The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have been asked to speak in these lectures about paths leading to a knowledge of the super-sensible world. This knowledge, and our knowledge of the phenomenal world, the fruit of years of patient and diligent study, to which we owe the magnificent achievements of modern times, are complementary. For reality can be apprehended only by the person who is able to reinforce the remarkable discoveries which the natural and historical sciences have added to our stock of knowledge in recent times with insight derived from the spiritual world.

Wherever the external world confronts us we are in no doubt that it is both spiritual and physical; behind every physical phenomenon will be found in some form or other a spiritual agent which is the real protagonist. The spiritual cannot exist in a vacuum for the spiritual is operative at all times and actively permeates the physical at some undefined time or place.

I propose to discuss in these lectures how the world in which man lives may be known in its totality, on the one hand through a consideration of his physical environment and, on the other hand, through the perception of the spiritual. In this way I hope to indicate the true and false methods of attaining such knowledge.

Before touching upon the actual subject matter of these lectures tomorrow I should like to offer a brief introduction so that you may have some idea of what to expect from them and what purpose I have in view. They are concerned in the first place to bring home to us the question: why do we undertake spiritual investigation at all? Why, as thinking, feeling, practical persons, are we not prepared to accept the phenomenal world as it is and take an active part in it? Why do we strive at all to attain knowledge of a spiritual world? In this context I should like to refer to an ancient conception, an old saying that embraces a truth ever more widely accepted and which, inherited from the earliest days of human thinking and aspiration, is still found today when we inquire into the Ground of the world. Without in any way using these ancient, outmoded conceptions as a basis, I would like, none the less, to call attention to them whenever the occasion arises.

From the East there echoes across thousands of years the saying: the world that we perceive with our senses is Maya, the Great Illusion. And if, as man has always felt during the course of his development, the world is Maya, then he must transcend the ‘Great Illusion’ to find ultimate truth. But why did man look upon this world of sense-impressions as Maya? Why, precisely in the earliest times when men were nearer to the spirit than they are today, did the Mystery Centres arise, Centres that were dedicated to the cultivation of science, religion, art and practical living, whose aim was to point the way to truth and reality, in contradistinction to that which, purely in the external world, was the Great Illusion, the source of man's knowledge and activity? How is one to account for those illustrious sages who trained their neophytes in the ancient, holy Mysteries and sought to lead them from illusion to truth? This question can only be answered if one reviews man more dispassionately, from a more detached angle.

“Know thyself!”—such is another ancient saying that comes down to us from the past. From the fusion of these two sayings—‘the world is Maya,’ from the East, and ‘know thyself!’, from ancient Greece—there first arose the quest for spiritual knowledge amongst later humanity. But in the ancient Mysteries, too, the quest for truth and reality had its origin in this twofold perception that, in the final analysis, the world is illusion and that man must attain to self-knowledge.

It is, however, only through life itself that man can come to terms with this question, not through thinking alone, but through the will, and through full participation in the reality immediately accessible to us as human beings. Neither in full consciousness, nor in clear understanding, but with deep emotion, every man the world over can say to himself: ‘Such as is the outer world that you see and hear, that you cannot be.’

This feeling goes deep. One must reflect upon the implication of these words: ‘Such as is the external world that you perceive with your five senses, that you cannot be.’ When we look at the plants we see the first green shoots emerge in springtime; they blossom in summer and towards autumn they ripen and bear fruit. We see them grow, fade and die: the duration of their life-cycle is a single year. We see, too, how many plants absorb from the soil certain substances which build up the main stem. On the way here yesterday evening by road we saw many extremely old plants which had absorbed quantities of these hardening substances in order that their life-cycle should not be limited to a single year, but should be extended over a longer period of time and thus would bear new growing-points on their stems. And it is given to man to observe how these plants grow, fade and die.

And when he observes the animals, he realizes their impermanence; so too with the mineral kingdom. He observes the mineral deposits in the majestic mountain ranges. And armed with his scientific knowledge, he realizes that they too are impermanent. And finally he turns to some conception such as the Ptolemaic or Copernican system, for example, or some conception borrowed from the ancient or later Mysteries—and he concludes as follows: all that I see in the splendour of the stars, all that irradiates me from sun and moon with their wondrous and complex orbits—all this, too, is impermanent. But apart from impermanence, the kingdom of nature has other attributes. These are of such a kind that man, if he is to know himself, should not assume that he and all that is impermanent—the plants, minerals, sun, moon and stars—are similarly constituted.

Man then comes to the conclusion: I bear within me some quality that is different from anything I see and hear around me. I must arrive at an understanding of my own being, for I cannot find it in anything that I see and hear.

In all the ancient Mysteries men felt this urge to discover the reality of their inner being, whereas all the transient phenomena of space and time were felt to be an expression of the Great Illusion. And so, in order to arrive at an understanding of man's inner being, they looked beyond the findings of sense-perception.

And here they experienced a spiritual world. How to find the right path to the spiritual world will be the subject of these lectures. You can readily imagine that man's first impulse will be to follow the same procedure he adopted in exploring the phenomenal world. He will simply transfer the method of sense-perception to his exploration of the spiritual world. If, however, investigation into the phenomenal world is usually fraught with illusion, then it is probable that the possibilities of illusion will be increased rather than diminished if the methods for investigating the phenomenal world are also applied to the spiritual world. And, in effect, this is what happens. In consequence we merely become the victims of an illusion all the more compelling.

And again, if we harbour vague anticipations, nebulous enthusiasms, unaccountable presentiments from dark corners of the soul, dream-fantasies about the spiritual, it will remain forever unknown to us. We remain in the world of conjecture; we share a belief, but have no real knowledge. If we are content simply to adopt this course, the spiritual will become not better known to us, but progressively more unknown. Thus man may go doubly astray.

On the one hand, he pursues the same line of enquiry in relation to the spiritual and phenomenal world. And the phenomenal world is found to be illusion. If he pursues the same approach to the spiritual world, as the ordinary spiritualists sometimes do, then he is subject to even greater illusions.

On the other hand he can follow the other way of approach. In this case no attempt is made to investigate the spiritual world along clear-cut, intelligible lines, but through self-induced belief and nebulous enthusiasm. Consequently the spiritual world remains a closed book. No matter how urgently we pursue the path of vague conjecture and emotional enthusiasm we shall know progressively less about the spiritual world. In the first instance the illusion is magnified, in the second, our ignorance. As against these two false paths we must find the right path.

We must bear in mind how impossibly difficult it is to substitute a knowledge of the true self for a knowledge of the Great Illusion in the sense I have indicated; and furthermore, if one intends to prepare oneself for a true, authentic approach to spiritual understanding, how impossible it is, in a state of illusion, to overcome all these nebulous feelings about the true self and come to a clear perception of reality. Let us look quite impartially at what is here involved. A materialist can never feel such deep admiration and respect for the recent scientific discoveries of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and others as the man who has insight into the spiritual world. For these men, and many others since the time of Giordano Bruno, spared no effort in order to gain insight into what the ancient Mysteries considered to be the world of Maya. There is no need to accept the theories advanced by Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Copernicus, Galileo and the rest. Let others theorize about the universe as they will; we have no intention of being drawn into their arguments. But we must recognize the tremendous impetus given by these men to the detailed, factual study of specific organs in man, animals and plants, or of some particular problem relating to the mineral kingdom. Just imagine how much we have learned in recent times about the functions of the glands, nerves, heart, brain, lungs, liver, etc. as a result of their stimulating researches. They deserve our greatest respect and admiration. But in real life this knowledge can take us only to a certain point. Let me give you three examples to illustrate my point.

We can follow in great detail the first human egg-cell; how it gradually develops into a human embryo, how the various organs evolve step by step and how, from the tiny peripheral organs the complex heart and circulatory system are built up. All this can be demonstrated. We can follow the organic growth of the plant from root to blossom and seed and from this factual information we can construct a theory of the universe that embraces the Cosmos.

Our astronomers and astro-physicists have already done this. They set up a theory of the Cosmos showing how the world emerges from a stellar-nebular system which assumed a progressively more definite form and was capable of spontaneous generation. But despite all this theorizing, we come ultimately face to face once again with the essential being of man, the problem of how to respond to the injunction, ‘Know thyself!’ If we know only the self that is limited to a knowledge of the minerals, plants, animals, human glandular and circulatory systems, we know only the world man enters at birth and leaves at death. But, in the final analysis, man feels that he is not limited to the temporal world. Therefore, in face of all that knowledge of the external world yields in such grandeur and perfection, he must answer from the depths of his being: all this you affirm only between birth and death. But do you know your essential self, your true essence? The moment that the knowledge of man and nature has moral and religious implications, the human being whose organs can only apprehend the world of the Great Illusion is reduced to silence. The injunction, “Know thyself, so that thou mayest know in thine innermost being whence thou comest and whither thou art going,” this problem of cognition, the moment religious issues are raised, cannot be answered at this limited level of understanding.

On entering the Mystery Schools the neophyte was left in no doubt that however much he may have learned through sense-observation, this information could offer no answer to the great riddle of human nature when religious issues were involved.

Furthermore, though we may have the most precise knowledge of the structure of the human head, of the characteristic movements of man's arms and hands, of his gait and stance, though we may respond never so sensitively to the forms of animals and plants in so far as we can know them through sense-observation, directly we try to give artistic expression to this information we are again faced with an unanswerable problem.

For how have men hitherto expressed through art their knowledge of the world? They owed their inspiration to the Mystery teachings. Their knowledge of nature and its various aspects was related to the existing level of understanding, but at the same time it was enriched by spiritual insight.

One need only look back to ancient Greece. Today a sculptor or painter works from the model—at least this was the practice until recently. He sets out to copy and imitate. The Greek artist did not work in this way, although he is alleged to have done so; rather did he sense the spiritual human form within himself In sculpture, if he wished to portray an arm in movement, he was aware that the external world was informed by a spiritual content, that every material object has been created out of the spirit and in his work he strove to recreate the spirit.

Even as late as the Renaissance a painter did not use a model; it served only as a stimulus. He knew intuitively what activated hand or arm and expressed this information in his rendering of movement. Merely to portray the external and superficial aspects of the world of Maya, merely to copy the model, does not advance our understanding; we do not see thereby more deeply into man, but are concerned only with externals and so remain a spectator outside him.

From the standpoint of art, if we fail to transcend the world of Maya we are faced with the formidable problem of human nature and no answer is vouchsafed us.

And again, on entering the old Mysteries, it was made clear to the neophyte who was about to be initiated: if you remain within the world of Maya, you will be unable to penetrate the essential being of man or of any other kingdom of Nature. You cannot become an artist. In the sphere of art it was found necessary to remind the neophyte of the clear injunction, “Know thyself,” and then he began to feel the need for spiritual knowledge.

But, you will object, there are thoroughly materialistic sculptors. After all they were no mere amateurs and knew what they were about. They too knew how to draw forth the secrets from their model and invest their figures and motifs with these secrets. That is indeed so, but whence did they derive their knowledge? People fail to realize that this ability did not come from the artists themselves. They owed it to earlier artists who in their turn had it from their predecessors. They worked from a tradition. But they were unwilling to admit this because they claimed they owed everything to themselves. They knew how the old masters worked and imitated them. But the earliest of the old masters learned their secret from the spiritual insights of the Mysteries. Raphae1 and Michelangelo learned it from those who still drew on the Mysteries.

But true art must be created out of the spiritual. There is no other solution. As soon as we touch upon the problem of man, any perception of the Great Illusion has no answer to life's problems, to the problem of man's destiny. If we are to return to the fountain-head of art and artistic creativity we must recover insight into the spiritual world.

Now a third example. The botanist or zoologist can gain wonderfully detailed knowledge of the form of every available plant. The bio-chemist can describe the processes that take place in plant life. He can also tell how foodstuffs are assimilated in the metabolic system, are absorbed by the blood vessels in the walls of the alimentary canal and are carried in the blood to the nervous system. A gifted anatomist, physiologist, botanist or geologist can cover a wide field of the world of Maya, but if he intends to use this knowledge for purposes of healing or medical treatment, if he wishes to press forward from the outer, or even the inner constitution of man to his essential being, he cannot do it.

You will reply: but there are doctors in plenty who are materialists and have no interest in the spiritual world. They treat patients in accordance with the methods of natural science and yet they achieve results.

That is so. But they are able to affect cures because they too have behind them a tradition based upon an old world-conception. Old remedies were derived from the Mysteries, but they all shared a remarkable characteristic. If you look at an old prescription, you will find that it is highly complicated. It makes considerable demands upon those who prepare it and who apply it to the particular purpose laid down by tradition. If you had gone to an old physician and had asked how such a prescription was made up he would never have replied: first I make chemical experiments and ascertain whether the materials behave in such and such a way; then I try it out on the patients and note the results. Such an idea would never have occurred to him. People have no idea of the circumstances prevalent in earlier epochs. He would have replied: I live in a laboratory (if I may call it that) that was equipped on the basis of the Mystery teaching and when I light upon a remedy I owe it to the Gods. He was quite clear on this point, that he was in close communication with the spiritual world through the whole atmosphere engendered in his laboratory. Spiritual beings were as unmistakably present to him as human beings are to us. He was aware that through the influence of spiritual beings he had attained a higher dimension of being and was able to achieve more than would otherwise have been possible. And he proceeded to make up his complicated prescriptions, not from natural knowledge, but as the Gods dictated. It was known within the Mysteries that, in order to understand man, one should not be identified with the world of Maya, but press on to the truth of the divine world.

With all their knowledge of the external world men are further today from the truth of the divine world than were the ancients with their knowledge derived from the Mysteries. But the way back must be found again.

From the third example it is evident that if we seek to heal, even though equipped with the widest possible knowledge of nature (that is, of the world of Maya), then we are faced again with the unsolved problems of human life and destiny. If we wish to understand man from the standpoint of Maya, the “Great Illusion,” from the standpoint of the “Know thyself” which is demanded for the purposes of healing, then we shall be unable to advance a single step further in our understanding.

And so, in the light of these examples, we can say: he who wishes to bridge the gap between the world of Maya and the “Know thyself” will realize, the moment he approaches the human being with religious feeling, as a creative artist, as healer or doctor, that he stands before a void if his sole starting-point is the world of illusion. He is powerless unless he finds a form of knowledge that transcends the knowledge of external nature, which is knowledge of Maya, the Great Illusion.

Let us now draw a comparison between the way in which men sought, out of the spirit of the Mysteries, to reach a comprehensive knowledge of the world and the way in which this is attempted today. We shall then be in a position to find our bearings in relation to the paths leading to this comprehensive knowledge

A few thousand years ago the world and its divine Ground or essence were spoken of very differently from the way in which authorities speak to-day. Let us look back to that epoch a few thousand years ago, when a sublime and majestic knowledge flourished in the Mysteries of the Near East. We will attempt to look more closely into the nature of this knowledge by giving a brief description of its characteristics.

In ancient Chaldea, the following was taught: man's soul forces reach their maximum potentiality when he directs the eye of the spirit to the wonderful contrast between the life of sleep (his consciousness is dimmed, he is oblivious of his environment) and his waking life (he is clear-sighted, he is aware of the world around). These alternating conditions of sleep and waking were experienced differently thousands of years ago. Sleep was less unconscious, waking life not so fully conscious. In sleep man was aware of powerful, ever changing images, of the flux and movement of the life of worlds. He was in touch with the divine Ground, the essence, of the universe.

The dimming of consciousness during sleep is a consequence of human evolution. A few thousand years ago waking life was not so clear and lucid as today. Objects had no clearly defined contours, they were blurred. They radiated spiritual qualities in various forms. There was not the same abrupt transition from sleep to waking life. The men of that epoch were still able to distinguish these two states, and the environment of their waking life was called ‘Apsu.’ This life of flux and movement experienced in sleep, this realm that blurred the clear distinction between the minerals, plants and animals of waking life, was called ‘Tiamat.’ Now the teaching in the Chaldean Mystery Schools was that when man, in a state of sleep, shared the flux and movement of Tiamat, he was closer to truth and reality than when he lived his conscious life amongst minerals, plants and animals. Tiamat was nearer to the Ground of the world, more closely related to the world of man than Apsu. Apsu was more remote. Tiamat represented something that lay nearer to man. But in the course of time Tiamat underwent changes and this was brought to the notice of the neophytes in the Mystery Schools. From the life of flux and movement of Tiamat emerged demoniacal forms, equine shapes with human heads, leonine forms with the heads of angels. They arose out of the warp and woof of Tiamat and these demoniacal forms became hostile to man.

Then there appeared in the world a powerful Being, Ea. Anyone today who has an ear for sounds can feel how the conjunction of these two vowels points to that powerful Being who, according to these old Mystery teachings, stood at man's side to help him when the demons of Tiamat grew strong. Ea or Ia, became later—if one anticipates the particle ‘Soph’—Soph-Ea, Sophia. Ea implies approximately abstract wisdom, wisdom that permeates all things. Soph is a particle that suggests (approximately) a state of being. Sophia, Sophea, Sopheia, the all-pervading, omnipresent wisdom sent to mankind her son, then known as Marduk, later called Micha-el, the Micha-el who is invested with authority from the hierarchy of the Angels. He is the same Being as Marduk, the son of Ea, wisdom—Marduk-Micha-el.

According to the Mystery teachings Marduk-Micha-el was great and powerful and all the demoniacal beings such as horses with human heads and leonine forms with angels' heads—all these surging, mobile, demoniacal forms, conjoined as the mighty Tiamat, were arrayed against him. Marduk-Micha-el was powerful enough to command the storm wind that sweeps through the world. All that Tiamat embodied was seen as a living reality, and rightly so, for that is how they experienced it. All these demons together were envisaged as the adversary, a powerful dragon which embodied all the demoniacal powers born out of Tiamat, the night. And this dragon-being, breathing fire and fury, advanced upon Marduk. Micha-el first smote him with various weapons and then drove the whole force of his storm-wind into the dragon's entrails so that Tiamat burst asunder and was scattered abroad. [>The “Poem of Creation” says: “The North Wind bore (it) to places undisclosed.”] And so Marduk-Micha-el was able to create out of him the Heavens above and the Earth beneath. Thus arose the Above and the Below.

Such was the teaching of the Mysteries. The eldest son of Ea, wisdom, has vanquished Tiamat and has fashioned from one part of him the Heavens above and from the other the Earth below. And if, O man, you lift your eyes to the stars, you will see one part of that which Marduk-Micha-el formed in the Heavens out of the fearful abyss of Tiamat for the benefit of mankind. And if you look below, where the plants grow out of the mineralized Earth, where minerals begin to take form, you will find the other part which the son of Ea, wisdom, has recreated for the benefit of mankind.

Thus the ancient Chaldeans looked back to the formative period of the world, to the forming from the formless; they saw into the workshop of creation and perceived a living reality. These demon forms of the night, all these nocturnal monsters, the weaving, surging beings of Tiamat had been transformed by Marduk-Micha-el into the stars above and the Earth beneath. All the demons transformed by Marduk-Micha-el into shining stars, all that grows out of the Earth, the transformed skin and tissue of Tiamat—this is the form in which the men of ancient times pictured whatsoever came to them through the old attributes of the soul. That information they accounted as knowledge.

Then the priests of the Mysteries anticipated the future by studying the psychic powers of their pupils. And when the neophytes had developed adequate strength of soul they were in a position to understand the first elementary lessons that children are taught in school today—that the Earth revolves round the Sun and that worlds are formed from nebulae. This knowledge was a well-guarded secret in those days. The teaching given openly was concerned, on the other hand, with the deeds of Marduk-Micha-el which I have just described to you. In our schools and universities today—and they lay no claim to secrecy—and even in our primary schools the Copernican system and astro-physics are taught, subjects which, in ancient times, only the sages dared undertake or were permitted to undertake and then only after long preparation. What every schoolboy knows could, in those days, be learned only by Initiates. Today all this is part of the school curriculum.

There was an epoch dating further back still than the epoch of the old Chaldean Mysteries, when people spoke only of such things as I have described—of Ea, of Marduk-Micha-el, of Apsu and Tiamat. They abhorred everything taught by these ‘eccentric’ Mystery teachers about the movements of the stars or of the sun; they wished to study, not the invisible, but solely the visible and tangible, though in the personified or symbolic forms revealed through old clairvoyance. They rejected the knowledge which the old Initiate-teachers and their pupils had acquired. Then came the time when the primeval wisdom was gradually diffused from the East, and both forms of knowledge were treasured. Men set great store on the manifestations of the Beings of the spiritual worlds, the deeds of Marduk-Micha-el, for example; and equally they treasured what could be illustrated diagrammatically—the sun in the centre and the planetary bodies revolving round it in cycles and epicycles. Then, in the course of time, insight into the spiritual worlds, the worlds of demons and gods, was lost and intellectual knowledge was fostered, the knowledge which we prize so highly today and which reached its zenith in the early years of our epoch. We are now living in an epoch that ignores the spiritual, even as the phenomenal world was ignored by those to whom the spiritual was self-evident. We have to anticipate the time when we shall again be in a position to accept side by side with the teachings of astronomers, astrophysicists, zoologists and botanists a knowledge of spiritual realities derived from spiritual insights. This epoch is now imminent and we must be ready to meet it if we are to accomplish our task and rediscover amongst other things the religious source of art and the art of healing.

Just as in ancient times the spiritual dwelt amongst men whilst the material world was contemned, to be followed by an epoch when material knowledge was fostered and the spiritual suppressed, so now the time must come when we must transform our vast, comprehensive knowledge of the external world, so deserving of admiration, into a renewed knowledge of the Mystery teachings. Since the material science of today has torn down the edifice of the old spirituality, so that nothing survives of the ancient structure save, at most, those fragments that we unearth, we must once again recover the spiritual; but there must be a full and clear understanding of everything we bring to light when we delve into the history of past epochs. We must find our way back to the spiritual through a new creative art imbued with religious feeling, through a new art of healing and through a new knowledge of the spirit that permeates the being of man.

These are three examples which I have given you today in the hope that we may strive to renew the Mysteries which shall give us an understanding of the Ground and principle of the world in its entirety and an understanding of man who shall work as a fully integrated person rather than as a narrow materialist to promote the welfare and enlightenment of his fellow men.

Good morning, gentlemen! So, you probably have another question?

Mr. Müller asks what might cause a change in the pupils?

Dr. Steiner: That is a very personal question! You would have to come down to the Clinical Therapeutic Institute; when I go down again, I will tell you so that you can come then. That is a medical matter.

Another question: what does the vertical stripe on the sides of the fish mean?

Another question: a man who drank an awful lot of alcohol died eight weeks ago. In the last few days before he died, he ate chocolate and sugar, which he had never done in his life. Why do you think that was?

Dr. Steiner: Now, regarding the question of the longitudinal stripe in fish, you must be clear about the following. When you look at any being, be it of the plant or animal world, you have to ask yourself how these beings relate to the outside world. You see, plants have their green color, first of all, in their leaves. This green color in the leaves comes from the fact that the plant has a very specific relationship to light and warmth. The plant absorbs what comes from the light on the one hand and gives back something else, which it does not absorb. And that is where the green color of the plant comes from.

Likewise, you may ask yourself: what is the reason for one or the other in the case of fish? Now I would just like to point out that you will see that fish that live more in cloudy water have a much darker color than those that live in bright water. Those fish that seek out the darkness are bluish, even black. Those fish that live in lighter places are lighter in color themselves. So you can see how the external influence of light and warmth affects the fish.

And consider other animals that live in areas where there is a lot of snow, for example polar bears. They themselves take on a white color. Everything that lives is somehow exposed to the environment.

Now, in the case of fish, there is a very clear relationship between their own being and their environment. And these stripes on the edge are there to make the fish finely sensitive to light and warmth in their environment. So the fish become particularly sensitive as a result. This is not so useful for them - I have spoken of this before - for the way they move, but it is useful for the way they process light and warmth internally, so that this is a kind of nerve organ.

As for your other question about the man who drank alcohol all his life and now, before his end, began to become very pious and ate the pious chocolate and sugar – you say: the last days before his death – well, this phenomenon can easily be understood when compared to numerous others that occur throughout life. I have met many people who have grown old. As they grew old, for example, they saw their handwriting become more and more shaky. The handwriting became shaky; they could no longer write properly, and it was precisely in their handwriting that they had grown old. They might have had a handwriting in which they wrote, let's say, Lehfeld (clear, distinct), and then they wrote: Lehfeld (shaky). But then, in the last days before their death, it turned out that they could write in a certain clear handwriting again; they could suddenly write well again. I have met many people who had regained their former ability to write clearly before their death. It has also been observed in numerous cases – I am not just sharing my own observations in this area, but well-attested observations that have been made – that people who have learned some language as a child – as a child they may have been in some foreign country, learned a language and forgot it again; that does happen; let us assume that as a forty- or fifty-year-old man, they had absolutely no opportunity to communicate with anyone else in this language – suddenly, a few days before their death, they begin to speak this language quite understandably again. It came out again! Yes, you see, these are very significant phenomena. What is actually going on here? This is what happens: when a person dies, his physical body, that is, one part of his being, remains on earth; it dissolves into the earth, is destroyed by the earth. I have already told you that the next part of the human being, the etheric body, gradually dissolves into the general cosmic ether a few days after death. And then, the astral body and the real self remain for the human being to pass through the spiritual world. They then pass through the spiritual world.

There is a complete separation of the individual members of the human being. And anyone who has an eye for it can observe in someone whose death is near how the various members, physical body, etheric body, astral body, separate from one another. Now, what does it mean when someone changes his writing a few days before his death? Yes, gentlemen, we do not write with our physical body! What do we actually write with? We write with the I! We use the physical body only as a tool of the I when we write. And our I does not grow old! With your I, you are as young today as you were when you were born. The I does not grow old. The astral body does not age to the same extent as the physical body. But it is the physical body that one has to use as a tool if one wants to write, so the physical body has to grasp the pen with its hand. Now, as a person grows older, he becomes weaker and weaker and can no longer properly access his physical body. But not only that, but all kinds of things are deposited in the physical body itself. And the result of this is that the person can no longer use his fingers properly. He becomes clumsy, trembles, instead of making firm strokes when he writes. When a person is close to death, the etheric body begins to separate from the physical body. There is a loosening. Sometimes this can happen a few days before death; sometimes it happens at the last moment. It cannot be said that one should no longer try to heal a person whom one has observed for days before his death, that he could also die; on the other hand, what has become loose can be joined together again. One must always, as long as a person is alive, try to heal him under all circumstances. But the fact is that in many people the etheric body loosens for days before death.

Now, when the etheric body loosens, the person becomes stronger. That a person becomes stronger when his etheric body loosens, you can also see from something else. There is a kind of madman who develops tremendous strength, quite extraordinary strength. You might often be amazed at what such a madman can achieve in terms of strength. Not only are the beatings he gives out much more severe than those of others, but furniture that no one would think of lifting can sometimes be lifted with ease by a madman. So you see, something strange happens that distinguishes such a person from a normal person. What happens in the case of the insane person? Well, in the case of the insane person, the etheric body is always somewhat loose, or the astral body is loosened. Now, the human being is not exactly strong through the physical body, but weak. He must serve the physical body through the etheric or astral body. It is quite correct to say in the vernacular: “Something is loose in him” - something is loosened. The people sometimes speak very correctly because an instinct for the supersensible is present in the people, and in such old folk sayings one should not see something contemptible, but something that is absolutely true. When the etheric or astral body of a madman has become loosened and thus strong, then, as a madman, he is in the same position as someone whose etheric body has already become loosened because he is dying in a few days. And when he becomes stronger in the etheric body, he can write better again. When he becomes stronger in the astral body – because everything that one has forgotten is in there – then he draws out of the astral body what he has forgotten and can again speak the language he used to speak.

But now take your case. You see, I didn't know the man and therefore don't know how he lived. Perhaps you knew him? Then you can answer certain questions. Did you know him well? Well, you see, with a person like that, it is very important to consider whether he had a woman or someone else in his life. Perhaps it could have been you who constantly told him how harmful it is to drink so much alcohol? (This is confirmed.) Now, there we have something that will lead us on the trail. He had people around him who always admonished him not to drink so much because it is not good for him. With this man, as they say, it went in one ear and out the other. This is another popular saying that is not without foundation. It is true that man is so constituted that certain things go in at one ear and out at the other. Why? Well, because the astral body does not hear them. The ear is only the instrument of hearing. The astral body does not hear.

But now it happens that the astral body hears the matter, but the physical body does not participate because the person in question is too weak. Now think about this. The man heard from Mr. Erbsmehl himself on my account: You are a completely crazy guy – I'm saying it quite radically now, aren't I – because you get drunk every other moment! That's not on, it's inhuman! and so on, and the man swallowed it all. That's what happened, it happens in life that people swallow the matter and then move on again. But his astral body has kept something of it. Perhaps you said it so strongly and so often that the astral body and the etheric body could not get away without keeping it. As long as they were stuck inside the physical body without any hindrance, they did not hear anything. At the moment when the physical body became so relaxed that the etheric and astral bodies were loosened, yes, then suddenly the thought came into the person through the etheric and astral bodies: Mr. Erbsmehl might have been right after all! Maybe it is completely crazy that I have drunk so much throughout my life. Now I want to do penance, now that things have been loosened up, as you can imagine. The astral body and the ether body say: Aha, now he is not drinking alcohol, now he is drinking chocolate and sugar water! Perhaps he would have drunk lemonade too, if there had been any. The fact that something like this can happen proves, especially to the person who looks at things sensibly, that all kinds of things can get into a person that do not come out. I also told you the opposite case once. The opposite case was where the story did not remain in the astral and etheric bodies, but entered the physical body too strongly, where, so to speak, one listened far too much to the matter. The opposite case is this: a former acquaintance of mine — he was a very learned gentleman — it happened one day that his consciousness and memory left him. He no longer knew who he once was, what he had done; he no longer knew anything of his entire erudition. He had forgotten everything. He didn't even know that he was himself, that he was he. But nevertheless, his mind was clear. His mind was working clearly. He went to the train station, bought a train ticket and traveled far. He had also taken money with him, what little he had left. He could travel far. When he arrived at the station for which the ticket was valid, he bought a new ticket. And he did that several times, not knowing anything about what he was doing. But the mind is so separate from the actual person that everything happened quite rationally, as animals act rationally - as I have often shown you in many a good example - without having an ego. Now that he found himself again, his memory came back. He knew who he was, and his learning also came back to his mind. But he found himself in Berlin in a shelter for the homeless! That's where he ended up last. He left from Stuttgart. It was later established that he left from there. He was unconscious in Budapest and so on. He was able to make the journey from Berlin to Stuttgart again. Then someone from his family, who was terribly worried, picked him up. He was able to do that again. He then ended it by committing suicide. One time it was due to unconsciousness, the other time it was suicide.

But what is going on in such a case? Yes, you see, I actually have this man I've been telling you about in front of me, so that I could actually paint him anytime. The man had eyes that made you think they wanted to go deeper and deeper into his head. He had something here at the front, as if his nose had dug into – all very subtly suggested, of course – the physical body. He spoke to you in a very strange way. He spoke to you in such a way that he was completely convinced of his words in a different way than another person. You had the feeling that he always tasted his own words on his tongue and swallowed them, he liked them so much. He likes it so much when he speaks, he swallows it all in. And if you contradicted him in any way, he would get quite angry. But he didn't show much of this anger on the outside, but his face distorted. If a car rattled somewhere on the street, he would jump terribly; if you told him any kind of news, he would jump just as much, whether it was happy or sad.

You see, this person had listened too much, and everything expressed itself immediately in his physical body. And so he had the habit of always burying his astral body very deep in his physical body; he didn't keep anything to himself, like your alcoholic, but everything was buried in the physical body until the physical body was ready to also move his own self for a while.

There you have the opposite case. In the case of this alcoholic, the admonitions remained in the astral body and came out when it loosened. In the case of the other person I told you about, the astral body became so deeply embedded in the physical body that the physical body also left on its own.

So you see, there are indications everywhere in the human being that these higher limbs, these supersensible limbs, are intimately connected with his physical body and with his etheric body. All this shows you, however, that you can really only get to know life by looking at such life contexts, which directly reveal to you: There is a physical body in a person, there is an etheric body in a person, there is an astral body, there is an I.

You can also see from the case where the person suddenly develops a completely different appetite under the moral pressure of what he has left in the astral body in life, how other phenomena can also occur. There is the following example. I will tell you an interesting story now. There was once a woman who dealt in vegetables and similar things. It is still the time that lies far behind us. The woman went from house to house with her vegetable basket. Now, she was always seen as a woman who saw life from a greengrocer's point of view. She laughed when someone said something funny; otherwise she was indifferent to life. She carried her vegetables into the houses, took her money and spent her life that way. Once she came to an apartment and wanted to sell vegetables. There was no one else there but the master of the house, who opened the door for her. And this master of the house had a very special look. He looked at people very sternly and had often noticed that when he looked at people with his special look, people would talk about things they would otherwise remain silent about. Now the following came to light; this is a very well-attested fact. This vegetable woman came to the man; he looked at her. She was frightened. He said nothing at all, just looked at her. He saw that she was frightened, didn't say a word, but kept looking at her. Now she was not only frightened, but said, “Don't look at me like that! Please don't look at me like that, I'll tell you everything!” He said nothing, but kept looking at her. So the woman said, ‘Yes, but I only did it out of fear.’ He said nothing again, he just kept looking at her. ‘Don't look at me like that, I really wouldn't have done it if I hadn't done it out of fear!’ He said nothing again, just kept looking at her. “Yes, I want to tell you everything, but don't look at me like that!” He looked at her. ‘I want to tell you everything! Yes, you see, I wouldn't have murdered it if I hadn't, if I hadn't done it out of fear!’ He continued to look at her. “Yes, I was so afraid of people, the child would have said something very bad about me, and so I did it out of fear. I wasn't even properly conscious!” And you see, this woman told him about a child murder she had committed from A to Z! What happened there?

The thing is this: this man had a certain keen eye. When a person has normal eyes, well, he talks to others, he doesn't particularly pierce them. When someone has an eye that can easily fixate, which then becomes penetrating, then magnetizes, one could say, the etheric body of the person. And the conscience is located in the etheric body. If the etheric body is properly connected to the physical body, well, no, when something stirs in it, the person will immediately push it down. But if the etheric body is magnetized by such a look, then this etheric body loosens. And if a person has something on his conscience, then it loosens and comes up and disturbs the astral body and the ego. And the consequence of this is that through this loosening of the conscience that has happened to the etheric body, the person makes confessions that he would not otherwise make.

These are the things that show, in turn, how the etheric body, when it is artificially loosened from the physical body, works independently and how the physical body actually hides much in the person that the person carries within himself. And that comes out when the etheric body loosens, possibly - not always, but possibly - before death.

There has also been a lot of abuse in these matters. If you were a bit of a life observer before the war, you could find the same thing over and over again in every hotel or wherever people pick up letters that are piled up where letters are usually piled up: something with the label of an American company. The same thing was everywhere. What had happened back then? Well, an American company had been founded that had branches. There was one in Berlin, in Frankfurt, in most of the larger cities. So business must have been good! It was announced that anyone who wanted to gain power over humanity would receive little books from this American company. All he has to do is send in a certain amount of money and he gets little books, and these little books contain instructions on how to gain power over humanity. Well, all the traveling salesmen, all the agents, they thought to themselves: “That's a nice thing, gaining power over people. Gosh, we'll sell a lot of those, no one will be able to resist us!” These little books immediately started to contain instructions on how the person concerned should adjust his eyes so that he does not look the other in the eye, but at the point between the eyes, he should stare fixedly; then the other person is magnetized and comes under his influence and does what he wants. Well, you know, the wine travelers and the other travelers have had all this sent to them. And you could see that, especially in hotels where such agents had stayed, these letters and things were always sent in bulk. Most of them didn't do better business because of that, but American society did do good business. It was of no use to most of them, but it might have been of use to a few; and they did something that no one should do under any circumstances, because it is a sin against human freedom. No person may aspire to get power over another person in such a way! And if nature gives it to him, as it did to that person of whom I told you, then it can indeed become bad enough under certain circumstances, but then it is nature that gives something like a special look; it is much less abused than with the person who wants to learn the matter. Now, during the war these follies have decreased and now they actually no longer exist. But one can say that one can learn from these things, on the one hand, how people themselves exploit the spiritual, and how the worst materialists – because they were mostly materialists, who allowed these things to come to them – also turn to the spiritual when it is a matter of making a profit with the spiritual. They do not believe in him, but they turn to the spirit when it is a matter of making a profit with the spirit! So I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that these things can be terribly abused.

But there are many other things to be considered. What people consciously strive for in this little book is, after all, practiced, albeit to a lesser extent, by some people who also achieve something with it for themselves. Perhaps you have occasionally attended meetings where speakers have spoken. Now, you will admit that the conviction that emanates from the speaker does not always play the only role, but that a tremendous amount of what emanates from the speaker as an influence also plays a role. And that is the case; the most popular popular speakers are sometimes those people who gain influence over crowds of people or other masses in an improper way. One does indeed have very special experiences in this time.

For example, I am currently writing essays about my own life at the Goetheanum. These essays, which some of you may have read, strive with a certain intention to tell the story as simply as possible, without embellishment, in the most straightforward way, with no particular emphasis. Now a critic has already been found who particularly criticizes this, who says, I do not bring poetry and truth like Goethe, but truth with all sobriety. Yes, that is precisely what I am striving for! And I do not strive at all to achieve what is demanded of such a critic. In the case of such a critic today, there is precisely that which, in contrast to a sober style, is a 'drunken' style. And, isn't it true, this drunken style is almost everywhere today. It is no longer important to people to somehow make an impact with what they say, but they need words that overwhelm others. That is where the wrong influence begins. If you write in the way I try to write, you have an effect on the ego, which has free will. But if you write in a drunken style, you have an effect on the astral body, which is not so free but is in fact unfree. You can influence the astral body especially when you talk to people in a way you know they like to hear.

Those people who do not want to convince in this way but to persuade usually use as sentences and words what pleases others, while the one who wants to tell the truth cannot always say what pleases others. For in our time it is even so that as a rule people do not like the truth. So just from the way a person writes his sentences, one can see: If a person writes his sentences in such a way that they are logical, that one sentence follows from the other, then he will have an effect on the ego of the other person, which is free. If a person writes his sentences in such a way that they are not logical, but rather are intended above all to please the other person, to stir up the other person's desires, urges, instincts, passions, then he will act on the other person's astral body, which is not free. And that is a characteristic of our time, that freedom is so often talked about, and that the greatest sin against freedom actually comes from public speaking and writing today. Actually, public speaking and writing is misused everywhere.

So you will understand the ordinary conditions of life better if you can distinguish between the I and the astral body in such a way that you can see how you can have an effect on one or the other. You will also be able to understand better such a phenomenon as when, before dying, a person starts to write again, or speaks a language again that he has forgotten, or, under a moral influence that he has ignored all his life, eats things that he would otherwise never have eaten. There you can see how the I is embedded in the physical body and loosens up.

Another question: last time, Dr. spoke about arsenic. Today, the opium question has become topical in Switzerland. Some time ago, an article by Dr. Usteri was published in the “Goetheanum” about the poppy plant in connection with opium. Would it be possible to hear something about opium?

Another question: About two years ago, the Einstein theory was introduced to the public. Today, we hear little more about it. Has this theory actually been proven, or has it also been neglected?

Dr. Steiner: Well, I would have to talk about Einstein's theory at length, because it is difficult to discuss Einstein's theory briefly. If you want to understand it properly, you need mathematical knowledge. But the strange thing about Einstein's theory was that everyone talked about it without understanding it, but only on authority, because, as I said, you need some mathematical knowledge. But insofar as one can understand something without mathematical knowledge – there is no time for that today – I would like to explain something so that you can see how it is based on truth on the one hand, and a great error on the other. People are still talking about it today. The general public is such that it takes to something when it is spread through the newspapers; but it does not remember anything. The public has forgotten it today, but the relevant university professors are now Einsteinians. So among the actual scholars, Einstein's theory is much more widespread today than it was years ago. I will discuss some of this next time, as far as one can do it in a very popular way. I just need more time than we have today. — Does anyone else have a question?

Question: I would particularly like to know the difference between alcohol and opium. According to Dr. Usteri's article, we can assume that poppy juice has an upward effect, while alcohol has a downward effect.

Dr. Steiner: You see, gentlemen, here we must ask ourselves: when a person drinks alcohol, what part of his being is influenced? The I. And this has the blood circulation as its tool in the physical body. The influence of alcohol on the I reveals itself physically in the blood circulation. So that the human being is very strongly influenced by alcohol in that which actually constitutes his life, in the blood circulation.

With opium, it is the case that it has a particularly strong effect on the astral body, and it affects it in such a way that the person draws it out of the physical body. You see, it is the case that he then perceives this drawing out of the astral body from the physical body as a very great sense of well-being. He is rid of his physical body for a while, and he perceives that as a sense of well-being.

People easily say, as you have probably heard, that sleep is sweet. But when we are asleep, we cannot really feel the sweetness of sleep because we are asleep! We cannot feel the sweetness of sleep; we can only experience it in retrospect. And because we experience it in retrospect, it may happen that people say that sleep is sweet. But when a person takes poppy juice or opium, he feels this sweetness, because in his body he is actually as if asleep and yet awake at the same time. This allows him to enjoy the sweetness, and he feels this sweetness and feels tremendously well in it. It is as if his whole body is permeated with sugar, with a very special sugar, with sweetness through and through. But at the same time his astral body is free from the physical body, and so he perceives, even if not clearly, all kinds of things. He does not have ordinary dreams, but perceives the spiritual world. He makes great journeys through the spiritual world. He likes that. It lifts him up, as you say, into the spiritual world. When he drinks alcohol, on the other hand, his physical body is completely taken up, right down to his blood. His astral body is not freed. Everything is taken up even more by the physical body. Therefore, when a person drinks alcohol, his physical body takes up much more of him than usual. That is precisely the difference. With opium, the soul and spirit are freed, firstly enjoying the physical body in its sweetness, but secondly it goes on journeys, whereby it enters the spiritual world, albeit somewhat disorderly, but nevertheless into the spiritual world. And the Orientals have much of what they describe in the wrong way, but still from the spiritual world, from opium, hashish and the like.

These are the things that show you, in turn, how one cannot understand such things in any other way than by taking into account the higher members of human nature.

We will continue the discussion next Saturday at nine o'clock.

The preceding considerations have essentially been concerned with showing how man in this day and age can gain an awareness of his present position in the evolution of mankind on earth. Even in circles that today do not want to know about the knowledge of spiritual worlds, some conception of this consciousness of the relationship of man to the universe is formed. And let us recall something that is much spoken of today in this connection, in this direction. Where all views of the universe are derived from the outer sensory events and the intellectual grasp of these sensory events, it is also said that the whole world consciousness of modern man has changed over the last few centuries. Attention is drawn to the great change that has taken place in this world consciousness of man through the Copernican world view.

We need only look back to the centuries that preceded the Copernican worldview; we need only look back, for example, to the scholastic worldview, which has been mentioned again here recently, and we find that for this worldview, spiritual forces and spiritual beings were present in the world of the stars. We hear how the scholastics spoke of the inhabitants of the stars, who belong to higher hierarchies in the development of their natures.

Thus, the people of this world view have directed their gaze out into the universe, have looked towards the planets of our planetary system, and towards the other stars in the night sky, and they have developed an awareness that not only etheric-material light from the starry worlds penetrates to them, but that, so to speak, when they look at the starry sky, the eyes of spiritual beings, whose outer embodiment can be seen in the stars, fall into their souls. Today, when man looks up at the planets and the other stars, he first of all forms an idea of how material bodies, permeated by ether, are floating freely in space, and how light emanates from these stars. But man does not think at all of the fact that from these stars the glances of spiritual beings of higher hierarchies meet him.

For modern man the Universe has become dead and unspiritual. And in the sphere of earthly existence, the man of ancient times found that which was intimately connected with the spiritual life of the universe. In the spiritual beings of the other stars were creative powers that had something to do with what develops spiritually and soul-wise here in man, spiritually, soul-wise and bodily, we might say. Men have looked up, let us say, to Saturn. They saw in the forces that come down from Saturn to Earth with the rays of light those forces that work within the human being and bring about the power of memory in this human being. They looked up to Jupiter, saw Jupiter connected with spiritual beings of higher hierarchies, who send their effects into man, so that the consequence of these effects in man is the development of the power of imagination. They looked up at Mars: they were of the view that the forces that work into man from the spiritual entities of Mars give man the power of reason.

Thus, a person belonging to an older stage of human development on Earth looked up at the starry sky and saw in the starry sky the origins of that which he perceived in himself spiritually, soulfully and physically. Man felt that he belonged together with beings of higher hierarchies, and man saw the outer revelations of these beings of higher hierarchies in the stars.

With the advent of the Copernican worldview, this world view also fell away. For it will be understood that an earth, which was seen as being under the influence of the immeasurable spiritual forces of the universe, was, one might say, also a gift of the whole universe for man, that man, by living on earth, saw in this earth the confluence of the effects of innumerable entities. Man felt, as it were, as a citizen of the earth, but, in feeling as such, at the same time as a citizen of the universe.

He looked up to the gods, worshiped his gods, but spoke of these gods in such a way that it was in their intentions to determine the course of human development on earth. The earth was explained in terms of its history, the earth as a dwelling place for man was explained from what was understood of the cosmos, what was understood of the universe. The earth was explained from heaven, and the gods were sought for the intentions for what was seen in the orbit of earthly events, and with which man was intimately connected.

What has emerged from the Copernican worldview gives modern man a completely different view of the world. Man increasingly felt that the earth is an insignificant world body flying around the sun. And when he reflected in a modern way on the relationship between this earth and the rest of the universe, he could not help but call this earth a speck of dust in the universe. All the other celestial bodies that his eye could see seemed more important to him than the earth, because external physical size became decisive for him. And in terms of this, the earth can hardly compete with a few celestial bodies.

Thus, for man, the earth became more and more a mere speck in the universe, as it were, and man felt insignificant in the cosmos on this insignificant earth, insignificant in the universe. With his spiritual powers, he was no longer connected to this universe. It must have seemed impossible for him to believe that what happens on this insignificant speck of dust in the universe, called Earth, is connected with the intentions of divine beings in the universe. One would like to say: All that man has seen on earth, because he recognized that heaven is populated by spirits and spiritual forces, all that has been lost to man in modern times. The universe has been desensualized and de-spirited. The earth has shrunk to an insignificant speck of dust in a world that has been de-spirited and de-spirited.

One must understand such a change in the world picture not only from the standpoint of a theoretical explanation of the world, but also from the standpoint of human consciousness itself. Man, who saw himself on an earth influenced by innumerable spiritual beings that had their realization, their intentions in man of the earth, otherwise knew himself, otherwise these views affected man, than the more spiritual space, in which glowing, spatially formed globes stand and move, of which one conceives no other activity than movement in space, than the revelation through light. How different must the human being, who now knew himself to be on one of the smallest of these world bodies, feel in the spiritless, soulless space, than within earlier world pictures. And yet, this conception of the world must have arisen in the course of the evolution of mankind. What an older mankind once knew about the heavens and their inhabitants, the divine spiritual beings, was indeed the inspiration, the imagination of an ancient dream-like clairvoyance, which was something that as such clairvoyance had descended from the universe into man. One must only imagine this correctly. When people in ancient times looked up at Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and saw divine spiritual forces at work in these heavenly bodies, it was because these revelations penetrated from the heavenly bodies themselves into their inner being and were reflected in them, so that through the influences of the universe, of the cosmos, they knew within themselves what was flowing from the cosmos into the earth. And so, through what heaven gave him, the earth became intelligible to him. Man looked up to his gods and knew what being he is on earth. In the modern conception of the world, he does not know any of this.

In the modern world view, the Earth has shrunk to a speck of dust in the universe, and now man stands as a small, insignificant creature on this speck of dust. Now the gods of the stars no longer tell him anything about plants, animals and the other kingdoms of the earth. Now he must direct his senses only to what lives in the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms, what lives in wind and wave, what dwells in clouds, lightning and thunder. Now he can receive no revelations other than those that his senses give him about the things of the earth, and he can then only conclude from the revelations of the things of the earth about what is in the universe, according to the sensual and intellectual revelation.

Man has undergone this significant transformation in the fifth post-Atlantean period, which signifies the development, the unfolding of the consciousness soul. Everything that had previously come to him from the universe, and which then shone again within his soul, had to be squeezed out of him, so that he could stand there and say to himself: I know nothing but that I live on a speck of dust in the universe. This universe gives me nothing that enlightens me about the spiritual and soul life within me. If I want to experience such spiritual and soul life within me, I must extract it from my own being. I must renounce the idea that the revealing powers come to me from the vastness of the universe. I must fill my soul through my own efforts and activity, and perhaps hope that something in what wells up out of my soul is alive, which, conversely, gives me an insight into the universe from the human point of view.

In the past, man had the opportunity to gain insight into himself as a human being through what the universe revealed to him. He was able to see himself as the son of heaven because the heavens told him what he was as such a son of heaven. Now man had more or less become the earth's hermit, who in the solitude of his life on the dust-grain of the universe must gather strength in order, so to speak, to develop in solitude that which can be developed in him, and to wait to see whether that which reveals itself within is something that can shed light on the universe.

And for a long time, for centuries, what was revealed within was not about the universe. Man described the mineral kingdom according to spatial-temporal forces. He then described the workings of this mineral kingdom in geognosy, in geology. He described the outer sensory processes, how they take place, how plants sprout out of the mineral ground of the earth. He also described the sensory processes that take place in the inner being of the animal and the physical human being itself. He looked around everywhere on earth, inquiring what his senses told him about this earthly existence. Above all, they told him nothing about his own soul, about his own spirit. It was precisely out of this cosmic mood, if one grasped it properly, out of this mood, which can be expressed in the words: I, a human being, am an earth hermit on a speck of dust in the universe — it was precisely out of this mood that the impulse had to come to develop the truly human in free inner unfolding.

And a great, all-embracing question had to arise: Is it really true that in the whole range of what my senses can see, feel, hear, etc., here on earth, what can be combined by the intellect from them, is it really true that there is nothing in this range that gives me more than these senses can tell me? Man has developed a science. But this science, however interesting it may be, says nothing about man. It aims at abstract, dead concepts, which then culminate in natural laws. But all this leaves man indifferent. Man cannot possibly be merely the confluence of these abstract concepts, I would say, this receptacle for all natural laws! For these laws of nature have nothing spiritual, nothing of the soul about them, although they are conceived out of the human spirit.

You see, the person who felt this mood at a time of great significance for the development of world views was the young Goethe. And the expression of what he felt is what he wrote in the first form that he gave to his “Faust”.

Let us recall how Goethe, in the very first form he gave to his “Faust”, really presents this Faust, still remembering what it is that man should seek in the universe, how he would like to feel as a spirit and soul within spirits and souls, but how he feels rejected by the soulless and unspiritual world. How he then reaches for the old revelation of the mystical, the magical, opens an old book in which he finds descriptions of how the higher hierarchical beings live in the stars and their movements, a book that speaks of how heavenly forces ascend and descend and pass golden buckets to each other.

Such a view had existed, but in the times in which Goethe places Faust, such a view no longer captivates people. And Faust turns away, as Goethe himself turned away from the old explanation of the universe, which sought a spiritual and soul element in the whole universe, and he opens the book of the Earth Spirit. And then we read the remarkable words with which the Earth Spirit speaks:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So at the whirling loom of time I labor,
And work the living garment of the Godhead.

But that there is something not quite right in the encounter between this Earth Spirit and Faust is clearly shown by Goethe in that Faust falls under the effect of this Earth Spirit, and that he is then exposed to the influences of Mephistopheles.

If you look at the monumental, succinct words of the Earth Spirit from the point of view of a concrete world view and are unbiased enough to make an assessment that was actually close to Goethe's own feelings, in that he did not stop at the Earth Spirit scene when writing Faust , but continued, if one considers all this, then one must fall into a kind of heresy in the face of much of what has been said and printed about “Faust,” but which certainly does not reflect the real opinion, the real view of Goethe. After all, what has not been said in connection with “Faust”!

You keep looking back to the words that Faust speaks to Gretchen, who is around sixteen years old, later in the course of the Faust epic: “the all-embracing, all-sustaining... Feeling is everything, name is sound and smoke,” and one feels so tremendously philosophical when quoting all that the expression is supposed to mean for one's own soul concepts, and now also quoting what Faust gives as instruction to a teenage girl. It is a schoolgirl instruction. It is actually compromising that one can cite this schoolgirl instruction from people who want to be clever as the quintessence of what one puts into words as a world view. This does indeed result, even if it is heretical, in an unbiased consideration.

But something similar also applies to the lapidary, monumental words spoken by the Earth Spirit: “In the floods of life, in the storm of action” and so on. They are beautiful, these words, but very general; we find something of a mystical pantheism of a sensually nebulous kind in them. I would say that it does not feel cloudy to us when we have this before us:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and death,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So at the whirling loom of time I labor,
And fashion the living robe of divinity.

Nothing happens that does not give us the ability to look concretely into the universe, into the cosmos.

Goethe certainly felt this, especially later, because he didn't stop there, he wrote the Prologue to Heaven. And if we take the prologue in heaven: “The sun resounds in the old way, in the spheres of the brothers' song” and so on, then it is much more reminiscent of the heavenly powers that float up and down and pass the golden buckets than of the somewhat nebulous tides and weaves of the earth spirit. Goethe returned from – well, one cannot say the 'divinization of the earth spirit', but something similar. Later, as a more mature person, Goethe no longer regarded this earth spirit as the one to which he wanted to turn solely and exclusively in the form of Faust, but he took up again the spirit of the great world, the spirit of the universe. And even if the words spoken by the Earth Spirit in the first version of Faust are beautiful, succinct and monumental, these words spoken by the Earth Spirit are also distantly related to the “All-embracing, All-sustaining One” and the teachings of the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. only distant kinship – these words spoken by the Earth Spirit also have a distant kinship with the “All-embracing, All-sustaining One”, with the instruction of the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. Why shouldn't they be beautiful for that reason? Of course, when instructing schoolgirls, one must take particular care to say things beautifully! Why shouldn't they be beautiful?

But of course we have to be clear about the fact that Goethe, as a mature man, did not see in nebulous pantheism that which gives man a real world-consciousness.

But there is something else at the root of it. Goethe, with his concrete way of looking at the things of the world – at least to a certain degree – would not have been able to draw his Faust in the way he did if he had portrayed him as a representative of humanity for the 12th century of Western civilization. He would have had to take on a different form, but he would never have been able to draw this form as he drew his Faust. Faust should not have put aside the book of Nostradamus and turned from the spirit of the great world to the earth spirit, because at that time there was an awareness that man, when he understands himself correctly, understands himself as a son of heaven, and the spirits of heaven have something to say to him about his own nature. But Faust is the representative of humanity who belongs to the 16th century, thus already to the fifth post-Atlantic period, the period that approaches the view: I live as the earth hermit on a speck of dust in the universe. It would no longer have been honest of the young Goethe to have Faust look up to the spirit of the great world. As a representative of humanity, this could not be the case with Faust, because in his consciousness, the human being no longer had any connection with the heavenly powers that rise and descend and pass the golden buckets to each other, that is, with the entities of the higher hierarchies. That was darkened, that was no longer there for human consciousness. So Faust could only turn to that with which he could be connected as an earthen hermit: He turned to the genius of the earth.

That Faust turns to the genius of the earth is something, I would say, radically grandiose, which occurs in Goethe: for this is the turn that human consciousness has taken in this age, away from the darkening powers of heaven to the genius of the earth, to whom the spirit itself has pointed, which has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. For this genius, who has passed through the mystery of Golgotha, has connected himself with the earth. By connecting himself with the evolution of humanity on earth, he has now given man the power, in the time when he can no longer look up to the spirits of heaven, to look to the spirits of the earth, and the spirits of the earth now speak in man. Formerly it was the stars in their motion that revealed the words of heaven to the human soul that could interpret and recognize these words of heaven. Now man had to look at his connection with the earth, that is, ask himself whether the genius of the earth speaks in him.

But only nebulous words, mystically pantheistic words, can Goethe in his age wrest from the genius of the earth. It is right, it is magnificent that Faust turns to the genius of the earth, but I would like to say that it is quite magnificent that Goethe does not yet let this genius of the earth express anything that can already satisfy. That the Genius of the Earth first stammers and stutters, I might say, the secrets of the world into mystic pantheistic formulas, instead of pronouncing them in a sharply defined manner, shows that Goethe has placed his Faust in the age in which he saw his Faust and himself.

But one must feel one's way towards this relationship between Faust and the Earth Genius, so beautifully portrayed by Goethe, so that the Earth Genius will gradually become more and more understandable to man, so that he will reveal himself more and more clearly to man when man allows the activity of his own soul, the activity of his own spirit, to reveal what is in the heavens. Formerly the heavens revealed to man what he needed to know for the earth; now man turns to the earth, because the earth is, after all, a creature of the heavens. And if one gets to know the genius or genii that have taken up their residences on earth, then one nevertheless gets to know things about the heavens.

That was also the procedure adopted, for example, in my book 'Occult Science: An Outline of Its Methods'. There, everything within the human being was questioned and asked to speak. There, much was actually drawn from the spirit of the earth. But the spirit of the earth speaks about the Saturn age, the Sun age, the Moon age of the earth, the Jupiter age, the Venus age. The spirit of the earth speaks to us of what it has retained in its memory of the universe. Once upon a time, people turned their gaze out into the vastness of the heavens to gain insights about the earth. Now, they look down into the human soul, listen to what the spirit of the earth has to say about human nature from the memory of the world, and through their understanding of the genius of the earth, they gain macrocosmic knowledge. Today, of course, if one attaches the right importance to spiritual science, to spiritual knowledge, one would no longer present Faust's conversation with the Earth Spirit as Goethe did, although in his time it was ingenious to present it in this way.

Today, the earth spirit should not speak in those general, abstract words that can be said to express anything from a floating water wave to a spirit of the earth. Only that is mystically dark, because this floating wave of water is now sitting at a loom and weaving! I know, of course, that many people feel extraordinarily well when such vagueness stirs in them through the soul; but one does not thereby attain the inner human conscious stabilization that one needs as a modern person. There is always something of a reverie or even of intoxication about it: “All-embracing, All-sustaining,” “in the tides of life, in the storm of action,” one is always a little beside oneself, not quite in oneself. It certainly gives people a sense of well-being when they can be a little beside themselves; some people prefer to be completely beside themselves and let all kinds of ghosts give them insights into the world.

By this I would just like to suggest that we cannot do otherwise in modern times than to turn to the genius of the earth that lives in ourselves! The fact of the matter is this: if we simply take what the scientific ideas of modern times give us, as it is, as it is laid down in external civilization today, then it remains abstract, leaving human consciousness cold. But when one begins to wrestle with these concepts, to wrestle even with Haeckel's abstractions, then something very concrete, something that can be experienced directly, comes out of this wrestling: Then the great realization comes over us that although we initially receive the indifferent scientific ideas, this form is only a mask. We must first realize that the genius of the earth is telling us what we receive. We must first listen with the whole ear of the soul to what we initially hear with the abstract mind. And in this way we learn to understand the genius of the earth in a concrete way by listening.

In this way we approach the way in which man, in the age of consciousness soul development, must attain world consciousness. These things must be grasped by the human being in a way that is felt. Then, with feeling, I would say with his heart's blood, he approaches the anthroposophical world feeling. And this, not just individual ideas about the world, but this world feeling, must be acquired by the modern human being if he wants to feel and think in the right way, in accordance with the suggestions that I have made here recently.

Tomorrow, my dear friends, I will continue these reflections. Today, I would first like to say a few words to you about the state of the negotiations in Stuttgart. These negotiations are connected with what you have noticed as a kind of crisis within the Anthroposophical Society.

At this moment, the Anthroposophical Society must decide in its leading personalities whether it has viability or not. You have also heard various things here about the living conditions of the Anthroposophical Society. I would just like to say a few words about this today: this anthroposophical movement started in Central Europe. But it is of interest to the broadest international circles. And anthroposophy itself has gone through the three phases I spoke to you about last time. The Anthroposophical Society has not fully kept pace with the development of anthroposophy, and today there is an abyss between the work of the Anthroposophical Society and the reality of anthroposophy as it can be found today. This abyss must be bridged. And since the anthroposophical movement originated in Central Europe, it is a matter of fact that conditions must first be put in order in Central Europe. Then, when they are in order in Central Europe, we must immediately think about the order of the international anthroposophical societies, which will then have their center here or elsewhere. But the vagueness in which the Anthroposophical Society finds itself today must first be resolved. For this reason, the first step was to work on the consolidation of the Anthroposophical Society in Stuttgart.

Now the negotiations were extremely difficult. This crisis arose for the reasons I mentioned here on January 6, and the situation is as follows: on December 10, I gave a kind of mandate to one of the members of the Central Council, Mr. Uehli. I said at the time: It has been noticeable for a long time that the Anthroposophical Society needs consolidation, and I can only hope for success if the Central Board in Stuttgart, supplemented by leading personalities in Stuttgart, tells me the next time I am in Stuttgart how they would like to begin the consolidation; otherwise, if the Central Board does not come up with ideas about the consolidation, I would have to approach each individual member myself. Only this alternative is possible. —

You can see from this, my dear friends, that what was presented as a necessity for the consolidation of the Society was said on December 10; so it has nothing to do with the fire. After the fire, after this terrible catastrophe that has shattered our hearts, it must be said: if reconstruction is to happen, a strong Anthroposophical Society is needed; because without it, reconstruction would not be possible.

So it is imperative that a consolidation, an inner strengthening, a clear will of the Anthroposophical Society comes about.

This has involved very difficult negotiations in recent weeks, initially in Stuttgart. I said: They have to happen first, then they will be able to be on international ground. Well, I would have to tell you a book, a very thick book, if I wanted to tell you everything that has been negotiated in these weeks. But basically it was inconclusive until yesterday. And the day before yesterday I suggested that, now things have turned out this way, a kind of committee should deal with drafting a circular letter in which the great questions affecting the Anthroposophical Society and movement today be brought to the attention of the members; that such a circular letter call for the calling of a meeting of delegates in Stuttgart, initially for the German and Austrian branches, so that work can be done on this consolidation [see $. 268].

This committee, whose effectiveness is initially intended only until the delegates' meeting, which is to take place at the end of February, on February 25, 26 and 27, is a provisional one. Until this delegates' meeting, it is to have the leading position in the Central European Anthroposophical Society. The representatives on the committee are Dr. Unger, a member of the old Central Executive Council, and Mr. Leinhas, representing the “Kommenden Tages”; then, as a result of the circumstances, there are a number of prominent Stuttgart citizens: Dr. Rittelmeyer, Mr. von Grone, Mr. Wolfgang Wachsmuth, Dr. Palmer, Dr. Kolisko; from elsewhere, Mr. Werbeck from Hamburg and, representing the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press, Miss Mücke. This committee has been entrusted with the preparatory work for the consolidation. After all the other efforts failed, a draft of the appeal to the assembly of delegates was produced yesterday. It is to be finalized and sent out at the beginning of next week and is to include the real issues facing the Anthroposophical Society today. So that is what I have to announce for the time being.

The negotiations were indeed accompanied by widespread dissatisfaction. After we had finished the negotiations on the draft appeal yesterday morning, I was able to speak to the members of our academic youth movement who were particularly concerned; so I hope that during the days I am now here in Dornach, the young will negotiate with the old in an appropriate way. The day before yesterday I expressed it in this way: I said, “I hope that now, taking into account the new committee, the young will be accepted by the old among the young.”

Something like this had to take place, because everywhere people are demanding a new, fresh element of life. That must come. Youth is knocking at the gates. It has every right to do so; it must be understood. But age cannot be ignored; it must be allowed to work; the foundations of the Anthroposophical Society have come out of it. A modus operandi must be found as quickly as possible that will lead to a strong Anthroposophical Society, otherwise we will not be able to continue our work.

I wanted to share this with you today so that you are informed about these matters. The old Central Executive Council has ceased to exist, and this committee will now manage affairs until the end of February.

By the time students reach their mid-teens, they have already entered puberty. Teachers need to keep this very much in mind well before it actually manifests. We simply need to open our eyes to what happens in growing children, both before and during the process of sexual maturity, to appreciate how important it is to be prepared for this challenge.

We have seen in our studies that until the change of teeth children are imitators and that, while there is still no clear differentiation between organic functions and soul activities, children are inwardly given over to the soul and spiritual forces flowing down from the head, which continue work organically and permeate the whole organism. The most characteristic feature of this stage is the way those soul-spiritual forces work together with the bodily forces.

I will need to use the insights of clairvoyant consciousness to give you a clear description of what happens in young children at this stage of life—not because I think we need to form our ideas in a particular way, but it just may be the best way to understand what has been said so far.

When young children sleep, the soul and spiritual members leave the physical sheaths (just as in any adult) and re-enter at the moment of awaking. In children, however, there is still no significant difference between conscious experiences while awake and unconscious experiences during sleep. Normally, if no memories of daytime events enter the world of sleep (and this rarely happens in childhood), the sleeping life of children moves within realms far beyond the earthly sphere. From these higher worlds, active forces are drawn that then work during the waking state, from the brain down into a child’s whole organism.

During the second dentition, certain soul and spiritual forces in children are released from working entirely in the organic sphere. They begin to assume an independent, soul-spiritual quality. Between the change of teeth and puberty, thinking, feeling, and willing in children begin to work more freely. Children are no longer imitators but, through a natural feeling for authority, they develop the consciousness they need to connect with the world. This faith in adult authority is essential, because outer conditions are not enough to ensure that children connect sufficiently with the world. The way adults confront one another, whether verbally or by other means, is very different from the way children encounter adults. Children need the additional support that a sense of authority provides. Consequently, experiences while awake will enter their soulspiritual life during sleep. So, teachers have the possibility of reaching children through education between the change of teeth and puberty to the same extent that earthly experiences enter children’s sleep and replace those of the spiritual world.

With the onset of puberty, an entirely new situation begins, and emerging adolescents are essentially different from what they were prior to sexual maturity. To describe this, it may be helpful to refer back to what was said at the end of yesterday’s lecture. Until the change of teeth, it is normal for children to live entirely within the physical body. However, if this state is extended beyond its natural time, when it would no longer be normal, it results in a very melancholic temperament. During childhood it is natural to have a relationship between the soulspiritual and physical organization that characterizes an adult melancholic. Bear in mind that what is right and good for one stage of life becomes abnormal in another.

During the second dentition, certain soul-spiritual forces are liberated from previous organic activities, and they flow into what I call the body of formative forces, or ether body. This member of the human being is linked entirely to the outer world, and it is appropriate for children to live in it between the change of teeth and puberty. If, even before the change of teeth, these ether forces were excessive—that is, if the child has lived too much in the etheric sheath before the second dentition—the result is a decidedly phlegmatic temperament. However, children can have a normal and balanced relationship with the ether body, and this is absolutely essential between the seventh and the fourteenth years, between the change of teeth and puberty. Again, if this condition is carried too far into later life, a decidedly phlegmatic temperament develops in the adult.

The true birthplace of the sanguine temperament is the next member of the human being that, under normal circumstances, becomes independent during puberty. Yesterday, I called this the astral body—the member of the human being that lives beyond space and time. If, between the change of teeth and puberty, children draw too much from what should come into its own only with sexual maturity, a sanguine temperament arises. Growing human beings become inwardly mature for sanguinity only with the arrival of puberty. Thus everything in life has a normal period of time. Various abnormalities arise when something that is normal for one period of life is pushed into another. If you survey life from this point of view, you begin to understand the human being more deeply.

What really happens as children mature sexually? During the past few days we have already illuminated this somewhat. We have seen how children continue, after the change of teeth, to work inwardly with forces that have to a certain degree become liberated soul-spiritual forces. During the following stages, children incarnate via the system of breathing and blood circulation, and the tendons and the muscles grow more firmly onto the bones. They incarnate from within out, toward the human periphery, and at the time of sexual maturity young adolescents break through into the outer world. Only then do they stand fully in the world.

This dramatic development makes it imperative for teachers to approach adolescents, who have passed through sexual maturity, quite differently from the way they dealt with the children before. Basically, the previous processes, before puberty, involved emancipated soul-spiritual forces that still had nothing to do with sex in its own realm. True, boys or girls show definite predispositions toward their own sexes, but this cannot be considered sexuality as such. Sexuality develops only after the breakthrough into the external world, when a new relationship with the outer world is established. But then, at this time, something happens in the realm of an adolescent’s soul and bodily nature, and this is not unlike what occurred previously during the second dentition. During the change of teeth, forces were liberated to become active in a child’s forces of thinking, feeling, and willing, which were then directed more toward the memory. The powers of memory were then released. Now, at puberty, something else becomes available for free activity in the soul realm. These are powers that previously entered the rhythms of breathing and, subsequently, strived to introduce rhythmic qualities into the musculature and even the skeleton. This rhythmic element is now transformed into an adolescent receptiveness to the realm of creative ideas and fantasy. Fundamentally, true powers of fantasy are not born until puberty, because they come into their own only after the astral body is born. The astral body exists beyond time and space and links together past, present, and future according to its own principles, as we experience it in our dreams.

What is it that adolescents bring with them when they break through into the outer world via the skeletal system? It is what they originally brought with them from pre-earthly existence; it was gradually interwoven with their whole inner being. And now, with the onset of sexual maturity, adolescents are, as it were, cast out of the spiritual world. Without exaggerating, we can express it that strongly, because it represents the facts; with the coming of puberty, young people are cast out of the living world of spirit and thrown into the outer world, which they perceive only through the physical and ether bodies. Although adolescents are not aware of what is happening inside them, subconsciously this plays a very important role. Subconsciously, or semi-consciously, it makes adolescents compare the world they have now entered with the one they formerly held within themselves. Previously, they had not experienced the spiritual world consciously, but they nevertheless found it possible to live in harmony with it. Their inner being felt attuned to it and prepared to cooperate freely with the soul-spiritual realm. But now, conditions have changed, and the external world no longer offers such possibilities. It presents all sorts of hindrances that, in themselves, create a desire to overcome them. This, in turn, leads to a tumultuous relationship between adolescents and the surrounding world, which lasts from fourteen or fifteen until the early twenties.

This inner upheaval is bound to come, and teachers do well to be aware of it before it arrives. There may be overly sensitive people who believe that it would be better to save teenagers from this inner turmoil, only to find that they have become their greatest enemy. It would be quite incorrect to try to spare them this tempestuous time of life. It is far better to plan ahead in your educational goals, so that what you do before they reach puberty comes to help and support adolescents in their struggles of soul and spirit.

Teachers must be clear that, with the arrival of puberty, a completely different being emerges, born out of a new relationship with the world. It is no good appealing to students’ previous sense of authority; now they will demand reasons for all that is expected of them. Teachers must get into the habit of approaching a young man or woman rationally. For example, think of an adolescent boy whom the spiritual world has led into this earthly world and who now becomes rebellious because it is so different from what he expected. The adult must try to show him (and without any pedantry) that everything he meets in this world has “prehistory.” The adult must get this adolescent to see that present conditions are the consequences of what went before. You must act the part of an expert who really understands why things have come to be as they are.

From now on, you will accomplish nothing by way of authority. You have to convince adolescents through the sheer weight of your indisputable knowledge and expertise and provide waterproof reasons for everything you do or expect of them. If, at this stage, students cannot see sound reasons in the material you give them, if conditions in the world seem to make no sense to them, they begin to doubt the rightness of their earlier life. They feel they are in opposition to what they experienced during those years that, seemingly, merely led to the present, unacceptable conditions. And if, during this inner turmoil, they cannot find contact with someone who can reassure them, to some extent at least, that there are good reasons for what is happening in the world, then the inner stress may become so intolerable that they might break down altogether. This newly emerged astral body is not of this world, and these young people have been cast out of the astral world. They willingly enter this earthly world only if they can be convinced of its right to exist.

It would be a complete misunderstanding of what I have been describing to think that adolescents are the least bit aware of what is happening in them. During ordinary consciousness, this struggle arises in dim feelings from the unconscious. It surges up through blunted will impulses. It lives in the disappointment of seemingly unattainable ideals, in frustrated desires, and perhaps in a certain inner numbness to what manifests in the unreasonable events of the world.

If education is to be effective at all during this stage (which it must be for any young person willing to learn), then your teaching must be communicated in the appropriate form. It must be a preparation for the years to come—up to the early twenties and even later in life. Having suffered the wounds of life and having retaliated in their various ways, young people from fifteen to the early twenties must eventually find their way back into the world from which they were evicted during puberty. The duration of this period varies, especially during our chaotic times, which tend to prolong it even longer into adult life. Young people must feel they are accepted again and be able to renew contact with the spiritual world, for without it, life is impossible. However, should they feel any coercion from those in authority, this new link loses all meaning and value for life. If we are aware of these difficulties well before the arrival of puberty, we can make good use of the inborn longing for authority in children, bringing them to the point at which there is no longer any need for an authoritarian approach. And this stage should coincide with the coming of sexual maturity. By then, however, educators must be ready to give convincing reasons for everything they ask of their students.

Seen from a broader, spiritual perspective, we can observe the grand metamorphosis taking place in a young person during the period of sexual maturity. It is very important to realize that the whole question of sex becomes a reality only during puberty, when adolescents enter the external world as I have described it. Naturally, since everything in life is relative, this, too, must be taken as a relative truth. Nevertheless, you should realize that, until sexual maturity, children live more as generic human beings; it is not until the onset of puberty that they experience the world differently, according to whether they are men or women. This realization (which in our generally intellectual and naturalistic civilization cannot be assumed) allows real insight into the relationship between the sexes for those who work with open minds toward knowledge of the human being. It also helps them understand the problem of women’s position in society, not just during our time but also in the future.

Once you appreciate the tremendous transformation that occurs in the male organism during the change of voice (to use one example), you will be able to understand the statement that, until the age of sexual maturity, a child retains a more general human nature, one still undivided into the sexes. Similar processes occur in the female organism, but in a different area. The human voice, with its ability to moderate and form sounds and tones, is a manifestation of our general human nature. It is born from the soul-spiritual substance that works on children until puberty. Changes of pitch and register, on the other hand, which occur during this mutation, are the result of outer influences. They are forced on adolescents from outside, so to speak, and they are the ways that a boy places himself into the outer world with his innermost being. It is not just a case of the softer parts in the larynx relating more strongly to the bones, but a slight ossification of the larynx itself takes place that amounts, essentially, to a withdrawal of the larynx from the purely human inner nature toward a more earthly existence.

This act of stepping out into the world should really be seen in a much wider context than is generally the case. Usually, people think that the capacity to love, which awakens at this time, is linked directly to sexual attraction, but this is not really the whole story. The power to love, born during sexual maturity, embraces everything within an adolescent’s entire sphere. Love between the sexes is only one specific, limited aspect of love in the world. Only when we see human love in this light can we understand it correctly, and then we can also understand its task in the world.

What really happens in human beings during the process of sexual maturity? Prior to this, as children, their relationship to the world was one in which they first imitated their surroundings and then came under the power of authority. Outer influences worked on them, because at that time their inner being mainly represented what they brought with them from preearthly life. Humanity as a whole had to work on them externally, first through the principle of imitation and then through authority. Now, at puberty, having found their own way into the human race and no longer depending on outer support as a younger child does, a new feeling arises in them, along with a whole new appraisal of humankind as a whole. And this new experience of humankind represents a spiritual counterpart to the physical capacity to reproduce. Physically, they gain the ability to procreate; spiritually, they gain the ability to experience humankind as a whole.

During this new stage, the polarity between man and woman becomes quite obvious. Any realization of human potential on earth is possible only through a real understanding of the other sex by means of social interaction; and this applies to the realm of soul and spirit as well. Both men and women fully represent humankind, but in different ways. A woman sees humanity as a gift of the metaphysical worlds. Fundamentally, she sees humanity as the result of divine abundance. Unconsciously, in the depths of her soul, she holds a picture of humankind as her standard of values, and she evaluates and assesses human beings according to this standard. If these remarks are not generally accepted today, it is because our current civilization bears all the signs of a male-dominated society.

For a long time, the most powerful influences in our civilization have displayed a decidedly masculine nature. An example of this (however grotesque it may sound) may be found in Freemasonry. It is symbolic of our times that men, if they wish to keep certain matters to themselves, isolate themselves in the lodges of Freemasonry. There are also lodges in which both men and women congregate, but Freemasonry has already become blunted in these, and they no longer bear its original stamp. The constitution of Freemasonry is a specific example, but it nevertheless expresses the male-dominated character of our society. Women, too, have absorbed a great deal of the masculine element from our civilization, and because of this they actually prevent the specifically feminine element from coming into its own. This is why we so often get the impression that, in terms of inner substance and outer form, there is very little difference between the ideals and programs of the various women’s movements and those of men—even in the tone of the speeches they deliver. Obviously, these movements differ insofar as, on the one side, there are demands to safeguard women’s interests, while, on the other, the demands are on behalf of men. But, in terms of their inner substance, they are barely distinguishable.

When you take a good look at modern medicine in all its materialistic aspects, you can see how it fails to understand human nature, especially in terms of its physical elements, so that it depends on experimentation. If you observe modern medicine, you find the product of a distinctly masculine attitude, however strange this may sound to you. In fact, one could hardly find a better illustration of male thinking than in what modern medicine so blatantly reveals to us. For a man, in his innermost being, experiences humanity as something of an enigma. To him it appears unfathomable and poses endless questions whose solutions seem to lie beyond his powers. This typically masculine characteristic is expressed in all the mysterious ceremony and the dry and manly atmosphere of freemasonry. This same male tendency has permeated our culture to such an extent that, although women suffer under it, they nevertheless wish to emulate it and to make it part of their own lives.

If we speak the truth today, people tend to think that we do so merely to present contrary statements to the world. Yet the reality is often unorthodox. Therefore, if we want to speak the truth, we must put up with seeming contrary, however inconvenient this might be.

Women live more in the images they create of humanity, while men experience humanity in more wishful and enigmatic ways. To understand this, we need to be clear about a symptom that is especially significant for the art of teaching today. When people speak of love today, they seldom differentiate between the various types of love. Naturally, we can generalize the concept of love, just as one can speak about condiments in a general way. But when people speculate abstractly about certain matters and then hold forth about them, it always strikes me as if they were talking about salt, sugar, or pepper merely in terms of condiments. We only need to apply such abstractions to practical life by putting salt instead of sugar in our coffee—they are both condiments, after all—to realize such foolishness. Anyone who indulges in general speculation instead of entering the concrete realities of life commits the same folly.

The love of a woman is very different from that of a man. Her love originates in the realm of imagination and constantly makes pictures. A woman does not love a man just as he is, standing there before her in ordinary, humdrum life (forgive me, but men, after all, are not exactly the sort that a healthy imagination could fall in love with). Rather, she weaves into her love the ideal she received as a gift from heaven. A man’s love, on the other hand, is tinged with desire; it has a wishful nature. This difference needs to be noted, regardless of whether it is expressed more in an idealistic or a realistic way. Ideal love may inspire longings of an ideal quality. The instinctive and sensuous kind may be a mere product of fancy. But this fundamental difference between love as it lives in a man and as it lives in a woman is a reality. A woman’s love is steeped in imagination, and in a man’s love there is an element of desire. And because these two kinds of love are complementary, they can become harmonized in life.

Educators need to bear this in mind when faced with sexually mature students. They must realize that one can no longer bring them certain things that belong to the preadolescent stage, and that they have missed the opportunity for doing so. Therefore, to prevent a onesided attitude in later life, we must try to give to prepubescent children enough of the right material to last them through the following stages. Fortunately, coeducation, in both primary and secondary education, is increasingly accepted today, so that boys and girls work side by side and learn to cooperate later on as men and women in society. Consequently, it is especially important to heed what was just said. Through this, a contemporary phenomenon such as the women’s movement will have a truly sound and healthy basis.

If we expand these considerations by taking a worldwide perspective, we are led to the fundamental differences that exist between East and West, with Asia on one side and Europe and America on the other. This difference between East and West is far greater than any other differences we may find when comparing, say, Europe and America. Throughout Asia, there are still traces of ancient, wise civilizations. Externally, they appear completely decadent, but their wisdom nevertheless lives on like a memory. It is revered as a sacred memory, to the extent that, fundamentally, an Asian cannot really understand a European, and vice versa. Those who are under illusions about this fact will delude themselves about the world’s greatest historical secret in our time. It is a secret of special significance not only for today, but very much so for the future.

Despite its manifold complexities, life in the West has a more uniform character than life in the East. The main concern of Western people is life in this earthly civilization, a civilization that draws its ideas mostly from what happens between birth and death. The people of the East (at least in their inner religious lives) do not limit their view to the earthly time between birth and death, or life in the outer mechanical civilization. People of the West, however, do live for this earthly time, even in their religious feelings. The people of the East, on the other hand, ask themselves searching questions, such as, Why was I born into this world? Why did I enter this senseperceptible world at all? Westerners take life in the physical world more or less for granted, even if they end it by suicide. Western people take earthly life for granted, and they have developed an inner receptivity for life after death only because it would be unsatisfying and a disappointment if earthly existence were entirely wiped out.

There is a fundamental difference between these two views. Again, however, we cannot get to the bottom of this merely through abstract descriptions instead of entering life fully. The farther we move from East to West, the more we find that the Western woman, despite her outer consciousness, cherishes a longing for the spirituality of the East. The man of the West, however, presents a totally different picture. He, too, has his secret longings, but not for anything vague and misty. His longings spring from what he experiences inwardly. From cradle to grave, he is enmeshed in the activities and pressures of his civilization, but something in him longs to get away from it all. We can perceive this mood of soul in all the civilized countries around us, from the River Vistula in Eastern Europe through Germany, France, and Britain, and right across the American continent to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. In all these lands, we find this attribute in common. Educators who deal with adolescents also experience this, perhaps to their despair and without recognizing the underlying causes. Only a teacher wearing blinders could possible overlook this.

During our previous meetings I mentioned that we really ought to throw away every school textbook, because only a direct and personal relationship between teachers and students should affect children. When it comes to teaching adolescents, however, every available textbook and, for that matter, almost our whole outer civilization become great sources of pain. I know that there are many who are unaware of this, because they do not go into real life with their eyes open wide enough. Here, again, in our outer civilization we find a notably lopsided masculine quality. Any book on history—whether a history of civilization or anthropology—will confirm this trend. As representatives of Western civilization, people long to escape the physical world in which they are caught up, but they lack the necessary courage to do so. People cannot find the bridge from the sensory world into the spiritual world. And so, everywhere in our civilization we find a yearning to get away from it all, and yet an inability to act accordingly.

It is hard enough to establish the right environment for teaching prepubescent children. But those who have to teach adolescents could almost feel helpless, because the means available for meeting their needs are so inadequate. This alone should kindle a real longing in such teachers for a deeper understanding of the human being. Of course, this longing may already be there in the teachers of younger children, but it is a prerequisite for anyone of sound pedagogical sense who teaches adolescents.

A woman’s nostalgia for the ways of the East and a man’s wish to be free of the bondage of Western life represent fundamental features of our time. This difference between the sexes is less apparent in preadolescent children, who still bear more general human features. Yet, as soon as we are confronted by adolescents, we meet many difficulties that arise quite concretely.

Imagine, for example, that a German literature teacher wants to recommend to her adolescent student a book that presents a German perspective of Goethe. She would really find herself in a quandary, since there are no suitable books available. If she chooses an available one, her scholar would not get the right picture of Goethe. If she chooses a biography of Goethe written by, say, Lewes, her German scholar would learn the more outward features of Goethe better than from any of the German books on the subject, but again he would not become familiar with the specifically German characteristics of Goethe. This is the situation today, for we simply do not have adequate literature for teaching adolescents. To remedy this, everything depends on women taking their proper place in culture. They should be allowed to contribute their specifically feminine qualities, but they must at the same time be careful not to introduce anything they have adopted from our maledominated civilization.

During the 1890s, I had a conversation with a German feminist. She expressed her views in radical terms, but I could not help feeling that, instead of enriching society with what only womanhood offers, she was trying to force her way into our onesidedly masculine culture by employing masculine tactics. My meaning must not be taken in a crude or biased way. I felt that I had to say to this free and uncompromising lady, “Your movement does not yet offer what the world really needs. The world does not need women who ‘wear the pants’ [forgive me, I believe in England that such a remark is unforgivably rude]. Rather, both masculine and feminine qualities make specific contributions toward the general enhancement of our society.”

As teachers, whenever we approach growing human beings, we must note the striking contrast between the prepuberty and post-puberty years. Let us take a concrete example: There is Milton’s Paradise Lost, which would be good to use in our lessons. The question is, when? Those of you who have thought through what has been said so far and have understood my remarks about the right time to introduce narrative and descriptive elements will find that this work by Milton (or epic poetry in general) would be suitable material after the tenth year. Also, Homer will be appreciated best when taught between the tenth and the fourteenth years. On the other hand, it would be premature to use Shakespeare as study material at this stage, since, in order to be ready for dramatic poetry, students must at least have entered puberty. To absorb the dramatic element at an earlier age, students would have to drive something out of themselves prematurely, which, later on, they would definitely miss.

What I tried to describe just now can be experienced vividly when, for example, you have to give history lessons to boys and girls after they enter puberty. Both masculine and feminine forces work during historical events, though in a different form than they do today. Yet all of the historical accounts available for teaching adolescents bear a decidedly masculine quality, as though they had been compiled by Epimetheus. Girls who have reached sexual maturity show little inclination toward such an approach. Boys may find it somewhat boring, but in their case it is not impossible to use this Epimethean way, which judges and holds onto what can be ascertained and established. But there is also a Promethean way of looking at history, which not only records events that occurred, but also shows their transformation into the ideas of the present time. This approach to history shows how the impulses that led the past have become the current thinking of today, and how impulses, in turn, continue to lead present time further. A Promethean way of looking at history, in particular, appeals strongly to the feminine element.

However, it would be very one-sided to teach history in the Promethean style at a girls’ school, or in an Epimethean style at a boys’ school. The minds of the young men would simply flow back into the past and become even more rigid than they are already. If the Promethean way of teaching history were to be only one applied in a girls’ school, the students would be tempted to fly off into futuristic speculations. They would always be attracted to the impulses that they happened to like naturally. We can achieve a more balanced society only if we add a historical view that bears the prophetic marks of Prometheus to the more predominant Epimethean way, which until now has been just about the only one available. Then, if both attitudes are alive in our lessons, we will at last achieve the right approach to history for students who have reached the age of sexual maturity.

Arithmetic and geometry, indeed all mathematics, occupy a unique position in education. Education can only be filled with the necessary vitality and give rise to a real interplay between the soul of the teacher and the soul of the child, if the teacher fully realizes the consequences of his actions and methods. He must know exactly what effect is made on the child by the treatment he receives in school, or anywhere else.

Man is a being of body, soul and spirit; his bodily nature is formed and moulded by the spirit. The teacher, then, must always be aware of what is taking place in the soul and spirit when any change occurs in the body, and again, what effect is produced in the body when influences are brought to bear on the life of spirit or soul.

Anything that works upon the child's conceptual and imaginative faculties, anything that is to say of the nature of painting or drawing which is then led over into writing, or again, botany taught in the way indicated yesterday, all this has a definite effect. And here, above all, we must consider a higher member of man's being, a member to which I have already referred as the etheric body, or body of formative forces. The human being has, in the first place, his physical body. It is revealed to ordinary physical sense-perception. Besides this physical body, however, he has an inner organization, perceptible only to Imaginative Cognition, a super-sensible, etheric body. Again he has an organization perceptible only to Inspiration, the next stage of super-sensible knowledge. (These expressions need not confuse us; they are merely terms.) Inspiration gives insight into the so-called astral body and into the real Ego, the Self of the human being.

From birth till death, this etheric body, this body of formative forces which is the first super-sensible member of man's being never separates from the physical body. Only at death does this occur. During sleep, the etheric organization remains with the physical body lying there in bed. When man sleeps, the astral body and Ego-organization leave the physical and etheric bodies and enter them again at the moment of waking.

Now it is the physical and etheric bodies which are affected when the child is taught arithmetic or geometry, or when we lead him on to writing from the basis of drawing and painting. All this remains in the etheric body and its vibrations persist during sleep. On the other hand, history and such a study of the animal kingdom as I spoke of in yesterday's lecture work only upon the astral body and Ego-organization. What results from these studies passes out of the physical and etheric bodies into the spiritual world during sleep.

If, therefore, we are teaching the child plant-lore or writing, the effects are preserved by the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, whereas the results of history lessons or lessons on the nature of man are different, for they are carried out into the spiritual world by the Ego and astral body. This points to an essential difference between the effects produced by the different lessons.

We must realize that all impressions of an imaginative or pictorial nature made on the child have the tendency to become more and more perfect during sleep. On the other hand, everything we tell the child on the subject of history or the being of man works on his organization of soul and spirit and tends to be forgotten, to fade away and grow dim during sleep. In teaching therefore, we have necessarily to consider whether the subject-matter works upon the etheric and physical bodies or upon the astral body and Ego-organization.

Thus on the one hand, the study of the plant kingdom, the rudiments of writing and reading of which I spoke yesterday affect the physical and etheric bodies. (I shall speak about the teaching of history later on.) On the other hand, all that is learnt of man's relation to the animal kingdom affects the astral body and Ego-organization, those higher members which pass out of the physical and etheric bodies during sleep. But the remarkable thing is that arithmetic and geometry work upon both the physical-etheric and the astral and Ego. As regards their role in education arithmetic and geometry are really like a chameleon; by their very nature they are allied to every part of man's being. Whereas lessons on the plant and animal kingdoms should be given at a definite age, arithmetic and geometry must be taught throughout the whole period of childhood, though naturally in a form suited to the changing characteristics of the different life-periods.

It is all-important to remember that the body of formative forces, the etheric body, begins to function independently when it is abandoned by the Ego and astral body. By virtue of its own inherent forces, it has ever the tendency to bring to perfection and develop what has been brought to it. So far as our astral body and Ego are concerned, we are—stupid, shall I say? For instead of perfecting what has been conveyed to these members of our being, we make it less perfect. During sleep, however, our body of formative forces continues to calculate, continues all that it has received as arithmetic and the like. We ourselves are then no longer within the physical and etheric bodies; but supersensibly, they continue to calculate or to draw geometrical figures and perfect them. If we are aware of this fact and plan our teaching accordingly, great vitality can be generated in the being of the child. We must, however, make it possible for the body of formative forces to perfect and develop what it has previously received.

In geometry, therefore, we must not take as our starting point the abstractions and intellectual formulae that are usually considered the right groundwork. We must begin with inner, not outer perception, by stimulating in the child a strong sense of symmetry for instance.

Even in the case of the very youngest children we can begin to do this. For example: we draw some figure on the blackboard and indicate the beginning of the symmetrical line. Then we try to make the child realize that the figure is not complete; he himself must find out how to complete it. In this way we awaken an inner, active urge in the child to complete something as yet unfinished. This helps him to express an absolutely right conception of something that is a reality. The teacher, of course, must have inventive talent but that is always a very good thing. Above all else the teacher must have mobile, inventive thought.

When he has given these exercises for a certain time, he will proceed to others. For instance, he may draw some such figure as this (left) on the blackboard, and then he tries to awaken in the child an inner conception of its spatial proportions. The outer line is then varied and the child gradually learns to draw an inner form corresponding to the outer (right). In the one the curves are absolutely straightforward and simple. In the other, the lines curve outwards at various points. Then we should explain to the child that for the sake of inner symmetry

he must make in the inner figure an inward curve at the place where the lines curve outwards in the outer figure. In the first diagram a simple line corresponds to another simple line, whereas in the second, an inward curve corresponds to an outward curve.

Or again we draw something of this kind, where the figures together form a harmonious whole. We vary this by leaving the forms incomplete, so that the lines flow away from each other to infinity. It is as if the lines were running away and one would like to go with them. This leads to the idea that they should be bent inwards to regulate and complete the figure, and so on. I can only indicate the principle of the thing. Briefly, by working in this way, we give the child an idea of “a-symmetrical symmetries” and so prepare the body of formative forces in his waking life that during sleep it elaborates and perfects what has been absorbed during the day. Then the child will wake in an etheric body, and a physical body also, inwardly and organically vibrant. He will be full of life and vitality. This can, of course, only be achieved when the teacher has some knowledge of the working of the etheric body; if there is no such knowledge, all efforts in this direction will be mechanical and superficial.

A true teacher is not only concerned with the waking life but also with what takes place during sleep. In this connection it is important to understand certain things that happen to us all now and again. For instance, we may have pondered over some problem in the evening without finding a solution. In the morning we have solved the problem. Why? Because the etheric body, the body of formative forces, has continued its independent activity during the night.

In many respects waking life is not a perfecting but a disturbing process. It is necessary for us to leave our physical and etheric bodies to themselves for a time and not limit them by the activity of the astral body and Ego. This is proved by many things in life; for instance by the example already given of someone who is puzzling over a problem in the evening. When he wakes up in the morning he may feel slightly restless but suddenly finds that the solution has come to him unconsciously during the night. These things are not fables; they actually happen and have been proved as conclusively as many another experiment. What has happened in this particular case? The work of the etheric body has continued through the night and the human being has been asleep the whole time. You will say: “Yes, but that is not a normal occurrence, one cannot work on such a principle.” Be that as it may, it is possible to assist the continued activity of the etheric body during sleep, if, instead of beginning geometry with triangles and the like, where the intellectual element is already in evidence, we begin by conveying a concrete conception of space. In arithmetic, too, we must proceed in the same way. I will speak of this next.

A pamphlet on physics and mathematics written by Dr. von Baravalle (a teacher at the Waldorf School) will give you an excellent idea of how to bring concreteness into arithmetic and geometry. This whole mode of thought is extended in the pamphlet to the realm of physics as well, though it deals chiefly with higher mathematics. If we penetrate to its underlying essence, it is a splendid guide for teaching mathematics in a way that corresponds to the organic needs of the child's being. A starting-point has indeed been found for a reform in the method of teaching mathematics and physics from earliest childhood up to the highest stages of instruction. And we can apply to the domain of arithmetic what is said in this pamphlet about concrete conceptions of space.

Now the point is that everything conveyed in an external way to the child by arithmetic or even by counting deadens something in the human organism. To start from the single thing and add to it piece by piece is simply to deaden the organism of man. But if we first awaken a conception of the whole, starting from the whole and then proceeding to its parts, the organism is vitalised. This must be borne in mind even when the child is learning to count. As a rule we learn to count by being made to observe purely external things—things of material, physical life.

First we have the 1—we call this Unity. Then 2, 3, 4, and so forth, are added, unit by unit, and we have no idea whatever why the one follows the other, nor of what happens in the end. We are taught to count by being shown an arbitrary juxtaposition of units. I am well aware that there are many different methods of teaching children to count, but very little attention is paid nowadays to the principle of starting from the whole and then proceeding to the parts. Unity it is which first of all must be grasped as the whole and by the child as well. Anything whatever can be this Unity. Here we are obliged to illustrate it in a drawing. We must therefore draw a line; but we could use an apple just as well to show what I shall now show with a line.

This then is 1. And now we go on from the whole to the parts, or members. Here then we have made of the 1 a 2, but the 1 still remains. The unit has been divided into two. Thus we arrive at the 2. And now we go on. By a further partition the 3 comes into being, but the unit always remains as the all-embracing whole. Then we go on through the 4, 5, and so on. Moreover, at the same time and by other means we can give an idea of the extent to which it is possible to hold together in the mind the things that relate to number and we shall discover how really limited man is in his power of mental presentation where number is concerned.

In certain nations to-day the concept of number that is clearly held in the mind's eye only goes up to 10. Here in this country money is reckoned up to 12. But that really represents the maximum of what is mentally visualised for in reality we then begin over again and in fact count what has been counted. We first count up to 10, then we begin counting the tens, 2 times 10=20, 3 times 10=30. Here we are no longer considering the things themselves. We begin to calculate by using number itself, whereas the more elementary concept requires the things themselves to be clearly present in the mind.

We are very proud of the fact that we are far advanced in our methods of counting compared with primitive peoples who depend on their ten fingers. But there is little foundation for this pride. We count up to 10 because we sense our hands as members. We feel our two hands symmetrically with their 10 fingers. This feeling also arises and is inwardly experienced by the child, and we must call forth the sense of number by a transition from the whole to the parts. Then we shall easily find the other transition which leads us to the counting in which one is added to another. Eventually, of course, we can pass on to the ordinary 1, 2, 3, etc. But this mere adding of one or more units must only be introduced as a second stage, for it has significance only here in physical space, whereas to divide a unity into its members has an inner significance such that it can continue to vibrate in the etheric body even though quite beneath our consciousness. It is important to know these things.

Having taught the child to count in this way, the following will also be important. We must not pass on to addition in a lifeless, mechanical way merely adding one item to another in series. Life comes into the thing when we take our start not from the parts of the addition sum but from the sum total itself. We take a number of objects; for example, a number of little balls. We have now got far enough in counting to be able to say: Here are 14 balls. Now we divide them, extending this concept of a part still further. Here we have 5, here 4, here 5 again. Thus we have separated the sum into 5 and 4 and 5. That is, we go from the sum to the items composing it, from the whole to the parts. The method we should use with the child is first to set down the sum before him and then let the child himself perceive how the given sum can be divided into several items.

This is exceedingly important. Just as to drive a horse we do not harness him tail foremost, so in the teaching of arithmetic we must have the right direction. We must start from a whole which is always actually present, from a reality, from what is present as a whole and then pass on to the separate parts; later, we find our way to the ordinary addition sum.

Continuing thus, from the living whole to the separate parts, one touches the reality underlying all arithmetical calculations: i.e., the setting in vibration of the body of formative forces. This body needs a living stimulus for its formative activity and once energised it will continually perfect the vibrations without the need of drawing upon the astral body and Ego-organization with their disturbing elements.

Your teaching work will also be essentially enhanced and vivified if you similarly reverse the other simple forms of calculation. To-day, one might say, they are standing on their heads and must be reversed. Try, for instance, to bring the child to say: “If I have 7, how much must I take away to get 3,” instead of “What remains over if I take 4 from 7?” That we have 7 is the real thing and that 3 remains is also real; how much must we take away from 7 to get 3? Beginning with this form of thought we stand in the midst of life, whereas with the opposite form we are dealing with abstractions. Proceeding in this way, we can easily find our way further. Thus, once more, in multiplication and division we should not ask what will result when we divide 10 into two parts, but how must we divide 10 to get the number 5. The real aspect is given; moreover in life we want eventually to get at something which has real significance. Here are two children, 10 apples are to be divided among them. Each of them is to get 5. These are the realities. What we have to deal with is the abstract part that comes in the middle. Done in this way, things are always immediately adapted to life and should we succeed in this, the result will be that what is the usual, purely external way of adding, by counting up one thing after another with a deadening effect upon the arithmetic lessons, will become a vivifying force, of especial importance in this branch of our educational work. And it is evident that precisely by this method we take into account the sub-conscious in man, that is, the part which works on during sleep and which also works subconsciously during the waking hours. For one is aware of a small part only of the soul's experience; nevertheless the rest is continually active. Let us make it possible for the physical and etheric bodies of the child to work in a healthy way, realizing that we can only do so if we bring an intense life, an awakened interest and attention, especially into our teaching of arithmetic and geometry.

The question has arisen during this Conference as to whether it is really a good thing to continue the different lessons for certain periods of time as we do in the Waldorf School. Now a right division of the lessons into periods is fruitful in the very highest degree. “Period” teaching means that one lesson shall not perpetually encroach upon another. Instead of having timetables setting forth definite hours:—8 – 9, arithmetic, 9 – 10, history, religion, or whatever it may be, we give one main lesson on the same subject for two hours every morning for a period of three, four, or five weeks. Then for perhaps five or six weeks we pass on to another subject, but one which in my view should develop out of the other, and which is always the same during the two hours. The child thus concentrates upon a definite subject for some weeks.

The question was asked whether too much would not be forgotten, whether in this way the children would not lose what they had been taught. If the lessons have been rightly given, however, the previous subject will go on working in the subconscious regions while another is being taken. In “period” lessons we must always reckon with the subconscious processes in the child. There is nothing more fruitful than to allow the results of the teaching given during a period of three or four weeks to rest within the soul and so work on in the human being without interference.

It will soon be apparent that when a subject has been rightly taught and the time comes round for taking it up again for a further period it emerges in a different form from what it does when it has not been well taught. To make the objection that because the subjects will be forgotten it cannot be right to teach in this way, is to ignore the factors that are at work. We must naturally reckon on being able to forget, for just think of all we should have to carry about in our heads if we could not forget and then remember again! The part played by the fact of forgetting therefore as well as the actual instruction must be reckoned with in true education.

This does not mean that it should be a matter for rejoicing whenever children forget. That may safely be left to them! Everything depends on what has so passed down into the subconscious regions, that it can be duly recalled. The unconscious belongs to the being of man as well as the conscious. In regard to all these matters we must realize that it is the task of education to appeal not only to the whole human being, but also to his different parts and members. Here again it is essential to start from the whole; there must first be comprehension of the whole and then of the parts. But to this end it is also necessary to take one's start from the whole. First we must grasp the whole and then the parts. If in counting we simply place one thing beside another, and add, and add, and add, we are leaving out the human being as a whole. But we do appeal to the whole human being when we lay hold of Unity and go from that to Numbers, when we lay hold of the sum, the minuend, the product and thence pass on to the parts.

The teaching of history is very open to the danger of our losing sight of the human being. We have seen that in really fruitful education everything must be given its right place. The plants must be studied in their connection with the earth and the different animal species in their connection with man. Whatever the subject-matter, the concrete human element must be retained; everything must be related in some way to man.

But when we begin to teach the child history, we must understand that at the age when it is quite possible for him to realize the connection of plant-life with the earth and the earth itself as an organism, when he can see in the human being a living synthesis of the whole animal kingdom, he is still unable to form any idea of so-called causal connections in history. We may teach history very skilfully in the ordinary sense, describing one epoch after another and showing how the first is the cause of the second; we may describe how in the history of art, Michelangelo followed Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, in a natural sequence of cause and effect. But before the age of twelve, the child has no understanding for the working of cause and effect, a principle which has become conventional in more advanced studies. To deduce the later from the earlier seems to him like so much unmusical strumming on a piano, and it is only by dint of coercion that he will take it in at all. It has the same effect on his soul as a piece of stone that is swallowed and passes into the stomach. Just as we would never dream of giving the stomach a stone instead of bread, so we must make sure that we nourish the soul not with stones but with food that it can assimilate. And so history too, must be brought into connection with Man and to that end our first care must be to awaken a conception of the historical sequence of time in connection with the human being.

Let us take three history books, the first dealing with antiquity, the second with the Middle Ages, and the third with our modern age. As a rule, little attention is paid to the conception of time in itself. But suppose I begin by saying to the child: “You are now ten years old, so you were alive in the year 1913. Your father is much older than you and he was alive in the year 1890; his father, again, was alive in 1850. Now imagine that you are standing here and stretching your arm back to someone who represents your father; he stretches his arm back to his father (your grandfather), now you have reached the year 1850.” The child then begins to realize that approximately one century is represented by three or four generations. The line of generations running backwards from the twentieth century brings him finally to his very early ancestors. Thus the sixtieth generation back leads into the epoch of the birth of Christ. In a large room it will be possible to arrange some sixty children standing in a line, stretching an arm backwards to each other. Space is, as it were, changed into time.

If the teacher has a fertile, inventive mind, he can find other ways and means of expressing the same thing—I am merely indicating a principle. In this way the child begins to realize that he himself is part of history; figures like Alfred the Great, Cromwell and others are made to appear as if they themselves were ancestors. The whole of history thus becomes an actual part of life at school when it is presented to the child in the form of a living conception of time.

History must never be separated from the human being. The child must not think of it as so much book-lore. Many people seem to think that history is something contained in books, although of course it is not always quite as bad as that. At all events, we must try by every possible means to awaken a realization that history is a living process and that man himself stands within its stream.

When a true conception of time has been awakened, we can begin to imbue history with inner life and soul, just as we did in the case of arithmetic and geometry, by unfolding not a dead but a living perception. There is a great deal of quibbling to-day about the nature of perception, but the whole point is that we must unfold living and not dead perception. In the symmetry-exercises of which I spoke, the soul actually lives in the act of perception. That is living perception. Just as our aim is to awaken a living perception of space, so must all healthy teaching of history given to a child between the ages of nine and twelve be filled with an element proceeding in this case not from the qualities of space, but from the qualities of heart and soul.

The history lessons must be permeated through and through with a quality proceeding from the heart. And so we must present it as far as possible in the form of pictures. Figures, real forms must stand there and they must never be described in a cold, prosaic way. Without falling into the error of using them as examples for moral or religious admonition, our descriptions must nevertheless be coloured with both morality and religion. History must above all lay hold of the child's life of feeling and will. He must be able to enter into a personal relationship with historic figures and with the modes of life prevailing in the various historical epochs. Nor need we confine ourselves merely to descriptions of human beings. We may, for instance, describe the life of some town in the twelfth century, but everything we say must enter the domains of feeling and will in the child. He must himself be able to live in the events, to form his own sympathies and antipathies. His life of feeling and will must be stimulated.

This will show you that the element of art must everywhere enter into the teaching of history. The element of art comes into play when, as I often describe it, a true economy is exercised in teaching. This economy can be exercised if the teacher has thoroughly mastered his subject-matter before he goes into the classroom; if it is no longer necessary for him to ponder over anything because if rightly prepared it is there plastically before his soul. He must be so well prepared that the only thing still to be done is the artistic moulding of his lesson. The problem of teaching is thus not merely a question of the pupil's interest and diligence, but first and foremost of the teacher's interest, diligence and sincerity.

No lesson should be given that has not previously been a matter of deep experience on the part of the teacher. Obviously, therefore, the organization of the body of teachers must be such that every teacher is given ample time to make himself completely master of the lessons he has to give.

It is a dreadful thing to see a teacher walking round the desks with a book in his hands, still wrestling with the subject-matter. Those who do not realize how contrary such a thing is to all true principles of education do not know what is going on unconsciously in the souls of the children, nor do they realize the terrible effect of this unconscious experience. If we give history lessons in school from note-books, the child comes to a certain definite conclusion, not consciously, but unconsciously. It is an unconscious, intellectual conclusion, but it is deeply rooted in his organism: “Why should I learn all these things? The teacher himself doesn't know them, for he has to read from notes. I can do that too, later on, so there is no need for me to learn them first.” The child does not of course come to this conclusion consciously, but as a matter of fact when judgments are rooted in the unconscious life of heart and mind, they have all the greater force. The lessons must pulsate with inner vitality and freshness proceeding from the teacher's own being. When he is describing historical figures for instance the teacher should not first of all have to verify dates. I have already spoken of the way in which we should convey a conception of time by a picture of successive generations. Another element too must pervade the teaching of history. It must flow forth from the teacher himself. Nothing must be abstract; the teacher himself as a human being must be the vital factor.

It has been said many times that education should work upon the being of man as a whole and not merely on one part of his nature. Important as it is to consider what the child ought to learn and whether we are primarily concerned with his intellect or his will, the question of the teacher's influence is equally important. Since it is a matter of educating the whole nature and being of man, the teacher must himself be “man” in the full sense of the word, that is to say, not one who teaches and works on the basis of mechanical memory or mechanical knowledge, but who teaches out of his own being, his full manhood. That is the essential thing.

Question: Should the dilution be continued arithmetically?

Answer: In this respect, no doubt, certain things will yet have to he discussed. Probably, with an increasing area you will need more water and proportionately fewer cow-horns. You will be able to manure large areas with comparatively few cow-horns. In Dornach we had twenty-five cow-horns; to begin with we had a fairly Large garden to treat. First we took one horn to half a bucketful. Then we began again, taking a whole bucketful and two cow-horns. Afterwards we had to manure a relatively larger area. We took seven cow-horns and seven bucketfuls.

Question: Could one use a mechanical stirrer to stir up the manure for larger areas, or would this not be permissible?

Answer: This is a thing you can either take quite strictly, or else you can make up your mind to slide into substitute methods. There can be no doubt, stirring by hand has quite another significance than mechanical stirring. A mechanist, of course, will not admit it. But you should consider well what a great difference it makes, whether you really stir with your hand or in a mere mechanical fashion. When you stir manually, all the delicate movements of your hand will come into the stirring. Even the feelings you have may then come into it.
Of course the people of to-day will not believe that it makes any difference; but you can tell the difference even in medical mattes. Believe me, it is not a matter of indifference whether a medicament is prepared more manually or mechanically. When a man works at a thing himself, he gives something to it which it retains. To mention one example, this is notably the case with the Ritter remedies, with which some of you are no doubt familiar. You must not smile at such things. I have often been asked what I think of the Ritter remedies. You are perhaps aware that there are some who sing hymns of praise on their behalf, while others spread the tale that they have no particular effect.

Undoubtedly they have an effect. But I am firmly convinced that if these remedies were brought on to the market in the usual way they would very largely lose their influence. With these remedies especially, it makes a great difference if the doctor himself possesses the remedy and gives it to his patient directly. When the doctor gives such a thing to his patient, when it is all taking place in a comparatively small circle, he brings a certain enthusiasm with him. You may say the enthusiasm as such weighs nothing; you cannot weigh it. Nevertheless it enters into the vibrations if the doctors are enthusiastic. Light has a strong effect on the remedies; why not enthusiasm? Enthusiasm mediates; it can have a great effect. Enthusiastic doctors of to-day can achieve great results. Precisely in this way, the Ritter remedies can have a far-reaching influence.

With enthusiasm, great effects can be called forth. But if you begin to do it in an indifferent and mechanical fashion, the effects will soon evaporate. It makes a difference whether you do the thing with all that proceeds from the human hand—believe me, very much can issue from the hand—or whether you do it with a machine. By and by, however, it might prove to be great fun—this stirring; and you would no longer dream of a mechanical stirrer even when many cow-horns were needed. Eventually, I can imagine, you will do it on Sundays as an after-dinner entertainment. Simply by having many guests invited and doing it on Sundays, you will get the best results without machines!

Question: No doubt there will be a little technical difficulty in distributing half a bucketful of water over one-fifth of an acre. But when you increase the number of cow-horns the difficulty will rapidly increase—quite out of proportion to the number. Can the given quantity of water be diluted still more, or is it essential to preserve the proportion of half a bucketful? Must you take about half a bucketful to one-fifth of an acre?

Answer: No doubt it will be possible as you suggest. But I think the method of stirring would then have to be changed. You might do it in this way. Stir up a cow-hornful completely in half a bucket of water, and then dilute it to a bucketful; but you will then have to stir it again.

On the whole, I think it would be best to stir only half a bucketful at a time. Reckon up, in the given instance, how much less of the stuff you need, even if it should be less than the contents of a cowhorn. It all depends on your bringing about a thoroughly intimate permeation. You are far from achieving a true permeation when you merely tip the stuff into water and stir it up a little. You must bring about a very intimate permeation. If you merely shake in the more or less condensed substance, or if you fall to stir it vigorously, you will not have a thorough mixture. Therefore I think it will be easier to stir several half-bucketfuls with small amounts of substance than to dilute the water again and stir it up a second time.

Question: Some solid matter will remain over, no doubt, even then. May the liquid afterwards be strained so that it can be distributed with a mechanical spray?

Answer: I do not think it will be necessary. For if you stir it quickly, you will obtain a fairly cloudy liquid, and you need not trouble whether any foreign bodies are left in it. You will not find it difficult to distribute the manure; pure cow-manure is best for the purpose, but even if there are foreign bodies in it, I do not think you need go to the trouble of cleansing it. If there are foreign bodies, they might even have a beneficial effect and do no harm. As a result of the concentration and subsequent dilution, it is only the radiant effect that works; it is no longer the substances as such, but the dynamic radiant activity. Thus there would be no danger, for example, of your getting potato plants with long shoots und nothing else upon them at the place where your foreign bodies happened to fall. I do not think there would be any such danger.

Question: I only had in mind the mechanical spray.

Answer: Certainly you can strain the liquid; it will do it no harm. It might be simplest to have your mechanical spray fitted with a sieve from the outset.

Question: You did not say whether the stuff from the horn should be weighed out, so as to get a definite proportion. Speaking of half a bucketful, did you refer to a Swiss bucket, or a precise measure of litres?

Answer: I took a Swiss bucket, the ordinary bucket they use for milking in Switzerland. The whole thing was tested practically, in the direct perception of it. You should now reduce it to the proper weights and measures.

Question: Can the cow-horns be used repeatedly, or must they always be taken from freshly slaughtered beasts?

Answer: We have not tested it, but from my general knowledge I think you should be able to use the cow-horns three or four times running. After that they will no longer work so well. There might even be this possibility: Use the cow-horns for three or four years in succession; then keep them in the cow-stable for a time, and use them again another year. This too might be possible. But I have no idea how many cow-horns an agricultural area can normally have at its disposal; whether or not it is necessary to be very economical in this respect. That is a question I cannot decide at the moment.

Question: Where can you get the cow-horns? Must they be taken from Eastern-European or Mid-European districts?

Answer: It makes no difference where you get them from—only not from the refuse yard. They must be as fresh as possible. However, strange as it may sound, it is a fact that Western life—life in the Western hemisphere—is quite a different thing from life in the Eastern hemisphere. Life in Africa, Asia or Europe has quite another significance than life in America Possibly, therefore, horns from American cattle would have to be more effective in a rather different way. Thus it might prove necessary to tighten the manure rather more in these horns—to make it denser, hammer it more tightly.

It is best to take horns from your own district. There is an exceedingly strong kinship between the forces in the cow-horns of a certain district and the forces generally prevailing in that district. The forces of horns from abroad might come into conflict with what is there in the earth of your own country. You must also remember, it will frequently happen that the cows from which you get the horns in your own district are not really native to the district. But you can get over this difficulty. When the cows have been living and feeding on a particular soil for three or four years, they belong to the soil (unless they happen to be Western cattle).

Question: How old may the horns be? Should they be taken from an old or a young cow?

Answer: All these things must be tested. From the essence of the matter, I should imagine that cattle of medium age would be best.

Question: How big should they be?

Answer: Dr. Steiner draws on the board the actual size of the horn—about 12 to 16 inches long (Diagram 9), i.e. the normal size of horn of “Allgäu” cattle, for example.

Question: Is it not also essential whether the horn is taken from a castrated ox, or from a male or female animal?

Answer: In all probability the horn of the ox would be quite ineffective, and the horn of the bull comparatively weak. Therefore I speak of cow-horns; cows as a rule are female. I mean the female animal.

Question: What is the best time to plant cereals?

Answer: The exact answer will be given when I come to sowing in the main lectures. It is very important, needless to say, and it makes a great difference whether you do it more or less near to the winter months. If near to the winter months, you will bring about a strong reproductive power in your cereals; if farther from the winter months, a strong nutritive power.

Question: Could the cow-horn manure also be distributed with sand? Is rain of any importance in this connection?

Answer: As to the sand you may do so; we have not tested it, but there is nothing to be said against it. The effect of rain would also have to be tested. Presumably it would bring about no change; it might even tend to establish the thing more firmly. On the other hand, we are dealing with a very high concentration of forces, and possibly the minute impact of the falling raindrops might scatter the effect too much. It is a very delicate process; everything must be taken into account. There is nothing to be said against spreading sand with the cow-manure.

Question: In storing the cow-horns and their contents, how should one prevent any harmful influences from gaining access?

Answer: In these matters it is generally true to say that you do more harm by removing the harmful influences, so-called, than by leaving them alone. Nowadays, as you know, people are always wanting to “disinfect” things. Undoubtedly they go too far in this. With our medicaments, for example, we found that if we wished absolutely to prevent the possibility of mould, we had to use methods which interfere with the real virtue of the medicament.

I for my part have no great respect for these “harmful influences.” They do not do nearly so much harm. The best thing is, not to go out of our way in devising methods of purification, but to let well alone.
(We only put pig's bladder over the top to prevent the soil from falling in.)

To try to clean the horns by any special methods is not at all to be recommended. We must familiarise ourselves with the fact that “dirt” is not always dirt. If, for example, you cover your face with a thin layer of gold, it is “dirt” and yet, gold is not dirt. Dirt is not always dirt. Sometimes it is the very thing that acts as a preservative.

Question: Should the extreme “chaoticizing” of the seed, of which you spoke, be supported or enhanced by any special methods?

Answer: You could do so, but it would be superfluous. If the seed-forming process occurs at all, the maximum of chaos will come of its own accord. There is no need to support it. It is in manuring that the support is needed. In the seed-forming process, I do not think it will be necessary to enhance the chaos any more. If there is fertilising seed at all, the chaos is complete. You could do it, of course, by making the soil more silicious. It is through silica that the essential cosmic forces work.

Whatever cosmic forces are caught up by the earth, work through the silica. You could do it in this way, but I do not believe it is necessary.

Question: How Large should the experimental plots be? Will it not also be necessary to do something for the cosmic forces that should be preserved until the new plant is formed?

Answer: You might experiment as follows. It is comparatively easy to give general guiding lines; but the most suitable scale on which to work is a thing you must test for yourselves. It will not, however, be difficult to make experiments on this question. Set out your plants in two separate beds, side by side—a bed of wheat, say, and a bed of sainfoin. Then you will find this possibility. In the one plant—wheat—which of its own accord tends easily to lasting seed-formation, you will retard the seed-forming process by the use of silica. Meanwhile, with the sainfoin, you will find the seed-forming process quite suppressed or very much retarded.

To investigate these things, you can always take this as a basis of comparison: Study the properties of cereals—wheat, for example—and then compare them with the analogous properties of sainfoin, or leguminosae generally. You will thus have the most interesting experiments on seed-formation.

Question: Does it matter when the diluted stuff is brought on to the fields?

Answer: Undoubtedly it does. You can generally leave the cow-horns in the earth until you need them. They will not deteriorate, even if after hibernating they are left for a while during the summer. If, however, you do need to keep them elsewhere, having taken them out of the earth, you should make a box, upholster it well with a cushion of peat-moss on all sides, and put the cow-horns inside. Then the strong inner concentration will be preserved. In any case. it is inadvisable to keep the watery fluid after dilution. You must do the stirring not too long before you use the liquid.

Question: If we want to treat the winter corn, must we use the cow-horns a whole quarter after taking them out of the earth?

Answer: It does not matter essentially, but it will always be better to leave them in the earth until you need them. If you are going to use them in the early autumn, leave them in the earth until you need them. It will in no way harm the manure.

Question: With the fine spraying of the liquid due to the spraying machine, will not the etheric and astral forces be wasted?

Answer: Certainly not; they are intensely bound. Altogether, when you are dealing with spiritual things—unless you drive them away yourself from the outset—you need not fear that they will run away from you nearly as much as with material things.

Question: How should one treat the cow-horns with mineral content, after they have spent the summer in the earth?

Answer: It will not hurt to take them out and keep them anywhere you like; you can throw them in a heap anywhere. It will not hurt the stuff, when it has once spent the summer in the earth. Let the sun shine on them; it will not hurt, it will even do them good.

Question: Must the horns be buried at the same place—on the same field which you will afterwards be wanting to manure, or can they he buried all together at any place you choose?

Answer: It makes so little difference that you need not worry about it. In practice, it will he best to look for a place where the soil is comparatively good. I mean, where the earth is not too highly mineral, but contains plenty of humus. Then you can bury all the cow-horns you need in one place.

Question: What about using machines on the farm? Is it not said that machines should not be used at all?

Answer: That cannot really be answered purely as a farming question. Within the social life of to-day, it is hardly a practical, hardly a topical question to ask whether machines are allowable. You can hardly be a farmer nowadays without using machines. Needless to say, not all operations are so nearly akin to the most intimate processes of Nature as the stirring of which we were speaking just now. Just as we did not want to mix up such an intimate process of Nature with purely mechanical elements, so it is with regard to the other things of which you are thinking. Nature herself, in any case, sees to it that where machines are out of place you can do very little with them. A machine will not help in the seed-forming process, for example; Nature does it for herself.

Really I think the question is not very practical. How can you do without machines nowadays? On the other hand, I may remark that as a farmer you need not just be crazy on machines. If one has a particular craze for machines, he will undoubtedly do worse as a farmer, even if his new machine is an improvement, than if he goes an using his old machine until it is worn out. However, in the strict sense of the word these are no longer purely farming questions.

Question: Could the given quantity of cow-horn manure, diluted with water, be used on half the area you indicated?

Answer: Then you would get rampant growths; you would get the result I hinted at just now in another connection. If, for example, you did this in potato-growing or the like, you would get rampant plants with highly ramified stems; what you are really wanting would not develop properly. Apply the stuff in excess and you will get what are generally known as rank patches.

Question; What about a fodder plant, which you want to grow rampant—spinach for instance?

Answer: There, too, I think we shall only use the half-bucketful with the one cow-horn. That is what we did in Dornach with a patch that was mainly vegetable garden. For plants that are grown over larger areas, you will need far less in proportion. It is already the optimum amount.

Question: Does it matter what kind of manure you use—cow- or horse- or sheep-manure?

Answer: Undoubtedly cow-manure is best for this procedure. Still, it might also be well to investigate whether or no horse-manure could be used. lf you want to treat horse-manure in this way, you will probably find that you need to wrap the horn up to some extent in horse-hair taken from the horse's mane. You will thus make effective the forces which in the horse—as it has no horns—are situated in the mane.

Question: Should it be done before or after sowing the seed?

Answer: The proper thing is to do it before. We shall see how it works; this year we began rather late, and some things will be done after sowing. We shall see whether it makes any difference. However, as a normal matter of course, you should do it before sowing, so as to influence the soil itself beforehand.

Question: Can the same cow-horns that have been used for manure be used for the mineral substance too?

Answer: Yes, but here too you cannot use them more than three or four times. After that they lose their forces.

Question: Does it matter who does the work? Can anyone you choose do the work, or should it be an anthroposophist?

Answer: That is the question. If you raise such a question at all nowadays, you will be laughed at, no doubt, by many people. Yet I need only remind you that there are people whose flowers, grown in the window-box, thrive wonderfully, while with others they do not thrive at all but fade and wither. These are simple facts.

These things that take place through human influence, though they cannot be outwardly explained, are inwardly quite clear and transparent. Moreover, such things will come about simply as a result of the human being practising meditation; preparing himself by meditative life, as I described it in yesterday's lecture. For when you meditate you live quite differently with the nitrogen which contains the Imaginations. You thereby put yourself in a position which will enable all these things to be effective; you put yourself in this position over against the whole world of plant-growth.

However, these things are no longer as clear to-day as they used to be in olden times, when they were universally accepted. For there were times when people knew that by certain definite practices they could make themselves fitted to tend the growth of plants. Nowadays, when such things are not observed, the presence of other people disturbs them. These delicate and subtle influences are lost when you are constantly living and moving among men and women who take no notice of such things. Hence, if you try to apply them, it is very easy to prove them fallacious. And I am loth to speak openly as yet about these things in a large company of people. The conditions of life nowadays are such that it is only too easy to refute them.

A very ticklish question was raised, for example, by our friend Stegemann in the discussion in the Hall the other day, namely, whether parasites could be combated by such means—by means of concentration or the like. There can be no question about it that you can, provided you did it in the right way. Notably you would want to choose the proper season—from the middle of January to the middle of February—when the earth unfolds the greatest forces, the forces that are most concentrated in the earth itself. Establish a kind of festival time, and practise certain concentrations during the season, and the effects might well be evident.

As I said, it is a ticklish question, but it can be answered positively along these lines. The only condition is that it must be done in harmony with Nature as a whole. You should be well aware that it makes all the difference whether you do an exercise of concentration in the winter-time or at midsummer. How much is contained in many of the old folk-proverbs! Even the people of to-day might still derive many a valuable hint from these.

I could have mentioned it in yesterday's lecture: Among the many things I should have done in this present incarnation, but did not find it possible to do, was this. When I was a young man I had the idea to write a kind of “peasant's philosophy,” setting down the conceptual life of the peasants in all the things that touch their lives. It might have been very beautiful. The statement of the Count, that peasants are stupid, would have been refuted. A subtle wisdom would have emerged—a philosophy dilating upon the intimacies of Nature's life—a philosophy contained in the very formation of the words. One marvels to see how much the peasant knows of what is going on in Nature.

To-day, however, it would no longer be possible to write a peasant's philosophy. These things have been almost entirely lost. It is no longer as it was fifty or forty years ago. Yet it was wonderfully significant; you could learn far more from the peasants than in the University. That was an altogether different time. You lived with the peasants in the country, and when those people came along with their broad-brimmed hats, introducing the Socialist Movement of to-day, they were only the eccentricities of life. To-day the whole world is changed. The younger ladies and gentlemen here present have no idea how the world has changed in the last thirty or forty years. How much has been lost of the true peasants' philosophy, of the real beauty of the folk-dialects! It was a kind of cultural philosophy.

Even the peasants' calendars contained what they no longer contain to-day. Moreover, they looked quite different—there was something homely about them. I, in my time, knew peasants' calendars printed on very poor paper, it is true; inside, however, the planetary signs were painted in colours, while on the cover, as the first thing to meet the eye, there was a tiny sweet which you might tick whenever you use the book. In this way too it was made tasty; and of course the people used it one after another.

Question: When larger areas are to be manured, must the number of cow-horns be determined purely by feeling?

Answer: No, I should not advise it. In such a case, I think, we really must be sensible. This, therefore, is my advice. Begin by testing it thoroughly according to your feeling. When you have done all you can to get the most favourable results in this way, then set to work and translate your results into figures for the sake of the world as it is to-day. So you will get the proper tables which others can use after you.

If anyone is inclined to do it out of pure feeling, by all means let him do so. But in his attitude to others he should not behave as though he did not value the tables. The whole thing should be translated into calculable figures and amounts for the sake of others; it is necessary nowadays. You need cows' horns to do it with, but you do not exactly need to grow bulls' horns in representing it! These are the things that lead so easily to opposition. I should advise you as far as possible to compromise in this respect, and bear in mind the judgments of the world at large.

Question: Is the quick-lime treatment of the compost-heap, in the percentages as given nowadays, to be recommended?

Answer: The old method will undoubtedly prove beneficial, only you must treat it specifically, according to the nature of your soil—whether it be more sandy or marshy. For a sandy soil you will need rather less quicklime. A marshy ground will need rather more quicklime on account of the formation of oxygen.

Question: How about digging up and turning over the compost heap?

Answer: That is not bad for it. When you have dug it up and turned it, you should, however, provide for its proper protection by putting a layer of earth all around it. Cover it over with earth; peat-earth or granulated peat is very good for the purpose.

Question: What kind of potash did you mean, when you said it might be used if necessary in the transition stage?

Answer: Kali magnesia.

Question: What is the best way of using the rest of the manure after the cow-horns have been filled? Should it be brought on to the fields in autumn, so as to undergo the winter experience? or should it be set aside until the spring?

Answer You must remember that the cow-horn manuring is not intended as a complete Substitute for ordinary manuring. You should go on manuring as before. The new method should be regarded as a kind of extra, largely enhancing the effect of the manuring hitherto applied. The latter should continue as before.

In the last lecture¹ I drew your attention to the necessity, as a point of departure in teaching, for a certain artistic shaping, to engage the whole being, above all, the “will-life.” From the discussions which we have pursued you will see at once why it is important, and you will see, further, that teaching must be managed so as always to take into account that man contains a dead, a dying element, which must be transmuted into something living. When we approach nature and other realms of the world in a merely contemplative attitude, by mental pictures, we are in the line of death; but when we approach nature and other world-beings with our will, we take part in a process of vivification. As educators, then, we shall have the task of continually vivifying dead substance, to protect from total expiration that quality in man which gravitates towards death; even, in a sense, to fertilize it with what vivifying element the will can give rise to. For this reason we must not be afraid of beginning our work with the child with a certain artistic form of teaching.

Now everything which approaches man artistically falls into two streams—the stream of the plastically formative and the stream of the musically poetical. These two domains of art, that of the plastically formative and the musically poetical, are really poles apart, although precisely through their polar antithesis they are well able to be reconciled in a higher synthesis, in a higher unity. You will be familiar, of course, with the fact that this duality of the artistic element comes to light even in racial terms during the course of the evolution of the universe. You need but remember certain writings by Heinrich Heine for this duality to be evident—he showed that what proceeded from the Greek people, or was related to them, that is what grew racially from their inner nature, is pre-eminently disposed towards the plastically formative shaping of the world, whereas all that sprang from the Jewish element is especially disposed to the really musical element in the world. You find, then, these two streams racially distributed, and anyone who is sensitive to these things will very easily be able to trace them in the history of art. Naturally there are continually arising aspirations, justified aspirations, to unite the musical with the plastically formative. But they can only really be completely united in a perfectly developed Eurhythmy, where the musical and the visible can become one—naturally not yet, for we are only at the beginning, but in the aims and ultimate achievement of Eurhythmy. It must, therefore, be remembered that the whole harmonious nature of man contains a plastically formative element towards which the will-impulse in man inclines. How, then, can we properly describe this human talent for becoming plastically creative?

Were we to be purely intellectual beings, were we only to observe the world through conceptions, we should gradually become walking corpses. We should, in actual fact, make the impression here on earth of dying beings. Only through the urge we feel within us to animate plastically-creatively with the imagination what is dying in concepts, do we save ourselves from this dying. You must beware of wanting to reduce everything to unity in an abstract way, if you wish to be true educators. Now you must not say: “We are not to cultivate the death-giving element in man, we are to avoid cultivating the conceptual, the thought-world in the human being.” In the psychic spiritual realm that would result in the same error as if doctors, turning into great pedagogues, were to contemplate the course of civilization and to say: “The bones represent the side of death in man; let us, then, protect man from this dying element, let us try to keep his bones alive, soft.” The opinion of such doctors would end in giving everyone rickets. It always implies a false principle to proceed to say, as many theosophists and anthroposophists like to do, if there is any talk of Ahriman and Lucifer² and their influences on human evolution; they say these things harm human nature, therefore we must beware of them. But that would be equivalent to excluding man from all the elements which should form his constitution. In the same way, we cannot prevent the cultivation of the conceptual element; we must cultivate it, but at the same time we must not neglect to approach human nature with the plastically formative. In this way there results the desired unity. It does not result from the extinction of the one element, but from the cultivation of both, side by side. In this respect people to-day cannot think in terms of unity. For this reason, too, they do not understand the Threefold State.³ In social life the only right solution is for the spiritual life, economic life, and the life of rights, to stand side by side and for their union to take place of itself, creatively, and not through human abstract organization. Only imagine what it would mean if people were to say: “As the head is a unity, and the rest of the body, too, the human body is really an anomaly; we ought to evolve the head from the rest of the body and allow it to move freely in the world!” We only act in accordance with nature when we allow the whole to grow out of one-sided aspects.

The question, then, is to develop the one isolated aspect, conceptual education. Then the other isolated aspect, the plastically formative, animates what is developed in the mere concept. The question here is to elevate these things into consciousness without losing our naivety, for this age always annihilates consciousness. There is no need to sacrifice our naivety if we fashion things concretely, not abstractedly. For instance, it would be a very good thing from all points of view to start as early as possible with the plastically formative, by letting the child live in the world of colour, by saturating oneself as a teacher with the instructions given by Goethe in the didactic part of his “Theory of Colour” (Farbenlehre). What is the basis of the didactic part of Goethe's Farbenlehre?⁴ The secret is that Goethe always imbues each separate colour with a feeling-shade. He emphasizes, for instance, the rousing quality of red, he emphasizes not only what the eye sees, but what the soul experiences in red. In the same way he lays stress upon the tranquillity, the self-absorption, experienced by the soul in blue. It is possible, without jarring on the child's naivety, to introduce him into the world of colour so that the feeling-shades of the world of colour issue forth in living experiences. (If, incidentally, the child gets itself at first thoroughly grubby it will be a good step in his education if he is trained to get himself less grubby.)

Begin as early as possible to bring the child in touch with colours, and in so doing it is a good idea to apply different colours to a coloured background from those you apply to a white surface; and try to awaken such experiences in the child as can only arise from a spiritual scientific understanding of the world of colour.⁵ If you work as I have done with a few friends at the smaller cupola of the Dornach building,⁶ you acquire a living relation to colour. You then discover if, for instance, you are painting with blue, that the blue colour itself possesses the power to portray inwardness. We can say, then, that in painting an angel impelled by his own inwardness you will feel the spontaneous urge to keep to blue, because the shading of blue, the light and dark of blue, produces in the soul the feeling of movement pertaining to the nature of the soul. A yellow-reddish colour produces in the soul the experience of lustre, giving a manifestation towards the external. If, then, the impression is aggressive, if we are encountered by a warning apparition, if the angel has something to say to us, if he desires to speak to us from his background, we express this by shades of yellow and red. In an elementary fashion we can invite children to understand this living inwardness of colours.

Then we ourselves must be very profoundly convinced that mere drawing is something untrue. The truest thing is the experience of colour; less true is the experience of light and shade, and the least true is drawing. Drawing as such already approaches that abstract element present in nature as a process of dying. We ought really only to draw with the consciousness that we are essentially drawing dead substance. With colours we should paint with the consciousness that we are evoking the living element from what is dead. What, after all, is the horizontal line? When we simply take a pencil and draw a horizontal line, we do an abstract, a dead thing, something untrue to nature, which always has two streams: the dead and the living. We extract the one trend and affirm that it is nature. But if I say: “I see green and I see blue, which are different from each other,” the horizontal line emerges from the contiguity of the colours and I express a truth. In this way you will gradually realize that the form of nature really arises from colour, that therefore the function of drawing is abstraction. We ought to produce already in the growing child a proper feeling for these things, because they vivify his whole soul's being and bring it into a right relation with the outside world. Our civilization is notoriously sick for lack of a right relation to the outside world. There is absolutely no need, I wish to remind you, to return to one-sided-ness again in teaching. For instance, it will be quite wise gradually to pass from the purely abstract art which people produce in their delight in beauty, to concrete art, to the arts and crafts, for humanity to-day sorely needs truly artistic productions in the general conditions of civilization. We have in actual fact reduced ourselves in the course of the nineteenth century to making furniture to please the eye, for example to making a chair for the eye, whereas its inherent character should be to be felt when it is sat on. To that end it should be fashioned; we should feel the chair; it must not only be beautiful; its nature must be to be sat on. The whole fusion of the sense of feeling with the chair, and even the cultivated sense of feeling—with the way in which the arms are formed on the chair, etc.—should be expressed in the chair, in our desire to find support in the chair. If, therefore, we were to introduce into school-life teaching in handiwork and manual skill with a decided technical-industrial bias, we should render the school a great service. For just imagine what a great cultural problem the individual who means well to humanity is faced with to-day, when he sees how, for instance, abstractions are on the point of inundating modern civilization: there will no longer be even a residue of beauty in civilization; this will be exclusively utilitarian! And even if people dream of beauty, they will have no sense of the compulsion we are under to emphasize more emphatically than ever the necessity for beauty, because of the socializing of life towards which we gravitate. This has to be realized.

There must, therefore, be no reservations with the plastically formative in teaching. But just as little must there be reservations in the true experience of that dynamic element which is expressed in architecture. It is very easy here to fall into the error of introducing the child too early to this experience. But, in a sense, even this must happen; I had addressed a few words to the children of Münich who were on holiday at Dornach, eighty of them, and who had had twelve lessons in Eurhythmy from Frau Kisseleff,⁷ and who were able to demonstrate what they had learnt to a group of their staff and Dornach anthroposophists. The children had their hearts in their work, and at the end of the complete Eurhythmy performance, which also included demonstrations by our Dornach Eurhythmists, the children came up and said: “Did you like our performance too?” They had the real urge to perform as well. It was a beautiful thing. Now at the request of the people who had arranged the whole entertainment, I had to say a few words to the children. It was the evening before the children were to be taken back again to Münich and district. I expressly said: “I am saying something to you now which you do not understand yet. You will only understand it later. But notice if you hear the word ‘Soul’ in future, for you cannot understand it yet!” This drawing of the child's attention to something which he does not yet understand, which must first mature, is extraordinarily important. And the principle is false which is so much to the fore in these days: We are only to impart to the child what he can at the moment understand—this principle makes education a dead thing and takes away its living element. For education is only living when what has been assimilated is cherished for a time deep in the soul, and then, after a while, is recalled to the surface. This is very important in education from seven to fifteen years of age; in these years a great deal can be introduced tenderly into the child's soul which can only be understood later. I beg you to feel no scruple at teaching beyond the child's age and appealing to something which he can only understand later. The contrary principle has introduced a deadening element into our pedagogy. But the child must know that he has to wait. It is one of the feelings we can promote within the child that he must be ready to wait for a perfect understanding until much later. For this reason it was not at all a bad idea in olden times to make the children simply learn 1 × 1 = 1, 2 × 2 = 4, 3 × 3 = 9, etc., instead of their learning it, as they do to-day, from the calculating machine. This principle of forcing back the child's comprehension must be overthrown. It can naturally only be done with tact, for we must not depart too far from what the child can love, but he can absorb a great deal of material, purely on the teacher's authority, for which understanding only dawns later.

If you introduce the plastically formative element to the child in this way you will see that you can vivify much of what is sapping away life.

The musical element, which lives in the human being from birth onwards, and which—as I have already said—expresses itself particularly in the child's third and fourth years in a gift for dancing, is essentially an element of will, potent with life. But, extraordinary as it may sound, it is true that it contains as it plays its part in the child, an excessive life, a benumbing life, a life directed against consciousness. The child's development is very easily brought by a profoundly musical experience into a certain degree of reduced consciousness. One must say, therefore: “The educational value of music must consist in a constant inter-harmonizing of the Dionysian element springing up in the human being, with the Apollonian. While the death-giving element must be vivified by the plastically formative element, a supremely living power in music must be partially subdued and toned down so that it does not affect the human being too profoundly.” This is the feeling with which we should introduce music to children.

Now this is the position: Karma develops human nature with a bias towards one side or the other. This is particularly noticeable in music. But I want to point out that here it is over-emphasized. We should not insist too much: This is a musical child; this one is not musical. Certainly the fact is there, but to draw from it the conclusion that the unmusical child must be kept apart from all music and only the musical children must be given a musical education, is thoroughly false; even the most unmusical children should be included in any musical activity. It is right without a doubt, from the point of view of producing music more and more, only to encourage the really musical children to appear in public. But even the unmusical children should be there, developing sensitiveness, for you will notice that even in the unmusical child there is a trace of the musical disposition which is only very deep down and which loving assistance brings to the surface. That should never be neglected, for it is far truer than we imagine that, in Shakespeare's words

The man that hath no music in himself
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; ...
Let no such man be trusted.

The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene I.

That is a very fundamental truth. Nothing should therefore be left undone to bring in touch with music the children considered at first to be unmusical.

But of the greatest importance, particularly socially, will be the cultivation of music in an elementary way, so that, without any paralysing theory, the children are taught from the elementary facts of music. The children should get a clear idea of the elements of music, of harmonies and melodies, etc., from the application of the most elementary facts, from aural analysis of melodies and harmonies, so that in music we proceed to build up the structure of the artistic element as a whole in just the same elementary way as we do with the plastically formative element, where we begin with the isolated detail. This will help to mitigate the persistent intrusion into music of dilettantism; although it, must not for a moment be denied that even musical dilettantism has a certain utility in the social life of the community. Without it we should not with ease be able to get very far, but it should confine itself to the listeners. Precisely if this were done it would be possible to give due prominence within our social life to those who can really produce music. For it should not be forgotten that all plastically formative art tends to individualize people: all the art of music and poetry, on the other hand, furthers social intercourse. People come together and unite in music and poetry; but they become more individual through plastic and formative art. The individuality is better preserved by the plastically formative; social life is better maintained in common enjoyment and experience of music and poetry. Poetry is created in the solitude of the soul—there alone; but it is understood through its general reception. With no intention of inventing an abstraction we can say that man discloses his innermost soul in the creation of poetry, and that his inner soul finds response again in the innermost soul of other people who absorb his creation. That is why pleasure, above all things, in, and yearning for, music and poetry, should be cultivated in the growing child. In poetry the child should early become familiar with real poetry. The individual to-day grows up into a social order in which he is tyrannized over by the prose of language. There are to-day innumerable reciters who tyrannize over people with prose, and place in the foreground of the poem nothing but the prose-content. And when the poem is so recited that the emphasis is laid on the thought content, we consider it nowadays the perfect recitation. But a really perfect recitation is one which particularly emphasizes the musical element. In the few words with which I sometimes introduce our Eurhythmy demonstrations, I have often drawn attention to the way in which in a poet like Schiller a poem arises from the depth of his soul. In many of his poems he first feels the lilt of an undefined melody, and only later into this undefined melody does he sink, as it were, the content, the words. The undefined melody is the element in which the content is suspended, and the poetical activity lives in the fashioning of the language, not in the content, but in the measure, in the rhythm, in the preservation of the rhyme, that is in the music which underlies poetry. I said that the present mode of recitation is to tyrannize over people, because it is always tyranny to attach the greatest value to the prose, to the content of a poem, to its abstract treatment. Spiritual-scientifically we can only escape the tyranny by presenting a subject, as I always try to do, from the most different angles, so that comprehension of it is kept fluid and artistic. I felt particular pleasure when one of our artistically gifted friends said that certain cycles of my lectures, purely in virtue of their inner structure, could be transformed into a symphony. Something of this kind actually does underlie the structure of certain cycles. Take, for instance, the cycle given in Vienna⁸ on the life between death and a new birth, and you will see that you could make a symphony out of it. That is possible because an anthroposophical lecture should not make a tyrannical impression, but should arouse people's will. When, however, people come to a subject like the “Threefold State,” they say that they cannot understand it. In reality it is not difficult to understand; only they are not used to the mode of expression.

It is consequently of extreme importance to draw the child's attention in every poem to the music underlying it. For this reason the division of teaching should be arranged so that the lessons of recitation should come as near as possible to those of music. The teacher of music should be in close contact with the teacher of recitation, so that when the one lesson follows the other a living connection between the two is achieved. It would be especially useful if the teacher of music were still present during the recitation lesson and vice versa, so that each could continually indicate the connections with the other lesson. This would completely exclude what is at present so very prominent in our school-life, and what is really horrible—the abstract explanation of poems. This detailed explanation of poems, verging perilously on grammar, is the death of all that should influence the child. This “interpretation” of poems is a quite appalling thing.

Now you will object: But the interpreting is necessary to understand the poem! The answer to that must be: Teaching must be arranged to form a whole. This must be discussed in the weekly Staff-meeting. This and that poem come up for recitation. Then there must flow in from the rest of the teaching what is necessary for the understanding of the poem. Care must be taken that the child brings ready with him to the recitation lesson what he needs to understand the poem. You can quite well—for instance, take Schiller's Spaziergang—explain the cultural-historical aspect, the psychological aspect of the poem, not taking one line after the other with the poem in your hand, but so as to familiarize the child with the substance. In the recitation lesson stress must be laid solely on the artistic communication of art.

If we were to guide the artistic element like this, in its two streams, to harmonize human nature through and through, we should have very important results. We must simply consider that when a human being sings it is an infinitely valuable achievement of companionship with the world. Singing, you see, is itself an echo of the world. When the human being sings he expresses the meaningful wisdom from which the world is built. But we must not forget that when he sings he combines the cosmic melody with the human word. That is why something unnatural enters into song. This can easily be felt in the incompatibility of the sound of a poem with its content. It would mean a certain progress if one were to pursue the attempt already begun, to maintain sheer recitative in the lines, and only to animate the rhyme with melody, so that the lines would pass in a flow of recitative and the rhyme be sung like an aria.⁹ This would result in a clean severance of the music of a poem from its words, which, of course, disturb the actually musical person.

And again, when the musical ear of the individual is cultivated he himself becomes more disposed to a living experience of the musical essence of the world. This is of the supremest value for the evolution of the individual. We must not forget: In the plastically formative we contemplate beauty, we live it; in music we ourselves become beauty. This is extraordinarily significant. The further back you go into olden times the less you find what we really call music. You have the distinct impression that music is only in process of creation, in spite of the fact that many musical forms are already dying out again. This arises from a very significant cosmic fact. In all plastic or formative art man was the imitator of the old celestial order. The highest imitation of a world-heaven order is the plastic formative imitation of the world. But in music man himself is creative. Here he does not create out of a given material, but lays the very foundations for what will only come to fulfilment in the future. It is, of course, possible to create music of a kind by imitating musically, for instance, the rushing of water or the song of the nightingale. But true music and true poetry are a creation of something new, and from this creation of the new will arise one day the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan evolutions.¹⁰ In linking up with music we retrieve, in a sense, what is still to be; we retrieve it for reality out of the present nullity of its existence.

Only in linking up in this way with the great facts of the world do we acquire a right understanding of teaching. Only this can confer on it the right consecration, and in receiving this consecration it is really transformed into a kind of divine service.

I have set up more or less an ideal. But surely our concrete practice can be ranged in the realm of the ideal. There is one thing we ought not to neglect, for instance, when we go with the children we are teaching—as we shall, of course—into the mountains and the fields, when, that is, we take them out to nature. In introducing these children like this to nature we should always remember that natural science teaching itself only belongs to the school building. Let us suppose that we are just coming into the country with the children, and we draw their attention to a stone or a flower. In so doing we should scrupulously avoid allowing so much as an echo of what we teach in the school-room to be heard outside in nature. Out in the open we should refer the children to nature in quite a different way from what we do in the class-room. We ought never to neglect the opportunity of drawing their attention to the fact that we are bringing them out into the open to feel the beauty of nature and we are taking the products of nature back into the school-room, so that there we can study and analyse nature with them. We should, therefore, never mention to the children, while we are outside, what we explain to them in school, for instance, about plants. We ought to lay stress on the difference between studying dead nature in the class-room—and contemplating nature in its beauty out of doors. We should compare these two experiences side by side. Whoever takes the children out into nature to exemplify to them out of doors from some object of nature what he is teaching in the class room is not doing right. Even in children we should evoke a kind of feeling that it is sad to have to analyse nature when we return to the class-room. Only the children should feel the necessity of it, because, of course, the disturbance of what is natural is essential even in the building up of the human being. We should on no account suppose that we do well to expound a beetle scientifically out of doors. The scientific explanation of the beetle belongs to the class-room. What we should do when we take the children out into the open is to excite pleasure in the beetle, delight in the way he runs, in his amusing ways, in his relation to the rest of nature. And in the same way we should not neglect to awaken the distinct sense in the child's soul that music is a creative element, an element that goes beyond nature, and that man himself becomes a fellow-creator of nature when he creates music. This sense will naturally have to be formed in a very rudimentary manner as an experience, but the first experience to be felt from the will-like element of music is that man should feel himself part of the cosmos.

• 1. Allgemeine Menschenkunde als Grundlage der Pädagogik, third lecture (the accompanying course. See Preface).
• 2. R. Steiner, Outlines of Occult Science, Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press of the Goetheanum, Dornach, also the Four Mystery Plays.
• 3. R. Steiner, The Threefold State.
• 4. See the Introduction to Goethe's works on Natural Science, edited by Rudolf Steiner.
• 5. R. Steiner's Theory of Colour.
• 6. Wege zu einem neuen Baustil (“Ways to a New Style in Architecture”) five lectures by Rudolf Steiner, with 104 illustrations. The Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press of the Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland.
• 7. Eurhythmy teacher at the Goetheanum, 1913–27.
• 8. Inneres Wesen des deuschen und Leben zwischen Tod und neuer Gebrut, 1914.
• 9. Paul Baumann, Songs of the Free Waldorf School.
• 10. R. Steiner, Outlines of Occult Science.

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

I. Instruction Class, Berlin, April 15, 1908

Based on John, chapter 11.

Easter is not only celebrated at this time because it is the beginning of spring; it has a much deeper significance. In ancient times, the group ego, the tribal ego, lived in people. In the initiated (Moses, Hermes, Buddha, Krishna, Zarathustra), the consciousness of the entire tribe was reflected. When they were initiated, they were out of the physical body with their etheric body and saw the essence of the entire tribe. On their return, they then laid this down in the law that they gave to their people. As a result, they became responsible for the sins committed against this law and had to reincarnate among their people until the people's karma was paid off. This was the case for all initiates before Christ, who received the revelation from within in the initiation sleep. Solomon, who was of the Abel-Seth people, belonged to this type of initiate. With these ancient initiates, the group soul of the people united with their etheric body during the initiation. It also lived in them afterwards. Therefore, they all had to undergo many incarnations.

Those who were not initiates in ancient times and did not belong to a people who received the revelations through such initiates - who lived scattered, who had to gather knowledge even from the physical world, were the Cain sons. One such was Hiram Abiff, who had gathered knowledge through life in the physical body and elevated it to wisdom. He expressed his wisdom in the building of temples. It was not the God within who revealed the wisdom to him, as it did to the descendants of the Abel-Seth sons, but it was the knowledge gained in physical existence. The Abel-Seth initiates were under the influence of Jehovah. In the twilight of their consciousness they were given the higher knowledge under the influence of the moon deity (Yahweh).

At that time, Hiram Abiff reached the limit of initiation. But he was only initiated later. For this, the spiritual sun had to come down to earth. This descended into the physical plane in the Christ. Only He could initiate Hiram Abiff. The clear [spiritual] Sun had to shine upon him at the initiation. He was Lazarus, who after the resurrection was called John. He was initiated by the Christ Jesus. That which Hiram Abiff had acquired through his life in the physical had to remain. Not the life of the group, but each individual incarnation should now become important. Every single incarnation was to add a leaf to the Book of Life, a leaf whose content was taken over into the spiritual, something that remained, that could no longer pass away, but was to remain until all future times. This is what Hiram Abiff represents.

Emphasis is placed not on an inner experience, in which the tribal nature is manifested, but on the one incarnation that has significance for all of the future.

Before this initiation of Hiram Abiff by Christ Jesus could take place, the spiritual sun, the sun, had to appear in spring and the old principle had to recede. The sun had to shine first with its light on the full moon, only then could the day of resurrection take place. Christ brought the new principle in place of the old Jehovah principle, that is why the Pharisees hated him, the representatives of the old principle. And when they realized that He represented this new teaching and brought the new initiation, they sought to kill Him after the resurrection of Lazarus. (“This man performs many signs and wonders.”)

In Christ Jesus, the soul of all mankind united with the Jesus bodies. The Christ was only once incarnated in the flesh. He will come again, but no longer in the flesh, only when humanity will recognize him in his etheric body.¹

Note: The folk spirit that united with Moses at the initiation and then lived in him was Michael.

II. Instruction lesson Berlin, April 15, 1908 (notes from another hand)

1. The resurrection of Lazarus

2. Why did the Pharisees want to seize and kill Christ afterwards?

3. Why does Easter fall on the first Sunday after the moon has become full after the spring equinox, March 21?

The resurrection of Lazarus is a kind of climax of the Gospel of John. It is an initiation, the course of which is told here - but a very special, very unique initiation. The initiations that had been carried out in the depths of the mystery centers in the pre-Christian era were of a completely different nature. In these pre-Christian times there were great, high initiates and also lesser ones. The greatest initiates: Moses, Hermes, Zoroaster – also Buddha and Krishna, who were also the lawgivers of their people, had undergone their initiation in such a way that the etheric body was taken out of the physical body for a period of three and a half days, and during this time the person to be initiated experienced the spiritual worlds in his etheric body.

In the past, the common bond of love was based on shared blood: People who belonged to the same tribe loved each other. The I of the tribe went through many generations; the individual human being had no validity. Everyone looked up to the patriarch - the Jew, for example, to his patriarch Abraham. One felt that one belonged to him as a Jew, one said: I am nothing - I and Father Abraham are one. This sense of belonging went from the individual member of the tribe to the patriarch like a ray of light. The initiate saw this ray of light, he saw the whole nation as embedded in its spiritual essence, which was expressed in the peculiarities of the nation and emanated from the patriarch. He saw all this clearly before him as he lay in the sleep of death. Yes, even more: the group soul of his people entered into him. He was now the group soul of the people. Thus, during his initiation, Moses was united with Michael. The laws that such an initiate then gave to his people were born out of the soul of the people themselves. And in formulating them, in setting them forth, the initiate became responsible for them. He had to incarnate again and again within his people. And the sins of his people against the law were his sins. He was karmically linked to them. The sins of the people lay on his karma. These great initiates who took this on were fully aware of this.

All these ancient initiates belonged to the Abel-Seth line. That is to say, they received enlightenment from above. The enlightenment came to them from the lunar forces. It was the forces of Yahweh that they received. And they received them not in the bright light of the sun, but in the darkness. Their etheric body received these Yahweh forces from the spiritual world, while the physical body lay as if in a sleep of death.

This was now to change. The people of the Cain current, those who had worked their way up from below through the work of their hands, had come so far that they could elevate the science they had gained for themselves to wisdom, that is, they could be initiated. The physical body had imprinted its impressions on their etheric bodies. Through their own labor they had purified, ennobled, spiritualized their physical bodies and their souls. These children of Cain were scattered throughout the world, and Hiram Abiff is named as the first of these scattered children of Cain in the world who had worked his way up so far. Hiram Abiff, the lonely hermit, stood before initiation. In his next incarnation he received it. Then he was called “Lazarus” - for in his previous incarnation, Lazarus was Hiram Abiff.

And this initiation of Lazarus was different from all previous ones. Until then, the initiates had received the lunar-Yahweh forces, that is, the forces concerning the mystery of birth and procreation, and each had received the forces of the people to which he belonged. But now the lunar force was no longer to be effective. Now the time had come when the all-embracing power of the sun, the Christ power, which is the power of all humanity, was to be bestowed upon humanity. This power of all humanity was to initiate Lazarus. The lunar forces were to be defeated by the more comprehensive solar power, which shines for all people. No longer should only blood count, flowing through the tribe, the people. From now on, only that which each individual human being works for in his soul should count. Every single human being within his incarnation should from now on have value, the individual incarnation should be consecrated to the striving for sanctification, spiritualization, no matter what name a person is called. This is the deepest idea of Christianity.

From now on, each incarnation should be like a leaf on which the eternal values of the struggling, striving human soul can be recorded. And at the end of such an incarnation, such a leaf should be placed in the Book of Eternity, which should contain ever greater values, ever deeper meanings, ever greater enrichments for each individual human being. These are the fruits of life that each individual human being should work for in his or her individuality, alone in constant striving. And then he should deposit these fruits of life in the bosom of all humanity, so that they can be integrated into the progress of all humanity.

The Christ is the great divine individuality who once appeared on earth in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, and once lived an incarnation that all striving, seeking human souls can look to as the great model and ideal for their individual striving. The Christ appeared in the flesh only once! But he will appear on earth again! He will reappear in a spiritual body, and those people who, through the striving of their souls, have spiritualized themselves to such an extent, will recognize him in his spiritual body and will be able to live with him.

This Christ, the high sun spirit, initiated Lazarus, the reincarnated Hiram-Abiff.

This meant, however, a radical break with the previous initiation principle. This was fully recognized by the Pharisees, who were also initiates, and this filled them with fear and terror. They recognized what was going on, but they also saw that from now on, if this new principle were to prevail, their own power would be over. From that time forth, they sought to destroy the bearer of the new principle of initiation, and it is they who finally made it possible for the Christ to be led to his death.

It is said of Lazarus that he was the disciple whom the Lord loved. And later it is said that John was the one who rested on the Lord's breast. There is a profound secret of soul development hidden behind these two statements, which we find in the Gospel of John.

Now we also understand why Easter falls at the time of each year when the young spring sun looks the moon full at the spring equinox in the face. She is said to be victorious over the lunar forces. Christ, the Sun-God, conquers the Moon-God! Therefore, in spring, when the sun has regained its full strength, the moon must look the sun full in the face before it is conquered by it. Thus Easter is a festival that reminds us that the human soul rises from the sleep of death within matter, looking up to the Christ-Sun, living in its light, striving in its love, can receive the new life, the resurrection life.

III. Instruction lesson without place or date given with the heading “The mission of man on earth”

When a person begins to ask himself who he actually is, how he can feel this way inside, it must gradually become clear to him that he feels like an ego-entity, and that everything he experiences in terms of joys and pains, everything that drives him to act, is grouped around this center and receives its true impulse from there. Separated from other beings, different from them, is the human being in his sense of self; and yet it is only through this sense of self that it is possible for him to consciously connect with his environment. With regard to the physical body, which visibly, perceptibly represents to the outside world what the human being feels inside as being on one's own, as if he were a being separated from the environment, it becomes clear to him that the heart is the actual center. The heart animates the other organs, in that the invigorating blood is sent from there to the smallest parts of the physical body.

Just as the I is the inner center from which all impulses for the revelation of the human being flow out into the environment, and to which all sensations from the outside world return, being absorbed and processed there, so the invigorating blood flows from the heart through the whole body and then returns to this center. The heart represents an expression of the I-effectiveness in the physical body.

There are two kinds of activity in both the human ego and the physical heart: outward sending and inward receiving and reworking. Just as the returning blue blood is transformed back into red living blood with the help of the breathing process through the lungs, so the experiences that the human ego absorbs from the environment must pass through the feelings and sensations of the astral body and thereby become stimuli for new activity. The human heart accomplishes its effect according to a certain tempo; a short while, a period of time, passes between the successive heartbeats. Thus, the human ego also needs a certain period of time between the arising of the impulse to act and the processing of the sensations, which thereby react from the outside world onto the ego. This tempo will be different for each person, depending on their individual disposition and level of development.

But if a person wants to gradually penetrate to the knowledge of their own being, they must try to understand their own appropriate tempo, listen to their own heartbeat and get to know the inner life of their being. He must be able to see his own being as if it did not belong to him. He must learn to observe it as something external to him, and only then can he gradually descend into it. Just as he previously sent his impulses out into the world around him, he will then transform his powers and turn them inwards instead of outwards. In this way, the inner world becomes the outer world for him.

What man finds when descending into his own interior, first into his three bodily sheaths, is beautifully described in the legend of the temple handed down to mankind from ancient times, in which is symbolically laid the whole course of the evolution of the earth in relation to the building of the temple of the human body - and the evolution of the human ego.

It is told how the great master builder Hiram Abiff wanted to enter the temple once more to see his work. When he wanted to leave the temple again, the first of the three treacherous journeymen met him at the first gate and struck him on the left temple so that the blood flowed down onto his shoulder. Then the Master turned to the other gate, where the second of the treacherous companions struck him and gave him a blow to the right temple, so that the blood flowed down. Then the Master turned to the last of the gates, where the third of the treacherous companions struck him with a blow to the forehead, so that the Master fell dead to the ground.

When the human ego descends into its three sheaths, it first encounters the astral body. It senses this astral body as it truly is. As if by a blow, the ego becomes aware and recognizes itself in this astral sheath. It encounters doubt in everything and in itself. Through this, it is attacked. This is the first of the treacherous companions.

Next, the person then encounters his etheric body, into which he descends. And again he comes to know himself as he is in this body, as if it is suddenly brought to his attention. Then superstition confronts him: all beliefs, all opinions that have been acquired through education. This is the second of the treacherous companions.

Then the person descends into his physical body and gets to know the illusion of the personal self. This is the third of the treacherous companions. When he encounters this, the possibility of feeling himself in his own self as separate from the outside world or his environment is taken away from him in one fell swoop. He learns to recognize appearance and truth, and he steps out of his narrow limitation. No longer enclosed by the three sheaths, the human being steps freely out of himself into the environment and recognizes himself as a microcosm in the macrocosm.

When man is symbolically represented as the pentagram, he must be regarded as encompassing the three lower kingdoms on earth. The mineral kingdom has only the physical body on earth, and can be indicated symbolically by a single line. The plant kingdom has in addition a second principle, the etheric body, and this must therefore be indicated by two lines touching one another. The animal kingdom has a third principle, the astral body. This can be indicated by three lines: (X with line connecting the upper edges) p 414

The etheric body contains the principle of growth. In the plant form, leaf would always appear after leaf if it were not for the astral body coming from above, which causes the flower to emerge. The etheric principle, which in plants would cause continuous growth, is partially transformed in animals, so that it exercises its powers more internally as a receiver of the astral body. The straight line of the etheric is closed and bent by a new line, which symbolically represents the astral principle, and this new line then bends the physical principle again on the other side. Hence the physical form, which in plants represents a vertical line, is bent and has become horizontal in animals. The animal can therefore be symbolically indicated with the three lines; in man, the I is added to the three principles. This I can be symbolically represented as a point above the three lines X, which pours its power into the etheric body and the physical body through two lines that pass through the astral, acting on the one hand through light and on the other through warmth. Through this influence of the I, the human form is raised to an upright line again, and so the symbol of the pentagram arises.

If man is the pentagram himself and lives entirely within it, he will not be able to see himself as such. He will only be able to consciously survey that part of his being that is below his ego, that which he has outgrown. These are the three lines that represent the symbol for the animal. That is why man only sees that part of his physical body that is below the shoulders from the front.

But if he really wants to know himself as an ego, then he must step out of himself, so that he also gets to know the upper part of the pentagram. He must create for himself a new center of perception, which lies outside the pentagram; he must be able to take a superhuman standpoint, which lies outside the ego and yet is a center of consciousness.

The Temple Legend tells how the Master received the first blow on the left temple, the second blow on the right temple, so that the blood ran down upon the shoulder, and the third blow on the forehead. Then physical death sets in. This indicates the upper part of the pentagram. With physical death, the human being steps out of his personal self and experiences himself in the macrocosm. The Temple Legend tells us how the Master's body was buried by the three companions, how the Master himself, reborn in the cosmos, experienced the developmental states of the earth as the old moon, as the sun with the seven planets and as Saturn with the twelve signs of the zodiac. When man has emerged from his three shells and experiences himself in the cosmos, as if newly born, the first thing he feels is the essence of the great mother, the earth mother, from whom he has grown out. He experiences earlier developmental states in which he was more dependent and intimately connected to the earth. He experiences this as the moon state, sun state and Saturn state.

What the great master builder Hiram Abiff could not experience at that time, because – as the temple legend says – he lived before the Christ event on earth, was the light and warmth of the Christ-being in the earth aura. For this being had not yet connected with the earth at that time. It could be seen in the sun, as Zarathustra had once seen it as Ahura Mazdao, the great aura, as the cosmic heart, when it was revealed to him that this sun being would one day live on earth in a human body. His great mission became clear to him, to work through many incarnations and in various ways to prepare such a human body that was capable of carrying the spirit of the sun within itself. He should tune his own individual pace of his ego so that it was in harmony with this higher ego of humanity. The sound and rhythm of his heartbeat should coincide with the sound and rhythm of the great cosmic heart, only then could the sublime sun being live in a human body.

When the great Master Builder, Hiram Abiff, lived on earth, this mighty fact had not yet been accomplished. But the individuality of Hiram Abiff lived on and was reborn on earth at the time when the Christ-being, the great Sun Spirit, lived in Jesus of Nazareth. Once the great master builder, Hiram Abiff, was led to his ancestor in order to receive the new hammer with which he was to continue his work. He was led to him through the fire. At that time, the human ego had to rise through the blood of the generations to the ancestors in order to attain higher wisdom. But now that the great spirit of the Sun had descended to Earth and lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ Jesus Himself placed the seed of the new life in the heart of the reborn Hiram Abiff. Through Him, he was raised to spiritual life; he was born again in the disciple whom the Lord loved. The human ego was quickened by the divine ego and raised to a higher existence. Thereafter this disciple could become the writer of the Gospel which has as its starting point the human and the divine ego. And it was revealed to him how the development of this human ego through the post-Atlantean cultural periods extended into the future, until the end of the days on earth, as he portrayed it in the Apocalypse. And in his Gospel it is said how Christ Jesus, with his last words from the cross, handed this disciple over to his mother, who was not his natural mother. As a son he gives the human ego to the Earth Mother, after he has quickened it with his powers, so that she may guard and care for it. As mother, He gives the Earth to this I, so that the son may give his powers to the mother. The human I shall redeem the Earth, uplift it with its powers into spiritual regions, with the full consciousness that without this Earth it could not develop into what it is and is to become.

With the event at Golgotha, when the blood flowed from the wounds of the great redeemer, when the cosmic heart's blood permeated the earth and its powers poured into the center, the earth became radiant, radiating light out into its surroundings from within. Then the possibility was also given for every human individuality to experience this light within itself. When the Earth became the body of the great Sun Spirit by permeating it with his spiritual powers, all beings on Earth were also endowed with these powers. The seed for the reunification of the Sun and the Earth had been sown. The physical body of Jesus of Nazareth was the mediator through which the cosmic powers united with the Earth aura. And when the blood flowed from this body on Golgotha, the Earth was again absorbed into the power of the Sun. Since then, this Christ power radiates from its center into the surrounding area, and from the Sun the Christ power radiates into the Earth. Man can experience this power and this light in himself as an earthly human being when he recognizes himself as a part of the earth, which, as the physical body of Christ, is permeated by His Being. Then the white light shines from within him, as it radiates from the center of the earth.

A person can also experience the power and light of Christ as it radiates from the outside and permeates him with higher life. Then it surrounds and permeates him, just as it passes through the earth, radiating from the sun. Then the human being feels united in spirit with this solar power; he feels himself growing together with the great cosmic heart from the depth of his heart. As a higher being, living in this spiritual sun, he recognizes his true self, as connected to it as he, as an earthly human being, is connected to the earth itself. And just as the sun's forces permeate and give life to the earth, so this higher being permeates and lives through the earthly human being with his powers.

In the temple of the human body there is a holiest of the holy. Many people live in the temple without knowing it. But those who have an inkling of it receive the strength to purify themselves to such an extent that they may enter this Holy of Holies. There is the sacred vessel, which has been prepared throughout the ages so that when the time came, it could be capable of containing the blood of Christ, the Christ-life. When man has entered, he has also found the way to the Holy of Holies in the great temple of the earth. There are many on earth who live without knowing it, but when man has found himself in his innermost sanctuary, he will also be allowed to enter there and find the Holy Grail. The vessel will at first appear to him as if it were cut out of wonderfully sparkling crystals, forming symbols and letters, until he gradually senses the sacred contents, so that it shines for him in a golden splendor. A human being enters the sanctuary of his own heart, then a divine being emerges from this sanctuary and unites with the God outside, with the Christ-being. He lives in the spiritual light that radiates into the vessel and thereby sanctifies it.

Because man lives as a twofold being, he can pour the spiritual power of the sun into the earth and be a connecting link between the sun and the earth. Just as from the center of life, the heart, the invigorating blood flows and pours through the entire physical organism into the bone system, which - as an external solidification and congealing in the organism - can be seen as the opposite of the living, ever active heart, so each human individuality must become a channel for the blood flowing from the cosmic center of life, permeating the solidified earth with life. The earth can be thought of as a cosmic skeletal system. It would be completely ossified and dried up if the cosmic heart had not poured out its life blood through a human body, thereby reviving it anew.

Once upon a time, the great spirit of the sun lived in a human body as an example for humanity, and every human being is meant to follow suit. Through Him the possibility for this has been given. To be imbued with the Christ-spirit, to know oneself as a center, to live in this spirit, through which spiritual light, spiritual power and spiritual warmth can stream into the earth, that is the mission of the individual human being and of all humanity, for in this way will they be able to redeem the earth and uplift it to spiritual regions.

IV Authentic information handed down.

Lazarus, the favorite disciple of Jesus Christ, who later became the author of the Gospel of John, is the re-embodied Hiram Abiff.

Adam-Eva -> Cain

Abel Seth -> Lamech, Hiram Abiff

Solomon -> Lazarus-John.¹

The individuality, which had been re-embodied as Hiram Abiff and Lazarus-Johannes, was initiated anew in its embodiments in the 13th and 14th centuries and has since borne the name Christian Rosenkreutz. ²

From the instruction session in Berlin, February 10, 1913 for the 3rd

The legend, the seven-step ladder ² And each of us should keep these things in mind during the day. Then, as a consequence, if the things we do here are done right, we will feel that the right forces are flowing in.

During the night, the human being can then come close to Hiram Abiff or Adoniram, Lazarus, who was initiated by the Lord Himself. Meditation is given for this purpose: “I am not only in the world for myself, but to become similar to my archetype.

This striving is a duty, not selfishness. These things are given in the first scenes of “Examination of the Soul” and “The Guardian of the Threshold”, as in the three dramas in general, much, much meditation material is given.

You should not forget that the spiritual powers are counting on you in the leadership of mankind.

Every person is a citizen of the spiritual world, but you should be aware of it! At night, you are always in a spiritual world, interacting with beings and judging. This can suddenly come to a person's awareness when waking up or at other times during the day: “I have to educate myself to become a revealer of the divine archetype within me.”

Meditate on death; this is a very important matter.

• 1. See the detailed descriptions in the volume 'The Event of the Appearance of the Christ in the Ethereal World', CW 118.
• 1. Record by Rudolf Steiner for Helene Röchling as a supplement to the temple legend.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner's message conveyed by Marie Steiner in the context of the Knowledge Cult; see the appendix to this section on page 423ff.
• 2. The so-called Jacob's ladder. Schauberg (“Comparative Handbook of the Symbolism of Freemasonry...”) II. Band S. 402f.): “The Persian symbol of the entrance of the soul of the deceased into heaven through the seven planetary spheres is said to have been a staircase or ladder leading to seven different doors. (...) According to Origen, the Egyptians used a similar symbol to represent the descent of heavenly souls in the Milky Way through the seven planetary spheres, namely a ladder that reached from heaven to earth and was divided into seven steps, each with a gate. (...) The ladder that Jacob saw in the famous dream and that also reached from earth to heaven was probably this Egyptian ladder that led the souls of men from heaven to earth and from there back to heaven again, which thus had not just three steps, as is generally the case. 2

We are trying to penetrate the theosophical life and knowledge bit by bit, but often during this penetration we have a heartfelt need to ask ourselves: why do we want and seek theosophy in the spiritual life of the present? We need not strain our minds or hearts too hard when such a question arises, and a word will come into our soul that will immediately have an enlightening and even more enlightening effect on our feelings: the word responsibility. Responsibility! This word should give us something that should exclude from the outset in our soul, in our hearts, that we are pursuing Theosophy out of some personal longing. If we observe what may befall us, perhaps without our being properly aware of it, when we hear the word responsibility in relation to the spiritual life that we call theosophical, then we will increasingly come to realize that we owe it to present-day humanity and to the best in us, which can serve this present humanity, to concern ourselves with 'theosophy'. We must not practise Theosophy just for our own pleasure, to satisfy ourselves somehow because we have this or that personal yearning, but we must feel that Theosophy is something that present humanity needs if the process of human development is to continue at all. We need only realize that without Theosophy, or whatever one might call it, without that spiritual life which we mean, humanity on earth would have to face a bleak future, truly a bleak future. This is so for the simple reason that all the spiritual impulses of the past, all that could be given to man in the past in the way of spiritual impulses, has been exhausted. It is gradually living itself out and can bring nothing new into the evolution of humanity. What would have to come if only the old impulses were to continue to work would be something that is perhaps still undreamt of today: not only an overwhelming, externally overwhelming, but numbing domination of mere outward technique, but also a perishing because all religious, scientific, philosophical, artistic and also, in the higher sense, ethical interest is moving out of the human soul. People would become a kind of living automaton if new spiritual impulses did not come. This is how we must feel when we think of Theosophy, as those whom their karma has brought to know that humanity needs new impulses.

We may well ask ourselves: What can we, each one of us, do according to our particular qualities and abilities, in the face of this general sense of responsibility? The way in which Theosophy has come into the world in recent times, and how it has developed over the last few decades into our days, is instructive for answering this question of the heart and soul, perhaps especially for you, my dear friends. We must never forget that the way the word Theosophy has entered the world in modern times is something of a spiritual miracle of civilization. This spiritual miracle of civilization is linked to a personality who, as a personality, is indeed close to you, my dear friends, since she drew her spiritual roots from your national heritage in a certain way. I am talking about Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. And for Western Europeans it is undeniable, in every respect undeniable, that the body in which the individuality, who in this incarnation was called Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, was enclosed, could only have come from the environment of Eastern Europe, from Russia. For she had all the Russian characteristics. But Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was taken from you by very special circumstances; Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was transferred to the West by the special karmic conditions of the present time. Now, let us consider what a strange cultural miracle actually took place.

Take this personality of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. She was a personality who, basically, remained a child throughout her entire life in many, many ways, a real child; a personality who, throughout her entire life, did not learn to think logically; a personality who, throughout her entire life, has not learned to control her passions, urges and desires to any extent, and was always able to fall into extremes; a personality who basically had very little scientific education. Through this personality, it is revealed to the world, one might say, as it could not be otherwise, through the medium of such a personality, in a chaotic, mixed-up, colorful way, a sum of the very greatest eternal wisdom of mankind. And anyone who is well-versed in these matters will find in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's works wisdom, truths, and insights of humanity that could not have been understood by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's intellect and soul, not even remotely. There is nothing clearer, if one only approaches all the facts impartially, than that for everything that was in the work of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the outer soul, the outer intellectuality of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was only a detour, only a means by which significant, great spiritual powers could communicate with humanity. And there is nothing clearer than that in the way it was to happen at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century, it could not have happened to anyone in Western Europe. It took the very special, on the one hand selfless, almost des-ensouled, and on the other hand again radically selfish, egoistic nature of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, to allow what happened to happen through higher spiritual powers. The selfless nature for the reason that every Western European mind would have brought into its own forms of thinking, into its own intellect, what had been revealed. And it needed the completely selfish, egotistical kind, because in the coarse, materialistic way of life in Western Europe at that time, there was no possibility of doing otherwise than to make, one might say, iron fists out of such a radical state of mind, out of such delicate hands, which had to cultivate and care for the occultism of modern times. It is a peculiar phenomenon. But, my dear friends, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky went to the West, went to that cultural center which, in all its idiosyncrasy, in its entire structure and configuration in all fields, except America, is the most materialistic cultural area of our time, a cultural area that lives in its language, in its thinking, absolutely in materialistic thoughts and in materialistic feelings. It would be going too far here to discuss the power that led Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to England in particular. And so we see that the sum of occultism, which expresses itself in a culturally idiosyncratic way in a medium – I do not mean this in a spiritualistic sense – initially strives for the western part of Europe.

Within this European West, the fate of this occultism was initially sealed in a certain direction, because there was no way around the fulfillment of a significant karma in this materialistic European West with the founding of the Theosophical Society. This karma was also fulfilled. This Western Europe has a heavy karmic debt; it cannot penetrate the secrets of existence without this karmic debt asserting itself in a certain way. When occultism is involved somewhere, karma immediately deepens, and forces are brought to the surface that would otherwise remain hidden. And not to criticize anything in particular, but to characterize, it is said what is to be said: The European West, in carrying out something that is historically necessary, has perpetrated countless injustices against the bearer of ancient spiritual culture, against the bearer of ancient occult secrets, in whose life, although spiritual things have become rigid and no longer exist for the present, they live at the bottom of the soul. — For that is the truth in India, in South Asia. The moment occult impulses came to Western Europe, a reaction immediately set in against the spiritual forces at work in the depths of Indian culture, and it became impossible – it was already impossible in the time of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – to retain what was indeed intended by certain spiritual powers as the actual spiritual movement necessary in our present time. It was impossible to hold on to that. The intention was to give humanity a body of occult teachings that could fit all people, all hearts, that everyone could go along with. But because of certain necessities, the impulse was transplanted to Western Europe, and an egoistic reaction asserted itself. Those spiritual powers that wanted to give the world a new impulse without distinction of any human differences were pushed back, and India, once suppressed in its occultism, took revenge karmically by infiltrating its own national egoistic occultism at the first opportunity when occultism appeared in the West. And that happened in the days of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. This was already happening when Helena Petrovna Blavatsky summarized the great truths and wisdoms of her “The Secret Doctrine”. Her first work, “Isis Unveiled”, shows only the very chaotic and illogical and passionate and confused nature of her being, but shows everywhere that behind her there are watching powers that want to guide her towards the general human. In the “Secret Doctrine,” alongside the self-evident greatest good, there is everywhere a human special interest, such an interest that emanates from certain occult centers that do not have the general human interest in mind today, but a partial, a special interest. Tibetan, Indian, and also Egyptian initiations today everywhere have only a partial human interest in mind, and want only to avenge the suppressed Eastern occultism in the Western world, to avenge the fact that the Western world has triumphed over the Eastern world through materialistic factors. It has triumphed over the Eastern world through materialistic factors; it has triumphed in so far as Christianity has been adopted into the actual progressive culture of human development, into the progressive life of human development. Christianity has not gone east of Asia, nor south of Asia; Christianity has gone west.

Now you might say, my dear theosophical friends: So it is good. Then the West accepted Christianity, and since Christianity is a stage in the onward progress of humanity, it is natural that the West should have triumphed over the East. — Yes, if that were so! If it were so, it would be self-evident. But it is not so. Christianity, which was prepared for centuries and millennia and which came into the world, has not yet triumphed anywhere on earth. And anyone today who would believe that they could truly and genuinely represent the Christ principle and the Christ impulse in the present would have fallen prey to an indescribable arrogance. What has happened so far? Nothing more than that the Western nations have adopted certain externalities of Christianity, have occupied the name of Christ and have clothed their old cultures, which had been established in Europe before Christianity, with the name of Christianity. Does the Christ reign within Christian Europe? No follower of occult movements will ever admit that the Christ reigns within Christian Europe, but will say: You speak of the “Christ”, but you still mean the same as the ancient Central European peoples meant when they spoke of their god Saxnot. — The symbolum of the Crucifixus stands over the European peoples. In a certain respect, however, the traditions of the god Saxnot prevail, whose symbol is the former short Saxon sword, which was there for the expansion of only material interests, because that was the occupation of the European peoples. Therefore, this occupation has also produced the noblest flower of materialistic culture, an appearance that is noble in the realm of materialistic culture: chivalry. Where in any culture can we find anything similar to the knighthood of Western culture? It does not exist anywhere else. No one would think of comparing the heroes of the Trojan War with the medieval knights. The Christ still lives little in people. People only speak of the Christ. When Westerners speak of Christ, Eastern peoples feel that they, the Eastern peoples, are far, far ahead in terms of their spiritual understanding of the world, in terms of what these peoples know of the secrets of existence. These Eastern peoples know this.

Even ordinary people can explain to you that, in a certain way, Eastern peoples can already appreciate their spiritual advantages. What do the Western peoples still do today in their masses, in their majority, when the secrets of existence are revealed? Well, we still sit together in quite small groups when we speak, we speak of something like what was spoken about last night, of the ruling spiritual powers and secrets that surround us everywhere. To the average Western European, this is folly or madness, for he still cannot understand Paul's words: “What wisdom is with God is often folly with men, and what is folly with men is wisdom with God.” And only those who have been infected by Westerners in the East would dare to question even the slightest of the profound truths about the spiritual secrets of the cosmos, as we try to reveal them when they hear them, because such things, as they were said yesterday, for example, are taken for granted by those who are immersed in the Eastern spiritual life. Therefore, let us not be surprised that it often seemed to these eastern peoples as if the Europeans had attacked them, as it seems to a group of people when a herd of wild animals approaches them, against which they defend themselves, which they do not resent for what they do, but which they regard as something inferior. We Westerners are, for the reasons indicated – whether this is justified today or not is not the point here – and according to the traditions of the East, naturally regarded as inferior by every member of the Brahmanical caste, for example.

And if we disregard Brahmanism and look, for example, at the cultures of Central Asia, at Tibetan or Chinese culture, which in the near future will gain in importance for the world in a way that people today would never dream of Nevertheless, we are only a short time away from this, when we see and become aware of how the souls of many Zarathustra disciples are still embodied in these cultures, then we will be tempted to take these things very seriously. We will also be able to understand that the Indian, Tibetan and Egyptian occultists could have been tempted to channel their own wisdom out of her soul into that which Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was able to give, but that which is her own belongs to a past human development process. And we must recognize the character of the past of these oriental wisdom teachings, which are contained in the Blavatsky teachings. We do not need to misjudge the value of such a matter, we do not need to misjudge that when Chinese culture, which one might say has broken its fetters, now floods over the Western world, then a spirituality comes with it that is truly the successor, in many respects still the unadulterated successor, of the old Atlantean culture. It will have the effect of something bursting open that has been held together, and which can spread to all the world; so it will pour out – on a small scale, ancient Indian culture has poured out at the first opportunity.

Therefore, my dear Theosophical friends, it was possible that from that time on, everything that was referred to in all occultism came to pass, and that from then on, the Theosophical movement was no longer a suitable instrument for the advancement of European culture. Every occultist is well aware of the saying that goes: the guiding powers of occultism or those who are in any way occultly active must never allow any special interest to prevail over the general interest of humanity. There is no possibility of working occult favorably when a special interest outweighs the general human interest. The moment a special interest takes precedence over the general human interest in occultism, the possibilities for real error are given. That is why every possible error has been able to enter the theosophical movement since that time. Due to the way in which England is connected to India karmically in the world context, there was simply the possibility that those exalted powers, which are at the starting point of the theosophical movement, were falsified. For it is a common occurrence in occultism for powers that want to pursue their special interest to take on the form of those who have given the actual impulses before. From a certain point in the theosophical movement, there was no longer any possibility of simply accepting everything that lay within this theosophical movement, and karma has willed that this has become less and less possible. And so, when the call came to us to unite with this Theosophical movement, nothing else could be done but to go back to the original sources, to those sources which, in contrast to the specific ones, we can call the general human ones. And so you have perhaps seen in Central Europe that we are trying to get at the occult sources in such a way that you will not notice in all that you are encountering that some special interest is connected with it. You may try to compare everything that can be found in Central Europe in the way of special interests with the kind of Theosophy that is practiced among us: The two things really cannot be brought together. You can take this Theosophy and probably find nothing German in it, except that, because it has to be written in a language, the books by myself are written in German. You will find nothing German in Theosophy, nothing that is somehow connected with the external traditions of Central Europe. And wherever a tendency to connect Theosophy with a special interest arises, it is immediately recognized as an impossibility.

This has now been the special task of Central Europe, to free Theosophy from the special peculiarities that it has acquired in Western Europe. It was our mission to purify Theosophy, to completely detach it from all special interests. And the more you go into the matter, the more you will find that I myself was able to detach everything that I was allowed to bring theosophically from any special interest. This is a symbolic indication, my dear Theosophical friends, but symbolically speaking – I only needed to be guided by what was present as an immediate impulse in the present incarnation, do not misunderstand, it only reflects a fact – those who were the external bearers, for example, of the blood from which I descend, they came from German areas of Austria; I could not be born there. I myself was born in a Slavic region, in a region that was completely foreign to the whole milieu and the whole idiosyncrasy from which my ancestors came. Thus it was that at the starting point of my present incarnation, I was symbolically impelled to detach myself from all special interests, so that in Central Europe, Theosophy really stands before us in Central Europe as a goddess, as something divinely detached from all humanity, that has as much to do with the person who lives there as with the person who lives there, and that will always have to remain.

The ideal we have, my dear Theosophical friends, as simple as it is expressed, will always have to stand before us because it is harder to fulfill than to express. It will have to stand before us as our ideal, the truth and sincerity, the unadulterated divine truth. Perhaps just when we strive for it, we will find the way, not for us, but for what was impersonal in Central Europe after the whole mission of Europe, for this divine theosophy to the East. And there, if I may now describe the way in which Theosophy has taken hold in the West, is passing through Europe and is to come to the East, I would again like to emphasize the word here: the word 'responsibility'. The cultures of the world develop in such a way that, as it were, one culture develops with another in a spiritual shell. One culture connects to another. The fact that Theosophy had to be so impersonal in Central Europe has given it a certain character of spirituality, of spirituality detached from all interests. This Theosophy has, my dear Theosophical friends, something brittle about it; it has the brittleness that comes from being untouched by special interests; it will therefore not appeal to those who cannot open their hearts to that which does not serve any particular interest.

But the spiritual content, this theosophy, can be found by the soul that thirsts for this spiritual content, that longs for this spiritual content. And here I must say, my dear theosophical friends, that I myself have met a soul from the spiritual world that longs for the spirit that expresses itself through theosophy. I have met this soul in the purely spiritual world. If we go up in the order of the hierarchies to the individual spirits of nations and speak within the individual spirits of nations of the national souls, then we also come across the Russian national soul, which is still young, so to speak, and which still has to develop further, as every being must develop. I know that this Russian national soul longs for the spirit that is expressed in Theosophy. It longs with all the strength it can develop. I speak of the sense of responsibility because you, my dear Theosophical friends, are children of this Russian national soul. It rules and works in you and you have a responsibility to it. The responsibility is to understand it! Don't be offended; this Russian national soul could often tell me many, many things. Most tragically, what this Russian national soul could tell me became clear to me around the year 1900. It became most tragically apparent at that time because one could notice something that I myself could only interpret in the right way long afterwards, because one could notice how little this Russian national soul is actually understood today. We in Western Europe have become acquainted with much, much from Russia, and much, much from Russia has made a great, powerful impression on us. We have become acquainted with the great impulses of Tolstoy, we have become acquainted with the psychology of Dostoyevsky, which has so deeply moved Western Europe, and finally we have become acquainted with a mind like Solovyov's, a mind that, when you let it take effect on you, makes the impression everywhere: that is how he is, as he has written. And what he has written only becomes truly clear when you stand behind him and feel the Russian national soul. And this Russian national soul has much more to say than even Solowjow knows how to say, because there is still much too much that comes from Western Europe before our hearts. Think, my dear friends, of the word sense of responsibility, think of the fact that you have this task of showing yourselves worthy of the Russian national soul, and that you should get to know the longing of the Russian national soul for impersonal theosophy. When you get to know Theosophy in terms of its innermost impulse, then, my dear friends, you will have all kinds of questions that can only come from a Russian soul: questions of the soul about the spiritual issues of Theosophy. I have found that so much noble, glorious, beautiful feeling has come to me from Eastern Europe: so much genuine, true human love and kindness, human compassion, overflowing feeling, subtle, intimate observation of what is in the world, and intense personal connection to the powers of existence. And from such loving, beautiful and noble feelings, many, many questions have been put to me by members of the Russian people, many questions – questions that must be asked one day because they are questions that humanity will not be able to live with in the future without answering. Questions that can only come from the east of Europe; so far only the Russian national soul has put them to me, the Russian national soul on the higher planes. I have often thought that the children of this national soul still have a long way to go to understand their national soul, to understand what this national soul actually longs for and how much still separates them, these children of the national soul, from the national soul itself. Therefore, do not be afraid to seek the path you can find, if you want, to your national soul. From your national soul you will find the questions without whose answers the humanity of the future will not be able to exist. But do not be afraid to go beyond personal interest, for be mindful of the great sense of responsibility that you should have towards the Russian national soul, be mindful of this feeling, for in the future the national souls will need their children, the people, to achieve their goals. And do not forget one thing. That which can carry you the highest, which can take you to the most beautiful, most luminous heights in the world, is most exposed to the danger of falling into error. You, my dear Theosophical friends, are to infuse the soul into the spiritual. You are to find the soul to the spirit. You can do it because the Russian national soul has immeasurable depths and possibilities for the future. But it is necessary that you are aware that the soul, which can rise to the spirit, has to inspire the spirit itself, and that you face the great danger of losing yourselves and getting stuck in the personal, in the individually personal, losing yourselves in the personal as such. Then the personal becomes strong when it comes from the soul.

You will not experience the obstacles that so many people in Western and Central Europe face. You are less born to skepticism; skepticism can only come to you from the West through indoctrination. You will learn to distinguish truth from untruth and dishonesty through a certain feeling in the field of occultism, where charlatanry and truth stand so close together. Not skepticism, but cynicism will be your danger. Your danger will be that the soul-spiritual, the powerful of your personalities, can spread clouds around you, astral clouds through which you then cannot penetrate to the objective-spiritual. Powerful of your personalities can spread clouds around you, astral clouds, through which you then cannot get through to the objective spiritual. Your fire, your warmth, they can spread around you like a cloudy aura, not letting the spiritual through, because you think you are enthusiastic about the spirit, but because of your enthusiasm you prevent the spirit from finding its way to you. So try to realize that you have a great advantage – now in the ideal spiritual sense – of being able to have a special interest because you are predestined, that is, your national soul, to receive the special interest of the Russian people to receive theosophy, which in Central Europe still had to be taken entirely as a divine power exalted above all human things, as something that you can receive as your own, as something that you can cherish and cultivate as your very own. For by your predestination you are endowed to breathe soul into the spirit. This has often been said in our ranks, but it is up to you to seize the opportunity as soon as possible, not to miss it, not just to develop feeling and will, but above all to develop energy and perseverance, less - if a word is to be said about the practical — to speak a word with regard to the practical side — talk about the way in which Theosophy must be in the West and in Russia and so on, and what is good for the one and the other, but first take in Theosophy, take it in, unite with the soul, with the heart. The rest will follow; it will follow for sure.

This, my dear friends, is something I wanted to talk to you about, wanted to talk about because wherever I am to speak directly to people, I have to face the sense of responsibility that we have towards people of the present day with regard to Theosophy. In the West, people should feel that they are sinning against humanity if they can have something of Theosophy and do not want it, reject it – sin against humanity! Sometimes it is quite difficult to grasp, because one must have an almost transcendental sense of duty, my dear friends, if one is to have such an obligation, such a sense of responsibility towards humanity. Your national soul tells you that it, this national soul itself, is indebted to you. The national soul has already assumed this obligation to humanity for you. You need only find this national soul. You need only let it speak through your thoughts, feelings and impulses of will, and when you feel the responsibility to the national soul, you will at the same time fulfill the duty to humanity. Therefore, you are also placed in a geographical position between the European West, which must have Theosophy, but for which it cannot become a personal matter to the same extent as for you, and the Asian East, which has had occultism and spiritual culture since time immemorial. You are placed in the middle. You would perhaps never manage to fulfill your task towards the spiritual culture of humanity in this geographically difficult situation, I would say, if you only had to think of your obligation to humanity. Because the temptations will be tremendously great when, on the one hand, not only the European West is at work, which has basically made many of the children of your national soul unfaithful to itself. In the face of a great deal of what is written by Russians and brought to us in the West, we have the feeling that it has nothing to do with the Russian national soul, but is a reflection of all kinds of Western things. The second temptation will come from the East, when the power of spiritual culture arises. There it will be our duty to know that, however great the spiritual culture of the East may be, the man of the present must say to himself: It is not the past that we have to carry into the future, but new impulses. It is not just any old spiritual impulse from the East that we have to take up, but to cultivate what the West can bring forth from its own spiritual sources. Then the time will come when Europe, if you also fulfill your duties towards your national soul, will begin to understand a little of what the Christ impulse actually is in the spiritual development of humanity. Seek, my dear friends, to understand everything that I have tried to express with and in these words, and above all seek in these words that which can become an impulse within you, not just to feel and sense that Theosophy is something something significant and great, but above all seek to take Theosophy into your soul and to organize your life and your deeds out of it.