other side remained earth-plus-moon with all the sinister forces that drag down the nobler elements in man. A twofoldness arises, which is followed by a threefoldness. The sun remains as it is, but the earth separates itself from the moon. The grosser substances withdraw and man remains behind upon the earth.

Looking at the third period, man feels the forces as a threefold principle. He asks: Whence come these forces? In the first period man was still connected with all the high forces of the sun. The forces that developed in the second period then went out with the moon. Man felt this as a redemption, but he had a memory of the first period in which he was still united with the sun-beings. He learned to know what longing was; he felt himself to be a cast-off son. With the forces that had gone out with sun and moon he could feel himself as a son of the sun and of the moon.

So, our earth evolved from a unity to a duality to a trinity: sun, earth, and moon.

The time when the moon split away, when man first received the possibility of developing himself, is designated as the Lemurian epoch. After great fire-catastrophes had terminated this Lemurian epoch, our earth gradually entered a condition that could produce the relationships prevailing in ancient Atlantis. The first beginnings of land emerged from the water-masses. This was long after the moon broke away, yet it was only because of that breaking-away that the earth was able to evolve as it did.

In Atlantis man was entirely different from today, but he had reached the point where he could move about within the air-sheath as a soft, swimming, floating mass. Only gradually did he develop a bony system. About the middle of Atlantis he had progressed so far as somewhat to resemble our present form.

But in Atlantis man had a clairvoyant consciousness. Our present consciousness developed only in much later times, and if we wish to understand the man of that time we must bear this clairvoyant consciousness in mind. We can understand this best through a comparison with the consciousness of today. Today man perceives the world from morning to evening by means of his senses. Through his sense-activity he continually receives impressions of sight, hearing, etc. But at night this sense-world sinks into an ocean of unconsciousness. For the occultist, this is really not so much a lack of consciousness as a lower grade of consciousness.

At this point we must make it clear that today man has a double consciousness, a bright day-consciousness and a sleep or dream consciousness. This was not at all the case in the first Atlantean times. Let us examine the alternation between waking and sleeping in those early times. During a certain period man dipped down into his physical body, but he did not perceive objects in the same sharp outlines as today. If we picture ourselves walking through a dense fog when the street lamps seem surrounded by a light-aura, we will have a rough idea of the Atlantean's object-consciousness. For the man of that time, everything was surrounded by such a fog; everything was as though enveloped in mist. That was the look of things by day. By night things looked entirely different, although still not the same as today. When the Atlantean went out of his body, he did not sink into unconsciousness but found himself in a world of divine spiritual beings, ego-beings, whom he perceived around him as his companions. As truly as man today does not see these beings at night, so truly did he in those times plunge into an ocean of spirituality, in which he actually perceived the divine beings. By day he was the companion of the lower kingdoms; by night he was the companion of the higher beings. Man lived in a spiritual consciousness, though this was dim; and, though he had no self-consciousness, he dwelt among these divine spiritual beings.

Now let us recapitulate the four epochs in the evolution of our earth. First, let us bring to mind the epoch in which sun and moon were still united with the earth. We must say that the beings of this earth are pure ideal beings, while man is present only as an etheric body, visible only to spiritual eyes. Then we come to the second epoch. We see the sun as a separate body, visible as an aura, and moon-plus-earth as a world of evil. Then we come to a third epoch, where the moon separates itself and on earth there work the forces that are the result of this threeness. Then we come to a fourth epoch. Here man is already a being in the physical world, which seems misty to him, and in sleep he is still the companion of divine beings. This is the epoch that closes with huge water-catastrophes, the time of Atlantis.

Now let us go one step further, to the man of the post-Atlantean time. As stated earlier, he has evolved through many thousands of years. We see him pass through the cultural epochs of the post-Atlantean time; the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean-Babylonian, the Greco-Latin culture, and our fifth culture. What, above all things, had man lost? He had lost something that we can conceive when we bear the description of Atlantis in mind.

Let us try to imagine the sleep-condition of the Atlantean. Man was then still the companion of the gods; he actually perceived a world of the spirit. This he had lost after the Atlantean catastrophe. The darkness of night surrounded him. In recompense there came a brightening of the day-consciousness and the development of the ego. All this man had achieved, but the old gods had vanished from his sight; they were now only memories. In fact, during the first post-Atlantean time all that his soul had experienced was merely a memory, a memory of his earlier inter-course with these divine beings.

We know that souls endure, that they reincarnate. Just as in ancient Atlantean times our souls were already present, were already living in bodies, so were they also present at the separation of moon and sun from the earth, and also in the earliest times of all. Man existed in the etheric dust or points, and the five cultural periods of the post-Atlantean time, in their views of the world, in their religions, are nothing else than memories of the ancient epochs of the earth.

The first period, the primeval Indian, developed a religion that seems like an inner lighting-up, an inner repetition, in ideas and feelings, of the very first period, when sun and moon were still bound up with the earth, when the lofty beings of the sun still dwelt on earth. We may imagine that this had to awaken a sublime view. The spirit who, in the first condition of the earth, in the primeval mist, connected himself with all angels, archangels, high gods, and spiritual beings, was for Indian consciousness summed up as a single high individuality under the name of Brahm or Brahma.¹ This first post-Atlantean culture recapitulated in the spirit what had happened earlier. It is a repetition of the first epoch of the earth, in its inner aspect.

Now let us look at the second cultural period. In the principles of light and darkness we have the religious consciousness of the primeval Persian period. The great initiate saw an opposition between two beings, one of which was personified in the sun and the other in the moon. Ahura Mazdao or Ormuzd, the Light-aura, is the being whom the Persians venerated as the highest god. Ahriman is the evil spirit, the representative of all the beings who belonged to earth-plus-moon. The religion of the Persians is a remembrance of the second epoch of the earth.

In the third cultural epoch, man had to say to himself, “In me are the forces of the sun and of the moon; I am a son of the sun and a son of the moon. All the forces of the sun and of the moon appear as my father and my mother.” Thus we have unity in the primeval past as the attitude of the Indian; while the duality that appeared with the separation of the sun is reflected in the religion of the Persians; and in the religious views of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians we find the trinity that appeared in the third epoch, after the separation of sun and moon. Trinity appears in all the religions of the third period, and in Egypt it is exemplified in Osiris, Isis, and Horus.

But what man had experienced in his consciousness in the fourth earth-epoch, the Atlantean, as a companion of the gods, emerges as a memory in the Greco-Latin period. The gods of the Greeks are nothing other than memories of the gods whose companion man was in Atlantis, the gods whom he saw clairvoyantly in etheric forms when he had risen out of his physical body at night. As truly as man today sees outer objects, so truly at that time did he see Zeus, Athena, etc. For him these were real figures. What the Atlantean felt and experienced in his clairvoyant condition reappeared, for the man of the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the pantheon. As the Egyptian time was a memory of the trinity that prevailed in the Lemurian epoch, the experience of Atlantis remained as a memory in the Hellenic hierarchy of gods. In Greece and elsewhere in Europe these were the same gods whom the Atlantean had seen, but under other names. These names were not invented; they are names for the same forms that walked beside man in the Atlantean time when he went out of his physical body.

So we see how the epochs of cosmic events find their symbolical expression in the religious views of the different post-Atlantean cultural periods. What took place during sleep in the Atlantean time lives again in the fourth period.

We are in the fifth post-Atlantean period. What can we remember? In the first period the ancient Indians could conceive the first earth-epoch; in the second period the Persians had the principles of good and evil; the ancient Egyptians could picture the third epoch in its trinity. The period of the Greeks, the old Germans, the Romans, had its Olympus. It remembered the godlike figures of Atlantis. Then came the modern time, the fifth period. What can it remember?

It can remember nothing. This is the reason why in this period, godlessness has been able to make headway in many respects. This is why the fifth period is driven to look toward the future rather than the past. It must look toward the future, when all the gods must arise again. This reunion with the gods was prepared in the time of the bursting-in of the Christ-force, which worked so powerfully that it could again endow man with a godly consciousness. The god-pictures of the fifth period cannot be memories. Only if man looks forward will life again become spiritual. In the fifth post-Atlantean period, consciousness must become apocalyptic.

Yesterday we examined the relations of the single cultures of the Post-Atlantean time. Today we have seen how cosmic events are reflected in the religious views of these cultures.

Our fifth period stands at a central point in the world, hence it must look forward. The Christ must for the first time be fully grasped in this period, for our souls are deeply interwoven in mysterious connections. We shall see how the repetition of the Egyptian time in our fifth period gives us a point of departure, and how we can actually pass over into the future.

• 1. It may occur to the reader that India, even in ancient times, was notable for the multiplicity of its gods rather than for their unity. In this connection the following passage from the Upanishads may be illuminating:
  
  Then Vidagda Sakayla questioned him: “How many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  He answered: “As many as are mentioned in the Hymn to All the Gods, namely three hundred and three, and three thousand and three.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “Thirty-three.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “Six.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “Two.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “One and a half.”
  “Yes, but just how many gods are there, Yajnavalkya?”
  “One.”
  (Brih. Upan., ii, 2, iv, 4.)

[ 1 ] Some questions may have arisen in many souls towards the end of yesterday's lecture about the so-called lowest realm of the hierarchies. And this is only natural, for according to modern ideas, much of what has been said must appear doubtful and inexplicable, but the following lectures will throw light on many points. One thing must be made clear to-day to enable you to gain the proper orientation of mind to deal appropriately with the subject. Someone might ask for instance: ‘Even if through thinking and concentrating over a stone, you really do raise a bewitched spirit out of it, after having set that spirit free, what remains in the stone? Is the being still in it, and what happens to the stone?’ Another may follow me and go through the same process, what comes of it? This question might arise in many minds. As I have said before; some of these questions will be answered in these lectures; but if the understanding of them has to depend only upon such qualifications for thinking as the Earth gives to man, these questions cannot really be grasped at all. For everything is veiled upon earth, everything is covered by Maya, and human thought sees things quite differently from what they are in reality, but it is not the fault of the facts, that these questions remain unanswered. The questions are put in the wrong way, but in time we shall find the standard by which we can put our questions correctly. Things change essentially for us when the whole matter does not remain so veiled in illusion. Upon the earth all things are, so to speak, jumbled together, and through this the thoughts of man are continually led astray. We get a clearer idea of things when we go back into more ancient times. [ 2 ] Just as man passes from one incarnation to another, one metamorphosis to another, so all the beings in the universe pass through reincarnations, from the smallest to the greatest, even such a being as our earth — a planetary being — passes through reincarnation. Our earth did not appear at first as earth; it passed through a different condition. This has always been much spoken of in anthroposophical circles. Just as man in this life is the reincarnation of a previous life, so the earth is also the reincarnation of another planet which was its forerunner. We call that former planet Moon, but we do not mean by it our present moon which is only a part, a residue of the ancient moon, we mean a former condition of the earth, which existed once upon a time and then passed through a spiritual state called Pralaya, in the same way as man passes through a spiritual condition after death. Just as man reincarnates, so this lunar planet is a reincarnation. That which we have characterised as the lunar planetary condition, was the reincarnation of a still earlier planetary condition, which we call Sun. This is not the sun of to-day, but quite a different being; it was the reincarnation of the first planet to which we look back when speaking of incarnations of our Earth, — the very ancient Saturn. Thus we have four successive incarnations; Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth.

[ 3 ] We have also often said that each planetary condition has a special task. What is the task of our earth? It is to make human existence possible for man as man. All the activities of the earth are such that through them man may become an I-being, an Ego being. This was not the case in the former conditions it has passed through. Man has only become human, in the present sense of the word, on earth. The former planetary conditions, which the earth has passed through had a similar task. Other beings became human on those other planets, and now stand at a higher stage than man. Perhaps you will remember in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact that an Egyptian Sage gave to Solon the Greek a remarkable hint regarding the truth of the Mysteries; he told him, that it was a truth of very great importance, that the gods were once men. This was one of those truths which the pupil of the Mysteries had to accept in ancient times, that the gods who to-day are above in the spiritual height, were not always gods, but that they had risen to those heights, and also that they were once men and had once passed through the human stage. A dangerous truth, because as a natural consequence the pupil of the Mysteries drew the inference that he too would become a god some day. It was also possible for man to say to himself: ‘A man can only become a god when he is ripe for it and if he imagines for one moment that he is a god before he is ready for it, he will not be a god, but a fool.’ And. so two roads are open to man; to live in patience, as Dionysius says, till the time of his deification, or else to imagine himself already a god before the time. The one road leads in truth to deification, the other one leads to folly, to madness. [ 4 ] Misunderstandings often arise about the sayings of the ancients, for at the present day one differentiates no longer between the various degrees of divine beings. The Egyptian Sage who spoke of the gods did not mean only one degree of the gods, but he meant the whole sequence of spiritual divine beings. Dionysius the Areopagite and the Western sages have always differentiated between those different degrees of divine spiritual beings. It is the same thing whether to speak of angels or of Dhyan-Chohans, for those who realise the unity of cosmic wisdom knew that these were merely different names for one and the same thing, but in this realm we must also know how to differentiate. The beings, who are the first to be invisible and who stand immediately above man, are called Angels in Christian esotericism, Angeloi, messengers of the divine spirit-world. Those who stand yet one degree higher, therefore two stages higher than man, are called Archangels, Archangeloi, also spirits of fire. Those who stand still higher than the Archangels, when they pass through their normal development, are called the Spirits of Personality, Archai, or Primeval Beginnings. Thus we have three degrees of beings who stand above man. These three degrees of spiritual beings have all passed through the human stage; once they were all men. The beings who are Angels to-day, if one considers it from the point of view of universal time, were human not so very long ago, for they were men upon the old Moon; and just as you, because of earthly conditions, inhabit the earth as men, so did the Angels inhabit the Moon during their human stage. The Archangels passed through their human stage on the Sun, and the Archai, or spirits of personality did the same on ancient Saturn. These beings have risen by degrees from their human stage, they are higher beings to-day, in higher grades of hierarchies than man. If we reckon the sequence of degrees in the kingdoms of the world in a spiritual sense we arrive at the following: On the Earth we have the visible mineral kingdom, the vegetable and animal kingdom, the human kingdom, and then we pass into the invisible, into the kingdom of Angels, the Archangels or Spirits of Fire, the Archai or Spirits of Personality. Whilst these beings in accordance with their own inner nature were progressing and developing, rising from man to divinity, or to messengers of the divine (the correct description of those beings), whilst they were thus rising in their evolution, the conditions of the planet, on which and for the sake of which they lived, gradually changed. If we look back at ancient Saturn on which the Archai or Spirits of Personality passed through their human stage, we find it very different from our earth.

[ 5 ] Yesterday, we spoke of the four elements which we distinguished on earth, as earth, water, air, fire. The three first elements did not exist as yet upon ancient Saturn. Of the four there was only fire, or warmth, on Saturn. The materialistic philosopher of to-day will say: ‘But warmth can only come about, only be perceived by means of external objects; there are warm bodies, warm water etc., but warmth cannot exist of itself.’ That is the materialistic philosopher's belief but it is not true. If you could have observed ancient Saturn with your present-day senses what would you have found?

Let us take it as an hypothesis that you might have flown through universal space to ancient Saturn. You would have seen nothing where the ancient Saturn used to be; one thing only you would have felt and that was warmth.

If you had flown through the body of ancient Saturn, you would have felt as if you had flown through a heated baking oven. You could not have drawn a breath of air, you could not have swum, for there was neither air nor water, you could not have stood, for there was no earth. Your hand could not have touched anything, for there was a mere ball of warmth. The whole of ancient Saturn consisted only of warmth. In its first metamorphosis our earth's existence began as a planet of warmth, and thus you can see how right ancient Herakleitos of Ephesus was when he said: ‘Everything has come from fire.’ Yes, indeed! As the earth is nothing but ancient Saturn transmuted, so everything on earth has been created out of fire. Herakleitos knew of this truth from the ancient Mysteries, and he hints at this when he says that the book in which he wrote of this was dedicated to the Goddess of Ephesus and that he placed it on the altar there, meaning that he was conscious of owing the knowledge of this truth to the Mysteries of Ephesus where the teaching of primeval Saturnian fire was proclaimed in all its purity. You can see now that those beings we call Archai, Primal-Beings or Spirits of Personality, passed through their human stage in quite different conditions from the man of to-day. Man can at present receive into the bodily constitution of his bone and blood system, solids, liquids and gases. The man of Saturn, the Spirit of Personality, had to build his body out of warmth.

[ 6 ] I told you yesterday that warmth has, so to speak, two sides to it. One side is what we can feel inwardly, as inner warmth; we feel that we are either cold or warm without having to touch our surroundings, as in the case when we contact the solid element; but we can also feel warmth outwardly, when we grasp a warm object. The peculiarity of the Saturn evolution is that it gradually passed from this inner warmth, which could be felt only inwardly, to the external warmth, to a warmth which, towards the end of its evolution, became more and more external, more realisable from outside. If you had undertaken your voyage through space during the first stage of the Saturn evolution, you would not have felt any warmth on your skin, but you would have felt yourself warm inside; you would have said, ‘I feel comfortably warm.’ Something resembling what you would call soul's warmth to-day, could have been felt by you if you had made this voyage during the very first stages of ancient Saturn. You can imagine the experience you would have had, if you consider the following: You know that there is a difference for you when you look at something red or at something blue. Red gives a warm feeling; and blue gives you a feeling of cold. Imagine that the feeling, which is liberated in the human soul by the impression of something red, did not exist as yet, but you might have felt something warm and comfortable. Towards the end of the Saturn evolution you would have felt not only inner warmth, but also as if warmth came towards you from outside. The inner warmth would have gradually changed to warmth which was outwardly realised. This is the way Saturn has developed; from an inner soul's warmth it changed to a warmth which was realised outwardly, to that which we call external warmth, or fire. One might say: ‘Just as a child grows up to manhood and has many different experiences so did the Spirits of Personality grow up on ancient Saturn; first they felt themselves inwardly warm, comfortably warm, then gradually they felt this warmth being exteriorised, made real, yes, we might even say incarnated.’ What happened then? If you want to imagine it you must represent it to yourselves thus: At first we have the inner warming process of the globe of Saturn. It is then first possible for the Spirits of Personality to incarnate. Whilst they are incarnating that which we call external warmth is produced. If you had undertaken your voyage during the later stages of Saturn you could have differentiated outer impressions of warmth and also of cold. And if you made a drawing of the self contained bodies of warmth you would find nothing but eggs of warmth clustering on the surface of Saturn, forming its outer crust. If you could have seen it from outside, it would have looked like a blackberry or raspberry. What were these eggs? They were the bodies of the Spirits of Personality, and it was precisely through their inner warmth that the Spirits of Personality built the external warmth of these Saturn eggs. It might be truly said of this condition: The Spirits brooded over the warmth, they actually brought forth the first fire bodies. If we may so express it: within that region of warmth, the external eggs of warmth coagulated from out their inner warmth. Out of universal space the first fire bodies were hatched. The Spirits of Personality, or Archai (they are also called Asuras) were incarnated in these fire bodies. Saturn only consisted of that element of fire.

[ 7 ] During the Saturn evolution it was possible for the Spirits of Personality to transmute external warmth into inner warmth. The process was not stiff or hard, but was one of inner movement. In fact, the Spirits of Personality were continually producing these eggs of warmth and letting them dissolve again. And now we shall be able to imagine the process more exactly. Let us suppose that you made that journey over and over again; you would have noticed that there were times when there was no outer warmth to be felt, only that inner feeling of comfort; then again times when those eggs of warmth appeared. You would have realised something like a breathing of the whole being of ancient Saturn, but it was a breathing of fire. You would have thought: ‘Sometimes I am within this ancient Saturn in such a way that I feel that all external warmth has turned inward, has withdrawn and I experience only that feeling of inner comfort.’ And you would have said: ‘Now Saturn has in-breathed all the warmth.’ And coming back another time and finding all those eggs of warmth you would have said: ‘Now Saturn has breathed out his inner warmth, all is external fire.’ [ 8 ] You must understand that the ancient Holy Rishis gave this idea to their pupils; they transported themselves in spirit back to the times of ancient Saturn, and made their pupils realise how a whole planet was able to produce something that resembled an expansion and contraction in breathing. They evoked in their pupils the conception that fire when it flows out forms countless bodies of warmth and when the fire is sucked in, it becomes the inner Self, an Ego, of the Spirits of Personality. Therefore, they compared the life of this planet to an in and out-breathing, but on ancient Saturn it was only a breathing of fire. Air as yet did not exist.

Now let us suppose that all those Spirits of Personality on ancient Saturn had remained at the stage of their normal evolution and had continually inhaled and exhaled warmth. They would have accomplished their regular Saturn evolution and the consequence would have been that in the course of time all would have been withdrawn again into inner warmth, and Saturn as an external planet of fire would have been received again into the spiritual realms of the World. This might have happened. We should then never have had the Sun, Moon, and Earth conditions, for then all that had been breathed forth would have returned to inner warmth, would have been received again into the spiritual world. I shall now make use of a trivial expression which will make this more comprehensible. It pleased certain of those Spirits of Personality better to draw in again only a part of that exhaled warmth; it pleased them to leave some of it behind, so that when inhaling, some of those Saturn eggs did not disappear completely, but remained. Thus two states or conditions developed gradually on Saturn: inner warmth, and along side of it outer warmth incarnated in the Saturn eggs. Not all of it was drawn in. The Spirits of Personality left some of that out-breathed warmth to take care of itself, as it were; they left it outside. Now why did they do that? They had to do it; if they had not they would never have become men on Saturn. [ 9 ] What does it mean to become men? It means to attain consciousness of self. You cannot do this unless you can differentiate yourself as ‘I’ from what is outside you. Only through this are you an ‘I,’ an ego: there, you say, is the flowering branch, here am I. I differentiate myself as ‘I’ from the objects around me. The Spirits of Personality would have allowed their ‘I’ merely to dream out eternally if they had not left something outside that could offer resistance to them. ‘There is another outside of me, I differentiate myself from the element of warmth which has been made objective.’ The Spirit of Personality, became Egos, attained consciousness of self, through having pushed a part of the Saturn essence outside into an existence of merely outer warmth. They said to themselves: I must allow something to stream out of me, and leave it outside, so that I am able to differentiate myself, so that my self-consciousness may be lit by that external element. Thus they created another kingdom near to them, created a mirrored image of their inner life in that outward life. Thus it came about that when the life of Saturn had run its course, the Spirits of Personality were not in a position to allow Saturn to disappear. This would have happened if they had inhaled all the fire; but they could not breathe in again that which they had exhaled out of themselves. The field which had offered them the possibility of gaining consciousness of self had to be left to itself. [ 10 ] No condition of Pralaya could have arisen for Saturn through the Spirits of Personality alone. Higher spirits had to come into action in order to dissolve Saturn so that a Pralaya, or state of transition, of disappearance and of sleep might take place. Higher spirits, the Thrones, of which we will only give the name at present, had to dissolve all this, so that, as the life of Saturn reached its end, the following process was carried out. The Spirits of Personality had attained self-consciousness, had breathed in again a part of the warmth, had realised the Self as the centre of their being, and left behind them a lower kingdom. Now entered the kingdom of the Thrones and dissolved that which had been left behind, and Saturn entered into a sort of planetary night. Then arose the planetary morning. Everything had to wake up again through laws which we shall learn later. If the whole of Saturn had disappeared through the inbreathing of the whole warmth, there could have been no awakening, for the whole of Saturn would have been taken up into the spiritual world. The Thrones could now for a season dissolve that which the Spirits of Personality had left behind, those eggs of warmth, but they could do so only for a time. These had to be given over as it were to a lower existence for their further development. Through this a planetary morning dawned; the second metamorphosis of Saturn — the Sun condition!

What was it that actually came to life in this new Sun-condition? The Spirits of Personality having now self-consciousness passed to it from ancient Saturn after the planetary condition of sleep; they were no longer required to pass through any similar condition to that which they had already passed through: they had breathed out certain eggs of warmth which had emerged again gradually, and differentiated themselves from the general mass; the consequence was that the Spirits of Personality were bound to that part of themselves which they had formerly left behind. If they had taken everything with them into the spiritual world they would not have been tied to the Sun, they would not have needed to come down again but they had to do so, because they had left behind them a part of their own essence, their own being. They had to concern themselves with it; it drew them downwards into a new planetary existence. [ 11 ] This was the Destiny of Saturn, world-Karma, cosmic Karma. Because the Spirits of Personality on ancient Saturn had not taken everything into themselves, they had prepared that Karma for themselves which obliged them to return. They found down below as an heirloom from ancient Saturn what they themselves had brought to pass. What happened when the Spirits of Personality now took up the Karma which they had created? That happened which I explained yesterday. The warmth divided itself, into light on one side, and into smoke on the other. In the reborn Saturn (the Sun) the eggs of warmth reappeared as gas air, or smoke, as we have called it on one side; and on the other side appeared light, because the warmth returned, so to speak, in a higher condition. Inwardly in the transformed Saturn there was smoke, gas, air, and on the other side light! If traveling through space you had now reached the place where this ancient Sun was, you would have perceived from afar that which had formed itself into light, because behind it was smoke. If not the light itself, you would yet have perceived a shining ball, just a you perceived a ball of warmth on Saturn. You would have encountered a shining ball and if you had come in touch with its surface, if you had penetrated that ball, you would have felt not only warmth but wind, air, gas, streaming from all sides.

Thus your ball of warmth has transformed itself into a shining orb; a sun has come into being. One is fully justified in calling it a sun; the orbs that are suns to-day are now passing through this same process, inwardly they are masses of streaming gas, and on the other side they cause that gas to turn into light; they shed abroad light through space. Thus, light was really first formed in the transmutations of our earth, light appeared then for the first time. In the warmth of ancient Saturn, the Spirits of Personality had first the possibility of becoming human; in the light which now streamed from the Sun those beings of the spiritual hierarchies, whom we call Archangels, or Archangeloi could become human. In fact, if you could have approached the Sun then, not only as a man of to-day but as a clairvoyant man, you would not only have perceived light streaming from it — not light only — but also the actions of the Archangels would have streamed towards you with the light. [ 12 ] But the Archangels had brought with them something in exchange as it were. The ancient Spirits of Personality had found on Saturn, pure warmth. The Archangels, who were first able to become human on the Sun, found there gas or smoke, also. What had they to do in order to secure a footing on the Sun, to establish a dwelling-place there? They formed their own souls, they wove their inner being, their soul-bodies out of warmth into light, and they joined to these soul-bodies the gas that was there, an external body. As you have to-day a body and a soul, so the Archangels as men had an inner life of warmth which rayed forth light, and an outer physical body which consisted of gas and air. As the man of to-day has a body consisting of earth, water, air and fire, so did those Archangels consist of air, and inwardly they consisted of light. The fire element they, of course, brought over with them: for this was the element which developed into smoke and light. The whole of their being consisted of light, warmth or fire and smoke or air. By means of the light they let their shining force stream out into universal space; by means of fire they lived their inner life, they experienced the comfort of warmth. Through the life they led in their gas bodies they lived in the Sun planet itself. They could now differentiate their own body of gas from the general substance of the Sun planet. They jostled against each other, and through this contact developed a kind of consciousness of self. This self-consciousness Archangels could develop further and further only because it pleased the Archangels better, if one may so express it, to dwell in their bodies of gas and smoke, or at any rate to leave them in the general Sun substance. For these Archangels during alternating conditions of the ancient Sun, had inhaled all the gas, all the smoke which was around them, they had taken it into themselves. We have now a process of real breathing. You would have felt those currents of gas on the ancient Sun as a process of breathing. You would have found there certain conditions, when there was an absolute stillness and you would have thought that the Archangels had now breathed in all the gas. Then the Archangels began to breathe it out again, inner currents began to flow and at the same time light came forth. The interchange of conditions on the Sun was as follows: the Archangels inhaled gas and stillness followed, darkness also — it was the Suns night ... They exhaled and the Sun was filled with streams of smoke, at the same time it sent forth its light outwards — it was the Sun's day. Thus there was a process of real breathing of the whole body of the Sun. Exhalation: — the Sun's day, illumination of the surrounding world. Inhalation: — the Sun's night, oncoming darkness in the world. [ 13 ] You have here the description also of the difference between the ancient Sun and the sun of to-day. Our present sun shines always, and darkness is produced only when some object is placed in front of its light. This was different with the ancient Sun. It had in itself the power to produce the interchanges of light and darkness, illumination and obscurity, for that was its process of exhalation and inhalation. Let us now vividly imagine how one would see those happenings externally. [ 14 ] Let us take the condition of exhalation. Light is then shed around, but at the same time the Sun is filled with smoke. These forms and currents of smoke are like regularly recurrent pictures, they are imprinted on the substance of the Sun with every exhalation. That which formerly was only egg-shaped, the eggs of warmth, changed into all sorts of regular images. Quite distinct smoke pictures with an inner life and inner regularity were produced. If I may use the expression: the eggs were hatched. That was really to what this solidifying process might be compared. Just as the chicken comes out of the eggs, so were those eggs of warmth split in two, and regular forms came out of them, figures of smoke which were the densest bodies of the Archangels. They inhabited the Sun in bodies of gas, smoke, and air. Thus they moved about as men on the Sun. We have now the spiritual idea of a fixed star, of a sun world, which is a sun through its own power, which can produce the interchange of day and night by its own power. Like an exhalation and inhalation it produces the interchange of light and darkness. For at that time the Sun was a sort of fixed star. Everything in our universal space that shines of itself sends out into that space together with light the life of spiritual messengers, the Archangels. [ 15 ] What, then, have the primal Archai, the Spirits of Personality, accomplished through their own evolution, what have they established? It is mainly through them that the Sun appeared. While otherwise only a Saturn existence would have appeared in evolution», while otherwise only the Archai, who had filled Saturn with warmth, would have existed, now, because the Archai had surrendered the external eggs of warmth, Saturn was transformed into Sun, on which the Archangels found it possible to pass through their human stage. They were the heralds who announced to the world: ‘The Primal Beginnings or the Spirits of Personality, were our forerunners. As messengers, we proclaim to the universe in rays of light, the former existence of Saturn, of warmth-filled Saturn. We are the messengers, the heralds of the Archai.’ Angel means Messenger, Archai means the Beginnings. The Archangels were nothing else than the heralds of the deeds of the Primal Beginnings or Archai of former times. Therefore, they are called Angels of the Beginnings, ‘Archai-Angels’ which, in English, has become Archangels. These Archangels were the men of the Sun.

If we make a survey of what takes place in the civilized world today, of what is present in it, we actually find—indeed, we may say this after the many explanations which have already been given—that civilization is increasingly falling into ruin. If we understand what spiritual science can tell us about the secrets of the universe, we must realize quite clearly that everything that takes place outside in the physical world has its source in the spiritual world. The causes for what takes place at any time in the historical development of mankind also lie in the spiritual world. Another truth, which cannot be called to mind too frequently, is that in the present moment of time, humanity's condition requires each individual to contribute something toward the reconstruction of culture from his own inner being. We no longer live in an age in which it suffices to believe that the gods will help. In the present time, the gods do not count on human beings recognizing them and their intentions, and much that a short time ago was not yet left to mankind is left to men's decisions today.

Such a truth must be grasped in all its gravity, and basically by each one individually. To do this it will be necessary, above all, to understand a number of things that we have outgrown. Gradually, in the course of the materialistic age, one might say that the human being has reached the point of grasping everything from a certain absolute standpoint, a standpoint, moreover, that differs according to the human being's age. When a person is twenty-five years old today, he feels called upon to judge everything. He believes that it is possible to have a final opinion about everything without undergoing any kind of development. Perhaps when he reaches the age of fifty, he may Look down with a certain sense of superiority upon his faculty of judgment twenty-five years ago. At age twenty-five, however, he will in no way feel drawn as a result of his upbringing to seek and reckon with the more mature judgment of a man of fifty.

Among the causes underlying our present chaos, the one just outlined is by no means the least important; instead, it is one of the most significant, though admittedly one that had to exercise its influence upon the whole evolution of mankind. Only by man's feeling completely emancipated in a certain sense from the whole world context; by adopting an absolute standpoint not only personally in the life between birth and death, but at any given moment of this life; by assuming the standpoint that he is able to judge everything in a sovereign manner; only because this illusion was added to the many other illusions of life—and in the merely physical world everything is in a sense illusion—the course of human development will gradually lead the single human being toward freedom.

We should bear in mind, however, the great difference between our present epoch, which sets out from this standpoint, and the past epochs in which entirely different life impulses lay at the foundation of human existence. We must pay heed to the life impulses of former times, which in turn are intended to become those of the future, to which all efforts in the present should be directed again. Indeed, such earlier life impulses must be observed. They only disappeared slowly and gradually in the course of human evolution, and we underestimate the whole tempo of modern spiritual development if we do not perceive the speed with which, in a few centuries, materialistic impulses have melted away a tremendous amount of the spirituality that once existed.

In order to gain some starting points for a real study of the present, which we shall pursue tomorrow, let's turn our minds back to, say, the best period of ancient Egyptian life. Naturally, in the life of ancient Egypt or ancient Chaldea, there certainly existed social institutions in the outer world as well. These social structures were inaugurated and implemented by certain human beings. However, these individuals did not make judgments by pursuing thoughts in their wise heads on how to come up with the best social arrangements, or by following their opinions on what might be right for the communal life of people. Instead, they turned to the initiation centers. In actual fact, the sage who was initiated into the mysteries of the universe in these centers was the actual leading advisor of the highest social rulers, who, depending on their rank and maturity, were in large part themselves initiates into the cosmic secrets. When one was supposed to make provisions concerning the affairs of the social order, one did not consult the clever human brain—in the literal sense of the word—but one consulted those who were capable of interpreting the heavenly signs. For one knew that when a stone falls to the ground this is connected with the forces of the earth; when it rains that has to do with the forces of the air—the atmosphere. If, on the other hand, human destinies should be fulfilled that are supposed to interact with each other, this has nothing to do with any natural laws that can be figured out in the above manner. It has to do with those laws that could be traced in the cosmos by means of what makes the course of the stars evident. So, the course of the stars was read in the same way we read the time of day from a clock. We do not say, “One hand of my clock is down here on the right, the other is on the left.” Rather, we say, “We know that this position indicates that the sun has set so many hours ago, and so forth.” Likewise, these individuals who could read the course of the stars said to themselves, “This or that constellation of the stars signifies to us one or the other intention on the part of those divine spiritual beings who guide and direct everything we may call human destiny.” One beheld the intentions of those accompanying spiritual beings of the cosmos by looking up to the course of the stars. One was clearly aware that not everything that man has to know reveals itself here on earth; indeed, the most important things he has to be aware of, the forces that work in his social life, reveal themselves in manifestations observable in the cosmos outside the earthly sphere. One knew that the concerns of humanity here on earth cannot be managed unless one investigates the intentions of the gods in the realm outside earth. Therefore, everything that was to be accomplished here within the social order was connected with the sphere outside the earth.

Where do we find any inclination today to investigate these great signs visible in the cosmos outside the earth, when here or there the belief arises again that some reform movement should be introduced? A far more important symptom than materialism, than anything which has arisen in the form of natural scientific materialism, is the fact that man no longer consults the cosmos outside the earth in regard to his earthly concerns. One does not become spiritual by setting up theories concerning the human being or anything in the universe; one will only become spiritual if one understands how to connect humanity's earthly concerns with the cosmos outside the earth.

In that case, however, one has to be convinced, above all, that the affairs of this world do not allow themselves to be arranged according to the judgments acquired by mere natural scientific education. Then, one has to be able to introduce into the whole civilizing education the capacity to connect the sphere transcending the earth with earthly concerns once more. Then, it was necessary, above all, to discern more clearly how this capacity was lost in the course of human evolution, and how we gradually arrived at the point of wanting to judge everything only from an earthly standpoint. Let us consider something that is now prevalent in the world, a component of social agitation.

You have all heard of the effort appearing everywhere to introduce compulsory labor—to require a person to work by means of some social order based on the legal decrees of this social order—no longer to appeal merely to what obliges man to work, namely, hunger and other motivations, but in fact to establish compulsory labor legally.

We see how, on one side, this compulsory labor is demanded by socialistic agitation. We note how, in Soviet Russia, this compulsory labor has already led to a downright rigid form, with human life taking on the aspect of life in the barracks. We also find that radical socialists enthusiastically uphold compulsory labor. We see also how the sleeping souls of the present receive news such as this, how government officials here or there have even determined to introduce compulsory labor. One reads this like any other news item, and does not pay it much attention. One rises in the morning as one usually does, eats breakfast, has lunch, goes into the country for the summer holidays, returns again and, in spite of the fact that the most important and fundamental events are taking place in the world, one behaves as one has always been accustomed to behave. Yet, mankind should not insist on clinging to old habits. Mankind should take seriously what it is that matters today, namely, having to relearn about all conditions of life. Even when we see that the demand for compulsory labor is being opposed, what are the viewpoints from which these matters are attacked? We have to admit that the opponents are as a rule not much brighter than those who advance these demands. For the most part, they will ask, “Well, can a person still find joy in his work?”—or something like that. All the reasons cited for and against the above are worth more or less the same, because they arise from the same judgments that are limited only to what takes place here between birth and death; they do not originate from a sufficient insight into life. When the spiritual scientist comes and says, “Go ahead and introduce compulsory labor, but in ten years you will have terrible results, for suicides will increase at an alarming rate,” people will view such a statement as fantasy. They will not recognize that this conclusion is derived from an inner knowledge of the relationships existing in the universe. They will not be willing to study spiritual science and to discover the basis from which one can find such a judgment justified. Instead, people will go on living as usual—some getting up in the morning, breakfasting and lunching, traveling into the country for the summer and more of the same, others sleeping away their time in some other manner, refusing to take these questions seriously. Still others will found clubs, social associations, women's associations, and so forth—things that are admittedly quite nice—but when such efforts are not connected to the actual cosmic order, they lead nowhere. Our age is much too conceited to abandon absolute standpoints which assume that, at any age, one definitely has a conclusive judgment about all things.

During these days and in the last few weeks I explained the way in which the various branches of the threefold social organism have originated in the different territories of earth evolution. I said that, fundamentally speaking, all our spiritual life is only a transformation of what originated a long time ago in the orient. But when we look into what was described on numerous occasions in the past few weeks from one aspect, and investigate it in regard to the standpoints which I have indicated just now, we find that, insofar as it referred to human destiny, all this knowledge of the Orient was deciphered from the course of the stars, from what exists outside the earth, and the Greek concept of destiny was the last ramification of such extraterrestrial wisdom.

Then came the knowledge arising from the Middle region. As we indicated, this was a more juristic knowledge; it was something that man drew more out of his own being. It was not linked with observations of the cosmos outside the earth. I told you that the higher-world outlook of the Occident has been permeated with a juristic element, how the events that run their course in humanity's development were placed under juristic concepts. Punishment is meted out by a cosmic judge just as the human judge hands down a penalty for some external misdeed. It was a juristic view, a juristic manner of conception, that permeated the entirely different form of the Oriental conceptions concerning the spiritual world.

This view of the spiritual world was connected with the fact that in the initiation centers those who were found to be sufficiently mature were initiated into the nature of that which was sent down to earth from invisible realms by what was revealed in the visible. Then, the events that were to take place on earth were guided according to the intentions of initiation. Naturally, in the case of such a knowledge it is necessary to take into consideration more than the singular standpoint of any given age, by which one believes oneself able to make an absolute judgment on all sorts of matters. From the viewpoint of initiation, the whole evolution of man must be considered, also what the human being brings into earthly existence through birth, and what can reveal itself to him when, in earthly life, he beholds a revelation of the super-sensible existence.

In recent times, something that was basically a science of the heavens has become permeated with a juristic element. This celestial science itself and its fate must be considered a little now. The sacred knowledge of the Orient was something that was cultivated in its purest form in the initiation centers perhaps 10,000 years ago in the Orient. Later on, although no longer in such pure form, it was cultivated in Egypt in a still relatively pure manner. Having become popularized in a certain sense, it was used by swindlers and conjurers on the streets of the later imperial Rome, although transformed into visible magic tricks. This is, after all, the course of world events; something that is sacred in one epoch can turn into the most unholy thing in a later age. While the highest Oriental knowledge belonged to the streets in the later imperial Roman time, juristic thinking was developing out of Romanism itself on the basis of the Tate Egyptianism, and subsequently dominated the world. In the ages that followed, but only slowly and gradually, what had once been brought down from the stars as human wisdom in the Orient grew dim and finally died out. For, even in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas⁹¹ still said, “Human destiny, all of destiny occurring in the sublunar world, is guided by the Intelligences of the stars. It is, however, by no means something inevitable for man.” So this Catholic-Christian church father of the thirteenth century does not refer to stars, to planets, merely as physical planets; instead, he speaks of the Intelligences that dwell in these planets who are the actual rulers of what should be called human destiny. What had once arisen in the Orient was really still present in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth centuries, although in its last ramifications, as an aspect of the Christian Catholic Church. It is simply a terrible misrepresentation of the present Catholic Church to withhold these matters from the faithful, so that the church can declare it a heresy, for example, to assume that the individual stars and planets are ensouled and permeated with spirit. By doing this, the Church not only denies Christianity; it even denies its last teachers who still had a more direct connection with the sources of the spiritual life than does the present age in any sense. Therefore, one must point out that it was not so very long ago that the conception was completely abandoned which still pictured the world as permeated with spirit. If people would teach the truth today concerning what still held sway in the spiritual life of the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; if, following preconceived opinions, they would not distort what prevailed in those times, then even this would still have a fructifying effect for a spiritualization of the present world-view. The materialism, the natural scientific materialism, or the materialism of the mystics or theosophists, particularly the materialism of the Catholic Church, could not exist. For what is contained in the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church originated from the purest spiritual science; and this pure spiritual science beheld the spirit everywhere in the universe.

All that was beheld as spirit in the universe by the eye of the soul has been discarded. The universe became pervaded with materialism. For that reason, naturally, nothing remains except words of faith. For example, behind the Trinity, the doctrine of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, stand the most profound mysteries. On the other hand, there is nothing contained any longer in what is taught today as the dogma of the Trinity. On one side, there is the doctrine, the belief of the religious denominations, on the other side, natural science devoid of spirit. Neither can save humanity from the misery into which it has fallen. In order to render rescue possible, it is necessary that a sufficiently large number of people rouse themselves inwardly. For, particularly in the present epoch, the possibility exists in man's inner being to pick up those threads of a soul-spiritual kind which, if their power is inwardly experienced in the proper way, lead to an understanding of what can be gathered from spiritual science for an illumination of the life of nature as well as the social life. One should not wish to retain at all costs the bad habits of one's inner life, however they have developed during the past few centuries. These bad habits are based on the opinion that if one can keep quiet and be passive, the gods will eventually enter into one, reveal everything within, and mystical depth will be illuminated by an inner light, and so forth. The present age is not suited for that. It demands an inner activity of soul and spirit from the human being; it demands that man turn and look at what is trying to reveal itself within. Then, he will find under all circumstances what wishes to reveal itself within, but he must be willing to unfold such inner spiritual activity. One must not believe, however, that much can be gained by some inner pseudomystical doings; above all else, one has to trace the spirit in the external things of the world.

I have called your attention to what happened, for example, in the East, in Asia. Once upon a time, so I told you, conditions in Asia were of a kind that the human being felt his heart expand, felt his soul grow warm, when, guided by the thought of the sacred Brahman, he directed his glance to the mighty external symbol of the swastika, the hooked cross. It made his inner life unfold. This inner mood of soul meant a great deal to him. Today, when an Oriental receives an ordinary Russian 2,000 ruble note—which is not worth much, for small change will no longer do for buying anything, only thousand ruble notes—he sees on it the beautifully printed swastika. Those thousand-year-old feelings that once upon a time inwardly beheld the sacred Brahman when the eye was directed to the swastika are certainly stirring. Today, the same emotional qualities arise on seeing the 2,000 ruble note.

Do you believe that one has a spiritual view of the world if one does not look at something like that and say to oneself, “Those are the Ahrimanic powers who are at work here; herein lies a super-earthly intelligence, even though it is an Ahrimanic intelligence?” Do you believe that it suffices merely to say, “Oh, that is the external material world! We direct our glance heavenward to spiritual things; we don't pay any attention to things for which people only have words?” If you seek for the spirit, you must look for it even where it turns up in the mighty aberrations of external world evolution itself, for there you can find the starting point for other aspects.

It is the tragedy of modern civilization that people believe that only human forces are at work everywhere, forces which arise between birth and death. Actually, our world is permeated all over by super-sensible forces, spiritual powers which manifest themselves in the various events that take place. If one wishes to do something, if one tries to realize intentions so that this or that result may come about, one needs to look to those benign spiritual powers capable of working against other spiritual powers; and the spiritual powers that can oppose the others have to be born in man through his own inner activity.

In regard to all this, however, one actually does need to look up into the spiritual world. This is something that is most inconvenient to many people. This is why the great majority of people in the world find even talk of initiation science unpleasant. For there is one thing that initiation science must make clear, under all circumstances, to the human being. Man is organized, in the first place, in the direction of his intellect. Certainly, there are other aspects to his organization such as digestion, metabolism, heartbeat, breathing, and physiological processes. He bears instincts within, hence, soul entities, and so forth. In addition, he bears within him what is termed intelligence, and the present age is especially proud of this intelligence. But where does our intelligence come from? Materialism believes that our intelligence is derived from those processes that occur below in the liver, in the heart; they then become more refined and turn into the processes within the brain. These processes in the brain are just a little different from those that take place in the liver or the stomach, but these same processes produce thinking. We know that this is not so. Those processes that run their course in the brain just as those in the liver or the stomach would cause no thinking at all. Up in the brain something takes place; out of the constructive processes destructive ones are constantly developed.

Here, not only upbuilding, but disintegrating processes are at work; matter is forever falling out into nothingness. Thus, we are not dealing with an upbuilding in the brain. Any constructive process only serves to nourish the brain, not to produce thinking. If you wish to focus on those brain processes that have something to do with thinking, and you wish to compare them to the remaining organism, you must not compare them to the constructive processes, the processes of growth, but to the processes of elimination. The brain is constantly involved in elimination, and, as I said, the processes of destruction, of disintegration, of death, are the accompanying phenomena of intelligence. If our brain were incapable of elimination, we would be unable to think. If our brain would only contain upbuilding processes, we would exist in a dull, instinctive condition; at most, we could attain to quite dir dreams. We arrive at clear thinking precisely because the brain secretes and eliminates substances. Thinking only functions parallel to processes of elimination. It is only because the human organization eliminates what is useless to it that thinking establishes itself out of the spiritual world.

Now take the thinking that has developed especially since the middle of the fifteenth century, the thinking of which modern man is so proud. It comes into being because we destroy our brain, because we bring about in it processes of disintegration, of elimination. Suppose that you are Trotsky or Lenin, traveling to Russia—transported there on orders of Ludendorff⁹² in a sealed railway carriage and escorted by Dr. Helphand⁹³ (it was such a train, going from Switzerland through Central Europe, which brought Lenin accompanied by people like Dr. Helphand to Russia under Ludendorff's protection)—suppose you are such a person and you believe that out of the processes representing intelligence—the only processes from which natural scientific thinking of the past few centuries has emerged—the social order could be developed. What kind of a social order will that turn out to be? It will be a reproduction of what takes place within the brain during the thinking processes. Do not think that what we develop without is different from what we develop within, if the only processes employed are thinking processes! If you try to establish a social order with them, it will be something destructive, just as thinking processes in the brain cause destruction—exactly the same thing. Thinking, applied to reality, destroys. One can gain insight into such matters only when one Looks into the deeper secrets of the being of man and the whole world. This is why humanity needs to pay attention to these things if any sort of valid judgment concerning public affairs is to be rendered. It does no good at all today to base discussions about any social concerns on the suppositions of the past few centuries, for they no longer hold water. It is important here to realize that completely different processes must come to pass in the human spiritual life; again, the science of initiation must step in and draw from spiritual resources what can never be gleaned from mere sources of human intelligence. A social science of the present can only emerge as a consequence of spiritual science. This can and must be grasped from its very foundation.

This is what is in fact important for modern man, namely, that he does not attain a relationship with spiritual science merely in some superficial manner, but that he learns to recognize how completely spiritual science is linked to human destiny for the future.

In order that a person can gauge something like this, a feeling must develop in the human being for what is asserting itself with profound earnestness out of the spiritual resources. For such a feeling to come about, however, much must be eliminated, above all else the generally prevailing frivolity. Recently, in a lecture that I gave for local teachers, I indicated a Symptom in which such frivolity appears today. One of our friends in London made efforts to arrange a gathering of a number of artists here in August. It was for the purpose of their becoming acquainted with our building and forming a sort of center from which the impulse could go out that is now so necessary if the building is ever to be completed. An English journalist was informed, not one from an ordinary daily paper but from a magazine that calls itself “Architect,” in other words, a publication that wishes to be taken more seriously. The journalist was even given a description in writing of what was intended. This fellow was so flippant and frivolous, however, that he wrote, “A visit to Dornach is anticipated by such and such persons. Dr. Steiner himself has promised to acquaint the visitors with what is going on there, and it is believed that ten days will suffice for this excursion. Of this time, four days will be spent on travel, and during the remaining six days, the visitors will be able to recuperate from the shock they will have experienced following their first impression of Dornach.” So, this frivolous character has no idea what he is supposed to write about, and for his penny-a-line, is only capable of making a stupid joke so that his readers can accordingly continue to maintain a frivolous mood.

Things have gone so far that the general mood of people is spoiled from the very outset, spoiled by this kind of journalist; there is no longer any question of anything being accomplished. The only thing such journalists can do is seize the opportunity to make some stupid, frivolous joke. No progress will be made if the earnestness with which such matters should be discussed is not understood. One will get no further if such matters are considered to be insignificant; if, from a certain jaded standpoint, one says, for example, “Oh, one cannot take such a journalist so seriously!” From a certain point of view, one certainly need not give much credit to such penny-a-lining, but it must be evaluated according to what effect is has in the world.

These matters are indeed serious and of such a nature that they induce us again and again to say, “This building here is intended to be a Landmark for what should take place for the sake of mankind's ascent!” To be sure, from certain quarters, no effort has been spared to make the building what it is now. Destiny, too, contributed its necessary share. It is, alter all, true that at the outset this building was erected here chiefly as the result of efforts made by the Central European countries. But when Central Europe's financial resources began to touch rock bottom, the neutral countries were ready in a most significant, commendable manner to do something for this building. Those from Central Europe who were able to do something for the building spared no effort throughout the time of the war psychosis, stirred up by hate and opposition, to maintain this site in such a manner that people from every part of the world, from all nationalities, could gather together here. This building was saved and maintained throughout all the years of chauvinism; nobody was denied the opportunity here to encounter others in a spirit of friendship, no matter what part of the world he came from. All this, however, demonstrates the impossibility of completing this building by relying on the earlier resources; it shows the necessity for efforts by those countries that are in a financially favorable position, for they are at the beginning of a period where they are not encumbered by financial disaster and are certainly in a position to do something for the building. One would hope that a message like the following will not one day spread through the world: A landmark for the dawning spiritual life was to be erected. Those people who were swept away by the cataclysmic world events and then perished left behind as a last legacy as much as they could accomplish. Those, on the other hand, who were not swept away, who could have begun the new life, did not realize what those who were doomed left for them.

• 91 . Thomas Aquinas: 1226–1274; compare Rudolf Steiner: The Redemption of Thinking, GA 74 (Spring Valley, Anthroposophie Press, 1983).
• 92 . Erich Ludendorff: 1865–1937, German general.
• 93 . Alexander Helphand, died in 1924, Russian socialist, for a time a political refugee in Germany. He played an important role in bringing about the Bolshevic revolution as well as the peace of Brest-Litovsk (1918).

The fifteenth century ushered in an era for the civilized humanity of the Northern Hemisphere, in which the human individuality began to develop more and more in full I-consciousness. The forces which elaborate this I-consciousness will grow increasingly stronger and all the phenomena of life—of life in the broadest sense—will take place in the sign of this development of the individuality. This, however, means that what comes from the spiritual world and plays into our physical world will take such a course that, in humanity as a whole, the individual element of the human being will take on greater importance. For it is not simply a matter of individual human beings thinking in an egotistical way, 'we are individuals': it is rather a matter of the whole development of humanity taking such a course that the individual human element can work into it.

Every age, every epoch, that we can trace in the course of human evolution developed some particular quality, just as now it is that of individuality. These characteristics are impressed into human evolution through the particular action of spiritual powers working into the physical life of humanity on earth. But precisely because of the separateness that we see in the individual human being today when the individuality is developing—when I-consciousness is developing fully, when the consciousness-soul is, as it were, giving itself contour, becoming integrated in itself—the special characteristics of this epoch are not directed from the spiritual world as they were in earlier epochs, and very exceptional things are making their appearance within humanity's evolution. And the human being who, through the development of his individuality is being increasingly educated for freedom, must also take up a conscious stand more and more to what results from this. Above all it is essential that a social life take shape, but a social life which, from our point of view, must have deep inner foundations. This must take shape despite the fact that the strong egoistical forces of the consciousness-soul, which are opposed to a social life, are emerging ever more strongly from the depths of existence. On the one side we have the strong egoistical forces of the consciousness-soul and, on the other, the all-the-greater necessity of founding a social life consciously. And we must take a conscious stand towards everything that can foster this social living together. We have shown in the past,¹ and from the most varied points of view, how differently the human beings of the West, the European Centre, and of the East are placed in the whole course of human evolution. We have pointed to different things that are peculiar to the human beings of the East, Central Europe and the West. And we want now to turn to a phenomenon that can already show us externally how these differentes within humanity express themselves in the civilized world.

We know that, under the influence of our modern scientific way of thinking about social life, a certain view of life has been developed. This comes to expression particularly strongly in the broad masses of the proletariat which has come into being in our technological age, our intellectual age. I have presented all this, insofar as it touches the social question, in the first part of my Towards Social Renewal (Kernpunkt der sociale Frage). Today I want only to indicate the diversity of views among the broad masses of humanity concerning the social question. We have, clearly differentiated, the social views of, let us say, the proletariat, which then, however, colour other strata of the population. We have, distinct from that of other peoples, the conception of life held in die West, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries. In these countries, under the influence of the modern technology and industry, there has also developed among the broad masses that materialistic concept of life which has often been characterized here. This arose side by side with materialism or was directly produced through the materialism of other classes. This socialist conception of life, however, developed in such a way that it stands entirely under the aegis of economic strife, for it is permeated by economic concepts, thoughts and struggles that are little penetrated by the struggle for a philosophy of life (Lebensanschauungskämpfen). This is the characteristic stamp of what is going on in the socialist world of the Anglo-Saxon West. And because the actual character of modern public life as a whole has hitherto been the economic life, it was from the economic conditions of the Anglo-Saxon proletariat that the impulses of socialism arose.

The impulses coming to expression in the Great Strike movement are significant precisely as a characteristic of what is taking shape in this respect in the West. Even if it seems that the discrepancies which are there could be settled, it only seems so, for such settlements would not be real; very significant effects will issue from the deeper forces playing in these conflicts. And although, by virtue of the whole make-up of the West, no genuine philosophies or concepts of life (Lebensauffassung), develop from these impulses, we can nevertheless dearly perceive how the views of life which do develop, and which have developed in recent times, have taken their incentive from the impulses present there [in the West].

In fact, Karl Marx,² who was born in Central Europe and was nurtured in the Central European stream of thought, had to go to England in order to absorb the practical impulses (Lebensimpulse) which had developed there. He, however, transformed them into a theory, into a conception of life. And Marxism as a theory of life has found little external expression in the West. Where it has come to external expression, however, is in Central Europe. In the aims of the social democracy there, it has taken on fully the nature of a philosophy. What in the West are economic impulses leading to economic conflict, were diverted and fixed into legal-political concepts which lived then in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century as Marxist ideology and took hold of the broad masses of the population. It also found its way into the areas stretching towards the East, to those parts of Europe which begin to take on the character of the East. But here again it expressed itself in another form. Economic in the West; political in the Centre; and in the East it assumes a distinctly religious character. A distortion exists, which occurred with the inundation of the East through Peter the Great³ —,and now Lenin⁴ and Trotsky.⁵ This arises because the Bolshevism making itself felt there is in fact a foreign import. If it were not for that distinction it would be far more evident that, even now, Bolshevism has a strong religious element which, however, is completely materialistic. It works through earlier religious impulses and will continue to do so. And it is precisely in this that its terrible aspect will show itself throughout all Asia, because it works with all the fervour of a religious impulse. The social impulse in the West is economic, in Central Europe is political, and works with a religious fervour eastwards from Russia over into Asia. Over and against these impulses which move through the development of humanity there is a great deal that is utterly unimportant. And anyone who does not see, in the most intense sense, something of symptomatic importance in such things as the present [1920] strike of the British miners simply has no understanding at all of the foment of deeper forces in the whole of our present development.

All this, however, which can be described externally in this way, has deeper causes—causes which lie ultimately in the spiritual world. The more recent life of humanity can only be understood if one understands this differentiation—a differentiation into the Western economic element, the Central European political-legal one, and the religious element—the spiritual element in the East which takes on a religious character but is actually the momentum of a decadent spirituality that still finds expression in the East. This shows itself so strongly that one must say: It is natural for the West—and this is carried out thoroughly by it—to have everything of an economic nature; purely economic aspirations can have no success in the Centre because all economic aims there assume a political character. The great outer failure in Eastern Europe has come about because, through the tradition of Peter the Great, what arises out of a spiritual-religious impulse, i.e. Pan-slavism or Slavophilism, has taken on a political character. Behind this political character, which has produced all the dreadful things that have developed in the European East and has set its characteristic stamp on all the aspirations of the East since Peter the Great, there is, fundamentally, always the spiritual tendency of Byzantium, that is spiritual Byzantine religiosity, and so on. The individual phenomena of history become comprehensible only if they can be seen in this light. One can say: To a certain extent, everything that is still in Europe—also towards the West, even into France—can be reckoned as belonging to the European Centre, for what is characteristic of the West is actually Anglo-Saxon. And, in its basic instincts, this 'Anglo-Saxondom' moves completely with the impulses that have arisen naturally within human development in the last three or four centuries. It was thus precisely in the West that these impulses could best bring about the development of all that was then forced upon the social life through the modern scientific way of thinking and all its achievements. This way of thinking and its achievements, together with the inherent nature of Anglo-Saxondom, was the foundation for the world dominion of the Anglo-Saxon. The brilliant rise of commerce, trade and industry which has come out of modern science, everything which led to the great colonizations, has arisen, in fact, through the confluence of the natural-scientific mode of thought and the character of Anglo-Saxondom. And this was sensed deep down in the instincts of die West.

One can actually point to a significant moment of modern historical development, to the year 1651, when the ingenious Cromwell with his Navigation Act⁶ brought about that configuration in English navigation and in all English trade which was the foundation for everything in the West which later arose. One can also point to how, for outwardly inexplicable reasons, French merchant shipping suffered its greatest decline just as Napoleon's star was in the ascendant. What takes place in the West takes place out of the forces lying in the actual direction of humanity's development. It takes place out of a completely economic way of thinking, out of the impulses of economic ideas. This is why everything which comes from Central Europe and is conceived not out of economic points of view, but out of political-legal-militaristic ones must succumb to them. We have a crude example of how, based an a political-military standpoint, Napoleon, with his 'Continental System',⁷ tried to counteract from the European continent everything that had resulted from Cromwell's Navigation Act. This Navigation Act was conceived and created entirely out of economic instincts. Napoleon's 'Continental System' at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a political conception. But a political conception is something that projects from earlier times into the modern age—it is antiquated, is actually an anachronism. This is why this political conception could be no match for the modern conception from which the Navigation Act arose. On the other hand, in the West where thinking follows the lines of economics in the sense of the new age, political affairs, even if they take an unfavourable course, do not fundamentally.

Consider the fact that from Europe France colonized North America. She lost these colonies to England. The colonies freed themselves again. The first, the French colonization in the eighteenth century, was a political act and bore no fruit. The English colonization in North America was entirely out of economic impulses. The political element could be destroyed—North America freed itself and the political connection no longer existed. But the economic connections remained intact.

Thus are things linked in human evolution. And we can safely say that history also shows that when two do the same thing it is in fact not the same. When Cromwell, at the right time and out of economic impulses, created his Navigation Act—which, for the other powers, was extraordinarily tyrannical and even, one could say, brutal—this arose nevertheless from an economic thinking. When, in modern times, Tirpitz⁸ created the German navy and merchant fleet it was conceived politically, purely politically and without any economic impulse—in fact, against all economic instincts. Today it has been wiped off the face of the earth because it was planned and conceived contrary to the course of human evolution. And thus it could be shown, with regard to all individual phenomena, how this, let us say historical threefoldness, really does exist; in the East, but in a decadent form today, something which points back to ancient times of Eastern evolution and has a spiritual character; in the Centre something which today is also antiquated and always, to a greater or lesser extent, takes an the form of the political-legal-militaristic; in the West the State is really only a decoration, the political has no real significance—what preponderates here is economic thinking. Whereas Germany has gone to pieces because the State has absorbed the economy, because industry and commerce have submerged and bowed down under the power of the State, we see in the West how the State is sucked up by the economic life and everything is flooded by the economic life. This, viewed externally, is the differentiation covering the modern civilized world.

But what one can view in this way externally is, after all, basically brought to the visible surface only from the underlying depths of the spiritual world. Everything in the spiritual development of modern times is designed towards setting up the individuality—the individuality in the West in a Western way, in an economic way; the individuality of the Centre in the already antiquated political-militaristic way; the individuality of the East in an antiquated way, in accordance with the ancient spirituality that is now completely decadent. This has to be borne by the spiritual world, and it is borne by the fact that both in the West and the East—we shall consider only these two regions for the time being—a peculiar and deeply significant phenomenon is appearing. And it is this: very many people—at least relatively many—are being born who do not follow the regular course of reincarnation.

You see, this is why it is so difficult to speak about such a problem as reincarnation, because one cannot speak about it in the abstract sense that is so popular nowadays. For it is a problem pointing indeed to something that is a significant reality in the evolution of humanity, but it can have exceptions. And we see how both in the East and the West—we shall have to speak of the Centre in later lectures—people are born whom we cannot regard in such a way that we can say: There lives in this person, in the completely usual way, an individuality that was there in an earlier life, and then again in a subsequent earlier life, and which will be there in a later life and again in a still later life. Such reincarnations form the regular course of human evolution, but there are exceptions. What confronts us as a human being in human form does not always have to be as it outwardly appears. The outer appearance can, in fact, be just appearance. It is possible for us to confront human beings in human form who only appear to be human beings of the kind that are subject to repeated lives on earth. In reality these are human bodies with a physical, etheric and astral body—but there are other beings incarnated here, beings who use these people in order to work through them. There are in fact a large number of people, for example in the West, who are not simply reincarnated human beings but are the bearers of beings who have taken an extremely premature path of development and who should only appear in the form of humanity at a later stage of their evolution. Now these beings do not make use of the whole human organism but use chiefly the metabolic system of these Western human beings. Of the three members of the human nature they use the metabolic system and do so in such a way that, through these human beings, they work into the physical world. For one who can observe life with a certain accuracy, people of this kind even show outwardly that this is how it is with them. Thus, for example, a large number of those individuals who belong to Anglo-Saxon secret societies and who have great influence—we have spoken on a number of occasions in past years of the roll of these secret societies⁹ —are actually the bearers of premature existences of this kind which, through the metabolic system of certain people, work into the world and seek out a field of action through human bodies and do not live in normal regular incarnations. The leading personalities of certain sects are of this nature, and the overwhelming majority of a very widespread sect that has a great following in the West is made up of individuals of this kind. In this way a completely different spirituality is working into present-day human beings and it will be an essential task to be able to take up a stand towards life from this point of view.

One should not think in an abstract way that everywhere and without exception human beings are subject to repeated lives on earth. This would mean that we do not attribute to external semblance the quality of semblance. To face the truth means even in cases like these, to seek truth; to seek reality where outer appearance is so deceptive that beings other than human beings are incorporated in human form, in a part of the human being, namely in the metabolic system. But they also work in the trunk, in the rhythmic system and in the sensory-nervous system. There are in fact three kinds of beings of this nature who incarnate in this way through the metabolic system of different people of the West.

The first kind of beings are beings that have a particular attraction to what, in a sense, are the elemental forces of the earth; that have an inclination towards, a feeling for the elemental forces of the earth and are thus able to sense how, in any particular place, colonization could be carried out in accordance with the conditions of the climate and any other conditions of the earth, or how a trading connection can be established there, and so on.

The second kind of spirits of this nature are those that set themselves the task within their sphere of action of suppressing consciousness of self, of preventing full consciousness of the consciousness-soul from emerging, and thus produce in other people around them, amongst whom something like this spreads like an epidemic, a certain desire not to call themselves to account concerning the real motives behind their actions. One could say that such an utterly untrue report, or such an utterly untrue document, as the one by the Oxford professors that has been published in the last few days¹⁰—such an utterly, even absurdly, untruthful document—must be accounted to the pupilship of this untruthful element which does not wish to look into the real impulses, but glosses over them; uses beautiful words, and all the while there is beneath it nothing, basically, but untruthful impulses. I am not suggesting here that these Oxford professors—who are probably perfectly upright men in themselves (I do not impute strong Ahrimanic impulses to them)—are themselves bearers of such premature beings; but the pupilship to such beings lies within them. These [second kind of] beings, therefore, incarnate through the rhythmic system of certain people in the West.

The third kind of beings that work in the West are those which make it their task to cause the individual abilities in the human being to be forgotten—those abilities which we bring with us from the spiritual worlds when, through conception and birth, we come into physical existence—and to turn human beings more or less into a stereotyped replica of their nation. This is what this third kind of being gives itself as its special task: to prevent the human being from coming to individual spirituality.

So, while the first kind of beings had an affinity with the elemental nature of the ground of the earth, of the climate and so on, the second kind has a particular tendency to breed a certain superficial, untruthful element, and the third type of being the tendency to root out individual abilities and to turn people more or less into a stereotype, a copy of their nation, their race. This last class of beings incarnates in the West through the head system, through the sensory-nervous system. Thus we have here, observed from different angles, the characteristic of the Western world. We have characterized it, if I may put it so, by getting to know a fairly large number of people who are scattered in secret societies, in sects and the like, but whose humanity is constituted in the fact that it is not simply a matter of repeated incarnations, but the incarnation, in a way, of beings who in their development are prematurely here an the earth and who, therefore, attract particular followers or radiate like an epidemic their own exceptional qualities onto other human beings. These three different types of beings do indeed work through human beings and we understand human character only if we know what I have just related—if we know that what lives in public life cannot be simply explained superficially but has to be explained in terms of the intrusion of spiritual forces of this kind.

The appearance in Western human beings of these three kinds of forces, of beings at this particular stage of development, is encouraged by the fact that it is given to the West to develop a specifically economic way of thinking. The economic life is, as it were, the ground and soil from which something like this can spring up. And what then, in total, is the task these beings have set themselves?

They have set themselves the task of keeping life as a whole restricted to the mere life of economics. They seek gradually to root out everything else—everything of the spiritual life which even where it is most active, has shrunk into the abstractness of Puritanism—to root out spiritual life, to chip away the political life and to absorb everything into the life of economics. In the West the people who come into the world in this way are the real enemies and opponents of the threefold impulse. The beings of the first type prevent die emergence of an economic life that stands as an independent entity alongside the political-legal and spiritual facets of the social organism. The beings of the second type, who make superficiality, phrase-mongering and untruthfulness their task, seek to prevent the establishing, alongside the economic life, of an independent democratic life of the State. And the third kind of being those that suppress the individual abilities of the human being and do not want the human being to be anything other than a kind of stereotype of his race, his nation—work against the emancipation and independence of the spiritual life.

Thus in the West there are such forces which work in this way against the impulse of the threefold social organism. And anyone who, in a deeper sense, wishes to work for the spread of this threefold impulse must be aware that he has also to take into account spiritual factors like these that are present in human evolution. Indeed the powers on which one must call when one wants to bring something new into the development of humanity are faced not only with the things that any hard-headed philistine notices but also with things that are only laid open to a spiritual knowledge. What use is it when people of today regard this as superstition and do not want to hear that such spiritual beings intrude through human beings? They are nevertheless there, these spiritual beings! And anyone who does not merely want to go through life with a sleeping soul, but with a fully awake soul, can observe the influences of these beings everywhere. If only, from the presence of the effects, people would allow themselves to be convinced a little of the existence of the causes!

This is the characteristic we find when looking towards the West. The West takes on this form because it lives completely in the most fundamental expression of the present epoch—in economic concepts, economic thinking.

The East had once a grand and lofty life of spirit. All spirituality—with the exception of what is striven for in Anthroposophy and is trying to give itself new form—all spirituality of the civilized world is, in actual fact, a legacy of the East. But the real glory of this religious-spiritual life was present in the East only in ancient times. And today the Eastern human being, even in Russia, finds himself in a strange disharmony because on the one hand he still lives in the ancient spiritual element of his heritage and, on the other, there is also working in him that which comes out of the present epoch of human development; namely the training towards becoming an individuality. This brings about a situation such that, in the East, there is a strong decadence in humanity; that, in a sense, the human being cannot become a full human being; that hard on the heels of this Eastern human being, as far west as Russia, is the spiritual heritage of ancient times. And this has the effect that when today the consciousness of this Eastern human being is lowered, when he is in a condition of sleep or dreaming, or in some kind of mediumistic trance state which is so very frequent in the East, he is then, indeed, not entirely impregnated by another being as in the West, but this being works into his soul nature; these beings, as it were, appear to him. Whereas in the West it is premature beings of three kinds that are at work (which I have ennumerated), in the East it is retarded beings, beings that have remained behind from an earlier evolutionary stage of perfection and who now appear to human beings of the East in a mediumistic state, in dreams, or simply during sleep, so that the human being in a waking state then bears within him the inspirations of such beings; is inspired during the day by the after-effects of beings of this kind who come over him during the night.

And here again there are three types of beings working in the East who likewise have a great influence. Whereas in the West one has to draw attention to individual human beings through whom these beings incarnate, in the East one must point to a kind of hierarchy that can appear to the most varied people. Again it is three types of beings; not, however, beings that incarnate through people but beings that appear to people and also inspire them during sleep at night.

The first type of these beings prevents the human being from taking full possession of his physical body, hinders him from finding a connection with the economic element, with the public conditions of the present-day in general. These are the beings who seek in the East to hold back the economic life as it is needed in the threefold social order.

The second type of beings are those that produce over-individualization—a kind of, if I may put it so paradoxically, unegoistic egoism. This is all the more subtle in the way it is so frequently found in people, particularly of the East, who fancifully attribute to themselves all possible selflessness—a selflessness which, however, is in fact a particularly subtle form of self-seeking, a particulary subtle egoism. They want to be absolutely good, they want to be as good as it is ever possible to be. This, too, is an egoistic sentiment. This is something that can be called, paradoxically, an unegoistic egoism, an egoism arising from an imagined selflessness.

The third type of being that appears, in the way described, to human beings of the East are those beings that hold back the spiritual life from the earth; that spread, as it were, a dull mystical atmosphere over human beings, as can be found so frequently today, particularly in the East. And again, these three types of spiritual beings, which work down from the spiritual world and do not incarnate into human beings, are the enemies of the threefold social organism. In this way the threefold impulse is hemmed in from the spiritual side in the East and from the human side, as described, in the West. Thus we see here the spiritual foundations underlying the differen-tiation.

We still have to add to this what is hostile to the threefolding in the European Centre so that, from a spiritual point of view, we gradually gain an idea of how one must equip oneself in order that the opposing powers—whether from the spiritual world, as in the East, or from human beings, as in the West, or from the Centre of Europe, in a way which I shall relate tomorrow—can be met by the threefold idea with an impulse that is of the greatest conceivable importance for humanity's evolution. And in order to know how one must act with regard to these things one must be equipped with an armour of thoughts.

• 1 . See Die soziale Grundforderung unserer Zeit—In geänderter Zeitlage, twelve lectures, Dornach and Bern 1918, (GA 186).
• 2 . Karl Marx (1818–1883), founder of scientific capitalism.
• 3 . Peter the Great (1672–1725), Tsar of Russia.
• 4 . Lenin, actually Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924).
• 5 . Trotsky, actually Leib Bronstein (1879–1940).
• 6 . Cromwell's Magna Charta Maritima strengthened the position of the English fleet by decreeing that foreign goods could be imported only on English ships or ships of the country of origin. This measure struck a blow primarily at the Dutch hegemony in international carrying trade.
• 7 . Napoleon's decree from Berlin on 21 November 1806 imposed the strictest blockade of the British Isles by closing the entire Continent to trade and commerce with England.
• 8 . Alfred von Tirpitz (1849–1930), German Admiral of the the Fleet and statesman, creator of the German naval fleet.
• 9 . See, et al., the lectures from 20 to 22 January 1917, Das Geheimnis des Lebens nach dem Tode in Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen. Das Karma der Unwahrhaftigkeit, Zweiter Teil, twelve lectures, Dornach 1917, (GA 174); Individuelle Geistwesen und ihr Wirken in der Seek des Menschen, nine lectures in different cities, 1917, (GA 178); and Die okkulte Bewegung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert and ihre Beziehung zur Welikultur, thirteen lectures, Dornach 1915, (GA 254).
• 10. In October 1920, professors and doctors of Oxford University sent an appeal to the professors of art and science in Germany and Austria, in order, as it says there, '...to remove the bitter enmity that has arisen under the influence of patriotism...' and to find a reconciliation through the 'brotherly feelings of study'—article entitled Die Völkeruersühnung (The Reconciliation of Peoples) in the Basel Nationalzeitung of 20 October 1920.

To understand the world without understanding Man is impossible. That is the net result to be derived from our studies here. And for that very reason I wish today to contribute a little more to the understanding of Man. Let us then start from the disparity between the organisation of the head and that of the limb man—a subject on which we have already frequently spoken here.

First of all I would remind you that the head-organisation, as it meets us in the life between birth and death, is the outcome of all those formative processes which have been undergone from the last death to the earthly embodiment of this present life. From this we must conclude that everything connected with the head-organisation does not, in its conformity to law, follow those rules and forces to which we are adapted as earthly beings. Through the bodily organisation which we receive in this particular incarnation we are adapted to Earth-life. We have spoken a little of how this is manifested. We complete one revolution, of taking nourishment and digesting it, every 24 hours. Thereby we are adjusted with respect to the cycle of nourishment and digestion to the movement of the Earth in 24 hours. Something is accomplished in us, as it were, resembling what takes place in the processes of the Earth within the Universe. Our head, however, we virtually bring with us in its organisation at birth; therefore the head is primarily adjusted not to earthly relationships, but to such as are really from beyond the Earth. The head therefore is in a peculiar position in relation to the rest of man. A comparison may serve to make clear the position of man's head during the early epochs of his Earth-life.

Suppose we were on board a ship. The ship makes various movements in different directions. If we have a compass, we see that the set of the magnetic needle does not follow the movement of the ship, but points always to the magnetic North Pole. It is independent of the movements of the ship. The ship's movements can indeed be themselves regulated by the constant position of the magnetic needle. In a sense it is the same with the human head. Man does many things in the physical world with the rest of his organism: the head in a sense has no part in what he does in earthly life. It is always organised with its inborn forces in accordance with the extra-earthly. It is a very important fact that we have in the human head something organised in this way for the extra-earthly. Nevertheless there is always an interaction between the organisation of the head and that of the rest of man. This interaction is only gradually brought to completion in the course of the time that passes between birth and death. The head, as we receive it from the super-earthly worlds at birth, is organised primarily for the life of ideation. It is in a sense so constructed that the life of ideas can use it as an instrument. If it were to develop only on the basis of the forces which it receives on leaving the super-earthly worlds, it would develop solely as an organ of ideation or thought; our connection with the world through the head-organisation would in course of time be entirely lost. We should, as it were, so pass through earthly life with our consciousness as to develop by means of the head ideas only—that is, no more than pictures of earthly life. We should become more and more conscious of extending beyond our organisation which is connected with the Earth-being, of extending beyond it with our head; as though through our head we were beings who were strange to the Earth and developed only pictures of all that is connected with earthly life.

This is not so, and precisely for the reason that the rest of the organism sends its forces into the head. If we enquire into the quality of these forces, which from childhood onwards are more and more directed from the rest of the organism into the head, if we wish to describe them, we must look for them particularly in the forces of the Will. The rest of the organism is continually impregnating the Thought-nature of the head with Will-forces. Thus we can say, in effect, speaking diagrammatically, that we acquire the head as the bearer of ideas, as the result of the foregoing incarnation; while the Will-forces are sent into it from the rest of the organism. What has just been said takes place not only in the life of soul, but shows its effects in the bodily life also.

As head-man we are born in this earthly world as beings of thought and ideation, and the forces of ideation are at first very powerful. They ray out from the head into the rest of the organism, and it is they which during the first seven years of life enable the forces which manifest in the second dentition to work out of the rest of our organism, these same forces consolidate in us also the life of Thought, which is not consolidated until we acquire the second teeth. They are the actual forces which produce the teeth; so that when we have the teeth, these forces are set free, and can assert themselves in the life of ideas. They can then form ideas, and in a corresponding way build the power of memory. Clearly outlined ideas can begin to find a place in our thought. As long however as we are employing the forces in the formation of the teeth, they cannot show themselves as true consolidating forces in the life of ideas.

As we grow beyond the seventh or eighth year, the Will which is essentially bound up with the lower man and not with the head, begins to manifest, and now comes the time when it would, as it were, shoot its forces up into the head. This cannot however come about so easily; for our head, which is organised for the extra-earthly, would not be able to receive these strong forces which the metabolic system, as vehicle of the Will, wishes to send forth to it. These forces must first be stemmed; they must make a halt until sufficiently filtered, toned down, given more of a ‘soul’ character, to make their influence felt in the head. This halt is made at the end of the second septennial period. When the Will-forces are arrested in the organisation of the larynx—for that is the way they manifest; in the male organisation they suddenly break forth in the change of voice. In the female organisation they manifest differently. These are the Will-forces coming to a standstill, as it were, before they reach the head. Thus we may say that at the end of our second septennial period, the Will-forces are arrested in the speech organisation. At that time they are sufficiently filtered and “souled” to make their influence felt in the head-organisation. Having reached the age of puberty, and the change of voice which runs parallel with it, we have reached the point when the faculty of thought and ideation can work together with the Will in the head.

Here we have an example of how with our Spiritual Science we can point concretely to events. The abstract philosophies which make their influence felt in modern times—Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea for instance—all remain in the abstract. Schopenhauer took pains to describe the world in its ideal character on the one hand, and its will character on the other; but he remains, as it were, in the mere abstract. So also does Eduard von Hartmann. They all remain in the abstract. To be concrete is to observe how, through these two halts—at the first and second septennial periods—in quite definite and distinct ways Idea and Will meet in the cosmic system of the human head. The essential thing is that we can point to that which is of the soul and spirit and show how it manifests and reveals itself in the outer physical world. So too, we see the forces of the head, which are sent forth to the body and manifest therein in the forming of the teeth, work together with the forces of the body sent to the head, which prepare themselves, by what they undergo in the formation of speech, to become true soul-will. In the formation of speech they are arrested and held back and only then do they press forward into the head.

Thus we must understand Man in his process of formation, and look at what actually goes on with him. I have said that the human head is no more adjusted to the earthly relations of man than is the magnetic needle to the movements of the ship. The needle is independent of them, and the human head is in the same way independent of the earthly connection.

Here we have something which gradually leads to the physiological concept of freedom. Here we have the physiology of what I have set forth in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, namely, that one can only understand freedom by grasping it in sense-free thinking—that is to say, in the processes taking place in man when he directs pure thinking by his Will and orientates it in accordance with certain defined directions.

We see how man comes step by step to study rightly the mutual relationship of the soul-and-spirit and the physical-corporeal, and how the process of speech-formation can be really understood by conceiving of it as a product of two sources from which the human being is supplied—the sources which are in the head-man on the one hand and in the limb-man on the other.

We can now experience more fully how impossible it is to say that some kind of communication of the will is carried from the brain through the motor nerves. The brain only derives its full power of volition from the rest of the organism. Of course you are not to imagine this as if you could draw it in a diagram, for the process of speech-formation not only was prepared earlier, but is something which goes through the whole of life and only appears in its most characteristic feature in the special time of transition. Thus we must understand clearly how man is adapted to an earthly as well as an extra-earthly life.

He is so adapted to earthly life that certain forces which the animal brings to their conclusion, man does not bring to a conclusion in his purely natural organisation. The animal is, as it were, born ready-equipped for all its functions. Man has to be taught to acquire these functions for himself. What thus takes place in man is really only an outer expression of something that takes place in him organically If we study the metabolism of the animal correctly, we find that it goes further than that of man. The metabolism of man must be held back at an earlier halting place. What in the animal is carried to a certain stage—must in man be arrested at an earlier stage. Superficially expressed, man does not carry digestion so far as the animal; the digestive process ceases earlier. He retains, through the arrested digestion, forces which become the vehicle for what he sends to the head through the Will.

As you see, human nature is complicated; and if one does not wish to take the trouble really to study its complications—why then, one arrives at a science such as we have in the external science of today! One does not arrive at the real nature of Man. The essential nature of Man will only be revealed when Spiritual Science is allowed to illuminate natural science. If however, it is with Man as I have described, and the connection between Man and the extra-human world outside him is as we have described it in these studies, then you will see that the extra-human world can only exist for Man if it has a certain resemblance to him, to his organisation. We have seen that as limb-men we are adapted to earthly relationships, but that through the head-organisation we have removed ourselves as it were out of earthly relations, like the ship's compass on the ship. Now something of this kind must take place also in the extra-human world. There must, for instance, be adaptation to the human limb-nature. Something must lift itself out beyond, there must be something that does not belong.

How does modern natural science study Man? It studies him as though he had no head. Of course it studies the head too, but how? As a kind of appendage to the rest of his organism. What natural science produces for the comprehension of human nature is only calculated to explain the part outside the head, not the human head itself; that must be explained from the spiritual world.

I might have used the following comparison. I might have said—I have already spoken of it recently—that the human head sits upon the rest of the human organism as people sit in a railway carriage. They take no personal part in the movement. They sit still and allow the carriage to move. In the same way, the human head sits at ease. It regards the rest of the organism which is adapted to the outer world, as its coach, and allows itself to be carried. It is itself organised for a very different world. And this is how it must be in the outer world also. A natural history of man, such as we have today, really speaks of a headless man, it does not understand his true nature at all. And an astronomy constructed on the same principles would not correspond to the whole extra-earthly world, but only to a certain part of it; the other part that is withdrawn from this main part, is not considered at all. As a matter of fact the trend of natural science for the last three or four centuries has been such that it has developed the movements of the Universe, disregarding a certain content of this Universe, just as the rest of natural science disregards the human head. Therefore astronomy has derived forms of movements such as ‘The Earth revolves in an elliptical path round the Sun’, which are as little correct for the Universe as the natural science of today is for the whole being of Man. They do not correspond to the actual facts. Hence we must so often point out that the Copernican view must be fructified by Spiritual Science. Many mystics, and theosophists too, are fond of preaching: ‘The world of senses around us is Maya.’ But they do not draw the ultimate logical conclusion, otherwise they would have to say: ‘Even the world of the Copernican system, this movement of the Earth around the Sun is maya, is an illusion, and must be revised.’ For we must realise that within it is something which can no more be recognised on the basis of the hypothesis employed by Copernicus, Galileo—or even Kepler—than the whole nature of Man can be understood from the principles of modern science.

Now when we come to treat of a subject like this, we must at the same time point to something which has already taken place in human evolution. If we call to mind what we have often said—that in olden times there was a kind of primeval wisdom of which man had but a dreamy atavistic consciousness, but which in its content far surpassed what we have since acquired—if we remember all this, we shall not find it difficult to bear in mind also that the idea of the world which was held in olden times was quite different from any cosmology possible today. For what was the cosmology of our forefathers—that is, of ourselves in our former Earth-lives? What was it?

The cosmology that man had in those times consisted far more than it does now in what man brought into the world at physical birth. We may still find in children, if we understand how to observe them aright, something like a picture of the world in which man lived before descending to physical life. In later life however, and indeed very early in later life, this picture vanishes. In olden times this picture endured. What existed in earlier epochs of spiritual evolution as an astronomical description of the solar or planetary system and its relation to man, was something man felt within him, although he experienced it in a dream-like state. Today we look back upon those times of our ancestors with a certain arrogance, yet they were times when we really knew there was something within ourselves that had connection with Mars, Mercury, and so on. That was part of the inner consciousness of the human being. It disappeared however as man developed further. In primeval times he saw only the outer constellation, but felt within himself an inner constellation, an inner cosmic system. Not only did he perceive a cosmic system outside him; but in his own head, which today is merely the vehicle of the—shall I say—indefinite life of ideas, there within, shone the Sun, with the planets circling round. In his head man carried this cosmic picture, and it had an inner force which worked upon the rest of the organism and influenced what he received at birth, or rather at conception, from the Earth-forces; that too was influenced, so that the rest of man was also drawn into this adaptation to the planetary forces.

And now we can carry the thought a little further. Man is born into this world, and as a heritage he receives—let us say—in the first place, the power to acquire his teeth, the milk-teeth. These are completed approximately in the circle of the first year. The second teeth need seven times as long; they are brought forth by the human organism itself. This points in the deepest sense to the fact that a certain rhythm which we bring with us at birth and which relates to the yearly revolution is slowed down by seven times in our earthly life. By seven times is the yearly revolution slowed down, and this is expressed in the fact that man has introduced into his division of time the relation of one to seven—day and week. The week is seven times as long as the day. This is an expression of how something takes its course in man which goes seven times slower than what he brings into physical existence at birth. Man will not understand the actual processes in the human being until he is able to see quite clearly and exactly how something within him which, as it were, was brought in from conditions outside the Earth, has to be slowed down by seven times during the earthly period.

The ancient Mystery teaching spoke much of these facts. If I were to express in our language what the old Mystery teachings—the ancient Hebrew Mystery teaching, for example—said from their atavistic knowledge of these matters, I should have to put it in this way.—The old Hebrew teachers explained to their pupils: Jehovah, who is the true Earth God, who added the Earth-organisation to that of Saturn, Sun and Moon—Jehovah has the tendency to slow down seven times what comes from the Moon-organisation. In relation to the course of the Earth something in the human being wants to go at accelerated speed. I might even say that the old Hebrew Mystery teacher said to his pupils: Lucifer runs seven times as fast as Jehovah. This points to two movements, two currents in human nature. These two currents also exist in extra-earthly nature—only there they are present in a somewhat different form. The thought however, which we here approach, is one not very easy to understand. We can perhaps gain insight into it by starting from social relationships, and then coming back to the cosmic-tellurian relationships.

I have often spoken in public lectures of something I should like to express here. When we contemplate the misery of the present time, we find the peculiar fact that the whole intelligence of modern humanity has developed in a way that is quite estranged from reality. It is a peculiar fact that, in practical life, we find more inefficient people than efficient. This is patent, for instance, as I have shown, in the fact that in the nineteenth century there was much discussion concerning the effect of the gold-standard upon international economic relations. You can go through the Parliamentary reports of that century, and try to form an idea from them of what people then thought would be the result of mono-metalism, the gold-standard. They regarded it as something which would make free trade possible unhindered by imposition of duty. Throughout the united economic domains of the world this was predicted wherever the gold-standard was extolled. What has actually come about? The imposition of duty. Little by little the actual relations have developed in such a way that everywhere duties have been imposed. That is the actual outcome.

Judging superficially one might say: Well, those people must have been very stupid! But they were not at all stupid; among those who had pledged themselves to the promotion of free trade by the gold-standard, were very able and clever persons, but they had no sense of reality, they reckoned only according to logic. They could not dive into the true relationships, any more than can our modern scientists comprehend the organisation of the heart, liver, spleen and so on. They make abstract theories and hold on to them; although they are materialists they remain rooted in the abstract. That is why such an occurrence is possible as that related in the following anecdote, which is founded on fact and is really very illuminating.

In a certain Academy of science there was a physiologist, a learned man, who developed a theory as to the varying length of time particular birds can fast. He made out a beautiful schedule. He had large cages of birds placed in his corridor and he starved those birds to ascertain how long they could live without food. He registered the times and obtained some lovely big numbers as a result. He elaborated these in a paper which he read at an Academical Meeting. Now in the same house there lived on the floor above another physiologist who did not apply the same methods. After the learned treatise had been read, he rose and said: ‘I must unfortunately object that these figures are not correct, for I had such pity on the poor birds that I fed them in passing.’ Now things do not always have to happen just like this! This is an anecdote. But it is founded on fact; and really much of the material underlying our exact science has been obtained in a like way. Someone in the background has ‘fed the birds’ instead of their having starved as long as the schedule showed. If one has a sense for reality, one cannot very well work with statistical methods of that kind; they do not hold out much promise. But this sense for reality is wholly lacking in modern humanity. Why is this so? It is due to a certain necessity of the evolution of humanity; and we can understand the matter as follows:

Picture it to yourselves in this way. The man of ancient times looked into this outer world. By means of all that he bore within him, he viewed the relationships and connections of the world outside. He formed also his theory of the stars from out of his own inner stellar system. He had ‘a sense for reality’ and he carried it in his senses. This sense for reality has disappeared in the course of man's evolution. It will have to be developed again, it will have to be developed to the same degree inwardly as it formerly was outwardly. We must really cultivate this sense for reality in our inner being by the training we receive in Spiritual Science; only then shall we be able to develop it in the world outside. If man were to keep straight on in the path in which he has been evolving with modern intellectuality, he would at length be quite unable to perceive what is going on around him, and then it could easily happen that while the cry is heard, ‘Free Trade is coming!’ in reality it will be Customs restrictions that are being established. This is continually happening in the various domains of so-called practical life. What happened then in a big thing happens today in small things everywhere. The ‘practical’ man predicts one thing, the opposite happens. It would be interesting to keep an account of what ‘practical’ men have predicted as ‘certain to happen’ during the last years of the war. Always the opposite came about, especially in the later years, precisely because there was no longer any sense for reality among the people. This sense however, can arise in no other way than by developing it first within. In future times no one will be considered a practical man or a thinker attuned to reality, who disdains to educate himself in his inner being through Spiritual Science, in a manner that cannot be done through the outer world today. We must carry into the world outside what we develop within. Hence the necessity for Spiritual Science; for people cannot arrive at the relation of the heart to the liver if they do not first acquire the method for it by means of a training in Spiritual Science. In earlier times people could say: the heart is related to the liver somewhat as the Sun to Mercury in the outer world; and man knew something of how this relationship of Sun to Mercury was drawn from the super-sensible world into the sense world. This is now no longer understood, nor can it ever be thoroughly understood if the foundation, the basic impulse for this comprehension, be not acquired from within. It is not through clairvoyance alone that man can make it his own. By clairvoyance the facts of Spiritual Science are investigated; but man acquires this sense when he enters with his whole thought and feeling into what has already been discovered by clairvoyant methods, and regulates his life accordingly. That is the essential point. What is of moment is to study the conclusions of Spiritual Science, not to satisfy a curiosity for clairvoyance. That must be emphasised again and again. For in the whole development of human culture, this application of the methods of Spiritual Science to outer life and to the knowledge of the great world, the world outside man, is of quite special importance.

When we consider what we thus have to look upon as the original head-organisation, when we consider it in the course of our life, we see how it gradually becomes permeated with all in our organisation that is adapted to the world outside. Thus we must learn to understand the world outside man from man's own organism, from the human limb-organisation; and there, only such things as I have already hinted at can help us. I have shown the contrast that exists between the waking and sleeping conditions of man. These are contrasting conditions, and when one condition is passing over into the other, that is to say, when we wake up and when we go to sleep, then we pass through a zero-point of our existence. The moment of awaking and the moment of falling asleep must have something to do with one another.

This indicates that if we try to turn the day-course of man into a geometrical figure, we can employ neither a circle nor an ellipse; for if we were to ascribe to the sleep condition one part of the ellipse, the conditions of awaking and falling asleep should fall apart; and this they cannot do. We shall see how even in outer appearance they present a similarity; they cannot fall apart. Thus we cannot draw the geometrical figure which is to correspond with man's daily round in a circular form nor in an elliptic form. We can only draw it as a looped line, a lemniscate. When we say: Man falls asleep out of the waking condition into the sleep condition, then with the lemniscate it is possible to show him coming out of sleep again through the same condition; and we have a curve, a line which truly corresponds to the daily course of human life. There is no other line for the daily course of life than the lemniscate, for no other line would lead the awaking through the same point as the falling asleep.

There is more than this. If we give attention to human evolution in childhood especially, we have to say: we wake up virtually the same as we went to sleep. We wake up the same in respect of the principal alternating conditions of

waking and sleeping. But if we rightly observe life, we cannot exclude the sleeping condition from human life as a whole. We instruct our children during the day. Out of all we bring to the child, much of it is not his at once, but becomes so only the next day, after the Ego and astral body have passed through the night-condition; only then does the child duly receive what we have given him by day. We must always have this in mind and regulate our teaching and education accordingly. Thus in regard to the alternating condition of day and night, we can say: we sleep, and on awaking come to the same place where we fell asleep; but in regard to human evolution, we shall have to say: we press forwards a little. We progress in another direction.

Hence we may not draw the line quite as a lemniscate; but in such a way that we come out a little further on, and so attain a progressive lemniscate. (A).

Thus when we observe the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, and continue the evolution, we obtain a spiral. This spiral is ultimately connected with our evolution, and our evolution again is connected with the whole cosmic system. Therefore we must seek this same line as the basis of the movements of the Universe. If, instead of abstract geometry, man had applied concrete geometry to celestial space, the concrete geometry that proceeds from a study of the whole man, he would have arrived at something different. For in the ancient wisdom one had this line (A). And one did not speak of Mars as moving along any other kind of line than this one. Gradually it was all forgotten. Man calculated instead of knowing. What was the result? It was a line which goes forward like this (B). But in that line one can get no further.

So man took this line and set circles upon it (C) and acquired the epicycloid theory.

The Ptolemaic theory is the last remnant of the old primeval wisdom. On its foundation Copernicus made a further simplification, and modern astronomy still speculates on that today—but in such a way that it much prefers to consider ellipses and circles than that inwardly curving line which presents a continuous spiral. Then people wonder that the observations do not agree with the calculations, and that fresh corrections have to be made continually.

Reflect how the whole theory of Relativity has been constructed on an error in Mercury's time of rotation. Only, the correction was attempted in a different way than would have been the case if one had gone back to Man's relation to the whole Cosmos. Of this more in the next lecture.

Our lectures, in that period of time before I had to go away some weeks ago, all tended to show how that which we call Spiritual Science can pass over into real life. They tended to show how that which we call the Cosmos stands in a certain inner connection with what we ourselves inwardly experience in man. And if you just survey the lectures given upon this very theme, I beg you once in a way, radically to ask yourselves this question:—What would it signify for the sum total of the evolution of humanity if these most penetrating, most significant results of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science would only penetrate into the life of those human beings working and living in a social relation with each other. They would know that man, while he attains his consciousness in a physical body, is all the time preserving something in this physical body which points to the period of time before his birth, or rather before his conception, when he was in a condition in which he was filled with a longing once again to have the life between birth and death. He carried within him then the feeling that the soul that has lived for a long time in the Spiritual world again needs the perception of the world obtainable through the bodily senses in order to progress further, and also needs actions performed in a physical body. This conscious contemplation of the pre-existence of the soul, if really understood in the right way, would not remain a mere theoretical view, but would lay hold of one's Feeling and Will, and thereby become a direct force in life.

We can see this my dear friends, in the humanity of the present- age.—They all show something of a lack of initiative, in its broad outlines. This lack of initiative, which broadly speaking, works in a weakening way on all these forces which are necessary in order to turn our decaying life once again into an ascending one, can only be bettered when man becomes conscious of his community with the Spiritual world. That however cannot be brought into the human soul through any theoretical considerations, but only through the living perception of what man was before he descended into the physical world.

Again, if that which looks beyond the time which we pass here as human beings between birth and death, is not the object simply of a vague belief but of a clear cognition, it does not work so abstractly in man as do the religious confessions of to-day, but works concretely, as a direct force of life, Man then works in such a way that what lies in his labour extends beyond his death; and because a man can take up such ideas into himself, life is thereby poured into everything which as a rule man only knows.

Just think for a moment. To-day we have a widely-extended Science of Nature; and as regards this external Science, we must say that man has progressed enormously; but the last few years have shown that this progress has not improved humanity in any moral respect. Such persons as Wallace and others, to whom I have often pointed when I wanted to emphasise that years ago, they were quite right when they said, “We have indeed made immense progress with respect to our knowledge of the outer world, but as regards our moral nature, humanity compared with primeval times, has not progressed.”

This progress must come to-day, in this historic Age, because human beings cannot remain as they are now, in their present disposition of soul. But how can this change be brought about? How can the more theoretical view of the world be animated? Let us take an apparently coarse example. In our human life, we make use of coal. We know that this coal is a relic of old forests, and so fundamentally it is a plant-substance. But now, how is this plant-substance, how is the whole world of plants connected with man as such? Just reckon over a few thousand years and see how much carbon dioxide, carbonic-acid the air would then contain,—because we breathe out carbon dioxide into the air with each expiration,—and you will find that it is a large quantity.

In the course of a few thousand years it would be an enormous quantity. In the course of a few thousand years, it would cause man to disappear; it would extinguish life. But now the plants absorb this carbon dioxide, and excrete the carbon; they form their body out of that which they absorb from man's cast-off produce; and these plants which once covered the Earth, now compose our layers of coal, our coal strata.

You see, that is an extraordinary transformation. At first it is more the qualitative aspect which comes into consideration; because naturally that coal was not formed by our breath but by other beings; but this qualitative aspect has to be considered. That which in a sense we excrete from ourselves, furnishes the basis for what we again use from the Earth. Thus far one can think, according to the theoretical results arrived at by Science.

Spiritual Science leads us further, I must remind you of what I have told you. It is true that man lays aside his physical body when he goes with his soul and spirit into the Spiritual worlds; but I also told you that the physical body, which is laid aside, signifies just that which builds up the Earth again.

As in our expiration we give carbon to the plant-world, so we give our body to the entire Earth. And what we see around us, my dear friends, is simply the product of such beings as ourselves, beings who, during the Moon, Sun and Saturn epochs were our predecessors, and who gave to the Earth that which composes the Earth to-day. When future worlds come, there will live in them that which we now excrete as our bodily substance. That is a thought of infinite scope, if one follows it out, because from our knowledge of nature (which is but a half-knowledge), we can get the connection of man with the entire world, and it is important that we should get that, extremely important; for if we bring together all that has been laid down as a foundation in our earlier lectures, we must say; that in our entire human nature, not merely in our thinking but in our entire nature, even as far as our external body, lives what we have worked upon in ourselves as our moral ideals. That dualistic philosophy, which can build no bridge between the natural world and the moral sphere, cannot imagine how what we have in our moral ideals can be connected with the very processes in our muscles; but if one can look at the world as we have tried to do in our recent lectures, one sees how what we think in our moral ideals incorporates itself into the very processes of our body. One sees that the Spiritual and bodily processes are interwoven and form a unity.

This method of looking at things ought to become general. If only it were taken up as part of the education of children, human beings would grow up who would not look on one side to a world developed from a nebulous condition, out of which, the Sun, the Stars and the Planets have condensed, and from which too, through the welding-together of matter void of morale or being, humanity has developed in order finally to return back into a purely natural condition. That which springs up in our souls as moral Ideals would then again be one with what stood at the starting point of our Cosmic evolution in its purely natural existence. We human beings would then realise that we are called upon to incorporate into the life of nature, what we experience as moral ideals. And then, in future worlds, we should know that what we now experience morally will re-appear as the Laws of Nature.

If only children could grow up to-day under the influence of such a perception, they would be able to take their place in the world in such a way that they would feel themselves as part of the Cosmos, and would thereby have a feeling for life drawn from these very forces which they would absorb into themselves with their knowledge of the Cosmos. Indeed, being educated to action, they would then know that whatever they do is to be imprinted in the entire Cosmos. If only that were the prevailing feeling, how differently human beings would live; whereas to-day man asks himself: “What am I really in this world?” He sees himself standing alone, sprung forth from indefinite Nature-forces, and permeated with moral ideals like soap bubbles. Such a man can be crippled in his very feeling for life. When he looks up to the stars he sees them passing through Cosmic space, but he feels he has no connection with them. They themselves have only arisen in a natural way. They are perishable worlds, falling to pieces, serving no purpose, and having no inner Spirituality.

We must bear in mind what a life-force for humanity might be developed from a Spiritual method of looking at things. That must be pointed out again and again, because that is just what human beings to-day understand least of all. They say that a Spiritual view makes a man live apart from the world; but my dear friends, it is the present modern view which makes one avoid the world. Why is this so? Because it works with the dogmas of the past, which in the past served a good purpose, because they then arose from a certain instinctive clairvoyance. But this instinctive clairvoyance has now disappeared, and human beings have no longer any relationship to it. The dogmas still retained are no longer understood. It is not a question of their falsity, but of modern humanity having no longer a living relationship with them. And outside of the dogmas still maintained, humanity to-day only has a nature science devoid of spirit. Anthroposophy will give a spirit-filled Science of nature, a science able to animate man, and that which trickles, as a knowledge of the spirit, into nature, will then transform itself in man in the same way as do the food-substances in a physical respect. That knowledge is transformed in man into Social Force, and one would experience it if one earnestly realised that Spiritual knowledge is nourishment for the soul, and can be absorbed and digested—if I can use that expression—it can be digested and re-appear as a force working socially. We can get social impulses in no other way than by taking up Spiritual cognition from surrounding Nature. Anyone who thinks he can carry out social reforms from any other impulse, thinks about the things of this world as one who meditates about man and wishing to explain him as clearly as possible, and in order to explain him to himself, forbids him food. Whoever speaks to-day of social forms without having Spiritual knowledge, does the same thing with reference to the social order of humanity as a man who wishes to explain man and prescribes for him a hunger cure. That is just what stands as a deep absurdity in the modern views of humanity, and which it cannot see through.

When we enter this life between Birth and Death, what we carry with us from the Spiritual worlds is only like an image, and fundamentally the whole of our soul-life is a life of images, pictures. But in former Ages this picture-life was animated by what then already existed in the natural perception as spirit. In ancient times there existed no concept of nature which was not filled with spirit. People to-day can read older views, but they read nothing there of a Natural Science, that is, of a natural Science devoid of spirit. Whoever goes back, even into the 13th or 14th Centuries, and reads the things written and spoken of nature there, may mock at the childishness, the superstition then existing; but the essential is, that all the things described then were described as permeated by spirit. To-day, on the other hand, we try as far as possible to see the phenomena of nature without spirit. Indeed, we regard it as the very perfection of our scientific observations to see them without spirit.

That which we take up out of nature without spirit, can however no longer work animatingly in the pictorial existence of our soul. We remain at a standstill in this respect and will not admit that it is merely an image. But this image, which is really the image of a past life, will not be fructified by the present life around us. This present life should be fructified by the past life, so that it can then be carried through the Gate of Death into the Spiritual worlds. It is only Spiritual Science livingly beheld which can give man that which it has to give him.

Just take, for instance, the dogmas of the old books of religion. Many men to-day fight against these because they find and consider them nonsensical; but they are in no wise nonsensical. Even such a dogma as that of the Trinity has a most profound sense. It was read by human beings from nature itself by means of the old instinctive clairvoyance, and for thousands of years in the evolution of humanity that dogma gave man an infinite amount. The external Churches have preserved such dogmas, but to-day they hardly exist except as a certain vocal sound. Men to-day feel no need to develop a relationship with what was an object of an ancient clairvoyance, and so it remains something which has no relationship to man to-day, because of his modern nature, although at one time it was a living soul-nourishment. And again, apart from these dogmas, we have our external Science of Nature, in a state of utter deprivation, which kills the soul unless it is permeated by the spirit.

These are the two basic evils which Spiritual Science as studied here, has to keep in mind: in order once more to give to the soul something which will animate it, and give it force, so that it can feel itself directly as a member of the entire Cosmos, and feel that responsibility in its social work which proceeds from knowing that as single individuals, even our tiniest action has a Cosmic significance for the whole evolution of the future. We have to look beyond that narrow circuit in which we are enclosed by reason of our lack of education; for that narrowing which man has himself brought about will increase more and more. That is why Spiritual Science meets with so much difficulty, because fundamentally that which it seeks to be, does not consist merely of words, nor thoughts, not merely ideas, but that which can permeate all those thoughts, flow through the words as the very Spiritual blood of life, and then trickle directly into each human soul. It is for that reason that, in any advocating of Spiritual Science, it is far more a question of how we speak than of what we say. We see to-day the most violent conflict between Materialism and Spiritualism. This conflict simply rests on the fact that human beings simply will not see what deep foundations this utterance has:—The truth always lies midway between two directly opposite associations.

My dear friends, is it true that God is within us? Is it true then that we are in God? It is true that we are in God. These two assertions are direct opposites. Both are true. God is in us, and we are in God; but the two assertions are polar opposites. The real truth, the whole truth lies between the two. The nature of all the conflict of ideas in the world rests on this—that human beings always tend to a one-sidedness, which is true, but only a one-sided truth; whereas the real truth lies between two opposite assertions. We must know both in order to get at the reality. For instance, to-day, in the present state of the evolution of the world, one must have the most earnest will to learn all we can of material existence above all, and not propagate the desire of those people who say: “We will only occupy ourselves with the Spirit: we do not want to know Matter.” To learn as much as possible of Matter is one side of human cognition, one thing for which the Will of man, must strive. On the other hand one must learn to know the Spirit, because between those two, lies what we are, and ought really to strive for. Both are wrong.—those who say the world is only Matter and those who say the world is only Spirit are wrong—For what is matter? Matter as human beings know it, is that which has remained behind from the Spirit, after the Spirit has become Spirit. Your own human form, my dear friends, is only what was once a thought of the Gods, which I here draw in red—the Divine workings of thought.

Just think; even as water that freezes gets a solid form, so this Divine thought gets a form and becomes the sheaths of man, (Blue). Then a new thought of God makes itself valid in the inner being of man, and then goes out again, (Red) and this Divine thought (left) was once transformed from a form which in still older times was also a thought of the Gods. Whatever we see as matter is nothing else than spirit which has become a firm form, and that which we perceive as the human spirit is simply a young form, a form engaged in the process of becoming. These two—Spirit and Matter—are only different because of their ages in the world—they only are of a different age. The mistake made about them does not consist in our applying ourselves either to Matter or to Spirit, but in wanting to maintain in the Present what we should so maintain in Life, which we should so fructify, that it may become something for the future.

Now just think. We bring something over into the present from our pre-existence in the Spiritual world; we bring that over as a Spiritual psychic life. But if we permeate that with a barren external spiritless Science of Nature, we harden it, we do not keep it germinal, we do not allow it to grow up for future worlds. We Ahrimanise it.

And if we try and grasp that which is already form, which is Divinity itself grown old and crystallised itself in form if we seek to grasp that in a nebulous way, through a nebulous mysticism into which we dream all kinds of things, we do not support ourselves on that which is given us by the Gods as our bodily support. And thus we Luciferise Matter. What is nebulous mysticism? Man should look into himself. He should recognise from out of the Cosmos that which he is in his own physical organism in his life between birth and death. Instead of that he cherishes the fantasy that he has a God within him. He has indeed a God within him, but he does not attain that through mystical fantasy, for he thus Luciferises what he should see in the later form of his own bodily sheaths. These are false views of Matter and Spirit, about which human beings come into strife with one another, for Matter and Spirit are one and the same, but at different ages of life.

That is something which it is very necessary our present Age should perceive; otherwise it can never come to an understanding of the social life. The attempt must be made to-day really to enter with one's thoughts into the true reality; but human beings do not want to do this,—they prefer to remain on the surface of things. A pretty little story was told to me a few days ago, which occurred a few weeks back in Zurich. Probably it has already been related to some of you here. One of our friends spoke at a University Celebration in Zurich about the scientific significance of Anthroposophy. A socialistic thinker in reply, got up and said: “One should not educate man to-day to such mystic phantasy, but to exact Science, for did not Goethe say: Into the inner being of nature no creative spirit can penetrate.”

You see, what this Swiss delegate brought forward rests simply on a superficial knowledge of what Goethe did say, For Goethe, quoting the above utterance of Halley said: “I have heard this repeated for 60 years and have sworn at it the whole time.” That is how the Spiritual Life is carried on to-day. That represents the accuracy with which men know things, and thus in a certain degree do they become authorities. Thus, do men strive to learn to know the world. Whether one man believes Goethe himself uttered what he swore at for 60 years, or whether as National Economists do they perform things such as I will characterise now, is really a matter of indifference. A very learned National Economist wrote a book about the free and the fixed formation of prices. He had to investigate a good deal as to the way in which, as I might say National Economy could be made social. Amongst the many things he discussed, is also the following. He says: Even George Brandes (who was himself no deep thinker) said: The people in their economic and social deeds are not guided by reason but by instinct.” Therefore, things should be explained to the people. That is what this National Economist is advocating. One must bring enlightenment to the people.

Now, my dear friends to this one could reply: In our many Universities, there are a great number of these National Economists, they are all enlightened, but when they arrange things amongst themselves, they are working exactly under the same institute instincts as the others,—neither more nor less. And so, as things are fashioned, especially to-day by our highly developed intelligence, as regards social life these same instincts remain, and are working. But now we must go further, we must now ask ourselves: How can we bring light into this working of the instincts, for that alone can be of social significance. It is simply nonsense to suppose that the majority of human beings can be guided by this; they cannot. Something must come in which can enter and transform these instincts. Reason cannot enter into them. We have here to remind ourselves of that ancient instinctive perception, (See Diagram) which has developed into our intellectuality; but this intellect lives only in the inner Spiritual life of man. On the other hand, the external forces working socially are permeated by instinct. Into this instinct something must penetrate which is related to the old instinctive vision, but which has an impulse from Spirituality. That is Imagination. Imagination must enter. (See Diagram) Imaginations as we call them in Spiritual Science, can alone give the force which can bring light to those instincts.

That which enables us to understand things to-day scientifically and externally; Botany, Zoology, Mathematics,—can be furnished by the intellect, but not that which implies human co-operation. There must enter what we have called Imagination. Imaginations must permeate the social life—that is the essential thing. In all social life which has developed from olden times up to recent times, there have lived the human instincts. It is actually only since the 2nd, and last third of the 19th Century that man has entered that age which no longer requires the old instincts. You can prove this exactly. Even at the turn of the 18th and 19th Century there still lived these ancient instincts in the social life of man. The uncertainty of man's instincts first appeared in that Age when intellect developed in its most shining form. Then tradition alone remained.

Just think, my dear friends, what gigantic efforts were made in the 19th Century, in order still to have moral views. Men had to preserve in the most abstract way what was still maintained from ancient times; and of necessity the old moral ideals were still propagated, though they were then petrified. We need to-day a rebirth of morality for that alone can produce what is social, that cannot come from the intellect, but simply and solely from moral intuition. Moral fantasy must raise itself to the Spiritual world, in order to fructify itself out of that world. That is now the essential, otherwise man faces the loss of moral impulses.

Those abstract Confessions which tend to belief alone cannot find in their faith the necessary strength for life to-day. Faith can give one something for the egoism of one's own soul; but with that egoism alone, at most one can live as an individual, separate being. If we want to enter into action, and that means social action, it is then necessary that we should be permeated with a Spiritual-psychic life-blood, and that can only come from a concrete Spiritual life. This consciousness of the Life-Force must flow through the Anthroposophical Movement into the Anthroposophical view of life. Especially from this point of view must one make oneself acquainted with these important concepts which to-day need a justification and defence.

Pantheism is a very favourite reproach against Anthroposophy, Pantheism, i.e., giving reverence to the things around us, for God lives in those things. That is heresy to the modern Confessions; and why? Why is it that the modern Confessions call our Anthroposophy a heresy? Because these Confessions are permeated through and through with materialism.—If the Jesuit regards the world around him simply as Matter, it is of course blasphemy to say that this Matter is Divine, is God. But can Anthroposophy help it if the Jesuits regard the world around them simply as Matter? It is not Matter, it is Spirit; and that which the Jesuits perceives as Matter in the world, that Anthroposophy has to show as illusion. We do not explain as Divine the world which we assert—is an illusion;—of course not, we do not claim that for Divine existence. Of course it is quite different to take what is around us and explain that as Divine, at the same time realising external sense-phenomena as illusion, than to regard it as mere Matter and then explain that the grossest Matter is Divine.

You see how far asunder these things are, and we must not grow weary of really trying to make these things valid before the world. Otherwise there may be a repetition of what happened lately, when something was printed in a Swiss Newspaper by way of objection to my methods of attaining Spiritual knowledge. There it was asserted that I said that one can see the Spirit; but that cannot be, because the Spirit is not sensible, and only the things of sense can be perceived. One cannot grasp the Spirit, and therefore one cannot see it.

You see, what a hopeless way this is; the writer maintains nothing else but that—he cannot see the Spirit, and therefore no one can see the Spirit. One can know nothing of the Spirit because one cannot grasp it. And in such variations, the thoughts of a whole Newspaper goes on. What works so terribly destructively to-day, is the fact that people have not the consciousness that they should read such things to the end. “Into the inner being of nature no creative Spirit can penetrate”—thus ran the first two lines; but the person reading them stopped there, and did not notice that Goethe added; “I have heard this said for 60 years, and have cursed it all the time.”

What we must look for everywhere to-day is the prevailing superficiality. I have often pointed this out, but it cannot be done too often. We must trace everywhere this terrible clinging to superficiality. It can be chiefly seen where it works so terribly to-day externally, i.e. in the sphere of Social Economics; There people will not dive down into that which lies in the very essence of things. For instance, I have been told to-day, that people are constantly saying that “The Threefold State” (book) is so difficult to understand,—well, that they want something which they can understand much more easily. But, my dear friends, if, with these things that can easily be understood, nothing is done in social life, but men have simply bungled, it is necessary to grasp what is a little difficult, which requires effort. It is strange to demand that a thing be made more comprehensible, for it is really necessary for our modern social thinking that we should make an effort. Things one can easily understand have worked so abstractly, so ruinously to-day. To demand that such things should be made more comprehensible, is simply frivolous. It really is. Indeed, it is not a question that one should not cultivate such inwardly frivolous thoughts as “This is difficult”—for if it were given in any such form as is desired, it would simply give people something else with which they could bungle. For really objective work this apparent difficulty simply must be overcome, it simply urges us to make a study of that book. That is the essential. In this earnest way should one try to enter into these things, in such serious times as these.

A lecture published in The Golden Blade, 1990. Also known as: The Influence of the Planets on Man, The Ego and the Sun, or Atomism. It is the thirteenth of seventeen lectures in the volume Perspectives on Humanity's Development.

The civilisation of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch—the period of the development of the Mind Soul in humanity—was directed from the Greek Mysteries. In other words: the indications upon which the culture of the human mind was based issued from the Mystery-Sanctuaries which existed here and there in Asia Minor and Southern Europe. Now the secret of man's connection with the Sun was an essential part of these Mystery-teachings. From the book Theosophy we know that the Ego lights up within the Intellectual or Mind Soul and enters into possession of its full, inner force during the age of Consciousness, or Spiritual Soul.

Now because the Ego of man was destined from a certain point of view to be awakened during the age of the culture of the mind or intellect, it was quite natural that the Mysteries of that age should have been concerned with the secrets of the Sun and their connection with the human Ego. In the book Riddles of Philosophy it is said that the Greek's life of thought consisted in an actual perceiving of the outer world. The Greek's thought was at the same time a perception, just as we today have a perception of colours or sounds. The thoughts and conceptions of the Greek were not brought into being merely by inner activity of the soul, but they were born as it were from the objects themselves. In this respect Goethe's thinking undoubtedly possessed qualities in common with Greek thought. This is quite clear from his famous conversation with Schiller. Schiller stated that Goethe's conceptions were not perceptions, but ideas, and to this Goethe retorted that he actually saw his ideas before him, that he perceived them objectively.

The life of thought in Greece was associated with a very definite inner experience which arose when men looked at the world around them. They regarded the substance of the ideas which thus lit up before them as being the creation of the Sun. With the rising Sun they beheld the appearance in space of the life of ideas, and this life of ideas passed away again with the setting Sun. Men have now quite lost the faculty of perceiving and experiencing spirituality in the world around them. When the Sun rises they see only the phenomena of light and colour which there appear. And it is the same when the Sun sets in the red glow of evening. The Greeks felt that the world of ideas came to them at sunrise and passed away from them at sunset. They felt that in the darkness of the night they were bereft of the world of ideas. And when they looked at the sky, which seems to us to be blue, but for the colour of which the Greeks used a word which simply meant “darkness”, they felt that their world of ideas came to an end at the boundaries of visible space. Beyond this world of space the Greek divined the existence of other worlds—the worlds of the thoughts of the Gods, which he connected with light. These worlds seemed to him to be concentrated in the living Sun, and to withdraw during the night into the spaces of the dark firmament. Without some insight into this entirely different world of perception and experience, we cannot understand the further evolution of man's life of soul. This faculty of inwardly living perception functioned for a certain period of time, but then the most advanced representatives of the human race, those who still received their training in the Greek Mysteries, began to feel that their power to perceive the spiritual radiations from the living Sun in cosmic space was waning, and they saw salvation in the Mystery of Golgotha, inasmuch as the impulse coming from the Mystery of Golgotha made it possible for them to rekindle the light within their own being. And they tried now to experience the light by entering in spirit into the events connected with the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now the intellect alone can give us no real knowledge of what has really come to pass in the life of humanity through the ages. A great and far-reaching metamorphosis took place in man's life of soul and must never be forgotten when we are studying the course of evolution. We who have been living in the era of the development of the Consciousness Soul since the beginning of the fifteenth century have in our inner, intellectual activity, only a shadowy reflection of the spirituality which pervaded the life of the mind in the fourth Post-Atlantean period of civilisation. And the task before us is to awaken a faculty of the soul which will quicken in this shadowy intellect of ours a living understanding of the universe. The shadow-intellect that is characteristic of all modern culture has fettered man to the Earth. He has eyes only for earthly things, particularly when he allows himself to be influenced by the claims of modern science. In our age it never occurs to man that his being belongs, not to the Earth alone, but to the Cosmos beyond the Earth. Knowledge of our connection with the Cosmos beyond the Earth—that is what we need above all to make our own.

We take earthly life today as the basis of our ideas and concepts and build up a conception of the Universe in line with the conditions of this earthly life. But the picture of the Universe thus arising has been evolved by simply transferring earthly conditions to the world beyond the Earth. By means of spectro-analysis and other methods—admirable as they are in their way—a conception of the Sun has grown up which is really modelled wholly upon earthly conditions. Everyone is familiar with the appearance of luminous, incandescent gas, and this picture is then transferred to the Sun in the heavens. But we must learn to think of the Sun in the light of Spiritual Science. The Sun which the physicist believes to be a luminous body of gas out in cosmic space is spiritual through and through. The Sun receives the cosmic light and radiates it to the Earth, but the Sun is not physical at all. It is spiritual in its whole nature and being. The Greek was right when he felt that the Sun was connected with the development of his Ego, for the development of the Ego is associated with the intelligence and the faculty of forming ideas. The Greek conceived the rays of the Sun to be the power which kindled and quickened his Ego. His was still aware of the spirituality of the Cosmos, and to him the Sun was a living being, related to the human Ego in an absolutely concrete way. When a man says ‘ I ’ to himself, he experiences a force that is working within him, and the Greek, as he felt the working of this inner force, related it to the Sun. The Greek said to himself: Sun and Ego are the outer and inner aspects of one and the same being. The Sun out there in space is the Cosmic Ego. What lives within me is the human Ego.

As a matter of fact, this experience still comes to those who have a deeper feeling for Nature. The experience is not nearly as vivid as it was in the days of Greece, but for all that it is still possible to become aware of the spiritual forces indwelling the rays of the Sun in springtime. There are people here and there who feel that the Ego is imbued with a new vigour when the rays of the Sun begin to shine down upon the Earth with greater strength. But this is a last faint echo, an outward shell of an experience that is dying out altogether in the abstract, shadowy intellectualism prevalent in every branch of civilised life today. The task before us is to begin once again to realise and understand the connection of the being of man with super-earthly existence.

If we study and compare many things that are to be found in anthroposophical literature, we shall be able to understand the way in which the Sun is related to the Ego, and we shall also realise that the forces which stream down to the Earth from the Sun and from the Moon are entirely different in character and function. In a certain respect, Sun and Moon stand in polar antithesis. The forces streaming from the Sun enable the human being to become the bearer of an Ego. We owe to the rays of the Sun the power which moulds the human form into an image of the Ego. The forces which determine the human form from outside, even during the period of embryonic life, are the active forces of the Sun. While the embryo is developing in the mother's body, a great deal more is happening than modern science dreams of. Modern science is of the opinion that the forces all originate from the fertilised germ, but the truth is that the human embryo merely rests there in the body of the mother and is given form by the Sun forces. These Sun forces are, of course, associated with the Moon forces which are also working but in a different way. The Moon forces work above all in the inner, metabolic processes. We may therefore say: the Sun forces give form to the human being from outside. The Moon forces radiate outwards from within the metabolic process; they are centrifugal forces. This does not contradict the fact that these Moon forces are working, for instance, in the shaping and moulding of the human countenance. The Moon forces stream out from a centre in the metabolic system and work as it were by attraction upon the forming of the human face, differentiating the features, but there is an interplay between these Moon forces and the Sun forces. The organism that is connected with procreation is subject to the Sun forces. The whole being of man is involved in this way in the interplay between the forces of the Sun and the forces of the Moon.

A distinction must be made, however, between the Moon forces that work in the inner processes of metabolism in man, and the forces that originate in the metabolic processes itself. The Moon forces stream into the metabolic process, but this metabolic process has forces of its own as well. And these are earthly forces. The substances and forces in the vegetable and other foodstuffs work in the human being by virtue of their own inherent nature. They work here as Earth forces. Metabolism is primarily an outcome of the working of Earth forces. If the substances of the foodstuffs were merely to unfold their own forces within the human organism, there would be nothing but a chaotic play of forces in man. The fact that these forces work without intermission to renew and upbuild the being of man, is due not to the Earth at all, but to the Moon. The human being is shaped from within outwards by the Moon, and from without inwards by the Sun. Because the rays of the Sun are received through the eye into the head-organisation. The Sun forces work within the organism as well, but for all that they are still working from outside.

And so on the one hand the development and evolution of the Ego of man is dependent upon the forces of the Sun. Without the Sun, man could not be an Ego being living on the Earth; on the other hand there could be no such thing as propagation, there could be no human race without the Moon. It is the Sun which places man as an individual on the Earth, and it is the Moon that charms down the human race to Earth—the human race conceived here as one whole. The human race as the physical product of the generations is a product of the Moon forces which have worked in the generative process. As an individuality, however, man is the product of the Sun forces.

If, therefore, we want to understand the human being and the human race as a whole, we cannot do so by studying merely those conditions which obtain on the Earth alone. The efforts of geologists to understand the being of man by investigating the nature of the Earth are all in vain. Man is not primarily a creation of the Earth. He receives his shape and form from the Cosmos; he is an offspring of the world of the stars, above all of Sun and Moon. From the Earth are derived only those forces which are contained in the substances of the Earth. These forces work outside the human being and also within him when they are introduced into his organism either through eating or drinking. But within the organism they are received into the realm of forces of a super-earthly nature.

The processes that take place within the human being are by no means an affair of the Earth alone. They are through and through an affair of the world of stars. This is the kind of knowledge that we must struggle to reach once more.

Think of the human being as he stands there before us in his physical body. This physical body takes in the foodstuffs from the outer world and the forces of the foodstuffs continue to work within the body. But the physical body is permeated by the astral body and in the astral body the Moon forces are actively at work. The Sun forces too play into the astral body. The etheric body is there in the middle, between physical and astral body.

When we study the forces of foodstuffs, we find that, to begin with, they are active in the physical body and are then taken hold of by the astral body in which the influence of Sun and Moon are working. But between the physical body and astral body the etheric body is fulfilling its functions. The forces in the etheric body come, not from the Earth but from all directions of cosmic space. The products of the Earth, the substances which exist in the solid liquid or aeriform condition, are taken in by the human being and worked upon by the forces of Sun and Moon. But forces streaming in from all directions of cosmic space are also working in the human organism. The forces contained in the foodstuffs themselves come from the Earth, but from cosmic space the etheric forces stream in. These etheric forces also take hold of the foodstuffs and work upon them in such a way that they become inwardly responsive to light and also to warmth. We say, therefore: the human being is part of the Earth because he has a physical body. His etheric body relates him to the whole environment of the Earth. Through his astral body he is involved in the weaving forces of Sun and Moon.

Now these influences of the Sun and Moon in the astral body are modified and differentiated in a high degree as they work upon the ‘upper’ man. By ‘upper’ man I mean, in this case, the part of the organism that is encircled and permeated by the bloodstream which passed upwards from the heart in the direction of the head. The ‘lower’ man, then, comprises the other part of the organism—that part which lies below the heart.

Thus we have the upper part of man, including the head and everything that is organically connected with the head. The formation of this part of the organism is dependent, mainly, upon the Sun's influences. Its most important period of development is during embryonic life. The Sun's influences work upon the embryo in a very special way, but these influences continue to be active when the human being is born and is living in the physical world between birth and death. The astral influences working upon that part of the human organism which lies above the heart—speaking very roughly, for it would be necessary to go into more precise detail if we were describing the blood circulation—these astral influences are then modified by the influences of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.

The planet Saturn circles round the Sun and sends forces to the Earth. These forces of Saturn work in the whole astral body of man, but above all in the part of the astral body which corresponds to the ‘upper’ man. They stream into the astral body, pervade it, and are the essential factor in bringing about a proper connection between the astral body and the physical body. When, for instance, a man cannot sleep properly, that is to say, when his astral body will not leave or come down again properly into his etheric and physical bodies or in some other way is not rightly connected with the physical body—this is due to an irregularity in the working of the Saturn forces. In other words, Saturn is the heavenly body which, by way of the human head, promotes and is responsible for setting up the proper relation of man's astral body to his etheric body and his physical body. And it is the Saturn forces too which mediate the connection of the astral body to the Ego, because of Saturn's relation to the Sun. Saturn's relation to the Sun is expressed in space and time inasmuch as Saturn accomplishes its orbit around the Sun in a period of thirty years.

In the human being, the relationship of Saturn to the Sun is expressed in the connection of the Ego with the astral body and in the way in which the astral body is membered into the whole human organism. The connection of Saturn with the upper part of the astral body was regarded as a factor of great importance in ancient times. In the Egypto-Chaldean period, three or four thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Teachers and Sages of the Mysteries judged a human being according to his relation to Saturn—which was revealed by the date and time of his birth. For these Sages knew quite well that the position of Saturn in the heavens at the time of man's birth enabled his astral body either to function regularly or irregularly in his physical body. Knowledge of these influences played a very important part in olden days. But the onward progress of evolution is denoted precisely by the fact that in our age, which, as you know, began in the fifteenth century, we have to become free of these forces and influences.

Please do not misunderstand me This does not mean that Saturn is not working in us nowadays. Naturally the Saturn forces work in us, just as they worked in the Ancients, but we must now learn to make ourselves free and independent of them. And do you know how we can make ourselves free? Nothing is worse than to give oneself over to the shadowy intellectualism of our age. If we do that, the Saturn forces run riot within us and give rise to the so-called nervous troubles that are so very prevalent in our time. When a man suffers from ‘nerves’ as we say, it is because his astral body is not properly connected with his physical organisation. This lies at the basis of the morbid nervous symptoms which are so common nowadays. Our striving should be to unfold real vision, to attain Imagination. If man can achieve nothing better than the forming of abstract concepts and ideas, nervous symptoms are bound to increase in severity, because this intellectual activity tends to alienate him from the influences of Saturn, which are still at work within his being. His astral body will be torn away from his nerves, and he will be driven more and more into a state of nervous tension and excitability. The nervous complaints of our age must be recognised in their cosmic aspect, for they are caused by an irregular working of the Saturn forces.

Just as Saturn works chiefly in the upper part of the astral body and in the whole astral body inasmuch as the astral body is connected with the organism as a whole through the nervous system, so is Jupiter active in thinking.

When a man thinks, one part of his astral body is active. It is pre-eminently the Jupiter forces in the astral body which strengthen the thinking faculty, and Jupiter is responsible for permeating the human brain with astral forces.

Now the influences of Saturn continue throughout the whole of man's life. The beginning of a human life may really be said to consist of the first three periods of ten years. This is the period of growth, for as a matter of fact the activity of the growth forces does not wholly cease until after the thirtieth year. And our whole life and our health depend on how our astral body has developed during the thirty years. Saturn needs thirty years to complete its orbit around the Sun and this has its exact parallel in the life of man.

The development of the faculty of thinking takes place essentially during the first twelve years of life. Again we find the parallelism in the orbit of the planet Jupiter.

Just as Jupiter has to do with thinking, so has Mars to do with speech.

Mars works upon a still smaller part of the astral body than that with which Jupiter is concerned in connection with the thinking of man. And the development of the forces which finally express themselves in speech, is dependent upon the working of Mars within our being. Man learns to utter the first sounds of speech in a period which corresponds approximately to half the time required by Mars to complete its orbit around the Sun.

We see, then, that the development of faculties situated primarily in the region of the human head is connected with the Saturn forces, the Jupiter forces, and the Mars forces. The forces of the three outer planets, therefore, work on within the astral body through the life of man. The Sun is connected more directly with the Ego, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars are concerned respectively with the behaviour and functioning of the astral body in the human organism, with the faculty of thinking and with the faculty of speaking.

The Sun is connected with the Ego. And then we come to the inner planets, as they are sometimes called, the planets which are nearer the Earth and lie between the Earth and the Sun, whereas Saturn, Jupiter and Mars lie on the other side of the Sun. The forces of these inner planets are likewise connected with the being of man. We will take Mercury to begin with.

Like the Moon, the centre, from which the Mercury forces work, lies in the inner being of man, and it is only in connection with the forming of the human countenance that Mercury works from outside. The Mercury forces work in the part of the human organism that lies below the region of the heart. From there these Mercury forces stream into the human organism. The working of the astral body in the breathing and circulatory functions of the human organism is regulated by Mercury. Mercury acts as the intermediary between the astral body and the rhythmic processes in the being of man. The Mercury forces act as the intermediary between the astral body and the rhythmic functions in the human organism. Because this is so, the Mercury forces intervene, as do the Moon forces, in the metabolic processes as a whole, but only in so far as the metabolic process is subject to rhythm and reacts in turn upon the rhythmic functions.

We come next to Venus. Venus works pre-eminently in the etheric body of man. The cosmic forces chiefly active in the etheric body, therefore, are those of Venus.

Then we come again to the Moon. The Moon forces in the human organism work in polar antithesis to the Sun forces. From within outwards the Moon forces lead substance over into the realm of the living and are therefore connected with procreation. The Moon stimulates not only the inner, reproductive processes of the organism, but the procreative process as well. Thus we have:

You see now in what way processes in the human organism are dependent upon the Cosmos. On the one side man is bound up with the earthly forces through his physical body. And on the other side he is bound up with his whole cosmic environment through the etheric body. The cosmic forces, however, work in different ways in his being as we have heard. This differentiation originates in the astral body in which the forces of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Moon are contained. By way of the Ego, the Sun works in man. Suppose that as the result of his earlier incarnations a man has within his being forces which predestine him to be a thinker in the earthly life upon which he is entering. He prepares for his descent to the Earth and—since Jupiter takes a definite time to complete his orbit—he will choose a moment for his birth when the rays of Jupiter pour directly down upon him.

In this way the heavenly constellations provide conditions into which a human being may be born—conditions which are determined by his previous earthly lives.

In the age of the Consciousness Soul, of course, it is the task of man gradually to make himself free of these conditions. But he must free himself from them in the right way.

In speaking of the Saturn influences, I said that it is a question of trying to replace shadowy intellectualism by real Imagination. In the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds indications are given which, if they are followed, can make us independent of the cosmic forces, although none the less these cosmic forces continue to work in our being.

Man is born on Earth into conditions determined by a constellation in the heavens, but he must equip himself with forces which make him independent of this constellation. It is to this kind of knowledge—a knowledge of man's connection with the Cosmos beyond the Earth—that our civilisation must attain. Man must learn to realise that the forces of heredity described by modern science are not the only forces at work in his organism. To imagine such a thing, my dear friends, is the purest nonsense. It is pure nonsense to think that the maternal organism contains those forces which are then transmitted by heredity and so build up a heart, a liver and the other organs. There would be no heart in the human organism if the Sun did not build it into the organism of man, neither would there be a liver if Venus did not place it into the organism. And so it is with each single organ. Their presence in the human organism is due to the working of cosmic forces.

These are the things that humanity must once again learn to understand. Man must realise that the mysteries of his being cannot be explained by a science which deals merely with earthly phenomena. Around man live other creatures—and they too are not merely creatures of the Earth. It appears, to begin with, as if the minerals were entirely earthly in their nature. But in the minerals, too, changes have taken place which were due to the forces working in the cosmic environment of the Earth. The crystallised forms of the metals are all due to the play of forces from beyond the Earth. The metals were given shape and form at a time when the Earth's forces were not yet working in their full strength, but when cosmic forces were working in the Earth. The healing forces contained in the minerals, above all in the metals, are connected with the way in which these metals were formed within the Earth by the working of cosmic forces.

In the first epoch of Post-Atlantean times, when the ancient Indian civilisation was at its prime, man felt and knew himself to be a citizen of the whole wide universe. Although he had not yet developed the forces which modern humanity is so proud to possess, he was in the true sense of the word, MAN. By the time of the Chaldean epoch, however, man's attention had already begun to be diverted from the Sun. He had become a kind of amphibium—a creature who is thankful when the rays of the Sun pour down upon it, and when it need not always be confined to its dark burrows in the pound. But in our time one cannot say that man even resembles a creature like the mole, for he is really much more like an earthworm who has eyes at most for what has first been sent out into space from the Earth and comes back again as rain. This is really all that men see in the way of forces from beyond the Earth. But this the earthworms also see! In his materialism today man has become an earthworm. He must rise above this earth state, but he can only do so by realising and knowing his connection with the Cosmos beyond the Earth.

Our task therefore, is to raise ourselves above the earthworm state into which our civilisation has fallen, and bring a new spiritual life into being.

After the historical considerations we have undertaken, we shall explore today a few things about contemporary man. This will provide us with the possibility of observing more accurately the place of contemporary man in the whole course of time. We should be clear that in the way the human being stands before us as spiritual, soul, and bodily being, he is differently oriented in three directions. We see this already when we look at the human being purely outwardly. In his spirit, man goes through the world independently of outer phenomena, while in his soul he is not as independent of these outer phenomena. One need only consider certain relationships that are visible throughout life in order to discover how the real soul life has certain connections with the outer world. One can be depressed or uplifted in one's soul. Recall how you have often felt depressed in a dream, and how the root of this mood of depression had to be traced back to the irregularity of the breathing rhythm. One could say that this is merely an elementary example, and yet all soul life is never without a similar connection with the rhythmic life that we go through in the rhythm of our breathing, of our blood circulation, and the outer rhythmic life of the entire cosmos. Everything that takes place in the soul is connected with the world rhythm.

Whereas as spiritual beings we can feel highly independent of our environment, we cannot do the same regarding our soul life, for our soul life lies imbedded within the whole world rhythm.

Furthermore, we stand within universal world phenomena as bodily beings. Again, at first we may proceed from merely elementary examples. Man, as a bodily being, is heavy, that is to say, he has weight. Other merely mineral beings also have weight. Mineral beings, plant beings, animal beings, and the human being as a bodily being all partake in this universal weightiness, and we must actually lift ourselves above this universal weightiness when we wish to make the body a physical tool of the spiritual life. We have often mentioned that if it were only the physical weight of the brain that mattered, the weight would be so great (1300 to 1500 grams) that all the blood vessels lying underneath the brain would be crushed. The brain, however, is subject to the Archimedean principle, since it floats in the cerebrospinal fluid. It loses so much weight by floating in the cerebral fluid that it actually weighs only 20 grams and therefore presses on the vessels at the base of the brain with only these 20 grams. You can see from this that the brain actually strives much more upward than downward. It counteracts heaviness. It tears itself free of the universal gravity and thereby acts like any other body that is placed in water and loses as much of its weight as the weight of the displaced water.

You thus can see an interplay between our whole bodily being and the outer world. With our soul weavings we are not only integrated in a rhythm but are fully enmeshed in the outer physical life. If we stand on a given point of the earth, we press down upon that place; when we move to another point, we press down upon that new place. In our human body, we are as much physical beings as the physical beings of the other kingdoms of nature.

We therefore can say that with our spiritual being we are to some extent independent of the outer world; with our soul being we are part of the rhythm of the world; and with our bodily being we are part of the rest of the world as though we were not also soul and spirit. We must consider this distinction carefully, for we do not attain an understanding of the higher being of man if we do not look at this threefold relationship of the human being to his entire environment. Now, let us look for a moment at man's environment. In man's environment (I am now summarizing what we have considered over the course of many months from different viewpoints) we first have all that is ruled by natural laws. Picture the whole universe ruled by natural laws and, included in these natural laws, the totality of this visible, sense-perceptible world.

Simple consideration shows that we are dealing here only with the actual earthly world. Only foolhardy and unjustified hypotheses of physicists can maintain that the same natural laws we observe on the earth around us are also applicable in the extraterrestrial cosmos. I have often pointed out to you how surprised the physicists would be if they were able to ascend to the place where the sun is. Physicists regard the sun as something comparable to a large gas oven without walls, more or less like a burning gas. If one arrived at the place in the cosmos where the sun is, one would not find such a burning gas. Instead one would find something totally unlike what the physicists imagine. If this (sketching) encloses the space that normally we picture as taken up by the sun, not only are there none of the substances found on earth, but there is even an absence of what we call empty space. Imagine, to begin with, filled space. On earth you always have a filled space around you. If it is not filled by solid or liquid substances, it is permeated by air, or at least by warmth, light, and so on. In short, we are always dealing with filled space. You also know, however, that it is possible, at least approximately, to create an empty space by extracting the air from a container with an air pump.

Imagine we have a filled space that we will designate with the letter A, preceded by a plus sign: +A. Now, as we make this space emptier and emptier, A will become smaller and smaller, but as the space is still filled we continue to use the + sign. We can imagine—although this is not actually possible under earthly conditions, for we can render space only approximately empty—that it would be possible to produce a completely empty space. Then, in this part of space that we have made empty, there would only be space. I will designate this with 0. It has 0 content. Now, we can do with this space the same thing that you do with your wallet: if your wallet is filled with money, you can take more and more out until finally there is nothing in it. If you want to spend more money, you cannot take anything more out of your wallet, as it is already empty. You can, however, go into debt. You have -0 in your wallet if you incur debts. You can think of this space in the same way: it is not only empty but you could say that it exerts suction because there is less than 0 in it: -A. It can be said of this space exerting suction—which is not just empty but has a content, which is the opposite of being filled by matter—that it is occupied by that space which one must imagine as filled out by the sun. The sun therefore has an inward suction; it does not exert pressure like a gas. The sun space is filled with negative materiality.

I only present this as an example in order for you to see that earthly lawfulness simply cannot be applied to the extraterrestrial cosmos. We must think of totally different relationships in the extraterrestrial cosmos from those we have learned to know in our environment on the earth. We must say that we are surrounded by lawfulness within earthly existence, and into this lawfulness is included the world of substances that is initially accessible to us. Now picture earthly existence. All you need to do is to picture the processes in the mineral world; place them before your soul, and you have that which, in so far as you see it, is completely encompassed by this lawfulness of earthly existence. Therefore we can say that the mineral world is encompassed by this lawfulness; yet something else is also encompassed by it. When we walk around, or even when we are carried around, in short when we act as objects in the physical world, we live in the same lawfulness as the mineral world. In relation to earthly lawfulness, it is immaterial whether we carry a stone around, whether it is moved, or whether a human being is carried around or moves himself; regarding this lawfulness, it is the same thing one way or the other. You need only consider that the only thing that comes into consideration regarding earthly lawfulness is a change in location of man's body, which he may, however, bring about himself. This is connected with other things. If you study only earthly lawfulness, what happens within the skin of man or what takes place in his soul can be quite irrelevant. Only the change in location within earthly space need be considered.

We thus can see that in addition to the mineral world there is the human being who has been moved (that is, outwardly moved). The only relationship of the outer world to man, in so far as that world is earthly and confronts our senses, is the relationship to the human being moved outwardly. If we seek any other relationship to man, we must at once refer to something else, and then we come to our extraterrestrial environment, for example, when we study the environment of the moon, that is, whatever emanates from the moon. It is a fact that many people are still aware of something of the effect of the moon on the earth. Many people believe in such effects of the moon on the earth, e.g., the connection of the phases of the moon with the quantity of rainfall. Learned people in our time consider this a superstition.

I have told you, some of you at least, of an amusing sequence of events that once took place in Leipzig. The unusual natural philosopher and aesthetician, Gustav Theodore Fechner, went so far as to write a book about the influence of the moon on weather conditions. He was a university colleague of the well-known botanist and natural scientist, Schleiden. Schleiden, as a modern materialist, was convinced, of course, that what his colleague Fechner was advancing about the influence of phases of the moon on the weather could only be based on superstition. In addition to the two scholars at the University of Leipzig there were also their wives, Frau Schleiden and Frau Fechner. At that time, the conditions were still so primitive that rain water needed to be collected for wash day. Frau Fechner said that she believed in what her husband had published concerning the influence of moon phases on the weather. She wanted to reach an agreement with Frau Professor Schleiden, who did not believe in what Fechner maintained, about when was the most efficient time to place out rain barrels in order to collect the most rain. Frau Fechner suggested that Frau Schleiden put out her barrels at different times, since according to Schleiden's opinion she should get just as much water as Frau Fechner. However, despite the fact that Frau Professor Schleiden considered the views of Professor Fechner to be exceedingly superstitious, she still chose to place her rain barrels out at the exact same times as Frau Fechner.

Now, the influence of the forces of other planetary bodies is less perceptible to our modern scientific consciousness. However, if one were to study more closely—as is to happen now in our scientific-physiological institute in Stuttgart—the line of growth followed on the stem by the leaves of plants, for example, one would find how each line is related to the movements of the planets, how these lines are, as it were, miniature pictures of the planetary movements. One thus would find that many things on the surface of the earth are comprehensible only when one knows the extraterrestrial and does not merely identify the extraterrestrial with the earthly, that is to say, when one presupposes that a lawfulness exists that is cosmic and not earthly.

We therefore can say that we have a second lawfulness within cosmic existence. Only when one begins to study these cosmic influences—and it is possible to do so quite empirically—will one have a true botany. Our plant world does not grow up out of the earth in the way conceived by a materialistic botany; rather it is pulled out by cosmic forces. What is pulled out in this way by cosmic forces in the process of growth is then permeated by the mineral forces that have saturated this cosmic plant structure so that it becomes visible to the senses. We thus can say firstly that the plant world is included in this cosmic lawfulness. Secondly, all that pertains to the inner movement of man—that is, a definitely physical movement, but within man—is included in this cosmic lawfulness (this is not as easy to establish as in the case of the plant world, because it achieves a certain independence from the rhythm of the outer processes; nevertheless, it imitates this rhythm inwardly). The outwardly moved human being, therefore, is included in the earthly lawfulness, but when you look upon your digestion, upon the movement of the nourishing substances in the digestive organs, when you look beyond merely the rhythm to the actual movement of the blood through the blood vessels—and there are many other things that move inwardly in man—you have a picture of what moves inside of the human being regardless of whether he is standing still or walking about. This cannot be integrated into the earthly lawfulness without further consideration but rather must be integrated into the cosmic lawfulness in the same way as are the forms and also the movements of the plants; in the human being, however, these forms and movements proceed much more slowly than they do in the plants. We therefore can say that the inner movements of man are also included in the cosmic lawfulness.

Now you could consider taking the cosmos into undefined distances; somehow in this way everything has an influence upon the life that develops on the earth's surface. Yet if these were the only two lawfulnesses that existed—that is, the earthly and cosmic lawfulnesses, in the way I have presented them to you—then nothing would exist on the earth but the mineral and plant kingdoms, for the human being, of course, would not be able to exist there. If the human being were present, he could move outwardly and the inner movements could take place, but this of course would not yet make up a human being. Neither would animals be able to be present on the earth under such conditions; in reality, only minerals and plants could exist. Cosmic lawfulness and cosmic content of being must be penetrated and permeated by something that is no longer a part of space, by something concerning which we cannot speak of space at all.

Naturally, everything that is included in the cosmic and earthly lawfulnesses must be thought of as existing in space; now, however, we must speak of something that cannot be thought of as existing in space, although it permeates the whole of cosmic lawfulness. Just imagine how in the human being the movements, that is his inner movements, are connected with his rhythm. To begin with, all that we call the movement of the nourishing substances within us merges into the movement of the blood. However, this movement doesn't take place in such a way that the blood simply flows through the veins as nutritive juice. Not only does the blood itself move rhythmically, but beyond that this rhythm has a definite relationship to the breathing rhythm through the consumption of oxygen by the blood. We have within us this dual rhythm. I pointed out once how the inner soul lawfulness is based upon the 4:1 ratio of the blood rhythm to the breathing rhythm in such a way that meter and verse measure are actually dependent upon it.

We thus see that what takes place as inner movement is related to rhythm, and rhythm, as we have said, is related to the soul life of the human being. In a similar way we must bring what we have in the movement of the stars into a relationship to the world soul. We therefore can speak of a third lawfulness within the world soul in which is encompassed: 1) the animal world, and 2) all the rhythmic processes related to the bodily human being. These rhythmic processes within man have a relationship to the whole world rhythm. We have already spoken about this, but I would like to bring it up again in relation to our further considerations here. You know that the human being takes approximately eighteen breaths per minute. Multiply that by sixty and you have the number of breaths per hour; multiply that total by twenty-four and you have the total for one day, approximately 25,920 breaths for the average human being in the course of a day. This number of breaths per day thus forms the day/night rhythm in the human being. We also know that the spring equinox moves through the constellations bit by bit each year, so that the point at which the sun rises in spring moves forward in the heavens. The length of time that it takes the sun to arrive again at its original point is 25,920 years. This is the rhythm of our universe, then, and our own breathing rhythm over twenty-four hours is a miniature picture of it. Hence, with our rhythm we are woven into the world rhythm, with our soul into the lawfulness of the world soul.

Now, there is a fourth lawfulness that lies at the basis of the entire universe as well as of the three previously mentioned lawfulnesses, namely, that within which we feel included when we become conscious of ourselves as spiritual human beings. In this process of becoming conscious of ourselves as spiritual human beings, we achieve clarity about these facts. At first we may not comprehend this or that about the world and, in fact, because of today's intellectualism, which has become a universal cultural force, very little indeed is comprehended. At a certain stage in our human evolution, we initially comprehend very little with our spirit. It is inherent, however, in the self-recognition of the spirit that it says to itself that as it evolves no boundaries can be imposed on its evolution. The spirit must be able to develop into the universe through knowing, feeling, and willing. By bearing the spirit within us, then, we must relate ourselves to a fourth lawfulness within the world spirit.

1.) Lawfulness within earthly existence
a) The mineral world b) The externally moved human being

2.) Lawfulness within cosmic existence
a) The plant world b) The inner movements of the human being

3.) Lawfulness within the world soul
a) The animal world b) The rhythmic processes

4.) Lawfulness within the world spirit
a) The human being b) The nerve-sense processes

Only now do we arrive at the real human being encompassed therein, for a human being could not really have existed merely within the other three lawfulnesses. Only now do we find the human being, but specifically that part of him that is his nerve-sense apparatus, all of what is, to begin with, the physical bearer of the spiritual life, the nerve-sense processes. When we look at the human being we consider first the entire human being in whom the head is the main bearer of the nerve-sense organs; then we consider the head itself. A human being is human, so to speak, by virtue of the fact that he has a head; the head is the most human part of man. In the human being as a whole and in the head, we already encounter the human being twice.

Now, when we consider what I have just described as a summary of what we have discussed in the last few weeks, it gives us to begin with a picture of the human being's connection with his environment; not merely the spatial environment, however, for the spatial world is related only to the first two lawfulnesses; we also have to do with the world that is non-spatial, which is related to the third and fourth lawfulnesses. It has become increasingly difficult for the contemporary human being to conceive that something could exist not within space or that sometimes it is not meaningful to speak in terms of space even when speaking of realities. Without such a conception, however, one can never rise to a spiritual science. If one wishes to remain within the confines of space, one cannot arrive at spiritual entities.

Last time I spoke here I told you about the world conception of the ancient Greeks in order to point out how in other eras the human being looked at the world differently from today. This picture of which I have just spoken to you can become evident to the human being in the present era; he arrives at it if, simply and without prejudice—that is undisturbed by the waste products sometimes offered by contemporary science—he observes the world.

I must add a few things to what I told you previously about the ancient Greek world conception so that we are able to see its connection with what I wished to present to you with this scheme. You see, if a human being is very clever he may say that the spatial world consists of some seventy-odd elements that have varying atomic weights and so on; those elements, he maintains, enter into syntheses; one can perform analyses on them, and so forth, and, based on chemical connections and chemical separations, one can explain what happens in the world regarding those seventy-odd elements. That they could be traced back to some earlier origin should not occupy us at the moment. In general, those seventy-odd elements are considered valid today in popular science.

A Greek—not in a contemporary incarnation, in which he would, of course, think like everyone else today if he were well educated—an ancient Greek, let us say, if he could appear in our present-day world, would be prompted to say, “Well, this is all very well and good, these seventy-odd elements, but one does not get very far with them; they actually tell us nothing about the world. We used to think quite differently about the world; we conceived of the world as consisting of fire, air, water, and earth.”

A contemporary person would reply, “That is a childish way to comprehend matters. We are far beyond that. We do, in fact, accept the aggregate states; in the gaseous aggregates we grant you the validity of the aeriform, in the fluid aggregates the watery, and in the solid aggregates the earthy. Warmth, however, does not mean at all the same thing to us as it does to you. We have moved beyond such childish notions. What constitutes the world for us we find in our seventy-odd elements.”

The ancient Greek would respond to this, “That is very nice, but fire—or warmth—air, water, earth are something entirely different from what you conceive. You do not understand in the least what we thought about it.”

At first our contemporary scholar would be curiously affected by such comments and would have the impression that he was encountering a human being from a more childlike stage of cultural development. The ancient Greek, because he would be immediately aware of what the modern scholar had in his head, would probably say, "What you call your seventy-two elements all belong to what we call earth; it is very nice that you differentiate it and analyze it further, but for us the properties that you recognize in your seventy-two elements belong to the earth. Of water, air, and fire you understand nothing; of those you have no conception.”

This Greek would continue—you can see that I do not choose an Oriental from an ancient cultural period but a knowledgeable Greek—“What ,you say about your seventy-two elements with their syntheses and analyses is all very nice, but to what do you believe it is related? It is all related merely to the physical human being once he has died and lies in the grave! There his substances, his entire physical body, undergo the processes that you learn to recognize in your physics and chemistry. What it is possible for you to learn within the structural relationships of your seventy-odd elements is not related at all to the living human being. You know nothing of the living human being because you know nothing of water, air, and fire. It is necessary first to know something about water, air, and fire in order then to know something about the living human being. With what is encompassed by your chemistry you know only what happens to man when he is dead and lying in the grave, the processes undergone by the corpse. That is all you come to know by means of your seventy-odd elements.”

If the ancient Greek went any further than this in this discussion he would not be a great success with our contemporary scholar, though he could go to the trouble of clarifying his views in the following way: “Your seventy-two elements are all what we consider earth. We may simply be regarding a general quality, but even if you analyze it further, you arrive merely at a more specific knowledge, and a more specific knowledge will not enable you to penetrate into the depths. If you acknowledged what we designate as water, however, you would have an element in which, as soon as it is weaving and living, earthly conditions are no longer active alone; water, in its entire activity, is subject to cosmic conditions.”

The ancient Greek's understanding of water was not limited merely to its physical characteristics but extended to everything that influences the earth as lawfulness from the cosmos, in which the movement of the water substance is encompassed. Within this movement of water substance lives the plant element. In distinguishing whatever is in the living and weaving water element from everything earthly, the ancient Greek saw in this living-weaving element the whole lawfulness of the life of vegetation, which is encompassed by this watery element. We thus can place this watery element schematically somewhere on the earth, but in such a way that it is determined from out of the cosmos. Then we can picture the mineral element, the actual earthly element, sprouting from below upward in a variety of ways, permeating the plants, infiltrating them, as it were, with earthly elements (see sketch).

What the ancient Greek thought about the watery element, however, was something essentially new, and it was for him a quite definite perception. The Greek did not view this conceptually; rather, he saw it in pictures, in imaginations. Of course we must go back to Platonic times (for Aristotle corrupted this way of viewing), even to pre- Platonic times, in order to find how the truly knowing Greek saw in imaginations what lives in the watery element and actually bears the vegetation, how he related everything to the cosmos. Now, however, the ancient Greek would continue, “What lies in the grave after a human being has died, what is lawfully penetrated by the structural laws that work in your seventy-odd elements, is inserted between birth—or let us say conception—and death into the etheric life working from the cosmos. This etheric life permeates you as a living human being; you will not understand any of this if you do not speak of water as a separate element, if you do not regard the plant world as being tethered in the watery element, if you do not see these pictures, these imaginations.”

“We Greeks,” he would say, “certainly spoke about the etheric body of the human being, but we were not spinning the etheric body out of our fantasy. Rather we said: if one watches in spring the sprouting, greening plant world gradually and variously coloring itself, if one sees this plant world bearing fruit in summer and observes the leaves withering in autumn, if one follows this course of the year in the life of vegetation and has an inner understanding for it, what then appears before the eye of the soul connects with one just as strongly as one is connected with the mineral world by the bread and meat one eats. In a way analogous to eating one connects with what is outwardly visible in the plant world during the course of the year. Then if one penetrates oneself with the perception that everything happening in the course of twenty-four hours is like a miniature-image of this, repeating itself through one's entire life, then we have within us a miniature image of what constitutes the surrounding world out there from the watery, etheric element, from the cosmos. Whenever we regard this outer world with true understanding, we can say that what is out there also lives within us. We say that the spinach grows out there; I pick it, cook it, and eat it, and thereby have it in my stomach, that is, in my physical body; in the same way we can say, out there, in the course of the year, lives and weaves an etheric life, and that I have within myself.”

The Greek was not conceiving of the physical water; rather, what lay at the basis of his conception was what he grasped in his imagination and brought into living connection with the human being. Thus he would say further to our contemporary scholar, “You study the corpse that lies in the grave, because you study only the earth—your seventy-odd elements are only earth. We studied the living human being; in our time we studied the human being who is not yet dead, who grows and moves out of an inner activity. That is impossible without rising to the other elements.”

Thus it was with the ancient Greeks, and were we to go still further into the past, the airy element and then the fire or warmth element would meet us in full clarity. We will also consider these later. And that is what is so characteristic of our cultural evolution since the first third of the fifteenth century, that the understanding for these connections has simply been lost; thereby the understanding for the living human being was also lost. We study only the corpse in science today. We have often heard that this phase in the history of humanity's evolution had to come, had to come for other reasons, namely, so that humanity could undergo the phase of the evolution of freedom. However, in the process a certain understanding of nature and the human being has been lost since the first third of the fifteenth century. The understanding of natural science up to now has limited itself to this one element, earth, and now we must find the way back. We must find our way back through Imagination to the element of water, through Inspiration to the element of air, through Intuition to the element of fire.

What we have seen and interpreted as an ascent in higher cognition—the ascent from ordinary object cognition through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition—is fundamentally also an ascent to the elements. We will speak further about this in two days.