The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On the foundation of the material of the preceding lecture I must summarise some things calculated to throw light on the whole of what we considered and indeed to make it fruitful. Although all this can only be a preliminary outline, it is well that we are able to give two days to this study. In continuing our yesterday's subject which referred to the development and retrogression of the teeth I want to put before you some facts which should throw light on man in the state of health and sickness. It is inadvisable to take such explanations on too materialistic lines; for we should really regard such external occurrence, as, for instance, dental decay as the visible symptoms of a certain inner process; this process hides itself from external perception, but has consequences which are externally visible.

You will understand the whole process of dental formation, if viewed in the light of other processes in mankind, which appear quite remote; for instance, the phenomenon with which you are well acquainted but whose correct significance can only be judged in connection with tooth formation. Girls and young women have good teeth—and after their first confinement and childbirth their teeth are defective. This circumstance should help to explain the connection of toothache and defective teeth with the whole bodily constitution. There is another very interesting connection, between dental processes and the tendency to hæmorrhoids or piles; this also needs study. A study of these things proves that what has the most mineralising effect in the body of man—for dental formation is our most mineralising process—is also closely associated with the general process of organisation and shows this association and interdependence in the human area most distant on the mouth and teeth. Here is a significant fact with regard the process of dental formation, which cannot be disputed. The completion of this dental formative process—the external cusp of the tooth which projects from the gums, is a region of the human frame which is given up to the external world as something mineral. Here the substance of the external layer (enamel) merges into the mineral world, nutritive processes are eliminated and a piece of inorganic substance is left. I indicated yesterday that the progressive development of dental structure is perhaps less important than the process of decomposition which accompanies the formation of the teeth throughout life. For on the one hand, it must be admitted that at this pole of the organisation at which the extremity of the tooth develops, the internal organisation cannot contribute very much to the formative process. But we must not forget that this internal organisation is closely involved in the destructive process, and therefore the more important and urgent question is how to retard the tendency in man to the destruction of this process. It would be a complete mistake to believe destruction and decay are purely the result of external injuries. My remarks yesterday on the function of fluorine in the formation of our teeth, refer mainly to the period of childhood, in which the formative process takes place from inside towards the surface and is in its preparatory stage. For it prepares itself deep in the interior of the whole organism before the second teeth appear. This formative process of fluorine reaches its culminating point in a stable equilibrium—brought about in the substance on the surface of the teeth; the fluorine becomes fixed here to the substance and is, as it were, at rest. But this rest is disturbed by the regressive development of the teeth, which approach gradual decay. This is a subtle process, starting from the tooth and connected with a formative process caused by the fluorine extending throughout the body, and yet continued throughout the whole life of man.

What I have just maintained sets the stage for the whole prophylaxis of the condition. Now I could say something of this sort: a considerable part of what is included in the educational methods of our Waldorf School, besides other things promoting health, is the prevention of early dental decay in those who attend the school for it is indeed remarkable that just in relation to the peripheral structures and processes very much depends upon the right education in childhood. It is regrettable that we are only able to work upon the child at a time—even at the Waldorf School—when it is somewhat too late for the prophylactic treatment necessary to dental formation. we ought to be able to start this work on younger children. However, as teeth do not appear all at once, but gradually, and the internal process is of longer duration, it is still possible to do something with children from six to seven years of age. Something—but certainly not enough. For it is advisable—as I have already emphasised—to ascertain the exact individual dental type. As soon as the first tooth makes its appearance of course it is possible to raise the objection that the dental formation is already prepared and that the crown of the tooth is perfected and only thrusts itself into the light. Yes, that is true, but it is possible to judge dental formative process from other indications than the teeth themselves. If a child of from four to six years old is clumsy and awkward with arms, hands, legs and feet—or cannot adapt himself to a skillful use of his arms and legs and especially of his hands and feet, we shall find that he is inclined to an abnormal process of dental formation. The behaviour of limbs and extremities reveals the same constitutional type as is shown in the dental formative process. Therefore a great influence is exercised on dental formation if we teach children as early as possible to run with dexterity, with intricate movements of the feet such as a kind of modified hopscotch in which the rear foot is brought with some force against the heel of the front foot, or similar exercises. If this is connected with an acquirement of skill in the fingers it will promote the tooth formation very considerably.

Go into our needlework classes and handicraft classes at the Waldorf School, and you will find the boys knit and crochet as well as the girls, and that they share these lessons together. Even the older boys are enthusiastic knitters. This is not the result of any fad or whim, but happens deliberately in order to make the fingers skillful and supple, in order to permeate the fingers with the soul. And to drive the soul into the fingers means to promote all the forces that go to build up sound teeth. It is no matter of indifference whether we let an indolent child sit about all day long, or make it move and run about; or whether we let a child be awkward and helpless with its hands, or train it to manual skill. Sins of omission in these matters bear fruit later in the early destruction of the teeth; of course sometimes in more pronounced forms, and sometimes in less, for there is great individual diversity, but they are bound to manifest themselves. In fact, the earlier we begin to train and discipline the child, on the lines indicated, the more we shall tend to slow down and counteract the process of dental decay. Any interference with dental processes is so difficult that we should carefully consider such measures even if they seem to be far-fetched.

Now this question is before me: How is fluorine absorbed into the organism; through the enamel, through the saliva, through the pulp or by the blood channels?

Fluorine in itself is one of the formative processes of man and it is somewhat beside the mark to speculate about the precise manner of its absorption. As a rule, we need only consider the normal nutritive process of everyday, by which substances containing various fluorine compounds are incorporated. Now follow this normal process of nutrition, which distributes fluorine to the periphery in the directions and to the regions where it is to be deposited. It is important to know that fluorine is much more widely distributed than is generally supposed. Much is contained in plants of the most different varieties—that is, comparatively speaking, for very little is required by man. But the process of fluorine formation is present in plants, even when fluorine itself is not chemically demonstrable; we shall refer to this presently in greater detail. Indeed fluorine is always present in water, even in our drinking water, so there is no difficulty in getting at it. It is only a matter of our organism being so constructed as to master and perform the highly complicated process of fluorine absorption. In the customary terminology of medicine, one may say that fluorine is carried to its destination through the blood channels.

Then I come to the inquiry whether the enamel of the teeth still receives nutrition after the teeth have been cut. No, this is not the case, as may appear from what has already been stated. But something else takes place, to which I would now call your attention. It might be expressed as follows: from the standpoint of spiritual research, around the growing teeth there is a remarkable activity of the human etheric body which is freed from the physical organisation or only loosely attached to it. This activity, which can be quite distinctly observed, forms as it were a constant etheric movement of organising around the jaws. Such a free organisation does not exist in the lower abdominal region; in that area it unites itself most closely with the physical organic activity, and thence arise the phenomena to which I have already referred. Thus, when there is a separation of the etheric body's activity from the physical organisation, e.g., during pregnancy, immediately at the opposite pole of the organism, pronounced changes in the teeth are brought about. Hæmorrhoids are another consequence of separation between the etheric and physical bodies, each “going their own way” But the fact that in this extremity of the human frame, the etheric body becomes independent implies that at the other pole the etheric body is drawn into the physical organisation, and destructive processes come into operation. For all things which increase organic activities—as for instance in the normal way in pregnancy, and in the abnormal way in diseases—all things which are stimulants to healthy functions have on the other hand concurrent effects on the dental structure where they work destructively. This is what should be especially noted.

What we do as an interplay between feet and hands is the macroscopic aspect of the fluorine workings. The constitution arising if the fingers and the legs become supple and skillful, is the working of fluorine. This is fluorine—not what the atomistic theorists imagine, but what is made manifest on the surface of the human organism, and is continued and extended inwards. This internal continuance of the process at the periphery is the essence of fluorine working. But if the external fluorine workings are disturbed, then the complexity of the human organism requires us to supplement education with therapeutics. For we not only perceive the result of defective or mistaken education in the condition of the teeth, but also in the child's being awkward and helpless. In such cases we must bring prophylactic influences upon the organism, and it is very interesting that a regulative action on the preservation of the teeth may be possible—of course if it has not been started too late—by means of an aqueous extract from the husks of horse chestnuts; that is to say Æsculin extract, in very high dilution and administered by the mouth.

This is again an interesting connection. The juice of the horse chestnut contains something of the same principle as that which builds up our teeth. There is always some substance out in the macrocosm with an internal organising effect. In Æsculin there is a force which ejects the “chemism” from the substance in which it is active. The chemism is so to speak rendered ineffective. If a beam of light is projected through a dilution of Æsculin, the chemical effect is obliterated. This obliteration is again perceptible if the aqueous dilution of Æsculin is taken internally; but note that it must be a very mild dilution and in a watery medium. Then it becomes evident that this overcoming of the chemism and trend towards pure mineralisation are essentially the same as the organic process which builds up the teeth. Only the obliteration in the external experiment is permeated still with the organising forces which are inherent in the human organism.

In a similar direction but by another method, we may use the common chlorophyll. The same force that is localised in the husk of the horse chestnut and some other plants, is also contained in chlorophyll, though in a somewhat different formation. But in order to use it we must try to extract as it were the chlorophyll in ether and use it not by internal dosage, but externally as a salve for the lower part of the body. If we rub the lower abdomen with etherised chlorophyll we shall produce the same effect on the preservation of the teeth, indirectly, through the whole organism, as is produced by the oral administration of Æsculin. These are things which need to be tested and which would certainly make a great impression on the general public if their statistical results could be made available. If the whole pulp of the tooth is “dead” an attempt should be made to adapt the whole organism to the absorption of fluorine. This is no longer a matter of mere dental treatment.

So you see how greatly dental treatment—in so far as dental treatment is still practicable—is related to all the growth-forces of the human organism. For what I have explained with reference to Æsculin and chlorophyll leads to the recognition of forces connected with very delicate processes of growth-processes tending towards mineralisation. The fact is that mankind has to pay for its higher evolution in the direction of the spirit, with a retrogressive development of the formative teeth process. And phylo-genetically the same is true; compared with the process of dental formation in the animals, our human process is one of retrogression. But it is not singular in that respect; this character of retrogression in the formation of the teeth is only one of many others in the organisation of the human head.

With this we have reached forms of thought which may be of great importance for our judgment of the whole process of dental formation. More insight will still be attained when we add some other facts which form a basis for it. I shall therefore include here a section which may not seem immediately to the point, for it will treat of questions of diet which are, however, closely related to our present theme.

Questions of diet are so important because they have social as well as medicinal implications. One may spend endless time in discussing whether the dietetic rules of Mazdaznan or other special schools and creeds, have any justification or significance. But in all the arguments pro and con, and the prescriptions which are given in these schools, we must admit that a person is treated as an unsocial being. But social problems combine with medical. The more we are compelled or advised to have some extra kind of food, something special to ourselves alone and not only in matters of food but in things from the external world—the more unsocial we become. The significance of the Last Supper lies in this: not that Christ gave something special to each of his disciples, but that He gave the same to all. The mere possibility of being together with others, as we eat or drink, has a great social value, and all that might tend to repress this healthy natural tendency, should—if I may say so—be treated with caution. If man be left alone in individual isolation, not only as regards conscious processes but also in all organic activities he develops all manner of appetites, and anti-appetites. Attention to these individual appetites and anti-appetites need not be given the importance usually bestowed. I am speaking now with reference to the whole constitution. If a man has become able to endure something naturally distasteful to him—that is to say, if an anti-appetite (in the wider sense, speaking of the whole organisation) has been conquered, then that person has gained more for the efficiency of his organisation than the constant avoidance of what is antipathetic. The conquest of something distasteful means the reconstruction of an organ which has been ruined or, in relation to the etheric, is a new organ; and this in no symbolic sense, but in fact. The organic formative force consists in nothing less than the conquest of antipathies. To gratify appetites beyond a certain limit, is not to serve and strengthen our organs, but to hypertrophise them and bring about their degeneration. To go too far in yielding to the antipathies of the organism, causes profound damage to the whole organisation. While on the other hand gradually to accustom a man to that which seems unsuitable to him always strengthens the constitution.

Almost everything we need to know in this division of our subject has been covered over by our modern natural science. For the external principle of the struggle for existence and natural selection is really purely external. Roux has even extended these concepts to the strife of the organs within man. But that too is really quite external. Such a principle can only become significant if what happens internally is actually observed and recorded. The strengthening, however, of a human organ, especially an organ in the phylogenetic line, always results from the overcoming of an antipathy. The formation, the actual organic structure, is due to the conquest of antipathies, whereas the continued growth of an organ already in being, is due to indulgence in sympathies.

But there is, of course, a definite limit. Sympathy and antipathy are not only on the tongue and in the eye; but the whole body liberates through and through with sympathies and antipathies; every organ has its special sympathies and antipathies. An organ can develop antipathy to the very forces that built and formed it at a certain stage. It owes its upbuilding to the very thing to which it becomes antipathetic, when it is completed. This leads us deeper into the phylogenetic realm; it leads us to take into world provokes all antipathetic reaction from inside; there is an internal resistance, a discharge so to speak of antipathy. But by this very reaction the progressive perfection of the organisation is brought about. In the realm of the organism he succeeds best in the struggle for existence who is best able to conquer inner antipathies and to replace them by organs. This conquest is part of the process of further development of the organs.

When we consider this aspect we are offered an important clue for the further estimate of actual dosage of remedies. You see in the process of organ formation itself a continuous oscillation between sympathy and antipathy. The genesis of the bodily constitution is dependent on the production of sympathy and antipathy, and their interplay. Moreover smaller dosages of substances used pharmaceutically have the same relation to highly potentised dosages, as sympathy has to antipathy, in the human organism. High potency has the opposite effect from low potency. That is bound up with the whole organising force. And in a certain sense it is also true that factors with a definite action on the organism in the early periods of life, turn their effect into the opposite in later periods; but that these effects in the organism can be shifted out of place. On this displacement is based on the one hand dementia precox as I have already stated, and, on the other, the formation of isolated “soul provinces” which at a later period of life wrongfully encroach on the organisation.

These matters will only be viewed aright if our science itself becomes somewhat spiritualised and we reach the stage of ceasing to try to cure so-called mental disorders by way of the spirit and the soul, but ask ourselves: where is the organic disorder or inadequacy, as this or that so-called mental or soul-sickness becomes apparent? And vice versa—however strange this may sound—in sickness of so-called physical kind there is even more need to examine the conditions of the soul, than in a case of sickness of the soul itself. In the latter class, the phenomena exhibited by the soul help little beyond the diagnosis. We must study these soul phenomena in order to guess where the organic defect can lie. The Ancients have provided for this in their terminology. It was not without purpose that these men of old time connected the picture of that mental disorder hypochondria with a name that sounds wholly materialistic: the bony or cartilaginous character of the abdomen. They would never have sought for the primary cause of the psychological unbalance—even when the hypochondria develops to actual insanity—anywhere except in some sickness of the lower bodily sphere. We must of course progress to the point of being able to regard all so-called material things as spiritual. We suffer severely today, simply because materialism is the continuation of medieval Catholic asceticism in the region of thought. This asceticism despised nature, and sought to attain to spiritual realms by an attitude of condemnation. Those who hold the modern world conception have extracted from the ascetic point of view just what they find convenient, and have no doubt that all the processes of the lower abdomen are crudely material and need not be seriously considered. But the truth is very different: the spirit works in all these things—and we need to know just how the spirit works there. If I bring the spirit which works within the organism together with the spirit acting in some external object or substance—the two spiritual forces collaborate. We must cease to despise nature, and learn again to regard to the whole external world as permeated with the spirit symptom and one of great value for the whole reform of medical thinking that just at the high tide of materialism there has arisen the custom of using hypnotic and other forms of suggestion in treating abnormal conditions in the individual? Things which seem at the opposite pole to materialism have come into favour in the materialistic age, when people had lost the possibility of learning the spiritual aspects of quicksilver, of antimony, of silver and of gold. That is the crux of the matter; the loss of the power to learn about the spirit of material things; and from this loss arises the attempt to treat spiritual ailments as spiritual only, just as in the psycho-analytic doctrines where it is attempted to direct the spirit as such. Sound views must again prevail on the subject of the spiritual attributes of matter.

It is one of the chief services of the nineteenth century to have held alive this acknowledgment of the spiritual permeation of external material things. One of the most important services; for external medicine of the allopathic school has unfortunately tended more and more to believe that one is only concerned with material, i.e., external-material effects and processes in the “extra-human” substances. Today on the one hand, in the diagnosis of so-called physical disorders, attention should be given to the state of the soul, and on the other, i.e., in abnormal soul states, the physical disturbances should be examined. Physical sicknesses should always prompt the inquiry: “what is the temperament of the person in whom they appear?” Suppose we find the sufferer is of hypochondriacal nature, that alone should be an indication for treatment of the lower organic sphere, with materially effective remedies, that is with low potencies. If we find that apart from the illness, the patient is of active mind or “sanguine,” it will be necessary to use high potencies from the outset of treatment. In short, the state of the soul is something that needs study and co-ordination when we consider bodily sickness. The total constitution of the soul is up to a certain point already obvious in the child; dementia præcox will not easily supervene if the child does not exhibit a phlegmatic disposition, that is to say the temperamental tendency appropriate to a much later stage in life, and then only to a limited degree. But still more important is it to recognise the disposition to inner activity or inner passivity. Only consider—if we work through so-called psychic treatment by means of suggestion we are placing the human being wholly in the sphere of influence of another. We repress his activity. But suppression of activity and of inner initiative gives rise to something even in outer life, which is important for the whole course of life. It appears externally in childhood and reacts on the whole dental condition, in later years as well. We shall deal further with this subject tomorrow.

Now I can come to the conclusion that for myself as an individual it is necessary to avoid certain foodstuffs, and to partake of others; I can choose a certain diet for myself—and it is important to bear this in mind, following what has already been said regarding the choice of food. And that diet can do me much good. But there is a very appreciable difference according to whether I adopt this diet as a result of individual experiment or simply accept what the doctor prescribes for me. Please do not take offense at this rather blunt statement. For the materialistic approach, it may well seem a matter of indifference, and equally beneficial, whether the diet that suits me has been instinctively chosen by myself, has been worked out experimentally by myself, perhaps at the physician's suggestion, but with individual initiative, or else has been prescribed for me by a physician. The ultimate result is seen in the fact that the diet prescribed by the physician will be of benefit in the beginning, but will have the disadvantage of leading in old age to mental degeneration more easily than would be the case with an active collaboration in questions of diet; this helps to keep the mind active and mobile into old age—of course, other factors play their part. The interplay of activity and passivity is much impaired in all “treatments by suggestion,” for such treatments imply not only giving up judgment, and doing what another prescribes, but also even the direction of the will itself. The guidances and impact on the will should only be employed in cases where we can assure ourselves that the impairment is not an injury to the person in question, because of other factors; and in fact that it is doing them a greater service to treat them for a while on “suggestive” lines. In general, however, spiritual science finds it necessary to emphasise the healing elements and effects in the material substances, in the atmospheric conditions, and in the movements and functions of the human organism itself; in short in all that cannot be termed spiritual influence proper, but must proceed actively from the consciousness or subconsciousness with the initiative of the patient himself. All these considerations are so crucial because they are the most of all sinned against in the age of materialism, and because the prevalent attitude has been so infectious as to have extended to pedagogy, where we may already experience the terrible abuse of all manner of hypnotic and suggestive tendencies. Their introduction into pedagogy is of appalling augury; and perhaps one will only be able to see clearly in this direction by answering the question: What is the effect of such exercises on the human organism as stimulate it to an awakening, instead of lulling into sleep? Just as when man falls asleep, movements are carried out in his imagination which are not followed by the will, just as the sleeper sinks into repose so far as the external world is concerned, while his consciousness is in motion, so the exact opposite occurs in the case of Eurhythmy. In Eurhythmy the reverse of the sleep condition is brought about; the consciousness awakens more vividly, as compared to its usual state. The hypertrophies of imagination typical of the dream, are dispersed and in their stead a sound and vigorous current of volition is sent through the limbs. The organised will is driven into the limbs. Study the different effects of Eurhythmic vowel forming on the lower and the upper human being respectively, and then again observe the effect of Eurhythmic formation of consonants on the upper and lower man, and you will realise that we may also seek a valuable therapeutic element in Eurhythmy itself.

In the last two lectures I tried to indicate the point in time when the scientific outlook and manner of thinking, such as we know it today, arose in the course of time. It was pointed out yesterday that the whole character of this scientific thinking, emerging at the beginning most clearly in Copernicus’ conception of astronomy, depends on the way in which mathematical thinking was gradually related to the reality of the external world. The development of science in modern times has been greatly affected by a change—one might almost say a revolutionary change—in human perception in regard to mathematical thinking itself. We are much inclined nowadays to ascribe permanent and absolute validity to our own manner of thinking.

Nobody notices how much matters have changed. We take a certain position today in regard to mathematics and to the relationship of mathematics to reality. We assume that this is the way it has to be and that this is the correct relationship. There are debates about it from time to time, but within certain limits this is regarded as the true relationship. We forget that in a none too distant past mankind felt differently concerning mathematics. We need only recall what happened soon after the point in time that I characterized as the most important in modern spiritual life, the point when Nicholas Cusanus presented his dissertation to the world. Shortly after this, not only did Copernicus try to explain the movements of the solar system with mathematically oriented thinking of the kind to which we are accustomed today, but philosophers such as Descartes and Spinoza²⁴ began to apply this mathematical thought to the whole physical and spiritual universe.

Even in such a book as his Ethics, the philosopher Spinoza placed great value on presenting his philosophical principles and postulates, if not in mathematical formulae—for actual calculations play no special part—yet in such a manner that the whole form of drawing conclusions, of deducing the later rules from earlier ones, is based on the mathematical pattern. By and by it appeared self-evident to the men of that time that in mathematics they had the right model for the attainment of inward certainty. Hence they felt that if they could express the world in thoughts arranged in the same clear-cut architectural order as in a mathematical or geometrical system, they would thereby achieve something that would have to correspond to reality. If the character of scientific thinking is to be correctly understood, it must be through the special way in which man relates to mathematics and mathematics relates to reality. Mathematics had gradually become what I would term a self-sufficient inward capacity for thinking. What do I mean by that?

The mathematics existing in the age of Descartes²⁵ and Copernicus can certainly be described more or less in the same terms as apply today. Take a modern mathematician, for example, who teaches geometry, and who uses his analytical formulas and geometrical concepts in order to comprehend some physical process. As a geometrician, this mathematician starts from the concepts of Euclidean geometry, the three-dimensional space (or merely dimensional space, if he thinks of non-Euclidean geometry.)²⁶ In three-dimensional space he distinguishes three mutually perpendicular directions that are otherwise identical. Space, I would say, is a self-sufficient form that is simply placed before one's consciousness in the manner described above without questions being raised such as: Where does this form come from? Or, Where do we get our whole geometrical system?

In view of the increasing superficiality of psychological thinking, it was only natural that man could no longer penetrate to those inner depths of soul where geometrical thought has its base. Man takes his ordinary consciousness for granted and fills this consciousness with mathematics that has been thought-out but not experienced. As an example of what is thought-out but not experienced, let us consider the three perpendicular dimensions of Euclidean space. Man would have never thought of these if he had not experienced a threefold orientation within himself. One orientation that man experiences in himself is from front to back. We need only recall how, from the external modern anatomical and physiological point of view, the intake and excretion of food, as well as other processes in the human organism, take place from front to back. The orientation of these specific processes differs from the one that prevails when, for example, I do something with my right arm and make a corresponding move with my left arm. Here, the processes are oriented left and right. Finally, in regard to the last orientation, man grows into it during earthly life. In the beginning he crawls on all fours and only gradually, stands upright, so that this last orientation flows within him from above downward and up from below.

As matters stand today, these three orientations in man are regarded very superficially. These processes—front to back, right to left or left to right, and above to below—are not inwardly experienced so much as viewed from outside. If it were possible to go back into earlier ages with true psychological insight, one would perceive that these three orientations were inward experiences for the men of that time. Today our thoughts and feelings are still halfway acknowledged as inward experiences, but he man of a bygone age had a real inner experience, for example, of the front-to-back orientation. He had not yet lost awareness of the decrease in intensity of taste sensations from front to back in the oral cavity. The qualitative experience that taste was strong on the tip of the tongue, then grew fainter and fainter as it receded from front to back, until it disappeared entirely, was once a real and concrete experience. The orientation from front to back was felt in such qualitative experiences. Our inner life is no longer as intense as it once was. Therefore, today, we no longer have experiences such as this. Likewise man today no longer has a vivid feeling for the alignment of his axis of vision in order to focus on a given point by shifting the right axis over the left. Nor does he have a full concrete awareness of what happens when, in the orientation of right-left, he relates his right arm and hand to the left arm and hand. Even less does he have a feeling that would enable him to say: The thought illuminates my head and, moving in the direction from above to below, it strikes into my heart. Such a feeling, such an experience, has been lost to man along with the loss of all inwardness of world experience. But it did once exist. Man did once experience the three perpendicular orientation of space within himself. And these three spatial orientations—right-left, front-back, and above-below—are the basis of the three-dimensional framework of space, which is only the abstraction of the immediate inner experience described above.

So what can we say when we look back at the geometry of earlier times? We can put it like this: It was obvious to a man in those ages that merely because of his being human the geometrical elements revealed themselves in his own life. By extending his own above-below, right-left, and front-back orientations, he grasped the world out of his own being.

Try to sense the tremendous difference between this mathematical feeling bound to human experience, and the bare, bleak mathematical space layout of analytical geometry, which establishes a point somewhere in abstract space, draws three coordinating axes at right angles to each other and thus isolates this thought-out space scheme from all living experience. But man has in fact torn this thought-out spatial diagram out of his own inner life. So, if we are to understand the origin of the later mathematical way of thinking that was taken over by science, if we are to correctly comprehend its self-sufficient presentation of structures, we must trace it back to the self-experienced mathematics of a bygone age. Mathematics in former times was something completely different. What was once present in a sort of dream-like experience of three-dimensionality and then became abstracted, exists today completely in the unconscious. As a matter of fact, man even now produced mathematics from his own three-dimensionality. But the way in which he derives this outline of space from his experiences of inward orientation is completely unconscious. None of this rises into consciousness except the finished spatial diagram. The same is true of all completed mathematical structures. They have all been severed from their roots. I chose the example of the space scheme, but I could just as well mention any other mathematical category taken from algebra or arithmetic. They are nothing but schemata drawn from immediate human experience and raised into abstraction.

Going back a few centuries, perhaps to the fourteenth century, and observing how people conceived of things mathematical, we find that in regard to numbers they still had an echo of inward feelings. In an age in which numbers had already become an abstract ads they are today, people would have been unable to find the names for numbers. The words designating numbers are often wonderfully characteristic. Just think of the word “two.” (zwei) It clearly expresses a real process, as when we say entzweien, “to cleave in twain.” Even more, it is related to zweifeln, “to doubt.” It is not mere imitation of an external process when the number two, zwei, is described by the word Entzweien, which indicates the disuniting, the splitting, of something formerly a whole. It is in fact something that is inwardly experienced and only then made into a scheme. It is brought up from within, just as the abstract three-dimensional space-scheme is drawn up from inside the mind.

We arrive back at an age of rich spiritual vitality that still existed in the first centuries of Christianity, as can be demonstrated by the fact that mathematics, mathesis, and mysticism were considered to be almost one and the same. Mysticism, mathesis, and mathematics are one, though only in a certain connection. For a mystic of the first Christian centuries, mysticism was something that one experienced more inwardly in the soul. Mathematics was the mysticism that one experienced more outwardly with the body; for example, geometry with the body's orientations to front-and-back, right-and-left, and up-and-down. One could say that actual mysticism was soul mysticism and that mathematics, mathesis, was mysticism of the corporeality. Hence, proper mysticism was inwardly experienced in what is generally understood by this term; whereas mathesis, the other mysticism, as experienced by means of an inner experience of the body, as yet not lost.

As a matter of fact, in regard to mathematics and the mathematical method Descartes and Spinoza still had completely different feelings from what we have today. Immerse yourself in these thinkers, not superficially as in the practice today when one always wants to discover in the thinkers of old the modern concepts that have been drilled into our heads, but unselfishly, putting yourself mentally in their place. You will find that even Spinoza still retained something of a mystical attitude toward the mathematical method.

The philosophy of Spinoza differs from mysticism only in one respect. A mystic like Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler²⁷ attempts to experience the cosmic secrets more in the depths of feeling. Equally inwardly, Spinoza constructs the mysteries of the universe along mathematical, methodical lines, not specifically geometrical lines, but lines experienced mentally by mathematical methods. In regard to soul configuration and mood, there is no basic difference between the experience of Meister Eckhart's mystical method and Spinoza's mathematical one. Anyone how makes such a distinction does not really understand how Spinoza experienced his Ethics, for example, in a truly mathematical-mystical way. His philosophy still reflects the time when mathematics, mathesis, and mysticism were felt as one and the same experience in the soul.

Now, you will perhaps recall how, in my book The Case for Anthroposophy,²⁸ I tried to explain the human organization in a way corresponding to modern thinking. I divided the human organization—meaning the physical one—into the nerve-sense system, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic-limb system. I need not point out to you that I did not divide man into separate members placed side by side in space, although certain academic persons have accused²⁹ me of such a caricature. I made it clear that these three systems interpenetrate each other. The nerve-sense system is called the “head system” because it is centered mainly in the head, but it spreads out into the whole body. The breathing and blood rhythms of the chest system naturally extend into the head organization, and so on. The division is functional, not local. An inward grasp of this threefold membering will give you true insight into the human being.

Let us now focus on this division for a certain purpose. To begin with, let us look at the third member of the human organization, that of digestion (metabolism) and the limbs. Concentrating on the most striking aspect of this member, we see that man accomplishes the activities of external life by connecting his limbs with his inner experiences. I have characterized some of these, particularly the inward orientation experience of the three directions of space. In his external movements, in finding his orientation in the world, man's limb system achieves inward orientation in the three directions. In walking, we place ourselves in a certain manner into the experience of above-below. In much that we do with our hands or arms, we bring ourselves into the orientation of right-and-left. To the extent that speech is a movement of the aeriform in man, we even fit ourselves into direction of front-and-back, back-and-front, when we speak. Hence, in moving about in the world, we place our inward orientation into the outer world.

Let us look at the true process, rather than the merely illusionary one, in a specific mathematical case. It is an illusionary process, taking place purely in abstract schemes of thought, when I find somewhere in the universe a process in space, and I approach it as an analytical mathematician in such a way that I draw or imagine the three coordinate axes of the usual spatial system and arrange this external process into Descartes’ purely artificial space scheme.

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This is what occurs above, in the realm of thought schemes, through the nerve-sense system. One would not achieve a relationship to such a process in space if it were not for what one does with one's limbs, with one's whole body, if it were not for inserting oneself into the whole world in accordance with the inward orientation of above-below, right-left, and front-back. When I walk forward, I know that on one hand I place myself in the vertical direction in order to remain upright. I am also aware that in walking I adjust my direction to the back-to-front orientation, and when I swim and use my arms, I orient myself in right and left. I do not understand all this if I apply Descartes’ space scheme, the abstract scheme of the coordinate axes. What gives me the impression of reality in dealing with matters of space is found only when I say to myself: Up in the head, in the nerve system, an illusory image arises of something that occurs deep down in the subconscious. Here, where man cannot reach with his ordinary consciousness, something takes place between his limb system and the universe. The whole of mathematics, of geometry, is brought up out of our limb system of movement. We would not have geometry if we did not place ourselves into the world according to inward orientation. In truth, we geometrize when we lift what occurs in the subconscious into the illusory of the thought scheme. This is the reason why it appears so abstractly independent to us. But his is something that this only come about in recent times. In the age in which mathesis, mathematics, was still felt to be something close to mysticism, the mathematical relationship to all things was also viewed as something human.

Where is the human factor if I imagine an abstract point somewhere in space crossed by three perpendicular directions and then apply this scheme to a process perceived in actual space? It is completely divorced from man, something quite inhuman. This non-human element, which has appeared in recent times in mathematical thinking, was once human. But when was it human?

The actual date has already been indicated, but the inner aspect is still to be described. When was it human? It was human when man did not only experience in his movements and his inward orientation in space that he stepped forward from behind and moved in such a way that he was aware of his vertical as well as the horizontal direction, but when he also felt the blood's inward activity in all such moving about, in all such inner geometry. There is always blood activity when I move forward. Think of the blood activity present when, as an infant, I lifted myself up from the horizontal to an upright position! Behind man's movements, behind his experience of the world by virtue of movements, (which can also be, and at one time was, an inward experience) there stands the experience of the blood. Every movement, small or large, that I experience as I perform it contains its corresponding blood experience. Today blood is to us the red fluid that seeps out when we prick our skin. We can also convince ourselves intellectually of its existence. But in the age when mathematics, mathesis, was still connected with mysticism, when in a dreamy way the experience of movement was inwardly connected with that of blood, man was inwardly aware of the blood. It was one thing to follow the flow of blood through the lungs and quite another to follow it through the head. Man followed the flow of the blood in lifting his knee or his foot, and he inwardly felt and experienced himself through and through in his blood. The blood has one tinge when I raise my foot, another when I place it firmly on the ground. When I lounge around and doze lazily, the blood's nuance differs from the one it has when I let thoughts shoot through my head. The whole person can take on a different form when, in addition to the experience of movement, he has that of the blood. Try to picture vividly what I mean. Imagine that you are walking slowly, one step at a time; you begin to walk faster; you start to run, to turn yourself, to dance around. Suppose that you were doing all this, not with today's abstract consciousness, but with inward awareness: You would have a different blood experience at each stage, with the slow walking, then the increase in speed, the running, the turning, the dancing. A different nuance would be noted in each case. If you tried to draw this inner experience of movement, you would perhaps have to sketch it like this (white line.) But for each position in which you found yourself during this experience of movement, you would draw a corresponding inward blood experience (red, blue, yellow—see Figure 2)

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Of the first experience, that of movement, you would say that you have it in common with external space, because you are constantly changing your position. The second experience, which I have marked by means of the different colors, is a time experience, a sequence of inner intense experiences.

In fact, if you run in a triangle, you can have one inner experience of the blood. You will have a different one if you run in a square.

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What is outwardly quantitative and geometric, is inwardly intensely qualitative in the experience of the blood.

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It is surprising, very surprising, to discover that ancient mathematics spoke quite differently about the triangle and the square. Modern nebulous mystics describe great mysteries, but there is no great mystery here. It is only what a person would have experienced inwardly in the blood when he walked the outline of a triangle or a square, not to mention the blood experience corresponding to the pentagram. In the blood the whole of geometry becomes qualitative inward experience. We arrive back at a time when one could truly say, as Mephistopheles does in Goethe's Faust, “Blood is a very special fluid.”³⁰ This is because, inwardly experienced, the blood absorbs all geometrical forms and makes of them intense inner experiences. Thereby man learns to know himself as well. He learns to know what it means to experience a triangle, a square, a pentagram; he becomes acquainted with the projection of geometry on the blood and its experiences. This was once mysticism. Not only was mathematics, mathesis, closely related to mysticism, it was in fact the external side of movement, of the limbs, while the inward side was the blood experience. For the mystic of bygone times all of mathematics transformed itself out of a sum of spatial formations into what is experienced in the blood, into an intensely mystical rhythmic inner experience.

We can say that once upon a time man possessed a knowledge that he experienced, that he was an integral part of; and that at the point in time that I have mentioned, he lost this oneness of self with the world, this participation in the cosmic mysteries. He tore mathematics loose from his inner being. No longer did he have the experience of movement; instead, he mathematically constructed the relationships of movement outside. He no longer had the blood experience; the blood and its rhythm became something quite foreign to him. Imagine what this implies: Man tears mathematics free from his body and it becomes something abstract. He loses his understanding of the blood experience. Mathematics no longer goes inward. Picture this as a soul mood that arose at a specific time. Earlier, the soul had a different mood than later. Formerly, it sought the connection between blood experience and experience of movement; later, it completely separated them. It no longer related the mathematical and geometrical experience to its own movement. It lost the blood experience. Think of this as real history, as something that occurs in the changing moods of evolution. Verily, a man who lived in the earlier age, when mathesis was still mysticism, put his whole soul into the universe. He measured the cosmos against himself. He lived in astronomy.

Modern man inserts his system of coordinates into the universe and keeps himself out of it. Earlier, man sensed a blood experience with each geometrical figure. Modern man feels no blood experience; he loses the relationship to his own heart, where the blood experiences are centered. Is it imaginable that in the seventh or eighth century, when the soul still felt movement as a mathematical experience and blood as a mystical experience, anybody would have founded a Copernican astronomy with a system of coordinates simply inserted into the universe and totally divorced from man? No, this became possible only when a specific soul constitution arose in evolution. And after that something else became possible as well. The inward blood awareness was lost. Now the time had come to discover the movements of the blood externally through physiology and anatomy. Hence you have this change in evolution: On one hand Copernican astronomy, on the other the discovery of the circulation of the blood by Harvey,³¹ a contemporary of Bacon and Hobbes. A world view gained by abstract mathematics cannot produce anything like the ancient Ptolemaic theory, which was essentially bound up with man and the living mathematics he experienced within himself. Now, one experiences an abstract system of coordinates starting with an arbitrary zero point. No longer do we have the inward blood experience; instead, we discover the physical circulation of the blood with the heart in the center.

The birth of science thus placed itself into the whole context of evolution in both its conscious and unconscious processes. Only in this way, out of the truly human element, can one understand what actually happened, what had to happen in recent times for science—so self-evident today—to come into being in the first place. Only thus could it even occur to anybody to conduct such investigations as led, for example, to Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. We shall continue with this tomorrow.

• 24. Spinoza, Benedictus: Amsterdam 1632–1677. The Hague. Philosopher, mathematician, had Humanistic and Talmudistic training. By vocation, optician and politician. His main work Ethics with the characteristic full title Ethica Ordine Geometrica Demonstrata (Ethic Represented by Geometric Method) could only be published by his friends after his death. See Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age and Riddles of Philosophy.
• 25. René Descartes: Lat., Renatus Cartenius, Le Haye (Tourraine) 1598–1650 Stockholm. Mathematician, physicist, philosopher. Educated by the Jesuits in La Fleche, he first became a soldier and was part of some campaigns but turned away from outer life to enter into the loneliness of a striver for knowledge, living first in Paris and then for a long time in Holland. He died in Stockholm, having been called there by Queen Christine. For him, doubt of tradition, but also of all sense perception, was the starting point of his philosophy and he found in self-consciousness the security of all being (“Cogito ergo Sum”). He developed the method of analytical geometry and gave an explanation of the rainbow. Main works: Essays, 1637, in it “Discours de la Methode and Dioptiric,” “Meditationes de Prima Philosophia,” 1641; “Passions de L'Ame,” 1650. See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 26. Non-Euclidian geometry is a prime example of “the self-contained inner ability to think.” C. Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) discovered first that one can think more than only a geometric system. Because nobody understood this, he decided not to publish his results and to withdraw from the fruitless quarrel. Independently of Gauss in 1828 N.I. Lobatschewskij and in 1829 J. Boljai first published their solutions to the same problem. Rudolf Steiner often spoke about the meaning of this achievement, as in Wege und Ziele des geistigen Menschen in the lecture “Der Heutige Stand der Philosophie und Wissenschaft,” (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1973; GA Bibl. Nr. 125). See also: Georg Unger, Physic am Scheidewege (Dornach: 1948), pages 19–28, and Vom Bielden Physikalischer Begriffe, Vol. 3 (Stuttgart: 1967), pages 31–32 and 193–194.
• 27. Johannes Tauler: About 1300–1361 Strasbourg. Preacher and pastor, Dominican, mystic, student of Meister Eckhart. Sermons and writings in German by W. Lehmann, 1923; see also Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, the chapter “Friendship with God.”
• 28. Rudolf Steiner, The Case for Anthroposophy (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1970).
• 29. In a reply to two lectures, which Walter Johannes Stein and Eugen Kolisko gave to defend two articles on “Anthroposophy as Science” in the Goettingen newspaper, Hugo Fuchs, Professor of Anatomy, spoke sarcastically of a human being with head, breast, and belly system. (From a report of the newspaper Die Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus, August 1920, No. 5).
• 30. From Goethe's Faust, Part I, the scene in the Student Room with Faust and Mephisto. See Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Significance of the Blood (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1967).
• 31. William Harvey, 1578–1658, physiologist, Professor of Anatomy, London, discoverer of the main bloodstream: De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis (1628).

To characterise the successive epochs of human evolution on the earth (referring, to begin with, only to post-Atlantean time) we can select one item or another out of spiritual science; we are thus gradually led to form real conceptions of the several epochs. To-day we shall speak about the fourth—that is, the Graeco-Latin time; and about the fifth, our own time, which began about the year 1413. We shall add certain particulars to what we already know about these epochs.

Every such epoch may be said to have a special task. I beg you not to think in this connection of a merely theoretic or scientific task, or of anything exclusively concerned with knowledge.

Every epoch has a special task,—a task which must be solved in life itself. In actual life itself, impulses have to arise with which the individuals living in these epochs must come to terms,—with which they have to wrestle, and out of which proceed not only their ideas but their feelings, their emotions, their loves and hates, and the will-impulse which they receive into themselves. Thus in the widest sense we can say: Every such epoch has a task to solve.

Looking into the Graeco-Latin epoch, we find that the task it had to solve is chiefly related to what we may comprise with the words “Birth and Death” within the Universe. These things have become rather vague and obliterated in our time. No longer in the deepest sense of life, but in a more theoretic sense, the great problems of Birth and Death stand before the human being of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. He no longer has a true feeling of the deep way in which the phenomena of Birth and Death entered the heart and mind of the human being of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. We human beings of the fifth epoch (as you know, we are still more or less at the beginning of it, for it began in the year 1413; and an epoch lasts 2160 years) We have to solve in the widest sense, in a living and energetic way, what we may call the problem of Evil. I beg you to envisage this most thoroughly. Evil will approach the human being of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch in every conceivable form. Scientifically he will have to solve the nature and essence of Evil. In his loving and in his hating, he will have to grapple in the right way with all that springs from Evil; he will have to fight and wrestle with the resistances of Evil to the impulses of the Will. All this is essential to the tasks of the fifth post-Atlantean time.

Nay, more, the problem of Evil belongs to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch in a still higher degree than did the problem of Birth and Death to the life of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Why so? It was, in fact, the Atlantean time which had to solve the question about Birth and Death with the same vital intensity with which the fifth post-Atlantean time will have to solve the problem of Evil. In Atlantean time the phenomena of Birth and Death stood before the human beings of that evolutionary epoch far more vividly and directly, in a far more elemental way, than now. That which is hidden behind Birth and Death, is, in effect, far more concealed to-day from human vision and from human feeling. Now the Graeco-Latin time, fundamentally speaking, was after all but a faint repetition of that which the Atlanteans had had to experience with regard to Birth and Death. The experiences of the Graeco-Latin time were, therefore, not so intense and vivid as will become the wrestlings of the fifth post-Atlantean time, which began in 1413, with all the powers of Evil,—with all that springs from Evil. For the human being himself will have to free himself from all this by means of the very opposite forces, which to evolve is in effect the specific task and need of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. What I have said in this moment need only be envisaged in a sufficiently intense and vivid way, and many things which we have characterised during these weeks will be clearly illustrated. Many things will appear as consequences of this fundamental premiss: that it is the task of the fifth post-Atlantean time to wrestle with the life-problem of Evil.

Let us now ask, how did Goethe perceive that this is so, when in his drama he showed Faust as the representative of humanity, placing him in conflict with Mephistopheles who is the representative of Evil? From this very fact you can see that the Faust drama is derived out of the deepest interests of the present epoch.

It is peculiar to man that he can only come to terms with the things with which he has to wrestle, if he extends his consciousness over them, i.e., if they do not remain in the unconscious. (We emphasised this more than once during our recent studies.) That is the peculiarity: Whatever evil impulses can possibly arise from the foundations of the cosmic order, must betray their presence to our consciousness.

But there is also another necessity. It is insufficient, as a rule, merely to know what belongs to the one epoch. These things can only be rightly judged by comparison. It is not really enough to be aware that now, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, man has to wrestle with Evil in the historic evolution of Earth-life. There must be added a certain consciousness about the preceding epoch,—that is, in our case, the Graeco-Latin epoch. The impulses that lived in the Graeco-Latin epoch must also become impulses of human beings of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Observe how wonderfully what the poet Goethe felt is connected with this perception, derived as it is from the very nature of human evolution—of the historic evolution of mankind. Goethe longed to know the world of classical-antiquity by direct perception, as well as it could be known in his time. He wanted, as it were, to guess its secret from all that he saw and realised in Italy. Therefore the longing for Italy lived in him like a kind of illness. But this was essentially due to the fact that Goethe felt himself in the fullest way a child of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Goethe did not aspire to Italy with the kind of impulse which inspires any Professor of the History of Art, who thinks himself already clever in every domain, and only wishes to extend his information. That was not what Goethe wanted. Goethe desired no less than a change in his state of consciousness,—another kind of vision. Many things could be cited in evidence of this. Goethe said to himself as it were: If I remain only in the North, my soul will have a form of vision that is not wide enough. I must live, for once, in the atmosphere of the South in order to get other forms of vision,—other forms of concept, other forms of thought, of feeling. The Witches' Kitchen Scene in Faust, for example, with its decidedly Northern content, was written by Goethe in Rome. He believed that he would only be able to enter fully into the very nature of spiritual contemplation, if his state of consciousness was transformed by the atmosphere that there prevailed. We must endeavour to find our way into Goethe in a more intimate and delicate way.

Now we can also see that Goethe did not set Faust over against Mephistopheles out of an empty or merely abstract reflection, but rather because he wanted to portray the representative man of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch within the evolution of mankind. At the same time, endeavouring as he did to compare things vividly in the two states of consciousness, he found it necessary to let Faust experience not only conditions and events of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but to carry him backward in time and let his soul dive down into the fourth epoch, so that this epoch, too, might set its stamp upon Faust's consciousness. For this is what happens where Faust comes together with Helena.

It is often interesting to put the different Scenes together in this all-embracing poem. It would be interesting, for example, to produce one after another the Witches' Kitchen, the Invocation Scene at the Imperial Court, and then the Scene where Helena herself appears. For these three scenes represent three successive acquaintances of Faust with Helena. In the Witches' Kitchen, while Mephistopheles is entertaining himself with the apes, etc., and with the witch. Faust sees the picture in the magic looking-glass. Faust, as he sees it, only speaks of the woman's beauty, but the words of Mephistopheles even now remind us that the picture of Helena appears:—

“Thou'lt find, this drink thy blood compelling,
Each woman beautiful as Helen.”

Here, then, emerges for the first time what is afterwards developed in the scene at the Emperor's Court, and finally appears in its third form in the “Classico-romantic Phantasmagoria” in the third Act of the Second Part. It would be interesting, for once, to see these three put together one after another. People might then perceive that the Faust drama is an organic, living entity, full of inner order.

It is not for nothing that we hear it again out of the lips of Faust himself at the Emperor's Court: “I scent the Witches' Kitchen.” As soon as the action is approaching Helena once more, he scents the Witches' Kitchen. We are reminded of Helena. These things are carefully weighed. Goethe is not like any other poet. Goethe is one who created out of necessities and impulses derived from a far wider sphere.

Let us now ask ourselves more precisely: “What is the meaning of this threefold encounter of Faust with Helena? The three are very different from one another. In the first, in the Witches' Kitchen, in the magic looking-glass, Faust is to a slight extent transfixed. He sees a picture. One who is acquainted with the more subtle distinctions of occult science can well estimate this picture which Faust sees in the magic look-glass. As I have often told you, our thoughts or ideas in ordinary life are no more than the corpses of that which we really experience. Behind all thoughts are Imaginations; we, however, kill the Imaginative part. You can read of it in a more exact philosophic form in my forthcoming book Riddles of the Soul, which contains a brief chapter on this very subject. That which Faust sees in the magic mirror in the Witches' Kitchen is something which is living in himself, raised up into an Imagination. In ordinary life he only has the idea in an abstract form. Now he experiences the picture of Helena which Goethe lifts out of the whole realm of his imaginative life; now he experiences it transformed again to a living Imagination. Thus in the first place—I beg you to observe this well—in the Witches' Kitchen Scene we have an Idea that has become Imagination.

In the Invocation Scene at the Emperor's Court, the thing goes further. Far more of Faust is taken hold of than the mere life of ideas. if Faust had merely seen the picture as he saw it in the magic mirror, he could not have reproduced it outwardly, whether by smoke or any other means. For him to reproduce it outwardly, it must be connected with his inner life of feeling and emotion. We cannot but admit that Goethe indicates his meaning with the greatest possible intensity. Faust no longer merely admires—within the life of ideas—the beauty of Helena, as in the picture in the magic looking-glass in the Witches' Kitchen. You can perceive this from the wonderful way in which Goethe describes, in the Invocation Scene, the entire scale of emotions and feelings whereby Faust feels himself united with Helena. Truly it is a wonderful enhancement. No single word could be removed, where Faust breaks out into the words that tell of his inner relationship to Helena: inclination—love—worship—mania. It could not be described more truly to the inner life of soul. Remember this enhancement, and you will see how Goethe emphasises the intimate connection of what happens here with all that Faust experiences in his heart, in his life of feeling. That which emerges in the Invocation Scene is no longer merely an idea transformed into Imagination; it is Feeling that has become Imagination. Here, then, you have the second stage—the Invocation Scene in the Emperor's Court—Feeling that has become Imagination.

Now we pass on to the “Classico-romantic Phantasmagoria,” where Helena appears not merely as a spectre, but as a present reality to Faust, for he begets Euphorion his son. Here Goethe clearly indicates that the ‘Classico-romantic Phantasmagoria’ proceeds from Faust's life of Will, no longer merely from his Feeling or his Thinking. The ‘Classico-romantic Phantasmagoria’ is Willing that has become Imagination.

Ideation, Feeling and Willing, translated into the Imaginative sphere—that is what you have in the enhancements of the encounter with Helena. All this is shaped with artistic truth. Even for one who does not dismember Faust as we are doing, but simply enjoys it, these things are there. Now the very fact that Goethe chooses Helena to appear to Faust, is in a way connected with the essence of the life-tasks of the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean epochs. We are here touching upon a problem which even the Bible only very gently touches. Ricarda Huch in her new book on Luther's Faith touches it rather less gently. It is the connection of the problem of the knowledge of Woman with that of the knowledge of Evil. A mysterious connection is indicated in the Bible, in that the Luciferic temptation took place through the Woman in Paradise. The longing for the Devil during the present, fifth post-Atlantean epoch is well described in Ricarda Huch's book, Luther's Faith. It is characteristic; but we cannot enter into these things any more, for we should be treading on very thin ice in our time if we were to indicate them, let alone to discuss them further.

Nevertheless, it was out of this impulse that the culture of ancient Greece—and Goethe in connection with it—derived the figure of Helena. We must, remember that the Helena problem played an important part in the content of the old Greek Mysteries. To recognise the being of Helena was essential to a certain process of Initiation. For in the being of Helena, in the old Greek Mysteries, one learned to know something of the tasks of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch in relation to the Spiritual World. Therefore in ancient Greece there was an exoteric and an esoteric legend of Helena. The exoteric legend is well known; the other has also become known, for all things esoteric become exoteric by-and-by. The exoteric legend is as follows: Through the well-known event with the three Goddesses, Paris was instigated to take Helena from Menelaus. He appeared in Greece; and with Helena's consent eloped with her,—took her to Troy. Thereupon the Trojan War broke out. The Greeks besieged and conquered Troy, and Menelaus took Helena back with him again. That is the exoteric legend.

Homer, as you are well aware, only reveals this exoteric legend. Though he himself was initiated into the esoteric legend, he would in no way betray it. It was not until a later period of Greece that the Dramatists—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—condescended to betray something of the esoteric legend, which was to this effect: that Helena did not acquiesce in her elopement; Paris did not elope with her, but stole her away by force against her will, and went with her across the sea. Hera drew the ships from their course, and Paris had to land with Helena in Egypt, where at that time king Proteus was ruling. Slaves who had escaped from Paris' ships told the whole story to Proteus, whereupon he took Paris and his train, and Helena, into captivity. Paris he let go, but he took Helena from him. According to this legend, Helena never became the wife of Paris. His treasures were taken from him; he was sent back to Troy without Helena, but on this journey to Troy he was able to take with him the Idol of Helena, in place of the real Helena who had remained behind with Proteus in Egypt. Paris, therefore, appeared in Troy with the mere Idol of Helena, and it was for the Idol that the Greeks fought; they would not believe the Trojans that the real Helena was not in Troy. Then, when the Trojan War was ended, Menelaus himself travelled to Egypt, and brought with him from thence his wife who had remained guiltless.

You are perhaps aware that Goethe very clearly hints at this esoteric aspect of the legend in the third Act of the Second Part of Faust,—in the ‘Classico-romantic Phantasmagoria.’ Mephistopheles-Phorkyas continues the speech of Helena who is at a loss and no longer knows where she is. In this Act Goethe places Helena before us, burdened with all the doubts that have befallen her. She has been robbed, and now she hears all that is being said of her. It is all utterly confusing. Things that relate to the Idol and not to the reality come to her ears, and in the last resort she herself no longer knows who she is. And out of all these doubts we hear her say:—

“Name not those joys to me! for
sorrow all too stern.
Unendingly was poured upon my
breast and brain.”

Mephistopheles-Phorkyas replies:

“Nathless, they say, dost thou
appear in double form,
Beheld in Ilion,—in Egypt, too,
beheld.”

Thus Goethe very clearly hints at the fact, how complicated the figure of Helena really is. He brings it into his Faust. For with the Helena problem much indeed is told. And it is not without meaning that it is Mephistopheles who acts as mediator in the second part of the Drama. He gives the key to Faust, directing him into those regions which to Mephistopheles himself are empty Nothing, yet in which Faust is confident that he will find the All. Here again, every word is of significance. Faust has the possibility to change his state of consciousness,—to lead it over into that which was experienced in the preceding, Graeco-Latin epoch,—in the fourth post-Atlantean. We must not take ‘the All’ in a merely abstract sense, but in a concrete spiritual shape and form. Into this spiritual form Mephistopheles cannot enter. He belongs to a different region. Mephistopheles is really there to work as Spirit in the spiritless world of material events, which above all must give its impulses to the man of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

In effect, during this fifth post-Atlantean epoch certain human beings have the task to be aware of the aspect of the spiritual world, thus to make conscious that which can really be achieved by means of the impulse of Evil.

Just as the eye cannot see itself but only other things, so too Mephistopheles, who is the very Impulse of Evil cannot see Evil himself. This is among the things which Faust must see and learn to know. Mephistopheles cannot see Helena; at least he cannot see her with full consciousness, with full attention. Yet after all, he is not altogether unakin to Helena. The way to Mephistopheles was only possible out of those impulses which Christianity gave for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. There is indeed a certain tendency to Helena; nevertheless, what ancient Greece—or her Initiates—desired to express through the Helena-problem remained remote and strange. The Christians of past centuries also knew Helena, but they knew her in the form of ‘Hell.’ However remote the kinship is, the word ‘Hell’ is not altogether without etymological connection with ‘Helena,’ for the things themselves have to do with one another. The Helena-problem is very complicated, as you can see when you behold the esoteric form of the Greek legend.

The same thing is clearly indicated at several points in my Mystery Plays: Ahriman-Mephistopheles must be recognised; we must see through him. The Faust Drama says in a certain sense the same. Referring to Ahriman-Mephistopheles, Goethe coined a sentence of great importance for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The human being of the fifth post-Atlantean age must somehow bring it about that Ahriman-Mephistopheles feels himself recognised by him. You will recall the closing scene in the last of my Mystery Plays. It is an important moment where Ahriman-Mephistopheles feels that he is recognised. At this moment the Impulse of Evil knows it:—Those who are having to experience Evil have found a standpoint which enables them to stand not within Evil, but outside it. That is most important. It is of deep significance when Mephistopheles calls out to Faust:—

“I'll praise thee, ere we separate; I see
Thou knowest the Devil thoroughly.”

This is important. Mephistopheles would not have said the same to Woodrow Wilson. He would have had no cause.

This relation between Faust and Mephistopheles contains a great deal of the problem of the fifth post-Atlantean age. For, as I told you, this fifth post-Atlantean age has the task to go on into the inevitable battle with the most manifold forms of Evil. The impulses of human evolution must become sharp and clear again. Such impulses must arise as have arisen in the conflict with Evil. Far more intense, I said, is this experience than the experience of the fourth postAtlantean age, because the latter was in a sense a repetition of the Atlantean epoch.

Wherein sloes a first experience in the course of human evolution on the Earth consist? It is indeed a first experience—an initial experience—which stands before us here. The fourth post-Atlantean age had to live through the problem of Birth and Death, but only as a repetition of the Atlantean epoch. Now, in the fifth post-Atlantean age, an initial experience has entered in once more. And—it consists in this: that we must draw anew out of the fount of Maya—out of illusion. The human being must make acquaintance with illusion—with Maya, with the great illusion.

I have repeatedly drawn attention to this from quite other. points of view. I did so, for instance, in my book The Riddle of Man, where I associated the problem of freedom with the fact that in our consciousness, to begin with, mere mirror-images take place,—mirror-images, that is to say, Maya. And in my present essay on the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, anno 1459, I emphasise the real function of illusion for our consciousness. The fact is that these things can only now be said directly for the first time. They do not belong to any abstract theory or fantasy, but to immediate reality. It is wonderful to see how Goethe was initiated into these things. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch must create very much out of illusion. In the character of Faust Goethe represents the human being of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. When Faust enters the larger world, he creates, paper currency. This too is characteristic of the Ahrimanic nature of commerce in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Paper currency is the tangible economic proof of the fact that the imaginary, the unreal, the illusory, prevails and plays its part in the commerce of this time.

It was not so in those periods of human evolution when the chief thing was not money but the exchange of commodities, or barter. Even if money was there, the economic life was not based upon it. In those times it would not have been true to say that the outer economic life was permeated by a network of illusions, as in fact it is during the present, fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Goethe brings Faust himself into connection with this illusion of the economic life. What does he mean to tell us when he places the second appearance of Helena directly after the Scene at the Emperor's Court? What is it really at this point? We are confronted with the whisperings of an astrologer, with suggestive influences—I mentioned it in yesterday's lecture—we are confronted with illusion. Illusion lives—this was what Goethe meant to say—illusion lives in the outer historic reality, lives in it spiritually. How often have we spoken of it in recent lectures! The concepts, the ideas, that lead to such great errors as I mentioned recently,—all these are born of illusion. You will remember: I told you of one characteristic error, but we could mention hundreds of others of this kind. Certain economists who thought themselves particularly clever, stated in 1914—out of their economic laws—that the War could not last longer than four to six months at most. It was impossible otherwise. Yet it will soon have lasted as many years. Why is it so? Why do human beings live in ideas that are proved absurd by the reality? Because there plays into their life of thought that ‘spectral fabric’ which Goethe represents as coming into the Emperor's Court through Faust. It is because the human beings do not see through what lives as spectral fabric in their ideas. As soon as the fifth, post-Atlantean epoch began, the imagination of those, who were sensitive to such things, was turned to the perception of reality over against such ‘spectral fabrics.’ Goethe had a prototype for this Scene at the Emperor's Court. I refer to Hans Sachs' beautiful description of the necromancer who causes Helena to appear at the Court of the Emperor Maximilian. It is not Faust in this case, it is the Emperor himself who wants to seize the image and falls a prey to it,—is paralysed by it. So then we have this weaving of ‘spectral fabrics’ into the reality of the historic process. And I should like to ask: Where else is it represented so grandly, so truly, out of the fulness of spiritual realities, as in Goethe's Faust?

Now as I said before, the consciousness of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and that of the fourth must work together. Faust grows away from Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles gains nothing from it but the conclusion:—

“One's self with fools to hamper,
At last even on the Devil puts a damper.”

Faust is seized by apoplexy, he is paralysed. His soul-nature has separated from his body. Yet there now follows the Scene which we presented here last year,—Faust's dream, which is perceived by Homunculus.

Whence comes the Helena of this second apparition, even though she is a mere ‘spectre’? It, is quite clearly indicated: it is the astrologer who brings her—albeit only by suggestion—out of the rhythm of the stars. Connect this fact with what I told you recently of the macrocosmic element that works in the woman before fertilisation. This Helena comes from the stars; but she guides the impulses within Faust's soul towards another Helena. Homunculus sees how in the vision of Faust the birth of Helena emerges. It is the Scene of Zeus, of Leda with the Swan. Faust is led over to the problem of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch,—to the solving of the problem of Birth. This is the thing that emerges at the very moment where Faust grows away from the clutches of Mephistopheles,—where Mephistopheles has nothing left of him but the outer physical body. Now there arises in the soul of Faust the impulse to go over into the fourth post-Atlantean epoch.

It is roost wonderful how the motifs are intertwined. We see how Goethe uses the interplay of that which lives within us out of the fourth and the fifth post-Atlantean epochs. But he knew still more. He points to the esoteric legend of Helena,—of how in Troy there was only the Idol, that which is founded in the stars, which is of cosmic origin; while the other, the individual Being of Helena, had moved to Egypt, to Proteus. In the declining city of Troy, that part of Helena remained which belonged to the third post-Atlantean epoch, which the third post-Atlantean epoch expelled. It was the part of Helena which Egypt allowed to go; while as to that which Egypt reserved for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, Menelaus took it back from Egypt and brought it again to Greece. Thus in the esoteric Helena-legend, which Goethe certainly adapted, not only the fifth but the fourth and also the third post-Atlantean epochs play their part. Goethe made use of the Helena-problem in a most wonderful way.

Recitation by Marie Steiner from “Poems” by Friedrich Lienhard

WHERE FROM?

I don't know and can't find words,
Where my home is.
They stand tall and shine like candles
The birches down into May.
But I see out, as if lost,
Far away, somewhere else I am at home,
Far!...

That homesickness that I cannot explain,
Those whispering questions in the firs
of a strange forest:

Was I in ancient times
A knight on the rough sea?
Do I hear the great surf
Rushing in sorrowfully and heavily?
Did I fall in battle
For a granite possession?
Was my heroic galley
Smashed by wild lightning?

Perhaps years ago I was
A fresh and vigorous lad;
A brooklet murmuring ran
Through a mill-bottom.
I have sat by it
In many a youthful carol,
While another, laughing, lay
In a different arm.
I know not and find no words
Where my home is.

People hurt me,
I ask the wind: why?
Wherever I listen, wherever I look,
Their behavior remains strange and silent to me.
Their city is full of unmelodiousness!
They never see the realms of the universe,
Do not see that they are trapped –
I wish I were a child again!

I would speak so sweetly,
So strangely, as I am moved!
Break the abundance of images
That hang luminously on my trees!
With “you”, with “brother” and “sister”
Wandering through a kind world,
Loving, saying love
To anyone I like.
Light as a ghost, only bound in God, free!

I don't know and can't find words
Where my home is...

MORNING WIND

You lovely morning bells, when stalk strikes against stalk!
When the ringing meadow moves to the swinging bells!
I listen to all the grasses, to all the bells
Come, wild morning wind, come in, come in, come in!

It is a delicate plucking, just a stirring of strings:
after all, the winds are little fingers that tremble as they glide over them!
Then a stronger whistling comes from the overblown meadow:
the dew shaken by the wind springs and sings in drops!

And what the delicate harp swings,
The wind song, the sound of the blades of grass,
And what sings in strong tones
On the whole noisy meadow slope:

I pick until I have shreds and scraps
to please myself and amuse you, sounds caught in fiddle and song!

So I know many melodies in all the meadows:
We wait for the morning wind and become a chime!

SUMMER FOREST

How shyly the summer wind walks in the fir forest!
It calls by as if from a distant child,
Who is standing in the forest, searching;
But only the mosquitoes hum in the summer breeze
... and their song blows away...
Dear forest!...

Of seven dwarfs, of Snow White dreams
Der Wandter, who in the sun-dazzled flicker
At his fir many hours lingers:
A Hans in Luck, who all the gold's glimmer
In a source threw, which foams in the valley...
Dear forest, oh dear forest!

Red Riding Hood wanders gracefully through the greenery,
the weight of the basket sways on the arm of the little one;
she reaches into the flowers that bloom along the path;
She has to marvel at every umbel, every strange ear
and chat as she makes her way...
Dear forest... oh, dear forest!...

WALDGRUSS

Waldhornschall
Hör' ich dahinten im Wasgenwalde!
O sieh, der Fingerhut
Leuchtet von sonniger Halde!
Eidechsen huschen übern Stein,
The thyme-scented rain smells lush,
Bumblebees hang on hot clover -

Oh forest, my forest,
I ache for your delights!

WANDERING SOUL

I have always been nurtured by the forest
As a hawk or a stream or an elf of the night;
As ivy, I clung to the ruins,
I stirred as a mist in the ground.
And when the forest wind's tinkling sound
Came through the colored clearing's radiance:
It was I who rang together all the slopes and heights
For a Sunday dance.
And when a beetle with a greenish glow
Flew over the late stick figure:
It was me, I burned a little light for the night, the damp one,
A little light in the grass and dew.

So I was enchanted and have been alive for a long time!
Now I sing it all in human sound...

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

In the village on Sunday afternoons
The songs and humming of one's own heart beat.

In the village on Sunday afternoons
The fields and hedgerows bloom in delicate tones.

Even to the neighbor in the shade there
God's word speaks from the silent Bible.

And the old man, who surveys his land,
Hears melodiously growing clover and cabbage.

For on all the melodies of growth
The echo of holy bells trembles...

FAITH

Like a flower on a mild night,
Fed by the moon, watered by dew,
I grow up from your soil
To that which has sunk me here.

Thy storms are past, thy rain is gone,
Thy vernal air doth woo, thy moonlit night doth dew
Do with me as thou wilt:
Thou art my gardener, I thy herb!

THE CREATING LIGHT

1.

You unfathomable radiance!
You unfathomable sea!
Oh spring, cast waves of bliss
Over the wanderer!

The light of the east and the steaming
The hawthorn in the dewy hedge,
The breaking and the roaring of the brooks
How do I sing such a sparkling day?

Listen, in the heavens hang
Enough singing larks!
I will make you drink,
O spring day, little by little.

2.

All the round pink blossoms
That burst from peach trees;
All the invisible larks
That sing on white clouds;

All the flowers that light like little flames
on the meadow ignite;
Those children who at the edge of the forest
laugh on Sunday mornings

Oh, and the beating of the heart:
Everything stretches upwards towards the day!
Everything that has breath becomes a poem:
A hymn of praise to the creative light!

3.

Have you also experienced it?
Often trembles from blossoms and herbs
A homesick, sweet saying,
As if it were a ghostly sound.

And sometimes, after thunderstorms,
There stands, in the evening glow, On the crystal clouds, An unknown land.

And if your hill is high enough, The wind's whispering train Bears a ghostly, delicate singing, As if the late red were sounding.

Do you know the sound so homesick and soft?
It is a greeting from the realm of the soul!
From there God has sent us,
That we may reveal words of light to the dark edge of the earth!

Have you also experienced it?

In the future, when an overview of the development of spiritual life is made, Friedrich Lienhard will always be counted among those poets who know how to bring into the world of outer, physical reality the sounds of spiritual life, the sounds of yet another world.

Friedrich Lienhard is a poet of whom we must say, especially in our present time, when so much that is untrue, inauthentic, and fantastic is mixed in art and poetry, that he is genuine and true as an artist, as a poet, and as a human being to the very bottom of his soul. And when all the tendencies that, in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, one might say tended towards all possible “isms” as a kind of accompaniment to materialistic tendencies in the artistic and aesthetic fields, have disappeared, only then will it be felt that the spiritual life in poets like Friedrich Lienhard shows the ideal goals in the world. One will feel that his poetry does not see art in the fact that one will see in it external images that have been viewed with the senses and simply placed in some poetic guise or other or expressed in some artistically formed words or forms, but that one will see the artistic, the poetic in it, that the invisible, mysterious world that physical world is truly enchanted everywhere, that this invisible, mysterious world, which man weaves out of the interaction of all world harmonies for the human gaze, and which is like a breath cast over the sensual reality, may be evoked from its enchantment, and that one may try to penetrate the message of poetic creation and poetry.

Thus, Friedrich Lienhard faces the world, humanity, and the entire universe not only as an artist, not only as a poet, but, more than that, as a seeker, as someone who interwoven with the riddles of human existence, of world existence, and who is able to tune his poetic power by feeling these riddles of the world, these riddles of humanity.

When we listen to the older of his poems, we feel how this human mind lives with all that lives and moves in nature itself, how the joys, the elemental joys of this human heart are released from the processes of nature, as if the spirits of nature itself in this human heart, and we hear the strange weaving of the elemental beings of nature in Friedrich Lienhard's poetic work, and that, in turn, is what in his poetry goes beyond the often dull and narrow of his contemporaneity, and out of which he had to grow.

On the other hand, the intimate, sincere, deep feeling for nature and the interweaving with all the intricacies of human life and what is produced in the individual human mind, on the one hand, longing, joyful elation, and on the other, brings pain and deep suffering, all this is caused by Friedrich Lienhard's poems, so that we cannot understand them if we grasp them individually as human beings, but grasp them as developing out of a people and a spirit of our newer development.

It is very peculiar when you have an ability to really feel your way into Friedrich Lienhard's poetry, especially at the point where the poem begins to take on its deeper traits and characteristics, but where people's souls often do not want to go. If you have the ability to empathize with and follow such things, you will find that the unique nature of Friedrich Lienhard's work truly poetically lives and weaves its own language, removed from the world, which demands its own answer, I would say, in the great existence of the world, which satisfies it in order to allow the living weaving and essence of all nature to live on in its own. Then we find, as in swinging waves, how with wings of being and of higher life, what creates and works in nature lives on, and makes us feel how elemental spirits of magic obtain being through what Friedrich Lienhard says, through what lives in the universe and wants to enter into poetic creation because it cannot fully live in creating nature. Thus we see how in Lienhard's language there is something like a higher natural tone, and how the weaving of alliteration lives quite naturally into Friedrich Lienhard's linguistic work. If we try to listen and fathom that which can truly show us how the heart finds expression in the tones of the words, we will see how nature still weaves into the shining light, into the air that produces sound, how forces and beings turn to the existence of nature that cannot be seen except by the artist's eye, cannot be felt except by the artist's heart and mind. Souls like Friedrich Lienhard's often appear to us as if the divine All-Mother of existence had saved up what was left of her surplus of creative power and what she could not use up to create the natural kingdoms, in order to express in a very special way in individual human individuals what she cannot say herself from within her own creatures.

And then we feel very deeply what Goethe wanted to say when he spoke of human creativity as a nature above nature, as a nature in which spiritual devotion and spiritual elevation are summarized in that which is otherwise spread out in the wide realms of natural existence.

Friedrich Lienhard became a seeker in this sense, carried by the mysterious forces that create and invigorate him, and so he surrendered to those moods of nature in which what what works and what is in nature, in order to feel what plays from human heart to human heart and what leads to the great universe and to what the poet is called to depict in a picture.

Thus we see how Friedrich Lienhard, as a seeker, is always growing and developing, how he is not like someone who simply presents himself to the world to say what is currently moving his heart, his individual human soul, but how grown with human becoming and weaving, which does not merely want to live as a single egoity, but wants to be like an exponent, like an effect of what lives in the vastness of the human soul, in the soul of a people, in the soul of an age.

After Friedrich Lienhard had reached a certain level of maturity, he immersed himself in what the more recent spiritual development has brought in so many different ways, and expressed in his own way how he began to study Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Jean Paul, Novalis in order to understand the other newer spiritual greats more closely, to understand them more deeply, to live with them more intimately. He described the paths he had taken in his very remarkable hermit journal, which nevertheless, as a hermit journal, was able to speak to the outside world about his “paths to Weimar”.

He had wandered the paths to Weimar, those paths to Weimar that are the present paths of humanity's newer nature wanderings, the paths of humanity today that can be found in our state of development, those paths on which Goethe sought the connection with the worlds of heaven and of the soul, those paths that Herder fathomed in order to find how human becoming is connected with cosmic evolution and with historical evolution. Those paths to Weimar through which humanity can sympathize with those from whom joy has receded, those paths to Weimar of which Goethe speaks, that they expand into a cosmic, into a world-feeling, those paths through which the human soul in all its intimacy can feel so connected with the nature of the universe, where the soul is able to feel with joy, feel with suffering, feel with the divine on the other side, that human nature is able to feel the divine in the harmonies of heaven, that it is able to bring a weeping eye on the one hand, a cheerful eye on the other. It was along these paths that Friedrich Lienhard sought to follow in Noyalis' footsteps. He wanted to find a way into the supersensible worlds with a groping human sense, the way that one must go if one still wants to find the human souls that have left their earthly bodies. It was along these paths that Friedrich Lienhard followed Goethe, who had preceded him, in loyal allegiance, on which the human soul is healed of all spiritual egoism, of all spiritual individualism, because it can allow itself to be absorbed by humanity's striving toward the All, those paths on which it is healed of egoism, of obstinacy. And so he found the way, alongside those who have striven for the healing and maturing of humanity, to empathize with Goethe, Schiller, to empathize with Novalis and the others.

That is what Friedrich Lienhard strove for on his journeys to Weimar, and then he added what he had found in the way of intellectual and spiritual development and feeling, and he brought into his art what he himself had striven for as the highest. Thus Friedrich Lienhard did not develop in isolation but in relationship to others, and now we have the great joy, at the time when Friedrich Lienhard's rich striving culminates in his fifty-first year, to see in our midst someone who strives for the spiritual heights of humanity, and we can have a great joy that he is in our midst, a joy that can be great because we not only want to develop a selfish spiritual life for each individual soul, but because, if we want to develop a healthy spiritual life, we have to draw threads to all that lives and strives in the world in a spiritual way.

Friedrich Lienhard has found a way to walk with the elemental spirits that rush through the leaves with the wind, that trickle with the water, that flicker in the light. He has found a way to walk with these elemental spirits of nature so that his words become boats that carry these elemental magical spirits human activity and human creativity – Friedrich Lienhard also found the way to build even larger boats that are able to take on and guide the other spirits, through which those who have gone to Weimar have sought the way from the individual soul to the collective soul of humanity.

Just as Friedrich Lienhard wandered on these two paths, he now also wanders the long spiritual path that we ourselves seek with our weak powers. With strong longings, he tried to penetrate not only the individual soul of this strange, hermit-like, spiritually gifted pastor from Alsace with his novel 'Oberlin', but with this novel he also tried to penetrate the entire cultural-historical fabric of time, within which Oberlin, the seer, the lonely seer from Alsace, stands.

Thus Friedrich Lienhard also came to be a poet like those who, like Hamerling and other similar poets, try to depict the secrets of humanity itself from the historical life and development of humanity, to find the riddles of life. It is highly appealing to see how the human life and essence of the entire age grows out of the portrayal in Friedrich Lienhard's beautiful novel Oberlin. In his later historical works, Friedrich Lienhard tried to go further, depicting how man today combines spirit and nature, how he can try to travel the pilgrimage of life with his soul. Friedrich Lienhard has truly grown into the spirit-filled work and activity, and how close he is to our striving will be shown to you in the recitation of the poems, which, I would say, are truly the substance of our soul and which we will hear.

In poems such as “Christ on Tabor” or “Temple of Fulfilment”, Friedrich Lienhard has found the most intimate connection with the spiritual feeling that we are seeking. When one can see that more and more the time is approaching in which a spiritual creator will show whether he is grasped by the spiritual calls that will sound in the future by the fact that he shows himself to be equal to a real real respect for the world's only, humanity's only form of Christ, if one may say this, then one may also say: Friedrich Lienhard has found his way to such forms of his poetry, thinking and creating that can stand understandingly in relation to humanity's only, the world's only form of Christ Jesus. Thus he belongs not only to the present, but, as one of the beginnings, to the future that we long for, that man must long for, who understands his time in the present.

In the poem “Temple of Fulfilment”, which we will hear later, Friedrich Lienhard shows us how what is in the symbol before him is also in our mind's eye in the symbol, in that symbol that is to express to us how the hearts, minds and spirits of humanity can grow into that future which must overcome materialism for the reason that Ahriman must be bound again for the salvation of the world, for the salvation of the world. We want to remember this above all at the time when our dear friend Friedrich Lienhard turns fifty, that he has known how to connect those who can follow the calls for the future of humanity, who have recognized, as one must recognize, that everything must be abandoned from the structure of human development and that only that which strives for the fruits of the spirit, the spiritual seeds that are sown today for the future, can remain.

So let us be among those for whom the fiftieth birthday of Friedrich Lienhard is a beautiful celebration, a celebration that they want to celebrate lovingly in their hearts, in their minds, a celebration at which we want to indulge in the thought that Friedrich Lienhard not only belongs to us for our joy, but belongs to those who want to work on the great 'building of the temple of spiritual human development'. We want to strengthen and invigorate our love for our friend, we want to strengthen and invigorate our understanding of his very unique way of thinking and being. Many of you, my dear friends, know him; he has been here and in other places among us. You know him, the remarkable man who walks among other people as if his eyes were looking into a world from which a piece of what the eyes usually look at with interest and attention disappears, as if he does not see many things, but instead sees other things that those around him do not see. And so, I would say, he seems pure in his outward walk like a dreamer of a world that others around him only become aware of when they sense it in his soul, in his mind, when they stand opposite his pensive head. He appears as a personality who feels much that others cannot feel, who is unworldly in many respects because he seeks kinship with a world that can only be known by becoming estranged from much of what is so familiar to many other people.

Indeed, when one feels, I would say discreetly, the peculiar characteristic of this personality, then the most intimate love for his whole being mixes with the veneration of his beautiful, his highness-filled work, and then we also learn to relate to him in the right way. Today, as we look forward to the fiftieth year of his life, we want to harbor and cultivate these thoughts within us, so that they can become beautiful wishes, strong wishes that Friedrich Lienhard may be granted to create much, much more in the rising, further epoch of life, in the higher, mature epoch from the deep source of his spirit-filled, nature-loving, humanity-loving, humanity-friendly creativity and work. And let us say it with the deepest satisfaction, a word in reference to him fills us with joy, fills us with satisfaction, but also fills us with a certain trust in our own cause, a word spoken in reference to him: Let us rejoice, for he is ours!

Recitation by Marie Steiner from “Lichtland” by Friedrich Lienhard

TEMPLE OF FULFILLMENT

The blue dome arches up to the red wall;
And in the blue are stars wrought in gold.
Twelve masters stand in the round columned hall
And turn their gaze of power from afar
thirteenth, who stands before the altar gray
In the silver robe of the leader
And collects twelve-fold strength in prayer.

So the sun runs through the signs of the zodiac
And receives twelve special powers,
Then sends them out into the world;
So power exchanges with power at all ends
Of the cosmos and the small human life;
And no least one shines and works in vain
The sun's goal can be reached by every star.

Everyone for everyone - and everyone for everyone!
This wonderful hall is rhythmic:
Because each of these gently curved arches
Is drawn over every master's head,
The marble remains beneath it;
The room is filled with a fine, breathing wave
Of clarified soul forces, strong and delicate.

Whoever enters this solar temple
Is marked by the double seven
of the symbolic columns that surround the hall
with symmetry all around;
Like a dove, he senses above him the white dome window's round shape floating:
And the holy ray falls on the altar.

Only what is sensed may be formed here,
fulfillment dwells in this building's curve;
the yearning for the distance calms down in peace,
and the earthly wound heals.
Escaped from base, nocturnal forces,
the consecrated one sees the place as destined
for his heavenly recovery.

And he beholds the archetypal form of all things,
The world's confused play becomes harmony;
The blood of the cross presents itself as roses,
On which the crystal-clear light from above
Falls as a sound, the sound of the melody of the spheres,
Which fills this high space with beauty
And every hard edge softly envelops...

You have been drawn to this temple for a long time,
You long to look inside and pray.
But you still turn to the rose beds
Along the yew wall of the outer world
And are not freed from what sounds outside
And that temple's existence booms –
When you have matured, you will enter it.

CHRIST ON TABOR

Beyond the tribulation,
Sparkling with the power of grace,
You stand, solar figure,
And the transitory suffering there is transformed
Into a golden light.

So you are beyond

And yet attainable:
Because we,
As often as we rise from the waters of affliction
As you would rise—
Surrounded by the sun, we stand with you,
Clad in gold, transformed into light.

Behold, you once stood like this,
When you walked in the garments of the earth,
Casting forth the radiance of future glory,
Great upon Tabor.
In dialogue with you were
The exalted masters of primeval times:
Elijah and Moses.
But beneath you, in shadow and darkness, The sparkling God-man!
Stepped out of the covers and stood,
Stood like a pillar of sacrificial flame
Tall on the nocturnal Tabor!

Then those approached, sparkling like you,
The great ones of the past,
Stepped out of the veiling light clouds,
took shape and stood in splendor
on the summit of Tabor.
And they exchanged radiant speech with you,
greeted you from the blessed ones,
filled the rapt disciples with flaming power
and withdrew again
into the mysterious moonlit night.

But you, Master, and your disciples
Silent, radiant; knowing smiles
On faces glowing in the light,
You walked back down to the dark people.

In close connection with what I had to bring before you in the lectures given at our Christmas Foundation Meeting, I should like, in the lectures that are now to be given, to speak further of the movement that is leading us in modern times to research into the life of the spirit. I refer to the movement spoken of under the name of Rosicrucianism or some other occult designation, and I should like to take this opportunity of giving you a picture of it in its inner aspect and nature. It will be necessary first of all to say something, by way of introduction, about the whole manner of forming ideas which had become customary round about the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries A.D., and which only very gradually disappeared; for it is even to be found here and there among stragglers, as it were as late as the nineteenth century. I do not want today to deal with the matter from a historical point of view, but rather to place before your mind's eye conceptions and ideas that you are to think of as inwardly experienced by certain people belonging to these centuries. In point of fact it is not generally realised that we have only to go back a comparatively short time in history, to find that the men who were accounted to be scholars were possessed of a world of ideas altogether different from our own.

In these days we speak of chemical substances, we enumerate seventy or eighty chemical elements; but we have no idea how very little we are saying when we name one substance as oxygen, another as nitrogen, and so on. Oxygen, for instance, is something that is present only under certain well-defined conditions—conditions of warmth, e.g., and other circumstances of earthly life, and it is impossible for a reasonable person to unite a conception of reality with something that, when the temperature is raised by so and so many degrees, is no longer present in the same measure or manner as it is under the conditions that obtain for man's physical life on Earth. It was the realisation of facts like this that underlay research during the early and middle part of the Middle Ages; the life of research of those times set out to get beyond the relative in existence, to arrive at true existence.

I have marked a transition as between the ninth and tenth centuries A.D., because before this time man's perceptions were still altogether spiritual. It would never, for example, have occurred to a scholar of the ninth century to imagine Angels, Archangels, or Seraphim as falling short in respect of reality—purely in respect of reality—of the physical men he saw with his eyes. You will find that before the tenth century, scholars always speak of the spiritual Beings, the so-called Intelligences of the Cosmos, as of beings one actually meets in life. The people of that time were of course well aware that the day was long past when such vision had been common human experience, but they knew that in certain circumstances the meeting could still take place. We must not, for instance, overlook the fact that on into the ninth and tenth centuries countless priests of the Catholic Church were quite conscious of how, in the course of their celebration of the Mass, it happened that in this or that enactment they met spiritual Beings, the Intelligences of the Cosmos. With the ninth and tenth centuries, however, the direct and immediate connection with the Intelligences of the Universe began to disappear from men's consciousness; and there began to light up, in its place, the consciousness of the Elements of the Cosmos, the earthy, the fluid or watery, the airy, the warm or fiery. And so it came about that just as hitherto men had spoken of Cosmic Intelligences that rule the movements of the planets, that lead the planets across the constellations of the fixed stars, and so forth, now they spoke instead of the immediate environment of the Earth. They spoke of the elements of earth, water, air, fire. Of chemical substances, in the modern sense of the word, they did not as yet take account. That came much later. It would, however, be a great mistake to imagine that the scholars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—even in a sense, the scholars of the eighteenth century—had ideas of warmth, air, water, earth, that resembled the ideas men have today. Warmth is spoken of today merely as a condition in which bodies exist. No one speaks any longer of actual warmth-ether. Air, water—these have likewise become for the modern man completely abstract. It is time we studied these ideas and learned to enter into a true understanding of them. And so today I should like to give you a picture, showing you how a scholar of those times would speak to his pupils.

When I wrote my Outline of Occult Science I was obliged to make the account of the evolution of the Earth accord at any rate a little with the prevailing ideas of the present day. In the thirteenth and twelfth centuries one would have been able to give the account quite differently. The following might then have been found in a certain chapter, e.g., of Outline of Occult Science. An idea would have been called up, to begin with, of the Beings who may be designated as the Beings of the First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. The Seraphim would have been characterised as Beings with whom there is no subject and object, with whom subject and object are one and the same, Beings who would not say: Outside me are things—but: The world is, and I am the World, and the World is I. Such Beings know only of themselves, and this knowledge of themselves is for them an inner experience of which man has a weak reflection when he has the experience of being filled, shall we say, with a glowing enthusiasm. It is, you know, quite difficult to make the man of today understand what is meant by “glowing enthusiasm.” Even in the beginning of the nineteenth century men knew better what it is than they do today. In those days it could still happen that some poem or other was being read aloud and the people were so filled with enthusiasm—forgive me, but it really was so—that present-day man would say they had all gone out of their minds. They were so moved, so warmed! Today people freeze up just when you expect them to be “enthused.” Now it was lifting this element of enthusiasm, this rapture of the soul that came naturally especially to the men of Middle and Eastern Europe—it was by lifting it into consciousness, by making it alone the complete content of consciousness, that men came to form an idea of the inner life of the Seraphim. Again as a bright, clear element in consciousness, full of light, so that thought turns directly into light, illuminating everything—such an idea did men form of the element of consciousness of the Cherubim. And the element of consciousness of the Thrones was conceived as sustaining, bearing the worlds in Grace.

There you have one such sketch. I could go on speaking of it for a long time. For the moment I only wanted to show you that in those days one would have tried to describe the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones in the true qualities of their being.

And then one would have gone on to say: the Choir of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones works together, in such wise that the Thrones found and establish a kernel; the Cherubim let their own light-filled being stream forth from this centre or kernel; and the Seraphim enwrap the whole in a mantle of warmth and enthusiasm that rays far out into cosmic space. [Footnote: Drawings were made on the blackboard, with coloured chalks.]

All the drawing I have made is Beings: in the midst the Thrones; in the circumference around them the Cherubim; and, outermost of all, the Seraphim. All is essential Being, Beings who move and weave into one another, do, think, will, feel in one another. All is of the very essence of Being. And now, if a being having the right sensitiveness were to take its path through the space where the Thrones have in this manner established a kernel and centre, where the Cherubim have made a kind of circling around it and the Seraphim have, as it were, enclosed the whole—if a being with the required sensitiveness were to come into this realm of the activity of the First Hierarchy, it would feel warmth in varying differentiations—here greater warmth, there less; but it would all be an experience of soul, and yet at the same time physical experience in the senses; that is to say, when the being felt itself warm in soul, the feeling would be actually the feeling you have when you are in a well-warmed room.

Such a united building-up by Beings of the First Hierarchy did verily once take place in the Universe; it formed what we call the Saturn existence. The warmth is merely the expression of the fact that the Beings are there. The warmth is nothing more than the expression of the fact that the Beings are there.

A picture will perhaps make clearer to you what I mean. Let us suppose you have an affection for a certain human being. You feel his presence gives you warmth. But now someone comes along who is frightfully abstract and says: “The person himself doesn't interest me, I will imagine him absent; the warmth he sheds around him, that alone is what interests me.” Or suppose he doesn't even say “The warmth he sheds around him is all that interests me.” Suppose he says: “The warmth is all that interests me.” He talks nonsense, of course, you will see that at once; for if the man is not there who sheds the warmth, then the warmth is not there either. The warmth is in any case only there when the man is there. In itself it is nothing. The man must be there, if the warmth is to be there. Even so must Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones be there; if the Beings are not there, neither is the warmth. The warmth is merely the revelation of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Now in the time of which I speak, everything was exactly as I have described it. Men spoke of Elements. They spoke of the Element of Warmth, and by the Element of Warmth they understood Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones—and that is the Saturn existence.

The description went further. It was said: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—these alone have the power to bring forth something of the nature of Saturn, to place it into the Cosmos. The highest Hierarchy alone is capable of placing such an existence into the Cosmos. But when this highest Hierarchy had once placed it there and a new world-becoming had taken its start, then the evolution could go on further. The Sun, as it were, that is formed of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones could carry evolution further. And it came to pass in the following manner. Beings of the Second Hierarchy, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai, Beings that had been generated by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, press into the space that has been formed through the working of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, that has been fashioned to Saturn warmth. Thither entered younger, cosmically younger Beings. And how did these cosmically younger Beings work? Whereas the Cherubim, Seraphim and Thrones reveal themselves in the Element of Warmth, the Beings of the second Hierarchy form themselves in the Element of Light. Saturn is dark; it gives warmth. And now within the dark world of the Saturn existence arises that which can arise through the working of the Sons of the First Hierarchy, through Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

What is it that is able now to arise within the Saturn warmth? The penetration of the Second Hierarchy signifies an inner illumination. The Saturn Warmth is inwardly shone through with light and at the same time it becomes denser. Instead of only the Warmth Element there is now also Air. And in the revelation of Light we have the entry of the Second Hierarchy.

You must clearly understand that it is in very deed and truth Beings who thus press their way into the Saturn existence. One who had the requisite power of perception would see the event as a penetration of Light; it is Light that reveals the path of the Beings. And wherever Light occurs, there occurs too, under certain conditions, shadow, darkness, dark shadow. Through the Penetration by the Second Hierarchy in the form of Light, shadow also comes to pass. What is shadow? It is Air. And indeed until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries men knew what Air is. Today men know only that air consists of oxygen, nitrogen and so forth. When that is said, it is very much as if someone were to say about a watch that it consisted of glass and silver. He would be saying nothing at all about the watch. And nothing at all is said about Air as a cosmic phenomenon when we say that it consists of oxygen and nitrogen. We say very much, on the other hand, if we know: Air comes forth from the Cosmos as the shadow of Light. In actual fact we have, with the entry of the second Hierarchy into the Saturn warmth, the entry of Light and we have too the shadow of Light, Air. And when we have this we have Sun. Such is the way one would have had to speak in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries.

And what follows after this? The further evolution comes about through the working of the Sons of the Second Hierarchy—Archai, Archangels, Angels. The Second Hierarchy have accomplished the entry of the Element of Light, Light that has drawn after it its shadow, the darkness of Air—not the indifferent, neutral darkness that belongs to Saturn, the darkness that is simply absence of Light, but the darkness that is wrought out as the antithesis of Light. And now to this Element of Light the Third Hierarchy—Archai, Archangels, Angels—add through their own nature and being a new Element, an Element that is like our human desire, like our impulse to strive after something, to long for something. Thereby the following comes to pass.

Let us suppose an Archai or Archangel Being enters, and comes upon an Element of Light, encounters, as it were, a place of Light. In this place of Light the Being receives, through its receptivity for the Light, the urge, the desire for darkness. The Angel Being bears Light into darkness—or an Angel Being bears darkness into Light. These Beings are mediators, messengers between Light and Darkness. It follows from this that what previously has only shone in Light and drawn after it its shadow, the darkness of Air, begins now to shine in colour, to glow in a play of colour. Light begins to appear in darkness, darkness in light. The Third Hierarchy create colour out of light and darkness.

Here we may find a connection with something that is historical, with something that is to be found in written document. For in the time of Aristotle men still knew, when they contemplated in the Mysteries, whence colours come; they knew that the Beings of the Third Hierarchy have to do with colour. Therefore Aristotle, in his colour harmony, showed that colour signifies a working together of Light and Darkness. But this spiritual element in man's thought, whereby he knew that behind Warmth he has to see Beings of the First Hierarchy, behind Light and its shadow Darkness, Beings of the Second Hierarchy, and behind the iridescent play of Colour he has to see in a great cosmic harmony, Beings of the Third Hierarchy—this spiritual element in man's thought has been lost. And nothing is left for man today but the unhappy Newtonian Theory of Colour. The Initiates continued to smile at Newton's theory till the eighteenth century, but in that time it became an article of faith for professional physicists.

One must indeed have lost all knowledge of the spiritual world when one can speak in the sense of Newton's Theory of Colour. If one is still inwardly stimulated by the spiritual world, as was the case with Goethe, then one resists it. One places before men the truth of the matter, as Goethe did, and attacks with might and main. For Goethe never censured so hardly as when he had to censure Newton, he went for him and his theory hammer and tongs! Such a thing is incomprehensible nowadays, for the simple reason that in our time anyone who does not recognise the Newtonian Theory of Colour is a fool in the eyes of the physicists. But things were different in Goethe's time. He did not stand alone. True, he stood alone as one who spoke openly on the matter; but there were others who really knew, even as late as the end of the eighteenth century, whence colour comes, who knew with absolute certainty how colour wells up from within the Spiritual.

But now we must go further. We have seen that Air is the shadow of Light. And as, when Light arises, under certain conditions we find the dark shadow, so when colour is present and works as a reality—and it can do so, for when it penetrates into the Air-element, it flames up in this Air, works in it, in a word is something, is no mere reflection but a reality flashing and sparkling in the Air-element—when this is so, then under certain conditions we get pressure, counter-pressure, and out of the real Colour there comes into being the fluid, the Element of Water. As, for cosmic thinking, the shadow of Light is Air, so is Water the reflection, the creation of Colour in the Cosmos.

You will say: No, that I cannot understand! But try for once really to grasp Colour in its true meaning. Red—surely you do not think that red is, in its essence, the neutral surface it is generally regarded as being? Red is something that makes an attack upon you.—I have often spoken of this.—You want to run away from red; it thrusts you back. Blue-violet, on the other hand, you want to run after! It runs away from you all the time; it grows deeper and ever deeper. Everything is contained in the colours. The colours are a world, and the soul element in the world of colour simply cannot exist without movement; we ourselves, if we follow the colours with soul-experience, must follow with movement.

People gaze open-eyed at the rainbow. [Footnote: A sketch of a rainbow was made on the blackboard with chalks of the colours as seen in the sky: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet.] But if you look at the rainbow with a little imagination, you may see there elemental Beings. These elemental Beings are full of activity and demonstrate it in a very remarkable manner. Here (at yellow) you see some of them streaming forth from the rainbow, continually coming away out of it. They move across and the moment they reach the lower end of the green they are drawn to it again. You see them disappear at this point (green). On the other side they come out again. To one who views it with imagination, the whole rainbow manifests a streaming out of spirit and a disappearing of it again within. It is like a spiritual dance, in very deed a spiritual waltz, wonderful to behold. And you may observe too how these spiritual Beings come forth from the rainbow with terrible fear, and how they go in with invincible courage. When you look at the red-yellow, you see fear streaming out, and when you look at the blue-violet you have the feeling: there all is courage and bravery of heart.

Now picture to yourselves: There before me is no mere rainbow! Beings are coming out of it and disappearing into it—here anxiety and fear, there courage ... And now, here the rainbow receives a certain thickness and you will be able to imagine how this gives rise to the element of Water. In this watery element spiritual Beings live, Beings that are actually a kind of copy of the Beings of the Third Hierarchy.

There is no doubt about it: if we want to get near the men of real knowledge in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we must understand these things. Indeed we cannot even understand the men of still later times, we cannot understand Albertus Magnus, if we read him with the knowledge we have today. We must read him with a manner of knowledge that takes account of the fact that spiritual things like these were still a reality for him: only then shall we understand how he expresses himself, how he uses his words.

Thus we have, as a reflection of the Hierarchies, first Air and then Water. The Hierarchies themselves dive in, as it were—the second Hierarchy in the form of Light, the third Hierarchy in the form of Colour. And with this latter event the Moon existence is attained.

And now we come to the Fourth Hierarchy. (I am telling it, you remember, as it was thought of in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.) We today do not speak of the Fourth Hierarchy; but men still spoke in that way in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What is this Fourth Hierarchy? It is Man. Man himself is the fourth Hierarchy. But by the Fourth Hierarchy was not meant the two-legged being that goes about the world today, ageing year by year! To the true man of knowledge of those times, present-day man would have appeared as something very strange. No, in those times they spoke of original Man, of Man before the Fall, who still bore a form that gave him power over the Earth, even as the Angels and Archangels and Archai had power over the Moon existence, the second Hierarchy over the Sun existence and the first Hierarchy over the Saturn existence. They spoke of Man in his original Earthly existence and then they were right to speak of him as the Fourth Hierarchy. And with this Fourth Hierarchy came—as a gift it is true, of the higher Hierarchies, but the higher Hierarchies have held it only as a possession they did not themselves use but guarded and kept—with the Fourth Hierarchy came Life. Into the world of Colour, into the iridescent world of changing colour, of which I have only been able to give you the merest hints and suggestions, came Life.

You will say: Then did nothing live before this time? My dear friends, you can understand how it is from the human being himself. Your Ego and your astral body have not life, and yet they exist, they have being. That which is of the soul and the spirit does not need life. Life begins only with your etheric body. And the etheric body is something external, it is of the nature of a sheath. Thus only after the Moon existence and with the Earth existence does Life enter into the domain of that evolution to which our Earth belongs. The world of moving, glancing colour is quickened to life. And now not only do Angels and Archangels and Archai experience a longing desire to carry Darkness into Light, and Light into Darkness, thereby calling forth the play of colour in the planet; now a desire becomes manifest to experience this play of colour as something inward, to feel it all inwardly; when Darkness dominates Light, to feel weakness, laziness; when Light dominates Darkness, to feel activity. For what is happening really, when you run? When you run, Light predominates over Darkness in you; when you sit and are lazy and indolent, then Darkness predominates over Light. It is a play of Colour, an activity of Colour, not physical, but of the soul. Colour permeated with Life, in its iridescence streamed-through with Life—that is what appeared with the coming of the Fourth Hierarchy, Man. And in this moment of cosmic becoming, the forces that became active in the play of colour began to build contours, began to fashion forms. Life, as it rounded off and moulded the colours, called into being the hard, fast form of the crystal. And we have come into Earth existence.

Such things as I have been describing to you were fundamental truths for the mediaeval alchemists and occultists, Rosicrucians and others, who flourished—though history tells us little of them—from the ninth and tenth on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and of whom stragglers are to be found as late as the eighteenth and even the beginning of the nineteenth century—always however in these later times regarded as strange and eccentric people. Only with the entry of the nineteenth century did this knowledge become entirely hidden. Only then did men come to acquire a conception of the world that led them to a point of view which I will indicate in the following way. Imagine, my dear friends, that here we have a man. Suppose I cease to have any interest in this man, but I take his clothes and hang them on a coat-hanger that has a knob here above like a head. From now on I take no further interest in the man and I tell myself: There is the man! What does it matter to me what can be put into these clothes? That, the coat-hanger with the clothes, is the man! This is really what happened with the Elements. It does not interest us any longer that behind Warmth or Fire is the First Hierarchy, behind Light and Air the Second Hierarchy, behind what we call Chemical Ether or Colour Ether and Water the Third Hierarchy, and behind the Life Element and Earth the Fourth Hierarchy, Man.—The peg, the hanger and on it the clothes.—That is all!

There you have the first Act of the drama. The second Act begins with Kant! One has there the hanger and the clothes hanging on it, and one begins to philosophise in true Kantian fashion as to what the “thing-in-itself” of these clothes may be. And one comes to a realisation that the “thing-in-itself” of the clothes cannot be known. Very clever, very clever indeed! Of course, if you first take away the man and have only the coat-hanger with the clothes, you can philosophise over the clothes, you can make most beautiful speculations! You can either philosophise in Kantian fashion and say: “The ‘thing-in-itself’ cannot be known,” or in the fashion of Helmholtz and think to yourself: “But these clothes, they cannot of themselves have forms; there is nothing really there but tiny, whirling specks of dust, tiny atoms, which hit and strike each other and behold, the clothes are held in their form!”

Yes, my friends, that is the way thought has developed in recent times. It is all abstract, shadowy. And yet we live today in this way of thinking, in this way of speculating; it gives the stamp to our whole natural-scientific outlook. And when we do not admit that we think in this atomistic way, then we do it most of all! For we are very far from admitting that it is quite unnecessary to dream of a whirling dance of atoms, and that what we have rather to do is to put back the man into the clothes. This is however the very thing which the renewal of Spiritual Science must try to do.

I wanted to indicate to you today, in a number of pictures, the nature and manner of thinking in earlier centuries and what is really contained in the older writings, although it has become obscure. The very obscurity, however, has led to incidents that are not without interest. A Norwegian scientist of today has reprinted a passage from the writings of Basilius Valentinus and has interpreted it in terms of modern chemistry. He could not possibly say otherwise than that it is nonsense, because this is what it appears to be if, in the modern sense, one thinks of a chemist standing in a laboratory, making experiments with retorts and other up-to-date apparatus. What Basilius Valentinus really gives in this passage is a fragment of embryology, expressed in pictures. That is what he gives—a fragment of embryology. According to the modern mode of thought it seems to indicate a laboratory experiment, which then proves to be nonsense. For you will not expect to reproduce the real processes of embryology in a retort—unless you be like the mediaevally minded Wagner of Goethe's Faust.

It is time that these things were understood. And in connection with the great truths of which I was able to speak during the Christmas Foundation Meeting, I shall have more to say concerning the spiritual life and its history during the last few centuries.

When we study human life on earth, we see it proceed in a kind of rhythm expressed in the alternating states of waking and sleeping. It is from this point of view that one must consider what was said in the last lectures about the constitution of man. Let us look, with ordinary consciousness, and in what might be called a purely external way, at the facts before us. In the waking man there is, first, the inner course of his vital processes; but these remain subconscious or unconscious. There is also what we know as sense impressions—that relation to our earthly and cosmic environments which is mediated by the senses. Further, there is the expression of the will—the ability to move as an expression of impulses of will.

Now, when we study man with ordinary cognition we find that the inner life-process, which runs its course in the subconsciousness, continues during sleep; sense activity and the thinking based upon it are, however, suppressed. The expression of the will is also suppressed; likewise the active life of feeling that connects willing and thinking, standing between them to a certain extent.

Now if we simply study, in an unbiased way and without succumbing to preconceived opinions, what we have just found by ordinary consciousness, we are led to say: The processes described as psychical, and the processes taking place between the psychical and the external world, cease in sleep. At most we can say that the dream life finds expression when man sleeps. But we must certainly not assume that these psychical processes are created anew—out of nothing, as it were—every time we wake. This would doubtless be a quite absurd thought, even for ordinary consciousness. On unbiased consideration we must assume that the vehicle of man's psychical processes is also present in sleep. We must admit, however, that this vehicle does not act on man during sleep, i.e. that which evokes in man's senses a consciousness of the external world, and stimulates this consciousness to think, does not act on man in sleep. Moreover, that which sets the body in motion from out of the will is also absent; likewise, what evokes feeling from the organic processes, is not there.

During waking life we are aware that our thoughts act upon our bodily organism. But, with ordinary consciousness, we cannot see how a thought or idea streams down, as it were, into the muscular and bony systems so that the will is involved. Nevertheless, we are aware of this action of our psychic impulses upon our body, and have to recognise that it ceases while we sleep.

Thus even external considerations show us that sleep takes something from man. The only question is, what? If, to begin with, we look at what we have designated man's physical body, we see that it is continually active, in sleep as in the waking state. Moreover, all the processes we described as belonging to the etheric organism continue during sleep. In sleep man grows, he carries on the inner activities of digestion and metabolism, he continues to breathe, etc. All these activities cannot belong to the physical body as such, for they cease when it becomes a corpse. It is then taken over by external, earthly Nature and destroyed. But these destructive forces do not overpower man in sleep; therefore there are counter-forces present, opposing the disintegration of his physical body. Thus we may conclude, from mere external considerations, that the etheric organism is also present during sleep.

Now we know from the preceding lectures that this etheric organism can become an object of knowledge through ‘imagination’; one can experience it ‘in a picture’, just as one experiences the physical body through sense impressions. And we know too that what may be called the astral organism is experienced through ‘inspiration’.

We will now go further—Of course, we could go on drawing conclusions in the above way. But, in the case of the astral body and ego-organisation, we prefer first to study how they actually appear to higher consciousness.

Let us recall how we had to describe the activity of the astral body in man. We saw that it works through the medium of what is airy, or gaseous, in the human organism. Thus we must recognise, to begin with, the astral body in all the activities of the airy element in man.

Now we know that the first and most essential activity of the astral body within the airy element is breathing; and we know from ordinary experience that we have to distinguish between breathing in and breathing out. Further, we know that it is the act of breathing in that vitalises us. We deprive the outer air of its life-giving power and return, not a vitalising, but a devitalising element. Physically speaking, we take in oxygen and give off carbonic acid. But we are not so much concerned with this aspect at the moment; it is the fact of ordinary experience that interests us here: we breathe in the vitalising and breathe out the devitalising element.

The higher knowledge which, as discussed in these last few days, is acquired through ‘imagination’, ‘inspiration’, and ‘intuition’, must now be directed to the life of sleep. We must actually investigate whether there is something that confirms the conclusion to which we were led, namely: that something is lifted out of man when he sleeps.

This question can only be answered by putting and answering another. If there is something that is outside man in sleep, how does it behave when outside?

Well, suppose a man, by such soul exercises as I have described, has actually acquired ‘inspiration’, i.e. a content for his emptied consciousness. He is now able to receive ‘inspired’ knowledge. At this stage he can induce the state of sleep artificially; this, however, is no mere sleep but a conscious condition in which the spiritual world flows into him.

I should now like to describe this in quite a crude way. Suppose such a man is able to feel, as it were, in an element of spiritual music, the spiritual beings of the cosmos speaking ‘into’ him. He will then have certain experiences. But he will also say to himself: These experiences which I now have, reveal something very peculiar; through them what I had to assume as outside of man during sleep no longer remains unknown. What now happens can really be made clear by the following comparison.

Suppose you had a certain experience ten years ago. You have forgotten it, but through something or other you are led to remember it. It has been outside your consciousness; but now, after applying sonic aid to memory or the like, you recall it. It is now in your consciousness. You have brought back into your consciousness something that was outside it, though connected with you in some way. It is like that with one who has a more inner consciousness and reaches inspiration. The events of sleep begin to emerge, as memories do in ordinary life. Only, the experiences we recall in memory were once in consciousness; the experiences of sleep, however, were not there before. But they enter consciousness in such a way that we really feel we are remembering something not experienced quite consciously before, at least in this life. They come to us like memories. And, as we formerly learnt to understand and experience through memory, we now begin to understand what happens during sleep. Thus into ‘inspired’ consciousness there simply emerges the experience of what leaves man and remains outside him during sleep, and what was unknown becomes known. We learn to know what it is really doing while he sleeps.

If you were to put into words what you experience with your breath during life, you would say: That I am inwardly permeated with life is owing to the element I breathe in. I cannot owe it to the element I breathe out, for that has the forces of death.

But when, as we saw just now, you are outside your body during sleep, you become extremely partial to the air you breathe out. When awake you did not notice what can be experienced with this exhaled air; you have only heeded the inhaled air which is the vitalising element while you and your soul are within the physical body. But now you have the same—indeed a more exalted—feeling towards the air you so anxiously avoid when you find it accumulated in a room. You express your dislike of the exhaled air. Now the physical body cannot bear it, even in sleep, but your soul and spirit, outside the body, actually breathe in—to put it physically—the carbonic acid you have exhaled. Of course, it is a spiritual, not a physical process; you receive the impression made by your exhaled air. In this exhaled air you remain connected with your physical body. You belong to your body, for you say to yourself: There is my body and it is breathing out this devitalising air. You say this unconsciously. You feel yourself connected with your body through its returning the air in this condition. Youfeel yourself entirely within the air you have exhaled. And this air you breathe out brings you continually the secrets of your inner life. You perceive these, although this perception is, of course, unconscious for the untrained sleeping consciousness. This exhaled air ‘sparkles forth’ from you and its appearance leads you to say: That is I myself, my inner human being, sparkling out into the universe.

And your own spirit, streaming towards you in the exhaled air has a sun-like appearance.

You now know that man's astral body, when within the physical, delights in the inhaled air, using it unconsciously to set the organic processes in action and induce in them inner mobility. But you also realise that the astral body is outside the physical when you sleep and receives, in its feelings, the secrets of your own human being from the exhaled air. While you ray forth towards the cosmos, your soul beholds unconsciously the inner process involved. Only in ‘inspiration’ does this become conscious.

Further, we receive a striking impression. It is as if what confronts the sleeping man stood out against a dark background. There is darkness behind, and against this darkness the exhaled air appears luminous: one can put this in no other way. We recognise its essential nature, inasmuch as our everyday thoughts now leave us and the active, cosmic thoughts—the objective, creative thoughts of the world—appear before us in what is flowing out of ourselves. There is the dark background, and the sparkling radiating light; in the latter the creative thoughts gradually arise. The darkness is a veil covering our ordinary, every day thoughts—brain thoughts, as we might call them. We receive a very clear impression that what we regard as most important for physical, earthly life, is darkened as soon as we leave the physical body. And we realise, much more strongly than we could have believed in ordinary consciousness, the dependence of these thoughts upon their physical instrument—the brain. The brain retains these, by an adhesive force as it were. Out there we need no longer ‘think’ in the sense of everyday life. We behold thoughts; they surge through what appears to us as ourself in the exhaled air.

Thus inspired knowledge perceives how the astral body is in the physical during waking life, initiating, with the help of the inhaled air, the functions it has to perform; how it is outside during sleep and receives the impressions of our own human being. While we are awake the world on which we stand, the world which surrounds us as our earthly environment and the vault of heaven above, form our outer world. When we sleep what is inside our skin, and is otherwise our inner world, becomes our outer world. Only, to begin with, we feel what is here streaming towards us in the exhaled air; it is a felt outer world, that we have at first.

And then something further is experienced. The circulation of the blood, which follows closely the process of respiration and remains unconscious during waking life, begins to be very conscious in sleep. It comes before us like a new world, a world, indeed, that we do not merely feel but begin to understand from another point of view than that from which we understand external things with ordinary consciousness. With ‘inspired’ consciousness—though the will as a life process is present in the unconsciousness of every sleeper—we perceive the circulatory process, just as we perceive external processes of Nature during earthly life. We now come to see that all we do through that will of which we are ordinarily unconscious, involves a counter-process within us.

With every step you transport your body to another place, but something else occurs as well: a warmth-process takes place within you, setting the airy element in motion. This process is the furthest extension of those general processes of metabolism that, like it, occur inwardly and are connected with the circulation of the blood. With ordinary consciousness you observe externally a man's change of place as an expression of his will; but now you look back upon yourself and only find processes occurring within you, and these make up your world.

Truly, what we here behold is not what the theories of present-day science or medicine describe on anatomical grounds. It is a grand spiritual process, a process that conceals innumerable secrets and shows of itself that the real driving power at work within man is not his present ego at all. What man calls his ego in ordinary life is, of course, a mere thought. But it is the ego of man's past lives on earth that is active in him here. In the whole course of these processes, especially of the warmth-processes, you perceive the real ego, working from times long past. Between death and a new birth this ego has undergone an evolution in time; it now works in an entirely spiritual way. You perceive all these metabolic processes, the weakest as well as the most powerful, as the expression of just the highest entity in man.

Moreover, you now perceive that the ego has changed its field of action. It was active within, working upon the breath provided by the mere respiratory process; but now you perceive, from without, the further stages of the warmth-processes that the ego has elaborated from the respiratory processes. You behold the real, active ego of man, working from primeval times and organising him.

You now begin to know that the ego and astral body have actually left the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. They are outside, and now do and experience from without what they otherwise do and experience from within. In ordinary consciousness the ego and astral organisations are still too weak, too little evolved, to experience this consciously. ‘Inspiration’ really only consists in inwardly organising them so that they are able to perceive what is otherwise imperceptible.

Thus we must actually say: Through ‘inspiration’ we come to know the astral body of man, through ‘intuition’, the ego. During sleep, intuition and inspiration are suppressed in the ego and astral body; when they are awakened, man, through them, beholds himself from without. Let us see what this really means.

You remember what I have already said. I spoke of man in his present incarnation (sketch, right centre), and of the etheric body which extends back to a little before birth or conception (yellow); of his astral body which takes him back to the whole period between his last death and his present birth (red); and of ‘intuition’ that takes him back to his previous life on earth (yellow).

Now, to sleep means nothing else than to lead back your consciousness, which is otherwise in the physical body, and to accompany it yourself. Sleep is really a return in time to what I described as past for ordinary consciousness, though nevertheless there. You see, if one really wants to understand the Spiritual,

one must acquire different concepts from those one is accustomed to apply in ordinary life. One must actually realise that every sleep is a return to the regions traversed before birth—or, indeed, to former incarnations. During sleep one actually experiences, though without grasping it, what belongs to one's pre-earthly state and earlier incarnations.

Our concept of time must undergo a complete change. If we ask where a man is when asleep, the reply must be: he is actually in his pre-earthly state, or has returned to his former lives on earth. When talking simply we say: he is ‘outside’ his body. The reality is as I have explained. It is this that manifests as the rhythmic alternation of waking and sleeping.

All this becomes quite different at death. The most striking change is, of course, that man leaves his physical body behind in the earthly realm, where it is received, disintegrated and destroyed by the forces of the physical world. It can no longer give rise to the impressions I described as being made upon the sleeping man through the medium of the exhaled air. For the physical body no longer breathes; with all its functions it is now lost to man. There is something, however, that is not lost—and even ordinary consciousness can see that this is so. Thinking, feeling and willing live in our soul, but over and above these we have something very special, namely: memory. We do not only think about what is at present before, or around, us; our inner life contains fragments of what we have experienced, and these re-arise as thoughts. Now those people, often somewhat peculiar, who are known as psychologists have developed quite curious ideas about memory. These investigators of the human soul say something like this: man uses his senses; he perceives this or that and thinks about it. He has then a thought. He goes away and forgets the whole thing. But after a time he recalls it; the memory of what has been, re-appears. Man can recall what is past and has been out of his mind meanwhile; he can bring it to mind again. On this account, these people think that man forms a thought from his experience, this thought descends somewhere, to rest as it were in some chest or box and to re-appear when remembered. Either it bobs up of its own accord, or has to be fetched.

This sort of thing is a very model of confused thinking. For the whole belief that the thought is waiting somewhere whence it can be fetched, does not correspond to the facts at all. Just compare an immediate perception which you have, and to which you link a thought, with the way an image of memory, or a memory-thought, arises. You make no distinction at all. You receive a sense impression from without, and a thought links itself thereto. The thought is there; but what lies behind the sense impression and calls forth the thought, you usually speak of as unknown. The memory-thought that arises from within you is, indeed, no different from the thought that emerges for outer perception. In one case—representing it schematically—you have man's environment (yellow); the thought presents itself from without in connection with this environment (red); in the other it comes from within. The latter is a memory-thought (vertical arrow). The direction from which it comes is different.

While we are perceiving—experiencing—anything, something is continually going on beneath the mental presentation, beneath our thinking. It is really as follows: Thought accompanies perception. Our perceptions enter our body, whereas our thought ‘stands out’. Something does enter our body, and this we do not perceive. This goes on while we are thinking about the experience, and an ‘impression’ is made. It is not thought that passes down but something quite different. It is this something that evokes the process which we perceive later and of which we form the memory-thought—just as we form a thought of the outer world. The thought is always in the present moment. Even unprejudiced observation shows that this is so. The thought is not preserved somewhere or other as in a casket, but a process occurs which the act of memory transforms into a thought just as we transform outer perception into a thought.

I must burden you with these considerations, or you will not really come to an understanding of memory. That the thought does not want to go right down, is known to children—and to grown up people, too, in special cases—though only half consciously. So, when we want to memorise something, we have recourse to extraneous aids. Just think how many people find it helps to repeat a thing aloud; others make curious gestures when they want to fix something in their minds. The point is that an entirely different process runs parallel to the mere process of mental presentation. What we remember is really the smallest part of what is here involved.

Between waking up and falling asleep we move about the world, receiving impressions from all sides. We only attend to a few, but they all attend to us. It is a rich world that lives in the depths of our being, but only some few fragments are received into our thoughts. This world is like a deep ocean confined within us. The mental presentations of memory surge up like single waves, but the ocean remains within. It has not been given us by the physical world, nor can the physical world take it away. When man sheds his physical body, this whole world is there, bound up with his etheric body. Upon this all his experiences have been impressed, and these man bears within him immediately after death. In a certain sense, they are ‘rolled up’ in him.

Now man's first experience, immediately after death, is of everything that has made its impression upon him. Not only the ordinary shreds of memory which arise during earthly consciousness, but his whole earthly life, with all that has ‘impressed’ him stands before him now. But he would have to remain in eternal contemplation of this earthly life of his if something else did not happen to his etheric body, something different from what happens to the physical body through the earth and its forces. The earthly elements take over the physical body and destroy it; the cosmic ether, working (as I told you) from the periphery, streams in and dispels in all directions what has been impressed upon the etheric body. Thus man's next experience is as follows: During earthly life many, many things have made their impression upon me. All this has entered my etheric body. I now survey it, but it becomes more and more indistinct. It is as if I were looking at a tree that had made a strong impression upon me during my life. At first I see it life-size, as when it made its impression upon me from physical space. But it now grows, becomes larger and more shadowy; it becomes larger and larger, gigantic but more and more shadowy. Now it is like that with a human being whom I have learnt to know in his physical form. Immediately after death I have him before me as he impressed himself upon my etheric body. He now increases in size, becomes more and more shadowy. Everything grows, becomes more and more shadowy until it fills the whole universe, becomes thereby quite shadowy, and completely disappears.

This lasts some days. Everything has become gigantic and shadowy, thereby diminishing in intensity. Man sheds his second corpse; or, strictly speaking, the cosmos takes it from him. He is now in his ego and astral body. What had been impressed upon his etheric body is now within the cosmos; it has flowed out into the cosmos. We see the working of the universe behind the veils of our existence.

We are placed in the world as human beings. In the course of earthly life the whole world works upon us. We roll it all together in a certain sense. The world gives us much and we hold it together. The moment we die the world takes back what it has given. But it is something new that it receives, for we have experienced it all in a particular way. The world receives our whole experience and impresses it upon its own ether.

We now stand in the universe and say to ourselves, as we consider, first of all, this experience with our etheric body: truly, we are not only here for ourselves; the universe has its own intentions in regard to us. It has put us here that its own content may pass through us and be received again in the form into which we can transmute it. As human beings we are not here for our own ends alone; in respect to our etheric body, for example, we are here for the universe. The universe needs us because, through us, it ‘fulfils’ itself—fills itself again and again with its own content. There is an interchange, not of substance but of thoughts between the universe and man. The universe gives its cosmic thoughts to our etheric body and receives them back again in a humanised condition. We are not here for ourselves alone; we are here for the sake of the universe.

Now a thought like this should not remain merely theoretical and abstract; indeed it cannot. If it were to remain a mere thought, we would have to be creatures of pasteboard, not men with living feelings. In saying this I do not deny that our civilisation really does tend to make people often as apathetic towards such things as if they really were made of pasteboard. Civilised people today often appear to be such pasteboard figures. A thought like this preserves our human feeling and sympathy with the world, and leads us directly to the point from which we started. We began by saying that man feels himself estranged from the world in a two-fold way: on the one hand, in regard to external Nature which, he must admit, only destroys him as physical body; on the other hand, in regard to his inner life of soul which, again and again, lights up and dies away. This becomes for him a riddle of the universe. But now, as a result of spiritual study, man begins to feel himself no mere stranger in the universe. The universe has something to give him, and takes from him something in turn. Man begins to feel his inner kinship with the world. He now sees in a new light the two thoughts that I have put before you and which are really cosmic thoughts, namely:

Thou, O Nature, canst only destroy my physical body.

I, myself. have no kinship with thee, in spite of the thinking, feeling and willing of my inner life. Thou lightest up and diest down; and in my inner being I have no kinship with thee.

These two thoughts, evoked in us by the riddles of the universe, now appear in a new light, for we begin to feel ourselves akin to the cosmos and an organic part of its whole life. Thus anthroposophical reflection begins by making friends with the world, really learning to know the world that, on external observation, repulsed us at first. Anthroposophical knowledge makes us become more human. If we cannot bring to it this quality of heart, this mood of feeling, we are not taking it in the right way. One might compare theoretical anthroposophy to a photo-graph. If you are very anxious to learn to know someone you have once met, or with whom you have been brought into touch through something or other, you would not want to be offered a photograph. You may find pleasure in the photograph; but it cannot kindle the warmth of your feeling life, for the man's living presence does not confront you.

Theoretical Anthroposophy is a photograph of what Anthroposophy intends to be. It intends to be a living presence; it really wants to use words, concepts and ideas in order that something living may shine down from the spiritual world into the physical. Anthroposophy does not only want to impart knowledge; it seeks to awaken life. This it can do; though, of course, to feel life we must bring life to meet it.

One who looks around a little in Germany today, and not at externals but with the eye of the soul; one who sees not only what offers itself to the casual visitor, who seldom learns the true conditions during his visit; one who does not cling to the fact that a few chimneys are smoking again and the trains are running on time; one who can to some degree see into the spiritual situation; such a person sees a picture which is symptomatic not only for this territory but for the whole decay of our world-culture in the present cycle. I would like today to point out to you, in an introductory way, a psycho-spiritual symptom which is far more significant than many sleeping souls even in Germany allow themselves to dream.

In old Germany decay and decline rule today, and the external things which I have mentioned cannot deceive us about this. But this is not what I want to point to now, for in the course of world-history we often see decay set in and then out of the decay there again spring upward impulses. But if we judge externally, basing our opinion on mere custom and routine and saying that here again everything will be just as it has been before, then we do not see certain deeper-lying symptoms. One such symptom (but only one of many), a psycho-spiritual symptom which I want to bring before you, is the remarkable impression made by Oswald Spengler's book The Decline of the West, which is already symptomatic in having been able to appear in our time. It is a thick book and widely read, a book which has made an extraordinarily deep impression on the younger generation in Germany today. And the remarkable thing is that the author expressly states that he conceived the basic idea of this book, not during the war or after the war, but already some years before the catastrophe of 1914.

As I have said, this book makes a particularly strong impression on the younger generation. And if you try to sense the imponderables of life, the things which are between the lines, then you will be particularly struck by such a thing. In Stuttgart I recently had to give a lecture to the students of the technical college, and I went to this lecture entirely under the impression made by Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. It is a thick book. Thick books are very costly now in Germany, yet it is much read. You will realize their costliness when I tell you that a pamphlet which cost five cents in 1914 now costs thirty-five cents. Of course, books have not risen in the same proportion as beer, which now costs ten times as much as in 1914. Books must always be handled more modestly, even under the present impossible economic conditions. Still the price increase on books shows what has happened to the economic system in the last few years.

The contents of this book may be easily characterized. It demonstrates how the culture of the Occident has now reached a point which, at a certain period, was also reached by the declining cultures of the old Orient, of Greece, and of Rome. Spengler calculates in a strictly historical way that the complete collapse of the culture of the Occident must be accomplished by the year 2200. In my public lecture in Stuttgart I treated Spengler's book very seriously, and I also combatted it strenuously. But today the contents of such a thing are not so important. More important than the contents or the psycho-spiritual qualities of a book is whether the author (no matter what view of life he may adopt) has spiritual qualities, whether he is a personality who may be taken earnestly, or even highly esteemed, in a spiritual way. The author of this book is, beyond any doubt, such a personality. He has completely mastered ten or fifteen sciences. He has a penetrating judgment on the whole historical process, as far as history reaches. And he also has something which men of today almost never have, a sound eye for the phenomena of decline in the civilizations of the present day. There is a fundamental difference between Spengler and those who do not grasp the nature of the impulses of decline and who try all kinds of arrangements for extracting from the decayed ideas some appearance of upward motion. Were it not heart-rending it might be humorous to see how people with traditional ideas all riddled with decay meet today in conferences and believe that out of decay they can create progress by means of programs. Such a man as Oswald Spengler, who really knows something, does not yield to such a deception. He calculates like a precise mathematician the rapidity of our decline and comes out with the prediction (which is more than a vague prophecy) that by the year 2200 this Occidental culture will have fallen into complete barbarism.

This combination of universal outward decline, especially in the psycho-spiritual field, with the revelation by a serious thinker that such decline is necessary in accordance with the laws of history—this combination is something remarkable, and it is this which has made such a strong impression on the younger generation. We have today not only signs of decay, we have theories which describe this decay as necessary in a demonstrable scientific way. In other words, we have not only decay but a theory of decay, and a very formidable theory too. One may well ask where we shall find the forces, the inner will-forces, to spur men to work upward again, if our best people, after surveying ten or fifteen sciences, have reached the point of saying that this decay is not only present but can be proved like a phenomenon in physics. This means that the time has begun when belief in decay is not represented by the worst people. We must stress again and again how really serious the times are, and what a mistake it is to sleep away this seriousness of the times.

If one grasps the entire urgency of the situation, one is driven to the question: How can we orient thinking so that pessimism toward western civilization will not appear to be natural and obvious while faith in a new ascent seems a delusion? We must ask if there is anything that can still lead us out of this pessimism. Just the way in which Spengler comes to his results is extremely interesting for the spiritual-scientist. Spengler does not consider the single cultures to be as sharply demarcated as we do when, for example, within the post-Atlantean time we distinguish the Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin, and present-day cultures. He is not familiar with spiritual science, but in a certain way, he too considers such cultures. He looks at them with the eye of the scientific researcher. He examines them with the methods which in the last three or four centuries have grown up in occidental civilization and been adopted by all who are not prejudiced by narrow traditional faith, Catholic, Protestant, Monadistic, etc. Oswald Spengler is a man who is completely permeated by materialistic modern science. And he observes the rise and fall of cultures—oriental, Indian, Persian, Greek, Roman, modern occidental—as he would observe an organism which goes through a certain infancy, a time of maturity, and a time of aging, and then, when it has grown old, dies. Thus Spengler regards the single cultures; they go through their childhood, their maturity, and their old age, and then they die. And the death-day of our present Occidental civilization is to be the year 2200.

Only the first volume of the book is now available. One who lets this first volume work upon him finds a strict theoretical vindication and proof of the decline, and nowhere a spark of light pointing to a rise, nothing which gives any hint of a rise. And one cannot say that this is an erroneous method of thought for a scientist. For if you consider the life of today and do not yield to the delusion that fruit for the future can grow out of bodiless programs, then you see that an upward movement nowhere appears in what the majority of men recognize in the outer world. If you regard rising and declining cultures as organisms, and then look at our culture, our entire Occidental civilization, as an organism, then you can only say that the Occident is perishing, declining into barbarism. You find no indication where an upward movement could appear, where another center of the world could form itself.

The Decline of the West is a book with spiritual qualities, based on keen observation, and written out of a real permeation with modern science. Only our habitual frivolity can ignore such things.

When a phenomenon like this appears, there springs up in the world-observer that historical concern of which I have so often spoken and which I can briefly characterize in the following words: One who today makes himself really acquainted with the inner nature of what is working in social, political, and spiritual life, one who sees how all that is so working strives toward decline—such a person, if he knows spiritual science as it is here meant, must say that there can only be a recovery if what we call the wisdom of initiation flows into human evolution. For if this wisdom of initiation were entirely ignored by men, if it were suppressed, if it could play no role in the further development of mankind—what would be the necessary consequence? You see, if we look at the old Indian culture, it is like an organism in having infancy, maturity, aging, decay, and death; then it continues itself. Then we have the Persian, Egyptian, Chaldean, Greco-Latin, and our own time, but always we have something which Oswald Spengler did not take into account. He has been reproached for this by several of his opponents. For a good deal has already been written against Spengler's book, most of it cleverer than Benedetto Croce's extraordinarily simple article. Croce, who has always written cleverly apart from this, suddenly became a simpleton with Spengler's book. But it has been pointed out to Spengler that the cultures do not always have only infancy, maturity, aging, and death, they continue themselves and will do so in this case also; when our culture dies in the year 2200, it will continue itself again. The singular thing here is that Spengler is a good observer and therefore he finds no moment of continuation and cannot speak of a seed somewhere in our culture, but only of the signs of decay which are evident to him as a scientific observer. And those who speak of cultures continuing themselves have not known how to say anything particularly clever about this book. One very young man has brought forward a rather confused mysticism in which he speaks of world-rhythm; but that creates nothing which can transform a documented pessimism into optimism. And so it follows from Spengler's book that the decline will come, but no upward movement can follow.

What Spengler does is to observe scientifically the infancy of the organism which is a culture or civilization, its maturity, decline, aging, death. He observes these in the different epochs in the only way in which, fundamentally, one can observe scientifically. But one who can look a little deeper into things knows that in the old Indian life, apart from the external civilization, there lived the initiation-wisdom of primeval times. And this initiation-wisdom of primeval times, which was still mighty in India, inserted a new seed into the Persian culture. The Persian mysteries were already weaker, but they could still insert the seed into the Egypto-Chaldean time. The seed could also be carried over into the Greco-Latin period. And then the stream of culture continued itself as it were by the law of inertia into our own time. And there it dries up.

One must feel this, and those who belong to our spiritual science could have felt it for twenty years. For one of my first remarks at the time of founding our movement was that, if you want a comparison for what the cultural life of mankind brings forth externally, you may compare it with the trunk, leaves, blossoms, and so forth, of a tree. But what we want to insert into this continuous stream can only be compared with the pith of the tree; it must be compared with the activating growth-forces of the pith. I wanted thereby to point out that through spiritual science we must seek again what has died out with the old atavistic primeval wisdom.

The consciousness of being thus placed into the world should be gained by all those who count themselves a part of the anthroposophical movement. But I have made another remark, especially here in recent years but also in other places. I have said that, if you take all that can be drawn out of modern science and form therefrom a method of contemplation which you then apply to social or, better still, to historical life, you will be able to grasp thereby only phenomena of degeneration. If you examine history with the methods of observation taught by science, you will see only what is declining, if you apply this method to social life, you will create only the phenomena of degeneration.

What I have thus said over the course of years could really find no better illustration than Spengler's book. A genuinely scientific thinker appears, writes history, and discovers through this writing of history that the civilization of the Occident will die in the year 2200. He really could not have discovered anything else. For in the first place, with the scientific method of contemplation you can find or create only phenomena of degeneration; while in the second place the whole Occident in its spiritual, political, and social life is saturated with scientific impulses, hence is in the midst of a period of decline. The important thing is that what formerly drew one culture out of another has now dried up, and in the third millennium no new civilization will spring out of our collapsing Occidental civilization.

You may bring up ever so many social questions, or questions on women's suffrage, and so forth, and you may hold ever so many meetings; but if you form your programs out of the traditions of the past, you will be making something which is only seemingly creative and to which the ideas of Oswald Spengler are thoroughly applicable. The concern of which I have spoken must be spoken of because it is now necessary that a wholly new initiation-wisdom should begin out of the human will and human freedom. If we resign ourselves to the outer world and to what is mere tradition, we shall perish in the Occident, fall into barbarism; while we can move upward again only out of the will, out of the creative spirit. The initiation-wisdom which must begin in our time must, like the old initiation wisdom (which only gradually succumbed to egoism, selfishness, and prejudice), proceed from objectivity, impartiality, and selflessness. From this base it must permeate everything.

We can see this as a necessity. We must grasp it as a necessity if we look deeper into the present unhappy trend of Occidental civilization. But then you also notice something else; you notice that when a justified appeal is made it is distorted into a caricature. And it is especially necessary that we should see through this. Now in our time no appeal is more justifiable than that for democracy; yet this is distorted into a caricature as long as democracy is not recognized as a necessary impulse only for the life of politics and rights and the state, from which the economic life and the cultural life must be dissociated. It is distorted into a caricature when today, instead of objectivity, impartiality, and selflessness, we find personal whims and self-interest made into cultural factors. Everything is being drawn into the political field. But if this happens, then gradually objectivity and impartiality will disappear; for the cultural life cannot thrive if it takes its directions from the political life. It is always entangled in prejudice thereby. And selflessness cannot thrive if the economic life creeps into the political life, because then self-interest is necessarily introduced. If the associative life, which can produce selflessness in the economic field, is spoiled, then everything will tend to leave men to wander in prejudice and self-interest. And the result of this will be to reject what must be based on objectivity and selflessness—the science of initiation. In external life everything possible is done today to reject this science of initiation, although it alone can lead us beyond the year 2200.

This is the great anxiety as regards our culture, which can come over you if you look with a clear eye at the events of the present. On this basis, I regard Spengler's book as only a symptom, but can anyone possibly say today: “Ah yes, but Spengler is wrong. Cultures have risen and fallen; ours will fall, but another will arise out of it.”? No, there can be no such refutation of Spengler's views. It is falsely reasoned, because trust in an upward movement cannot today be based on a faith that out of the Occidental culture another will develop. No, if we rely on such a faith nothing will develop. There is simply nothing in the world at present which can be the seed to carry us over the beginning of the third millennium. Just because we are living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, we must first create a seed.

You cannot say to people—Believe in the Gods, believe in this, believe in that, and then all will be well. You must confess that those who speak of, and even demonstrate, the phenomena of degeneration are right with regard to what lives in the outer world. But we, every individual human being must take care that they shall not remain right. For the upward movement does not come out of anything objective, it comes out of the subjective will. Each person must will, each person must will to take up the spirit anew, and from the newly received spirit of the declining civilization each person must himself give a new thrust; otherwise it will perish. You cannot appeal today to any objective law, you can appeal only to the human will, to the good-will of men. Here in Switzerland, where things have unrolled themselves differently, there is little to be seen of the real course of events (although it is also present here); but if you step over the border into Middle Europe you are immediately struck, in all that you observe with the eye of the soul, by what I have just described to you. There comes before your soul the sharp and painful contrast between the need for adopting initiation-wisdom into our spiritual, legal, and economic life and the perverted instincts which reject everything which comes from this quarter. One who feels this contrast must search hard for the right way to describe it, and one who does not choose words haphazardly often has trouble in finding the right expression for it. In Stuttgart I spoke on Spengler's book and I used this expression, “perverted instincts of the present.” I have used it again today because I find it is the only adequate one. As I left the stand that day I was accosted by one of those who best understand the word “perverted” in a technical sense, a physician. He was shocked that I had used just this word, but out of curious reasons. It is no longer commonly supposed that one who speaks on a foundation of facts, out of reality, chooses his words with pain; rather is it supposed that everyone forms his words as they are usually formed out of the superficial consciousness of the times. I had a talk with this physician, told him this and that, and then he said he was glad that I had not meant this word “perverted” in any elegant literary sense. I could only reply that this was certainly not the case, because I was not in the habit of meaning things in an elegant literary way. The point is that the man in the street today never assumes that there is such a thing as a creation out of the spirit; he simply believes, if you say something like “perverted instincts,” that you are speaking on the same basis as the last litterateur. That tone dominates our minds today; our minds educate themselves by it. Just in such an episode you can see the contrast between what is so necessary to mankind today—a real deepening, which must even go back as far as the basis of initiation-wisdom—and that which, through the caricature of democracy, comes before us today as spiritual life. People are much too lazy to draw something up from the hidden forces of consciousness within themselves; they prefer to dabble at tea-parties, in beer-gardens, at political meetings, or in parliaments. It is the easiest thing in the world now to say witty things, for we live in a dying culture where wit comes easily to people. But the wit that we need, the wit of initiation-wisdom, we must fetch up from the will; and we will not find it unless the power of this initiation-wisdom flows into our souls. Hence, we cannot say that we have refuted such a book as Spengler's. Naturally, we can describe it. It is born out of the scientific spirit. But the same is true of what others bring to birth out of the scientific spirit. Thus he is right if there does not enter into the wills of men that which will make him wrong. We can no longer have the comfort of proving that his demonstration of decline is wrong; we must, through the force of our wills, make wrong what seems to be right.

You see, this must be said in sentences which seem paradoxical. But we live in a time when the old prejudices must be demolished and when it must be recognized that we can never create a new world out of the old prejudices. Is it not understandable that people should encounter spiritual science and say they do not understand it? It is the most understandable thing in the world. For what they understand is what they have learned, and what they have learned, is decay or leading to decay. It is a question, not of assimilating something which can easily be understood out of the phenomena of decline, but of assimilating something to understand which one must first enhance his powers. Such is the nature of initiation-wisdom. But how can we expect that those who now aspire to be the teachers or leaders of the people should discern that what gives man a capacity for judgment must first be fetched out of the subconscious depths of soul-life and is not sitting up there in the head all ready-made. What really sits up there in the head is the destructive element.

Such is the nature of the things which you encounter wherever the consequences have already been drawn, where you have only to look at this seeming success. It is comprehensible that in the decline of occidental civilization our consciousness cannot easily enter into this field. Hence, we stand today entirely under the influence of this contrast which has been described to you; on the one side the need for a new impulse to enter into our civilization, and on the other side a rejection of this impulse. Things simply cannot improve if a sufficiently large number of people do not grasp the need for this impulse from initiation-wisdom. If you lay weight on temporary improvement you will not notice the great lines of decline, you will delude yourself about it, and you will march just so much more surely toward decline because you fail to grasp the only means there is to kindle a new spirit out of the will of men. But this spirit must lay hold of everything. Above all, this spirit must not linger over any theoretical philosophical problems. It would be a terrible delusion if a great number of people—perhaps just those who were somewhat pleased by the new initiation-wisdom and derived therefrom a somewhat voluptuous soul-feeling—should believe it would suffice to pursue this initiation-wisdom as something which was merely comfortable and good for the soul. For just through this the remainder of our real external life would more and more fall into barbarism, and the little bit of mysticism that could be pursued by those whose souls had an inclination in that direction would right soon vanish in the face of universal barbarism. Everywhere, and in an earnest way, initiation-wisdom must penetrate into the various branches of science and teaching, and above all into practical life, especially practical will. Fundamentally everything is lost time today that is not willed out of the impulses of initiation-wisdom. For all strength which we apply to other kinds of willing retards matters. Instead of wasting our time and strength in this way, we should apply whatever time and strength we have to bringing the impulse of initiation-wisdom into the different branches of life and knowledge.

If something is rolling along with the ancient impulses, no one will stop it in its rolling; and we should have an eye to how many younger people (especially in the conquered countries) are still filled with old catch-words, old chauvinism. These young people do not come into consideration. But those young people do come into consideration on whom rests the whole pain of the decline. And there are such. They are the ones whose wills can be broken by such theories as those of Spengler's book. Therefore, in Stuttgart I called this book of Oswald Spengler's a clever but fearful book, which contains the most fearful dangers, for it is so clever that it actually conjures up a sort of fog in front of people, especially young people.

The refutations must come out of an entirely different tone than that to which we are accustomed in such things, and it will never be a faith in this or that which will save us. People recommend one happily nowadays to such a faith, saying that if we only have faith in the good forces of men the new culture will come like a new youth. No, today it cannot be a question of faith, today it is a question of will; and spiritual science speaks to the will. Hence it is not understood by anyone who tries to grasp it through faith or as a theory. Only he understands it who knows how it appeals to the will, to the will in the deepest recesses of the heart when a man is alone with himself, and to the will when a man stands in the battle of daily life and in such battle, must assert himself as a man. Only when such a will is striven for can spiritual science be understood. I have said to you that for anyone who reads my Occult Science as he would read a novel, passively giving himself to it, it is really only a thicket of words—and so are my other books. Only one who knows that in every moment of reading he must, out of the depths of his own soul, and through his most intimate willing, create something for which the books should be only a stimulus—only such a one can regard these books as musical scores out of which he can gain the experience in his own soul of the true piece of music.

We need this active experiencing within our own souls.

Now that we have gathered together a number of elements in order to get at the essence of the Apocalypse, we will have to look more at the Apocalypse itself, and we will have to arrange things in such a way that we begin with several questions which are connected with the goal or end of what the Apocalypticer sees and what he wants to communicate to mankind; later on we will see why this particular choice of study materials is appropriate.

If we look at what he gives, one could say that it is a communication to human beings, a revelation to human beings, but a revelation which differs considerably from what arises when other communications which don't proceed from clairvoyance are brought to men. The Apocalypticer points out that it was a special event, a mighty enlightenment which enabled him to make his statement to humanity. However, thereby the Apocalypse appears as something which arises as a fact and an event which belongs to the continuation of Christian evolution.

We can say that of course the Mystery of Golgotha is the great starting point of Christian evolution upon earth which towers over everything else and which could only be anticipated and hoped for before; but then come the individual facts which must occur in order that Christian evolution continues from the Mystery of Golgotha through all the cycles of time to come. And the revelation which occurred through the Apocalypse is such an event. The author of the Apocalypse is fully aware that he's thereby not only putting what he experienced and is communicating to people into present-day evolution, but that what lies in the reception and further elaboration of the Apocalypse is a reality.

You see, the important, difference between Christianity and other religious confessions is that one has teachings in the ancient religious confessions, whereas the deed of Golgotha is the important thing in Christian evolution, and more deeds must be added to this important one. Therefore, the important thing for Christianity to do is to look for a real connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, and it's not of primary and fundamental importance to have the gospels interpreted for one. In recent times Christianity has taken on intellectualistic forms through the influence of intellectualism. One could, say that this is why that famous statement could be made: Jesus doesn't belong in the gospels. In other words, one can take the content of the gospels as teachings, but one doesn't have to: take the teacher who stands, behind them into account; he's not important. This means that, only the Father belongs in the gospels. It's as if the main thing about the Mystery of Golgotha was that Christ Jesus has appeared and has given a teaching from the Father. That is not the important thing. The important thing is that a deed was done on Golgotha—that Christ Jesus lived on earth and did the deed on Golgotha. The teaching is an incidental, accessory thing. Christianity must struggle through to, a recognition of this again, but it must also do it.

And so the Apocalypticer is aware that he receives this revelation and that this fact has taken place and that he works on through this fact; this is the important thing for him. For what is continually happening as a result of this? You know that from a formal viewpoint present-day man is living in such a way that he wears his three garments, physical body, etheric body and astral body which is connected with a certain normality. When he is in a sleeping condition the astral body and ego are outside the physical and etheric body and are in the earthly environment, in the spiritual region of the earthly environment, which is behind sensory, physical phenomena. They are not equipped for perceptibility in people today, they only become equipped through initiation. Man lives a dull existence during sleep, and only retains a general feeling about this on awaking, or he sees things in dreams, which emerge from sleep in the way which has often been described. Now if we don't think anything else than this; we have man's astral body and ego in the spiritual world, and they stand in that world in such a way that they can receive no direct impressions of Christ and his real nature.

Thus if we would think nothing else than what I just mentioned, the ego and astral body would enter the spiritual world every night and would have no direct connection with the Christ, would come back again to this earthly, physical garment, and since the Mystery of Golgotha has taken place in the course of earth evolution, they would have an impression of Christ, for the Christ is in the earth's aura, but this impression would remain dull. Just as other nocturnal impressions remain dull for day consciousness, so this impression that the Christ dwells in the physical and etheric bodies which lie there during sleep would only be perceived in the way that the sleeping condition is perceived by someone when he is waking up, and no distinct, clear experience could be there.

Let's suppose that right after the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished, human beings were there who experienced what happened and who could communicate their direct impressions of the Mystery of Golgotha to others. And in fact Christ gave his apostles an esoteric training and a number of important teachings after his resurrection. All of this was handed on and it continued in the first decades after the Mystery of Golgotha had been accomplished. At a certain point this had to come to an end. And we can see how it gradually died down in certain circles. It's correct to say that there were tremendous esoteric teachings about Christianity in the writings which were denounced for being gnostic and in other writings of old church teachers who were apostolic students or pupils of apostolic students, which were then eradicated by the church, because the church wanted to get rid of the cosmic elements which were always connected with these teachings. The church destroyed very important things. They were destroyed; a reading of the akashic records will restore them to the last dot on the “i” when the time has come to restore them again.

Nevertheless, the great impressions which were there would have faded for outer historical evolution. The Apocalypse appeared the moment these things were in danger of dying out. And if the Apocalypse is taken in properly—and various people have made this attempt in the second epoch after the Mystery of Golgotha—if the Apocalypse is taken in, if this grand picture, this prophetic picture of evolution penetrates man's astral body and ego, then the ego and astral body bear a revelation which comes directly from the spiritual world—as I told you in the first lecture—which is really a kind of a letter, a direct verbal revelation from the spiritual world which is connected with visions. If this is taken into the astral body, and namely into the ego-organization and carried out into the sphere of the earth's aura during sleep, it means that all those who had taken in this Apocalypse; with inner understanding were gradually inscribing its content into the ether of the earth's aura. So that one can say: the presence of Christ gives the fundamental tone in the earth's aura, and he continues to work in it.

This Christ impulse has a strong influence upon man's etheric body every night when the astral body and ego are outside of the physical and etheric body, except that the average person is usually not able to find the Christ impulse which is contained in the etheric body when he returns to the physical body in the morning with his ego and astral body. But when John's pupils in the wider sense of the word take in the content of the Apocalypse, it becomes inscribed in the ether of the earth's aura. What is inscribed there then works upon the human etheric body between the times of going to sleep and waking up. It was inscribed there already through the great, significant impressions which the author of the Apocalypse, or better said, the receiver of it, got from divine, spiritual beings, so that people who have an inclination to relate themselves to the Mystery of Golgotha can expose their etheric body to the content of the Apocalypse during their sleeping condition. This is a real thing. Through the necessary Christ sentiments one can bring about such a condition of sleep that what is as it were brought about in the earth's ether by the content of the Apocalypse and what lies in the direction of Christ-evolution is inscribed in man's etheric body. This is the way it really happens. This is what was present as the deed of the Apocalypse revelation which continued to have an effect.

And in one's work as a priest one can quietly say to those souls who are entrusted to one's care: the Christ has entered earth evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha. He inspired the writing of the gospels to serve as a preparation, so that their content can pass over into men's astral body and ego—one has to use suitable terminology here—and so that they are prepared to receive the Christ impulse in their etheric body when they wake up. Through the fact that the Apocalypticer is focusing on Christian evolution and is describing it through the various epochs of evolution and into the future, what is present in this evolution is incorporated into man's etheric body in a concrete way.

You see, therewith we have something in earth evolution which is quite new with respect to the ancient mystery teachings. For what did the ancient mysteries really convey to initiates? They gave them what one can see if one surveys the real spiritual nature of what was laid down an eternally long time ago, as it were, and if one finds the divine being who has been working along certain lines all the way back to eternity in outer physical activities. So that the initiates in the ancient mysteries didn't expect to get anything else into their etheric body than what gets into one's etheric body through the results of initiation.

A Christian initiate gets past this point. He wants to take what has come into earth evolution in the course of time, namely, everything which is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha and with Christ, into his etheric body. So that in fact the revelation of the Apocalypse is the beginning of a kind of an initiation for the whole Christian world, and not for individuals; but individuals can prepare themselves to participate in it.

One could say that it's only this which opens up a path to get beyond the Father-nature principle. According to its form, all ancient initiation is basically a Father initiation. One sought nature and the spirit in nature and one could be satisfied with that. For man stood in the world. Now the Christ has been there in the earth. Now he remains there; he did his deed and he remains there now. One cannot take in what has taken place through the Mystery of Golgotha through an ancient initiation. One has to raise oneself into a world of the, spirit which is not the one that streams through the ancient mysteries. What streams through the old mysteries only hoped that the Mystery of Golgotha would stream through the new mysteries at some point. However, man now connects himself with the spirit directly through the spirit and not through nature. In ancient times initiates always chose the detour, through nature. New initiates, that is, many half or partly initiated people in the later centuries after the Mystery of: Golgotha—not in the first ones—thought that they connected themselves with the spiritual nature of the world through what has flowed into it through Christ and through what has been built upon Christ. This is the way such an initiate looked upon the Apocalypse; this is the way it was looked, upon at that time. Thus he looked upon it as something, which he spoke about as follows: Nature is one way to get into the spiritual world, and the marvelous knowledge which is revealed through the Apocalypses is the other way. It is a perplexing, felicific thing when the spiritual investigator encounters people in the second to sixth centuries—but not before—who. Say: “Nature is great,”—they meant what one knew about nature in antiquity—“but what is disclosed in a supersensible way by, the Apocalypticer or other apocalypticers is just as great or greater.” For nature leads to the Father, and what is opened up by the Apocalypticer leads through the Son to the Spirit. One was looking for a path to pure, unmediated spiritual things through something like the Apocalypse.

At the: same time this pointed to a real change which must and will come about when men make themselves worthy of it. In ancient times one had the strong feeling that man comes out of the spiritual world but that he has a development which connects itself strongly with what comes to meet him in the physical, sensory world. One felt this connection with the physical sense world ' very strongly and one was of the opinion that man has become a sinful, iniquitous being because he connects himself with the matter which is present in the earth.

By contrast with this another time was to be prepared, and it was foreseen by the Apocalypticer and announced in advance. He looked for an image or the right Imagination in order to place what is behind these secrets before the soul in imaginative pictures. And so he renewed and summarized an idea which was commonplace in esoteric Hebraic teachings. But only there. One pointed out the following there. Souls come out of the spiritual world. These souls which come out of the spiritual world clothe themselves in what comes out of the earth, and when they build houses for the most external work of the spirit, cities arise. But when they ensheathe the inner activity of the human soul, the human body arises out of the earth's building blocks. Thereby the concept of the construction of outer dwelling places merged with the concept of the building of one's own body. That was a beautiful and wonderful image, because it has such a factual foundation, namely, that one looked upon a house as a sheathe for the more extensive and extended part of one's deeds, soul processes and soul functions that—one saw the sheathe for this in the outer house. However, one had the beautiful and wonderful idea: If I do an outer deed in a house which is built for me out of earthly matter, and I use the house walls and the whole house as a sheathe, this is just the hardened, scleroticized extension of what is there when I do the inner deeds of the soul. Whereas man's body is the first house which man builds for the innermost deeds of the soul.

Then when he has his body and he extends what he has, he builds himself a second house; this second house is built out of the earth's ingredients. That was a very common idea, that one really looked upon one's body as a house, and that one looked upon a house as the outermost garment which man puts on here in the physical earth world.

Therefore, one looked upon man's housebuilding activity as something which proceeds from the soul's creative activity. In past times man was very much grown together with his house and the like, namely when he could think: O.K., he certainly has this body and this skin (See drawing). And now if he would get another skin in the course of his life for the more extensive activity of his soul, it would be a tent; except that this doesn't grow, he has to make it himself.

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Now one feature of the Hebraic esoteric doctrine was that one looked upon the absorption of earthly ingredients for human development and the flowing together and control of earthly things in a quite particular way. You see, with respect to the physical, one will always admit: The earth is arranged in such a way that it has a north pole where cold accumulates, as it were. And one will describe this north pole from the nature of the earth in a physical, geographic way, and one will consider it to be an important part of the earth. Hebraic esoteric doctrine also did this with the soul activities which are contained in the earth's forces and in a way which was the opposite of the situation with the north pole on the earth it looked upon Jerusalem, the very concrete Jerusalem, as the place where cultures run together and the most perfect houses are collected. This was a pole for the concentration of outer culture around the human soul, and its culmination was Solomon's temple.

Now one felt that this was exhausted in the evolution of the earth, and the people who knew something about the Hebraic esoteric teaching looked upon the destruction of Jerusalem after the Mystery of Golgotha as something which was not an outer event that was brought about by the Romans; they thought that the Romans were the puppets of spiritual powers and that they only carried out the plan of the spiritual powers. For they thought that this method of looking for ingredients from the earth in order to build human bodies and houses was no longer usable. When Jerusalem became great all the substances and materials from the earth which were to be used in order to build human bodies and houses had become exhausted.

If one translates this Hebraic esoteric teaching into the Christian one, it means that: If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, Jerusalem would have been destroyed anyway. But what can be a new construction by men who create with the aid of the earth would not have been inserted into this destruction. A kind of a seed of a completely new structure was laid into what was destined to be destroyed in Jerusalem. Mother earth dies in Jerusalem. Daughter earth is expectant or lives in the expectation of another seed. Bodies and houses are not built from the earth here through the gathering together of ingredients as in the old Jerusalem which stands there as the culmination of what occurs on the earth, but the earth rises as a spiritual pole of the old Jerusalem. One will no longer be able to or it will be increasingly difficult to make something like the old Jerusalem from the earth's ingredients. Another time arises instead which was laid down as a seed by the Mystery of Golgotha. Men receive something from above which envelopes them, more on the outside, or more on the inside. The new city sinks down from above and pours over the earth—the new Jerusalem. The old Jerusalem was made out of the earth and its substances: the new Jerusalem is made out of spiritual ingredients from heaven.

You will think that such an idea is rather strange by comparison with everything which is thought in our time and compared with what you could learn from what is thought in our time. How does one picture man's development from an anatomical, physiological viewpoint today? Man eats, stuffs food into his stomach, digests it, throws off certain substances and replaces what has to be replaced by the substances he assimilates.

However, this is not what happens, for man is a three-membered being who consists of a nerve-senses man, a rhythmic man and a metabolic limb man. None of the substances in food go into the actual metabolic limb man—they all go into the nerve-senses man. The nerve-senses man absorbs the salts and other substances which are needed and which are always finely distributed in air and light, and it guides them into the metabolic-limb man. The latter is fed entirely from above. It's not true that it gets its substances from physical foods. Diseases arise if substances from the earth, enter the metabolic limb man. All of the food which is taken in and digested only supplies the organs of the nerve-senses man. The head is formed by substances, from the earth. The organs of the metabolic-limb man are formed by things from the heavens. What is in the rhythmic man is only a coarser indication which goes in two directions. Man doesn't eat the oxygen in the air—he inhales it. This is coarser than the way that man assimilates things for the metabolic-limb man. Man takes in what he needs for the metabolic-limb man through a very much finer breathing. Respiration is something which is coarser. And what man does with oxygen to produce carbonic acid is something which is finer than what happens so that the food stuffs which go through the stomach can supply the head. This is the transition in the rhythmic man.

This is the real story about man's building and its processes. The truth of the matter is that what is created by the materialistic view and is taught by anatomy and physiology is nonsense. The moment one knows this one knows that what builds up the human body doesn't only come from below upwards from the earth's plant, mineral and animal kingdoms, and one knows that what supplies the organs which are often considered to be the coarsest ones comes from above. Then one will be able to see that there was a kind of a surplus in nourishment from below until Jerusalem was destroyed. A surplus of what comes from above gradually begins to be important after the Mystery of Golgotha.

Even though we saw that people have twisted the facts around, things are developing in such a way today that nourishment from above is becoming more important than the one from below. Thereby man is being transformed. Our head is no longer like the heads people had in ancient times. They used to have foreheads which receded more. (see drawing) Present-day foreheads protrude more; the outer brain has: become more important. This is the thing which has changed. What is becoming more important in the brain is more like digestive organs than what is at the center. The peripheral brain is more like man's digestive organs than the delicate tissues in the whiter brain, that is, in the continuation of the sensory nerves into the center of the head. And metabolic organs are nourished from above.

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One can understand these things right down to the smallest details if one has the will to speak about certain things in the way that the Apocalypticer does when he says: Here is wisdom. Except that what is in the ordinary knowledge which is living and weaving among people today is not wisdom, but darkness. What one calls “scientific results” today is definitely the result of Kali Yuga; it is a total eclipse of the human mind. One should look upon this as a secret and not blare it out in the streets. Something is esoteric if it remains in a certain circle. You see, the growing of the new Jerusalem has already begun, has begun since the Mystery of Golgotha.

When man's earth period will be completely fulfilled he will not only be able to work heavenly substances into his body through his senses but he will also extend this heavenly substance to what will then be an outer city through what one calls spiritual knowledge and art—an extension of the body in the way that I explained. The old Jerusalem was built from below upwards, the new Jerusalem will really be built from above downwards. This is the tremendous perspective which arose from a vision, a super-colossal vision of the Apocalypticer. He became aware of this mighty thing: Everything arises here which men could build out of the earth upwards, as it were, and becomes concentrated in the old Jerusalem. This came to an end. He saw this rising up and this melting away in the old Jerusalem and he saw the approach of the human-being city, the new Jerusalem from above, from the spiritual worlds.

This is the goal, the last tendency of the revelation in the Apocalypse. In this respect it really contains Christian paths of humanity and Christian goals of humanity. If we try to understand them, we arrive at a certain peculiarity concerning the Apocalypse which some people have an inkling of although they can't quite understand it. Anyone who makes a serious effort to understand the Apocalypse cannot help asking himself: How do I do this? How do I get into this, how do I get into the idea about the old and new Jerusalem, what do I have to do in order to understand it? Anyone who seriously wants to understand the Apocalypse cannot help telling himself: I have to get into its content and I can't just continue to talk about images which have no content for me. In order to get into the content one needs a cosmology and a view of humanity which can only be given by a new Anthroposophy and by a real perception of' the spiritual world. One comes to Anthroposophy through the Apocalypse because one is using the means to understand the Apocalypse and because one notices: John received the Apocalypse from regions where Anthroposophy was before it came to human beings.

This is why one needs the transition; one has to understand the Apocalypse in an Anthroposophical way if one wants to understand it in an honest and serious way. You notice this most of all in something like the final goal, the new Jerusalem. However, you have to know the secrets about the building up of man from above and below better than science knows them. Then you can extend these ideas to the overall activity of men on earth, which is also from below upwards and which changes into one from above downwards. The building of the old Jerusalem will change into the spiritual building of the new Jerusalem from above downwards. People should grow into what is being built in a spiritual way not just in the exegetes' symbolical, theoretical, pictorial way but in such a way that the spirit becomes just as real for us as the material and physical was for thousands of years.

To the extent that you are worthy of it you will look upon the new Jerusalem as something which hangs down from above in just as real a way as the old Jerusalem stood on its foundations from below upwards, and you won't just take this in a pictorial way or in the way that the exegetes present it. This is something which one has to remember the Apocalypse contains no symbols, but references to quite concrete facts and to what happens, and not to something which just wants to indicate the events through symbols. That is the important thing. This is the way we have to feel and find our way into the Apocalypse. We will take this up again tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The light of the sun is flooding
The realms of space;
The song of birds resounds
Through fields of air;
The tender plants spring forth
From Mother Earth,
And human souls rise up
With grateful hearts
To all the spirits of the world.

Those of you who were present at the performance in Munich will remember that this children's song was the prelude to the Rosicrucian Mystery. Tonight, something of a spiritual scientific nature should unfold itself to us in connection with the content of this drama and with what, one could say, has come to life in it.

If I may, I would like to touch on the long, slow spiritual path that led to this Mystery Drama. When I think about it and look at it, its origins go back to the year 1889, twenty-one years ago; it is not approximately but exactly twenty-one years that bring me back to the germinal point of this drama. In these matters, absolute exactness can be observed. The direction has been quite clear to me in which, in 3x7 years, these seeds have grown (without any special assistance, I can say, on my part), for they have led their own individual life in these 3x7 years. It is truly remarkable to follow the path of such seeds to what may be called their finished form. Their progress can be described as a passage through the Underworld. It takes seven years for them to descend; then they return, and for this they need seven more years.

By then, having reached more or less the place where they first engaged a person before their descent, they must go in the opposite direction for seven years toward the other side; one could even say, onto a higher level. After twice seven years, then, plus seven more years, it is possible to try to embody them, foreseeing that whatever has been right in their development can take on a distinct form. If I were not convinced that within the Rosicrucian Mystery an individual organism has lived and grown for 3x7 years, I would not venture to speak further about it. I feel not only justified in speaking, however, though this is not really the question, but also in a sense obligated to speak about what lives in this Rosicrucian Mystery, not only between the lines, between the characters, in the What and the How, but what is alive in everything in the drama and what must be alive in it.

In various places since the performance of the drama in Munich, I have stated the fact that many, many things of an esoteric nature would not need to be described, that lectures would be unnecessary on my part, if only everything that lies in the Rosicrucian Mystery could work directly on your souls, my dear friends, and on the souls of others, too. I would have to use the enormous number of words necessary in my lectures and speak for days, for weeks, even for years, in order to describe what has been said and what could be said in the single drama. Everything you find in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment,¹ which is written in a somewhat tentative style—and in esoteric matters it is certainly correct to write thus as a description of the path into higher worlds—combined with what was said in Occult Science,² can be found, after all, in a much more forceful, true-to-life, and substantial form in the Rosicrucian Mystery. The reason is that it is more highly individualized. What is said in such a book as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds about human development had to be applicable to every individual who wishes to direct his path in some way into higher worlds, applicable to each and every person. Because of this, the book takes on—even with as much concreteness as possible—a certain abstract character, or you might call it a semi-theoretical character. We must hold fast, however, to this point: human development is never merely development in general. There is no such thing as development per se, no such thing as common, ordinary, orthodox development. There is only the development of this or that particular person, of a third, fourth, or twentieth human being. For each individual in the world, there must be a different process of development.

For this reason, the most honest description of the esoteric path of knowledge must have such a general character that it never in any way will coincide with an individual development. Should one actually describe the path of development as seen in the spiritual world, one can do it only by shaping the development of a single human being, by altering for the individual whatever is universally true. The book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, contains, to a certain extent, the beginning of the secrets of all human development. The Rosicrucian Mystery contains the secrets of the development of a single individual, Johannes Thomasius.

It was a truly long descent from all the occult laws of development down to a single, actually real human being. In this process, on this path, what has a tendency to become theory in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds had to be turned almost completely upside down. If it was to go beyond mere theory and particularly if it was to enter the artistic sphere, it had to be completely reversed, because the laws of art are quite different from any others. Just as there are natural laws, so there are also artistic laws, and these cannot be manipulated by the ordinary human consciousness, for then only dry-as-dust allegories would be the result.

Artistic laws must be handled just as Mother Nature handles her own laws when she lets a child, a plant, or an animal come into existence. If everything we can know about the world of nature is to be seen from the one direction that reveals its laws and secrets to the beholder, then whatever is to be revealed in art—any kind of art—must be seen from the other side, from just the opposite point of view. Therefore, it would be the worst imaginable interpretation of a work of art to start from ideas, concepts, or laws we have picked up somewhere, when we approach, say, a poem. Whoever thinks of explaining a work of art by means of abstract or symbolic ideas cannot be considered artistic. The poorest method of looking at a piece of work from the past in which true esoteric power has been invested, for instance, Goethe's Faust, would be to search within this work of art for the ideas and concepts one already has. Bad habits of this kind once prevailed in the theosophical movement in the most horrible way. I can remember something that happened just last year when we were performing Schuré's play, The Children of Lucifer. How shocking it was to the dramatist, who is an artist in the best sense of the word, when someone came up to him to ask, “Does this character represent Atma, this one Buddhi, a third Manas, or maybe this one is Kama Manas?” etc., etc. This kind of allegorizing is simply impossible in a truly creative, artistic process, and it is just as impossible in an explanation or interpretation. Therefore, it can now be said that no one should be pondering the anthroposophical meaning of Johannes Thomasius. To this question there is only one answer: as the main character in the drama, he is nothing more than Johannes Thomasius. He is nothing more than the living figure, Johannes Thomasius, in whom nothing more is portrayed than the mystery of development of one man, Johannes Thomasius.

If one speaks in too general a way about the various characters, one thing will be missing, which is hinted at in the words of the drama itself:

There forms itself out of this circle
a knot out of the threads
which karma spins in world becoming.

There is no development evolving at any point of human history without the knotting of threads within that development, “spun by karma in world becoming.” And no individual development can be described without showing what is at work in the realm of the occult, that is, in the physical environment one looks at with the forces lying behind that physical environment. Therefore, Johannes Thomasius must be placed in the human surroundings out of which his development is proceeding in the real world of physical men and women.

For this reason, the drama has to have a double introduction. The Prelude shows how the cosmic world in which the threads are knotting together for Johannes, threads that “karma spins in world becoming,” how this world confronts the ordinary outside world. One can certainly ask if this must be shown, if there must be a Prelude to show how this cosmic world looks from outside. Yes, it has to be shown. Something would be lacking if it were not so presented. The world in which karma spins its knots was quite different in 5000 B.C., for instance, from the world in 300 B.C. or in 1000 A.D. or today. The exoteric, ordinary, outside world is always changing, too, and its own karma is connected with the environment of a person who wishes to develop himself. Thus, the circle is drawn from outside inward. On the inside is the small circle in which Johannes Thomasius stands: the second Prelude. In the ordinary world outside there are trivial waves touching the shore; in the small circle, great waves are surging high. They show their turbulence, however, only within the soul of Johannes. That is why we are introduced first to the physical plane, and it is shown to us in such a way that the threads, which karma is spinning everywhere within this physical plane, are pointed out.

When you look with occult vision at any group of people, you will find that there are strands extending from one person to another, tangled in the most astonishing way. You see human beings who apparently have little to do with each other in ordinary life, but between their souls are flung the most important, most vital connections. Everything so tangled together has gradually to be illuminated, with the focus on one particular knot. Sometimes, however, whatever is in the process of becoming must be hinted at more subtly. These delicate tones had to be sounded in Scene One, where the action is taking place on the physical plane and people with a wide variety of interests are coming together. Outwardly, they chat about this or that. As they talk, however, more or less on the surface, they are revealing karma. Everyone we first meet in Scene One on the physical plane is bound to the others by destiny. What is most fundamental is how they are bound by destiny. None of the connections have been simply thought out; they are all based on esoteric life. All the threads can come to life, and each thread is quite unique.

The remarkable character of these connections you can guess at when you find such figures as Felix and Felicia Balde meeting with Capesius and Strader. What they say is not the important thing; it is that just these persons say it. They are living persons, not invented characters. I, for one, am well acquainted with them; by that I mean they are not thought out but fully alive. They are real. I have taken especially the figure of Professor Capesius, who has grown quite dear to my heart, directly from life. The extraordinary scene of the seeress Theodora had to be brought into this setting of our ordinary world. She, as one who sometimes looks into the future, now foresees the event that is to happen before the end of the twentieth century, the coming Christ event. It is a future event that can be explained karmically, although it would be wrong to interpret other events so precisely.

Then there is the karmic relationship existing between Felicia Balde and Professor Capesius, which we find hinted at by the peculiar effect on Capesius of Felicia's fairy tales. When, too, we see Strader deeply moved by the seeress Theodora, it suggests that karmic threads are arising in Strader's heart, connecting him to her. These are all threads that lie occultly behind the physical occurrences, and they seem to be spun by karma and directed toward one point, Johannes Thomasius. In him they come together. While so much is being spoken about on the physical plane, a light begins to radiate in Johannes' soul, a light that arouses terrible waves within him. At the same time, however, this light kindles his esoteric development; as a distinctly individual development it will cross his own karma with world karma. We see, therefore, what a strong impression the happenings around him on the physical plane are making on him and how the unconscious greatness in his soul is striving upward to higher worlds.

The journey into higher worlds, however, should not take place without a compass; there must be guidance and direction. Into the midst, then, of these many relationships comes the one who is described as the leader of the group. He is also the one who understands the cosmic relationships and discerns therefore “the knots that karma spins in world becoming”; it is Benedictus, and he becomes Johannes' guide. The karma working in Johannes Thomasius, which perhaps otherwise would have to work another thousand or even thousands of years, is kindled and set ablaze in one particular moment through a karmic relationship between Benedictus and Johannes, lightly drawn in the Meditation Room scene (Scene Three). There we find ourselves at the point where a human being, destined by karma to develop himself, begins to strive upward into higher worlds. In order not to do so blindly, he will be led by Benedictus in the right direction. These thoughts will become clearer when the following passages of Scene Three are presented.

A room for meditation.
Benedictus, Johannes, Maria, and a Child.

Maria

I'm bringing you the child.
He needs a guiding word from you.

Benedictus

My child, from now on you shall come
to me each evening to hear the words
that then should dwell with you
before you enter the soul realm of sleep.
Will you do this?

Child

I'll do it gladly.

Benedictus

This evening fill your heart,
till sleep enfolds you,
with strength from these few words:
‘The heavenly powers of light are carrying me
into the spirit's house.’

(The Child is taken out by Maria, who then returns.)

Maria

And now that this child's destiny shall in future flow
within the shadow of your paternal care,
I too may ask your guiding counsel,
for I've become his mother
through powers of destiny,
if not by blood.
You showed me how
to bring him up
from that first day
when I discovered him,
left by his unknown mother at my door.
And all your rules
I followed for his guidance
worked wonders on my foster child.
For every force could come to light
that in his body and his soul lay hidden.
It soon was clear that your advice
sprang from the realm
which sheltered this child's soul
before it built its body's sheath.
We saw it hopefully unfold
and shine more brightly each new day.
You know how hard it was for me at first
to gain the child's affection.
He grew up in my care,
yet nothing more than habit
first joined his soul with mine.
He looked at me, perceiving only
that I gave him all he needed
for the well-being of his body and his soul.
Then came the time when in his heart
love was enkindled
for me, the foster mother.
An outer cause brought forth this change.
The seeress came into our circle.
The child became attached to her
and learned, enchanted by the way she spoke,
one or the other charming word.
Then came a moment when exaltation
laid hold of our strange friend;
our child could see
the glimmering light within her eyes.
He felt his young soul shaken to the core
and, frightened, rushed to me.
From this time on
the child has been devoted
to me in warmest love.
Yet since he now received his care from me
not just through natural impulse
but with awakened feeling—
since his young heart stirs warmly
whenever he looks lovingly at me—
the treasures of your wisdom
have lost their fruitfulness.
And withered now is much
that had already ripened in the child.
I saw revealed within his being
what for my friend has proved so terrible.
I'm ever more a dark enigma to myself.
Do not deny my asking this grave question:
why do I ruin friend and child
when lovingly I try to do for them
the work that spirit guidance
lets me perceive within my heart as good?
You've shown to me the lofty truth:
illusion's veil is covering the surface of our life.
Yet I must have clear knowledge,
if I must bear this destiny
which is so cruel and which works such evil.

Benedictus

There forms itself within this circle
a knot out of the threads
which karma spins in world becoming.
O friend, your sorrows
are part of such a knot of destiny in which
the deeds of gods entwine themselves with human life.
When on the pilgrimage of soul
I had attained that stage
which granted me the honor
of serving with my counsel in the spirit spheres,
there came to me a higher being
which should descend into the realm of earth
to take up its abode within a human body.
Man's destiny is now demanding this
at such a turning point of time.
A great step forward in our evolution
is only possible when gods
unite themselves with man's own lot.
For spirit eyes, which should awake
in human souls, can only be evolved
when first a god has laid the seed
within a human being.
The task was now assigned to me
to find that human being
who might be worthy to accept within his soul
the seed-force of the god.
I had to link a deed of heaven
unto a human destiny.
My spirit's eye made search—
it fell on you.
Your course of life had fitted you
as mediator for new healing forces.
In many lives you had acquired
an openness for the nobility
alive in human hearts.
The precious quality of beauty,
the highest claim of virtue,
you carried in your gentle soul
as spirit heritage.
What your eternal ego
brought down into this life through birth
matured to ripened fruit
in your first youthful years.
You did not scale too soon
the lofty spirit heights.
The longing for the spiritual world
did not arise in you
till you had fully grasped
the senses' innocent delights.
Your soul encountered love and anger while as yet
your thought was far away
from all desire for spirit.
To drink the joy of Nature in her beauty
and pick the fruits of art
was all you wished to find as riches in your life.
And you could gaily laugh
as only a small child can laugh
who has as yet no knowledge
of life's grey shadow side.
You learned to fathom human happiness,
and mourn men's pain, in times
when not an inkling had yet dawned
of questioning the roots of joy and sorrow.
The soul who shows such character
encounters earthly life
as the ripe fruit sprung from many lives.
Its childlike nature is its blossom, not
its root of being.
It was this soul alone that I could choose
as mediator for that spirit
who should attain to active power
within our human world.
So comprehend now that your being
must change into its opposite
when pouring forth from you to other beings.
The spirit in you works
in everything that can grow ripe in man
as fruit for realms eternal.
And therefore much it must destroy
that only has its place within the realm of time.
Its sacrifice in death, however,
is seed of immortality.
What flourishes for higher life
must bloom from death of lower being.

Maria

So this is how it stands with me.
You give me light,
but light that robs me of the power of sight
and tears me from myself.
Am I then nothing but a spirit's mediator
and not my own true being?
No more will I endure
this form of mine,
which is a mask and not the truth.

Johannes

Dear friend, what is it?
Your gaze has lost its light.
Your body's turned into a pillar.
I take your hand—
and it is cold as death.

Benedictus

My son, you've had to meet with many trials;
but now you stand before the hardest one.
You see her body's covering.
And yet before my gaze
her Self soars into spirit spheres.

Johannes

O see, her lips begin to move.
She speaks ...

Maria

You gave me clarity,
yes, clarity that shrouded me
in darkness on all sides.
I curse your clarity,
and you I curse
who made of me
a tool of those wild arts
through which you seek to misguide men.
Not for one moment have I ever doubted
how high you stand in spirit.
Yet now one single instant has sufficed
to tear all faith in you out of my heart.
And I must recognize that they are hell-born beings,
the spirits whom you serve.
I had to mislead others
because you misled me!
I'll flee from you to regions
wherein no word of yours can penetrate,
and yet be near enough
so that my curses can still reach you!
The fire of my blood
you've torn away from me
and given to your own false god
what must be mine.
The fire of this blood,
O may it burn you!
I had to trust
in lying and deceit,
and to accomplish this
you had at first to make of me
a phantom form.
I've often had to see
how deeds and thoughts of mine
were changed into their opposite.
So now let all
that once was love for you
be changed into wild hatred's fire.
I'll hunt through all the worlds
to find that fire
that can consume you.

I cur ... ah ...

Johannes

Who is it that is speaking here?
I do not see my friend—
I see a gruesome being!

Benedictus

Maria's soul is hovering in the heights;
she's left behind her here with us
her mortal semblance only.
And where a human body
is left without a spirit,
there's room which then
the enemy of good seeks out
to step into the realm of visibility.
He finds a body's covering
and through it he can speak.
Just such an adversary spoke
who strives now to destroy the work
I must fulfill
for many human beings' future,
for you as well, my son.
For could I take these curses,
just spoken by Maria's vacant shell,
as other than the tempter's guile,
you should not follow me.
The enemy of good was at my side;
and you, my son, have seen
plunge down into the darkness
the temporal part of her
to whom your whole love radiates.
Because so often spirits
have spoken to you through her lips,
world karma has not spared you
from hearing through them also
the prince of hell.

Now you can seek her finally
and learn to know her being's core.
For she shall be the image of that higher man
to whom you shall aspire to raise yourself.
Her soul is soaring forth to spirit heights
where men can find their being's primal form
that in itself is rooted.
You now shall follow her to spirit realms
and see her in the Temple of the Sun.
There forms itself
within this circle
a knot out of the threads
which karma spins in world becoming.
My son, you have stood firm so far;
you will progress still further.
I see your star in its full radiance.
There is no place in sense existence
for battles such as men must fight
who strive for consecration.
What sense existence hides as riddles
which can be solved by intellect,
what human hearts receive from such existence—
no matter if it comes from love or hate
or whether it bursts forth with frightful power—
this for the spirit seeker must become
a field on which he, uninvolved,
directs his vision from without.
For forces must unfold themselves for him
which are not found upon this field itself.
You had to wrest your way through trials of soul
which only come to those
well-armed to meet those powers
belonging to the spirit worlds.
And had those powers not found you ready
to tread the path of knowledge,
they would have had to lame your feeling
before you were allowed to know
what now has been revealed to you.
The beings who can gaze at world-foundations
lead men who strive into the heights
at first up to that summit
where can be shown
if they have strength
for conscious spirit sight.
Those who possess such forces
can be released out of the world of sense.
The others still must wait.
You have sustained your Self, my son,
when powers of the heights have shaken you
and spirit forces shrouded you in dread.
Your Self has strongly battled its way through,
when doubts were wrestling in your breast
and sought to give you over to dark depths.
You have been my true pupil only
since that portentous hour
when you, despairing, felt
that you yourself were lost,
and yet the strength in you still held you firm.
I was allowed to grant from wisdom's treasures
what gave you strength
to hold yourself,
though you believed no longer in yourself.
So was the wisdom which you conquered
more truthful than the faith
bestowed on you.
You are now found mature.
You now may be released.
Your friend has led the way.
In spirit you will find her.
I can still further give you the direction:
Call forth the fiery power of your soul
with words which, uttered through my mouth,
give you the key to spirit heights.
They will accompany you
when nothing longer guides you
which eyes of sense can still behold.
With your whole heart now willingly receive them:

Light's weaving essence radiates
through far-flung spaces
to fill the world with life.
Love's blessing pours its warmth
through time's long ages
to call forth revelation of all worlds.
And messengers of spirit join
light's weaving essence
with revelation of the soul.
And when with both, the human being
can join his own true self,
he is alive in spirit heights.

O spirits who can be perceived by man,
quicken with life the soul of this our son.
Let shine in him
what can illumine
his soul with spirit light.
Let sound in him
what can awaken
his self to joyous spirit growth.

Spirit Voice (behind the scene):

Thoughts now guide him
to depths of world-beginnings;
what as shadows he has thought,
what as phantoms he has felt
soars out, beyond the world of forms—
world, of whose fullness
men, when thinking,
dream in shadows;
world, from whose fullness
men, when seeing,
live within phantoms.

(As the curtain falls slowly, the music begins.)

Those last tones of music, composed by our dear friend, Arenson,³ bring to expression what is echoing from higher worlds into Johannes Thomasius' soul in the drama. It follows the solemn experience he has had in the Meditation Room, which proved him genuinely mature and strong enough to ascend into these higher worlds. At the end of the scene just recited, we hear words actually sounding out of the spiritual worlds in a completely real way, into a soul that up to a certain level, if I may so describe it, has stood the test. The imponderable had to be touched on gently with words that are more meaningful than one at first believes.

It must be quite clear that the knot spun out of the threads of world karma presents to Johannes Thomasius a fact of the most sublime and powerful nature in that solemn place. What is actually happening?

Johannes Thomasius has to perceive a soul to whom he is joined karmically in a wonderful way (as shown later in Devachan, Scene Seven), ascending directly before him into the spiritual world. It is a unique moment in world history when such a soul enters divine worlds. Naturally, not everything connected with this moment can be fully described, but it is definitely a real happening that anyone conversant with occult life will recognize in its frightening and powerful interweaving of light and shadow.

Such a person knows, too, what happens in the physical world at the shattering moment when a soul disappears into the spiritual world, not with the gradual step of individual karma but suddenly, challenged by world karma. These are moments that are vital for the evolution of mankind. They are also moments when the real, ever-present forces of temptation, peering into our physical world out of the spiritual world (just as the powers of good do), have the strength to take possession of deserted physical sheaths and use them as platforms for their guile and powers of deception. The body is the point from which they launch their attack. Immediately, then, the situation will show itself as maya, illusion, of the worst kind.

Confronted with the small deceptions of karma, a person who is not far developed will be unable to withstand temptation. Confronted with much greater deceptions of karma, something that at a certain stage of development one would no longer have believed to be possible, a soul will recoil terrified, unless it has already gone through certain tragic depths of life experience. One can imagine some people saying that they, too, could have withstood what happened in the Meditation Room—but they should really find themselves sometime in the same situation! The reality is far different from what we might think it to be. In a spiritual reality, strange forces are at work. If someone does not believe this, he should just consider whether or not he has had any genuine experience with a human physical body abandoned by its own soul. Human beings know only ensouled bodies. In this case quite different forces come into play, and it is against these forces that Johannes Thomasius has to stand firm, having been guided to this moment in world karma.

Now two things come into question. Johannes Thomasius first has to endure what is usually known as kamaloka, the world in which there appears to us as a mirror image what we ourselves truly are. Again, this sounds milder when spoken about than it is in reality. When it appears in its reality, there is not merely a picture limited in space to tell us what it is, but it intones this from every corner of the world around us. The whole world is we ourselves. For this reason, when you hear in Scene Two how Johannes Thomasius descends into the depths of his soul where he is “among rocks and springs,” it is not a single mirror image he conjures up, speaking to him out of his soul, but it sounds to him from everywhere around him, out of the rocks and springs, out of his whole surroundings. At such a moment, words that were tame enough as they came out of world theories or philosophical works, or even spiritual scientific writings, suddenly grow into terrifying power, for they sound forth out of the whole world from every side as though, reflected from unending space, they are caught up in the various processes of nature.

O man, know thou thyself!

Thus, they sound when they become audible after living year after year within the soul. The soul then is left, lonely and forsaken, and stands before its Self. Nothing is there but the world—but this world is one's own soul; it contains everything the soul is, what its karma is, everything it has perpetrated.

In a poetic work, only a special theme can be singled out—for instance, an action far in the past, the desertion of a woman—but this comes fully alive to confront Johannes Thomasius' soul. I can say only a few words about this. When it happens, Johannes loses what is necessary for him to lose: confidence in himself, in his strength, even in the ability to find in loneliness the healing for what brings him such agonizing pain on the physical plane when experiencing it there. The following words, therefore, I beg you to take as they should be taken, that is, as shaking the soul and filling it completely. When Johannes Thomasius hears from all the world around him the words, “O man, know thou thyself,” his soul answers, as though his ego were not present:

For many years these words
of weighty meaning I have heard.
They sound to me from air and water;
they echo up from depths of earth.
And just as in the acorn secretly
the structure of the mighty oak is pressed,
within the power of these words
there is contained
all that my thought can comprehend
about the nature of the elements,
of souls as well as spirits,
of time and of eternity.
The world and my own nature
are living in the words:
O man, know thou thyself!

This is answered powerfully “from the springs and rocks.” Then his whole inner being is turned outward:

And now! within me
it is becoming terribly alive.
Around me darkness weaves,
within me blackness yawns;
out of the world of darkness it resounds,
out of soul-blackness it rings forth:
O man, know thou thyself!

(There sounds from springs and rocks:
O man, know thou thyself!)

You must try to imagine how the Self joins the cosmic process outside. Usually, we stand still or go about our hourly tasks and fail to see what is happening out there. We have no idea of it and believe that we are within our own inner being. But Johannes is following consciously what is going on. Consciously, he keeps pace with the power of all the elements, moves with the hours of the day and transforms himself into the night.

The earth I follow in her cosmic course.
I rumble in the thunder,
I flash within the lightning.

All this leaves the impression with him: I am. This is the moment, however, when the I am becomes the Daimon of his own soul. In the process, man's self-assertion is completely silenced. One can scarcely try to speak out, “I am,” but the soul replies:

... But oh, I feel
already separated from my being.

Then Johannes' own being appears in a limited, constrained form:

I see my body's shell.
It is an alien being outside myself;
it is remote from me.
There hovers nearer now another body ...

Now he can no longer speak with his own mouth but with the mouth of another person. It is the woman to whom he has done a wrong:

‘He brought me bitter sorrow;
I gave him all my trust.
He left me in my grief alone.
He robbed me of the warmth of life
and thrust me deep into cold earth.’

Then he returns to his own body:

She whom I left, unhappy one,
I was now she herself,
and I must suffer her despair.
Self-knowledge lent me strength
to pour myself into another self.

At this point a path is begun that is afterward described at the close of the scene in the words showing the effect of the world and the effect of solitude. In the world everything that streams in from outside works in the most frightful way. What comes from within works in such a way that the solitude is absolutely filled with people. This is a test, a test designed for the purpose hinted at in the words recited to you earlier:

The beings who can gaze at world foundations
lead men who strive into the heights
at first up to that summit
where can be shown
if they have strength
for conscious spirit sight.
Those who possess such forces
can be released out of the world of sense.
The others still must wait.

At this moment Johannes Thomasius would have lost consciousness and been flung back into the sense world if he had not held his ground in Scene Two, the scene we have been discussing in which he confronts his Self. Two things then became clear: his Self, as far as it is aware, has little strength; this deprives him of self-confidence. But the eternal “I” within him, of which he as yet knows nothing, has immense strength. It buoys him up and helps him to surmount the experience in the Meditation Room when Maria's soul departs. He needs, therefore, only the words of Benedictus, the force of those words, to guide him upward.

In the lines read to you, you must sense a Mystery of Words. What this means is not merely something written down in a play. In these lines, cosmic forces are actually contained, down to the very sounds. Indeed, the sounds cannot be changed. The opening of a door into the spiritual world is provided by these words; therefore, they must be heard just as they are spoken. Anything of the nature of the following lines cannot be put together in an arbitrary manner:

Des Lichtes webend Wesen, es erstrahlet
Durch Raumesweiten,
Zu füllen die Welt mit Sein.
Der Liebe Segen, er erwärmet
Die Zeitenfolgen,
Zu rufen aller Welten Offenbarung.
Und Geistesboten, sie vermählen
Des Lichtes webend Wesen
Mit Seelenoffenbarung;
Und wenn vermählen kann mit beiden
Der Mensch sein eigen Selbst,
Ist er in Geisteshöhen lebend.

Light's weaving essence radiates
through far-flung spaces
to fill the world with life.
Love's blessing pours its warmth
through time's long ages
to call forth revelation of all worlds.
And messengers of spirit join
light's weaving essence
with revelation of the soul.
And when with both the human being
can join his own true self,
he is alive in spirit heights.

Only after this can there sound from out the other world what is to sound into the soul. These are only hints, as has been said before.

Johannes Thomasius is then really impelled into the spiritual world. He cannot, however, rise directly into this world into which every person must go; he must first pass through the astral world. In Scene Four you have the astral world represented as Johannes Thomasius perceives it on the background of his own particular, individual past experience. It is not a universal description of this world but rather a description of what, for example, Johannes Thomasius had to experience there. The astral world is quite different from the physical. It is possible to meet a person there and see him as he was decades before, or to see a young man as he will become in future years. They are both realities. In your soul nature, you are still the same today as you were as a child of three. What you see in the soul world is by no means what is shown in man's outer physical form. The physical appearance conceals at every moment what was true before and what will come as truth in the future. When we look into the astral world, it is first of all necessary to overcome the primary maya of the sense world in order to understand the illusory power of time. For this reason, Johannes Thomasius sees in the astral world the person he has met on the physical plane, Capesius, as he once was as a youth, and he sees the one he knows as Strader just as he will be as an old man. What does this mean? Johannes knows Strader as he is now in the sense world with the forces present in his soul on the physical plane. But already within Strader are the conditions for what he will become after several decades. This also has to be included in our knowledge of a human being. Thus, time is rent asunder. It is really so that time is quite elastic in its nature when one enters the higher worlds. In the physical world Johannes Thomasius knows Capesius as elderly, Strader as young; now they stand together in the astral world: Capesius young, Strader old. It is not that time is stretched forward and backward but that one man is shown in his youth, the other in his old age. It is an absolutely real fact.

Something more is shown in this scene, something people react to with adolescent scorn. This is the fact that our soul experiences are greater than we usually think they are, that good and bad have their consequences when experienced within the soul. For example, if we think thoughts that are cruel or even false, they stream into the depths of the world and back again; we are closely connected in our soul experiences with the elemental powers of nature. This is no mere image. From the esoteric point of view, for example, it is a reality when Capesius is brought before the Spirit of the Elements, who leads every human being into existence. Actually, Capesius is confronting what the Spirit of the Elements is concerned with—and concerned with in such a way that when we experience anything in the soul, it is related to the elemental forces of nature. Johannes Thomasius is shown that both Capesius and Strader, out of the depths of their souls, can arouse the opposing powers of the elements. In that world, therefore, thunder and lightning follow what they have felt in their souls as pride or haughtiness, error, truth or lies. In the physical world, the error or lie a person has in his soul is quite peculiar. Someone can stand before us with error and lying in his soul and may appear to be quite innocent. But the moment we look at him with astral vision, we can see raging storms that otherwise are represented on earth only as a picture by the most terrible convulsions of the elements. All this Johannes has to experience and everything, too, that in the astral world can show him the remarkable connections he did not recognize when he met them on the physical plane.

The names given in this Rosicrucian Mystery are not given just by chance. Names such as “the Other Maria,” and so on, all point to definite relationships, so that the “one” and the “other” Maria are not merely “two Marias” but present themselves as Maria-forces to the other characters. “The Other Maria,” the mysterious nature figure, is revealed to Johannes Thomasius as the soul living below the ordinary conscious soul quite inaudibly and imperceptibly as long as man lives only in the physical world. But you must not take these relationships and characters as symbols. The Other Maria is absolutely a real person, a reality, just as the first Maria is. They should be taken for what they really are.

Everything that Johannes Thomasius has experienced passes before the eyes of his soul. He has experienced the astral world. This he can now bring into his consciousness by saying:

In realms of soul I find again
the human beings who are known to me.
The man who spoke about Felicia's fairy tales:
I could behold him here
as in his younger years;
and also he who as a youth
had chosen to become a monk:
here as an old man he appeared to me.
And with them was the Spirit of the Elements.

(End of Scene Four)

Johannes Thomasius has passed through what wipes out time before his eyes, because he has now become mature, sufficiently mature to see into the astral world. Is this world free from error? No, it is not. But in the astral world one thing can become a certainty for man. It will become a certainty for him, if he enters it in purity and without guilt, that there is a higher world shining into the astral world, just as the astral world shines into the ordinary physical world. The only question is whether or not he can see this as it actually is. People who go about in this physical world are themselves only a kind of illusion, in that they have something behind them leading them into the higher world. They stand in contrast to what they have perhaps been in distant or more recent times and what they will become in the future. But certain errors do not show us the astral world in which one is quite entangled in the world of the senses. For instance, they do not show the relationship of the three great forces of our existence: Will, Love, and Wisdom. This is so difficult to discern and understand in its reality that it remains hidden for a long time in the astral world. It is not an easy matter to discover it there. Besides, some relationships that are errors in the sense world are continued on into the astral world.

The working together of will, wisdom, and love, which at this point can only be touched on, takes place in the physical world through human beings. In the higher worlds, it takes place through the beings who expend their forces whenever, on the physical plane, the forces of supersensible beings descend into human souls. This happens through initiates in those temples where there are human representatives for the single world-forces, where human beings have come so far as to renounce the desire to portray the whole human being as he is but limit themselves to portraying a single force. It is the representatives who have taken over. But when man looks into the astral world, those holy places of the representatives of the powers of will, wisdom, and love are shown to him in a picture filled with maya. Therewith is woven a fearful web between the illusion of the sense world and of the astral world.

Now, I should have to talk for weeks if I wished to explain how it is with that figure of the higher powers shown as the initiate of the powers of will; he has met Johannes Thomasius on the physical plane, and there he really seems to be an ordinary, superficial fellow. In such a case the question can arise: are the primal forces of will supposed to work through such a person? Yes, they are. We can perhaps understand that the force manifesting the powers of will can permeate just this kind of less developed human being in the same way as the radiance of wisdom enters a man like Benedictus. We must grasp the following. If we have a beautiful flower in full bloom and place a seed beside it, it may be that the seed when developed will bring forth a still more beautiful flower. The flower can at this moment be considered quite perfect, but, according to cosmic reality, the seed is actually something more perfect. Hence, we have these opposites: Benedictus, the eminent bearer of wisdom, and the man who on the physical plane behaves in such a strange way toward everything said about the spiritual worlds and in such a strange way rejects it all. When in a group of people he hears talk about the spiritual worlds, he says, as if he were unwilling to listen:

I cannot find the bridge that leads across
from mere ideas to actual deeds.

(Romanus, Scene One)

He is a man who finds elsewhere what leads to deeds; to him, any talk about the spiritual is simply empty talk. You could tell this fellow beautiful things about theosophy; to the man he is, now, on the physical plane, it is nothing but words. What he finds worthwhile is the working of machines. When he hears about the Other Maria, how spiritual power has become part of her, kindling a strength of feeling and love in her so that she can perform healing deeds, he is the one who rejects all this, saying merely, “That comes from her having a good heart!” He remains wholly on the physical plane, where he is indeed a philistine, an ordinary fellow, but also at the same time an energetic, determined man of will. Hence, he says:

If this good person has achieved so much
the impulse lies
in her warm heart.
When work is done, men surely need
refreshment and renewal from ideas.
But only training of the will,
combined with skill and strength
in all the genuine work of life,
will further human progress.
When whirr of wheels
is humming in my ears,
and when contented human hands
are labouring at machines,
it's then I feel the powers of life at work.

This is the man of will, the man of action. If you were to talk to him day in and day out about the spirit, his only response would be, “You can't turn a winch with that; meanwhile, what are people going to eat?” This amounts to saying, “Turn your winches all day long, and then, if you have a little spare time, talk about the spirit for amusement!” Here are the forces still latent in the seed, and they are good forces, important forces. Through the powers of will they stream into the world. When people hear about spiritual worlds and receive what is said, each in his own way, this must not be judged theoretically, for it is extremely difficult to arrive at the truth. If you do not understand that a seed must be looked upon as the counterpart to such a person as has just been described, you will be experiencing the same kind of illusion as the one presented by the Subterranean Temple. There it is an astral maya. There is reality in what Johannes Thomasius perceives in the scene with Capesius and Strader when he sees them at different ages. But in Scene Five a maya, a Fata Morgana of the spiritual world, is pictured, from which, after it has been experienced, the soul must free itself. Therefore, you have to take Scene Five as justified only by the fact that reality is intermingled with the maya.

No part of this scene would contribute to Johannes Thomasius' development unless it bore the same relationship to astral experience that the concepts and ideas of the physical world bear to our understanding of the world. What scientific knowledge is for the physical plane, the “Maya Temple” is for the astral world. The “Maya Temple” is no more a reality rooted in the spiritual world than a concept is something we can eat. But concepts must live in the world for an understanding of the world to be possible. Only in this way can there play in from another world what is profoundly illuminating for Johannes Thomasius, that is, to recognize the definite knot in world karma formed when Felix Balde comprehends that in solitary wanderings about the world he must not bury his soul treasures but must bring them to the temple.

Then, for the first time, it is possible for Johannes Thomasius to perceive relationships in the spiritual world that are, so to speak, much more real, and of a more delicate and intimate nature. For example, the projection of the astral world into the physical world takes place when such a thing happens as the inspiring of a man like Capesius by someone who does not really know, herself, how much is living in her soul. In the Mystery Play, Felicia Balde does not know this. In the case of a man of intellect, a man who works intellectually, everything passes through his intellect. There is nothing whatever in the intellect that can give us strength while it instructs us about the world. This lies outside the capacity of the intellect. In a person of exceptional intelligence, a force coming from the spiritual world may pass through the intellect and then continue. At this point, he will be able to speak of the spiritual world in splendid, theoretical terms. The mind, however, does not influence the degree of inner esoteric life or the content of the soul. What comes from theories may reach the soul even without passing through the intellect; it can discover a person who is receptive to the fountainhead of spirit and who can summon up something there that Capesius, for instance, describes on the physical plane. This is clearly shown in his words about Felicia Balde, who lives out there in the solitude with Felix, and what she really means to him—when he says how gladly he listens to her because she speaks out of the most profound, age-old wisdom. It is important for us to grasp fully what Capesius is saying: on the physical plane, there is a woman to whom he likes to listen and from whose lips come things welling up from occult sources. She cannot clothe them in elegant words, but when her words reach the ear of Capesius, he can say:

I must allude
if I'm to tell about it,
to something which in truth
seems far more wonderful to me
than much that I have heard of here,
because it speaks more to my heart.
I scarcely should be able in another place
to bring the words across my lips
which here I find so easy.
I feel my soul, at times,
as though entirely empty and exhausted;
it is as if the very fountainhead
of knowledge had run dry within me,
as if I could not find one word
that seems worthwhile to speak or to be heard.

(Scene One)

Such things exist. Such people, however much they know, feel at these times as if they could get no further.

And when I feel such barrenness of spirit,
then I escape and go where these good people
have their refreshing, quiet solitude.

Then his soul begins to open out, because that is for him the door into the occult world.

And there Felicia tells me many a tale
in pictures fabulous,
of beings dwelling in the land of dreams
and in the realm of magic fairy tales,
who live a motley life.
The tone in which she tells of them
recalls the bards of ancient times.
I do not ask the sources of her words,
but this one thing I clearly know:
that new life wells and flows into my soul
dispelling its paralysis.

The reality of all this Johannes Thomasius can observe on the physical plane, for he is present, but to be able to explain it to himself he has first to look into the astral world. In Scene Six then, in the astral world, Felicia Balde appears to him “just as she is in life.” She gives the Spirit of the Elements one of the hundreds of fairy tales she has told Capesius. Now, however, comes the reciprocal movement to what takes place below the threshold of consciousness.

Felicia has told Capesius her fairy tales. When she tells one that she herself does not understand, the forces arise in his soul that banish his mental paralysis; then he can, in turn, relate something to his audience. It sounds, however, quite different from what Felicia has related. Mysterious forces are active even in Capesius. When one seeks to discover them, he will find their origin in the astral world, where it can be seen how they call forth countercurrents. Wherever there are elemental powers, they call up the kind of reverberations that Felicia's words awaken in the soul of Capesius. The same kind of thing occurs in our brain. A little spirit lives there who perhaps thinks out the most wonderful things. When we try to discover how he comes out of the macrocosm, we are likely to find the Earth-brain, which thinks thoughts on quite a different scale from those appearing in the small human brain. A man will often assert something he does not see in his own brain, but it will look grotesque when it is reflected in the giant Earth-brain. This has to be reflected; hence, the relationship of Gairman, who appears on the physical plane and then as the Spirit of the Earth-brain. About this, too, one could speak for a long time. Were we to look with soul vision at what takes place in the lonely cottage when Felicia tells her fairy tales and afterward behold the Spirit of the Earth-brain, we would discover many a secret, as, for instance, how ironical this Spirit of the Earth-brain is and how often he mocks. Ridicule has to be a concern of his, because he finds much to laugh at in what human beings do.

From an artistic point of view, it is justifiable that the moment this mockery is out of place, Gairman appears in the role he has so often to play and shows himself in his true guise. We see then, after Felicia Balde has told one of her fairy tales before the Spirit of the Elements in Scene Six, how an abnormal effect is produced on the Spirit of the Earth-brain, who translates the tale in quite different words. Felicia relates the story:

... Once upon a time
there was a Being
that flew from East to West,
following the journey of the sun.
It flew on, over lands and over seas;
and from the heights it watched
the busy life of men.
It saw how men love one another,
and how in hate they persecute each other.
Nothing could hinder
this Being in its flight;
for hate and love create
always the same a thousandfold.
But over one house on its way
the Being had to pause.
Within, there was a tired man
who pondered over human love
and pondered, too, on human hate.
His pondering had carved
deep furrows on his brow,
had turned his hair quite white.
In its concern for him,
the Being lost its guide, the sun,
and stayed at this man's side.
It was still in his room
at evening when the sun went down;
and when the sun returned,
the Being was once more
caught upward by the spirit of the sun.
Again it saw the many people in love, in hate,
continue on their earthly course.
And when it came a second time
above the house, still following the sun,
its gaze fell there
upon a dead old man.

The Spirit of the Earth-brain responds in a way that is naturally not at all justifiable:

Once upon a time there was a man
who tramped from East to West;
the urge for knowledge lured him on
to travel over lands and seas,
and by his rules of wisdom
he watched the busy life of men.
He saw how men love one another
and how in hate they persecute each other.
At every single instant
he saw himself at all his wisdom's end.
For how it is that hate and love
forever rule the earthly world
could not be brought into a law.
He noted many thousand cases,
yet lacked a comprehensive whole.
This dry researcher
encountered on his way
a Being of the Light,
upon whom life weighed heavily,
for it was in a constant battle
with a dark shadow-form.
‘Well, who are you?’
inquired the dry researcher.
‘Oh, I am Love,’
one being answered.
‘In me behold dark Hate,’
so spoke the other.
The man, however, could
no longer hear these beings' words.
As deaf researcher, tramped on
from East to West, this man.

These things are distinct experiences of the astral world. Johannes Thomasius has to pass through them in order to ascend into the spiritual world.

Today I will only say briefly that it is necessary for Johannes Thomasius, in order to reach the spiritual world itself, to make a real connection with that world on threads already woven in the physical world. As you will hear later in the recitation of Scene Seven, his connection with the spiritual world arose out of the karma encompassed by incarnations, and this could be revealed only to Devachanic vision. Devachanic elements actually have to play their part. Therefore, I ask you to notice how everything is alive in the living, weaving Devachanic ocean. This can be described, but the details must more or less be hinted at. For a real description, we must go further. Let us not think that we know anything of higher worlds by speaking about them with the words sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul, alluding to Philia, Astrid, and Luna. These three figures are in no way personifications of the three soul principles, nor are they symbols for them. Listen to the vowels with which each of these characters describes her activities. Try to hear what lives in the vowels. Then you can follow how the sequence of single vowels and single words make clear what is given in a different way as sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls. Should you delete any part of it, it will no longer be intact. Therefore, it is important to listen carefully to the words when, for instance, Luna speaks, so as to get an understanding of the Devachanic element in the consciousness soul:

Ich will erwärmen Seelenstoff
Und will erhärten Lebensäther.
Sie sollen sich verdichten,
Sie sollen sich erfühlen,
Und in sich selber seiend
Sich schaffend halten,
Dass du, geliebte Schwester,
Der suchenden Menschenseele
Des Wissens Sicherheit erzeugen kannst.

I will enwarm soul-substance
and will make firm life-ether.
They shall condense themselves,
they shall perceive themselves,
and in themselves residing
guard their creative forces,
that you, beloved sister,
Within the seeking soul
may quicken certainty of knowledge.

(Scene Seven)

In the movement of the words can be heard in this description of Devachan what otherwise cannot in any way be expressed. This, too, must be taken into consideration. When speaking about higher worlds, we are definitely obliged to speak in many different ways. What I could never say theoretically about the sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls you may perceive, if you have the desire to understand it, from the characterization of the three figures, Philia, Astrid, and Luna. But you must understand that these three are not symbols or allegories of the sentient, intellectual, and consciousness souls. Should you ask, “What are these three?” the answer would be, “They are persons who are alive; they are Philia-, Astrid-, and Luna-people.” This always must be kept firmly in mind.

How karma, finally intertwining and twisting itself together, can display in a picture what as microcosm Johannes Thomasius experiences in his soul—this was portrayed in the whole closing scene of the Munich performance. Showing how karma is at work, the various characters stood in their places. Each had his position according to his relationship to another person. If you imagine this actually mirrored in the soul of Johannes Thomasius, you will then have more or less what is contained in this picture of the spirit realm in Scene Seven, which could only with great difficulty be given verbal expression.

(There followed a recitation of Scene Seven by Marie von Sivers, accompanied at the beginning and end by the music of Adolf Arenson.)

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Anthroposophic Press, Inc., Spring Valley, NY, reprinted 1983.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, Inc., Spring Valley, NY, 1979.
• 3. Adolf Arenson (1855-1936) composed the music for the four Mystery Dramas at the request of Rudolf Steiner.