The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Although it is difficult in a certain respect to deal with the fundamentals of spiritual science, as it is meant here, as it was done in the lecture the day before yesterday, it may well be said that the communications relating to those research results, which are to form the subject of today's lecture, are in a certain respect actually a risk in relation to the ways of imagining and thinking of the present age. For although one may have to find some paradoxes in the lecture of the day before yesterday from the point of view of these ways of thinking and habits of mind, from such a point of view one will certainly and understandably not find it easy to see serious research in what is to be said today. Rather, many people in the present day will be inclined to see it only as the ravings of a strange fantasist. One must be fully aware of this when speaking about these things; aware that everything that enters into general consciousness at a later time, much of what then later becomes a matter of course, is something paradoxical and fantastic in the time when it first appears.

I would just like to say this in advance to characterize how aware the spiritual researcher is of all the things that can understandably be felt when he allows himself to share his research results, which still seem paradoxical for today's time.

Before I come to these research results, I would like to characterize the basic mood of the spiritual researcher's soul in a few introductory words. This basic mood is quite different from the mood towards another field of research. While in our knowledge of the external world and also in our knowledge of ordinary science, we today have the feeling, with a certain amount of justification, that we have the powers of knowledge within us, that we only need to put them into effect, so to speak, and then we can judge everything that nature itself and the researcher discovers in nature. While in this research one devotes all one's efforts to the very purpose of research, to observe things and to recognize their laws through the intellect, the attitude of the spiritual researcher towards the truth, towards all striving for knowledge, is quite different. By working one's way into this spiritual research, one increasingly feels the need to devote all one's soul-work, all one's inner striving, to preparation; and more and more one gets the feeling that, when one wants to approach some truth in this or that field, one would actually like to keep waiting, keep preparing oneself further and further, because one is aware that The more effort and work one puts into the path of the soul that must be traveled before one can research, the more one matures and is ready to receive the truth. For it is the receiving of the truth that is the real subject of spiritual science. And this feeling, this mood, comes over the soul so strongly that one feels a holy awe at the approach of these things, and that one would rather wait again and again for important, essential insights of spiritual research than allow these things to enter into consciousness too soon. This requires a very special mood in the spiritual researcher himself, that mood which gradually permeates all the work, as was mentioned the day before yesterday as an inner soul work in exercises, and which brings about a certain attitude in the spiritual researcher towards the truth, precisely the attitude of holy awe towards the truth.

Having said this, I would now like to enter, without prejudice, into what will be said about the important, meaningful subject so close to every soul this evening. Certainly, there are not the worst minds in our present time that still hold on to the opinion that the truths of faith are special and the truths of knowledge are also special, and that everything that man can imagine as going beyond birth and death is only an object of faith, not of strictly provable science. It is precisely this strict separation between faith and knowledge that is abolished by spiritual science. And one feels in harmony with what has long wanted to enter into modern spiritual striving when the truths that lie beyond death are developed in the sense in which it is to be done here; one feels in harmony with it when one repeatedly bears in mind the fact that that the great Lessing did indeed deal with one of the main truths of this spiritual science, in the work that he wrote as his spiritual testament shortly before his death, the mature fruit of his thinking and meditating: his “Education of the Human Race”. Lessing does not shy away from saying that the belief in repeated lives on Earth does not necessarily have to be an error because it occurred, as it were, as something that the human race came up with before the prejudices of school and philosophers had yet cast something of a hazy veil over what humanity knew from the beyond of death at the beginning of its cultural development. In this way one feels in harmony with the best personalities who have integrated their striving into the cultural development of humanity, especially if one stands on the ground of this spiritual science.

It was said the day before yesterday that the things of spiritual life, the processes of the same, can only be researched when, through what was described the day before yesterday, the human being really comes to strengthen the forces slumbering in his soul so much that this soul finds the possibility - it was said comparatively: as the chemist extracts hydrogen from water — so the soul of the spiritual researcher finds the possibility, through soul exercises, to withdraw from the physical body and to experience itself separately from the physical body, so that it can then associate a meaning with the word: I experience myself as a spiritual being outside of my body, and my body, with everything that belongs to it in the sense world, stands before me as an external object stands before us when we look at it with our eyes or touch it with our hands. And already during the last time when I was allowed to give some public lectures here, I was able to draw attention to the significant moment that occurs in the life of the spiritual researcher when, through the exercises mentioned the day before yesterday, this spiritual researcher has truly matured. If you want to know more about these exercises, you can find it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and in my 'Occult Science in Outline'. Here too, only the principle of what the spiritual researcher experiences is to be pointed out. When he has brought his soul to the point where it can emerge from its body, then one day, or one might also say one night, the experience comes; for both are possible: in the midst of the usual events of the day, in the midst of the night, and if properly prepared, neither will disturb it. It can occur in a hundred different ways, I would just like to describe the typical character. It can occur either way, it will always occur in a typical way, what I am now describing: It happens that the person wakes up as if from sleep; he knows: something is happening that is not a dream. He is removed from all external perception, all sorrows, all passions, all that connects him to the day. Or in the middle of the day the event occurs where one's imagination must stand still, where something completely different enters into the imagination, into consciousness. That which then enters can be like this — it will always be similar to how I describe it; I would like to describe as concretely as possible how this harrowing event can really happen for the spiritual researcher. One can have the feeling: You are now like in a house that has been struck by lightning. Your surroundings are disintegrating like a house that has been struck by lightning. The lightning goes right through you. You feel how everything to which you are materially connected is being separated from you as if by the elements, and you feel as if you are being detached from yourself, maintaining yourself as a spiritual being. It is the deepest, most harrowing impression imaginable. From that moment on, or from a similar one, one knows what it means to experience oneself in the soul, apart from one's body. And the spiritual researchers of all times have used an expression for this experience that seems fully appropriate to the one who knows this experience. For there has been a kind of spiritual research at all times, just as the different cultures required. Today's is different from those of earlier times; it is commensurate with the advances of modern science. But what is achieved through it has also been achieved through the methods that had been made possible by the different cultures. Thus, spiritual researchers of the most diverse times have described the experience just mentioned with the words: as a human being, one arrives at the gate of death. And indeed, what one can first imagine as being experienced through death actually occurs. It does not occur directly as a reality; for the spiritual researcher returns to his body and everything is as before; he perceives the external world again. But everything he experiences is a picture of what really happens when a person passes through the gate of death, when the outer, physical life ends and the life after death begins.

If we now wish to understand how the spiritual researcher comes to know the things that are mentioned here, we must bear in mind that, through the careful preparation of his soul, as has been mentioned, he attains a perception that is quite different from that of the outer senses; he can truly look into those spheres of existence that are to be discussed.

The first thing that the spiritual researcher comes to when he has overcome such a moment at the gateway of death, the first thing could be called in a sense: one reaches beyond human memory. Human memory, the human power of recollection, is indeed something that lives in our soul, as it were, as the beginning, one might say, of something spiritual. Even external philosophical researchers who know nothing of spiritual science can see this. The French researcher Bergson, who has achieved such brilliant successes, sees something purely spiritual in the memory of man that has nothing to do with biological or physiological processes. And when the prejudices of natural science, which still cling to almost everyone today, have passed, then people will realize that our memory contains something for the human soul that is, as it were, the beginning of a transition from what is bound to the senses and the brain to something purely spiritual and soul-like. When we push our perceptions back into our memory, we do not store them through any physical process, but purely in the soul. I can only hint at this. A scientific justification of what has just been said would take a great deal of time and require special lectures. Just as in ordinary life we perceive memory images that arise from the treasure trove of our soul, which, as they occur, have nothing that could lead us to mistake them for an illusion or hallucination, so now, not from the treasure of the soul, but from spiritual worlds, the spiritual processes and spiritual facts now arise before the soul of the spiritual researcher; and one then notices that behind what we call the treasure of memory, the human soul can experience something else. The spiritual researcher then sees, as it were, the following: Now you have been drawn out of your body with your soul; now you can really get an overview because it has become an external object, that which you have acquired through the sense world: the treasure of memory. But this treasure of memory is like a veil that covers something that always lives in the soul, only unconsciously; but what is covered by memory and remembrance is veiled. Yes, in the depths of the human soul there is something that is always alive in it; but when a person unfolds his memories in his soul, he covers up this subconscious spiritual-soul life. When the spiritual researcher rises into the spiritual-soul realm, one might say that his memories are attached to the comet's tail of his spiritual-soul nature. But through these memories he can see something that could be called: forces of a higher kind than those that are preserved for us by memory. If the expression were not so frowned upon – but it is difficult to find appropriate expressions for these areas that have nothing to do with the sensory world – one could use the expression: one ascends to a super-memory from memory. One gradually enters into what was imaginatively called imaginative imagining the day before yesterday. Whereas with memory one always has the feeling that the images of memory are rising and presenting themselves to the soul as you passively surrender to them, now you are immersed in what lies beyond memory and you know that you have to actively help bring forth what then arises as imagination, as the content of supermemory. But through the soul prepared for these things, one also knows that what reveals itself as lying behind memory is always there, that it was only covered by memory, and one knows, by recognizing it in its essence, that what descends into the depths that lie beneath the treasure trove of memory is itself something that is now working on our physical organism, that is active in it. A quite different discovery is made. The following discovery is being made, and it is of extraordinary significance for the relationship between spiritual research and natural science. Natural science presents itself to us today by saying: everything that a person feels, thinks and wills is bound to processes in his nervous system. It is right in saying this, but with its methods it cannot find out how the soul life is bound to the nervous system, or how thinking, for example, is bound to the brain. One has to go to much deeper foundations of the soul life. When one comes up with spiritual research, one realizes: Yes, it is quite correct for the ordinary conception of everyday life, and also for scientific work, that all the thoughts we form, and also all sensations, for example, are bound to the brain; but how are they bound to the brain? The deeper soul, of which ordinary consciousness knows nothing, which is only discovered through spiritual research, only works on, we say, a certain part of the brain, only sends its workers into the senses and brain; and through the fact that this “subconscious” soul works on the nervous system, the latter becomes a mirror to reflect what occurs in ordinary life. What occurs in ordinary life is the mirror image of the soul-spiritual. Just as if a mirror were placed here and you were to approach it, you would not see yourself but only your mirror image, so it is when you develop your everyday thinking, feeling and willing. The deeper soul works specifically on the nervous system and brain, and what it develops there makes it possible to perceive something. So it is the soul-spiritual that works on the eye, and what causes certain processes in the eye. When these processes are triggered, the eye reflects back into the spiritual-soul that which we call color. Thus it is the deeper soul-spiritual that works in the body. And spiritual research will lead humanity to this: to recognize that it is we ourselves who live in the interior of our conceptions, and that it is we ourselves, with our deeper being, who first prepare the body to become a mirroring apparatus for what the soul then experiences. This is how it is in ordinary, external, spatial life. But at the moment when our perceptions become images of memory, something else must happen; if we do not want our perceptions to flash past us like dreams before they become memory, we have to pay attention to them. Anything that is to become a memory, that is to remain with us in our soul, requires longer concentration than is necessary for mere perception, say. A color impression would not remain in our memory if we only looked at it for just as long as it takes to evoke the color. If we look at it longer, we appeal to that power that preserves all of this in our soul as a memory. We push back, as it were, our soul activity into a deeper being and this turns out not to be the physical body, but something finer, more ethereal than the physical body; and what in spiritual research with the term “ethereal,” which is frowned upon and not at all popular today. However, the word does not have the meaning usually associated with it. It presents itself as an ethereal body that is already of a spiritual nature.

But our soul does not only work by creating these images of memory; it works much more through its contact with the outside world in the life between birth and death. And that is where the spiritual researcher discovers the remarkable fact that our memories only remain images because they are stopped by the etheric body and not allowed into the physical body. If they were to flow into the physical body, they would become activity in it, these ideas, so they would merge into the formative forces, into the living forces of the physical body, would organize it thoroughly. The fact that we let our ideas be ideas, that we do not let them merge into organic forces, means that they retain the character of memory, we preserve them in their imaginative power. They can remain memories.

But the soul also develops much stronger forces in life than those that develop the memories, and these stronger forces are now also initially stored in the soul. But they lie like an over-memory behind the ordinary store of memory; they are within us. This is what the spiritual researcher experiences when he looks through memory at this super-memory treasure, that he knows: something lives in your soul that cannot have an effect on your physical body, that lies below the surface of memory, but also does not come into effect in your physical body, now, as it is between birth and death. There is something that does not remain a mere idea, but which does not become an organically active force either. The spiritual researcher experiences this by being outside of his body. But at the same time he experiences something else, which he can express when he has become clear about the fact, by saying: Yes, I experience something in my soul, which is in it, which so to speak has no application because it cannot enter the body, which is formed since birth or, let us say, conception, because it finds no accommodation in it. And now, by delving into this, which I have indicated here, the spiritual researcher experiences it in such a way that he can recognize it, as one recognizes the germ that is in a plant. The plant develops from the root to the fruit, in which the germ is. But the germ is already inherent in the whole plant. That, which is the germ, has no meaning for this plant; it cannot sink its powers into this plant; but it is in it, it is the disposition for a following plant, let us say, of the next year. When the spiritual researcher delves down, he delves into something that is a soul core, a soul germ, in him, which he knows is formed in this life between birth and death, but it does not develop its powers not in this life; he dives into the deeper layers of the soul and lies ready for a following life, as in the fruit of a plant the germ lies ready for the following plant, which could not develop without the preceding one.

In this way one comes to an understanding of the harmony of successive human lives on earth with all of nature, if one knows how to dive into the soul. The important thing is that the spiritual researcher never loses sight of the fact that what you are experiencing can only be such that you become aware of your own activity again and again; because if you are not aware of it, you do not understand how it came about, then it becomes an illusion, a hallucination or mere fantasy. It is a complete fallacy to object: Yes, how can the spiritual researcher know that what he discovers is not a hallucination, an illusion, or fantasy? It could be a hallucination that one has suggested to oneself. If the spiritual researcher would place himself in relation to what he experiences as it has been described, as the morbid mind places itself in relation to a hallucination, then this objection would be fully justified. For it presents itself in the mind like an external perception, one does not see through it. But the spiritual researcher gets to know exactly through the right preparations - as you can read in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds?” - that he can distinguish what is only reminiscence of the outside world, and what is imagination and hallucination , to which he remains passive, that he must distinguish this from what presents itself in such a way that he recognizes it in the same way as one is aware of a letter or a word: that which is written on the paper does not mean itself, but something else. For the spiritual researcher does not use what he has seen as one uses hallucinations, but in such a way that one can compare it with a spiritual reading in a writing of imaginations that present themselves. Only when one learns to use in one's mind, in a free way, what one presents there through one's own activity, in such a way that one lives in it as one lives in the writing, through which one sees through to what what they mean; only by rising in such an inwardly strengthened way to that which enters into the vision of the soul can one attain to truly seeing what processes and entities of the spiritual world are. But then, because one gradually becomes familiar with the element of our soul that is not the same as the body, one comes to understand the being of which one can say that the quality of immortality applies to it.

Spiritual science is not a speculative philosophy in which one reflects on the reasons that may arise for the immortality of the soul: spiritual science shows how to arrive at the soul itself and, from this true soul, it shows what it really is. It lays bare, as it were, the soul; and then it turns out that what is laid bare as the soul is not a product of the external body, but that this body is the result of what is discovered there. For when, on the one hand, one discovers within oneself the core of the soul, one senses and experiences that it is the germ of a next earthly life, then one also experiences in this content of consciousness, which lies above the store of memory, what has been drawn into the human being as the human physical body before he began his existence as a physical being at birth or, let us say, at conception. Just as the soul itself spatially prepares its brain when we perceive, so that it reflects its content, so one experiences that the spiritual-soul that one has reached before birth, before was present in a spiritual world and acquired the powers in this world to unite with the physical substance given by father and mother, to permeate this substantiality, to organize itself with it. We experience that the human being, as he enters the world, is not merely the product of father and mother, but that the spiritual unites with the material, with that which is given by father and mother; the spiritual that comes down from spiritual worlds, where it has lived between the last death and this conception. And by getting to know that in the soul which lies beyond memory, the spiritual researcher can also learn to recognize how the soul behaves when the physical, so to speak, no longer holds back the activity of this spiritual-soul, when death has come upon the person. When death has overtaken a person, the soul initially lives – this is the fact that presents itself to spiritual research – in that which has not become physical during life; it lives in its store of memories. In the first period after death, a wide range of memories unfolds before the soul of everything the person has experienced between birth and death. Even all those events come up that have been forgotten during life. This experiencing of all the memories lasts only a few days. The spiritual researcher can see through what is occurring as the first experience after death, because he is, after all, getting to know the nature of memory. When the soul has left the body, the content of consciousness for the spiritual researcher is really something like what it is for the dead person when he has passed through the gate of death. As soon as he is out of the body, the spiritual researcher also experiences everything that his entire thought content is, but now as a world; just as one usually has mountains and clouds and stars and sun and moon and rivers and cities around oneself, so out of the body one has a tableau of what one has experienced; only one can see through this tableau, one can see its effect. By getting used to, to use a trivial expression, really seeing through these things outside the body, one also gradually comes to be able to consciously cast one's gaze on what the soul experiences after death, what it has experienced after the last death, what it faces after the death that will come. At first it is this memory picture that spreads, the thoughts that have accumulated. But behind it, another soul power appears. Now that death has passed, this soul power is no longer inhibited by the body; now it works in such a way that this memory picture disappears from the person's surroundings after a few days.

As I said at the beginning, one comes to daring things when one wants to talk about the subject of today's lecture, but one cannot avoid touching on these things if one does not want to indulge in generalities. I have tried to explain what spiritual research has revealed about the duration of this first experience after death. It has been found that this review of the thought images of the experiences of the last life takes a different amount of time for different people: longer for one person and shorter for another. But in general, it lasts about as long as the strength can last during life, through which the person can stay awake when he is prevented from falling asleep. One person can hardly keep himself awake for one night without being overcome by sleep, while another can for many nights. This inner strength to fight sleep is the measure for the number of days that this remembering back lasts after death. Then it disappears and something else occurs.

What now occurs can only be absorbed if one already knows it through out-of-body experiences; but it is very difficult to find words for these experiences of the soul, which are very different from those experienced in everyday life. Our language is, after all, shaped for the sensual world. What lies outside the sensual world, the soul experiences quite differently than here in the sensual world. Therefore, I ask you to excuse me if some expressions seem awkward or paradoxical to you; but you can be assured that when someone sets out to describe with the very ordinary words of language that for which words are difficult to find, he will not be able to describe directly from the experiences of the soul that which is experienced after the return. What the soul experiences now, what the spiritual researcher experiences outside the body, is what I would like to give the term to, because it is neither feeling nor willing, it is something between feeling and willing. In ordinary life, one does not have this soul power, which one develops inwardly. One recognizes it as a spiritual researcher. It is as if the will moves with us in the world; and as if this will, I would like to say, by moving, carries on its wings or its tides what now comes to us as a feeling in such a way that it is as if it is outside of us, as if it plays on the waves of the will. While we are otherwise accustomed to feeling this feeling as something that is inwardly grown with us, now it becomes like surging and weaving on the waves of the will; and yet we know that in this experience we into the world, that what is out there as willing feeling, as feeling willing, what is out there as the color and tone perceptions of the sense world, is permeated by our being. There is feeling out there that we perceive as light; but at the same time we know we are connected with it.

But in the first period after the review, the person experiences this in such a way that the only world he perceives at first is basically the one from which he emerged, so to speak, at death. After the memory tableau has dawned, this feeling-wanting, wanting-feeling unfolds in the soul; but it expresses only things that are still connected with the last life on earth, so that we can characterize these things that we experience there in something like the following way: Earth life never gives man all that it could give him in his experience. A lot of things remain so that we can say: We have not enjoyed everything that could have been enjoyed, that could have made impressions between birth and death. There is always something left between the lines of life, so to speak, of desires, of wishes, of love for other people and so on. Unfinished business – to use the trivial expression – in the last life, that is what we look back on spiritually with desire, and now we look back spiritually with desire for years. During these years it is so that we have our world mainly in what we have been, so to speak. We look into our last existence on earth and see what remains undone. And only by living in a sphere for years in which nothing can be satisfied as it is satisfied on earth, because we have indeed discarded the bodily organs for it, do we work our way out of such connections with the last life on earth in the soul.

Here too, spiritual science has to survey the length of these experiences, and the following can be said: the time a person lives through in the earliest childhood up to the point where he remembers back, has no influence on the duration of the experiences that have now been described. Likewise, the time that we continue to live through after the age of twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven has no influence. The years from about the age of four into the twenties also indicate the length of time in which one – so connected with one's last life on earth – has to gain experiences in the spiritual world, to withdraw from earthly life. Spiritual observation shows that the time taken to build up the body with the upward striving forces after the previous spiritual life, after going through conception and birth, lasts until the mid-twenties, and that the time taken long it took to imbue life with the physical, organic-fertile forces, to imbue it with the forces that desire and enjoy in life, it takes about the same amount of time to find one's way out of the last earthly life. So that if you turn twelve years old, for example, you may only need five years to emerge from your last life on earth, or seven years; but if you turn fifty, for example, the years after the mid-twenties no longer contribute anything special to the extension of the period just mentioned.

It must be said of this period that it already contains to a certain extent what can be called: the human being perceives spiritual processes and spiritual beings in his environment. I already indicated the day before yesterday that when the spiritual researcher experiences himself in his spiritual and mental self, he is in a real spiritual world. The dead person moves into this spiritual world; but at first he is so busy with his connections with his previous world, in the way we discussed before, that he can only gain a connection with what is in his spiritual surroundings by taking a detour through his earlier life. To give an example: let us assume that someone has passed through the gate of death. The retrospective view is over. He is living in this time of tearing himself away from the contexts of his previous life on earth. Someone he has loved is still in the physical body. The one who is still in this stage of experience, of which we are just speaking, cannot look directly at the soul that is still on earth; but a kind of switchover is formed, as it were: in the last life on earth, we loved the person who has remained behind; we look at the feeling of love when we are in the stage that we are now discussing. Feelings are our outside world. By looking at them, we find the way to the soul that is still on earth. Likewise, we must also find the way to a soul that has already passed through the gate of death through feeling. So one can say: a person lives with human souls as a soul after death, but initially in a roundabout way through his own life.

But more and more a power develops in man, a soul power, which only the spiritual researcher knows when he experiences himself spiritually and soul-wise outside of the body. There is no expression for this. For the other power one can at least say: 'Volitional feeling' or 'feeling volition', because it has something in common with volition and feeling. Even when volition and feeling have become objectified, they still have something in common with the impulses of feeling and will that we otherwise have in life with the things that surge around in volitions and feelings out there. But what the soul now experiences, what awakens in it as a power, the more it moves away in the manner described from the last life on earth, I can only describe with an expression that may sound clumsy in relation to ordinary language, but which is nevertheless indicative. I can only call it: creative soul power, soul creativity. It is something that the soul experiences directly now. That one is absorbed in an activity is something the soul experiences completely; but at the same time, that this creative power really develops, really radiates from the soul into the environment and - again it is clumsy, but it has to be used to make oneself understood, this expression - this power is something that radiates into the environment like a spiritual light, illuminating the spiritual processes and beings all around, so that we see them; just as when the sun rises, we see external objects through the sun, we see spiritual processes and beings through our own inner luminosity, which is poured out. Now the time is approaching when the soul is in the spiritual environment to the extent that this creative power awakens in her to illuminate this world. And here the religions have not used an insignificant expression when they say, to describe life after death: This feeling of being in the creative power, this living in a spiritual environment, which becomes visible when one sends one's own creative power into it, this experiencing of oneself in the outpouring of light is a feeling of bliss. Even the pains are experienced as bliss in this world. There the soul now experiences its further life.

Now it is a matter of the soul only being able to go through this experience in alternating states, which has just been described. I do, however, enter spheres that to the ordinary person are pure fantasy. But according to the preparatory instructions that have now been given, I am also allowed to discuss these things, for it must be clear that the spiritual researcher will never claim anything other than that such things can only be revealed to him when he experiences out of the body. So the soul experiences alternating conditions. It is not always in a state in which it radiates its spiritual luminosity emotionally over its surroundings, so that human souls and other entities are now around it and spiritual processes are experienced by it. It is not always the case that the soul therefore lives in the external spiritual world, but this state must alternate with the state in which the soul feels that this radiance of spiritual luminosity is, as it were, being dampened. The soul becomes inwardly dull, it can no longer radiate its light into the surroundings, it must withdraw into itself. And now comes the moment when, in the meantime between death and a new birth, the soul lives a completely lonely life. This lasts a long time. If you want to compare it to ordinary life, you can say: just as in ordinary life a person has to alternate between sleeping and waking, after death he has to alternate between a life that pours out into the outer world and a life of inner solitude. When everything that was previously experienced in the state of expansion has been taken in, but when the soul knows: you are now completely alone with yourself. Just as one becomes unconscious during sleep, here one withdraws into oneself, but does not become unconscious. The soul experiences a strengthened consciousness precisely in these times of loneliness, but it experiences it in such a way that it knows: out there is the spiritual world, but you are alone with yourself, everything you experience, you experience within yourself. What you experience within yourself are the echoes of what you have experienced outside of yourself. Only through this can the inner luminosity grow stronger again and emerge from the soul once more. And then you wake up spiritually again and experience the other state.

It is one of the most remarkable experiences to really learn to associate a meaning with the words that for the time between death and a new birth the soul lives in spiritual companionship and loneliness, that for this alternation of social experiences and loneliness in the spiritual world, although through much longer periods than day and night, that for this after-death experience it means something similar to sleeping and waking for the physical experience. I have indicated these conditions in my penultimate book: 'The Threshold of the Spiritual World'. But the soul experiences so, by continuing to live between death and a new birth, gradually a down-dumping, a dimming of their luminous power. One would like to say: the experiences of inner loneliness are becoming stronger and stronger. They gradually become so that the person experiences a whole world within, one might say a whole cosmos. Truly, it becomes so that one is justified in saying: the person is overcome by something like a feeling of fear of himself when he discovers what is all down there in the depths of the soul, and what now comes out in the middle of life between death and a new birth.

And then the time comes that I tried to depict in my fourth mystery drama: 'The Awakening of the Soul'. I tried to show this time when a person can only have inner experiences; when the nights of loneliness become longer and longer; when a person can no longer awaken spiritually to a consciousness in which he radiates his luminosity all around. I have tried to express what the person experiences then with a symbolic expression, with the expression: the midnight of spiritual existence between death and a new birth. It is the time when a person experiences everything in the depths of his soul as his world, when he only knows: beyond the shores of your soul are the spiritual worlds, where everything that exists of spiritual beings is, where all human souls are, disembodied or embodied, and where all other beings are; but one only knows it because one has the echoes of it within oneself. And now something arises in the soul that again cannot be described with an ordinary word. Isn't it true that ordinary language has the word 'longing' for the most passive state in the soul. When we are longing in physical experience, we are at our most passive. We long for something, we desire something we do not have – and longing certainly cannot bring about what we long for. We can only behave passively. But the soul forces take on a completely different character when the soul is outside the body. From the depths of loneliness, from what the soul experiences in the manner described in the world midnight of the spirit, the longing arises to live again into the world from which one has been torn in one's loneliness. And now this longing becomes active, and out of it arises something spiritually real, an organizing power. It really becomes a new power of perception. This spiritual longing gives birth to a new soul power, again a power that can now perceive an external world, but a world that is both external and internal: external because it really is outside our being; internal because we look at it as the world we lived through in the previous life, the world of our previous incarnation on earth. This now becomes our outside world through our longing. We look at everything that remained unfinished in the previous life, and our longing builds up forces within us to create balance for what the soul has done in the previous earthly life that was bad, foolish, evil, ugly, in order to create balance for it in a new life.

This is the time when every person can look back on his previous earthly lives, the time when, between death and a new birth, a person is confronted – confronted in his mind – with all the deeds of his previous lives, and the tendency awakens in him to make amends in a new earthly life, to live out the new earthly experiences and make good what was experienced in previous earthly lives. I have met people who said that one life was enough for them; I even met someone who was on the verge of finding something sensible in these repeated lives on earth. But then he wrote me a card from the nearest railway station saying that he didn't want to know about the next life on earth. But the important thing is not that we can form an idea of these repeated lives on earth, but that every soul is able to look back on its previous lives on earth and at the same time absorb the tendency to experience a new life on earth that will make up for its previous ones. And one also experiences that there are people to whom one owes something, or who owe something to one: this appears before the soul as a supplement to one's own life on earth. And the tendency arises to live together again with those people to whom one owes something, in order to make up for what one owes. And the same tendency arises in other people. As a result, forces arise in different people who used to live at the same time; spiritual forces are aroused that tend down to earth. This is why such people, who had been together earlier, come together in the new earth life. What these souls have remained indebted to each other must be settled. As I said, the tendencies come together there. And then one experiences this spiritual life between death and a new birth over and over again: more and more the tendencies I spoke of become apparent and take hold. They become living tendencies. And from what he has experienced in past lives, the person creates the archetype, the spiritual archetype of the new life on earth.

He now creates this himself as time moves on; he now creates what connects with the material substance given by father and mother to enter a new life on earth. And depending on the inherited qualities of the father and mother in the material substance and how closely they are related to the spiritual archetype, the spiritual archetype is drawn to the material substance before conception. So that one can say: the elective affinity between the inherited qualities and the archetype, which decides to which parental couple the soul is magnetically drawn, in which life one finds oneself. In this way the person returns to earth again, unites again with an earthly body. And spiritual research can now see what develops in the child, one might say, in such a mysterious way – anyone who knows how to observe a child's life will see it is so – by the gradual appearance of expressive features from within, by the skillful movements developing from the clumsy ones develop from the clumsy ones, and in that what so visibly works from within models and plasticizes the body; in all this the spiritual researcher sees that which has gone through the experiences between death and a new birth, as we have been talking about, and how it connects more and more with the body – that is what the spiritual researcher sees. Now he understands why initially no memories of these experiences before birth can be present: The forces that could become powers of memory are used up to organize the body. The child would remember everything from before, because it has these powers; but the powers are transformed; just as the pressure forces that I develop when I run my finger over the table are transformed into warmth, so these powers of memory are transformed into organizing forces. What the child organizes internally, what makes the brain plastic so that the child can think later, that it can develop memory powers in the physical body: that is transformed, retrospective power; it disappears in this form, in which it can develop the retrospective view, and organizes the body. And the spiritual that organizes the body is the soul that has been transformed and flows into the body. And so we understand the life we are currently living by understanding what happened outside of life beyond death. What is at work in a person in earthly life has appropriated his powers between death and a new birth. The forces that come to light in a purely spiritual way are the powers of memory, which have been transformed, flowing into the body and organizing it through and through.

Natural scientists will one day discover how the forces that lie purely in heredity are also depleted in the human being at the time when the ability to inherit arises. Certain lower animals die at the same time as they mature for the birth of another being; what powers the human being must develop in order to have physical offspring and to pass something on to them must be concluded by the time they reach sexual maturity; I can only hint at this. Natural science and spiritual science together will be able to provide important insights into this. But in all that works as physical forces in man, spiritual forces are at work. It is the spiritual forces that are active in the physical body in such a way that they permeate this physical body. The physical body is, as it were, the reflection of the spiritual. And basically, it is actually destructive processes that bring about the aforementioned reflection. It is always destructive processes when we see colors, when we hear sounds; even when we form memories, we undergo destructive processes within us. This is the reason for the necessity of sleep, so that the human being does not allow the destructive processes to work alone.

Thus we live, permeating and empowering our body with the forces we acquire outside of the body, and life can only be understood if we consider the spiritual and mental aspects at work in it. Spiritual science is not as fortunate as other sciences in that it can speak of death in plants and animals in the same way as it does in humans. What I have said now applies only to man. In this way spiritual research broadens our view beyond what lies between birth and death. Yes, spiritual research even explains details. I can well imagine that those of you who have a little time for these results of spiritual research would like to hear more details, but I can only give a few examples.

First of all, an example is given that may seem particularly mysterious to the spiritual researcher himself, despite the fact that it sounds paradoxical. This is the existence of criminal natures. It is not true that spiritual research is not at all of the opinion that criminals deserve only compassion and should not be punished. It is not the business of the spiritual researcher to interfere in the external affairs of the world; but to understand what meets us in human life is what the spiritual researcher wants, and he wants it from the depths of the spiritual world. So we ask ourselves: What about a life that manifests itself as criminal? Well, things are easily said, but the answers to such questions must first be wrung from the spiritual researcher, and he must also, in fact, force himself to speak about these things because they seem so utterly paradoxical to the present-day way of thinking. When the criminal is examined, by means of clairvoyance, it turns out that criminal natures are a kind of spiritual premature birth. There is a possibility for every soul to descend from the spiritual worlds and to connect with physical materiality, which is, so to speak, the normal one; but the tendencies that lead to this normal one intersect with other tendencies, so that most people – but criminals especially – descend into earthly life much earlier than would normally be the case. This turns out to be strange. Now that has something else in its wake. To really penetrate with the whole body, to stand in the physicality of the earth as a complete human being, that is only possible if one reincarnates at least approximately at the normal time. But if there are reasons to come down earlier due to previous earthly lives, then one takes something with one that lives in the subconscious, of which one is not at all aware. There is something living in the depths of the soul that makes one take life too lightly, because one did not come down at the time when one could have connected most perfectly with the physical. So one connects only superficially. But one knows nothing about it. It becomes an inner mood of the soul; not to take life fully. And so it may be that in his ordinary consciousness he even has an abnormally developed sense of self-preservation, so that he faces the social world with hostility, develops the strongest egoism, so that he becomes a criminal – and yet in his inner nature, which he does not know, there is a certain superficiality, a carelessness about life, he does not want to place any value on this life. This is caused by a spiritual premature birth. If that is the case, then this life also comes into existence in such a way that the person can fuel the ever-present instinct for self-preservation through what he does not know, which is a taking life lightly, and you see that sprout in the souls of criminals. Only when I knew that this was the case did another thing become clear to me. There is a dictionary of crook language. One can only understand the peculiar nature of the language of crime, this taking of life lightly in the words that come from the subconscious of the soul, when one knows what has been indicated above. But it must be pointed out again and again that in the totality of human lives on earth, what one life breaks is balanced again, so that the criminal, precisely through what he has to experience as a result of his crimes, ascends to other lives on earth in which a balance occurs.

But other things also become understandable when we look at the mysteries of life with spiritual research. We see people who are taken away by misfortune for my sake. Strangely enough, it turns out that when people are killed by an accident at a time when they would not otherwise have left the earth, that is, at a time when the earthly-physical forces are still present; for example, if someone is run over by a locomotive in the thirty-fifth year of their life without seeking death, then the forces in his body that could still have been effective are still present. When one departs from the physical world, these powers do not vanish into nothingness, but one sees how the soul-spiritual, the powers of intelligence, the powers of exact thinking can be strengthened by such an accident, so that such a person can be reborn with stronger powers of intelligence than another who dies a natural death. One must realize that spiritual research, in that it surveys life from a broad horizon, must speak differently about many things than one speaks in ordinary life. Someone who dies at an early stage of life, let us say, through an illness, who undergoes much through this illness, prepares his soul through this illness in such a way that his powers of will can be strengthened. Dying young from illness strengthens the willpower.

Yes, some of it may seem like pure fantasy; but I am also aware – I may as well admit it – that I have a certain responsibility when I discuss these things, and that I would not discuss them if I did not know the means of spiritual research with which these things can be known with the same certainty as the things of the external world can be known. I would consider it the greatest frivolity if these things were said without a knowledge lying in the soul that is imbued with such a mood as has just been indicated.

Thus man's life becomes understandable precisely through that which lies outside the physical life; and as life develops between birth and death, so it is a result of the life that lies beyond birth and death. To some this may appear to be a devaluation of life. So that it does not appear so to the honored listeners, I would like to repeat something very briefly. Someone may say: We are being made aware that what we experience in an earthly life, we have prepared for ourselves. It is true. But if we experience misfortune, we experience it because we have previously implanted the tendency of our soul to enter into this misfortune. Just as the Alpine plant does not thrive in the lowlands but seeks the heights, so the human soul seeks out the situation in which misfortune can befall it; it grows into what it experiences as fate. Just as it is a matter of course for the plant to live in the Alps, so it is a matter of course for the human soul to plunge into misfortune when it absorbs the tendency through insight: only if you overcome this misfortune can you become more perfect in a relationship where you would have to remain more imperfect if misfortune did not happen to you. If someone says: so we are made the smiths of our own misfortune; and if it is said that we should not only bear and endure our misfortune, but in a certain way have even earned it supernaturally: This cannot be a consolation for us! – so, on the other hand, it must be said what I already made clear earlier by means of a comparison: if someone has lived up to the age of eighteen in abundance, without learning anything, out of his father's pocket, and his father then goes bankrupt, then, seen from the outside, it can be a great misfortune when life now lets him down. And he is right to find life unhappy now. But let us assume that he has reached the age of fifty and looks at his life from a different point of view: “If I had not been struck by misfortune, I would not have become what I am now.” For my father it was misfortune, for me it was a developmental catalyst for my life. Thus we are not always in a position to find the right point of view for an accident at the time we experience it. Before birth, we stand on a completely different point of view than afterwards: on the one that what has happened earlier must be experienced in a new life, which creates a balance for what has happened earlier. There we prepare the misfortunes that we later justly endure with suffering ourselves, and which we justly lament because we then consider them only from the point of view of physical-earthly experience.

I would still like to say a little about the time that passes between death and a new birth. The short time of hindsight after death, which only lasts for days, I have already indicated; the time that comes afterwards lasts longer, it lasts for decades. The spiritual researcher comes to it in the following way, how long this time lasts. He must first ask himself, so that he can develop the powers within himself to see something like this: What is it in your soul that, when you experience yourself outside the body, appears to you as something that can be carried by the soul through death? And strangely enough, one experiences that one takes something out of the body, while otherwise one leaves everything behind. As a spiritual researcher, you leave your passions, memories and so on behind when you leave your body; but you take with you your conquests, you take with you what you can only acquire in an earthly life, say, after the age of twenty. People today don't like to hear this, because today people are considered mature even before the age of twenty. You can see that in the newspapers, above and below the line, many people today have not reached the age of twenty. But the truth is that what one experiences through oneself, so that it really becomes accumulated wisdom, happens through having already experienced something and looking back on the earlier experience with a later one. This inward ascent through its conquests, this inward experience of the soul, is what already germinates – so it turns out – what the soul then experiences between death and a new birth. And so the soul must live in a continuous process of such conquests, of transforming its powers. Normally the soul remains in the spiritual world between death and a new birth as long as it has something to transform. From the other side, the following can be said: We live in a certain time; we absorb this or that, experience this or that by belonging to this or that tribe. Having gone through death, we have formed our life experiences from this. But the earth is changing. Not only are the physical conditions changing. Let the honored listeners think back to the time around the founding of Christianity when the areas here, where Vienna now lies, have changed. But in even shorter periods of time, the cultural face of the earth, the spiritual content of our surroundings, from which we draw our memory, our store of memories, is changing. Now the soul does not normally return to a new life on earth until it can enter a completely new spiritual environment. It turns out that the soul is not reborn without reason, but so that it can experience new things. To do that, it has to change everything it experienced in the previous life, for example, the ability to express itself in a particular language. This must be transformed; it must acquire another language ability. So that is the time. It usually lasts from one to one and a half millennia. But as I said, spiritual premature births can occur due to certain circumstances.

Time is pressing; I cannot go into the description of the special circumstances any further. I would just like to say this: that those of the esteemed listeners who might go home with the feeling, 'Yes, none of this is really credible; how can a person possibly know about this!' — may be mindful of what I mentioned at the beginning, that in fact later self-evident truths — insights that have penetrated into all souls — first communicated themselves to earthly culture as paradoxical. And anyone who wants to cultivate spiritual science today must already familiarize themselves with how understandable it is that what is so certain to become established in the minds of people as the Copernican world view has done, after it was first regarded as fantasy, even as something harmful, by many. But once more I may draw attention to the picture that presents itself to the spiritual researcher and to the one who is able to understand spiritual science in the sense mentioned the day before yesterday, in order to give him the strong awareness of the truth that will gradually assert itself. Even if it has to force its way through the narrowest crevices, so that it is pressed down by the heaviest masses of prejudice, it will still force its way through. This consciousness is strengthened when we look at Giordano Bruno; here we have a picture of someone who, by saying: ” People believed that when they looked up into the vast space above, the blue vault of heaven spread out; the sun and planets orbited it, and the blue vault of heaven is a wall, a blue wall! At that time Giordano Bruno could say: This wall only appears to you because your perceptive faculty only reaches up to it. You build this boundary yourselves; it is not there at all. Infinities of space spread out. And infinities of space are filled with infinite worlds.

Today, the spiritual researcher must consider this expansion of the human gaze into the infinities of space; he must consider how Giordano Bruno first pointed out that the boundaries of space in the vault of heaven are only created by the limitations of human perception itself; he must point out that there is also such a firmament for the time of human experience. By surveying human life with the physical organs of perception and the mind, one sees these limits, the limits of birth and death, as one once saw the limit of space in the blue vault of heaven, but which in reality does not exist. So too the limit of the time of human experience between birth, or let us say conception and death, is only posited by the limitedness of the human faculty of perception. And beyond birth or conception and death, temporal infinity expands, and embedded in this temporal infinity are the backward and forward repetitions of human life on earth and those lives that flow between death and a new birth. I cannot, however, go into detail about the fact that all these repetitions once had a beginning, that man was born out of the spiritual and found his dwelling place here – at that time the earth itself arose out of the spiritual world – and that man, after he has gone through the earthly repetitions, when the earth itself detaches itself from human souls, then man passes over into another, again spiritualized life. This can only be hinted at here; more exact details will be found in my Secret Science.

Even if the insights of spiritual science are in contradiction to the thinking of the present time in the way indicated, it must still be said that in the intuitions of those who were the leaders of humanity - I closed the same reflection the day before yesterday - one nevertheless finds what is being revived in spiritual science today. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, has not been had by men; for it is a child of our time, and will arise out of the education of our time; but those who knew themselves united in soul with the spirit of the universe, which surges and weaves in all men, they shaped the words into that to which spiritual science can say 'Yes' in the full sense. Spiritual science shows us how to understand life between birth and death by showing us that in this physical body, in all of physical life, what is immortal, what can also live in a spiritual world, is at work and weaving. Spiritual science shows us that we have life in the body through the life outside the body, so that no one can understand the life between birth and death who does not understand the life outside the body, in the spiritual firmament. Goethe expresses this with the words – intuitively sensing the later insights of spiritual science – with words that not only clearly state Goethe's belief in an immortal life, but also express how he knew that the real value in realization of present life, in the experience of earthly existence, depends on one's glowing through, illuminating through, permeating through this earthly existence with knowledge of that which is extrinsic, supernal, and immortal. Therefore, it is precisely this realization of spiritual science, that a true inner essence of the mortal is recognized by the immortal, as summarized in a feeling in the words in which Goethe once expressed his conviction: “To those who, out of the peculiar essence of their present life, do not want to form an opinion about another life, to them I would like to say with Goethe: ‘I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing in a future continuation; yes, I would like to say with Lorenzo de Medici: ’I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing in a future continuation; yes, I would like to say with Lorenzo de Medici: ‘I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing in a future continuation; yes, I would like to say with Lorenzo de Medici: ’I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing in a future continuation; yes, I would like to say with Lorenzo de Medici: 'I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing present life, to those I would say with Goethe: “I would not for the world renounce the good fortune of believing in a future life; nay, I would say with Lorenzo de' Medici that all those are dead even to this life who have no hope of another.”

This winter's lecture series sought to characterize the spiritual movement from various perspectives, which is supposed to be the attempt to lead the human soul through immersion in its own essence to those insights that it must long for with regard to the most important riddles of existence and life. An attempt has been made to show how, in a completely natural way, by considering present or emerging intellectual currents, spiritual science will show itself to be the right instrument for guiding the human soul into the realm of spiritual knowledge in a way that is appropriate to the present and the near future, in accordance with the laws given by the development of the human spirit. At the same time, as an undertone of these winter reflections, we have always tried to let it be heard what achievements and results spiritual life and spiritual striving have brought to humanity in the nineteenth century. For one can truly say that, given the way in which spiritual striving and spiritual life in the nineteenth century has seized humanity, and how this humanity has brought about the great triumph of material existence, it would seem a hopeless undertaking if this spiritual science, as it is meant here, had to rebel against or reject the justified demands of natural science or, in general, the intellectual results of the nineteenth century.

So it may perhaps be appropriate to end this lecture cycle by taking a look at what we can call the spiritual heritage of the nineteenth century, in order to perhaps be able to point out, by considering this spiritual heritage of the nineteenth century, how natural the spiritual science meant here is for the current development cycle of humanity.

What does this spiritual science of the soul attempt to be? It attempts to be a realization of the soul's origin in the spiritual; it attempts to be a realization of those worlds, those supersensible worlds, to which the soul belongs as a spiritual being, quite apart from the fact that this soul lives within the physical-sensory world through the tools and instruments of its body. It thus attempts to prove this soul to be a citizen of the supersensible worlds. It attempts to show that the soul, when it applies those methods often spoken of here during the course of this winter, can achieve such a development that powers of recognition are awakened in the soul, which otherwise hardly resonate in a person's life like an undertone of this life, but which, when unfolded and developed, really place this soul in the worlds to which it actually belongs with its higher being. When the soul discovers these powers in itself, it comes to recognize itself as an entity for which birth and death, or, let us say, conception and death, represent boundaries in the same sense that the blue firmament of heaven represents boundaries for the soul that recognizes in the spirit of natural science since the dawn of modern natural science, roughly since the work of Giordano Bruno and those who were like-minded to him. As the soul becomes aware of the forces slumbering within her, something similar happens in her for the temporal-spiritual as it did for the outer knowledge of the spatial-material in the time of the dawn of modern science, when, for example, For example, Giordano Bruno pointed out that this blue vault of heaven, which for centuries and centuries was thought to be a reality, is nothing more than a boundary that human knowledge sets for itself through a kind of inability and which it can transcend if it understands itself.

Just as Giordano Bruno showed that behind this blue vault of heaven lies the infinite sea of space with the infinite worlds embedded in it, so spiritual science has to show that the boundary set by birth and death or by conception and death only exists because the human soul's capacity is limited in time just as it once limited itself through the blue vault of heaven in space, but that when infinity can be extended beyond birth and death to the conception of the spiritual facts in which the soul is interwoven, the soul recognizes itself as permeating through repeated earthly lives. So that the soul's life on the one hand flows in the existence between birth and death, on the other hand in the time from death to a new birth.

If we go out with our view into the temporal-spiritual expanses, as science has gone out into spatial expanses, then the human soul recognizes itself by stepping out of the life it has gone through between death and the last birth, into the life between birth and death, both as co-creator of the finer organization of its own body and as creator of its own destiny. Furthermore, it has been said – this has perhaps been less touched upon this winter, but it has been in previous years and can be read about in spiritual-scientific literature – that the soul, when it grasps itself in its deeper powers, also traces itself back to the times when life in physical forms of existence began; that it can trace itself back to those times when it was already there before our earth planet took on its material form, before the earth as a material form itself emerged from a purely spiritual primal being, in which the human soul was already present in its first form, even before the emergence of the natural kingdoms surrounding us, the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. And again the prospect opens up of a future into which the human soul has to enter when the earthly embodiments have been fulfilled, into which it will then pass into a purely spiritual world that will replace the earth; so that one can look can look forward to a future in which the human soul will enter, will enter purely spiritually, so that it will have to bring the fruits of earthly life forms to what it will achieve again as a spiritual kingdom, as in a primeval state. But it will not achieve it in the same form as it started out, but with the result of everything that can be acquired in earthly embodiments.

When the soul takes hold of itself in such a way that it condenses with the forces slumbering within it, then it also recognizes itself in connection with worlds that are the source worlds themselves opposite our earth planet; it recognizes itself as a citizen of the entire universe. From the successive earth-lives of the individual soul, spiritual science can take the upward surge to the successive lives of the planets, and even of the suns in the universe. The method is therefore one that consists in the soul's self-education to its deepest powers. The result is the realization of the origin and direction of the soul's life, the realization that the first is spirit, to which the soul belongs, that it is spirit that lets matter emerge from itself and brings it into its forms, and the most important form, which interests us most in our earthly existence, is the form of the human body. This realization will therefore have to become part of the consciousness of humanity in the near future: that spirit is the first and the highest, that spirit releases matter out of itself, just as water gives rise to ice out of itself, that spirit is what gives its outer form to the human body, that spirit with the spiritual activities, facts and entities of the world, and that the human soul is a citizen of this world of spiritual facts and entities, which release all external material existence from themselves, pouring it into the corresponding forms that then make up the visible universe around us, which can be perceived by the senses. This is how I would briefly characterize what can be the method and what the result of what is called spiritual science here.

This spiritual science is only just beginning in our present time. It has often been emphasized that it must seem quite understandable that enemies and opponents of this spiritual science are still rising from all sides today. This must seem understandable, especially to those who stand on the ground of this spiritual science themselves and, so to speak, know its whole character in relation to the rest of the cultural life of the present day. It is not surprising that this spiritual science finds enemies and opponents, that it is seen as fantasy, as reverie, perhaps sometimes as something even worse. It would be more surprising if, given the nature of this spiritual science, there were already more voices of recognition and encouragement in the present than is the case. For it seems very much as if not only the results of this spiritual science, but also the whole way of thinking and imagining, as it had to be practiced here, contradicts all habits of thought and all modes of imagination that have arisen for humanity precisely through the legacy of the nineteenth century. But it only seems so. And it may be said that this appears most to those who believe that they must stand on the firm ground of this heritage of the nineteenth century, that they consider only a materialistic way or a materialistically colored way of looking at the world to be compatible with this heritage of the nineteenth century.

What the spiritual scientist himself must recognize as this spiritual science does not seem to contradict the legacy of the nineteenth century at all.

At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great philosopher of the West, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, was writing his famous work “The Destiny of Man,” which is a testament to the hope for what the human soul can achieve inwardly and what it can become when it becomes aware of its powers and uses them. If you follow how he expressed himself to his most intimate friends and close associates while working on this writing, it is that he was able to glimpse into the deepest secrets of human cognitive and religious feeling. When one then goes through this writing, one can be fascinated by a kind of self-testimony, which in this writing the human soul seeks for the sake of its security, for the sake of its hope. In the first chapter, Fichte assumes that the knowledge gained through the external observation of nature and the physical world is basically only an external appearance, hardly that which one could seriously call a dream. how the soul takes hold of itself, takes hold of itself in its will, how it becomes certain of its own existence, then one gets an impression, which can be characterized something like this, even more through the individual explanations of this writing than through the whole context in which it is placed. This human soul has tried to pose the question: Can I stand before myself if I have no trust in all the knowledge that presents itself to me through my senses, and even through the contemplation of the external intellect? — In the style of his time, Fichte answered this question affirmatively in a grandiose way. What is impressive about this writing is precisely what it can become for the soul through the nature of the language, through the inwardly secure tone, which is so secure despite the renunciation of outwardly apparent knowledge.

Now, this writing is right in the middle of a striving of Western intellectual life for the sources of human confidence and human knowledge. The period in which Fichte aspired to such a powerful way of grasping the human soul was followed, so to speak, by the heyday of philosophical endeavor. What Fichte himself tried, what Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer tried, what was attempted in the field of philosophy in the first third of the nineteenth century to penetrate the secrets of the world with the power of human thinking , all this worked – however one may feel today about the results of this intellectual upsurge – through the way one felt in this striving, how one willed, grandiosely on every feeling and sensing human soul.

If you let yourself be influenced by Schelling, you might say, you would gain from an understanding of the world that is made secure by intellect but then becomes more imaginative. It is a world view that could really carry him beyond all material things into the spiritual evolution of the world. If you then move on to Hegel's striving of thought, which to penetrate into the innermost being of things through the power of thought alone, so that Hegel wanted to make clear to the human soul that in the power of thought it has the sources into which all the powers of the world flow and in which one has everything to grasp oneself, so to speak, in the eternal — then one sees a powerful struggle of humanity. One need only consider the hope and confidence that were attached to this powerful struggle.

And again, if one turns back, one might notice something that can somewhat enlighten the deeper observer of this entire epoch, of which we have now briefly spoken, about its origin. Thus, if we look back to the year 1784, we find a small, characteristic essay by Kant entitled “What is Enlightenment?” Its almost pedantic style does not always allow us to see how deeply the sometimes quite intellectual thoughts of this essay are rooted in the whole struggle of the human soul in modern times. “What is Enlightenment?” This question was posed by Kant, the same Kant who was so moved by the often chaotic but nevertheless powerful striving of the human spirit, as it came to light for example in Rousseau, that when he – which is more than an anecdote – could not keep still, but disrupted his entire daily routine and went for a walk at a completely irregular time (Kant, after whose walk one could otherwise set the clock) in Königsberg! But we know how Kant's soul was stirred by the freedom movement of the eighteenth century. This then, when we take this little writing in our hands, comes across to us, one might say, quite monumentally, in the sentences that we read there. Enlightenment, Kant says, is the emergence of the human soul from its self-imposed immaturity. — Dare to use your reason! This sentence is taken from Kant's writing of 1784. One really appreciates this sentence: Dare to use your reason!as well as the others, especially when one realizes that they express something like the human soul coming to itself for the first time in a certain sense. Let us try to see these two Kantian sentences from his essay of 1784 in their true light, using a simple thought.

Cartesius, who as a philosopher did not precede Kant's work by very long — if we consider this “not very long” in terms of world development — went back to a striking and significant sentence. He pointed the human soul to its own thinking and thus did the same again that Augustine had already done in the first Christian centuries. It sounded like a keynote of Descartes's soul life when he said: “I think, therefore I am,” and in saying this he was saying something that Augustine had already said in a similar way: You can doubt the whole world, but by doubting you think, and by thinking you are, and by grasping yourself in thinking you grasp existence in yourself.

A person of sound mind cannot, according to Cartesius, possibly recognize himself as a thinking soul and doubt his existence. I think, therefore I am – this was, despite the fact that Augustine had already formulated a similar sentence, nevertheless something extraordinarily significant for the century of Cartesius and for what followed in the eighteenth century. But if we follow Cartesius as he goes on to build a worldview, looking further from this sentence as a basis, then we see that he takes up everything that has been handed down from centuries of tradition. One sees how his thinking, with what wants to arise from the human soul itself, stops at the traditions brought together from the centuries, at the spiritual truths, at the questions about the fate of the human soul after death and so on. Cartesius stops at the actual spiritual truths.

When you consider that, it becomes clear what it means that the Kantian sentences resounded in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century: Enlightenment is the stepping out of the human soul from its self-imposed immaturity, and: Dare to use your reason! That is to say, people have now dared to trust the human soul with the power to reach the sources of its existence, to reach the sources of its strength through its own power, through its own greatness. This is precisely the characterization of Kant's statement, and it is proof of it.

From there everything that is contained in the bold sentences of Fichte's writing started, from there started that bold thought work that stands so grandiosely in the philosophy of the Occident from the first third of the nineteenth century. If we consider this upsurge of the human spirit, which we do not want to consider today in terms of the truth or falsity of its content, but in terms of what the human soul hoped to gain from it in terms of inner confidence and certainty of hope, and if we turn our turns one's gaze further into the mid-nineteenth century, one is perhaps touched by a word of a man like the writer of the history of philosophy, also the independent philosopher, but especially the biographer of Hegel, Karl Rosenkranz. In his preface to his “Life of Hegel” (1844), he writes: “It is not without melancholy that I part from this work, since one would hope that one day there would be a coming to be, not just a coming to be of the becoming! For does it not seem as if we of today are only the gravediggers and monument-makers for the philosophers who gave birth to the second half of the last (eighteenth) century only to die in the first of the present?” From such a statement, one feels perhaps more than from other descriptions how around the middle of the nineteenth century the whole splendor of philosophical endeavor had quickly faded from the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and from the first third of the nineteenth century.

But another splendor arose immediately. While in the 1830s and 1840s the splendor of philosophical intellectual life quickly faded, a new confidence arose, one might say a new bliss of hope. This had already been prepared by the great scientific overviews of a physiologist like Johannes Müller and by everything that people like Alexander Humboldt and others have done. But then came such significant achievements as the discovery of the cell and its effect in the living organism by Schleiden and Schwann. This marked the beginning of a new era of the splendor of scientific knowledge. And now we see, in what has been done, all that will indeed shine immortal in the evolution of the nineteenth century. We see how the great achievements of physics follow on: in the forties, the discovery of the law of the conservation of energy and of the transformation of heat by Julius Robert Mayer and by Helmholtz. Those who are familiar with contemporary physics know that it was only through this discovery that physics became possible in the modern sense. We see how physics is led from triumph to triumph, how the discovery of spectral analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen draws attention away from the material conditions on Earth and towards the material conditions in the heavens, by recognizing how the same substances are revealed in all the conditions in the heavens. We see how physics arrives at combining its theoretical foundations with the practical application of its principles, how it succeeds in penetrating into technology, and how it changes the culture of the Earth planet. We see natural fields such as electricity and magnetism, by connecting them with technology, stand as something great. We see the most highly developed future prospects joining the contemplation of the living, the organic, which was given by Darwin and in its further developments by Haeckel.

We see all this incorporated into the spiritual life of humanity. We see how Lyell's research from the beginning of the nineteenth century is followed by today's geology, which attempts to give a picture of the course of events on earth in a material sense. We see how grandiose attempts are also being made here to integrate the origin of man into the processes of the earth by means of purely material laws, to connect the biological with the geological. But all that has taken the place of the power of thought in the first third of the nineteenth century has not only deeply influenced theoretical worldviews. For if that had been the case, one could say that all this initially took place as if on a kind of upper horizon of intellectual development; but below that is the horizon of the rest of the population, who do not concern themselves with it. No, there is nothing in the development of mankind into which his instincts have not driven, which has now been sketched with a few cursory lines. We see it stretching everywhere into the mysterious formations of this spiritual path of humanity.

The human soul itself, in its innermost being and existence, has by no means remained untouched by what has taken place there. What took place there could be summarized, so to speak, characterizing the legacy that the nineteenth century left us, for example in a soul that was still allowed to listen to what came out of Fichte's mouth, which is contained, for example, in his writing “The Destiny of Man”. Such a soul would have had certain feelings and emotions about its own nature, about the way it can experience itself. This inner structure in relation to the experience of oneself at the beginning of the nineteenth century would present itself quite differently if we consider a soul that, I do not want to say, adheres to a materialistic creed, but which, with open senses and with interest, devotes itself to everything that legitimately flows from the heritage of the nineteenth century. This human soul has not remained untouched in its innermost being by what is unfolding around it in the expansion of the big city centers, has not remained untouched by the cultural achievements that stand as an embodiment of the new spiritual life, that spiritual life that has been gained from the contemplation of the new laws of the mechanical world order. From these views, which, so to speak, prove that the universe and its laws are to be regarded in a similar way to the laws that also govern machines and locomotives, a soul was still free to devote itself wholeheartedly to a work such as Fichte's “The Destiny of Man”. It has been rightly emphasized that this human soul had to undergo its transformation under the influence of all that has necessarily emerged as a material cultural result of the way of thinking, feeling and sensing that was characterized by the way it was transformed in the nineteenth century.

Consider the individual symptoms that have emerged as a result of what nineteenth-century scientific thought has delivered. Think of how the painter in earlier times stood in front of the canvas, how he mixed his colors, how he knew that they would hold; because he knew what he had mixed into them. The nineteenth century, with its great achievements and advances in technology, instructs the painter to buy his colors. He no longer knows what is presented to his senses, he does not know how long the splendor that he creates on the canvas will last, how long the impression will last. Yes, it is only under the influence of technology, which has emerged from the achievements of natural science, that we have today what we have today as public journalism, as our modern newspaper system and everything that makes an impression on the human soul, which, above all, has changed the whole pace of the human soul, and with it the thought forms, the whole influence on the feelings and thus also the structure of the feelings. Not only must we remember how quickly things come to man today through the achievements of modern technology, but we must also point out how quickly what the human mind achieves reaches other human minds through journalism, and what abundance reaches the human mind.

Now compare what a person can learn today through this journalism about what is happening in the world, and also about what the human mind is exploring, with the way he could learn about all the events at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Take a mind like Goethe's! We can look at him precisely because of the careful way in which his correspondence has been preserved, we can almost know what he did from hour to hour, we can know what he talked about and did with this or that scholar. Through this, the achievements of human intellectual life slowly flow together in his lonely Weimar room. But the central figure of Goethe was necessary for this to happen, which anyone can do today through journalism. But that changes the whole human soul, the whole position of the human soul in relation to the environment.

Let's approach something else. Today we write books or read books. Anyone who writes a book today knows that it will no longer be readable after about sixty years if it is printed on the paper that is the result of great technological advances, because it will have disintegrated. So, if you are not under any illusions, you know how much what was done in the past differs from what is available today.

In one lecture of this series, I tried to characterize a mind that, although it is connected to the whole spirit of the first half of the nineteenth century, is nevertheless a mind of the second half of that century: Herman Grimm. We have seen that he presents himself as a custodian of the heritage of the first half of the nineteenth century into the second half. But anyone who reads Herman Grimm's art essays with inner understanding will notice two things, among other things. In his work, even in the most valuable essays, a certain school resonates that he went through, a school that can be heard resonating in every essay. He was only able to undergo this schooling because, relatively early on, by what is called chance, he came into contact with a great mind, that of Emerson, a great preacher and writer who was a preacher and writer of world views not in the sense of older times, but in the most modern sense. Try to visualize Emerson, to immerse yourself in him, and you will find that a nineteenth-century spirit stands before us. Try to feel the pulse of the thoughts that arise with the coloration and nuance of the nineteenth century, even when they refer to Plato the philosopher or Swedenborg the mystic. No matter how unprejudiced they are, they are nineteenth-century thoughts that could only be thought in a century that was destined to make the telegraph the world's means of communication. Emerson, in particular, has a mind that, while rooted in Western culture, elevates this culture of the West to what it has become in the eminent sense. One tries to compare a page by Emerson with a page by Goethe, wherever one might open Goethe. Then try – which, however, you must find natural in the case of Goethe – to compare the image of the leisurely Goethe, still walking in the steps of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the rapidly hurrying being of the man of the nineteenth century, which continues to have an effect in the train of thought of Herman Grimm. That is one thing.

But then we saw how Herman Grimm, in his wonderful novel of the times, 'Unüberwindliche Mächte' (Insurmountable Forces), even pointed to the existence of the human etheric body or life body, as he pointed to much that has only been fully developed in spiritual science. But one can also see how Herman Grimm deals with everything artistic in a thoroughly personally interesting, outstanding way, how he is able to juxtapose more distant periods of time artistically, how he is able to give an interesting, subtle consideration of art. It is impossible for anyone who is able to see such things to think that the thoughts that form the most beautiful essays of Herman Grimm could have been written in any other age than the one in which it was impossible for Herman Grimm to travel from Berlin to Florence or South Tyrol without being in a hurry. For this is the precondition for the formation of much of his work. Imagine that someone like Herman Grimm could have said in earlier centuries: “I have always written the most important parts of my Homer book in Gries near Bolzano during the weeks of spring, because that is when I feel the effect of spring!” That something like this could be integrated into a person's life is only possible in the overall atmosphere of the nineteenth century. There we feel a confluence of what springs forth as a wonderful contemplation of art in Herman Grimm, what proves to be an immersion into the soul of the entire cultural impact of the nineteenth century, with what emanates from technology, and flowing back into it, from the triumphs of the nineteenth century.

It is impossible to understand some of the deepest things of the nineteenth century if one is unable to summarize them with what is the most important legacy of the nineteenth century: with the scientific ideas with which the nineteenth century tried to understand the world. Today we cannot but admit that something lives in our soul as one of its most important instruments, which would not be there at all without the structure of scientific thinking, as we have it as a legacy of the nineteenth century. That is one side of it, the side that presents itself to us in what this human soul has made of itself after it has undertaken what Kant so monumentally characterized when he said: Enlightenment is the human soul's emergence from its self-imposed immaturity, and: Dare to use your reason! — This tendency of the Enlightenment, that is, the use of the means of research of the human soul, went through the philosophical upsurge and into the age of natural science, just as this human soul happens to be. But how did that happen overall? From the point of view of spiritual science, we have to consider a larger context if we want to understand what has actually been expressed, if we want to understand the configuration, the structure of our soul, in which we see the will to enlightenment on the one hand, and on the other hand everything that scientific culture has given us. To do this, we have to juxtapose at least three successive cultural epochs of human development. These cultural cycles have already been referred to in the context of these lectures, in the sense of the observation that arises from an understanding of human spiritual life, which attempts to fathom how the human soul returns through the ages in successive earthly and from earlier ages to later ones not only carries over its own guilt in order to atone for it in the sense of a great law of fate, but also carries over what it has inwardly experienced in the way of cultural achievements. In the sense of this spiritual knowledge, we initially distinguish three ages. Other ages precede these three. However, there is not enough time today to go into them.

The first age of importance for us is the Egyptian-Chaldean age, which came to an end around the eighth century BC. If we want to characterize it, we can say that during this age the human soul lived in such a way that it still sensed something of its connection with the whole universe, with the whole cosmos. In its destiny on earth, it still felt dependent on the course of the stars and the events of the great universe. This age of earlier millennia is filled with reflections on the dependence of human life on the starry worlds and the great universe, right up to about the eighth century BC. The soul felt wonderfully touched when it delved into ancient Egyptian or ancient Chaldean wisdom, when it saw how everything was geared towards feeling the connection of the soul with the cosmos beyond the narrow human existence. Something that was important for feeling this connection of the soul with the cosmos in this cultural epoch was the appearance, for example, of Sirius. And important with regard to what man did for the culture of the soul, what he utilized for the soul or accomplished for it, was the observation of the laws of the heavens. Man felt that he was born out of the whole universe, felt his connection with the extra-terrestrial as well as with the earthly; he felt, as it were, transferred down out of spiritual worlds into the earthly world. This feeling was a final echo of the ancient clairvoyance from which the human soul originated, and which has been mentioned here several times. This ancient clairvoyance was present in primeval times, and man has lost it in the course of development so that he can observe the world in its present form. At that time, in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, there was still an echo of ancient clairvoyance. Man could still grasp the spiritual connection of soul-spiritual laws in all natural existence and wanted to grasp it. In a certain respect, the human soul was not alone with itself. By feeling itself on earth, it was connected and interwoven with the forces that played into the earth from the universe.

Then came the Greco-Latin period, which we can roughly estimate, in terms of its essential nature and its after-effects, as lasting from the eighth century BC to the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth century AD, because the after-effects of this cultural epoch continue for so long. When we look at this age, especially at its first awakening, we find that the human soul has freed itself in a higher sense from the universe, in its knowledge, in its faith, in its recognition of the forces at work within it. In particular, if we look at the Greeks, we can see that the healthy human being, as he developed in the soul, also felt, as he stood on the earth, connected with his natural bodily being. This is what the Greek soul felt and experienced in the second of the periods under consideration. Today it is actually difficult to characterize what is meant by this. We have tried to bring it closer to our understanding in our reflections on Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. The Greeks lived quite differently in relation to the spiritual and soul life. This was particularly the case, for example, with the Greek artist. Today, one does not even want to admit what was special about the feelings and perceptions of the Greek soul. That the sculptor, who represented the human form in the true sense, could have before him what we call the model today, that he could shape the human form according to the model, is impossible for the Greeks to imagine. It was not so. The relationship of today's artist to his model would have been unthinkable in Greece. For the Greek knew: My entire body is alive with my soul and spirit. He sensed how the forces of this spiritual-soul life flowed into the formation of the arm, into the formation of the muscles, into the formation of the whole human form. And he knew that just as they flowed into the human form, so he had to express them in his sculptures. In accordance with his inner knowledge of the nature of the body, he knew how to recreate what he himself could feel in the external material. Thus he could say to himself: I am weak, but if I developed my will, I could let it work in the formation of the muscles, in the formation of the arm, and thereby become stronger. — What he experienced in this way he poured into his figures. The contemplation of external forms was not the essential thing for him, but the feeling of being placed in the earth's culture in one's own body and soul and the reproduction of what was experienced in the external world.

But the experience of the whole personality was also in Greek culture. It is quite impossible to think of a Pericles or any other statesman as a modern statesman would be thought of. We see a modern statesman acting on general principles, representing what he thinks and wants. When Pericles in ancient Athens steps before the people and carries out something, it is not because he says to himself: Because I see it, it must be carried out. — That is not the case. But when Pericles steps before the people and asserts what he wants, then it is his personal will. And if it is adhered to, it is because the Greek has the knowledge that Pericles can want the right thing because he feels it as a personality. The Greek is a self-contained nature, he lives himself, thinking in a closed way. He can do this because, unlike the members of the Egyptian-Chaldean period, he no longer feels a connection with the gods and so on. That is only present as an echo. But what he experiences directly is that he feels his physical body connected with the spiritual soul. So that in this way he is already more alone with his soul than the man of the Egyptian-Chaldean time, but he is still connected with all the rest of nature, because his body, his flesh, has given him this connection. One must feel that: The soul in the Greco-Latin period, already more free from the general universe than in the previous period, must still feel connected with all that is in the natural kingdoms around it. For the soul felt connected with what is an extract from these natural kingdoms, the physical-corporeal. This feeling is what must be seen as the characteristic of this Graeco-Latin period, which then included the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now we see the emergence - and we are in the midst of it with our thinking and feeling - of the third period, which we have to consider. How does it differ from the Graeco-Latin period? The human soul is much more alone, because the Greek felt connected to what he was in his body, to nature. Let us place before the Greeks the possibility that they should have looked at the smallest living creatures through a modern microscope, they should have thought of the cell theory. Impossible for the Greek soul! For it would have felt, when it came to these microscopic observations, that it was unnatural and unnatural to devise instruments through which one sees things differently than they present themselves to the natural eye of the body! — The Greeks felt so connected with nature that it would have seemed unnatural to them to see things differently than they present themselves to the eye. And to make the world's things visible through the telescope would have seemed just as unnatural to him. In many respects, the ancient Greek way of thinking resembles the way a personality felt who was inspired by this way of thinking and who made the beautiful statement: What are all the instruments of physics compared to the human eye, which is nevertheless the most wonderful apparatus! That is to say, the Greek view of the world was the most natural one, the one that one gains when one arms the senses with instruments as little as possible and thus sees things differently than when man perceives nature directly, as he is placed in the environment.

Our time is quite different! In our time it was quite natural, and it came more and more to be so through the development of the spirit since the period just characterized, that what one strove for as an objective scientific picture of the world was completely separated from what lives in the human soul. Only in this way could the view arise that the truth about the human organization can only be learned by directing the armed eye at things, by examining living beings with the microscope and applying the telescope to conditions in the sky, by using an instrument that comes to the aid of the inaccuracy of the eye. But if we consider the spirit that is expressed in this, we must say that now man separates what lives in his inner being, what is connected with his ego, from his world picture. The human ego, the human self, is even more lonely and alone than it was in Greek times. If we try to compare the Greek world view with our world view, as given to us by science, we have to say: in practice, too, efforts have been made to make this world view independent of what goes on in the deepest inner soul of man, what lives and weaves and is in the human I. In the ancient Egyptian-Chaldean period, for example, the soul and the world were one for the human being's perception. In Greek times, the human soul and the human body were one, but through the human body, the human being was still connected to his world view. Now, the spiritual-soul has become more and more detached, completely detached from what it considers to be the justified content of the world view. Lonely and closed in on itself is the human soul.

Now let us consider the remarkable polarity that becomes evident to us when we move from the Egyptian-Chaldean period through the Greek-Latin period to our own. What man strives for in our epoch above all else, in contrast to the earlier Greek epoch, is to gain a scientific world picture that is independent of his soul. What also necessarily resulted is to separate the human soul from what it was connected to in earlier times, to place the soul on its own, to push it entirely back into its consciousness. In the Egyptian-Chaldean period, the human soul still directed its spiritual and soulful gaze out into the world and allowed itself to be inspired by what was in the world. Even in Greek times, people still took what suited their conception of the world and incorporated it into art. In more recent times, the conception of the world stands alone, separate from the soul experience of the human being. And yet we must say: in modern times, when the human soul has thrown itself out of the objective world view, where it no longer finds itself in the soul in that which flows mechanically and objectively outside, when it has broken the connection with the external world existence, it still wants to gain within itself the strength for knowledge, as a world view, for its entire being. It would still have been inconceivable to the Greeks if someone had told them: Dare to use your reason! or: Enlightenment is the human soul stepping out of its self-imposed immaturity. - One could speak Socratic words in Greece, but not these words, because the Greek would not have understood them. He would have felt: What do I want through my reason? At most, to gain a picture of the world. But this image of the world lives continually in me, as the world flows into my powers and my soul and spirit. It would be unnatural in the face of what flows into me to use my reason. — And the follower of the Egyptian-Chaldean period would have found the call to use his reason even stranger and even more unnatural. To the sentence: Dare to use your reason! he would have replied: Then I would lose the best intuitions and inspirations that flow to me from the universe. Why should I use only my reason, which would impoverish me in my experience, when I make use of it, compared to what flows into me from the universe?

Thus we see how the human souls that come from earlier epochs always encounter a different age. Thus they are educated, in Lessing's expression: in the Egyptian-Chaldean period, in which the soul feels at one with the world; then in the Greek-Latin period, in which the soul feels at one with its own body, and now the souls are going through the period in which they have to find themselves within themselves because they have taken themselves out of their objective world view.

We find it quite in keeping with this that this age must produce a Fichte with his book “The Destiny of Man”, and that he raises the question: What if this world view were perhaps only an illusion, a deception, only a dream? How then can the I, which now feels impoverished — that is a feeling that comes from the times — come to inner confidence? How can it find itself?

Thus we see Fichte's teaching on the I as a necessary result of the whole evolution. We see how, precisely in the nineteenth century, because of the scientific world view – as in Fichte's time, when the power of thought was still in full bloom – the I wants to create clarity through itself. And the attempts of Schelling and Hegel, following Fichte, can only be characterized by seeing in them the endeavour to gain a connection with the world through thought from the I that has emancipated itself from the world picture. But we see how, in the third of these characterized periods, the natural-scientific world picture gradually takes away, so to speak, from the I as well, by impoverishing it, all echoes with the old world pictures. Such things are usually not sufficiently observed in our time.

If we look back to one of the people who contributed in an eminent way to our scientific world view, to Kepler, who achieved so much that still has an effect on our scientific view, we find a remarkable idea in his “Harmony of the World”. He raises his gaze from the harmony of the world to the whole Earth. But for Kepler this Earth is a giant organism, alive, somewhat like a whale. At least, when he looks for an organism among the living creatures that resembles the earth organism, he finds the whale, and he says: This giant animal, on which we walk, which breathes, does not breathe like man, but in the times determined by the course of the sun, and the rising and falling of the ocean is the sign of the inhaling and exhaling of the earth organism. Kepler finds the human view too limited to comprehend how this process takes place.

When emphasizing Kepler's connection with Giordano Bruno for a one-sided view of the world, one should not forget that Giordano Bruno also repeatedly pointed out that the Earth is a giant organism that breathes in and out with the tides of the ocean. And we do not have to go back very far to find the same idea in more recent times. There is a beautiful saying of Goethe's to Eckermann, where he says, “I imagine the earth as a giant animal that has its inhalation and exhalation process in the rising and descending air and in the ebb and flow of the sea.” That is to say, the view of the earth as presented by today's geology only emerged very gradually, and another view was lost, which we can still feel resonating in Goethe and which still comes across to us very vividly in Kepler and Giordano Bruno. What Kepler, Giordano Bruno, what Goethe thought and felt, men felt quite vividly in those ancient times when the soul felt at one with the world. That this feeling of at-one-ment with the world should have grown dim in the course of time was the natural course of evolution.

If we wish to characterize what is presented here in terms of spiritual science, we arrive at the following description. A more detailed explanation can be found in “Occult Science: An Outline”.

If we look at the human soul, not in the chaotic way that modern science often does, but with the eye of spiritual science, we see that it is divided into three parts. First, there is the lowest part of the human soul, which, as one might say, still characterizes in many respects only the whole chaotic depth of the human soul, where the upper parts of human nature do not fully reach: the sentient soul. This is where the drives, affects, passions and all the undefined feelings in the soul arise. Then we have a higher link of the human soul: the intellectual or mind soul. This is the soul that already lives more consciously within itself, that grasps itself within itself, that not only experiences itself in the surges that it feels surging up from the depths in instinct, desire and passion, but that, above all, feels compassion and shared joy, and develops within itself what we call concepts of understanding and so on. And then we have that part of the soul that we can call the consciousness soul, through which the human soul truly experiences itself in itself.

In the course of human development, these different parts have successively undergone their formation. If we go back to the Egyptian-Chaldean period, it was mainly the education for the sentient soul that people went through at that time. For the connections of the great cosmos could speak to the sentient soul, and these entered into the human soul without man being aware of it. The wisdom of the Chaldean-Egyptian culture was therefore attained unconsciously. When we move on to the Greek-Latin period, we have the special development of the intellectual or emotional soul, where through intellect and emotion — we can see from this that this soul element has two parts — the inwardness is expressed, which is already more imbued with consciousness. And in our time we now have — and this follows directly from what has been described — the culture of the human soul, whereby this human soul is to come fully to consciousness in itself, that is to say, to develop the consciousness soul. This is what reached the highest pinnacle in the nineteenth century: the objective world view, which leaves the soul alone with itself so that it can grasp its self, its I, with its consciousness soul. In order to grasp the innermost essence of the human being in its inner illumination, it was necessary that the soul did not present itself to the world in the semi-unconscious way of the Egyptian world view or in the way we have described it for the Greek-Latin , but that it broke away from the world view in order to develop within itself that which had to become strongest in it, the I, the consciousness soul. Thus, in the successive earthly lives, favorable opportunities gradually presented themselves for man to develop the sentient soul, the soul of mind or feeling, and the consciousness soul in the successive earthly cultures.

But now let us take a look at this legacy of the nineteenth century, this consciousness soul: it struggled – we can basically trace this in particular in the nineteenth century – struggled in the philosophy of a Fichte, in the subsequent philosophical representations, struggled even in the more materialistic philosophies, for example in the philosophy of a Feuerbach, who said: The idea of God is only the self-representation of man projected out of space.

Man set the idea of God outside of himself because he needed support in the lonely consciousness soul. And if one follows the most radical philosophers, Feuerbach and others up to Nietzsche, one sees everywhere the human soul coming to power and inner security after it has been torn away from the world view that has become objective. Through this process, we see the human soul developing in a very regular way, we see the development of that which reached its peak in the nineteenth century: the emancipation of the consciousness soul and the consciousness soul's taking hold of itself through its own power.

What is to set the tone in the next age is always prepared in an earlier age. It can be clearly demonstrated how the development of the intellectual or mind soul already plays a role in certain cultural phenomena of the Egyptian-Chaldean period; and in the Greco-Latin period, especially where it is post-Christian, for example in the work of Augustine, one can see how humanity struggles to prepare the consciousness soul. Therefore, we have to say: our human soul can only be fully understood when it prepares, in the midst of the age of the consciousness soul, that which is to be developed after the consciousness soul. What needs to be developed?

The inner development of the human soul strives towards what must be developed, but so too does the so-called objective world view itself. Let us consider several symptoms in conclusion. What has the nineteenth century, with its brilliant culture, achieved? We see one of the most brilliant natural scientists of the nineteenth century, Ds Bois-Reymond, with his objective world view. He wants to save – just read his speech “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” – for the human soul what he needs for its inner security, and he seeks to find his way with the idea of the “world soul” because this soul of consciousness, which has become lonely and detached from the objective world view, is inexplicable to him. But the objective world view stands in his way. Wherever the human soul makes its appearance, it manifests itself in the brain, in the nerve cords and in the other instruments of action. Now Du Bois-Reymond is at the frontier of natural science. What does he demand if he is to recognize a world soul? He demands that someone show him an instrument in the universe that is similar to the one present in man when the human soul thinks, feels and wills. He says, for instance: Show me a tangle of ganglion balls and nerve fibres embedded in the neuroglia and supplied with warm arterial blood under the right pressure, corresponding to the increased capacity of such a world soul. He does not find it. The same Du Bois-Reymond demands this, who in the same speech also stated: If you observe the sleeping human being, from falling asleep to waking up, he may be explainable in scientific terms; but if you observe the human being from waking up to falling asleep, with all the drives, desires and passions, all the images, feelings and volitional impulses that arise and subside within him, he will never be explainable in scientific terms.

He is right! But let us see where the legacy of the nineteenth century has led us. Du Bois-Reymond says: “If I look at the sleeping human body scientifically, I cannot find anything that explains the interplay of the forces that are at work in our perceptions, feelings, impulses of will, and so on. For it is simply illogical to seek an explanation for the inner nature of the phenomena of the soul in the processes of the body, just as it would be nonsensical to seek an explanation for the organ of the lungs in the inner nature of air.

This will be the legacy of the nineteenth century: science will show that, even when it remains strictly on its own terrain, it cannot explain the workings of the soul and spirit in human beings from the processes that are available to it. Rather, it can be said without reservation: When this human body awakens from sleep, the soul and spirit are inhaled, as the lungs inhale oxygen or air; and when it falls asleep, the soul and spirit are exhaled, as it were. In the state of sleep, the soul-spiritual is alone outside the human body as an independent entity.

The legacy of the nineteenth century will be that natural science will fully unite with spiritual science, which says: Man has an ego and an astral body, with which he leaves his physical body and etheric body during sleep, is in a purely spiritual world during sleep with his ego and astral body, and leaves his physical body and etheric body to the laws that are peculiar to them. In this way natural science itself will demarcate its own field, and through what it has to admit it will show how spiritual science must be added to it as a complement. And when natural science itself will correctly recognize, for example, one of its greatest achievements: the natural development of organisms from the most imperfect to the more perfect, it will see that precisely in this development of the natural natural in the sense of Darwin's theory, in which the evolution of the human soul is not included, but which must first be grasped by the spiritual-soul if the merely earthly is to be organized into the human. A fine legacy of the nineteenth century will be a correctly understood natural science, showing how spiritual science is necessary to supplement natural science. Then, as a necessary consequence, the two will be in complete harmony. And the human soul will grasp itself by awakening the slumbering powers within it and recognizing itself.

In the Egyptian-Chaldean period, people were still in contact with the cosmos. This showed man his spiritual background. In the Greco-Latin period, man was still indirectly connected to the cosmos through the body. He still felt the cosmos because he felt the unity between the spiritual-soul and the physical. Now, the objective world view has become only a sum of external processes. Through spiritual science, however, the soul, by finding itself in its own spiritual-deep powers, will recognize itself in a new way in connection with the universe. The soul will be able to say: When I look down, I feel connected with all living things, with all the kingdoms of nature that are around me. But now, after going through the culture of the sentient soul of the Egyptian-Chaldean period, through the culture of the mind or emotional soul of the Greek-Latin period, and now having absorbed the culture of the consciousness soul, in which the gaze of the I was directed towards material culture , I feel connected to a series of spiritual realms: downwards to the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms when I look out materially, and upwards to spiritual realms, to the realms of the spiritual hierarchies, to which the soul belongs just as it belongs upwards, as it is otherwise accustomed to looking downwards towards the natural kingdoms. A future perspective is opening up before her that is fully in line with the perspectives of the past. Man has worked his way out of the spiritual contexts of the past; in the future he will work his way into the spiritual realms. The soul will feel a connection with the nature kingdoms through its spiritual-soul forces, and it will feel a connection with the spiritual realms through the spirit self. For just as our time is characterized as the time of the development of the consciousness soul, so in our time the development of the spirit self is preparing for the future of human spiritual culture, which will gradually mature.

When we look at the development from a spiritual scientific point of view, we see that it is quite organically necessary for this legacy of the nineteenth century to express most characteristically a task that was present: the task of rejecting the soul back to itself, throwing it out of the natural in order to force it to develop its own soul and spiritual powers. And this will be the best legacy of the nineteenth century, when the soul will see itself as having been torn away from everything, but feeling all the more encouraged to unfold its own powers. While the Age of Reason sought to make use of reason itself, the coming age must awaken still deeper forces slumbering in the depths of the soul, and thus a spiritual world will come into view, as the soul of the future must have it.

Thus the future will be grateful to the nineteenth century for having enabled the soul to develop the higher powers of objective science out of itself. That is also a legacy of the nineteenth century. If we consider the inner development of the human soul, we see that it must pass from the development of the sentient soul, through that of the mind or emotional soul and the consciousness soul, into the development of the spirit self. But man finds the spirit-self only when he is first torn away from all the external world by the scientific observation that is the legacy of the nineteenth century. If one looks at the legacy of the nineteenth century in this way and then goes into the details, one will see that the best thing about the positive results of the scientific heritage of the nineteenth century is the strengthening of the soul, because it then finds itself in that which science cannot give it. The soul will one day stand and feel with Du Bois-Reymond: Yes, the sleeping human body can be explained by the laws of physiology, but not what is inhaled by it as spiritual-soul. The soul will feel that it must raise to consciousness that which is unconscious in sleep through spiritual-scientific methods, in order to have a view into the spiritual worlds. And then a later Du Bois-Reymond will no longer stand so perplexed before the human body when he wants to explain it scientifically, because he will say to himself: the human soul is not in there at all, in the neuroglia and in the ganglion balls; so why should I then prove neuroglia and ganglion balls in the giant world soul?

We find the idea expressed in an outstanding nineteenth-century mind, that of Otto Liebmann, who only wanted to use what the nineteenth century could give him for an understanding of the sources of existence. Liebmann lectured on philosophy in Jena for many years: Why should we not be able to assume that our planets, moons and fixed stars are the atoms or even the molecules of a giant brain spreading out in the universe in a macrocosmic way? But he thinks that it will always be denied to human intelligence to penetrate to this giant brain, and that it will therefore also be denied to penetrate to the knowledge of a spiritual world soul at all. But spiritual science shows that Otto Liebmann was quite right. For it is impossible for the intelligence he speaks of to arrive at any kind of satisfaction of human longings in this field. Because this intelligence has first become great by emancipating itself from the objective world view, it is not surprising but self-evident that a philosophy built on this objective world view can find nothing in a world soul. If, in Du Bois-Reymond's sense, the natural scientist cannot find the human soul in the ganglia balls and neuroglia of the sleeping human body, why should one be able to find anything about the nature of the world soul in the giant ganglia balls of a giant brain? No wonder the physiologist must despair of it!

But these fundamentals are the best legacy of the nineteenth century. They show that the human soul is now thrown back upon itself and must seek and find the connection with the spiritual worlds, not through contemplation, but through the development of its inner powers. The human spirit will find, when it contemplates that conception of the world which it knows as the Darwinian theory of evolution, that its greatness is based on its having excluded itself. Man would not have come to the stage of development he has now reached if he had not excluded himself from the conception of the world. But when he understands this, he will realize that he cannot find in this theory of evolution what he himself had to extract. If one understands the Darwinian theory of evolution correctly, one will find, as it is not contradictory to it, to believe the spiritual researcher when he looks, in retrospect behind the phenomena of sense, at a spirit in which the human soul is rooted as a spirit.

This final lecture should show that in truth there is not the slightest contradiction between what is meant here by spiritual science and the true, genuine achievements of natural science, and that if one delves correctly into what the scientific world view, after the course of human development has been properly understood in spiritual scientific terms, human development, one knows precisely how it cannot be otherwise, and how the scientific world view, because it has become so, is the most beautiful means of educating the human soul to become what it should become: a being striving from the consciousness soul to the spirit self.

In this way, spiritual science is also shown to be part of the culture of our time. What was prepared in the Egyptian-Chaldean period with the culture of the sentient soul, and what was further developed in the Greek-Latin period with the culture of the mind or mind soul, has found its further development in our time in the culture of the consciousness soul. But everything that comes later is already prepared in the earlier stages. Just as there was a culture of the consciousness soul even in Socrates and Aristotle, which will continue for a long time in our time, so it is true that here, within our age, there must be the source for a true teaching for the spirit self. Thus the human soul grasps itself in connection with those worlds in which it is rooted, spirit in spirit.

In addition to all else, the natural science of the nineteenth century is a means of education, and the best means of education precisely for spiritual science. Perhaps it will be seen from the winter lectures that the spiritual-scientific views presented here regarding the heritage of the nineteenth century will provide a secure foundation for spiritual science, which should not become a conglomeration and chaos of something arbitrary, but something that stands on a foundation as secure as the admirable science of nature itself. If one believes that there must necessarily be a break between what natural science is and has achieved and what spiritual science is, then one could become disillusioned with this spiritual science. But when one sees how natural science had to become what it has become so that the human soul can find its way to the spirit in the new way, as it must find it, then one will recognize it as that which must necessarily be included in evolution as that which contains the seeds for the period of time that will follow our own just as our own follows those that have gone before. Then the apparent contradictions between the natural scientific and the spiritual scientific world picture will be reconciled.

Of course, I do not for a moment believe that in the short time of the lecture - which lasted so long - I have been able to exhaust even the slightest of what shows the continuing significance of the nineteenth-century scientific path with all its forms from the perspective of spiritual science. But perhaps by expanding on what has been said, by pursuing what was intended to be inspired today, especially by comparing the results of spiritual science with the correctly understood results of natural science, the honored audience will be able to see in their souls how a spiritual consideration of human evolution shows the necessity of spiritual science entering into the progress of human development. These lectures were organized and their keynote was always taken from this consciousness of an inner necessity for development. This lecture in particular was intended to evoke the feeling of how justified it may seem that the mere confidence that philosophers like Fichte and others sought to derive from the consciousness soul cannot be gained from the consciousness soul standing alone and shut up in its own thoughts, but only when the soul realizes and recognizes that there is something quite different within it than its mere intelligence and reason: when it finds the powers within itself that lead it to imagination, inspiration and intuition, that is, to life in the spiritual world itself, and when it realizes that out of a truly inner certainty about this, it may be spoken of again in the first third of the twentieth century – with the correctly understood legacy of the nineteenth century.

When Hegel, boldly building on what he believed he had grasped in the mere consciousness soul, once spoke significant words in his lectures on the history of philosophy, we may, in translation, his words, we may perhaps use them here at the end to characterize – not conceptually summarizing, but expressing like a feeling that arises like an elixir of life from the spiritual-scientific considerations. With some modification, we want to express in Hegel's words what the soul can feel for the security of life, for the necessary sources and foundations of existence and for all life's work, what it can feel in relation to the great riddles of existence, about fate and immortality. All this is such that the soul is met with the right worldly light, when it — but now not from an indefinite and abstract consciousness soul, but from a realization that in the soul there are dormant powers of knowledge slumbering in the soul that make her a citizen of spiritual worlds - when she is completely imbued with a feeling, so that this feeling becomes the direct expression of the spiritual science in question, making the soul secure and hopeful:

The human spirit may and should believe in its greatness and power; for it is spirit from the spirit. And with this belief, nothing in the cosmos, in the universe, can prove so hard and brittle that it does not reveal itself to it in the course of time, insofar as it needs it. What is hidden at first in the universe must become more and more evident to the seeking soul in its increasing realization and surrender to it, so that it can develop it into inner strength, inner security, inner value of existence and life!

My dear Friends,

today we will begin with the recitation of a scene where we can trace the workings of a conscious endeavour on the part of the dramatist to bring style into drama. I will say only a few words in preparation, for you will find that the scene itself will show you how a real poet—in the best sense of the word—relates himself to this question of style, how he deals with it in practice.

Schiller's early plays were, as we know, not characterised by style. Die Räuber certainly not, but neither can Fiesko nor Kabale—no, nor even Don Carlos, be said to have attained to style. Then, for a while, Schiller's creative powers in that direction were exhausted, and he had to devote himself to other activities; and it was during this time that his relations with Goethe underwent a change. It is not too much to say that, having seen what Goethe's genius could create, Schiller took this work of Goethe's as the foundation for a further development of his own artistic ideal. Goethe's dramas became for him a kind of school at which he studied and prepared himself for new activity in the same field. We can follow the process step by step in the interchange of letters between the two poets, and in the records of their conversations. Nor need we be surprised that Schiller, who saw in Goethe the artist par excellence, should take him for his pattern, the Goethe who had created an Iphigenie and a Tasso, dramas where the language reaches a high level of style. Not that Schiller had any thought of letting drama develop exclusively in the 'direction of style in speech, he was naturally concerned for the totality of dramatic art; but from this time on, he devoted his best effort to the attainment of style. We can see it already in Wallenstein; and in the later dramas, in Maria Stuart, in Die Braut von Messina, in Die Jungfrau von Orleans, we find him concentrating more and more on the development of style in some aspect or another.

In Maria Stuart, from which our scene is taken, we have an attempt to develop a style that is different from that of Die Braut von Messin—a style, namely, in the treatment of mood. For what is so striking in this play is the successive moods that pervade the different scenes. The moods are of course evoked by the characters, especially by the prominent part taken in the play by two such antagonistic characters as Mary, Queen of Scots herself, and Queen Elizabeth; but altogether the drama runs its course, fundamentally speaking, in moods; we can even say that the characters live out their parts in moods. You need only study a few of these individually to see how they pass through mood after mood, as the situation changes. Take the momentous scene that Frau Dr. -Steiner will presently read to us, a scene that is outstandingly characteristic of the whole play. You have here an excellent example of stylised mood. There is, to begin with, the mood that can be observed in Mary herself, and that plays no small part also in the drama as a whole, the mood that arises from the fact that Mary is at first committed to the charge of a kindly inclined gaoler but comes later into the custody of one who is rigid in the discharge of his duties; and then we have all that happens as a result of the change. The mood is still at work in this remarkable scene that is so teeming with interest and incident, and we shall be able to watch how the characters of Mary and Elizabeth unfold under its influence—the characters also of others who are present.

I draw your attention to this because I want you to see how earnest Schiller is in his striving for style. After Wallenstein he sets out, in fact, to give each play style in a different way. Of the significance of this for the actor I will speak later, after you have listened to the scene. Let it suffice now to point out that in Maria Stuart it is moods that are stylised, whereas in Die Jungfrau von Orleans it is events: the successive events come before us there in truly grand manner. And then in Wilhelm Tell we have a stylising of character; Schiller attains in this play to what may verily be called a painting of the human soul. In Die Braut von Messina we find him endeavouring to follow Goethe as closely as possible by developing style in the inner form and picture of the stage. Lastly, he sets out with the intention of giving style to the whole interworking of men and events. That was in his Demetrius, which he did not live to finish.

So now we will ask you to listen to the scene in Schiller's Maria Stuart that portrays the development of the situation to which I have alluded.

(Frau Dr. Steiner):

Gegend in einem Park. Vorn mit Bäumen besetzt, hinten eine weite Aussicht.

Erster Auftritt.

(MARIA tritt in schnellem Lauf hinter Bäumen hervor. HANNA KENNEDY folgt langsam.)

KENNEDY

Ihr eilet ja, als wenn Ihr Hügel hättet,
So kann ich Euch nicht folgen, wartet doch!

MARIA

Lass mich der neuen Freiheit geniessen,
Lass mich ein Kind sein, sei es mit!
Und auf dem grünen Teppich der Wiesen
Prüfen den leichten, geflügelten Schritt.
Bin ich dem finstern Gefängnis entstiegen?
Hält sie mich nicht mehr, die traurige Gruft?
Lass mich in vollen, in durstigen Zügen
Trinken die freie, die himmlische Luft.

KENNEDY

O meine teure Lady! Euer Kerker
Ist nur um ein klein weniges erweitert.
Ihr seht nur nicht die Mauer, die uns einschliesst,
Weil sie der Bäume dicht Gesträuch versteckt.

MARIA

O Dank, Dank diesen freundlich grünen Bäumen,
Die meines Kerkers Mauern mir verstecken!
Ich will mich frei und glücklich träumen,
Warum aus meinem süssen Wahn mich wecken?
Umfängt mich nicht der weite Himmelsschoss?
Die Blicke, frei und fessellos,
Ergehen sich in ungemessnen Räumen.
Dort, wo die grauen Nebelberge ragen,
Fängt meines Reiches Grenze an,
Und diese Wolken, die nach Mittag jagen,
Sie suchen Frankreichs fernen Ozean.
Eilende Wolken! Segler der Lüfte!
Wer mit euch wanderte, mit euch schiffte!
Grüsset mir freundlich mein Jugendland!
Ich bin gefangen, ich bin in Banden,
Ach, ich hab keinen andern Gesandten!
Frei in Lüften ist eure Bahn,
Ihr seid nicht dieser Königin untertan.

KENNEDY

Ach, teure Lady! Ihr seid ausser Euch,
Die langentbehrte Freiheit macht Euch schwärmen.

MARIA

Dort legt ein Fischer den Nachen an!
Dieses elende Werkzeug könnte mich retten,
Brächte mich schnell zu befreundeten Städten.
Spärlich nährt es den dürftigen Mann.
Beladen wollt ich ihn reich mit Schätzen,
Einen Zug sollt er tun, wie er keinen getan,
Das Glück sollt er finden in seinen Netzen,
Nähm er mich ein in den rettenden Kahn.

KENNEDY

Verlorne Wünsche! Seht Ihr nicht, dass uns
Von ferne dort die Spähertritte folgen?
Ein finster grausames Verbot scheucht jedes
Mitleidige Geschöpf aus unserm Wege.

MARIA

Nein, gute Hanna. Glaub mir, nicht umsonst
Ist meines Kerkers Tor geöffnet worden.
Die kleine Gunst ist mir des grössem
Glücks Verkünderin. Ich irre nicht. Es ist
Der Liebe tätge Hand, der ich sie danke;
Lord Lesters mächtgen. Arm erkenn ich drin.
Allmählich will man mein Gefängnis weiten,
Durch Kleineres zum Grössern mich gewöhnen,
Bis ich das Antlitz dessen endlich schaue,
Der mir die Bande löst auf immerdar.

KENNEDY

Ach, ich kann diesen Widerspruch nicht reimen!
Noch gestern kündigt man den Tod Euch an,
Und heute wird Euch plötzlich solche Freiheit.
Auch denen, hört ich sagen, wird die Kette
Gelöst, auf die die ewge Freiheit wartet.

MARIA

Hörst du das Hifthorn? Hörst du's klingen,
Mächtigen Rufes, durch Feld und Hain?
Ach, auf das mutige Ross mich zu schwingen,
An den fröhlichen Zug mich zu reihe!
Noch mehr! 0 die bekannte Stimme,
Schmerzlich süsser Erinnerung voll.
Oft vernahm sie mein Ohr mit Freuden
Auf des Hochlands bergichten Heiden,
Wenn die tobende Jagd erscholl.

Zweiter Auftritt.
(PAULET. Die Vorigen.)

PAULET

Nun! Hab ich's endlich recht gemacht, Mylady?
Verdien ich einmal Euern Dank?

MARIA

Wie, Ritter? Seid Ihr's, der diese Gunst mir ausgewirkt?
Ihr seid's?

PAULET

Warum soll ich's nicht sein? Ich war
Am Hof, ich überbrachte Euer Schreiben—

MARIA

Ihr übergabt es? Wirklich, tatet Ihr's?
Und diese Freiheit, die ich jetzt geniesse,
Ist eine Frucht des Briefs—

PAULET (mit Bedeutung)

Und nicht die einzge!
Macht Euch auf eine grössre noch gefasst!

MARIA

Auf eine grössre, Sir? Was meint Ihr damit?

PAULET

Ihr hörtet doch die Hörner—

MARIA (zurückfahrend, mit Ahnung)
Ihr erschreckt mich!

PAULET

Die Königin jagt in dieser Gegend.

MARIA

Was?

PAULET

In wenig Augenblicken steht sie vor Euch.

KENNEDY

(auf MARIA zueilend, welche zittert und hinzusinken droht)
Wie wird Euch, teure Lady! Ihr verblasst.

PAULET

Nun! ist's nun nicht recht? War's nicht Eure Bitte?
Sie wird Euch früher gewährt, als Ihr gedacht.
Ihr wart sonst immer so geschwinder Zunge,
Jetzt bringet Eure Worte an, jetzt ist
Der Augenblick zu reden!

MARIA

Oh, warum hat man mich nicht vorbereitet!
Jetzt bin ich nicht darauf gefasst, jetzt nicht.
Was ich mir als die höchste Gunst erbeten,
Dünkt mir jetzt schrecklich, fürchterlich.—Komm, Hanna,
Führ mich ins Haus, dass ich mich fasse, mich
Erhole—

PAULET

Bleibt! Ihr müsst sie hier erwarten.
Wohl, wohl mag's Euch beängstigen, ich glaub's,
Vor Euerm Richter zu erscheinen.

Dritter Auftritt.
(GRAF SHREWSBURY zu den Vorigen.)

MARIA

Es ist nicht darum! Gott, mir ist ganz anders
Zumut.—Ach, edler Shrewsbury! Ihr kommt,
Vom Himmel mir. ein Engel zugesendet!
—Ich kann sie nicht sehn! Rettet, rettet mich
Von dem verhassten Anblick—

SHREWSBURY

Kommt zu Euch, Königin! Fasst Euern Mut
Zusammen! Das ist die entscheidungsvolle Stunde.

MARIA

Ich habe drauf geharret—Jahrelang
Mich drauf bereitet, alles hab ich mir
Gesagt und ins Gedächtnis eingeschrieben,
Wie ich sie rühren wollte und bewegen!
Vergessen plötzlich, ausgelöscht ist alles,
Nichts lebt in mir in diesem Augenblick,
Als meiner Leiden brennendes Gefühl.
In Blutgen Hass gewendet wider sie
Ist mir das Herz, es fliehen alle guten
Gedanken, und die Schlangenhaare schüttelnd
Umstehen mich die finstern Höllengeister.

SHREWSBURY

Gebietet Euerm wild empörten Blut,
Bezwingt des Herzens Bitterkeit! Es bringt
Nicht gute Frucht, wenn Hass dem Hass begegnet.
Wie sehr auch Euer Innres widerstrebe,
Gehorcht der Zeit und dem Gesetz der Stunde!
Sie ist die Mächtige.—Demütigt Euch!

MARIA

Vor ihr! Ich kann es nimmermehr.

SHREWSBURY

Tut's dennoch!
Sprecht ehrerbietig, mit Gelassenheit!
Ruft ihre Grossmut an, trotzt nicht, jetzt nicht
Auf Euer Recht, jetzo ist nicht die Stunde!

MARIA

Ach, mein Verderben ha`, ich mir erfleht,
Und mir zum Fluche wird mein Flehn erhört!
Nie hätten wir uns sehen sollen, niemals!
Daraus kann nimmer, nimmer Gutes kommen!
Eh mögen Feur und Wasser sich in Liebe
Begegnen, und das Lamm den Tiger küssen.—
Ich bin zu schwer verletzt—sie hat zu schwer
Beleidigt.—Nie ist zwischen uns Versöhnung!

SHREWSBURY

Seht sie nur erst von Angesicht!
Ich sah es ja, wie sie von Euerm Brief
Erschüttert war, ihr Auge schwamm in Tränen.
Nein, sie ist nicht gefühllos, hegt Ihr selbst
Nur besseres Vertrauen!—Darum eben
Bin ich vorausgeeilt, damit ich Euch
In Fassung setzen und ermahnen möchte.

MARIA (seine Hand ergreifend)

Ach, Talbot! Ihr wart stets mein Freund.—Dass ich
In Eurer milden Haft geblieben wäre!
Es ward mir hart begegnet, Shrewsbury!

SHREWSBURY

Vergesst jetzt alles! Darauf denkt allein,
Wie Ihr sie unterwürfig wollt empfangen.

MARIA

Ist Burleigh auch mit ihr, mein böser Engel?

SHREWSBURY

Niemand begleitet sie, als Graf von Lester.

MARIA

Lord Lester!

SHREWSBURY

Fürchtet nichts von ihm! Nicht er
Will Euern Untergang.—Sein Werk ist es,
Dass Euch die Königin die Zusammenkunft
Bewilligt.

MARIA

Ach! Ich wusst es wohl!

SHREWSBURY

Was sagt Ihr?

PAULET

Die Königin kommt!

(Alles weicht auf die Seite; nur MARIA bleibt, auf die KENNEDY gelehnt.)

Vierter Auftritt.
(Die Vorigen. ELISABETH. GRAF LEICESTER. Gefolge.)

ELISABETH (zu LEICESTER)

Wie heisst der Landsitz?

LEICESTER

Fotheringhayschloss.

ELISABETH (zu SHREWSBURY)

Schickt unser Jagdgefolg voraus nach London!
Das Volk drängt allzu heftig in den Strassen,
Wir suchen Schutz in diesem stillen Park.
(Talbot entfernt das Gefolge. Sie fixiert mit den Augen die MARIA, indem sie zu FAULET weiter spricht.)
Mein gutes Volk liebt mich zu sehr. Unmässig,
Abgöttisch sind die Zeichen seiner Freude,
So ehrt man einen Gott, nicht einen Menschen.

MARIA

(welche diese Zeit über halb ohnmächtig auf die Amme gelehnt war, erhebt sich jetzt, und ihr Auge begegnet dem gespannten Blick der ELISABETH. Sie schaudert zusammen und wirft sich wieder an der Amme Brust)
O Gott, aus diesen Zügen spricht kein Herz!

ELISABETH

Wer ist die Lady?
(Ein allgemeines Schweigen.)

LEICESTER

Du bist zu Fotheringhay, Königin.

ELISABETH

(stellt sich überrascht und erstaunt, einen finstern Blick auf LEICESTER richtend)
Wer hat mir das getan? Lord Lester!

LEICESTER

Es ist geschehen, Königin—und nun
Der Himmel deinen Schritt hieher gelenkt,
So lass die Grossmut und das Mitleid siegen!

SHREWSBURY

Lass dich erbitten, königliche Frau,
Dein Aug auf die Unglückliche zu richten,
Die hier vergeht vor deinem Anblick.

(MARIA rafft sich zusammen und will auf die ELISABETH zugehen, steht aber auf halbem Wege schaudernd still, ihre Gebärden drücken den heftigsten Kampf aus.)

ELISABETH

Wie, My lords?
Wer war es denn, der eine Tiefgebeugte
Mir angekündigt? Eine Stolze find ich,
Vom Unglück keineswegs geschmeidigt.

MARIA

Sei's!
Ich will mich auch noch diesem unterwerfen.
Fahr hin, ohnmächtger Stolz der edeln Seele!
Ich will vergessen, wer ich bin und was
Ich litt; ich will vor ihr mich niederwerfen,
Die mich in diese Schmach herunterstiess.
(Sie wendet sich gegen die Königin.)
Der Himmel hat für Euch entschieden, Schwester!
Gekrönt vom Sieg ist Euer glücklich Haupt;
Die Gottheit bet ich an, die Euch erhöhte!
(Sie fällt vor ihr nieder.)
Doch seid auch Ihr nun edelmütig, Schwester!
Lasst mich nicht schmachvoll liegen! Eure Hand
Streckt aus, reicht mir die königliche Rechte,
Mich zu erheben von dem tiefen Fall!

ELISABETH (zurücktretend)

Ihr seid an Euerm Platz, Lady Maria!
Und dankend preis ich meines Gottes Gnade,
Der nicht gewollt, dass ich zu Euern Füssen
So liegen sollte, wie Ihr jetzt zu meinen.

MARIA (mit steigendem Affekt)

Denkt an den Wechsel alles Menschlichen!
Es leben Götter, die den Hochmut rächen!
Verehret, fürchtet sie, die schrecklichen,
Die mich zu Euern Füssen niederstürzen!—
Um dieser fremden Zeugen willen, ehrt
In mir Euch selbst! entweihet, schändet nicht
Das Blut der Tudor, das in meinen Adern
Wie in den Euern fliesst!-O Gott im Himmel!
Steht nicht da, schroff und unzugänglich wie
Die Felsenklippe, die der Strandende
Vergeblich ringend zu erfassen strebt.
Mein alles hängt, mein Leben, mein Geschick,
An meiner Worte, meiner Tränen Kraft;
Löst mir das Herz, dass ich das Eure rühre!
Wenn Ihr mich anschaut mit dem Eisesblick,
Schliesst sich das Herz mir schaudernd zu, der Strom
Der Tränen stockt, und kaltes Grausen fesselt
Die Flehensworte mir im Busen an.

ELISABETH (kalt und streng)

Was habt Ihr mir zu sagen, Lady Stuart?
Ihr habt mich sprechen wollen. Ich vergesse
Die Königin, die schwer beleidigte,
Die fromme Pflicht der Schwester zu erfüllen,
Und meines Anblicks Trost gewähr ich Euch.
Dem Trieb der Grossmut folg ich, setze mich
Gerechtem Tadel aus, dass ich so weit
Heruntersteige—denn Ihr wisst,
Dass Ihr mich habt ermorden lassen wollen.

MARIA

Womit soll ich den Anfang machen, wie
Die Worte klüglich stellen, dass sie Euch
Das Herz ergreifen, aber nicht verletzen!
O Gott, gib meiner Rede Kraft und nimm
Ihr jeden Stachel, der verwunden könnte!
Kann ich doch für mich selbst nicht sprechen, ohne Euch
Schwer zu verklagen, und das will ich nicht.
—Ihr habt an mir gehandelt, wie nicht recht ist,
Denn ich bin eine Königin wie Ihr,
Und Ihr habt als Gefangne mich gehalten.
Ich kam zu Euch als eine Bittende,
Und Ihr, des Gastrechts heilige Gesetze,
Der Völker heilig Recht in mir verhöhnend,
Schlosst mich in Kerkermauern ein; die Freunde,
Die Diener werden grausam mir entrissen,
Unwürdgem Mangd werd ich preisgegeben,
Man stellt mich vor einschimpfliches Gericht—
Nichts mehr davon! Ein ewiges Vergessen
Bedecke, was ich Grausames erlitt.
—Seht! Ich will alles eine Schickung nennen;
Ihr seid nicht schuldig, ich bin auch nicht schuldig;
Ein böser Geist stieg aus dem Abgrund auf,
Den Hass in unsern Herzen zu entzünden,
Der unsre zarte Jugend schon entzweit.
Er wuchs mit uns, und böse Menschen fachten
Der unglückselgen Flamme Atem zu.
Wahnsinnge Eiferer bewaffneten
Mit Schwert und Dolch die unberufne Hand—
Das ist das Fluchgeschick der Könige,
Dass sie, entzweit, die Welt in Hass zerreissen
Und jeder Zwietracht Furien entfesseln.
—Jetzt ist kein fremder Mund mehr zwischen uns—
(nähert sich ihr zutraulich und mit schmeichelndem Ton)
Wir stehe einander selbst nun gegenüber.
Jetzt, Schwester, redet! Nennt mir meine Schuld;
Ich will Euch völliges Genügen leisten.
Ach, dass Ihr damals mir Gehör geschenkt,
Als ich so dringend Euer Auge suchte!
Es wäre nie so weit gekommen, nicht
An diesem traurgen Ort geschähe jetzt
Die unglückselig traurige Begegnung.

ELISABETH

Mein guter Stern bewahrte mich davor,
Die Natter an den Busen mir zu legen.
—Nicht die Geschicke, Euer schwarzes Herz
Klagt an, die wilde Ehrsucht Eures Hauses.
Nichts Feindliches war zwischen uns geschehn
Da kündigte mir Euer Ohm, der stolze,
Herrschwütge Priester, der die freche Hand
Nach allen Kronen streckt, die Fehde an,
Betörte Euch, mein Wappen anzunehmen,
Euch meine Königstitel zuzueignen,
Auf Tod und Leben in den Kampf mit mir
Zu gehn.—Wen rief er gegen mich nicht auf?
Der Priester Zungen und der Völker Schwert,
Des frommen Wahnsinns fürchterliche Waffen;
Hier selbst, im Friedenssitze meines Reichs,
Blies er mir der Empörung Flammen an
Doch Gott ist mit mir—und der stolze Priester
Behält das Feld nicht.—Meinem Haupte war
Der Streich gedrohet, und das Eure fällt!

MARIA

Ich steh in Gottes Hand. Ihr werdet Euch
So blutig Eurer Macht nicht überheben—

ELISABETH

Wer soll mich hindern? Euer Oheim gab
Das Beispiel allen Königen der Welt,
Wie man mit seinen Feinden Frieden macht.
Die Sankt Barthelemi sei meine Schule!
Was ist mir Blutsverwandtschaft, Völkerrecht?
Die Kirche trennet aller Pflichten Band,
Den Treubruch heiligt sie, den Königsmord;
Ich übe nur, was Eure Priester lehren.
Sagt! Welches Pfand gewährte mir für Euch,
Wenn ich grossmütig Eure Bande löste?
Mit welchem Schloss verwahr ich Eure Treue,
Das nicht Sankt Peters Schlüssel öffnen kann?
Gewalt nur ist die einzge Sicherheit;
Kein Bündnis ist mit dem Gezücht der Schlangen.

MARIA

Oh, das ist Euer traurig finstrer Argwohn!
Ihr habt mich stets als eine Feindin nur
Und Fremdlingin betrachtet. Hättet Ihr
Zu Eurer Erbin mich erklärt, wie mir
Gebührt, so hätten Dankbarkeit und Liebe
Euch eine treue Freundin und Verwandte
In mir erhalten.

ELISABETH

Draussen, Lady Stuart,
Ist Eure Freundschaft, Euer Haus das Papsttum,
Der Mönch ist Euer Bruder—Euch zur Erbin
Erklären! Der verräterische Fallstrick!
Dass Ihr bei meinem Leben noch mein Volk
Verführet, eine listige, Armida,
Die edle Jugend meines Königreichs
In Eurem Buhlemetze schlau verstricktet—
Dass alles sich der neu aufgehnden Sonne
Zuwendete, und ich—

MARIA

Regiert in Frieden!
Jedwedem Anspruch auf dies Reich entsag ich.
Ach, meines Geistes Schwingen sind gelähmt;
Nicht Grösse lockt mich mehr—Ihr habt's erreicht,
Ich bin nur noch der Schatten der Maria.
Gebrochen ist in langer Kerkerschmach
Der edle Mut—Ihr habt das Äusserste an mir
Getan, habt mich zerstört in meiner Blüte!
—Jetzt macht ein Ende, Schwester! Sprecht es aus,
Das Wort, um dessentwillen Ihr gekommen,
Denn nimmer will ich glauben, dass Ihr kamt,
Um. Euer Opfer Grausam zu verhöhnen.
Sprecht dieses Wort aus! sagt mir: ' Ihr seid frei,
Maria! Meine Macht habt Ihr gefühlt,
Jetzt lernet meinen Edelmut verehren! '
Sagt's, und ich will mein Leben, meine Freiheit
Als ein Geschenk aus Eurer Hand empfangen.
—Ein Wort macht alles ungeschehn. Ich warte
Darauf. Oh, lasst mich's nicht zu lang erharren!
Weh Euch, wenn Ihr mit diesem Wort nicht endet!
Denn wenn Ihr jetzt nicht segenbringend, herrlich,
Wie eine Gottheit von mir scheidet—Schwester!
Nicht um dies ganze reiche Eiland, nicht
Um alle Länder, die das Meer umfasst,
Möcht ich vor Euch so stehn wie Ihr vor mir!

ELISABETH

Bekennt Ihr endlich Euch für überwunden?
Ist's aus mit Euren Ränken? Ist kein Mörder
Mehr unterweges? Will kein Abenteurer
Für Euch die traurge Ritterschaft mehr wagen?
—Ja, es ist aus, Lady Maria. Ihr verführt
Mir keinen mehr. Die Welt hat andre Sorgen.
Es lüstet keinen, Euer—vierter Mann
Zu werden, denn Ihr tötet Eure Freier
Wie Eure Männer!

MARIA (auffahrend)

Schwester! Schwester!
O Gott! Gott! Gib mir Mässigung!

ELISABETH

(sieht sie lange mit einem Blick stolzer Verachtung an)
Das also sind die Reizungen, Lord Lester,
Die ungestraft kein Mann erblickt, daneben
Kein andres Weib sich wagen darf zu stellen!
Fürwahr! Der Ruhm war wohlfeil zu erlangen,
Es kostet nichts, die allgemeine Schönheit
Zu sein, als die gemeine sein für alle!

MARIA

Das ist zuviel!

ELISABETH (höhnisch lachend)

Jetzt zeigt Ihr Euer wahres
Gesicht, bis jetzt war's nur die Larve.

MARIA

(von Zorn glühend, doch mit einer edeln Würde)
Ich habe menschlich, jugendlich gefehlt
Die Macht verführte mich, ich hab es nicht
Verheimlicht und verborgen, falschen Schein
Hab ich verschmäht mit königlichem Freimut.
Das Ärgste weiss die Welt von mir, und ich
Kann sagen, ich bin besser als mein Ruf.
Weh Euch, wenn sie von Euern Taten einst
Den Ehrenmantel zieht, womit Ihr gleissend
Die wilde Glut yerstohlner Lüste deckt.
Nicht Ehrbarkeit habt Ihr von Eurer Mutter
Geerbt; man weiss, um welcher Tugend willen
Anna von Boleyn das Schafott bestiegen.

SHREWSBURY

(tritt zwischen beide Koniginnen)
O Gott des Himmels! Muss es dahin kommen!
Ist das die Mässigung, die Unterwerfung,
Lady Maria?

MARIA

Mässigung! Ich habe
Ertragen, was ein Mensch ertragen kann.
Fahr hin, lammherzige Gelassenheit!
Zum Himmel fliehe, leidende Geduld!
Spreng endlich deine Bande, tritt hervor
Aus deiner Höhle, langverhaltner Groll!—
Und du, der dem gereizten Basilisk
Den Mordblick gab, leg auf die Zunge mir
Den giftgen Pfeil—

SHREWSBURY

Oh, sie ist ausser sich!
Verzeih der Rasenden, der schwer Gereizten!
(ELISABETH, vor Zorn sprachlos, schiesst wütende Blicke auf MARIEN.)

LEICESTER

(in der heftigsten Unruhe, sucht die Elisabeth hinwegzuführen)
Höre
Die Wütende nicht an! Hinweg, hinweg
Von diesem unglückselgen Ort!

MARIA

Der Thron von England ist durch einen Bastard
Entweiht, der Briten edelherzig Volk
Durch eine listge Gauklerin betrogen.
—Regierte Recht, so läget Ihr vor mir
Im Staube jetzt, denn ich bin Euer König.
(ELISABETH geht schnell ab, die Lords folgen ihr in der höchsten Bestürzung.)

---

MARY STUART
by Schiller
Act III, Scene 1

In a Park. In the foreground Trees; in the background a distant Prospect.

(MARY advances, running from behind the trees: HANNAH KENNEDY follows slowly.)

KENNEDY

You hasten an as if endow'd with wings—
I cannot follow you so swiftly—wait.

MARY

Freedom returns! O let me enjoy it—
Let me be childish—be childish with me!
Freedom invites me! O let me employ it,
Skimming with winged step light o'er the lea;
Have I escaped from this mansion of mourning?
Holds me no more the sad dungeon of care?
Let me, with joy and with eagerness burning,
Drink in the free, the celestial air!

KENNEDY

O, my dear Lady! but a very little
Is your sad gaol extended; you behold not
The wall that shuts us in; these plaited tufts
Of trees hide from your sight the hated object.

MARY

Thanks to these friendly trees, that hide from me
My prison walls, and flatter my illusion!
Happy I now may dream myself, and free;
Why wake me from my dream's so sweet confusion?
The extended vault of heaven around me lies,
Free and unfetter'd range my wandering eyes
O'er space's vast immeasurable sea!
From where yon misty mountains rise on high,
I can my empire's boundaries explore;
And those light clouds which, steering southwards, fly,
Seek the mild clime of France's genial shore.
Fast fleeting clouds! ye meteors that fly;
Could I but with you sail through the sky!
Tenderly greet the dear fand of my youth!
Here I am captive! oppress'd by my foes,
No other than you may carry my woes,
Free thro' the ether your pathway is seen,
Ye own not the power of this tyrant Queen.

KENNEDY

Alas! dear Lady! You're beside yourself,
This long-lost, long-sought freedom makes you rave.

MARY

Yonder's a fisher returning to home;—
Poor though it be, would he lend me his wherry,
Quick to congenial shores would I ferry.
Spare is his trade, and labour's his doom—
Rich would I freight his vessel with treasure,
Such a draught should be his as he never had seen,
Wealth should he find in his nets without measure,
Would he but rescue a poor captive Queen.

KENNEDY

Fond, fruitless wishes! See you not from far,
How we are follow'd by observing spies?—
A dismal, barb'rous prohibition scares
Each sympathetic being from our path.

MARY

No, gentle Hannah! Trust me, not in vain
My prison gates are open'd. This small grace
Is harbinger of greater happiness.
No! I mistake not—'tis the active hand
Of love to which I owe this kind indulgence.
I recognise in this the mighty arm
Of Leicester. They will by degrees expand
My prison; will accustom me, through small,
To greater liberty, until at last
I shall behold the face of hüll whose hand
Will dash my fetters off, and that for ever.

KENNEDY

O, my dear Queen! I cannot reconcile
These contradictions. 'Twas but yesterday
That they announc'd your death, and all at once,
today, you have such liberty. Their chains
Are also loos'd, as I have oft been told,
Whom everlasting liberty awaits.
(Hunting horns at a distance.)

MARY

Hear'st thou the bugle, so blithely resounding?
Hear'st thou its echoes through wood and through plain?
Oh, might I now, on my nimble steed bounding,
Join with the jocund, the frolicsome train!
(Hunting horns heard again.)
Again! O this sad and this pleasing remembrance!
These are the sounds, which, so sprightly and clear,
Oft, when with music the hounds and the Korn,
So cheerfully welcom'd the break of the morn,
On the heaths of the Highlands delighted my ear.

Scene II.
(Enter PAULET.)

PAULET

Well! have I acted right at last, my Lady?
Do I for once, at least, deserve your thanks?

MARY

How! Do I owe this favour, Sir, to you?

PAULET

Why not to me? I visited the Court,
And gave the Queen your Letter.

MARY

Did you give it?
In very truth did you deliver it?
And is this freedom which I now enjoy,
The happy consequence?

PAULET

(significantly)

Nor that alone;
Prepare yourself to see a,greater still.

MARY

A greater still! What do you mean by that?

PAULET

You heard the bugle-horns?

MARY

(starting back with foreboding apprehension)
You frighten me—

PAULET

The Queen is hunting in the neighbourhood—

MARY

What!

PAULET

In a few moments she'll appear before you.

KENNEDY

(hastening towards MARY, about to fall)
How fare you, dearest Lady?—you grow pale.

PAULET

How? Is't not well? Was it not then your pray'r?
'Tis granted now, before it was expected;
You who had ever such a ready Speech,
Now summon all your powers of eloquente,
The important time to use them now is come.

MARY

O, why was I not told of this before?
Now I am not prepar'd for it—not now—
What, as the greatest favour, I besought,
Seems to me now most fearful:—Hannah, come,
Lead me into the house, till I collect
My spirits.

PAULET

Stay;—you must await her fiere.
Yes!—I believe you may be well alarm'd
To stand before your judge.

Scene III.
(Enter the EARL OF SHREWSBURY.)

MARY

'Tis not for that,
O God! Far other thoughts possess me now.
O, worthy Shrewsbury! You come, as though
ou were an angel sent to me from heav'n.
I cannot, will not see her. Save me, save me
From the detested sight!

SHREWSBURY

Your Majesty,
Comraand yourself, and summon all your courage;
'Tis the decisive moment of your fate.

MARY

For years I've waited, and prepared myself.
For this I've studied, weigh'd, and written down
Each ward within the tablet of my mem'ry,
That was to touch, and move her to compassion.
Forgotten suddenly, effac'd is all.
And nothing lives within me at this moment,
But the fierte, burning feeling of my wrongs.
My heart is turn'd to direst hate against her;
All gentle thoughts, all sweet forgiving words
Are gone, and round me stand with grisly mien,
The fiends of hell, and shake their snaky locks!

SHREWSBURY

Command your wild, rebellious blood;—constrain
The bittemess which fills your heart. No good
Ensures, when hatred is oppos'd to hate.
How muck soe'er the inward struggle tost,
You must submit to stern necessity,
The pow'r is in her hand, be therefore humble.

MARY

To her? I never can.

SHREWSBURY

But pray, submit.
Speak with respect, with calmness!
Strive to move Her magnanimity; insist not, now,
Upon your rights, not not the season.

MARY

Ah! woe is me! I've pray'd for my destruction,
And, as a curse to me, my prayer is heard.
We never should have seen each other—never!
O, this can never, never come to good.
Rather in love could fixe and water meet,
The timid lamb embrace the roaring tiger!—
I have been hurt too grievously; she hath
Too grievously oppress'd me;—no atonement
Can make us friends!

SHREWSBURY

First see her, face to face:
Did I not see how she was mov'd at reading
Your letter? How her eyes were drown'd in tears?
No—she is not unfeeling; only place
More confidence in her. It was for this
That I came on before her, to entreat you,
To be collected—to admonish you—

MARY

(seizing his hand)

Oh, Talbot! you have ever been my friend,
Had I but stay'd beneath your kindly care!
They have, indeed, misused me, Shrewsbury.

SHREWSBURY

Let all be now forgot, and only think
How to receive her with submissiveness.

MARY

Is Burleigh with her too, my evil genius?

SHREWSBURY

No one attends her but the Earl of Leicester.

MARY

Lord Leicester?

SHREWSBURY

Fear not him; it is not he
Who wishes your destruction,—'twas his work,
That here the Queen hath granted you this meeting.

MARY

Ah! well I knew it.

SHREWSBURY

What?

PAULET

The Queen approaches. (They all draw aride;

MARY

alone remains, leaning on KENNEDY.)

Scene IV. (Enter ELIZABETH, EARL OF LEICESTER, and Retinue.)

ELIZABETH (to LEICESTER)

What seat is that, my Lord?

LEICESTER

'Tis Fotheringay.

ELIZABETH (to SHREWSBURY)

My Lord, send back our retinue to London;
The people crowd too eager in the roads,
We'll seek a refuge in this quiet park.
(TALBOT sends the train away. She looks steadfastly at MARY, as she speaks further with PAULET.)
My honest people love me overmuch.
These signs of joy are quite idolatrous.
Thus should a God be honour'd, not a mortal.

MARY

(who the whole time had leaned, almost fainting, on KENNEDY, rises now, and her eyes meet the steady piercing look of ELIZABETH; she shudders and throws herself again upon KENNEDYS bosom)
O God! from out these features speaks no heart.

ELIZABETH

What lady's that?—
(A general, embarrassed silence.)

LEICESTER

You are at Fotheringay,
My Liege!

ELIZABETH

(as if surprised, casting an angry look at LEICESTER)
Who hath done this, my Lord of Leicester?

LEICESTER

'Tis past, my Queen;—and now that heav'n hath led
Your footsteps hither, be magnanimous;
And let sweet pity be triumphant now.

SHRBWSBURY

O royal mistress! yield to our entreaties;
O cast your eyes on this unhappy one,
Who stands dissolved in anguish.
(MARY collects herself, and begins to advance towards ELIZABETH, stops shuddering at half-way:—her action expresses the most violent internal struggle.)

ELIZABETH

How, my Lords!
Which of you then announc'd to me a prisoner
Bow'd down by woe? I see a haughty one,
By no means humbled by calamity.

MARY

Well be it so :—to this will I submit.
Farewell high thought, and pride of noble mied!
I will forget my dignity, and all
My sufferings; 1 will fall before her feet,
Who hath reduced me to this wretchedness.
(She turn towards the QUEEN.)
The voice of Heav'n decides for you, my sister,
Your happy brows are now with triumph crown'd,
I bless the Power Divine, which thus hath rais'd you.
(She kneels.)
But in your turn be merciful, my sister:
Let me not lie before you thus disgraced;
Stretch forth your hand, your royal hand, to raise
Your sister from the depths of her distress.

ELIZABETH (stepping back)

You are rohere it becomes you, Lady Stuart;
And thankfully I prize my God's protection,
Who hath not suffer'd me to kneel a suppliant
Thus at your feet, as you now kneel at mine.

MARY

(with increasing energy of feeling)
Think on all earthly things, vicissitudes.
Oh! there are gods who punish haughty pride:
Respect them, honour them, the dreadful ones
Who thus before thy feet have humbled me!
Before these strangers' eyes, dishonour not
Yourself in me: profane not, nor disgrace
The royal blood of Tudor. In my veins
It flows as pure a stream, as in your own.
O! for God's pity, stand not so estranged
And inaccessible, like some tall cliff,
Which the poor shipwreck'd mariner in vain
Struggles to seize, and labours to embrace.
My all, my life, my fortune now depends
Upon the influence of my words and tears;
That I may touch your heart, O! set inne free.
If you regard me with those icy looks,
My shudd'ring heart contracts itself, the stream
Of tears is dried, and frigid horror chains
The words of supplication in my bosom!

ELIZABETH (cold and severe)

What would you say to me, my Lady Stuart?
You wish'd to speak with me; and I, forgetting
The Queen, and all the wrongs I have sustain'd,
Fulfil the pious duty of the sister,
And graut the boon you wished for of my presence.
Yet 1, in yielding to the gen'rous feelings
Of magnanimity, expose myself
To rightful censure, that 1 stoop so low.
For well you know, you would have had me murder'd.

MARY

O! how shall I begin? O, how shall I
So artfully arrange my cautious words,
That they may touch, yet not offend your heart?—
Strengthen my words, O Heav'n! and take from them
Whate'er might wound. Alas! I cannot speak
In my own cause, without impeaching you,
And that most heavily. I wish not so;
You have not, as you ought, behav'd to me;
I am a Queen, like you, yet you have held me
Confin'd in prison. As a suppliant
I came to you, yet you in me insulted
The pious use of hospitality;
Slighting in me the holy law of nations,
Immur'd me in a dungeon—tore from me
My friends and servants; to unseemly want
I was exposed, and hurried to the bar
Of a disgraceful, insolent tribunal.
No more of this ;—in everlasting silence
Be buried all the cruelties I suffer'd!
See—I will throw the blame for all an fate,
'Twas not your fault, no more than it was raine.
An evil spirit rose from the abyss,
To kindle in our hearts the flames of hate,
By which our tender youth had been divided.
It grew with us, and bad designing men
Fann.'d with their ready breath the fatal fixe:
Frantics, enthusiasts, with sword and dagger
Arm'd the uncall'd-for hand! , This is the curse
Of kings, that they, divided, tear the world
In pieces with their hatred, and let loose
The raging furies of all hellish strife!
No foreign tongue is now between us, sister,
(approaching her confidently, and with aflattering tone)
Now stand we face to face; now, sister, speak;
Name but my crime, fully satisfy you,—
Alas! had you vouchsaf'd to hear me then,
When I so earnest sought to meet your eye,
It never would have come to this, nor would,
Here in this mournful place, have happen'd now
This so distressful, this so mournful meeting.

ELIZABETH

My better stars preserv'd me. I was warn'd,
And laid not to my breast the pois'nous adder!
Accuse not fate! your own deceitful heart
It was, the wild ambition of your house:
As yet no enmities had pass'd between us,
When your imperious linde, the proud priest,
Whose shameless hand grasps at all crowns, attack'd me
With unprovok'd hostility, and taught
You, but too docile, to assume my arms,
To vest yourself with my imperial title,
And meet me in the lists in mortal strife:
What arms employed he not to storm my throne?
The curses of the priests, the people's sword,
The dreadful weapons of religious frenzy,—
Ev'n here in my own kingdom's peaceful haunts,
He fann'd the flames of civil insurrection;—
But God is with me, and the haughty priest
Has not maintain'd the field. The blow was aim'd
Full at my head, but yours it is which falls!

MARY

I'm in the hand of Heav'n. You never will
Exert so cruelly the pow'r it gives you.

ELIZABETH

Who shall prevent me? Say, did not your uncle
Set all the kings of Europe the example,
How to conclude a peace with those they hate?
Be mine the school of Saint Bartholomew;
What's kindred then to me, or nations' laws?
The church can Break the Bands of ev'ry duty;
It consecrates the regicide, the traitor;
I only practise what your priests have taught!
Say then, what surety can be offer'd me,
Should I magnanimously loose your Bonds?
Say, with what lock can I secure your faith,
Which by St. Peter's keys cannot be open'd?
Force is my only surety; no alliance
Can be concluded with a rate of vipers.

MARY

O! this is but your wretched, dark suspicion!
For you have constantly regarded me
But as a stranger, and an enemy.
Had you declar'd me heir to your dorainions,
As is my right, then gratitude and love
In me had fix'd, for you, a faithful friend
And kinswoman.

ELIZABETH

Your friendship is abroad,
Your house is Papacy, the monk your brother.
Name you my successor! The treach'rous snare!
That in my life you might seduce my people;
And, like a sly Armida, in your net
Entangle all our noble English youth;
That all might turn to the new rising sun,
And I—

MARY

O sister, rule your realm in peace:
I give up ev'ry claim to these domains—
Alas! the pinions of my soul are lam'd;
Greatness entices me no more: your point
Is gain'd; I am but Mary's shadow now—
My noble spirit is at last broke down
By long captivity:—you've done your worst
On me; you have destroy'd me in my bloom!
Now, end your work, my sister:—speak at length
The word, which to pronounce has brought you hither;
For I will ne'er believe that you are come
To mock unfeelingly your hapless victim.
Pronounce this word;—say, Mary, you are free:
You have already felt my pow'r,—learn now
To honour too my generosity.'
Say this, and I will take my life, will take
My freedom, as a present from your hands.
One word makes all undone;—I wait for it ;—
O let it not be needlessly delay'd.
Wde to you, if you end not with this word!
For should you not, like some divinity,
Dispensing noble blessing, quit me now,
Then, sister, not for all this island's wealth,
For all the realms encircled by the deep,
Would I exchange my present Lot for yours.

ELIZABETH

And you confess at last, that you are conquer'd:
Are all your schemes run out? No more assassins
Now an the road? Will no adventurer
Attempt again, for you, the sad achievement?
Yes, madam, it is over:—You'll seduce
No mortal more. The world has other cares;—
None is ambitious of the dang'rous honour
Of being your fourth husband :—
You destroy Your wooers like your husbands.

MARY

(starting angrily)

Sister, sister!—
Grant me forbearance, all ye powr's of heav'n!

ELIZABETH

(regards her long, with a Look of proud contempt)
Those then, my Lord of Leicester, are the charms
Which no man with impunity can view,
Near which no woman Bare attempt to stand?
In sooth, this honour has been cheaply gain'd;
She who to all is common, may with ease
Become the common object of applause.

MARY

This is too much!

ELIZABETH (laughing insultingly)

You show us now, indeed,
Your real face; till now 'twas but the mask.

MARY

(burning with rage, yet dignified and noble)
My sins were human, and the faults of youth;
Superior force misled me. I have neuer
Denied or sought to hide it: I despis'd
All false appearance as became a Queen.
The worst of me is known, and I can say,
That I am better than the fame I bear.
Woe to you! when, in time to come, the world
Shall draw the rohe of honour from your deeds,
With which your arch-hypocrisy has veil'd
The raging flames of lawless secret Lust.
Virtue was not your portion from your mother;
Well know we what it was which brought the head
Of Anna Boleyn to the fatal block.

SHREWSBURY

(stepping between both Queens)
O! Heav'n! Alas, and must it come to this!
Is this the moderation, the submission,
My Lady?—

MARY

Moderation! I've supported
What human nature can support: farewell,
Lamb-hearted resignation, passive patience,
Fly to thy native heaven; hurst at length
Thy Bonds, come forward from thy dreary cave,
In all thy fury, long-suppressed rancour!
And thou, who to the anger'd basilisk
Impart'st the murd'rous glance, O, arm my tongue
With poison'd darts!

SHREWSBURY

She is beside herself!
Exasperated, mad! My Liege, forgive her.
(ELIZABETH, speechless with anger, casts enraged Looks at MARY.)

LEICESTER

(in the most violent agitation; he seeks to lead ELIZABETH away)
Attend not to her rage! Away, away,
From this disastrous place!

MARY

(raising her voice)

A Bastard soils,
Profanes the English throne! The gen'rous Britons
Are cheated by a juggler (whose whole figure
Is false and painted, heart as well as face!).
If right prevail'd, you now would in the dust
Before me lie, for I'm your rightful monarch!

(ELIZABETH hastily quits the stage; the Lords follow her in the greatest consternation)

(From the translation by Joseph Mellish.)

In some dramas we can see quite clearly, when we look into the question of their origin, that it is the theme, the plot with its characters, that has inspired the dramatist to write bis drama. This was true more or less of Schiller when, as a young man, he set himself to compose Die Räuber. All through the play we can see that what interests him is the subject-matter in the widest sense of the word. He is attracted by the event and the characters that take part in it; he wants to make poetry of them. The same can be said even of Goethe in one period of his life. At the time when he was beginning to compose Faust and was writing also Götz von Berlichingen, his main interest was in the plot and the characters. Faust is a character that interests him intensely. And then, what a Faust can experience—that too has a great attraction for him. And in Götz von Berlichingen it is in the first place the Nero himself, and then the time in which he lived; these two themes were of lively interest to Goethe.

But now look at Schiller embarking upon his Maria Stuart. We have here quite another situation. Maria Stuart is the result of a conscious endeavour on Schiller's part to be an artist in the realm of drama. His whole desire is to compose plays that shall be artistic; and he looks round for material to serve bis purpose. He looks for a material that will lend itself to the style he wants to develop. His starting-point was by no means the story of Mary, Queen of Scots; he sets out in search of a theme upon which he can successfully create a drama where it shall be the moods that give style to the piece.

Now the initial purpose of the dramatist is of no little significance for the actor; and if we are making plan for a school of dramatic art, we ought certainly to arrange that both kinds of drama are studied. The students should practise with dramas where the poet's interest lies mainly in the plot,—such a drama, for instance, as Götz von Berlichingen, or Die Räuber; and they should work also with dramas like Maria Stuart, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, Die Braut von Messina, or Wilhelm Tell. And while the students are studying in this way the different dramatic styles, that will also be the moment for them to pass from a study that concerns itself purely with acting to a study that, instead of merely asking all the time: How are we to do this?—How are we to do that?, takes rather for its theme the entire play itself as a work of art. I will give you an example.

Wilhelm Tell is a play that provides excellent opportunity for an actor to develop style in his work by studying the style of the piece. But it should be made clear to the student that in this play Schiller's style comes to grief in many places. The fact will be forcibly brought home to you if you should ever happen to hear some orthodox professor of literature interpreting one of the scenes in a way that may possibly accord with the illusions of a professor who has more credulity than discernment, but does not at all accord with real life. What a wonderful scene that is,' you might hear him say to his pupils, where Tell declines to attend the meetings the others are holding, declaring that he is a man of deeds and not of words, and that he will leave it to them to do the talking, and hold himself ready to be called on when the moment for action has come.' I did once hear a credulous professor speak in this way to a still more credulous audience of both young and old! And then all too easily such a view becomes the accepted interpretation and is handed down and repeated as if it were an indisputable truth. And we can see it spreading like a disease through the schools, and indeed wherever it has a chance to push its way in. No one stops to ask : But is it possible that Teil should speak like that? For it certainly is not possible! True, Tell had the character that Schiller means to give him. He was not a man of many words ; you would not find him taking a front seat in the meetings and making grandiloquent Speeches. But he would be there. He would be sitting at the back and listening. Tell was not the kind of man to boast that he let the others do the talking and wanted only to be called on when it was time for action,—which would give the impression that he had himself no idea as to what ought to be done! It is simply not true, the way Schiller makes Tell speak in that passage, and the student has here a good opportunity of learning to judge for himself without bias,—and that is supremely important where art is concerned. What Schiller has done in this passage is to push the stylisation too far. Then it can become routine,—which it must never do, it must always have life.

And now let us suppose, die actor—or the student—takes a drama of the one or the other kind as subject for his study. How will he proceed with a drama like Die Räuber or Don Carlos? or, on the other hand, with a drama like Maria Stuart or Die Braut von Messina? For a drama of the first kind, the right course will be to work only for a shorter time at the development of mime and gesture whilst another does the reciting, and to lead over quite soon to simultaneous speaking and acting. There must of course always be first the practice in gesture to the accompaniment of a reciter, but in this case not for long; the student should as soon as possible unite the gesturing with the spoken word.

With a drama of the second kind, the actor or student will require to practise the silent gesture and mime with a reciter speaking the words for him, for a much longer period. He should indeed defer till as late as possible the union in his own person of gesture and word. By following this method he will attain a result which there is no need to attain in the former type of drama and which could even perhaps be detrimental there to the performance of his part. I mean the following. The gesture, having through long practice come to rest, as it were, in die actor, continues to be present there in him and co-operates in the forming of the word,—the actor of course meanwhile quite unconscious of the process ; it happens instinctively as far as he is concerned. And if we want to stage a drama that is first and foremost, in its whole intention, a work of art, dien we have to make .sure that all through our study of it we succeed in uniting the art of the acting with the art, the poetry, that is in the play itself. Only then will the art of the acting make its right contact with the audience; and upon that, after all, everything depends.

The audience will not easily be brought into a mood that grips them in their very soul, if we put before them a realistic scene which is, in addition, realistically acted. It is quite possible to fascinate people with a realistic scene, so that for the moment they give their whole attention; but if we sincerely want to reach our audience, there can be no better way than by lifting them right out of naturalistic experience, and taking them up to the level of art.

Let us take now the scene that has been read to us and imagine we have to consult together how we shall proceed to stage it. Giving our attention first to the question of scenic effect, how shall we create the right environment for die words that are spoken in this scene?

To build up a décor from a naturalistic point of view, to paint, let us say, a forest as naturalistically as possible, would most certainly not achieve our object. For could anyone imagine that such a scene as this (the scene ends, you will remember, in a manner that is directly contrary to the will of everyone present, takes them one and all by surprise),—could anyone imagine that the motif of the scene could be rendered with style if we set out to surround it with the mood of a forest? The one and only thing to do is let the surroundings of the scene present, by your artistic treatment of them, the mood that belongs to this juncture in the play.

I must here allude to a request that has been handed me in writing, asking if I would add a little more to what I said the other day about the painting of stage scenery. But, my dear friends, so far as my memory goes, I have not spoken at all on this subject. What I said then was in reference to landscape painting.¹ We were considering the character of art in general, and took landscape painting for our example. I do not like to be misunderstood in this way. I have up to now said nothing whatever about painting for the stage. As a matter of fact, the very first thing you must realise in this connection is that for stage d&or, painting as an art does not come into question. We have to rely on our equipment for stage lighting, etc., to do the painting for us.

To return to the scene from Maria Stuart, our main concern should be that the speakers have around them the mood of the scene with all the successive changes it undergoes.

Now on the matter of moods there is bound to be always some difference of opinion, but 1 think no one will find it seriously discordant if we propose to arrange for the whole stage to be suffused during this scene with a reddish lighting. The colour will naturally have to change a lade as the scene goes on, but can always keep a fundamental reddish tone. At the end of the scene, where Mary speaks so sharply, the reddish tone can, as it were, pierce inwards into itself and become dazzling yellow. There will also be not a few other modifications here and there. For example, right at the beginning of the scene, where Mary is in a thoroughly sentimental wein, you can introduce into the general reddish mood a bluish-violet mood. That then will be your first question settled.

And now, how are you going to see that your wings and back-drop make their right contribution to the mood of the scene? Impossible to have there a realistically painted picture of a bit of forest. Trees, however, you must have; and what about their colour? The scene demands that the colouring of the trees shall harmonise with the mood of the lighting. You cannot paint into a red mood trees that are absolutely green; you will have to introduce a touch of red into their colour. And in order to provide something on which the eye can rest when Mary grows sarcastic, you can take yellow also on to your palette,—I should rather say, on to your brush; for one should never paint from a palette, but always with water colours. Then the actors will have around them a true picture of the mood of the scene.

And it will be the same with all your arrangements for the staging of the play. When you come to the question of costume, you must realise that it is of no use to set about inventing all manner of fancy dresses which only make the wearers look queer and awkward. That is not the way to attain style. Costumes should be cut to suit the wearers; it is in the colour that you will have to let style come in,—in the choice of colour, in the harmony of the colours worn by different parts. And here one will not be so childish as to snatch at the first idea that offers, which would naturally mean in this rase that Mary should wear black. Black should appear on the stage only in the rare cases where it is justified from an artistic point of view. As a matter of fact, on the stage black obliterates itself, makes a void. Devils, or beings of such ilk, we can allow to appear in black, but we ought never to think of using black for any other purpose. Mary will have to be dressed in dark violet. Her colour should be chosen first. (For the achievement of style, it is always important to know where to begin.) Then, with Mary in violet, you cannot do otherwise than choose for Elizabeth a dress of reddish-yellowish colour; and the colours of the other characters will be gradually shaded as taste requires.

Working in this way, you will get your picture. And you will see, your audience will understand it. Provided it has been faithfully built up on these lines the picture will make its appeal.

For how is it that the actor of today finds it so difficult to carry bis audience with him? Simply because we are not sufficiently in earnest about this question of style. We want to attain style, but we do not set about it seriously enough. We ought not really to complain so muck of the audience; it is never die audience who are to blame. It is the art itself that is wanting! But, my dear friends, how can we expect to achieve art if, behind the founding of our theatres, lie impulses and motives such as are disclosed in the following well-authenticated incident?

A big theatre was once started in a town by a journalist who was also a playwright, and who took on himself the direction of the theatre. It was named after a distinguished classical author. Externally, you see, the founder was trying to do die thing in style. ‚Arrangements were also made for a speech to be given at the opening ceremony, in which very fine things were said about this author, and about the splendid future that the theatre would have if it followed in his footsteps; for he had himself been eminent in the art of the stage and had laid down many golden rules for its practice.

If now a true devotion to art in the highest sense had begun to manifest in the work of that theatre—naturally, fare of a lighter kind being offered also now and again in deference to public taste—it might have been in quite good style to open the theatre with a Speech of this kind. But style has to be something inward; it has to be livingly experienced. And I would ask you now to judge for your-selves whether there really was style in the enterprise, when I tell you what took place immediately after the official opening,—despite the high-sounding words that had been spoken by the director. There had of course been other Speeches too, including one by the chairman of the theatre committee, who spoke in becoming terms of the director, and so on, and so on. Yes, there was style in the opening ceremony; but of what kind? There was no life in it!—as all too quickly became apparent! For what happened when the function was over and the audience had dispersed? Among the people around such a director there will generally be some who are sincere idealists. Not many; but there will be a few. One such—or perhaps only a semi-idealist—went up to the director and said: ‘I wish you all success! Running your theatre in the way you have described, you will be helping to revive and restore art.’ To which the director replied: But it's the profits I'm after!'

Yes, you see how it is! The style of which the opening ceremony gave promise has all crumbled to dust. It was not in the man's heart, not in his inner being. Style has, in fact, become in our day something which people no longer feel in life, they are insensitive to it; and that is why I find it so important to impress upon you that he alone can hope to achieve style in art who sets out in all seriousness to live in it.

• 1. See Lecture 10.

A course of lectures in Helsingfors was to have begun today, but as karma has brought us together here instead, it may be useful to speak of certain subjects belonging to Spiritual Science, and then perhaps some particular wish may be expressed in the form of a question arising from our study on this unexpected occasion.

We will concern ourselves with certain thoughts which throw light on the subject of man's evolution in connection with the evolution of the earth, and as often before, we shall try to enlarge upon many things already known to us. Many things connected with the religious life and men's view of the world may have prompted the question: How are these things related to the deeper conceptions of life and the world which arise from Spiritual Science?

To begin with, I want to speak of two important concepts which confront the soul of modern man, even though he may believe he has long outgrown them. These two concepts are usually designated by the words ‘Sin’ and ‘Grace’. Everyone knows that the concepts ‘Sin’ and ‘Grace’ are of outstanding significance in the Christian view of life. There are theosophists who—from the standpoint of karma, as they allege—give no thought to concepts such as those of Sin and Grace or to the broader concept of Sin and Original Sin. This lack of reflection can lead to no good, because it prevents such people from recognizing the deeper aspects of Christianity, for example, and of other problems connected with views of life and the world. The background of the concepts of Sin, Original Sin, and Grace, is infinitely more profound than is generally imagined. The reason why this deep background is not perceived at the present time is that the real profundities of nearly all the traditional religions—this applies, to a greater or less extent, to nearly all of them in the form in which they now exist—have been more or less obliterated. The tenets of these religions seldom contain anything even remotely comparable with what lies behind these concepts of Sin, Original Sin and Grace. For what lies behind them is actually the whole evolution of the human race.

We are accustomed to divide this evolution into two main phases: a phase of descent, from the most ancient times until the appearance of Christ on the earth, and the phase of ascent which begins with the appearance of Christ on the earth and continues into the farthest future. Thus we regard the Coming of Christ as the event of supreme importance, not in the evolution of humanity alone but in the whole of our planetary evolution.

Why must the Christ Event be given this place at the very centre of our cosmic evolution? It is for the simple reason that man has come down from spiritual heights into the depths of material existence, whence he must again ascend to the heights of spirit. We have therefore to do with a descent and an ascent of man. In respect of man's life of soul, we say: In times of remote antiquity men were able to lead a spiritual life approximating far more closely to the Divine than is possible today. They were nearer to the divine-spiritual and divine-spiritual life shone with greater strength into the human soul. It must not, however, be forgotten that this descent into the material-physical world was necessary, because when men were nearer to the divine-spiritual, their whole consciousness was dimmer, more dream-like; it was less lucid, but at the same time inwoven with divine-spiritual thoughts, feelings and will-impulses. Man was nearer to the divine-spiritual but more like a dreaming child than a fully wide-awake, conscious human being. He has descended inasmuch as he has acquired the faculty of judgment necessary in physical life, namely, reason. Therewith he has descended from the heights of divine-spiritual existence but has become more clearly conscious of himself, has found a firm centre within his own being. In order to work his way upwards again he must fill this inner kernel of his life of soul with what has been brought by the Christ Impulse. And the more his soul is filled with the Christ Impulse, the higher he will ascend again into the divine-spiritual world, reaching it not as a being with dreamy, hazy consciousness, but as a being looking into the world with alert, lucid consciousness.

Closer investigation of the process of human evolution discloses that it is the ‘I’, the ego, of man which alone has made it possible for him to acquire the faculty of clear, intelligent perception of the physical world of sense, but that the ego was the last member of his being to develop; the astral body had developed earlier, the etheric body still earlier, and again earlier, the first rudiments of the physical body. We will remind ourselves especially today that the first stage of the development of the astral body preceded that of the ego. Many things we have heard in the course of time will have made it clear to us that before man could pass through the stage of ego-development, he must have passed through a stage where he consisted of three members only: physical body, etheric body, astral body. But already then he was involved in the process of the evolution of the ego; he lived within this evolutionary process, waiting, as it were, for the later bestowal of his ego. Rightly understood, this enables us to conceive that certain things must have happened to man and to the whole process of his development before he actually received his ego. These happenings belong to an epoch preceding that of the development of the ego. This is of great significance, for if man had passed through a phase of evolution before receiving his ego, what happened during that phase cannot be attributed to him in the same sense as what has happened since the bestowal of the ego is to be attributed to him.

There are beings who obviously have no ego in the human sense, namely, the animals. They consist of physical body, etheric body and astral body only. Everyone who thinks rationally recognizes something about the animals. Whatever fury may be exhibited by a lion, for example, we shall not say of a lion as we might say of a human being: he can be evil, he can sin, he can commit immoral deeds. We shall never speak of immorality in connection with the actions of an animal. This in itself is significant because even if we give no thought to it, we are thereby recognizing that the difference between man and animal consists in the fact that the animal has physical body, etheric body and astral body only, whereas man has the ego in addition. Man passed through a phase of evolution when the astral body was the highest member of his being. Did something happen to him during that stage which must be regarded in a different light from that in which the actions of animals are to be regarded? Yes indeed! For it must be clearly understood that although man was once a being consisting of physical body, etheric body and astral body, his nature was never the same as that of the animals as we know them today. Man was never an animal, but in other epochs he passed through a stage of evolution when he had these three bodies only—epochs when there were as yet no animals in their present form and when the conditions of existence on the earth were quite different.

What was it that actually happened to man at that time? As he had not received his ego, we cannot attribute to him what we now do in distinguishing him from the animals. What arose through him cannot be judged as it is to be judged today, when he has an ego. In the last stage of transition, when man was on the point of receiving his ego, there came the Luciferic influence. In that epoch of his evolution man was not the being he is today, but neither is he to be identified with the animals. Lucifer approached him. At that time man could not—acting as it were with full moral responsibility—choose whether he would or would not follow Lucifer; nevertheless he could be drawn into Lucifer's toils in a way other than that which applies to the animals today. This temptation by Lucifer occurred at the time when man was actually at the point of receiving his ego. This temptation was a deed to which man yielded before the period of ego-development but which has cast its shadows into the whole of this development. Who then, in the real sense, was the sinner? Not man as an ego-endowed being. Through Lucifer, man became a sinner with one part of his being—the part with which, properly speaking, he can no longer be a sinner today, for now he has his ego. At that time, therefore, he sinned with his astral body. That is the radical difference between the sin we now incur as men and the sin which at that time crept into our human nature. When man succumbed to the temptation of Lucifer, he succumbed with his astral body. This, therefore, is a deed which belongs to the period prior to that of ego-development and is entirely different in character from any deed of which man has been capable since his ego entered into him—even in its very earliest rudiments. It was therefore a deed of man which preceded the entry of the ego, but it cast its shadows into all subsequent ages of time. Man's nature was such that before receiving his ego, he was able to perform the ‘deed’ of lending himself to the Luciferic temptation but through all later time he has been under the influence resulting from this deed. In what sense under its influence? The consequence of the astral body having incurred guilt before man became an ego-endowed being has been that in each successive incarnation he sank more deeply into the physical world. The impetus for this descent was this action, this deed, which was enacted then in the astral body. Man found himself on a steep downward gradient, and with his ego he now lends himself to forces in his nature deriving from the stage of his evolution preceding that of the development of his ego.

How did these forces take effect in the evolution of humanity? They took effect in the following way. We know that until approximately the seventh year of life the physical body of the human being develops, from the seventh to the fourteenth years the etheric body, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first years the astral body, and so on. When the development of the etheric body has been completed, man reaches the stage when he is able to propagate his kind. (We will not now consider what form this takes in the animal kingdom.) When the etheric body has fully developed, the human being is able to reproduce his kind. Anyone who gives a little thought to this—he need not be clairvoyant but only reflect a little—will say: when the development of the etheric body is complete it is possible for a human being to bring forth another of his kind in the fullest sense. This means that as he grows on into the twenties he can develop no new procreative powers. It cannot be said that a man of 30 adds anything to this capacity to propagate his kind; he possesses it to the full as soon as the development of his etheric body is complete. What factor is added later? Nothing that he himself subsequently acquires is added, for he already possesses the power of propagation to the full when the etheric body is completely developed. What, then, is added? As far as the full power to propagate his kind is concerned, the one and only capacity subsequently added by the human being is that of being in a position to vitiate, to weaken it. What he can still acquire after the full development of his etheric body cannot enrich the actual power to propagate his kind, but can only impoverish it. The fact is that qualities acquired after the onset of puberty contribute nothing to the improvement of the human race but only make for its deterioration. This is due to the influence of the impulse which proceeds from the guilt incurred by the astral body. After the etheric body has fully developed, that is to say, at about the fourteenth year, the astral body develops further. Yes, but the influence of Lucifer is implanted in the astral body! What works back again from there into the functioning of the etheric body can only have the effect of weakening the forces of the etheric body which enable man to propagate his kind. In other words: what the astral body has become as the result of the temptation of Lucifer is a perpetual cause of degeneration and deterioration of the human race. And this has actually happened.

There has been continuous deterioration in man through the course of the incarnations. The farther we go back towards the Atlantean epoch, the more do we find in the physical endowments of man, higher forces than were working in later times. Where, then, was the impulse activated in the astral body through the temptation of Lucifer, implanted? It was implanted in heredity, causing increasing deterioration in that process. Sin that man incurs with his ego may work back upon the astral body and can only take effect in karma; but the sin incurred by man before he had an ego, contributes to a continual degeneration and deterioration of the human race as a whole. This sin became an inheritance. And just as it is true that no human being can inherit anything from his ancestors in the higher, spiritual sense—for nobody is clever because he has a clever father but because he learns things that make for cleverness (nobody has yet inherited the principles of mathematics or other such concepts from his ancestors)—just as we cannot inherit these capacities but acquire them through education, it is equally true that what works back into the etheric body from the astral body, contributes only to the undermining of the faculties of the human race. There we have the true meaning of the concept of ‘Original Sin’. The Original Sin which still persisted in the human astral body was handed down by gradual transmission and imparted itself to the hereditary qualities—which were themselves involved in the process of physical degeneration—as a factor in man's descent from spiritual heights into physical degeneration. So the legacy of Lucifer's influence has been a continuous impulse which in the very truest sense must be designated as Original Sin; for what entered into the human astral body through Lucifer is transmitted from generation to generation. There is no more appropriate term for the real cause of man's fall into the material-physical world than the expression: Original Sin, Inherited Sin. But our conception of the Original Sin must differ from that of other sins of ordinary life which are to be attributed entirely to ourselves: we must think of Original Sin as a destiny of man, as something that had inevitably to be imposed upon us by the World Order, because this World Order was obliged to lead us downwards—not in order to worsen us but in order to awaken in us the forces wherewith again to work our way upwards. We must therefore conceive of this Fall as something that has been woven into human destiny for the sake of the freeing of mankind. We could never have become free beings had we not been thrust downwards; we should have been tied to the strings of a World Order which we should have been obliged to follow blindly. What we have to do is to work our own way upwards again.

Now there is nothing that has not its opposite pole. Just as there can be no North Pole without a South Pole, so there can be no phenomenon such as this sin of the astral body without its opposite pole. Without being able to speak in the ordinary sense of moral wrong on our part, it is our destiny as men to be permeated by Luciferic forces. In a certain respect we can do nothing about it, indeed we must rather be thankful that it happened so. We were obliged, then, to incur a burden for which we cannot in the full sense be held responsible.

In human evolution there is something that is related to this as the North Pole is related to the South Pole. This sin which, in its consequences, is inherited, which represents sin in man of which he is not guilty in the real sense, must be counterbalanced by the possibility of re-ascent, also without merit of his own. Just as without guilt of his own, man was obliged to fall, so he must be able to re-ascend without merit of his own—that is to say, without full merit of his own. We fell without being ourselves guilty and we must therefore be able to ascend without merit of our own. That is the necessary polarity. Otherwise we should be obliged to remain below in the physical-material world. Just as we must place at the beginning of our evolution a guilt which man did not himself incur, so at the end of evolution we must place a gift that is bestowed upon him without merit on his part. These two things belong together. The best way of understanding why it is so is to think of the following.

What a man does in ordinary life proceeds from the impulses of his feelings, his emotions, his natural urges, his desires; he gets angry and does certain things out of anger; or he loves in the ordinary way and his actions are prompted by this emotion. There is one word only that can aptly express what man does in this way. You will all admit that in what a man does out of passions, out of anger, or out of ordinary love, there is an element that defies all abstract definition. Only a prosaic, academic brain would attempt to define what actually underlies some particular action of a human being. Yet there is a word which indicates the antecedents of the actions of a man in ordinary life—it is the word ‘Personality’. This word embraces all the indefinable factors. When we have really understood a man's personality, then we may be able to judge why it was that he developed this or that passion, this or that desire, or whatever it may be. Everything that is done out of these impulses bears a personal character. But we are so entangled in material life when we act out of our impulses, desires and passions! Our ego is submerged in the ocean of the physical-material world, is anything but free when it follows the dictates of anger, of passions, or also of love in the ordinary sense. The ego is unfree because it is ensnared in the toils of anger, of passion and the like.

If we observe our present age we shall find something that simply did not exist in ancient times. Only those who have no knowledge of history and who can scarcely see farther than their noses will declare that in the earlier periods of ancient Greece, for example, there were present such things as we today express with words that have been famous now for more than a century—words such as ‘liberty’, ‘equality among men’, and the like. These words signify moral and ethical ideas, as in the first declared object of the Theosophical Society: ‘To form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Man without distinction of race, creed, caste or sex.’ For us, as men of the modern age, this is an ideal. It was not at all the same among the ancient Egyptians, among the ancient Persians, or indeed among any of the other peoples of antiquity. In the present age men adhere to such ideals but, in most cases, what they do in the name of liberty, brotherhood, and so forth, bears all the characteristics of abstraction, and admits of definition. For the majority of men, what they grasp of the real import of these ideals of freedom, brotherhood and so on, is capable of definition because they grasp so very little. Passions may become inflated but, for all that, numbers of human beings give us the impression that we have before us something that is withered and sapless. These ‘ideals’ cannot be called personal; they are abstract ideas, lacking the full-blooded vigour of personal life. Yet we attribute greatness to individuals in whom the idea of liberty, for example, seems to have become an out-streaming elemental force, as if it were issuing from wrath, passion, or ordinary love. In many respects today ideas which are to be regarded as the very highest moral ideals are allowed to lie fallow; yet these ideas could be the beginning of momentous development. Just as man has plunged with his ego into the physical-material world, has unfolded personality while acting under the influences of passions, impulses and desires, so he must rise, not merely with abstract concepts but with personality to the heights of ideas which are still abstract today. When this happens, spiritual ideals will be imbued with the same elemental force that can be perceived in actions springing from hatred or love in the ordinary sense.

Man will eventually ascend to higher spheres with his personality. But something else is required. When the human being dives with his ego into the ocean of physical-material life, he finds his personality, he finds his warm blood, he finds the surging impulses and desires in his astral body—in short, he dives down into his personality. But now he must ascend into the realm of moral ideals—which must no longer be a realm of abstraction. He must rise to the Spiritual, and then there must stream towards him a reality in every sense as ‘personal’ as the reality streaming to him when he dives with his ego into his warm blood and surging passions. He must now scale the heights without lapsing into abstraction. How, then, as he rises into the Spiritual, can he enter into something that is a ‘personal’ reality? How can he develop these ideals in such a way that they are invested with the character of personality? There is only one way whereby this can be achieved. In these heights of spiritual life man must be able to draw to himself a Personality as inwardly real as the personality below in the flesh is real. Who is this Personality Whom man must draw to himself if he is to ascend into the Spiritual? This Personality is none other than Christ! One who speaks in the sense contrary to St. Paul may say: ‘Not I, but my astral body’—but St. Paul says, ‘Not I, but Christ in me’—indicating that when Christ lives in us, abstract ideas are invested with a personal character. Herein lies the significance of the Christ Impulse. Without the Christ Impulse humanity would reach abstract ideals only, abstract ideas of morality and the like, such as are described as ideas working in history by many historians today but which can neither live nor die because they have no creative power. When reference is made to the part played by ideas in history, it should be realized that these are dead, abstract concepts, incapable of exercising sway over epochs of civilization. Living reality alone can exercise such sway. The task before man is to unfold a higher Personality. This is the Christ-Personality Whom he draws to himself, receives into himself.

Man cannot rise again to the Spiritual by merely talking about the Spirit but only by taking the Spirit into himself in the living, personal form presented to him in the Events of Palestine, in the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus does man rise upwards again under the influence of the Christ Impulse. In no other way can abstract ideals be invested with the force of personality than by allowing the Christ Impulse to permeate the whole of our spiritual life. If on the one side, through guilt incurred before the development of the ego, we have burdened ourselves with what is called Original Sin, if there we have something for which we cannot be held wholly responsible, neither are we ourselves responsible for the fact that it is possible to draw the Christ to ourselves. Our ego plays a part in what we do or endeavour to do in order to come near to Christ, and there we can truly speak of merit. But the fact that Christ is present, that we are living on a planet where He once dwelt and in times after this actually happened—this is not due to any merit of our own. Therefore what flows from the Living Christ in order to bring us upwards again into the spiritual world, comes from beyond the sphere of the ego and draws us upwards as irresistibly as we incurred guilt without ourselves being guilty. Through Christ's existence on earth we have the strength to rise again into the spiritual world without merit of our own, just as we incurred guilt without sin of our own. Neither fact has to do with the element of personality in which the ego lives, but both are connected with happenings that precede and follow the coming of the ego. Man has evolved from a state of existence when he had only physical body, etheric body and astral body, and he evolves further through transforming his astral body into Manas (Spirit-Self). Just as man has worsened his astral body through incurring Original Sin, so he heals it again through the Christ Impulse. An inflowing power repairs the astral body to the same extent to which it has deteriorated. That is the Atonement, that is what in the true sense is called ‘Grace’. Grace is the concept that is complementary to that of Original Sin. So the Christ Impulse has made it possible for man to become one with Christ, to say with St. Paul: ‘Not I, but Christ in me’, thus giving expression to everything that is designated by the concept of Grace.

Therefore to speak of the existence of Original Sin and of Grace does not denote misunderstanding of the idea of karma. For in speaking of the idea of karma we are speaking of the reincarnation of the ego in the different earth-lives. Karma is inconceivable without the presence of the ego: Original Sin and Grace, impulses which lie below the surface of karma, [are] in the astral body. We can say with truth that human karma was first brought about because man had burdened himself with Original Sin. Karma flows through the incarnations and before and after there are happenings which introduce and subsequently expurgate it. Before karma—Original Sin; and after—the victory of the Christ Impulse, the fullness of Grace.

So again from this point of view, Spiritual Science has a great and significant mission, particularly in our time. For true as it is that humanity has only lately come to recognize ideals in the form of abstractions, to unfold abstract ideas of liberty, brotherhood and the like, it is also true that we are facing a future when these ideas must no longer hovel before us as abstractions but approach us as living forces. True as it is that men have passed through the transitional stage of forming abstract ideals, it is equally true that they must advance to the stage where these ideals come to personal fulfillment within them; they must advance to the portal of the new Temple. That is the prospect before us. Men will be taught that what works down from spiritual heights is not mere abstraction but living reality. When the new faculty of vision that is to arise in the next phase of evolution begins to function, when men give up thinking, ‘How well I am getting on!’ but with etheric vision behold the living power of Christ Who will reveal Himself in an etheric body—as we know, this will happen to certain individuals before the middle of the century—when they begin to behold the Living Christ, they will know that what they have glimpsed for a time in the form of abstract ideas are in very truth living beings within our evolution. For the Living Christ Who first appeared in physical form—which at that time was the only form in which He could convey to men that even those who were not His contemporaries could believe in Him—the Living Christ will reveal Himself in a new form. The fact that He lives will need no proof, for then there will be actual witnesses—men who themselves experience, even without special development but with a kind of matured vision, that the moral powers of our World Order are living realities, not merely abstract ideals.

Our thoughts cannot carry us into the true spiritual worlds because they have no life. Not until we cease to regard these thoughts as our own creations but as testimonies of the Living Christ Who will appear to men, shall we rightly understand these thoughts. Then, as truly as man became a personality through descending with his ego into lower spheres, as truly will he be a personality when he ascends to the heights of spirit. This is beyond the comprehension of materialistic thinking. All that materialism can understand, and readily understand, is that there are abstract ideals, ideals of the Good, the Beautiful, and so forth. That there are living Powers who draw us upwards through their Grace—this can be realized only through spiritual development. That is what the renewed Christ Impulse means. When we no longer regard our ideals simply as ideals but through them find the way to Christ, then we help Christianity forward in the sense of Spiritual Science; then Christianity will enter a new stage and cease to be merely a preparation. Christianity will itself make evident that it contains the greatest of all impulses for all time to come. And then those who believe that to speak of developing Christianity is only to endanger it will see how greatly they are in error. These are the people of ‘little faith’, who are alarmed when it is said that in Christianity there are glories still greater than have yet been revealed. Those whose conception of Christianity bears the hallmark of greatness are men who know that the words that Christ is with us to the end of time are true—meaning that He is the constant Revealer of the New and at the same time its origin and source.

By realizing that Christianity will bring forth from its depths an increasing flow of new and more living creations, we enhance its greatness. Those who are always saying: ‘That is not in the Bible, that is not true Christianity and those who maintain that it is, are heretics’, must be reminded that Christ also said: ‘I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now’. He did not say this in order to indicate that He wished to withhold anything from men, but that from epoch to epoch He would bring them new revelations. And this He will do through those who are willing to understand Him. Those who deny that there can be new revelations do not understand the Bible, neither do they understand Christianity. For they have no ears for what is implied in the admonition given by Christ: ‘I have still much to say to you—but prepare yourselves in order that you may be able to bear it and understand it.’

The true Christians of the future will be those who are willing to hear what the Christians who were contemporaries of Christ were not yet able to bear. Those who allow Christ's Grace to flow into their hearts in ever increasing abundance—they will be the true Christians. The ‘hard of heart’ will resist this Grace, saying: Go back to the Bible, to the literal text of the Bible, for that alone is true. This is a disavowal of the words which in Christianity itself kindle light, words which we will take into our hearts: ‘I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.’ Good it will be for men when they can bear more and more in this sense: for thereby they prepare themselves for the ascent into the spiritual heights. And to these spiritual heights Christianity leads the way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christian theologians are calling the gospel of John into question today.⁵³ They say the first three gospels, the synoptic gospels according to Matthew, Mark and Luke, are consistent in the way they speak of Jesus. Any variations between them are considered unimportant. It is said that on the basis of the synoptic gospels one can have a consistent idea of Jesus. The gospel of John differs greatly from them, speaking of the founder of Christianity in a very different tone and apparently a very different way. It is therefore considered less credible. The synoptics, people say, were intended to tell the life of Christ, whilst the writer of John's gospel lived at a later period and wrote a kind of hymn to express how he felt. Theologians see John's gospel as the fictional work of a believer. The times have gone when a theologian like Bunsen⁵⁴ might write: ‘If the gospel of John does not tell the historical truth, Christianity simply will not be tenable.’ It is the task of spiritual science to show the significance of John's gospel again to the people of today.

There is another reason why present-day theologians give preference to the synoptics over John's gospel. If one takes the content of these three gospels, having thrown out the miracles, one has the image of an exalted human being, but someone who is no more than an exalted human being. According to the gospel of John, however, Jesus was more than just a highly developed human being. He was a universal spirit incarnated in an earthly body. The synoptics speak of Jesus of Nazareth, the gospel of John is about the Christ.

The introduction to John's gospel refers to an all-encompassing cosmic principle, the logos, which incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth: ‘In the beginning was the logos.’ People do not want to know about a sublime spirit descending. They only believe in highly developed human beings and not that a god ever lived on earth. It is because of this that people have gradually lost their relationship to the gospel of John over the last centuries. This lecture will be about the way people relate to the gospel of John.

If you read John's gospel the way you read any other book, to find out what it says, you are reading it very much the wrong way. John's gospel is not a book in the sense one generally takes a book to be. It is a book of life.

Let me say first of all that in all deeply religious documents every word has been put there with profound intention. This may be illustrated by considering the question: ‘What is the name of Jesus' mother according to John's gospel?’ Everyone will say: ‘Mary’. But this cannot be shown from John's gospel. Jesus' mother is first mentioned in the story of the wedding at Cana, but she is not named: ‘On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee and the mother of Jesus was there.’⁵⁵ She is mentioned again and not named as one of the three women who stood by the cross: ‘But beside Jesus' mother and his mother's sister, Mary, the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.’⁵⁶ Here it is not his mother but her sister who is called ‘Mary’. It is unlikely that both sisters would be called Mary, and we therefore have to assume that Jesus' mother had a different name.

Another example is this. The writer of John's gospel or the individual who is otherwise always called John, is always only referred to as ‘the disciple whom the Lord loved’. ‘When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing there, he said to his mother: Here is your son.’⁵⁷ This is deeply important if we are to understand the questions we meet when we take the gospel of John in a spiritual sense.

Until a few centuries ago, the gospel of John was considered to be a book of meditation. It had to become inward experience if one wanted to have inner understanding of Jesus. It was for priests who wished to behold the secrets of Christianity. Hundreds of people have truly done this, and hundreds of them have gained the fruit of it. To penetrate to the Christian mysteries one had to let one's soul mature solely with the aid of John's gospel. People had to know, however, that the first lines had magic powers. The pupil had to let them come alive in his soul for a quarter to half an hour every morning, never speculating on them but purely to absorb their power. This was meditation. Someone who lived with the first lines of John's gospel in this way for months, for years, would realize their special power, for the eyes of the spirit would open for him. Those lines are live powers capable of waking dormant faculties. The pupils would then have living astral visions of the images given in the gospel. The first words of it served to give people this experience. Their power was greater in the past than it is today. People have changed more than one tends to think.

People did not read in the 13^th century, when printing had not yet been developed. Reading has changed humanity a great deal. Even the most devout individual today has no idea of the riches of feeling people then had. Today we must give different meditations to people who want to progress.

It would also be necessary to translate John's gospel properly,⁵⁸ so that it may once again be what it used to be for people.

In the origin was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was a god.

This was with God in the origin.

All that exists has come into being through it, and nothing that has come into existence has done so except through it. In it was life, and life was the light of mankind. And the light shone into the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.

There came to be a man, sent by God, and his name was John. He came to witness, that he bear witness of the light, that all might believe through him.

He was not the light, but a witness of the light.

For the true light, that illumines all men, was to come into the world. It was in the world, and the world came into being through it, but the world did not know it.

It came into individual human beings (it came to the I-people); but the individual human beings (the I-people) did not receive it.⁵⁹

At the time of the Lemurian race, the human soul entered into its first human incarnation. Before then it rested in God; human beings were not yet I-endowed.

This inner vision—what happens when someone gains insight into the world of the spirit? Everyday people live between waking and sleep, the latter at most broken up by dreams. Human beings consist of physical body, ether or life body, astral body and I. These four members are together when people are awake. The physical body is a sum of physical apparatuses, the eye a camera obscura, the ear a stringed instrument. The ether body enters into these, vitalizing them and conveying the sensations to the astral body—the bearer of pleasure and pain, drives, desires and passions—and then also to the I. In sleep, the physical and ether bodies lie in the bed, the astral body with the I is lifted out. The ether body stays with the physical body and vitalizes it; vital functions continue without interruption in sleep. Colours, sounds, pleasure and pain are in deep darkness, as it were, with the individual not aware of them.

There are as many worlds as the human being has sense organs to perceive. Without eyes no light. If man had an organ for electricity he would perceive it just as he now perceives light, for instance.

In sleep, a human being lives in the astral or also in the devachanic world, but is not sentient of it. A change will only come if he works consistently to develop higher organs. Light then begins to dawn around him. In sleep, he is sentient of a space around him that is filled with objects. Something happens to him the way it does to someone born blind who has an operation. Astral and spiritual sense organs develop, he sees the world of the spirit, and sleep no longer makes him unconscious. Later the world of the spirit around him begins to sound. He hears the Pythagoreans' music of the spheres, something people nowadays think is a metaphor. Goethe knew exactly what it was. In his prologue to Faust he said:

The sun proclaims its old devotion
In rival song with brother spheres,
And still completes in thunderous motion
The circuits of its destined years.⁶⁰

This cannot be taken to be mere words but must be taken literally. One hears the sun sound forth when one hears the music of the spirit. In part 2 of Faust, Goethe wrote:

Resounding now for ears of spirit
The new day is already being born.⁶¹

The world of the spirit thus first comes during sleep for human beings, but they must also be able to take the experiences they have had in their sleep into the everyday world. They must find the things they first discover in sleep among the physical objects they know when awake. This comes with further training.

When the first lines of John's gospel had had their effect, and the gospel's images arose before the mind's eye, the pupil would be assisted in developing certain feelings. After some further exercises the teacher would ask him to develop the following feeling, doing this for a long time: ‘If the plant that grows in the soil were to consider the rock on which it is growing it would have to say to it: "You, stone, belong to a lower realm than I do, but I could not exist without you." It would have to bend down to it and thank it in all humility for making life possible for it. In the same way every higher class of human beings must bend down to the lower class and thank it. Every individual who is at a higher level owes his existence to the one who is lower than he is. This is a feeling you must firmly establish in your soul, for hours every day, for weeks and for months.’

If the pupil did this, a spiritual image would finally appear before his eyes that would be the same for everyone. He would see twelve people of a lower order sitting around him and he would wash their feet. The teacher would then say: ‘Now you have inner understanding of the 13^th chapter of John's gospel, the washing of the feet.’ Apart from this image seen in the spirit there would also be physical symptoms which again were the same for almost all of them. The pupil would feel as if there was water washing around his feet.

He then had to develop a second feeling, again for weeks and months. When all the pain and hardships of life beset me, I want to develop the strength to withstand them. When he had developed this inner feeling a new vision would arise. He would see himself being scourged. This vision again would be the same for everyone. The outer symptom would be a stinging and itching sensation over the whole body that continued for a long time. He would then have to develop a third feeling. It is not enough to bear the hardships of life: ‘The best you have in you may have scorn and derision poured on it. Remain upright in spite of this.’ When the pupil had developed this feeling a third vision would appear: He would see himself wearing the crown of thorns. The external symptom would be a severe headache.

He then had to develop another feeling. ‘All people say “I” to the body they bear. Your body must be no more important to you than any other object. You must feel your body to be something alien to you.’ When the pupil had gone through this, the vision of the crucifixion would come, and externally the stigmata of the Christ on hands and feet and on the right side of the chest—not the left, as is usually said. These symptoms would come again on many occasions at times of meditation.

The teacher would then say to the pupil: ‘You will now experience the mystic death.’ This can only be described in approximate words. The pupil's experience would be that the whole of existence was extinguished for a moment; all objects had gone, were hidden behind a veil. The veil would then rip apart from top to bottom and the pupil would look into the world of the spirit. Before this there was something else. Before he knew mystic death, the pupil would have visions of all the evil that may exist in the world; he had to descend to hell before he experienced the mystic death.

In the sixth stage the pupil would begin to feel that his body no longer was something that belonged to him. His conscious awareness expanded to embrace the whole earth. When this had been developed it would be called the entombment. The seventh stage can no longer be described in earthly terms. It was resurrection and ascension to heaven. This state is beyond anything a human being can think of.

The gospel of John describes these seven stages. Someone who had gone through them all would recognize Jesus as he had lived on earth. The gospel of John is the way of coming to know Christ Jesus. It was therefore given to those who wanted to grow wise as a book to help their development, not as a book of devotions. Every part of it can become living experience.

Details: The revelation of this truth is a stage in human evolution that cannot be compared with any other. The following came into the world with Jesus: Man already had four members when he first incarnated, but he developed further. Let us consider an undeveloped human being. His astral body would still be the way it was when he received it. Let us compare it with the astral body of an average European or that of an idealist such as Schiller⁶² or a highly developed individual such as Francis of Assisi.⁶³ The average European no longer obeys every drive. He will reject some, and also put other feelings in their place—moral laws. The I has been working on the astral body. His astral body consists of two parts—the unpurified part, which is still the way it was when he received it, and the purified part. In Schiller, the purified part was already large, compared to the unpurified. And the astral body of a Francis of Assisi consists of the purified part only. This purified part of the astral body is called the spirit self or manas, and the human being then has five principles to his essential nature.

Human beings can work on their ether bodies in the same way. Religious and artistic feelings work on the ether body and create the life spirit, buddhi, out of it. If someone is able to gain control of the physical body, the part of it which he has made spiritual is the atman. The process is exceedingly slow in external evolution. In Greece the buddhi was called Chrestos, and most people today have only the first beginnings of this. The greatest power given to our age to develop the buddhi came with the Christ. He made it possible to develop the sixth principle, the buddhi, in the whole of humanity. He made humanity spiritual.

The seventh principle is that of the father. The holy spirit develops manas, the Christ the sixth principle, and when this has been extensively developed for a whole race, the power that has lain hidden in it emerges, and that is the sixth principle. All human beings who are part of that race will then have reached the sixth stage of initiation, which is the entombment.

A cheerfull or a sad face tells us that the soul is cheerful or is sad; the outer reveals the inner, everything brings the soul to revelation. If you think of the earth as the body of an ensouled being, then the souls of human beings have merged with the soul of the earth when their bodies have merged physically with the earth. The soul in the earth could be just as the human soul is in the human body. Man takes his food from the body of the earth and tramples it underfoot. Jesus said: ‘He who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me.’

Older writings often have keywords, specific terms for particular things. Thus a master going to the inner sanctuary with his pupils is ‘going up the mountain’. The sermon on the mount was for the pupils only: ‘And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain ... his disciples came to him.’⁶⁴

In the same way ‘temple’ refers to the physical body. It is usually referred to as our lower nature. Is it truly low in relation to the astral body? The fact is that the physical body is much more highly developed than the astral body today. Later on, of course, the astral body will be much more highly developed than the physical body. Consider the thigh bone, where maximum strength is given using the minimum of material. Or consider the heart, which is so wisely organized that it resists continuous attacks from the astral body for decades.

It was said that when an initiate's astral body loosened and came to conscious awareness: ‘He has gone out of the temple.’ The Christ speaks of the temple in the gospel of John: ‘Then they took up stones to throw at him. But Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.’⁶⁵ He also spoke in this sense of cleansing the temple and destroying it and rebuilding it in three days.

How the Christ came into the world may be seen as follows. The sixth principle, the buddhi, is born of the fifth when this has reached its highest point, of the spirit self or manas or, to use the name the Greeks had for the fifth principle, Sophia. All gnostics who accepted the meaning of the gospel of John called the mother of Jesus ‘Sophia’.

With the appearance of Jesus the earth received the sixth principle. The life spirit united with humanity. For this to be accomplished, the Sophia had to be fully mature first. When the life spirit unites with humanity, humanity is the Sophia. This is given as a parable in the story of the wedding at Cana.

The Lord let the gospel of John be revealed by the disciple whom he loved. That is always the name given to the first and favourite pupil of a master. In the gospel of John, reference to the disciple whom the Lord loved is first made in chapter 11, where he speaks of the raising of Lazarus. In those days, a pupil would spend three days in the temple to be initiated. Not only his astral body but his ether body, too, would be loosened. He therefore died, as it were, and was raised again at the end of the three-day period. The Lord initiated the disciple whom he loved, and the raising of Lazarus signifies this.

The disciple who stood by the cross was therefore again Lazarus, and the same initiate also wrote the gospel of John. To make it all harmonize, the disciple whom the Lord loved is not mentioned before the raising of Lazarus in chapter 11. This was the view held in all gnostic and Rosicrucian schools. It is a view that will be held again.

The gospel of John is a book full of secrets, full of powers offered to humanity.

Questions and Answers

What is the ‘causal body?’

When people die today, the ether body separates from the physical body together with the astral body and the I. The ether body still stays with the higher members for a time, and during this first period after leaving the physical body a person's whole last life lies spread before him like a vast tableau. This is because the ether body supports not only the vital functions but also memory. In life it was limited by the physical brain and unable to function fully. As soon as the physical barriers have gone, the complete memory spreads before the human soul. This continues until the ether body separates from the astral body and I after a few days. It is only the ether substance which separates, however. The memory picture is taken along. The individual keeps this essence of the ether body, and the sum of such essences from all lives on earth is the causal body.

How should we regard the celebration of the last supper in the gospel of John, and especially bread being given to Judas, the betrayer?

A specific part of the old form of initiation consisted in the pupil being taken to the temple, and in a ‘three-day death’, which meant that the ether body was also loosened and taken through astral and devachanic experiences. One of these was that every part of the body became a human figure. There were twelve parts, and the pupil would see twelve figures, with himself the thirteenth, the soul of the twelve.

Sensuality has brought egotism and this must be overcome. This was an important part of the teaching for medieval initiands. At that time, a teacher might have said something like the following to a pupil. ‘Look at the plant, it chastely holds the fruiting organs up to the sun. A fruit can only develop if the flower is kissed by the sun. Man is an upside-down plant. The animal is between the two. The cosmic soul goes through plant, animal and man. The cosmic soul is crucified on the cross which is the earth. Man's substance is interwoven with desires. His flesh is lower than the flesh of a plant. Later, man will be without desire again and chastely offer himself to the rays of the spiritual sun.’ The principle known as the holy grail arises, which is a bringing forth in the spirit.

At the last supper in the gospel of John, lower self-seeking is represented by Judas, the betrayer. The disciple whom the Lord loved was leaning on his breast. The purified energy goes up to the heart which will be the organ for bringing things forth in the spirit in future. This can already be seen in the anatomy of the heart. The heart is an involuntary muscle and therefore should have smooth fibres. But it does not; it is striated the way voluntary muscles are. It is thus already pointing to a time when it will be a voluntary muscle.

When pupils woke from their initiation, the words ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!’⁶⁶ would be wrested from their lips, they mean ‘My God, my God, how you have transfigured me!’ These words given in the original text are easily changed to the other version, which is: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

The house where the last supper was taken was one of the initiation houses.

What did the transformation of water into wine at Cana mean?

The way modern theologians explain it, it is the transformation of the old testament into the new, which is to be the bubbling wine. Here in the north, Siegfried was the pre-Christian initiate who did not go beyond pre-Christian initiation. This is indicated by his vulnerable spot. Siegfried, invulnerable, was vulnerable at the point where the Christ bore the cross.

One individual will come who signifies the meaning of the earth. Water is the blood of this spirit. Water was known as ‘the blood of Christ’ in all the mysteries.

In the 8th century before Christ, the rites of Dionysus developed and with them also excessive drinking of wine. Wine was not known in Atlantean times. Today it has fulfilled its function. The appearance of the vine louse is a sign that wine has had its day. When it did not yet exist, all human beings had an awareness of the eternal core that goes from life to life. Belief in reincarnation was a consolation for an Egyptian worker who had to labour so hard that we cannot imagine it today. Those people did not drink wine. Drinking wine cuts human beings off from insight into the higher aspects. This had to happen at one time. If humanity had never had wine, they would have grown weary of the earth and that could not be allowed to happen. To develop civilization, human beings had to come to love the earth; they had to be cut off from their earlier incarnations and love only the one in which they were at the time. The whole of humanity once had to go through a period when they knew nothing of their higher principles and of earlier incarnations. Christianity did not teach reincarnation in public for two millennia; it was only taught to initiates, which is also what the Christ did when he asked them to tell no one about the things they had seen till he had come again,⁶⁷ that is, until the sixth principle had slowly evolved. That time has now come. The whole of humanity has now gone through one incarnation where they were cut off from the higher world.

In earlier times marriage was among blood relations. A consequence of the change to marrying out of one's tribe was that clairvoyance was lost. Today marriage between blood relations would cause degeneration. In those early days, people not only remembered things from their own but also from their parents' lives. This inherited memory bore a name: Adam, Seth, Enoch. Apart from memories, good and evil things were also inherited—original sin.

To change this, general love of humanity had to replace the blood bonds. ‘He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.’⁶⁸

Jesus also went to people not of his tribe, to the Samaritan woman. ‘Jews had nothing in common with Samaritans.’⁶⁹ Christ Jesus came from Galilee, a country of the most mixed blood possible.

A spirit on a distant star looking at the earth would see the physical earth penetrated and surrounded by an ether and an astral body. If this spirit had observed earth evolution from Abraham to the present day it would have seen its colours change at the moment when the blood flowed from Christ's wounds. An initiation like that of Paul the apostle⁷⁰ could not have happened before the coming of the Christ. This external initiation had become possible when the earth's whole astral body changed.

Question concerning the future of Christianity

Christianity has such infinite depths that it is quite impossible to see how it will develop. As a religion it is the last. It has all the potential for development. Theosophy merely serves Christianity.

The difference between the Christ and the other founders of great religions is that in the other religions people believe in what the founders taught, in Christianity people believe in what the Christ himself represents.

Healing influence of the ether body on the physical body

Mental diseases are partly due to the fact that the ether body does not have the power to influence certain parts of the physical body. If the ether body is too weak to control part of the body, this part will get sick. If you strengthen the ether body you have helped.

• 53. E.g. Strauss, David Friedrich (1808–74), German theologian, Leben Jesu (life of Jesus) 1835, translated into English by George Eliot in 1846; Renan, Ernest (1823–92), French philologist and historian, Vie de Jésus (life of Jesus) 1863; Hamack, Adolf von(1851–1930), Das Wesen des Christentums (the nature of Christianity) Leipzig 1901.
• 54. Bunsen, Christian KarlJosias, Baron (1791–1860), Prussian diplomat, theologian and scholar, author of works on history and theology.
• 55. John 2: 3-5.
• 56. John 19: 25.
• 57. John 19: 26
• 58. Rudolf Steiner had translated John 1:1 -14 for a lecture he gave in Munich on 27 Oct. 1906 (in German in GA 94). See also lecture of 2 Dec. 1906 in this volume.
• 59. The manuscript of Rudolf Steiner's translation into German is in the Archives in Domach (No. NZ 3477). The words in parentheses were added by him at a later stage.
• 60. Karl Julius Schröer wrote in his Faust commentary: ‘The ancient Germans believed that a sound could be heard as the sun rose (Tacitus, Germania 45). In one of the Songs of Ossian translated by Goethe it says: “Where the sun sings as he rises.” The Pythagoreans held the view that the law of physics according to which heavenly bodies move and are held, is expressed in sounds that are the harmony of the spheres.’
• 61. Here Karl Julius Schröer again referred to the ancient Germans and to Ossian, continuing: ‘Goethe probably had the passages 5, 749 and 8, 393 in the Iliad in mind. The Horae, guardians of Olympus, guard, open and close the gate of heaven. Those passages do, however, say: Heaven's gate crashed open of its own accord which the Horae were guarding.’
• 62. Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (1759–1805), German writer, poet and playwright.
• 63. St Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), Pater Seraphicus, see R. Steiner's lectures given in Berlin on 15 Feb. 1909 (in The Principle of Spiritual Economy, GA 109) and 22 March 1909 (in The Deed of Christ and the Opposing Spiritual Powers, GA 107).
• 64. John 13:18. Sermon on the mount—see also the lecture given in Stuttgart on 19 Jan. 1907, in this volume.
• 65. John 8: 59.
• 66. Matthew 27: 46; Mark 15: 34.; ‘sabachthan’, is usually translated as ‘forsaken’. A similar-sounding word ‘shevachthani’ means ‘elevated’ or ‘glorified’. See lecture given in Basel on 12 Sept. 1910 (in The Gospel of St Matthew, GA 123).
• 67. Mark 9: 9.
• 68. Luke 14: 26; Matthew 10: 37; Mark 10: 29.
• 69. John 4: 9.
• 70. John 4: 9.

The soul, as it becomes clairvoyant, will progress further, beyond the elemental world we have been describing in these lectures, and it will penetrate the actual spiritual world. On ascending to this higher world, the soul must take into account even more forcefully what already has been indicated. In the elemental world there are many happenings and phenomena surrounding the clairvoyant soul that remind it of the characteristics, the forces, and of all sorts of other things in the sense world, but rising into the spiritual world, the soul finds the happenings and beings totally different. The capacities and points of view it could get on with in the sense world have to be given up to a far greater degree. It is terribly disturbing to confront a world that the soul is not at all accustomed to, leaving everything behind it has so far been able to experience and observe. Nevertheless, when you look into my books Theosophy or Occult Science or if you recall the recent performance of Scenes Five and Six of The Souls' Awakening, it will occur to you that the descriptions there of the real spiritual world, the scientific descriptions as well as the more pictorial-scenic ones, use pictures definitely taken—one can say—from impressions and observations of the physical sense world.

Recall for a moment how the journey is described through Devachan or the Spirit-land, as I called it. You will find that the pictures used have the characteristics of sense perception. This is, of course, necessary if one proposes to put on the stage the spirit region, which the human being passes through between death and a new birth. All the happenings must be represented by images taken from the physical sense world. You can easily imagine that stage hands nowadays would not know what to do with the sort of scenery one might bring immediately out of the spiritual world, having nothing at all in common with the sense world. One therefore faces the necessity of describing the region of spirit with pictures taken from sense observation. But there is more to it than this.

You might well believe that to represent this world whose characteristics are altogether different from the sense world, one has to help oneself out of the difficulty with sense-perceptible images. This is not the case. When the soul that has become clairvoyant enters the spiritual world, it will really see the landscape as the exact scenery of those two scenes of the “Spirit Region” in The Souls' Awakening. They are not just thought out in order to characterize something that is entirely different; the clairvoyant soul really is in such scenery and surrounded by it. Just as the soul surrounded in the physical sense world by a landscape of rocks, mountains, woods and fields must take these for granted as reality if it is healthy, the clairvoyant soul, too, outside the physical and etheric bodies can observe itself surrounded in exactly the same way by a landscape constructed of these pictures. Indeed, the pictures have not been chosen at random; as a matter of fact they are the actual environment of the soul in this world. Scenes Five and Six of The Souls' Awakening did not come about in just this way because something or other of an unknown world had to be expressed and therefore the question was considered, “How can that be done?” No, this world pictured here is the world surrounding the soul that it to some degree simply forms as an image.

However, it is necessary for the clairvoyant soul to enter into the right relationship to the genuine reality of the spirit world, the spirit-land that has nothing at all in common with the sense world. You will get some idea of the relationship to the spiritual world which the soul has to acquire from a description of how the soul can come to an understanding of that world. Suppose you open a book. At the top of the page you find a line slanting from the left above to the right below, then a line slanting from bottom left to top right, another line parallel to the first and still another parallel to the second; then come two vertical lines, the second shorter than the first and connected at the top to its center. Then comes something like a circle that is not quite closed with a horizontal line in its center; finally come two equal vertical lines joined together at the top. You don't go through all this when you open a book and look at the first thing that stands there, do you? You read the word “when.” You do not describe the w as lines and the e as an incomplete circle, and so on; you read. When you look at the forms of the letters in front of you, you enter into a relationship with something that is not printed on the page; it is, however, indicated to you by what is there on that page.

It is precisely the same with the relationship of the soul to the whole picture-world of the spirit region. What the soul has to do is not merely to describe what is there, for it is much more like reading. The pictures before one are indeed a cosmic writing, a script, and the soul will gain the right inner mood by recognizing that this whole world of pictures—woven like a veil before the spiritual world—is there to mediate, to manifest the true reality of that world. Hence in the real sense of the word we can speak of reading the cosmic script in the spirit region.

One should not imagine that learning to read this cosmic writing is anything like learning to read in the physical world. Reading today is based more or less on the relation of arbitrary signs to their meaning. Learning to read as we have to do for such arbitrary letters is unnecessary for reading the cosmic script which makes its appearance as a mighty tableau, expressing the spiritual world to the clairvoyant soul. One has only to take in with an open, unbiased inner being what is shown as picture-scenery, because what one is experiencing there is truly reading. The meaning itself can be said to flow out of the pictures. It can therefore happen that any sort of interpreting the images of the spiritual world as abstract ideas is more a hindrance than a help in leading the soul directly to what lies behind the occult writing. Above all, as described in Theosophy and in the scenes of The Souls' Awakening, it is important to let the things work freely on one. With one's deep inner powers coming sometimes in a shadowy way to consciousness, there will already have been surmises of a spiritual world. To receive such hints, it is not even necessary to strive for clairvoyance—bear this well in mind. It is necessary only to keep one's mind and soul receptive to such pictures, without setting oneself against them in an insensitive, materialistic way, saying, “This is all nonsense; there are no such things!” A person with a receptive attitude who follows the movement of these pictures will learn to read them. Through the devotion of the soul to the pictures, the necessary understanding for the world of the spirit will come about.

What I have described is actual fact—therefore the numerous objections to spiritual science coming from a present-day materialistic outlook. In general, these objections are first of all rather obvious; then, too, they can be very intelligent and apparently quite logical. Someone like Ferdinand Fox,¹¹ who is considered so supremely clever not only by the human beings but also, quite correctly, by Ahriman himself, can say, “Oh yes, you Steiner, you describe the clairvoyant consciousness and talk about the spiritual world, but it's merely a collection of bits and pieces of sense images. How can you claim—in the face of all that scenery raked together from well-known physical pictures—that we should experience something new from it, something we cannot imagine without approaching the spiritual world?”

That objection is one that will confuse many people; it is made from the standpoint of present-day consciousness apparently with a certain justification, indeed even with complete justification. Nevertheless when you go more deeply into such objections as these of Ferdinand Fox, you will discover the way to the truth: The objection we have just heard resembles very much what a person could say to someone opening a letter: “Well, yes, you've received a letter, but there's nothing in it but letters of the alphabet and words I already know. You won't hear anything new from all that!” Nevertheless, through what we have known for a long time we are perhaps able to learn something that we never could have dreamed of before. This is the case with the picture-scenery, which not only has to find its way to the stage for the Mystery Drama performance but also will reveal itself on every side to the clairvoyant consciousness. To some extent it is composed of memory pictures of the sense world, but in its appearance as cosmic script it represents something that the human being cannot experience either in the sense world or in the elemental world. It should be emphasized again and again that our relation to the spiritual world must be compared to reading and not to direct vision.

If a man on earth, who has become clairvoyant, is to understand the objects and happenings of the sense world and look at them with a healthy, sane attitude, he must observe and describe them in the most accurate way possible, but his relation to the spiritual world must be different. As soon as he steps across the threshold, he has to do something very much like reading. If we look at what has to be recognized in this spirit land for our human life, there is certainly something else that can demolish Ferdinand Fox's argument. His objections should not be taken lightly, for if we wish to understand spiritual science in the right way, we should size up such objections correctly. We must remember that many people today cannot help making objections, for their ideas and habits of thought give them the dreadful fear of standing on the verge of nothingness when they hear about the spiritual world; therefore they reject it.

This relationship of a modern human being to the spiritual world can be understood better by discovering what someone thinks about it who is quite well-intentioned. A book appeared recently that is worth reading even for those who have acquired a true understanding of the spiritual world. It was written by a man who means well and who would like very much to come by knowledge of the spiritual world, Maurice Maeterlinck;¹² it has been translated with the title Concerning Death. In his first chapters the author shows that he wants to understand these things. We know that he is to some extent a discerning and sensitive person who has allowed himself to be influenced by Novalis, among others, that he has specialized somewhat in Romantic mysticism and that he has accomplished much that is very interesting—theoretically and artistically—in regard to the relationship of human beings to the super-sensible world. Therefore as example he is particularly interesting.

Well, in the chapters of Concerning Death in which Maeterlinck speaks of the actual relationship of the human being to the spiritual world, his book becomes completely absurd. It is an interesting phenomenon that a well-meaning man, using the thinking habits of today, becomes foolish. I do not mean this as reproof or criticism but only to characterize objectively how foolish a well-intentioned person can become when he wishes to look at the connection of the human soul to the spirit world. Maurice Maeterlinck has not the slightest idea that there is a possibility to so strengthen and invigorate the human soul that it can shed everything attained through sense observation and the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing of the physical plane and indeed, even that of the elemental world. To such minds as Maeterlinck's, when the soul leaves behind it everything involved in sense observation and the thinking, feeling and willing related to it, there is simply nothing left. Therefore in his book Maeterlinck asks for proofs of the spiritual world and facts about it. It is of course reasonable to require proofs of the spiritual world and we have every right to do so—but not as Maeterlinck demands them. He would like to have proofs as palpable as those given by science for the physical plane. And because in the elemental world things are still reminiscent of the physical world, he would even agree to let himself be convinced of the existence of the spiritual world by means of experiments copied from the physical ones. That is what he demands. He shows with this that he has not the most rudimentary understanding of the true spiritual world, for he wants to prove, by methods borrowed from the physical one, things and processes which have nothing to do with the sense world. The real task is to show that such proofs as Maeterlinck demands for the spiritual world are impossible.

I have frequently compared this demand of Maurice Maeterlinck to something that has taken place in the realm of mathematics. At one time the university Math departments were continually receiving treatises on the so-called squaring of the circle. People were constantly trying to prove geometrically how the area of a circle could be transformed into a square. Until quite recently an infinite number of papers had been written on the subject. But today only a rank amateur would still come up with such a treatise, for it has been proved conclusively that the geometrical squaring of the circle is not possible.

What Maeterlinck demands as proof for the spiritual world is nothing but the squaring of the circle transferred to the spiritual sphere and is just as much out of place as the other is in the realm of mathematics. What actually is he demanding? If we know that as soon as we cross the threshold to the spiritual world, we are in a world that has nothing in common with the physical world or even with the elemental world, we cannot ask, “If you want to prove any of this to me, kindly go back into the physical world and with physical means prove to me the things of the spiritual world.” We might as well accept the fact that in everything concerned with spiritual science we will get from the most well-meaning people the kind of absurdities that—transferred to ordinary life—would at once show themselves to be absurd. It is just as if someone wants a man to stand on his head while continuing to walk with his feet. Let someone demand that and everyone will realize what nonsense it is. However, when someone demands the same sort of thing in regard to proofs of the spiritual world, it is clever; it is a scientific right. Its author will not notice its absurdity and neither will his followers, especially when the author is a celebrated person. The great mistake springs from the fact that those who make such claims have never clearly grasped man's relation to the spiritual world.

If we attain concepts that can be gained only in the spiritual world through clairvoyant consciousness, they will naturally meet with a great deal of opposition from people like Ferdinand Fox. All the concepts that we are to acquire, for instance, about reincarnation, that is, the truly genuine remembrances of earlier lives on earth, we have to gain through a certain necessary attitude of the soul towards the spiritual world, for only out of that world can we obtain such concepts. When there are impressions, ideas, mental images in the soul that point back to an earlier life on earth, they will be especially subject to the antagonism of our time. Of course, it can't be denied that just in these things the worst foolishness is engaged in; many people have this or that experience and at once relate it to this or that former incarnation. In such cases it is easy for our opponents to say, “Oh yes, whatever drifts into your psyche are really pictures of experiences you've had in this life between birth and death—only you don't recognize them.” That is certainly the case hundreds and hundreds of times, but it should be clear that a spiritual investigator has an eye for these things. It can really be so that something that happens to a person in childhood or youth returns to consciousness completely transformed in later life; then perhaps because the person does not recognize it, he takes it for a reminiscence from an earlier life on earth. That can well be the case. We know within our own anthroposophical circles how easily it can occur. You see, memories can be formed not only of what one has clearly experienced; one can also have an impression that whisks past so quickly that it does not come fully to consciousness and yet can return later as a distinct memory. A person—if he is not sufficiently critical—can then swear that this is something in his soul that was never experienced in his present life. It is thus understandable that such impressions cause all the foolishness in people who have busied themselves, but not seriously enough, with spiritual science. This happens chiefly in the case of reincarnation, in which so much vanity and ambition is involved. For many people it is an alluring idea to have been Julius Caesar or Marie Antoinette in a former life. I can count as many as twenty-five or twenty-six Mary Magdalenes I have met in my lifetime! The spiritual investigator himself has good reason to draw attention to the mischief that can be stirred up in all this. Something more, however, must be emphasized.

In true clairvoyance, impressions of an earlier life on earth will appear in a certain characteristic way, so that a truly healthy clairvoyant soul will recognize them quite definitely as what they are. It will know unmistakably that these impressions have nothing to do with what can arise out of the present life between birth and death. For the true reminiscences, the genuine memories of earlier lives on earth that come through scrupulous clairvoyance, are too astonishing for the soul to believe it could bring them out of its conscious or unconscious depths by any humanly possible method. Students of spiritual science must get to know what soul experiences come to it from outside. It is not only the wishes and desires, which do indeed play a great part when impressions are fished up out of the unknown waters of the soul in a changed form, so that we do not recognize them as experiences of the present life; there is an interplay of many other things. But the mostly overpowering perceptions of former earth lives are easy to distinguish from impressions out of the present life. To take one example: a person receiving a true impression of a former life will inwardly, for instance, experience the following, rising out of soul depths: “You were in your former life such and such a person.” And at the moment when this occurs, he will find that, externally, in the physical world, he can make no use at all of such knowledge. It can bring him further in his development but as a rule he has to say to himself, “Look at that: in your previous incarnation you had that special talent!” However, by the time he receives such an impression, he is already too old to do anything with it. The situation will always be like that, showing how the impressions could not possibly arise out of one's present life, for if you took your start from the ordinary dream or fantasy, you would provide yourself with quite different qualities in a former incarnation. What one was like in an earlier life is something we ordinarily cannot imagine, for it is usually just the opposite of what we might expect. The genuine reality of an impression arising through true clairvoyance may show in one way or another our relationship to another person on earth. However, we must remember that through incorrect clairvoyance many previous incarnations are described, relating us to our close friends and enemies; this is mostly nonsense. If the perception you receive is truly genuine, it will show you a relationship to a person whom it is impossible at the time to draw near to. These things cannot be applied directly to practical life.

Confronted with impressions such as these, we have to develop the frame of mind necessary for clairvoyant consciousness. Naturally, when one has the impression, “I am connected in a special way with this person,” the situation must be worked out in life; through the impression one should come again into some sort of relationship with him. But that may only come about in a second or third earthly life. One must have a frame of mind able to wait patiently, a feeling that can be described as a truly inward calmness of soul and peacefulness of spirit. This will contribute to our judging correctly our experience in the spiritual world.

When we want to learn something about another person in the physical world, we go at it in whatever way seems necessary. But this we cannot do with the impression that calls for spirit peacefulness, calmness of soul, and patience. The attitude of soul towards the genuine impressions of the spiritual world is correctly described by saying,

To strive for nothing—wait in peaceful stillness,
one's inner being filled with expectation.
(The Soul's Awakening, Scene 3)

In a certain respect this frame of mind must stream out over the entire soul life in order to approach in the right way its clairvoyant experiences in the spirit.

The Ferdinand Foxes, however, are not always easy to refute, even when inner perceptions arise of which one can say, “It is humanly not possible for the soul with its forces and habits acquired in the present earth life to create in the imagination what is rising out of its depths; on the contrary, if it were up to the soul it would have imagined something quite different.” Even when one is able to point out the sure sign of true, genuine, spiritual impressions, a super-clever Ferdinand Fox can come and raise objections. But one does not meet the objections of those who stand somewhat remote from the science of the spirit or of opponents who don't want to know anything about it with the words, “One's inner being filled with expectation.” This is the right mood for those who are approaching the spiritual world, but in the face of objections from opponents, one should not—as a spiritual scientist—merely wait in expectation but should oneself raise all those objections in order to know just what objections are possible.

One of these is easy to understand today, and it can be found in all the psychological, psychopathological and physiological literature and in the sometimes learned treatises that presume to be scientific, as follows: “Since the inner life is so complicated, there is a great deal in the subconscious that does not rise up into the ordinary consciousness.” One who is super-clever will not only say, “Our wishes and desires bring all sorts of things out of soul depths,” but will also say, “Any experience of the psyche brings about a secret resistance or opposition against the experience. Though he will always experience this reaction, a person knows nothing of it as a rule. But it can push its way up from the subconscious into the upper regions of soul life.” Psychological, psychopathological and physiological literature admit to the following, because the facts cannot be denied: When someone falls deeply in love with another person, there has to develop in unconscious soul depths, side by side with the conscious love, a terrible antipathy to the beloved. And the view of many psychopathologists is that if anyone is truly in love, there is also hatred in his soul. Hatred is present even if it is covered over by the passion of love.

When such things emerge from the depths of the soul, say the Ferdinand Foxes, they are perceptions that very easily provide the illusion of not coming from the soul of the individual involved and yet can well do so, because soul life is very complex. To this we can only reply: certainly it may be so; this is as well-known to the spiritual investigator as it is to the psychologist, psychiatrist or physiologist. When we work our way through all the above-mentioned literature dealing with the healthy and unhealthy conditions of soul life, we realize that Ferdinand Fox is a real person, an extremely important figure of the present day, to be found everywhere. He is no invention. Take all the abundant writing of our time and as you study it, you get the impression that the remarkable face of Ferdinand Fox is springing out at you from every page. He seems nowadays to have his fingers in every scientific pie. To counteract him, it must be emphasized again and again, and I repeat it in this case gladly: to prove that something is reality and not fantasy is only possible through life experience itself. I have continually said: The chapter of Schopenhauer's philosophy that views the world as a mere mental image and does not distinguish between idea and actual perception can be contradicted only by life itself. Kant's argument, too, in regard to the so-called proof of God' s existence, that a hundred imaginary dollars contain just as many pennies as a hundred real dollars, will be demolished by anyone who tries to pay his debts with imaginary and not real dollars.

Therefore the training and devotion of the soul to clairvoyance must be taken as reality. It is not a matter of theorizing; we bring about a life in the realm of spirit by means of which we can clearly distinguish the genuine impression of a former life on earth from one that is false, in the same way that we can distinguish the heat of an iron on our skin from an imaginary iron. If we reflect on this, we will understand that Ferdinand Fox's objections about the spiritual world are really of no importance at all, coming as they do from people who—I will not say, have not entered the realm of spirit clairvoyantly—but who have never tried to understand it.

We must always keep in mind that when we cross the threshold of the spiritual world, we enter a region of the universe that has nothing in common with what the senses can perceive or with what we experience in the physical world through willing, thinking, and feeling. We have to approach the spiritual world by realizing that all our ability to observe and understand the physical sense world has to be left behind. Referring to perception in the elemental world, I used an image that may sound grotesque, that of putting one's head into an ant hill—but so it is for our consciousness in the elemental world. There the thoughts that we have do not put up with everything quite passively; we plunge our consciousness into a world (into a thought-world, one might call it) that creeps and crawls with a life of its own. A person has to hold himself firmly upright in his soul to withstand thoughts that are full of their own motion. Even so, many things in this elemental world of creeping and crawling thoughts remind us of the physical world.

When we enter the actual spiritual world, nothing at all reminds us of the physical world; there we enter a world which I will describe with an expression used in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World: “a world of living thought-beings.” Our thinking in the physical world resembles shadow-pictures, shadows of thoughts, whose real substance we find in the spiritual world; this thought-substance forms the beings there whom we can approach and enter into. Just as human beings in the physical world consist of flesh and blood, these beings of the spiritual world consist of thought-substance. They are themselves thoughts, actual thoughts, nothing but thoughts, yet they are alive with an inner essential being; they are living thought-beings. Although we can enter into their inner being, they cannot perform actions as if with physical hands. When they are active, they create relationships among themselves, and this can be compared to the embodiment in the sense world of thoughts in speech, a pale reflection of the spiritual reality. We can accustom ourselves to experience the living thought-entities in the spiritual world. What they do, what they are, and the way they affect one another, forms a spirit language. One spirit being speaks to another; thought language is spoken in the realm of the spirit! However, this thought language in its totality is not only speech but represents the deeds of the spiritual world as well. It is in speaking that these beings work, move, and take action.

When we cross the threshold, we enter a world where thoughts are entities, entities are thoughts; however, these beings of the spiritual world are much more real than people of flesh and blood in the sense world. We enter a world where the action consists of spiritual conversation, where words move, here, there, and everywhere, where something happens because it is spoken out. We have to say of this spiritual world and of the occurrences there what is said in Scene Three of The Guardian of the Threshold:

At this place words are deeds
and further deeds must follow them.

All occult perception attained for mankind by the initiates of every age could behold the significance in a certain realm of this spirit conversation that is at the same time spirit action. It was given the characteristic name, “The Cosmic Word.”

Now observe that our study has brought us to the very center of the spiritual realm, where we can behold these beings and their activities. Their many voices, many tones, many activities, sounding together, form the Cosmic Word in which our own soul being—itself Cosmic Word—begins to find itself at home, so that, sounding forth, we ourselves perform deeds in the spiritual world. The term “Cosmic Word” used throughout past ages by all peoples expresses an absolutely true fact of the spirit land. To understand its meaning at the present time, however, we have to approach the uniqueness of the spiritual world in the way we have tried to describe in this study.

In the various past ages and peoples, occult knowledge has spoken with more or less understanding of the Cosmic Word; now, too, it is necessary, if mankind is not to be devastated by materialism, to reach an understanding for such words about the spiritual world, from the Mystery Drama:

At this place words are deeds
and further deeds must follow them.

It is imperative in our time that when such words are spoken out of the knowledge of the spiritual world, our souls should feel their reality, should feel that they represent reality. We must be aware that this is just as much an exact characteristic of the spiritual world as when in characterizing the physical sense world we apply ordinary sense images.

Just how far our present age can bring understanding to bear on such words as “Here in this place words are deeds and further deeds must follow them” will depend on how far it takes up spiritual science and how well people today will be prepared to prevent the dominating force of materialism that otherwise will plunge human civilization into impoverishment, devastation and decay.

• 11. Ferdinand Fox Reinecke. See Guardian of the Threshold, Scenes 1 and 8; The Souls' Awakening, Scene 12, where there is the remark: “Ahriman goes off and returns with the Soul of Ferdinand Fox, whose figure is a sort of copy of his own.”
• 12. Maurice Maeterlinck (1862 – 1949), Belgian poet who wrote his metaphysical, “Symbolistic” drama, poetry and prose in French. Dramas include “Melisande” and “The Blue Bird.” He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1911.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Hella Wiesberger

At the re-establishment of the Anthroposophical Society at Christmas 1923/24, Rudolf Steiner spoke of his plan to establish the new esoteric school in future as a “Free University for Spiritual Science” with three classes and pointed out that such three classes had existed before, only in a slightly different form. These were the three working groups or departments of the Esoteric School, as they had existed from 1904 until the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914. In keeping with the precept of maintaining continuity as far as possible, he had also linked these groups to what already existed at the time and which lay in the direction of his own intentions: for the first group to the Esoteric School of Theosophy of the Theosophical Society, for the second and third groups, from which the department of the cult of knowledge was formed, to a society with masonic cult forms. ¹

Structure

The Esoteric School of Theosophy – abbreviated as E.S.T. or simply called E.S. – was founded in 1888 by H.P. Blavatsky and was under her sole leadership until her death in 1891.² After that, Annie Besant and W.Q. Judge took over together, and from 1895 A. Besant alone.” The few German Theosophists who were seeking esoteric training were affiliated with this E.S. in London. It was only through Rudolf Steiner that a German Esoteric School was established together with the German Society.

The following can still be reconstructed today about the successive development of the first circle initially affiliated with the E.S.T.

On October 20, 1902, the German Section of the Theosophical Society, based in Berlin, was officially founded with Rudolf Steiner as General Secretary and Marie von Sivers as Secretary. Annie Besant, one of the most active representatives of the Theosophical Society and then head of the Esoteric School, came to Berlin and delivered the certificate of foundation. On this occasion, Rudolf Steiner asked her to admit him to the E.S.³ He reports on this in his “Life Course” (chapter 32) as follows:

"In this context, I must discuss something that the opposing side, shrouded in a fog of misunderstanding, repeatedly brings up. For personal reasons I need not talk about it at all, because it had no influence on my development or on my public work. And compared to everything I have to describe here, it remained a purely “private” matter. It is my admission to the “Esoteric School” within the Theosophical Society.

This “Esoteric School” goes back to H.P. Blavatsky. She had created a place for a small inner circle of the Society where she shared what she did not want to say in the general Society. Like other experts on the spiritual world, she did not consider it possible to communicate certain deeper teachings to the general public.

Now all this is connected with the way in which H. P. Blavatsky came by her teachings. There has always been a tradition of such teachings, going back to the old mystery schools. This tradition is cultivated in all kinds of societies, which strictly guard against the teachings of the societies from leaking out.

But from some quarter it was thought advisable to communicate such teachings to H. P. Blavatsky. She then connected what she received with revelations that arose within her. For she was a human individuality in whom the spiritual worked through a remarkable atavism, as it once worked in the leaders of the mysteries, in a state of consciousness that, compared to the modern one, was pervaded by the consciousness soul and tuned down into the dream-like. Thus, something in Blavatsky was renewed that had been at home in the mysteries of ancient times.

For the modern man there is an infallible way to decide what of the content of spiritual vision can be communicated to wider circles. This can happen with anything that the researcher can clothe in such ideas as are proper to the consciousness soul and as, by their very nature, also come into play in recognized science.

The situation is different when spiritual knowledge lives not in the consciousness soul but in more subconscious soul powers. These are not sufficiently independent of the forces at work in the physical. Therefore, for teachings that are brought from subconscious regions in this way, the communication can become dangerous. For such teachings can only be absorbed by the subconscious again. And teacher and student are moving in an area where what is beneficial and what is harmful to the human being must be treated very carefully.

All this does not apply to Anthroposophy because it draws its teachings entirely from the unconscious region.

Blavatsky's inner circle lived on in the “Esoteric School”. I had placed my anthroposophical work within the Theosophical Society. Therefore, I had to be informed about everything that was going on in it. For the sake of this information and because I myself considered a narrower circle necessary for those who had progressed in the anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, I allowed myself to be accepted into the “Esoteric School”. However, my narrower circle was to have a different meaning than this school. It was to represent a higher section, a higher class for those who had absorbed enough of the elementary knowledge of anthroposophy. Now I wanted to tie in with what already existed and what had been established historically. I wanted to do this with regard to the Theosophical Society and also with regard to the Esoteric School. That is why my “inner circle” initially existed in connection with this school. But the connection was only in the institutions, not in what I communicated from the spiritual world. So in the early years, my inner circle looked like a department of Mrs. Besant's “Esoteric School”. Internally, it was not at all like that. And in 1907, when Mrs. Besant was at the Theosophical Congress in Munich, the external connection between us also ceased completely, according to an agreement between Mrs. Besant and me.

The possibility that I could have learned something special from Mrs. Besant within the “Esoteric School” was out of the question, because I did not attend events of this school from the very beginning, except for a few that were intended to provide me with information about what was going on.

At the school at that time there was no other real content than that which came from H. P. Blavatsky, and that was already printed.⁴. In addition to this printed material, Mrs. Besant gave all sorts of Indian exercises for the advancement of knowledge, which I rejected.

Thus, until 1907, my immediate circle was, in a sense, related to what Mrs. Besant cultivated as such a circle in terms of the institution. But it is completely unjustified to make out of these facts what opponents have made out of them. They went so far as to assert the absurdity that I was led to the spiritual knowledge only through the esoteric school of Mrs. Besant."

The letters summarized in the first part of this volume document that Rudolf Steiner was asked for esoteric instructions immediately after the founding of the German Section, that is, even before he was officially nominated Arch-Warden (National Leader) of the Esoteric School in 1904. The formation of a circle, which he considered necessary and which his first students hoped for, is hinted at in the letter to Marie von Sivers of April 16, 1903, which states: “Without a core of true Theosophists who, through the most diligent meditation work, improve the present karma, the Theosophical teaching would only be preached to half-deaf ears.” (GA 262), as well as by the answer to a corresponding question from Mathilde Scholl: “It would be quite nice if the newer members of the E.S. in Germany would somehow come together more closely. We need that especially in Germany. For the E.S. must become the soul of the Theosophical Society.” (Letter dated May 1, 1903, $43.

One year after this statement, in May 1904, Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers spent a week in London to discuss with Annie Besant his role in the E.S. Marie von Sivers was always present as an interpreter during his personal conversations with Annie Besant. In a circular letter dated May 10, 1904, sent to all members of the E.S. in Germany and Austria, Annie Besant announced that Rudolf Steiner had been authorized to act as Arch-Warden for Germany and Austria. According to his statements, he was also responsible for German-speaking Switzerland and Hungary.⁵ Annie Besant's circular letter of May 10, 1904, read as follows (see facsimile on page 26):

To all members of the E.S. in Germany and Austria.

I hereby appoint Dr. Rudolf Steiner as Arch-Warden of the E.S. in Germany and the Austrian Empire, with full authority, as my representative, to call meetings of the school, to organize groups and appoint Wardens, and to do all else necessary for the welfare of the school, remaining in direct communication with myself. Annie Besant.

(To all members of the E.S. in Germany and Austria.

I hereby appoint Dr. Rudolf Steiner as Arch-Leader of the E.S. in Germany and Austria, with full authority as my representative to hold meetings of the school, organize groups and appoint leaders, and to do everything necessary for the welfare of the school in direct communication with myself. Annie Besant.

Upon his return from London to Berlin, Rudolf Steiner began to build up his Esoteric School in addition to his activities for the public dissemination of spiritual science and the development of the Society. Since he placed the main emphasis of his activity from the very beginning on public work, he began to present the Christian-Rosicrucian path of training that is necessary for the West in a series of articles in the public Theosophical journal “Lucifer-Gnosis”, which he founded and edited: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” (June 1904 to 1908, 1st edition 1909). The earliest date of an E.S. event undertaken by him in his capacity as Arch-Warden of the E.S.T. also dates from this month of June 1904. It was during the days of the Theosophical Congress in Amsterdam, which lasted from June 18 to 21, 1904, and in which, in addition to Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers, several German Theosophists also participated; among them were Mathilde Scholl from Cologne, Sophie Stinde and Pauline von Kalckreuth from Munich, Günther Wagner from Lugano and his sister Amalie Wagner from Hamburg. Mathilde Scholl reports that Amalie Wagner was to be accepted into the E.S. at the time and that Rudolf Steiner organized this acceptance in her hotel room. However, this can only have been a kind of anticipation, since the official E.S. work was only established from Berlin after the Amsterdam Congress. The first esoteric lessons took place there on July 9 and 14, 1904; at any rate, these are the two earliest known dates for esoteric lessons in Berlin, and from the available notes it can be seen that the E.S. work in Berlin began at that time. But these lessons must actually still be counted among the preliminary stages, which basically extended into the fall of 1905. For it was only when the second and third departments were established that the school was fully formed.

During the month of August vacation in 1904, Rudolf Steiner addressed personal letters to various external members, admitting them to the school or inviting them to join. Another E.S. meeting was planned for the beginning of September (according to a letter dated August 29, 1904 to Günther Wagner); however, it is not known whether it actually took place.

In the second half of September 1904, Rudolf Steiner accompanied Annie Besant on her lecture tour through several German cities and repeated the public lectures she gave in English in German. At the last stop on this trip, in Cologne, where both were staying with Mathilde Scholl, a meeting of E.S. members also took place, according to her account: “Mrs. Besant, Dr. Steiner, Fräulein von Sivers, Miss Bright, Mr. Keightley, Mathilde Scholl in Mrs. Besant's room. Before we left the room, Mrs. Besant spoke with Dr. Steiner about the study material for E.S. students. She recommended Leadbeater's “The Christian Creed.” Dr. Steiner replied politely but firmly that he could not use this book for his students.

In the period that followed, until May 1905, a few esoteric lessons took place in Berlin. But the first official orientation through the “long-prepared circular letter to the German E.S. members” with rules did not take place until the beginning of June 1905.

In October 1905, when a large number of members travelled to Berlin at the express request of Rudolf Steiner for the general assembly of the German Section and the School was expanded to include the second and third sections of the Knowledge of Religion, several E.S. lessons were also held. Steiner personally wrote down the content of the lesson of October 24, 1905 for Anna Wagner, the wife of Günther Wagner, who had been unable to attend for health reasons. ⁶ This is the only esoteric lecture recorded in his handwriting, apart from the short summary in a letter from the lecture on October 4, 1905 for Adolf Kolbe in Hamburg. All other records of such hours were made by participants afterwards from memory, since it was not allowed to take notes during the hours themselves.

From this autumn of 1905 onwards, more and more esoteric hours took place not only in Berlin, but also in other German cities and later in other countries, where Rudolf Steiner's students worked in this way. After the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914, the esoteric work was discontinued because strictly closed events could be mistrusted, but also because it was not possible to work esoterically in a time so burdened by strong emotions. It was only ten years later, in connection with the re-establishment of the Anthroposophical Society, that an Esoteric School was re-established.

The rules

From the relevant documents it can be seen that during the period of the establishment of the first esoteric working group, “rules” were set up that were based on those of the E.S.T. The latter were originally very strict, but over time they were modified several times. At the time of Rudolf Steiner's affiliation, admission to the T.S. could be requested after two years of membership. The school was divided into grades, which could be worked through in four different ways or methods (disciplines): a general one, a special yoga one, a Christian-Gnostic one, and a Pythagorean one. Before one was admitted to the actual training, however, one had to belong to the probationary or hearer order (Shrävaka order in Indian) for at least one, and later two, years. Upon admission, a written “promise” had to be given to treat the received papers confidentially and to return them upon request. After the prescribed probationary period, one could be admitted to the actual first degree, provided one was willing to make the written vow to make Theosophy the all-determining factor of one's life.

Since Rudolf Steiner's first esoteric study group was outwardly affiliated with the examination order of the E.S.T., and within the general discipline therefore in the first rules issued by him the designation “Shrävaka-Orden” - was connected, his students also had to give the obligatory “promise”, as can be seen from various letters. He ran his working group completely independently of this. For example, there were no electable disciplines, even though the four disciplines are mentioned in the letters to Anna and Günther Wagner dated January 2, 1905. But at that time everything was still in the process of being formed and soon after it had obviously become a matter of course to follow Rudolf Steiner's intentions. For example, on January 23, 1905, Mathilde Scholl, who through his mediation in May 1904 had been accepted by Annie Besant into the first degree of the E.S.T. in London, but had not yet received his instructions, wrote to him: “Personally, it is now of no importance to me at all whether Mrs. Mead sends the writings or not, because everything I need you give me and is given to me, and that is so much that I can only raise my eyes with awe and wonder at all that is coming.” Similar words are spoken in a letter from Günther Wagner, who wrote to him on April 3, 1905: “Months ago I received from Mrs. Oakley an English E.S. pamphlet containing messages about the four paths that are taken in the E.S., which you also mention in your kind and loving letter to my wife. My wife and I have decided to follow the 'Christian' path and now ask whether we should also start on April 1 in Germany, as stated in the English pamphlet. Will a German instruction be issued? Probably, since you cannot give written instructions to all E.S. members living abroad. I would also like to know whether there are any other regulations for students in the first degree (according to the old regulations) than those in the English brochure, or whether everyone should follow these from now on. On January 2, you wrote to my wife, instructing her to do the exercises for four weeks from around January 6. She did that and continues to do so, but she too is asking for further instructions.” These questions were answered more and more with the first E.S. circular letter of June 5, 1905 and the further instructions given.

Thus far, the gradual development of the first circle can be reconstructed. However, the question of how the oath of the E.S.T. was handled remains open, since Rudolf Steiner's pupils did not go through the degrees of the E.S.T. and yet there are some such oaths that, as far as they are dated, date from 1906. Whether they were given at the time of admission to the first degree of the Section for the Cult of Knowledge or in some other context is not known. In any case, in the same year, 1906, Rudolf Steiner also wrote to an esoteric disciple: “Please do not regard the keeping of secrets as an obligation in principle, but as a temporary one, due to the confused present circumstances in the E.S. and T.S. ... I myself would be glad if this too need not be.” This statement is consistent with the fact that nothing of it has been handed down - although the circle of students had already grown quite large - that after the separation from E.S.T. in May 1907, Rudolf Steiner had written promises made. In fact, when the Esoteric School was re-established in 1924, the only appeal made with regard to the obligation to treat the teaching material received confidentially was to the sense of responsibility of the individual. In this sense, Marie Steiner wrote after Rudolf Steiner's death: “He did not believe that esotericism could be practised as in earlier times, in the deepest seclusion, with strictly binding vows. These were no longer compatible with the sense of freedom of the individual. The soul must come before its own higher self and recognize what it owes to this self and to the spiritual world in reverent silence.” ⁷

The teaching material

The teaching was divided into three parts, so to speak: the rules and exercises that applied equally to all students; the personal exercises; and the esoteric lessons, in which the intimacies of the training path were discussed and the consciousness was directed to the great teachers of humanity, the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings, as the actual leaders of the school. The ideal goal of the training was, through the higher consciousness developed by the exercises, to gradually find access to the Masters themselves.

The descriptions of the nature and work of the Masters, as imparted in esoteric hours, were intended to help on this path. The little that has been handed down is summarized in the section on the Masters. However, since Rudolf Steiner not only spoke about them in esoteric lessons, but also in lectures for members of the Society and even in public, a sufficient idea can be gained from the picture that he painted of the Masters. See the attempt at an overview in the appendix to the section 'From the teaching material on the Masters...'.

Knowledge about the masters has been of fundamental importance in the Theosophical Society and its Esoteric School since its inception.⁸ For Rudolf Steiner himself, the existence of the masters was a reality that he had personally experienced decades before his association with the Theosophical Society. He testified to this on several occasions.⁹ He also taught from his own experience the necessity of teaching the truths of occultism to the world, as he received them from his master. Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe», Heft 83/84, 1984. There is also personal testimony that he was convinced by his Master of the necessity of teaching the truths of occultism to the world:

”... if the Master had not been able to convince me that despite everything [the immaturity of the time for the high truths of occultism], Theosophy is necessary for our age: I would have written only philosophical books even after 1901, and, speaking literarily and philosophically.” (Letter of January 9, 1905 to Marie von Sivers, GA 262).

And he had only joined the Society after he had realized at the “endpoint of a long inner development” that “the spiritual forces I must serve are present in the T.S.” ¹⁰

However, while in the T.S. the Masters were always spoken of as the “Masters of Wisdom”, he spoke of them as the “Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings” or also the “Feelings of Humanity”, because they not only possess a high degree of wisdom, but also an “unlimited source of love for humanity” (letter of August 2, 1904, p. 62). This nuance, like everything in his work, points to the central point of his spiritual knowledge: the unique significance of the Christ principle for the development of all humanity and the Earth. For Steiner, Christ was the Master of all Masters and the “Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings” were those who “stand in direct connection with the forces of the higher hierarchies” (Düsseldorf Lecture, June 15, 1915) and who have grasped that “the progress of humanity depends on the comprehension of the great event of Golgotha” (Berlin, March 22, 1909).

The most enlightening thing about Rudolf Steiner's personal relationship with the masters is probably what he said in one of his very first public lectures in Berlin. Referring to the description of these highly developed individuals in Sinnett's “Secret Buddhism”, he tried to make it clear that, if one bears in mind that there are endless possibilities on the ladder of development — from the least developed to, for example, Goethe and beyond — the concept of the master need not be strange to European thinking. And then follow the words that are so decisive for him:

”...that the so-called masters are great inspirers for us - nothing more - great inspirers in spiritual realms. However, their development goes far beyond what is offered by popular culture. They are great inspirations for us; but they do not demand faith in any authority, not faith in any dogma. They appeal to nothing but one's own human insight and provide guidance on how to develop the powers and abilities that lie in every human soul, through certain methods, in order to ascend to the higher realms of existence.” (Berlin, October 13, 1904)

In the following lecture, he characterizes the masters in such a way that it can be understood how they, in particular, respect human freedom to the highest degree, so that no kind of dependency can arise. For example, no one can suffer harm from the rules in “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in contrast to much of what is touted in such fields today. But because so much is being advertised that is not only worthless but can also be harmful, “the Masters have given permission to publish such rules.” (Berlin, December 15, 1904).

Taking the various statements about the Masters, at first glance they seem to contradict each other. In particular, what was said in the lecture of October 13, 1904 seems to contradict what is to be read in letters to esoteric disciples: “I can and may only lead so far as the exalted Master, who guides me Himself, gives me the instruction” (Letter of August 11, 1904); or when it is said that the theosophical teachings go back to the Masters:

"We say rightly that Theosophy did not come into the world through this or that book, nor through this or that sum of dogmas. Theosophy comes from those exalted individuals whom we call the Masters of wisdom and of the harmony of intuitions, because they have opened the sources of spiritual life, which can henceforth flow into human beings.

“Spiritual life ultimately goes back to those sources that we seek in those individualities whom we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings. In them we find the impulses, if we seek them rightly, of how we are to work from epoch to epoch, from age to age.” (Berlin, December 26, 1909)

However, if we delve into these various statements, the apparent contradiction between them disappears. It becomes clear that Rudolf Steiner himself belongs to those initiates who receive the impulses of the masters with their free powers of thought and have to elaborate them for the progress of humanity. The world of the supersensible, and thus also of the masters, has its own language. It reveals itself in signs and symbols, the study and interpretation of which is only possible through special training. The way in which occult revelations are translated, interpreted and applied depends entirely on the depth of the person's ability to comprehend and on their sense of moral responsibility. Rudolf Steiner's achievement for cultural progress lies quite obviously in the fact that he was able to translate the sign language of the underlying creative-spiritual of all existence into the conceptual language of anthroposophy, which is in keeping with modern consciousness. He had to represent this personal deed in the world without having to invoke the authority of the masters. He was personally responsible for his teaching. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Steiner, especially in the years after the First World War, no longer spoke of the Masters in the intimate way of the earlier years, the stronger the scientific character of Anthroposophy was developed. ¹¹

The way of teaching in the Esoteric School

While Rudolf Steiner personally took responsibility for the way in which he publicly taught his supersensible knowledge in the sense described above, the same did not apply in the same way to the Esoteric School. He himself stated that the school was under the direct leadership of the masters and that it must therefore be a basic commitment of the school that everything that flows through it originates only from the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings, while the basic obligation for the students would be to apply their entire reason to everything that was taught and to ask themselves whether it is reasonable to follow this path. (Esoteric Lesson Düsseldorf, April 19, 1909, p. 223).

Apparently not always, but in certain esoteric lessons or in certain moments of esoteric lessons, Rudolf Steiner spoke as the direct messenger of the masters. A participant in the Düsseldorf lesson of April 19, 1909 reports that this particular lesson began with the words: “My dear sisters and brothers! This esoteric lesson is one that is not subject to the responsibility of the one who speaks!” And this was said because in the following description of how Zarathustra was once initiated by the spirit of the sun, Rudolf Steiner was said to have been Zarathustra himself at that moment. It could have been perceived as a tremendous experience, how “our great teacher, who had shared with us the results of his research, now showed us himself how an ancient leader and teacher of humanity could reveal himself in an inspiring way,” how Rudolf Steiner was the first person in modern times to be trained, not as a medium, but as a fully conscious spiritual researcher, through his own strict schooling, to become a serving tool for spiritual beings."

Only a few have passed on something about this very special way in which Rudolf Steiner could be experienced as a messenger of the masters in the esoteric hours. One of them put his memory into the words:

Another reports the deep impression he received when he was able to attend an esoteric session for the first time, with the following words:

"Everyone was sitting in silence. When Rudolf Steiner entered, an unearthly light seemed to shine on his face, from the realm from which he came to us - it didn't just seem like it: it was there. He spoke as if he knew the great masters who guide our lives and aspirations from an immediate knowledge: Kuthumi, Morya, Jesus and Christian Rosenkreutz - the “Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feelings”.

Suffice to say that the consecration of this hour was indescribably beautiful. Here Rudolf Steiner appeared entirely as the messenger of a higher world. The impression is unforgettable.¹³

In his book of memoirs, “Transformations of Life” (Basel 1975), the well-known Russian poet Andrei Bely describes in the most detailed and linguistically subtle way how he experienced the task of training attention more for the how than the what in the “Class of Hearing”. For there was no external difference between the esoteric lectures and the other lectures, since everything had an esoteric tone, all the more delicate the more popularly Rudolf Steiner spoke. But what could have been experienced in a concentrated way in the esoteric lectures was precisely how the how became the what and radiated everything.

• 1. See “On the History and the Content of the Gnostic Section of the Esoteric School”, CW 265.
• 2. For the history of the E.S.T., see the preliminary remarks to the second part of this volume.
• 3. On October 23, 1902. Marie von Sivers had already become a member of the E.S.T.
• 4. "Esotericism” (3rd volume of Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine”), published as posthumous writings by Annie Besant (1897)
• 5. See “Rules”, page 144
• 6. In “From the content of the esoteric lectures”, GA 266/1.
• 7. Preface to the first edition of the lectures “The Karmic Connections of the Anthroposophical Movement”, Dornach 1926, reprinted in “Contributions to the Rudolf Steiner Complete Works” No. 23 Christmas 1968.
• 8. For more on this, see the preliminary remarks to the second part.
• 9. See the Notes for Edouard Schur and letters to Marie Steiner-von Sivers, both in Briefwechsel und Dokumente... (Correspondence and Documents...), GA 262; also the autobiographical lecture Berlin, February 4, 1913 in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, Heft 83/84, 1984.
• 10. In a draft of the first circular letter to the German Theosophical lodges in the summer of 1902, before the official founding of the German section. In Briefwechsel und Dokumente... (Correspondence and Documents...), GA 262, note on page 17.
• 11. Elisabeth Vreede in a lecture given in Stuttgart on July 9, 1930. See Elisabeth Vreede/Thomas Meyer: Zur Bodhisattvafrage, Basel 1989.
• 12. Jenny Schirmer-Bey in “What is happening in the Anthroposophical Society. News for its members”, 1974, No. 35 dated September 1, 1974
• 13. Ludwig Kleeberg, “Wege und Worte”, Stuttgart 1961