The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! In yesterday's lecture, I tried to show that the aims and essence of spiritual research, as it is meant here, correspond to the urge and yearning of the present time, that they essentially meet the needs of human souls, which have been preparing for a long time up to our present day and which are now clearly perceptible to everyone who wants to see, to everyone who just wants to understand themselves correctly. One can now, especially when considering the question of the significance of this spiritual research or spiritual science for life, for the immediate, one might say fully active life of the human being, take up yesterday's remark, because one can best understand the significance of a thing for life when one first sees certain urges and needs arising from life that this thing demands. Today, many people expect a [satisfying] worldview. Spiritual research or science will provide it.

What the soul needs when its I wants to develop its character is what many people today expect from a kind of conclusion that can be drawn from the truly advanced natural science of our time. For certain things this is certainly justified; however, an attentive observation of what is happening in our time clearly shows us how many things cannot be achieved in this way, how the life of the present so longingly, so strongly longs for a research, for the spirit.

Many facts could be cited; only one of the most recent will be presented here. On September 18 at the Naturalists' Assembly in Münster, Professor von Wettstein gave a lecture on the importance of biology, the science of life, for culture and life; that is, [he pointed out] with complete justification, how one could see in the course of the nineteenth century that a worldview should be given in a popular way that should be based on the achievements of natural science. And he emphasized how natural science has progressed steadily, and how it had to be broken by science with what was to be shown for the human soul in the materialistic age; and with full justification, he endeavored to remain calm in observing the fact and not to draw hasty conclusions about those world-view questions that may very much enter into the realm where human thinking goes astray into what is indeed unjustified.

In fact, spiritual science wants nothing more than to follow such advice in its own way and in its own field; not by arriving at the truth of life through all kinds of conclusions and circumstantial evidence of the world view from external sensual facts , but by awakening the slumbering powers of the soul, that which Goethe describes as “spiritual eyes”, observing what is behind the world of the senses, behind being in the senses in general, and with which the human soul thinks itself connected.

This is what our time and life craves. And if spiritual science is about fathoming the truth, then the way in which it can relate to life in a way that fertilizes and heals it must be such that every soul finds satisfaction. Therefore, this demand may well be made in response. And here one thing can be said: spiritual science must fulfill one thing if it is to meet the needs of life: it must have the power, independently of a certain higher education, independently of the development of this or that fact of science, independently even of a certain height of philosophical worldview, to also enter into the simplest mind that has to do its daily work as a human being and does not have time to deal with this or that individual science in a detailed way. Spiritual research must be generally accessible. In order to avoid being misunderstood, I would like to add that spiritual research must be in complete harmony with the science of the time, and must not contradict its just demands. The strictest researcher with his strictest demands may come, and spiritual science must be able to answer to him. And anyone who engages with the serious literature of spiritual science will see how this can be.

But it is also important that it brings things to light that every soul, regardless of education, can understand. And here I would like to respond, not with a theory, but with a kind of fact. I would like to mention not a fact that is taken directly from spiritual science itself, but a fact that actually points to something that happened before spiritual science emerged, but which shows how souls that long for an inclination towards the spiritual world understand each other in a remarkable way, regardless of their level of education. I will cite something that bears witness to such understanding, and which will occur to an increased degree when spiritual science becomes more and more established in the souls that need it.

Moriz Carriere, one of the most amiable and thoughtful philosophers of the present day – it can only be noted here that he was one of those who always held philosophy's idealism in high regard at a time when materialism was sweeping in over the great questions of world view – of his work on the cultural development of humanity, he not only shows how the spiritual works in the development of humanity, but also how true science can be reconciled with the genuine needs of the soul in terms of the big questions of existence, and with the relationship between world view and religion. Now Moriz Carriere himself relates a remarkable experience that he had just as he was trying to show how the spiritual works in the pursuit of human development, and how the great figure of Christ Jesus in particular fits into human development. Then he received a series of manuscript pages in the mail. They came from a simple man. His name was never known either. His name was Karl Zeuner. At a time when the waves of revolutionary life were running high, he had somehow broken the law and was imprisoned. He was thrown into prison. And now he tells how he despaired of the friends who had striven with him for external goals, of the remnants of what was left to him from the religious education of the school, how he was lonely. He recounts how he then heard a familiar song from afar in his prison. He recounts how that inspired his soul, how special powers stirred in his soul. He wrote down thoughts that gradually came to his reawakening soul in prison.

Right when you start reading these pages, you come across strange sentences, especially at the beginning. He says something like: “When I look at my own soul and then at what surrounds me, I feel in my soul the same essence that lives in all things outside, and I feel in my own soul like a part of the whole world soul.” And from there he starts to form his ideas about the course of world history, describing how the spirit in people, who have gradually developed, is active.

Why did Moritz Carriere find this so surprising? It is surprising when you compare these pages of the simple man with what Moritz Carriere wrote based on a knowledge of contemporary science and studies of the cultural development of the world. If you take his main ideas, they are almost an agreement down to the last word between the two, the simple man and the highly educated philosopher. The simple man in his solitude, who only calls upon his innermost soul forces, writes something that is the same as what the philosopher draws from the wells of learning. That is, when he comes to questions of worldview, if a person only wants to search, there is an understanding between the one who searches in his soul and the one who searches this path on the basis of comprehensive learning.

This shows us how understanding through the spirit is possible between the most educated and the simplest, most primitive soul. And if in a particular case it was possible even without spiritual science, on the basis of certain concepts and ideas, then we may say: Firstly, the promotion of such an agreement corresponds to an urge of our present life. It corresponds to the spirit of our time that souls of all stations and degrees of education should communicate about their deepest needs; and secondly, such communication will be all the more necessary when souls need not come to the spirit through concepts and ideas that they squeeze out of their inner being – which are like shadows compared to what spiritual science has to give – but through spiritual science, this will be achieved all the more.

This means that our time in particular is faced with the challenge of finding a way to achieve general understanding of the fundamental questions of existence, and we have arrived at the gateway to their practical solution through spiritual science.

This means that spiritual science is able to intervene directly in life. However, there is an objection to this spiritual science, as some people emphasize, especially when it comes to putting this generally understandable knowledge in its proper perspective. They say: Yes, but first it is taught that the one who penetrates into the spiritual world awakens the slumbering soul. And what is said in my “Knowledge of Higher Worlds” requires a long journey before one can gain insight into this spiritual life. How can one speak of general comprehensibility when only one who has transformed one's soul can penetrate it?

This objection is understandable and yet not entirely justified, because this is a necessary requirement for the spiritual researcher to establish the facts of the spiritual world for himself. The spiritual researcher can investigate spiritual facts that are important for life. He can then formulate them, express them in words, concepts and ideas, and communicate them to the general public. Spiritual training is necessary for research; but when these facts are there and, formulated in concepts, words and ideas, then even the simplest mind can understand them, anyone can understand them. Nothing more is needed than to surrender to these ideas, concepts and words without prejudice; for it is the case with these spiritual facts that when we let these ideas take effect on us, they prove themselves. They can give us everything we need from them for the purposes of practical life — the upliftment, strengthening and recovery of our health that we require from them. What true spiritual researchers can give to the world can always be tested by science! These things may not, of course, stand the test of superficial criticism, but they can stand the true test. But what more or less everyone says and feels is that they have to admit a general turning of human knowledge towards the higher world. But as soon as one goes into the details of spiritual research, as soon as one begins to describe the observations of the spiritual world, to describe what happens between death and a new birth, what is called the development of humanity, according to the impulses given by spiritual science. In short, when details are given, our contemporaries still often recoil. They seek a general indication, without this - they admit - human life, the strengthening, healthy one, could not exist. But when one goes into details, when one describes the nature and things of the spiritual world, then the same objection immediately arises: no one can penetrate up there, we cannot know anything about that. Here we are at the point, honored attendees, where spiritual science will first have to make itself understood to what are indeed expressed needs of life, but what one only wants in generalities.

Let me give you another specific example of how humanity is seeking a new answer to the needs of the soul. The former president of Harvard University, USA, spoke of it, calling it the need for a new religion. Spiritual science does not want to found a new religion; spiritual science has nothing to do with forming sects; it wants to understand the old ones, wants to explore in the spiritual what the human soul needs. Our contemporaries believe that this urge for spiritual research is an urge for a new religion. Dr. Eliot has pointed out how our needs in life are pushing us towards spiritual science. Dr. Eliot, who was at the forefront of science for a long time and was president of a university, expressed the following in essence: People have always assumed that the soul is different from the body, although it is inherent in it. Everyone believes that there is in man a living, ruling, peculiar essence or spirit, which is himself. This is something as fundamentally real as the body. It is the most active part of the human being and is recognized as such: and this has always been the case and will always be the case.

When one hears such words, one can conclude that even people who have a broad education have this urge and aspiration.

Many examples could be given; everywhere one will see that the spirit is indicated out of the need for life, not out of knowledge, but in a peculiar way that shows what aversion still exists to the details of how they are to be presented through spiritual science.

When someone, like Dr. Eliot, points out the needs of the time, then this reference is somewhat as if one were to say with regard to natural science: No one can deny that there is a nature, a nature that brings forth beings in space, a nature that causes events to occur in time that have a beginning and an end, and so on. Someone who points to nature in this way can be compared to someone who points to the spirit as Dr. Eliot does. But can anyone be satisfied with the fact that there is a nature with various living beings and events?

What is satisfying is that a person can go out and perceive the individual concrete entities. Not the abstract satisfies people, but the details; facts must come before our soul. What could never satisfy anyone in relation to nature is what should still satisfy many in relation to the spiritual – an empty generality, an abstraction.

But people still refuse to go into the details, the details, the facts of the spiritual world, which shine out of spiritual science just as the individual facts of nature shine out of natural science.

Spiritual science today stands on the same ground as natural science did four centuries ago, when it began to look at nature through its means. While yesterday it was pointed out that one goes into the details of natural scientific matters, today it must be pointed out that one must first get used to thinking about the details of spiritual life in the same way as about the details of natural processes; and how it is not enough to know that there are general natural products, how the natural scientist must distinguish, for example, between oats and wheat, so man will also need more and more the details of spiritual facts. Just as one cannot approach natural needs in the same way with wheat and oats, so one cannot approach spiritual needs with general references to the spiritual world. When this or that consolation is needed or when this or that character trait is to be poured into the soul, then details and facts must be given. This is the path that spiritual science has to take. And because this tendency towards the general dominates the world today, we see from the individual things that are demanded how, although people admit that their present life contains a yearning for the spirit, which has a fertilizing effect on the soul that it fills when it is satisfied, no one can say anything accurate about the most essential things, because people generally resist the individual.

From this speech by Eliot, we can also take out another sentence in which he talks about how the spiritual worldview that is being built seems to apply to all the scientific achievements of the new era, and will deal with joy and life.

He thus opposes old age, death, and so on. We have before our eyes a distancing from death and mourning, death and sin, on the part of those who tell people what the life of the soul should be when they have passed through the gate of death. Dr. Eliot demands that all this is unnecessary in the new world view, that it should be concerned with life and joy. This is entirely in keeping with the outlook of our time, which focuses on the living deed and sees reasons to make life strong and joyful. That is fully justified. It is also justified to say that the new view of life must deal with life and joy; and in contrast to this, the sentence sounds wonderful: the new world view should ignore death and mourning. There is still a weighty objection: however much human thinking does not want to deal with it, death and mourning will deal with man and show their existence to man, and life will always demand, so that one can understand it, to know something about death and its riddles, and joy will demand forces that lift us up again when mourning weighs us down.

But this is precisely the aim of spiritual science: to awaken in the soul that which brings one to the justified, certain conviction that what is human existence in its true nature is not part of the external sensual world, but is of an eternal nature, passing from life to life. And this realization of the deepest life in its individual life will only bring the knowledge of true life that Eliot demands, because as knowledge it knows how the truly living always conquers death. And this knowledge will know how to draw out of the depths of the soul the forces that arise from the spiritual and that know how to lift us up again when the outer life depresses us through grief or something else.

We can take a fact from human life, a fact from the spirit of our time, and then draw our conclusions as to what the life of the individual can get from the results of spiritual research.

Everyone experiences that their life has a youth, progresses, and that a point of culmination is finally reached, and that they then descend again. They experience how gradually withers that which they call their physical body. A superficial science has just concluded from this fact that the spiritual depends on the physical. Because the brain withers so that an external stimulus of the intellect is not possible, one draws the conclusion that the soul-spiritual withers with the physical. This is as if one concludes from the unusability of a piano that the player would no longer be there.

If spiritual science is allowed to flow in, what it knows from the spiritual world, then the soul will have powers towards old age, which intervene in life in a healing way. In my little writing about the education of the child, you can see how spiritual science also intervenes in the details of practical education. How often one hears people giving all kinds of educational advice. Those who know life are often alarmed by such general sentences and rules, and those who follow the literature attentively will see how inadequate these reformist ideas of today are for the growing human being. But when one knows from spiritual research how, under completely different conditions, the human being grows up in the different years and periods of his life, how the physical body develops up to the seventh year, how then the educational measures have a completely different effect in the seventh to fourteenth years, when the etheric body is forming, and from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, when the astral body develops. Only when one knows how these epochs in human life are differentiated, and how the human being progresses in precisely differentiated stages, only then is one able to establish such principles from the nature of the human being that truly bring forth what lies in the soul. The future will show how life can be enriched by such pedagogy, which is taken from spiritual science; for anyone who approaches life in such a way that the conditions are created for us to give the soul the forces that awaken life at certain times must then always see for himself what spiritual science can become for all people. Wherever the human being stands, he cannot only acquire theoretical knowledge. Instead, spiritual science gives the human soul truly spiritual substance, spiritual nourishment that works in the soul and is digested, if I may use the trivial expression, and always keeps the soul soft, inwardly active, full of content, and aware of itself. This is knowledge that is needed in life and will be needed more and more.

Then, when life begins to decline, when wrinkles start to appear on our faces and our hair begins to turn white, then we not only have theosophical knowledge, but, through a spiritual-scientific view of life, we carry within us a living core that is full of content, experiences itself more and more as the outer shell falls away, and the human being feels within: You lay aside the shell and the body, the physical, but within you carry the strength to go through the spiritual world, to get new strength there for building a new life. Saying this to yourself inwardly gives security.

This applies in general to all people. In a sense, spiritual science will help people more and more to overcome what must naturally arise if one does not feel the living spirit.

Another fact that is particularly important in our time is nervousness. In a certain way, everyone today feels what is meant by the age of nervousness, because it is inwardly connected with certain concepts that have been formed. How often does a person feel this or that powerlessness, this or that fault, this or that vice, in the sense of the materialistic world view, so that the person looks at his ancestors, at his line of inheritance.

In poetry, it is often depicted how a person, feeling burdened by his ancestors, says to himself: This is inherited disposition, this cannot be changed. The product of such a state of mind is weakness, desolation - no observer should fail to see how this actually makes people weak.

Today, one encounters strange experiences. Materialistic researchers, in particular, speak of the nervousness of our time, as materialistic explanations have always done. Only recently a book was published by an Austrian scholar who, curiously enough, attributes the whole predisposition with one expression: that everything in man is based on the physical and chemical composition of his organism, even his character. And if you read the book further, something strange happens: the author gives advice. You would think that you could expect some kind of remedy to be taken to help with the chemical-physical imbalance; the gentleman in question does not recommend any pills, at least not for many cases, but rather recommends strengthening the character through moral means, through all kinds of soul things!

We do not want to argue with our time in such areas. We want to focus our attention on the question: where should the things be taken from that make a person who is desolate with this or that ailment - physical-chemical conditions that make up his character - where should the means be taken to make him a fighter against his nervousness, against his neurasthenia?

Spiritual science will answer: When people realize that it was just as much a mistake to claim that the complex of characteristics of the child arises solely from the inheritance from the parents, when one draws that conclusion, it is just as much an error of observation as it once error of observation when in the sixteenth century, and even in the seventeenth, it was said, and not only laymen but also learned researchers believed it, that higher animals, even fish, can arise from inanimate substance.

And there was a great revolution when the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi stated: Living things can never arise from non-living things. Living things can only arise from living things. With great difficulty, Francesco Redi escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

The same must be said for the spiritual and soul: the spiritual and soul can only emerge from the spiritual and soul. We look back to the spiritual and soul, which is the seed in earlier times for our present life. We feel the injustice of what we carry within us as fate, as predispositions, as spiritual-soul possessions, being supposed to be only something inherited from our ancestors, and we recognize that it is rooted in the spiritual that we acquired in earlier times. Then the human being becomes aware that there is something in him besides the inherited traits. And to the extent that he recognizes this, he need not look at his inherited traits and say to himself, “I have to bear these.” No, the spiritual researcher, when he has recognized his soul core, must seek to strengthen his powers and help them develop.

In this way spiritual science will have an effect on life, making it healthy, and the individual will place himself firmly in life.

This basically indicates the other result of life research: the social. Our time has initially only the tendency - albeit justified - to study the external arrangement, how one should make this or that institution so that people can find their existence. The inner tendency brings spiritual science, how people should bring their inner being out, in order to grow into life and stand in life.

All this will include the fact that this time must become aware that it is not dealing with dead theory in spiritual research, but that life forces themselves are being awakened. As a result, the age will recognize the reality of what comes from spiritual science, will experience it, because spiritual science will grasp itself in life. Thus the human being who carries spiritual science within himself will face life in a different way, which is impossible without spiritual science, but which life will foster more and more. When the spirit, the soul, is grasped as reality, when it is realized that the soul is reality, then there will no longer be a lack of understanding for the serious fact of life that out of a healthy, powerful grasp of the soul's core, forces also flow that can protect the outer physical body from damage, weakness, and even illness.

In this respect, the view of our time is shown in the common use of a saying that is, however, increasingly dying out: “A healthy soul dwells in a healthy body,” which means that if you just make the body healthy, then a healthy soul dwells in the body. In spiritual science, this will be understood quite differently, that a healthy soul dwells in a healthy body, because the innermost soul, in its health, forms the physical life in the body. People will recognize the healing powers that spiritual science instills into the soul, although not with the means that people want to use for recognition today, because today they will look and say: There is a person who has studied spiritual science but still became ill. The answer to this is that spiritual science or spiritual research has not yet come very far in terms of its dissemination, and secondly, of course, nothing can be done directly against external damage to the physical body if this damage comes only from the physical, just as you cannot heal a broken leg from the soul.

But there is also something that we recognize through the peculiar way in which the insights of spiritual research work, that the soul transforms back to an external coexistence with existence, as it had before the alienation from nature. We see in the child, and also in the animal, an instinctive growing together with the existence of the spiritual world. We see how the animal does not eat too much, how the instinct is healthy, but we see how certain things are conditioned in the cultural human being by the fact that he is alienated from nature. Sometimes one can look at this with a shudder, how humanity is moving away from this direct experience and coexistence with existence. Just the other day I saw a person who weighed out a certain amount of food for each meal. In the current transformation into a purely mechanical science, we even treat the human stomach and digestive tract like retorts. There it remains - the mechanical - not only in science, there it goes over into the treatment of human life. In contrast to this is the stream of spiritual research. With knowledge, the human being returns to existence in such a way that he instinctively protects himself in the higher sense from that which should not be. And then, of course, the healing effect of spiritual research will have to be assessed somewhat differently than it is today.

If questions now arise, such as: How many illnesses does the healing of spiritual science actually protect us from? — is difficult to answer, because the illnesses don't come; nevertheless, it is more reasonable that man, by living in the instinct life, is protected by spiritual science from illnesses than that he has to heal himself afterwards. Thank God, it cannot be proven, because the result is that these damages no longer occur.

Thus we see how a return to nature, in the very modern sense, is brought about for life through spiritual science. Much more could be said; in the end everything would clearly indicate that spiritual science brings about healing, advancement in life, and the right place in life, in the natural context of life.

Thus not only knowledge, the most valuable possession, but significant consequences for life are brought about by spiritual science, consequences that one can only imagine when one considers them as they have been, albeit only briefly, hinted at today. But all this will come about because man will penetrate into the spiritual worlds, not only in general, but by recognizing the individual spiritual facts. Just as he speaks not only of general nature in nature, but recognizes the details, the individual minerals, the individual plants and the individual animals, so he will also recognize the spiritual world in its details. Then the spiritual nature around him will be as nature itself is meant to foster, fertilize and even sustain physical life.

Then man will feel himself embedded in the spirit as he otherwise feels embedded in the physical in the substances of nature. One will learn to feel that one lives in the spirit as one lives in the physical. Just as one feels the processes that take place outside in the universe in the physical organism, one will feel the spiritual relationships, to grief and joy, to suffering and desire, to desire and contemplation in their own world, and life will find that which promotes life and health from the spirit.

That is what can be hoped for from spiritual science, because this spiritual science is to fulfill the soul's desire to feel at one with everything that is going on in the universal spiritual realm. When man will no longer think that everything is just an event, a life, what is going on in him, and his will like a power that has no significance for the environment, when he will know that what is going on in him is as interconnected with the spiritual as with the physical of the physical body, then man will receive strength and power, health through such science health; then will man find what I sought to indicate in my drama 'The Test of the Soul', as a soul expresses this sense of security in the spiritual, that man knows himself in the spirit, experiences himself in the spirit, thinks in the spirit and really breathes in it and in this real breath of life attains a life-filled existence.

This soul health will emanate from spiritual science when it is fulfilled, when it is given through spiritual science, which is expressed in those words, where it is said what can take place in a seeking soul. What has been said today can be summarized in what a soul that feels at home in the spirit can say to itself:

In your thinking live world thoughts

— do not dwell in man merely temporarily, but are eternal world thoughts —

In your feeling weave world forces
In your will work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts
experience yourself through cosmic powers,
create yourself from will-beings.
Do not end with what is worldly remote,
through the play of thought-dreams – –;
begin in the expanses of the spirit,
and end in the depths of your own soul: –
you will find divine goals,
recognizing yourself within yourself.

Today, allow me to shed some light on a very current topic that touches the immediate present from the point of view of Theosophy. The fact that it is possible for such a question, such a movement that directly engages cultural life, to be placed in the light of our worldview is demonstrated by a small piece of evidence from the last few days that is extraordinarily significant in several respects. It shows that practical people in particular recognize the need to deepen our culture through the theosophical worldview, and that on the other hand, in the broadest circles, theosophy is still something that seems quite unknown.

Last Sunday, a very strange article appeared in the “Tag”, on whose political content I do not want to go into at all, about Russia, Japan and peace, by Carl Peters. You can think what you want about the name Carl Peters; no one will dispute that he is one of the great practitioners of our day. In this article, he talks about the differences in the perception of the peace between Japan and Russia within the two countries. He mentions the manifesto with which this peace was proclaimed to the people in Russia, which contains the words that God may give his great blessing to these people, and for the development of Russia in the future. He then mentions the proclamation of peace to Russia. [The Mikado says in his peace manifesto]: The result of the war is due to the kind souls of our ancestors. Now that peace and quiet have been secured, we call upon the great ancestors to enable us to pass the fruits on to our descendants. The Emperor of Japan visits the temple to bring the news of the conclusion of peace to the imperial ancestors. ... [space] I am quoting this because of the words the author of the article says about it. He says: “The two have this in common, that they appeal to a spiritual fate in the world process.” The difference is that, according to the East Asian view, it is not a victory of the material. The Japanese view is more pantheistic, the Christian view more [monotheistic]. Which one is right cannot be determined by rational arguments. I would like to add the following remark: The Japanese are a [sober, almost mathematical] nation, so I do not assume that what we can believe plays a major role for them. If they assume an influence on earthly fate, it is based not on faith but on knowledge. I would like to suspect that High and East Asia possess certain spiritual knowledge that the highly developed West can only dream of. If they are able and willing to introduce such knowledge into our more or less flattening culture, they would provide us with ideal values that go far beyond what we can offer them. ... [space]

It is not what is contained in these words that we want to examine. The fact that they have been spoken by a so-called [practitioner] is what we want to put at the top of our consideration. Two things strike us. One is that the necessity for a spiritual deepening of our culture is pointed out in such harsh words [about forces that do not live in the material world], and on the other hand, reference is made to East Asia and the hope is expressed that our flattening culture should receive a refreshment from the East, in that the hope is expressed that these knowers can offer us more than we can offer them with our culture. The fact that one can know something about the forces emanating from people who no longer live in earthly existence is taken very seriously here by a man of the world.

It is very strange that on the one hand the necessity is so emphasized, and on the other hand at the same time there is no awareness that for thirty years there has been a movement in Europe that is not working from the remnants of an older people whose spiritual consciousness cannot be at its full height today, but that, I say, there has been a spiritual movement in Europe itself for thirty years, as there is Theosophy. This is completely forgotten; and no consideration is given to the fact that we may be called upon here to establish this spiritual culture in a completely different way than those East Asian peoples. The whole thing is a throwing of light on the one hand, after the longing for spirituality, for knowledge of the spiritual world, and on the other hand, I would like to say, a superficial conception of our own European aspirations.

More than any other question, what has been touched on here may interest us when discussing the women's issue. The theosophical movement can in no way be suspected of treating this matter in any reactionary way. Simply the way it has developed would flatly contradict such an assertion. Women have been among the best founders and collaborators of the theosophical movement from the very beginning. Yes, the actual founder of the Theosophical Society – Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – was a woman. And in terms of the sum of knowledge contained in the works of this woman, nothing that has been given in the cultural works of the last few centuries can match it.

You don't have to believe it. If you seriously immerse yourself in what this woman has given, then the conviction grows that what has just been said is a truth. And Annie Besant, her successor – another woman – has understood in a quite extraordinary way how to combine modern science, modern thinking, and a progressive outlook on life with the theosophical ethos and the theosophical movement in general.

Within the Theosophical Society, men and women work together. Never, in any way, does one have the feeling within the Society that gender plays any role in this. Yes, from one side, which has not grasped the Theosophical movement in its deepest essence, this movement has been called a feminine one; partly because it was founded by a woman, partly because perhaps now in the majority women work in the movement. This fact protects us above all from the prejudice that we could understand this matter in some kind of retrogressive, hostile sense.

But the theosophist is called upon to consider all these things in the light of spirituality, in the light of the highest spiritual culture. He must also do this with regard to this matter. Above all, we will notice that this women's issue, as it now presents itself to us, is a product of our modern world view, our modern thinking and feeling. The way it presents itself to us today would not have been possible a hundred years ago. Insofar as Theosophy is always concerned with clearly and distinctly understanding the spirit of humanity in different epochs, we will also have to clearly understand how this women's issue in particular has emerged from our culture. Theosophy is less concerned with criticizing and more with understanding in all directions. Therefore, it will be less programmatic about this issue of women's rights, but will rather have to explore what the cause of this issue is.

We do not get to the bottom of this issue as easily as we do with others. This is because Theosophy leads us deep into human nature. And this is more diverse and complicated than one might think. While the modern man could easily ignore the distinction between man and woman, the theosophist must look at this difference from the depth of human nature and ask himself whether, despite this difference, the peculiar cooperation that has emerged within the Theosophical Society could also benefit larger cultural circles, perhaps even give rise to a general world view on this question in the present day.

If we look back over time, we find that the perception of women, both of themselves and of the perception they had of the opposite sex, has changed greatly over time. Likewise, the external institutions within which the two sexes have lived have changed significantly. If we look at this superficially, we will not arrive at the real cause and basis. It is known that in the beginning of the time into which not history, but prehistory leads us, the woman played a substantially different role. It is known that patriarchy, the “father family”, with its peculiarly constituted inheritance law and other social institutions, arose from an original “mother family” - matriarchy, that woman had a privileged position with regard to matters relating to the offspring, such as inheritance law and so on.

The theosophist must ask himself: how is such a thing connected with the original spiritual forces of the world? This brings us to the discussion of a fact that has been touched on here several times, but which we must apply to this particular case. The basis of all human life in its historical development on earth is a natural one, one that has developed from an [instinctive] disposition to conscious, clear thinking, to conscious, clear institutions created by the intellect and certain moral concepts.

The original bonds of humanity had arisen from nature. Blood relationship was the original one. Institutions that created moral concepts are later placed in the place of ancient blood relationship.

The materialist sees nothing but the raw force of nature in this blood relationship. But anyone who has a spiritual worldview knows that what is expressed as instinct, what comes to the fore as drive, what is expressed as blood relationship, can all be traced back to spiritual forces, to spiritual beings that stand behind the sensual existence. Just as man today, more or less consciously, directs the social order, so originally the devas [or dhyans], divine powers, directed the context of humanity, [they ordered human conditions].

This working out of a spiritual basis, which is still unconscious to man, appears as drive and instinct. The bearer of this original instinct, based on spiritual essence, was woman. The ancient myths and legends of the peoples bear witness to this fact. [From the theosophical point of view this is easily provable, but this view can also be proved purely intellectually.] Only one thing needs to be mentioned. If you look at the images that go back to the earliest stages of human existence, you will have found in these images the tradition of an original female basis for the entire human race. The Greeks depicted their Zeus with a female bust.

The theosophical worldview takes us back to the very beginning of time, as far back as we can trace time on Earth, to those times when there was no gender separation, to those times of which we cannot speak in detail today, to those times when the sexes were not divided between two different individuals, but were united. Those familiar with scientific research will know that even natural science points to a being from prehistoric times that was not single-sex but two-sex. In this regard, I draw attention to the Darwinian Oskar Schmidt. Theosophy speaks of that time in which the pictorially represented prehistoric man was a fact. He was more inclined towards the female sex.

A little thought can make this clear. Reproduction was tied to the female sex at all times. That which was there as a basis was also expressed in the external social context. In the early days, this natural basis was translated into a kind of moral worldview, in terms of social institutions, rights and institutions.

That the spiritual power of man was particularly concentrated in woman, is shown to us even by the view that we find in Tacitus, where woman is seen as a prophetess, [called to proclaim from the spiritual world what will happen in the future – Velleda, Alruna –] who has to proclaim whether right or wrong exists, whether something should be undertaken or not. We find such views among various peoples. The fact that the spiritual, too, where it appears at the beginning of our times, where it appears as something new, as something wise, is rooted in the same natural foundation, emerges from such facts.

And now something else: Go back to the earliest times of religious world view, and you will find a common trait in all peoples that is connected with this natural basis of the human race, and on the other hand with the consciousness from which the oldest institutions and the thoughts and aspirations of humanity have developed. In sexual symbols, in images that are connected to this natural basis, the culture and religion of different peoples is expressed in very specific times. These are naive but beautiful and magnificent times when people, in sweet simplicity and naivety, associated nothing low or frivolous with these sexual symbols, where procreation was a power of nature and was symbolized in the woman, who showed herself in various forms of expression like the divine creation for them. There have been attempts to revive these views from a so-called sexual religion. There is no right to do it the way it was done. For the current basis of feeling is not such that one can feel one's way back to that original and unblemished state that was associated with these symbols, so that the way these old things are discussed today has something offensive about it for the connoisseur.

Only slowly and gradually did those institutions, those states of consciousness that are linked to the female origin of the human race, change into a different order, an order that, to put it briefly, was made by man, by the man who has broken away from this natural foundation, by the man who has nothing to do with the visible progress in the human race.

It is only through the law, through legal regulation, that the right of the man is introduced into the original right based on blood relationship, taken from the female point of view. Thus we see that it is only on this original basis of a religious world view, which starts from the generative powers of nature, that what we encounter in the remnants of ancient peoples, [Mongolian ancient tribes] as ancestral culture, develops. A power that worked directly was revered in woman.

Then, in place of the wise and the soothsayers, and in place of the veneration of the directly present female, there arises what is called the cult of the ancestors, the veneration of deceased members of the people who have rendered outstanding services for the good of the whole — male ancestors. They venerated what had an effect beyond death. You can still see this in the fact that the Mikado brings the message of peace and war to the graves of his ancestors. So we see the transition from female culture to male culture.

The conquest of institutions that have been linked to women by nature since time immemorial through reason and the thinking of man is slow and gradual. But something else is connected with this, something that I cannot better describe than as the transition from a primeval conservatism to an idealism that is gradually emerging in the world.

You can follow this in those periods of world development in which those old religious cultures of which I have spoken developed. These go back either to times when the divine-creative could be seen in the power of creation, or to times when it had long since died but still continued to work as something present. These cultures build on something in the past. At first, we find in world development those that build on humanity's starting point, that point to the old, to what has come from before, to what has been sacred since time immemorial, to nature, to the ancestors. This is the starting point of the human race, and gradually this view changes into a completely different one. In all peoples who have provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you will find the veneration of the ancestors in the veneration of the prophets, the veneration of those who proclaim the future. In all the peoples who provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you find, instead of ancestor worship, the worship of the prophets, the worship of those who proclaim the future, those who hold up the high ideals to the people. Primitive conservatism gradually gives way to idealism. The focus turns from the past to the future, even among the people from whom Christianity itself emerged. The prophets were the real great personalities, and hand in hand with them goes a detachment from the natural, from mere blood relationship, from all that points to the foundations of our race.

We see the tremendous depth of human development when we look at this turnaround. That which is connected with the relationship between the sexes, which is the subject of much discussion among anthropologists and others today, the so-called sense of shame, was not present at the starting point of our culture. [What was connected with the creation of man was not hidden; it was something natural, self-evident.] It only emerged at the time when a characterized change took place as a necessity. Where the power of nature gave way to reason and ideals, people began to cover what was considered to be a remnant of the natural foundations of the human race.

Take a closer look at this point. What is man ashamed of? Consider this feeling of shame in other areas. Everywhere you will find that man is ashamed when something is done by him in such a way that he actually more or less recognizes the demand that he could have done it better, that it is actually not right the way he did it. We can say something quite similar about the feeling of shame in general. It is there and refers to something that comes from ancient times and can be overcome, and which is as it should not be if we look to the future.

Here human instinct, human perception, points to something that the theosophical world view presents as realized in the distant future. Today I must point out that the development of humanity through the sexes is only a transitional stage, that just as humanity has emerged from the union of the two sexes in one individual, humanity is again heading for a state in which there are again not two, but only one sex. Thus you see our present development through the theosophical world view placed in a distant past and a distant future that are similar, that resemble each other in certain ways.

We can perceive how this fact is reflected in the most intimate expressions of the human race. Take a look at ancient artistic or semi-artistic representations of the divine creative power, at the way the ancient Egyptians associated it with the service of Isis, and compare it with the peculiar trait that emanates from Raphael's Madonna. What is natural, what is connected with the power of creation, can be seen to have been expressed in a semi-artistic way in ancient times. This creative power is shyly veiled in a Raphael Madonna, and we encounter a completely different, higher moment: love, a spiritual relationship that takes the place of the old natural relationship. The mother with the child, bathed in the magic of love. And the spiritual is expressed, as for example in the Sistine Madonna, in the protruding angel heads. The creative power is hinted at as a spiritual echo. There you see a great universal truth sensed by the artist.

The religions themselves take this path. Ascetic religions, such religions that are escapist, are not at the starting point of humanity. They only emerge at the time when the indicated change has taken place. It is magnificent and powerful in the times when this change is being prepared. The saviors in human development are mythically depicted as immaculately conceived. You have this with Buddha and with the other saviors of humanity and finally in the Christian religion itself. In religion, the original natural foundation is developed into the most sacred.

[Again, compare the Egyptian Isis service with these spiritualized religions.] This is wonderfully indicated in the transformation of Egypt, with the ideal and the spiritualized perception at the starting point of our era. Then you will feel this transformation in all humanity. That is why the theosophical world view is clear about the fact that the natural basis from which the human race originated is the external physiognomic expression of a spiritual being. This spiritual essence is the same that man will approach again in a conscious way in the future.

If we bear in mind that we are progressing from the spirit in its natural form to the spirit in its immediate form, then we will understand many things better that have taken place in the course of sexual development. Above all, we will better understand what I mentioned earlier: the replacement of ancient female institutions and female foundations by a male culture, in which we still live today. The natural basis was to be suppressed. At first it could only be suppressed in the area of external institutions, but otherwise it remained in place, and so we are confronted by a strange hybrid in our present-day institutions. Half of them are still based on what remains of the old natural basis with blood relationship, and half of them are steeped in human understanding, in moral institutions that have been poured over them. In our current institutions, both elements peek out in a colorful mix. [Basically, man has only whitewashed what the original natural basis of women's culture has provided him with; it shows through everything.] However, we will turn to the future with its culture and efficiency. Then this spirit will show itself in its actual, appropriate form, and in the light of a completely different view than the one that originally existed. When man originally wanted to raise himself to the Divine, when he wanted to raise his eyes to Him to whom the highest honor and worship must be paid, then he turned to the Power that is germinating and sprouting through man himself, creating naturally.

More and more, this view is changing into a completely different one, and today we are only just at the dawn of this other view. But for a select few, it has long since emerged. Three words in the wonderful, ancient Indian Vedanta wisdom already express the germ of this world view: Tat twam asi – that art thou. – And what does this mean? It means a great deal. When the Vedanta sage immersed himself in this “That thou art”, he turned to the whole great universe, he turned to everything outside of himself, to that with which he felt at one. He then said to every stone: You are of the same nature and essence as I – that thou art. Just as my hand belongs to me, so the stone belongs to a being, to which I also belong.

Everything around us is an invitation to look outside, to seek the divine in the world itself, not just to worship the spirit in the creative and generative forces that work through human nature itself. Tat twam asi is the worship of the divine spirit in all of nature, and with that, at the same time, the call to carry this divine spirit into our entire environment, to transform this environment so that the original state around us from which the human being himself has sprung will arise again.

From asexuality comes sexuality. From the male-female comes the male and the female. This difference will again submerge in the common, objective spiritual world when man will find his self in the great universe, when he will feel brotherhood and connection with the whole great universe, which has no gender, which is all the more perfect the more exalted it is above all similar differences.

When this thought lives completely so that he can permeate culture with this thought of the higher human being exalted above all gender, then the sun has risen. This is what shines for you today as the dawn of a new culture. Then the future of our culture is self-evident, the culture into which we must enter when idealism is further developed, and this culture must not carry anything in the outer world that has anything to do with gender. So we enter institutions and facilities that show us a cultural environment, a moral environment, that applies equally to men and women, that is the same for men and women.

That is the theosophical thought, and the theosophical ideal is to reorganize our institutions according to this, which have emerged [from an originally female culture that has passed through a male culture, to bring them into a higher state in which these two epochs will only exist in the Hegelian sense as dissolved moments].

This can only be in a culture that is spiritual in the best sense of the word, a culture that starts from what has nothing to do with gender differentiation. The one that is emerging in the theosophical movement is such a culture. For what does the theosophical worldview cultivate? The higher self in man, that nature and essence which has nothing at all to do with man and woman. For that in man which the theosophist looks at, that which he makes the object of his special consideration and study, the higher man, the spiritual man, appears in one embodiment as man, in another as woman. The one who lives as a man today has, like the other who lives as a woman, passed through as many male and female incarnations. Man and woman were an outward expression of the inner higher individuality, which is neither male nor female.

Thus, something that is male-female at the same time already lives in today's man, something that unites both sides. And a worldview that shows this male-female as the basis of both through the embodiments, a worldview that cultivates this, only prepares the ground on which man and woman are completely equal, not only in our legal institutions, but also in their feelings. Through “Tat twam asi” we overcome gender differences, and the cooperation between men and women in the Theosophical Society is a kind of model, a small beginning for a great, powerful culture that must develop in this direction in the future, where the two sexes will not live side by side in abstract equality, because the diversity can be greater than it is today. But what is the same is what matters. That is the external world that is formed around us.

What matters is not what we carry within us, but what lives around us outside. As long as man is selfish, as long as the whole culture is based on domination and personality, man draws the impulses for institutions from his female or male personality. But as soon as he creates what is grounded in the higher self, the inner being can be shaped as it likes, the outer world, which is reflected in the inner being, is the same. To use an image, set up two concave mirrors, a convex one next to a concave one, and place the same image in front of both. The convex mirror, the one that curves outwards, will show a different image than the concave mirror, but it is the same image in both cases. As long as there is male and female in the physical body, there will of course still be a convex and a concave mirror, but the same external world will be reflected. It must not be shaped in a one-sided way by one sex or the other.

Those who have grasped the spirit will see something infinitely higher in it. Only a materialistic view sees the spiritual as an effect of matter. The theosophist, however, comes to the conviction that all matter originates only from the spirit, that everything that is material today was once spiritual, and that everything we could observe at the starting point originates from earlier, spiritual foundations. In the same way, a future natural super-sexuality will arise from the present super-sexuality, which man himself creates. We will create our outer institutions, which we will bring into the world, to an equal extent out of the spirit of woman and man. They themselves will be the cause of the later natural effects. What man creates as asexual culture will later create a super-sexual nature.

Therefore, it was quite natural that the original culture reverted to the worship of that which was conservatively held from ancient times, to the worship of creative natural forces, to the worship of ancestors. The spirit preceded nature. Through it, nature was created. If one wanted to look up to the spirit, one had to look at the dawn of the world. But if you want to see the future, you have to work with it as a human being – in both the conscious and unconscious state. Then the prophetic view of the future takes the place of the old cult of ancestors and the worship of the family. We ourselves must prepare today what is to be in the future, what kind of external culture is to exist.

Thus a great, all-embracing cosmic horizon leads us to a solution of the women's question that opens up great perspectives for us. If today, through the theosophical worldview, the higher human nature is sought in man or woman and gender remains a completely private matter, then what is really being covered is not considered. In a sense, this is the higher development of feeling, which emerges as a sense of shame in times of transition. What used to be a shy concealment is now a holy overcoming.

This kind of reaching out and looking forward is a great and powerful ideal for the future. By developing the higher human being in man and woman, the theosophical worldview awakens such feelings in man and woman that create culture. Noble, beautiful feelings that transcend everything base must arise from this cultivation of the higher human nature. Culture originated from a kind of female foundation. And when we look back to ancient times, we can find the female generative powers revered as divine nature everywhere. This then developed into a [male] culture. Initially, we have a true antithesis to this [male] culture in today's women's movement, which can also be explained from it, [today the women's movement is a revolt against this male culture, and it is entirely justified].

But every one-sidedness in the world shows us its complement. What confronts us in external history presents itself to us ideally in a kind of counter-image. The one-sided older culture seeks a counterpart. The old feminine culture, the Isis culture, finds its ideal antithesis in the Osiris cult, which was dismembered, perished, and for which Isis longs. This is the image through which the female wants to complement herself, where a new thinking takes the place of the old culture.

Then another ideal appears in Christianity. In the beginning, Christianity had to be a masculine level of culture. But it was complemented. Just as the culture of Isis was complemented by an ideal of man, so this culture of man was complemented by an ideal of woman: in the medieval cult of Mary.

Goethe also hinted at the contrast between female and male culture in his “Faust”. “The eternal feminine draws us up,” he says in connection with the preceding verses. This is what he envisioned: higher culture will be the one in which the female counterpart of the male no longer needs to be longed for in the female and the female ideal no longer longed for in the culture of men, where the feminine no longer needs to be drawn up, but where the higher divine, the higher self, appears as the drawing force in man. This higher self, the whole human being, is what the theosophical worldview strives for. How could it not be that women are the first to understand what is now, at dawn, to be the culture of the future.

For thousands of years we have had a culture of man. Our whole culture is a male culture. Our modern justice, theology, medicine and so on are almost exclusively products of the male culture. Those who approach these things more deeply will easily find a physiological expression of the male soul. But if it is to be different now, then it is self-evident that the inspirer must be the woman. If the theosophical movement is to be understood more quickly, then it must be understood in this direction. Those who do not see it this way can call it a feminine in a pejorative sense today. But those who are clear about the fact that the great progress of culture takes place from the feminine to the masculine and from there to the masculine-feminine will find it self-evident that women can best understand this theosophical world view.

It is more difficult for a man to [free himself from the prejudices of today's culture], because he has grown up from an early age with the results of a man's culture. He should literally transform himself inwardly. He will also have to do so if he wants to be up to date. But all that is to come also prescribes for us the free interaction, the completely free cooperation of man and woman, the absolute equality in the perception of the higher self, the actual spirit of the human being.

Thus the former ideal of the eternal in man, which we encounter in the Osiris cult, and the eternal in woman, which has found a mystical formal expression in the new age and has been lived by poets and mystics, will be transformed into the ideal of the harmoniously structured human being, who is not afflicted with any one-sidedness. We can foresee a culture all around us that will bear the outer physiognomy of supersexuality. That is the task of the theosophical world view. We do not work with phrases, with words and programs, not with demands, but we seek to awaken the living life in the soul from the contemplation of the spirit, to open up the source that is self-creating. We do not just speak as Theosophists, but we indicate what, according to the nature of the facts, must develop in these souls.

So you can see from this particular question that European spiritualism, European theosophy, has something quite different to say than to reproduce the remains of old worldviews that have retained the cult of the ancestors. They have spirituality, the reference to the spiritual, but they do not have what we have as those who have to work according to ideals, not according to old habits. Spiritualism is certainly a necessity for us and it must come into the world; but not a spiritualism that carries the achievements of our culture to the graves of our ancestors – although we can understand and respect such a thing – but a spiritualism that is prophetic, that carries the best that we can develop within us to be burned for a fire that will be the beacon of our future.

Yesterday, in the description of the development of the various cycles of earthly development, we reached a point which made us realise how the three celestial bodies, the Sun. the Moon and the Earth, gradually separated from one another. We began by considering this separation and stopped at the point where the Moon separated itself from the Earth, but we also tried to reach this same point by setting out from the present time and going back to the Atlantean epoch. Let us now consider the condition of the Earth at the time of Atlantis. Long, long epochs of time must be borne in mind, taking up millions of years, so that the great changes which took place, not only in the universe, but also upon the earth, need no longer surprise us.

Let:us consider once more the Earth, after its separation from the Moon. It was still enveloped by a volume of air, which presented, however, quite a different aspect from the present air. You must not think that this air inwardly resembled a glowing stove—although its temperature was far higher than is the case now. At that time many substances which are now solid existed within the Earth in a liquid state. An air thickly permeated with gases of the most varied substances, enveloped the Earth, an atmosphere which we might designate as fire-air, a repetition of the former Moon-condition,

When the Earth became independent after its separation from the present Moon, it was surrounded by a strange atmosphere which may be designated as fire-air, Through the fact that the Earth freed itself from the atmosphere which went away with the Moon, the beings who lived upon the Earth were able to attain certain higher stages of development. Within the atmosphere of the Earth the most advanced animal-men had reached a higher stage than the one which they had attained upon the Moon, and these were the beings who later developed into men. A great number of these animal-men remained behind upon the Moon-stage. As a result, they not only remained behind, but owing to the entirely new conditions which now arose, they sank half a degree below the level which they had previously attained, (animal-men could, only live upon the Moon) and thus they became animals. Animals did not as yet exist upon the Moon. We therefore have two kingdoms: Human beings—and the kingdom of animal-men, beings who had remained behind and had gradually sunk to the level of animals.

The same applies to the plant-animals. A certain number of these had developed to a higher stage, to that of animals; others had remained behind and changed into plants. A The kingdom of plant-minerals also followed this line of development: some became heavy minerals, while others ascended in their development to the level of plants.

Not everything arose in accordance with one standard of measure, for the animals which we know to-day arose, for instance, partly through the descending development of men-animals and partly through the ascending development of plant-animals. In the vegetable kingdom also we have side by side the plant-minerals in an ascending course of development and the plant-animals in a descending course. The plants now chiefly constituting the pleasant plant-carpet of our earth, arose through the ascending development of the Moon's plant-minerals; this is, for instance, the case with the violet. On the other hand, everything that gives us a decaying impression is in a descending development, whereas our green, leafy, plants will in future attain to higher stages.

Our minerals developed entirely upon the Earth; there were no minerals upon the Moon, such as exist to-day. The mineral kingdom is the former plant-mineral kingdom which sank down to a lower stage and which was embedded into the earth as a firm crust. When the Earth cast off the Moon, the substances which remained behind and which later on became
minerals, solid metals,. etc., were still an altogether liquid mass. The substances which at that time had already reached a solid state, were hurled out into the cosmic spaces, because, had it kept these substances, the Earth could not have developed, further. Then the first metals which reached a solid state were added. Sometimes they had most peculiar forms! What you now encounter in the mountains as granite or gneiss, at that time revealed quite clearly that it had arisen through the descending development of vegetable beings, of plants which had become stones.

You may gather from this that upon the Sun and upon the Moon the mineral kingdom was a vegetable kingdom. The vegetable kingdom has not developed out of the mineral kingdom, but minerals have developed out of the vegetable kingdom! The coal which is now dug out of the earth is nothing but a complex of petrified plant—plants which decayed and became stones, so that now they can be dug out of the earth as petrified plants. If you were to go back still further, you would see that once even the hardest stones were plants; and that they have arisen out of plants through the descending development of plants to the mineral kingdom.

A clairvoyant sees this in the following way: If you investigate gneiss, the mineralogist will tell you that it consists of feldspath, hornblende and mica—but he cannot go further. The clairvoyant says: Feldspath in gneiss appears to spiritual vision quite clearly as the petrified stalk and the green leaves of plants, the petrification of those parts which built them up; whereas the mica foundation is related to that part of the plants which still develops to-day as the plants sepals and corollae. When a modern occultist observes a piece of gneiss he will say: This is a petrified plant, and even as plants now possess leaves and flowers, etc., so the mica foundation of gneiss has developed out of the sepals and petals of ancient epochs.

Thus it can be explained how every mineral developed out of former plants. For the substances which came over from the ancient Moon were plants, which then became densified in the liquid mass of the Earth. Even as one can see the water in a receptacle freezing into solid ice, so it is possible to observe in the early stages of the Earth's development the gradual forming of solid masses. Thus the solid crust of the Earth slowly developed out of the liquid Earth. The further we proceed, the higher and purer become the beings who live upon the Earth, and those that were unable to ascend became petrified. It was the same both with animals and men. Man reached the stage of being able to transform his body in a still higher measure.

The Moon-men floated and swam about in a primordial ocean; they were predisposed to this swimming movement. This may sound strange to modern men, nevertheless it is true; and let it be said without reserve, that I do not wish to mitigate some of these apparently grotesque descriptions;, for generally people laugh at truths when they are revealed for the first time.

The human. being who swam about in this primordial ocean had as yet no eyes and endowed with sight such as we have to-day: man, indeed, received the foundation of sight upon Saturn, but in this primordial ocean he did not need to see; he had to orientate himself in other ways. The ocean contained all the food which he required for his life and also animals, some benevolently disposed towards him; and some not. At that time man still possessed an organ which now exists in the head, it is the size of a cherry and is called the pineal gland (in reality it is not a gland). Once upon a time, this organ was of immense size; it enabled man to orientate himself in the ocean and it protruded from his head like a lantern. Man moved about, by using this lantern-like organ in front; it was a sensitive organ, not an organ of sight. He used it when swimming about. Later on, he no longer needed it and so it shriveled.

At that time it was not possible to speak of an Ego foundation. In regard to everything which man did, he was still under the guidance of higher spiritual powers: We may compare him with the animals of to-day. From a spiritual-scientific aspect, we now look upon animals by saying that man differs from the animal through the fact that he has an individual soul; every man has his own soul, his individual Ego.

This is not the case with animals; for whole groups of animals have one soul in common. For instance, all the animals pertaining to the lion species have one soul, which lives in the astral world. Similarly all the animals of tiger-nature have a soul in common. In the case of animals we therefore speak of group souls. All the horses together have one group soul; these horses belong together. Even as the single fingers belong to the hand, so the animals belong to their group soul. Consequently we cannot speak of individual responsibility in the case of animals. Only of an individual soul can we say that it is either good or evil.

At that time, the human beings possessed a kind of group-soul embedded in the bosom of the Godhead. We must however realise that that which now lives in us as our Ego already existed in those early epochs, but it did not live within the human body.

Man's origin must be sought in two currents: that which came over from the Moon and continued to develop, constituted the animal-man who lived upon the Moon; but that which now lives in us as our individual soul, existed in those times in the higher realm, in the care of the Godhead,—only man's body lived below in the primordial ocean. Later on body and soul united; the soul descended and spititualised the body, so that man became an individual soul.

Imagine a receptacle containing water; in it are many many drops of water, but it is impossible to distinguish them. If you were to take many hundreds of small sponges dipping them into the water, the drops first contained in the volume of water would be individualised. Similarly imagine your spirituality soaring above the primordial ocean and compare your soul reposing in the bosom of the Godhead with the drops of water; the bodies absorb the souls, even as the small sponges absorb the drops of water; the souls thus became independent, in the same way in which the water becomes individualised into drops through the sponges. Below we have the primordial ocean with the floating-swimming bodies, and above there are the souls. We cannot describe this better than by saying: “And the Spirit of God moved (literally: brooded) over the face of the waters,” which means that he elaborated that which was below until it was able to take in the soul-drops.

The bodies themselves had to soar and float, and for this purpose the beings within them needed a special organ. At that time man had no lungs, but a kind of air-bladder; this kept him afloat in the ocean.

The fish which have remained behind upon that stage, have even to-day an air-bladder and no lungs. The lungs developed little by little, as the air freed itself from the moisture and man could raise himself above the water, so that he began to breathe in air. A long process, lasting millions of years, finally enabled man to breathe in the air through his lungs. This gave rise to the physical form capable of absorbing the soul. The more man became a being who breathed through lungs, the more he became capable of taking in the soul. You cannot express this better than with the words: “And God breathed His own breath into man's nostrils and he became an individual soul.”

At the same time this enabled man to develop something which he did not possess before; he became capable of forming red blood. Before that time all human beings had a constitution which gave them the same temperature as their environment; if they were surrounded by a higher temperature, they were adapted to it. Red blood did not exist at that time and the animals above the stage of amphibians are human bodies which have remained behind at a much later stage of development. After the epoch in which man began to develop red blood, the animals also began to develop into warm-blooded beings.

Even as a plant cannot develop out of a stone, but stones developed out of plants, so the animal developed out of man. Every being upon a lower stage developed out of beings who once stood upon higher stages, this is the theory of evolution. Man first had to transform himself into a being with red blood, and then he could leave behind the animals. You may literally see in animals the stages left behind in man's development. In every animal man perceives more or less a piece of himself which he has left behind. Paracelsus expressed this so wonderfully in the words: When we look about in the world, we see, as it were, the letters of an alphabet; in the human being alone these letters unite and form a word. Consequently the meaning of that which lies spread out in man's environment is to be seen in man himself.

You must then bear in mind the following: An apparently insignificant process (but in the light of spiritual science it is an extraordinarily important process) took place at that time: it already began in the early stages of the Earth's separation from the Moon, when the Earth was still connected with the Moon, and it consisted in a certain cooperation between Mars and the Earth. During the whole first half of the Earth's development, the forces of Mars streamed into the Earth, so that this first half is actually designated as the Mars condition of the Earth. Iron is connected with this passage through Mars and iron then began to play an entirely new role in the earthly process of evolution.

Iron plays a far more superficial part in plants, but you can see how things are connected: cosmically, the Earth passed through Mars and Mars gave it iron; iron was then stimulated to exercise the functions which it now possesses and iron appeared in the blood. The aggressive side of human nature, that which turns man into a warrior here on earth, is connected with the iron in the blood. The Greek myth knew this, for it designated Mars as the God of War.

The human body thus became capable of taking in the Ego; for without red, warm blood a body cannot be the bearer of an Ego. This is very important. Pulmonary breathing is the first condition for the formation of warm, red blood. The required processes then arose upon the earth and became embodied with the blood. Little by little, man developed so as to become a red-blooded being breathing through lungs, and then he left behind the other creatures, the lower warm-blooded animals.

In occultism, animals are not only differentiated in the ordinary way, but another differentiation is pointed out. We distinguish the “inwardly sounding animals”, those which can express their own pain and pleasure in sounds from the “non-sounding animals”. If you descend to the lower animals, you may still hear sounds, but these are purely external, produced by rubbing together certain parts of the body,or by climatic influences; these are sounds produced by external causes. Only the animals which branched off when man had developed into a warm-blooded being were able to express pain or pleasure through sounds coming from within.

This was the time when man's larynx was transformed into an organ of sound. The fact that outside the liquid earth substance became crust, produced an inner process in the human being; parallel with the external process of hardening, an osseous and cartilaginous skeleton developed within the human being out of the soft parts of his body. Beings with a skeleton did not exist before that time.

The minerals outside are the counterpart of the bones. The Earth perpetuated this epoch in the masses of rock and man in his skeleton. Man then gradually became an upright walking being, thus changing over from his former horizontal position into a vertical one. He turned round, so that his front extremities became organs of work, and his other extremities were used for walking. There is a connection in all this, for no being without a sound-producing larynx and an upright walk can be an Ego-being.

Animals were predisposed for this, but they degenerated. Consequently they could not transform themselves into beings endowed with speech, for speech is connected with a larynx located in a in a body having an upright position. We may gather this through a primitive fact. Many dogs are undoubtedly cleverer than parrots, yet a parrot learns more, because its larynx is in a more vertical position. Parrots and starlings learn to speak a little, because their larynx is located vertically.

This shows you that the Earth and man advance to ever new stages of development. The atmosphere also changed: a condition developed in which the Earth was surrounded by a misty, foggy air. This took place at the time, when the Lemurians saw their continent crumbling away, so that they wandered out to Atlantis and became Atlanteans.

During this, phase of evolution; in which man acquired the first elements of speech, which were, to be sure, sounds expressing mere feelings, the soul emerged more and more. Essentially speaking, the Atlantean had a dull kind of clairvoyance. As he came out of the sub-earthly ocean, his eyes developed to the extent of enabling him to participate in the light raying out from the sun through the masses of mist. Physically, his power of sight and perception developed more and more, but he gradually lost his old clairvoyance. The most advanced race of the Atlanteans developed in a certain region of the Earth's surface during the last third of the Atlantean era, which was a significant close of phase of evolution.

In view of the existing conditions, the Atlantean who traveled more to the West, became inwardly neutral natures, cold and indifferent, and developed later on into the copper coloured population of America. The others who traveled further South, became the black Negro population, and those who turned to the East became later on the yellow Malayan population. These populations concentrated themselves in the most unfavourable places which prohibited a further development. But the peoples who lived in a region now occupied by Ireland, and further West, in a country now covered by the ocean, reached the highest stage of development. The mixtures of not and cold streams which existed there, permitted the human body to develop in the best and speediest manner. A pronounced Ego-feeling, a first foundation of such a feeling, developed from the still magical will power of those epochs. It was then that man first learned to say “I”. The human beings then also learned the first foundations of counting and of arithmetic, and they developed the first capacity of forming judgments and of combining thoughts.

There were always Beings among them who had progressed further, who were the leaders of humanity and their relationship to man was that of Beings who belonged to a higher realm. These Beings became the teachers and guides of men and it was they who induced them to migrate towards the East. From the site which lay in the neighbourhood of present-day Ireland certain peoples had already migrated to the East, settling as far as Asia. Now the most highly developed masses of peoples began to migrate to the East, and everywhere along their journey they formed colonies, the most powerful of these colonies, with the most highly developed culture, existed in the neighbourhood of the present Gobi desert. Later on, a certain number of peoples travelled from there to many parts of the world: one group went to the present India; where they encountered an indigenous yellow-brown race, with whom they became partly united.

It was after the Atlantean flood, that this colony travelled South and founded the first culture of the post-Atlantean epoch, the first culture of our own age. The most advanced teachers who went with this colony, the first great teachers of ancient India, are called the ancient Indian Rishis. The Hindoos of to-day are the descendants of that ancient population, but if we wish to discover traces of this culture we must go far back into times which are not known to history; the Vedas, for example, already belong to a later epoch, for nothing was recorded in those early days.

The ancient Hindoo nation represents the first cultural group after the Atlantean age and consequently they resembled the Atlanteans most of all. The Atlantean was a kind of dreamer; his consciousness was dull, he did not have any power of judgment and self-consciousness and like a dreamer he wandered about half consciously. The ancient Hindoos were the first to overcome this condition, but they were still partly rooted in it. The ancient Hindoo longed to experience the spirit realm of past times and yearned for the clairvoyance which the Atlanteans still possessed. In ancient India the early Yoga training still consisted of a kind of dulling of human consciousness, which transferred the human being back to the times when he could still perceive in his environment spiritual beings. The Hindoo longed for this clairvoyance of ancient Atlantis and in the Yoga training the Rishis taught him the methods of producing clairvoyance, though these methods followed another line of development.

The Atlantean did not possess any power of judgment, whereas in India the power of judgment had already awakened; but men loved, so to speak, that which they had already overcome and they knew how to conjure it up again, by dulling their consciousness and by recalling that which they had seen in earlier epochs. The culture of ancient India preserved this through its highest representatives. The Hindoo did not seek to enhance his consciousness, but he dimmed it down to a dreamy state, and this explains the passivity of the Hindoo character. It would be a great disadvantage, indeed harmful, if modern culture were to take hold in a greater measure of life in India.

During the first epochs, the human beings did not perceive minerals; and what the Atlantean saw least clearly of all ,was the mineral kingdom. Through his visions, the spirit-world was the one which existed for him, and this world lived in everything. He perceived the human being surrounded by colours—by sympathetic colours if he liked him. This was the world which the Hindoo tried to conjure up again. But human progress requires that man shall enter more and more into a relationship with that which exists upon the earth in the world of matter, The Atlanteans did not need any instruments; they orientated themselves through their clairvoyance and they attributed no importance whatever to physical instruments. The Hindoo followed the Atlantean in this, and consequently he looked upon the physical world as Maya, as a kind of illusion and lie. He had no interest in the world which is accessible to the ordinary senses. He asked the dream-like world of the Spirit to rise up before him.

The progress from this Indian culture to the next cultural epoch, i.e. the Persian one preceding the time of Zarathustra, consisted in the fact of humanity learning to appreciate external reality. A second colony went out from the Gobi desert and founded a kingdom in Asia minor which existed in remote times and which gave birth to the kingdom of Zarathustra. The Persian began to perceive the existence of a world in which he had to be active. The Divine essence appeared to him as something which he had to overcome, against which he had to measure his strength. From the spiritual world he drew the forces which he needed in order to work in this world. The world appeared to him as something dark, which had to be transformed with the aid of the good forces. The Hindoo established a science pertaining exclusively to the spiritual world, which told him nothing about the external reality. But to the Persian this external reality presented another aspect, it was something which had to be constantly transformed through his own work.

The third colony which went out from the Gobi desert went further West into Asia Minor and founded the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian cycle of culture. In addition to the earlier science of the Spirit, these nations also possessed a science of the physical world. An astrology and geometry arose in Egypt which taught the Egyptians how to treat and cultivate the earth. Science extended to spheres which the Hindoo still looked upon as a world of illusion. Now this world of illusion had become a world calling for the keenest thought, for a manner of thinking connected with physical things. When the Hindoo immersed himself in the starry world, this world was to him only the expression of the Godhead. But the Chaldean loved the physical World; to him it was a part of the Godhead into which he penetrated and immersed himself. This activity leading him from the divine into the physical world appears to us in the Babylonian-Assyrian culture.

We have now reached a point leading us to the fourth cultural cycle, which we designate as the Graeco-Latin culture. The human being is now included in the external perception, The Egyptian knew that the world was not a chaos, but that it was fraught with meaning and that it had been constructed throughout immeasurable aeons of time. The sphinx and the pyramid expressed great cosmic thoughts. The ancient Egyptian concealed his knowledge of these truths in images: he created the sphinx, which faces us like a riddle of evolution itself: the development of man's higher essence from earlier animal-like conditions. This was the wisdom which the Egyptian spoke out into the world in his own way. In ancient Egypt you may find calculations and measurements,which were drawn directly from heaven. The cities were built in such a way that the Egyptian expressed in these constructions a sacred order of laws and they sought to express in images the cosmic laws which governed the universe. This did not as yet include the individual human essence, which only begins to unfold in Greek art, and which shows us that man now takes hold of his own being as an immediate reality and seeks to create it as an image in space.

Man became more and more familiar with the world which the Hindoo designated as Maya. He began to face his own self. Within the world which in ancient India was considered as an illusion, the Greek created a world of realities and realised that he had to create it without the help of the Gods; more and more he united himself with the external reality and out of his own strength he permeated the external reality with a divine essence. If you study the Greek “polis” you do not find in it any trace of jurisprudence. Man had to establish this during the Roman epoch as “Roman right” which governed the private social intercourse of men, as Roman citizens.

The human being thus acquired an ever greater knowledge of that which takes place in the world of external reality.

The fifth cycle of culture is the one in which we now live, with our materialistic civilisation. It is the time in which man has descended most profoundly into the external world. Compare, our age with preceding ones: We know, to be sure, how to apply the forces of the spiritual world to our physical environment—we carry the spiritual world into it. But in the light of spiritual science this presents strange aspects. Think of the time when the human being still produced his flour by grinding corn between two stones—he did not apply much spiritual power to do this. In ancient Egypt and Chaldea he still immersed himself in the wisdom of the heaven; he still learned a great deal concerning the spiritual significance of the earth itself and of the starry sky. The Greek still placed into the world of physical reality the idealised human form. What is the aspect of our own time? A great amount of spiritual power is used to produce modern natural science with its technical appliances. How great is the difference between obtaining food by primitive means, and obtaining it from America with the aid of telephone, engines, etc.! Yet these complicated technical means are after all used to satisfy the same needs also felt by animals and which animals are able to satisfy by primitive means! Try to investigate how many of the modern inventions really serve spiritual life, and how much spiritual power is used for the sake of furthering material life! What an enormous amount of spiritual power must human beings develop at the present time for the satisfaction of material requirements! There is no great difference whether an animal satisfies its hunger by grazing, or whether man obtains his food from America or Australia through all kinds of means.

This is hot an adverse criticism, for this had to come. Man had to submerge himself in the physical world. The Hindoo still looked, upon it as an illusion, but modern man considers the physical world as the only reality. We have reached the deepest point in our descent and this rendered possible the greatest progress upon the physical plane: This descent, however, must not be in vain, even from a spiritual aspect!

A new element has now arisen, an element that was implanted into the world during the first third of the post-Atlantean epoch: it is the rise of Christianity, the most significant influence in the whole development of the earth. In the light of occultism, everything which proceeded is only the preparation for Christianity. Buddha, Hermes, and so forth, prophetically pointed towards Christianity, for Christianity must lift man out of his deepest entanglement with matter. And it will raise man out of this entanglement. Man's ascent from matter begins again. The task of spiritual science is to help in this ascent into the spiritual world.

The next epoch of our Post-Atlantean culture will bring still more inventions and discoveries; but man will more and more perceive mere letters in the physical world. A genuine Christianity will speak of the external world as condensed Spirit, and the Spirit will once more arise out of matter. We shall then no longer say that the external world is an illusion, for we shall recognise it fully and lose nothing, and yet rise up to a higher spiritual world.

Christianity will contribute most of all towards this course of development. During the sixth epoch, great masses of men will be deeply moved and seized by truths which are now revealed to few, and this will give mankind an insight into the spiritual world. What now exists as thought will in future be a real force. Many people will have this power of thought during the sixth epoch of culture. The theosophical Christianity of to-day will spread among great masses of men. These thoughts will grow stronger and stronger and they will have a creative influence upon the human form.

Once upon a time the human body had quite a different aspect from that which it has to-day; indeed, if I were to describe to you this human body of ancient times, you would be greatly surprised. Because it was still soft, the Ego could exercise a far greater influence upon it. Modern man has only retained an insignificant rest of the psychic influence of will upon his body, for instance, when you are seized by sudden fright you grow pale, because the inner soul-condition penetrates as far as the blood and your complexion changes. But other bodily conditions can show you how little we are now able to control our body. With the gradual ascent into the spiritual world this will change; man's body will become softer and softer and he will once more be able to influence the thoughts which now still exist so sparsely, will gradually grow stronger; these thoughts will then be able to transform even the body. Man will be able to mould his own body—but this will only be the case in a very distant future.

Sex arose in the human being only during the Lemurian age; before that time he was bi-sexual, both male-and female. With the incorporation of the Ego, the human being was split into two sexes. We shall learn to know this better, when we shall consider more closely the development of the human blood. This will lead us to the problem of the division into sexes and also to the fact that the now existing division of the sexes will again disappear.

Thus we look into a future in which the human being will exercise quite a different influence upon his body.

What is, for example, that which sends the blush of shame into our face? What is it? A last remnant of the influence which man once exercised over his body. Man will more and more be able to work consciously into his body, and then will come the time when he will be able to transform the muscle of his heart into one which obeys' him.

Science describes the heart as a mere physical apparatus: as a pump. But the blood does not only stream through the body because the heart pumps the blood through it; everything which constitutes the blood depends upon the soul; the blood pulses more or less quickly according to our feelings, and it is the blood which produces the movement of the heart. But in future the human being will have a conscious influence upon the heart; therefore the heart is an organ which is now at the beginning of its development. The heart is a muscle with a spiritual development, an organ through which the human being will be able to express himself as he develops towards a higher stage, thus exercising a creative influence upon his whole body.

The heart is only at the beginning of its development, and for this reason it is a cross to materialistic science. Materialistic science tells you: all the muscles through which you move, are formed of transversal strips, but all those muscles which move automatically consist of longitudinal strips. The heart however is a peculiar organ upsetting every calculation! It is an automatic muscle, nevertheless it has, even to-day, transversal fibres.

To-morrow I will show you how certain things can be explained in the light of spiritual science.

Spiritual science thus throws light upon that which surrounds us. We shall redeem everything which has become matter from its present rigid condition. This is how the thought of redemption, may be grasped in its deepest essence! Man has developed to an ever higher stage, leaving behind him certain kingdoms in the course of this development. He will become powerful and redeem that which he has left behind; he will help to redeem the earth! But if he is to redeem the earth he must not despise it, but unite himself with it.

Last time I took the liberty of saying a few words about the task or the significance of a theosophical branch. What I said then is really something that cannot be emphasized enough, perhaps, for those who are in the theosophical movement or who want to participate in what is called theosophy today. Nothing is more common today than opposing, than fighting against mere theory, against mere teaching, and on the other hand, again, the desire for life, for sensation and feeling, for that which is not theory and not teaching; for no time has been so caught up in theories, teachings and dogmas - without one really knowing it - as the present one.

That seems to be a strong claim, and yet I would like to maintain it, even against those who object: Isn't that the dark ages, the dark dogma, and isn't our time beyond that? You will find a well-known magazine on display this week, in which the first page talks about a book that deals with Christianity and that comes from the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann. It is not obvious enough for us today to deal with the ideas of this writing. But a well-known fighter for the current renewal of Christian ideas has expressed ideas in the “future” in connection with this writing, which do give us food for thought because they are very widespread in our present time. Jentsch says that Hartmann said in this writing something that has often been said before, but that the logical mind of Eduard von Hartmann has stated as clearly as possible once again, so that everyone now knows that one can never again deal with any theoretical or systematic, doctrinal basis of religious views or truths. The time when religion was philosophically or theologically justified is over. Today we know full well – and in saying this he expresses something that will resonate in many hearts – that all systems of thought become entangled in contradictions and that only life, looking up into a world beyond, to a divine world order, can truly interest us.

The good man does not realize that, although he rejects all other dogmatics, two or three dogmas, even if they remain merely abstract, have a certain value for him. He wants to cast off all dogmatics, and he is precisely a dogmatist of the most pronounced kind. Although one does not want to be a dogmatist, and yet one is one, without knowing how strong one is as a dogmatist. This has also led to the fact that all similar movements - be it the “Giordano Bruno League” or the “Society for Ethical Culture” - more or less stand on a strictly doctrinal point of view, that it is therefore more important to them to spread teachings. Whether they are teachings about the right moral action or about monism or about a reform of our religious education in schools, which is to be replaced by a moral education that only amounts to a certain moral dogmatics - because something has to be taught after all - it makes no difference. So the old dogmas are replaced by new ones, by the dogmas of liberalism. Everywhere it comes down to doctrine, everywhere to the content of the word.

This is not at all necessary in the theosophical movement. I wanted to emphasize this point: Whatever we teach, whatever one or the other writes or teaches in his books, may it be high truths, and may there be many people who feel addressed by such truths because they represent a world system without contradictions and so on – that is not what matters in the theosophical movement. What matters is not what we teach, what we assert, what we say, but how we live together in the theosophical movement, what kind of attitude we develop. This attitude, which we should develop and want to develop, is that in our soul lives the consciousness of spiritual activity, the consciousness that thoughts, sensations, feelings are just as real forces in the world as magnetism, electricity, light or steam power. Not the one who admits that there is truth in the things spread in our literature is a true theosophist, but the one who, together with his fellow human beings, finds himself in the ever-recurring awareness in his soul that when he thinks, feels or wills something that may not even be translated into an external action, that it will then have an effect.

And when one of us speaks to such a congregation, which brings this awareness to him, then his words are quite different from the words of any other lecturer or any other speaker. Because then you will be sitting here in the knowledge that not only your physical body, which is here, is something real, but that your feelings and emotions and your thoughts, which pass through your mind, are as present as your physical body. And when you cross the threshold with this awareness and absorb the words that are spoken here, then these words will find the way they are meant to find into the world. The words of the theosophist are not spoken for the sake of one or the other agreeing or disagreeing with them. It is not whether they are true or not that is of primary importance, but the fact that they are forces. No matter how beautiful and excellent the thoughts expressed in the words of the individual may be, this is of less importance; what is of primary importance is through which channels these thoughts pass. A theosophical lodge or branch is the starting point for numerous channels through which these thoughts, when spoken, find their way out into the whole world.

But these words will only be heard in this way if the listeners are aware of a spiritual world. Then the speaker's powers are strengthened by the consciousness of each person present; then the spiritual forces are like those in an electric battery, and they penetrate out into the world like waves and are effective wherever the opportunity arises. It is this attitude, this consciousness, this life in the teaching that is important, not the content. Our teachings are drawn from the contemplation of the great spiritual connections of existence and from the contemplation of the nature of the human being. The goal is not that we know them, but that they have an effect. And this effect is important for the reason that these thoughts are the same ones through which everything in the world has happened for millions of years, ever since there has been a time. And as true as the world has become as it is now through these thoughts, so true will the world become in the future through the same thoughts, as it should and must become.

But there is a factor that must be involved in order for the right thing to happen in the future, and this factor is called “human being”, this factor is called “knowing and conscious human being”. We can say: There was a time when the great thoughts of the world order were realized by what we call the gods. At that time, man was still completely unconscious. At that time man could not yet participate in the building of the world. You see, man is now at the beginning of the development of his consciousness. He will approach times when this consciousness will draw ever wider and wider circles. Thus he will be ever more called upon to collaborate in what the gods once did. That is why we call our theosophy 'Divine Wisdom', because we have the wisdom from it, and because we must have our share if we want to set up our construction in the future.

In the future, man will be called upon in a broader sense to participate more consciously than he does today. Just as today's society creates a moral world order for itself, so too will a time come when spiritual forces will permeate the soul of man to a much greater extent than they do today, and the rigid social order will have a much deeper, more intense meaning. And just as man today only uses the laws of nature on the surface in order to do what lives and works in industry, so a time will come when man will use the spiritual laws of the world to make our institutions. Man will gain mastery over health and disease by applying the great laws of the world. There is a divine being in man at the beginning of his development, and to bring out this divine being and make it a creative one is the goal of Theosophy or 'divine wisdom'. Theosophy does not exist to satisfy the curiosity of those who want to know something about God, but to give people the strength to fulfill their task as a divinizing being. Although it may not happen in a short period of time, we will be able to realize this more and more.

What I would now like to summarize in one sentence may seem quite peculiar to some people, but it is a truth that the occultist knows as a natural scientist knows some other truth, some external truth. There is such a truth. I have already pointed this out in the twenty-seventh issue of Lucifer-Gnosis. It is connected with health in the world. It is a truth, admittedly, in the spiritual sense, and the connection is not so obvious. Ultimately, it is absolutely true that a healthy external physical body is the result of an inner life of the spirit in truth. To express myself more clearly, but somewhat remotely: a theosophical lodge, a theosophical branch is also a source of health. As you sit here together in the attitude of mind of which I have spoken, and absorb into your consciousness those truths which are nothing other than an echo of the great world thoughts that have created the harmonies of the world, tremble and vibrate through your soul the true thoughts of the world. And just as it is true that everything physical is an effect of the spirit, it is just as true that the state of the physical will be determined by the vibrations, by the waves that now tremble through your soul. If the thoughts that stimulate the wave vibrations of your soul are healthy, then these will also stimulate the physical vibrations, and these must then be healthy. By radiating these vibrations in all directions throughout the world, we are creating a source of health. A source of health emanates from the theosophical lodges. You will not notice this recovery in your life tomorrow or the day after. But in the future you may find that health is the result of the current pursuit of truth. We build healthy bodies for future generations by allowing our souls to cultivate the truth in spiritual life. We place ourselves in the whole course of time, we place ourselves in the course of the world, if we have the right faith.

Many say, yes: What harm has materialism done us? It has brought us many powerful devices and so much knowledge and understanding of life at all naturalist and medical gatherings. You can hear so much about life there. You can hear how great the hygienic progress is and so on, how much lower the mortality rate is today than it was a century ago. All this has been brought to us by the study of natural laws, a study that works with pure matter. But you also have to see deeper. You have to see that the outside does not always correspond to the inside, and that the outside is a very deceptive indicator of the inside.

Yes, we do not want to deny that great and magnificent things have been created in our age of materialism. But who created it? Here we come to a point that teaches us the difference between what man merely thinks, what merely lives in the human mind, and what lies deep in the bottom of his soul. You must strictly distinguish these two things. You go through the world and do your daily tasks according to what you think today. But what you think today is based on a reason that is not from today. What you think today is based on a deeper soul reason that is the result of the past. Even from a purely external point of view, even the materialistic thinkers of the nineteenth century grew out of the thinking of the past. They were educated in schools that had not yet fallen prey to materialism. Where did the great teachers of materialism such as Büchner, Vogt, Moleschott learn their subject, and why do their books have such a seductive quality? It is because their school was in a time when it had not yet been so taken over by materialism. In truth, we carry within us the essence of what we were in past lives. Indian philosophy tells us with profound wisdom: What you think today, you will become tomorrow. This applies to people and to all facts and beings in the world. Today, our thinking is superficial. Today, we are what we thought in the past.

They believe that we have overcome the old. People speak of the dark, gray Middle Ages. But the first times of the Middle Ages rest as our deepest being in our soul. At that time we lived in an earlier incarnation. What we think today, we will only be in a future incarnation. We should not be surprised that we think in a materialistic way, but nevertheless have reaped fruits that are the result of earlier epochs. What we have today is only the result of an age that we are inclined to look down on with ridicule and scorn. It was out of this deep realization that the impulse arose that led to the theosophical movement in the last third of the nineteenth century.

We are now facing the fruits of earlier times and earlier ways of thinking. But those who are watching over the signs of the times know that our thoughts, what we have in our souls today, determine our future life. This future will be an ever faster and faster unfolding of life. You must be aware that life does not proceed at the same pace in all ages. All those sitting here have heard many theosophical lectures, and I may therefore often say a word that is taken from deeper wisdom. We know that besides the physical plan there is the astral plan, and he who knows the higher life also knows how to predict the course of development in this higher world and to follow the course of progress.

If we compare the period from the time of Charlemagne to the end of the eighteenth century with the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, thus comparing a millennium with a century, we note the surprising fact that approximately the same things happened in both periods. The progress of the human wave was only ten times faster and it will be faster and faster in the time to come. Therefore, we must be prepared for the things that our thoughts bring about to become external reality in the not too distant future. This shows you the impulse from which the theosophical movement has flowed.

The recovery of the following generation should be due to our thoughts, just as we owe the progress we have made to the preceding generations. Those who look at the theosophical movement in this light may be called 'prophetic' in nature. But at all times, prophets have been, and had to be, those who really wanted to guide the course of events. For to determine what should happen in the future, on a large scale, one must first know what is lawful for that future. The great individuals who know what is lawful for the future have therefore given us the opportunity to get to know again the great laws of the world, which had been forgotten for so long, and to feel them for the spiritual and physical recovery of our race. Take this quite literally, that true thoughts have a healing physical effect, and that those thoughts, which are awakened in the theosophical lodge through our soul vibrations, are medical-medical forces that pulsate through humanity. Feel this truth, this truth of life, with all your soul and feel the importance in the theosophical movement, then you will come to another chapter and be able to grasp it.

There are many among us who say: Yes, the theosophical movement spreads a beautiful, high ethics, it spreads beautiful teachings that are consistent in themselves. But one should stick to it and not raise one's eyes and confuse people in mystical, mysterious, abstract and mental worlds. How many there are in the Theosophical Society who say: Leave us alone with the astral and mental realm, we want to develop the consciousness of unity. A certain shyness can be noticed towards what we know as the doctrine of the astral and mental. But one day it must be said: The one who wanted to exclude this teaching of these higher worlds from the theosophical movement was acting against the intentions that the great individuals, whom we call the masters, gave us. We might as well abandon the theosophical movement if we ban the teaching of the higher worlds from it. Certainly, one can speak of an ethic, of an ethical teaching today. This ethical teaching is already being introduced in schools. Ethical societies have been founded that attempt to establish and introduce general human duties without regard to this or that worldview, to this or that religious belief. But you can only establish duties based on what you know. But take a look at these teachings of duty. They are a true reflection, a perfect imprint of the material age in which we live. What you find in the way of new duties among the new enlightened ones is nothing more than the consequence of a materialistic world view, the consequence of what the eyes can see, ears hear and hands can touch. This is certainly idealism, and one can be a noble idealist in this field – without doubt. But this is the last consequence, the last outflow of a materialistic time.

And because even those who believe themselves to be idealists, and who aspire with their thoughts and feelings to a higher world and at least want to retain a dark foreboding of a higher world, because they want to start thinking, feeling and acting and not just talk, immediately fall back into materialistic habits of thought. Because there are many such people in the theosophical movement, the idea is spreading in it too: we should limit ourselves to such a materialistic ethics, to a unity consciousness that one cannot grasp and does not want to grasp because people are afraid of touching the higher worlds in a certain way.

The theosophists, who say that one should not speak of the astral and mental planes, also point out that a certain amount of theosophical truth can be spread with the mere intellect. They also want to hint at what is the deeper essence and foundation of all reality, as a divine reality underlying all realities. But to see it for themselves, to grasp it, to face it as it is, they shrink back from that. That would be just as if someone wanted to say: Yes, there is an electrical force, we want to admit it; but to apply it, to study it in order to construct electrical machines and so on, we do not want to get involved in that. That is dangerous, we could confuse ourselves, that gives the world a different picture. But such a one does not really approach the power of electricity. Rather, the right approach is taken by the one who says, “I want to get to know the power of electricity in every respect, so that I can bring it into existence and use it in the outer arrangements of men.” The first follower of the power of electricity would resemble the theosophist who says, “Let us not concern ourselves with the astral and mental worlds, but only with the consciousness of unity.” He would not apply spiritual power to the immediate present.

But if we do not want to just dream of the divine, not just have hunches, not just talk and at most feel vaguely, but actually implement it in reality, then we have to get to know it in its individual forms, as it reveals itself in the higher worlds, and then we can penetrate into the higher worlds. Just as we conquer our physical world by getting to know the individual forms of electrical power, we get to know our life as a tangible reality when we make this power our own. In the future, this power, which today is only realized in the world by universal beings, will be consciously realized and controlled by human beings.

It is not to satisfy our curiosity that we look into the spiritual world, not in vain do we seek to open the eyes of the mind and soul to those beings who do not live in the physical body, but as if from our passions and instincts and inner soul forces. It is not without reason that we rise to those beings whose body is not physical, whose body is woven from the same material as our thoughts are woven, to those beings whom we call the beings of the mental world. We rise to them in order to learn what needs to be woven into the world in which we live. That is a fundamental truth, that the spirit is always present. When you see a flower, you do not just see a physical object – today's science does not want to know anything about that: this flower is spirit, and its sensual form is only an expression of the spirit. I have said many times: if you have a surface of water and you let the water cool more and more, ice will form. Someone will now come and say: ice is real water, only in a different form. Then another person comes and says: But it is not water, it is solid and not liquid. Everyone knows that ice is condensed water, shaped by cold and differently formed. It is quite similar with the flower. In this flower you have only a differently formed spirit. Just as you can transform ice into water, so you can also dissolve the flower into its spiritual essence. Our physical world is nothing but astral and mental substance that has become too solid. All those sitting here are also mental beings and express themselves in their physical bodies in a condensed form. If you want to work for the greater good, you have to know the forces. If you want to create ice, you need to have cold and water. If you want to shape the physical world in the right way, you have to know the spirit.

You have to explore the forces of the spirit, not to satisfy our curiosity about the higher worlds and to learn all kinds of interesting things, but because we draw from them our knowledge for our practical life. What is astral today will be physical in the future; and what is mental today will be astral in the future and physical in the more distant future. When we speak of the astral plane in a theosophical lodge and allow these astral truths to permeate our soul and create vibrations in it, these souls will in the future be incarnated in people who are disposed to the astral plane. If we are then incarnated on earth again, these truths will flow out of us. What will then take physical shape through us are the things that descended into our soul as parts, as children of the astral world. We are here to bring down the laws of our work and life from the higher worlds. Therefore, the question cannot be whether one or the other likes to ascend to the higher worlds, but only whether we should and must ascend. That we should ascend, that there should come again an age which spiritualizes the world, which spreads spiritual views among mankind, this was the realization of the great beings who inspired the theosophical movement.

The age that lies behind us, the epoch in which man became material, was preceded by another. This era relied on great, exalted spiritual beings who were the teachers and guides of humanity. In ancient times, when great holy leaders guided humanity, all of these leaders were at least deeply imbued with the truths that the theosophical movement is spreading among humanity today, including the truth of the repeated incarnation of the human soul. If you imagine the relationship of the great teachers of antiquity to the masses, you will get an idea of the way of teaching in ancient times. Think back to those times and to the great advanced individuals who looked into the mysterious, secret structure of the world, which was closed to the eyes of others - as St. John expresses it in the Apocalypse. They spoke to people in a pictorial form that they could not yet grasp with their minds, but which they had to be prepared for in order to grasp with their minds in later incarnations. And that led to the form of language that was spoken at that time, to the language of legends, myths and fairy tales.

This is where you are sitting today. But all your souls were once embodied in those distant times, all your souls listened to one of the great teachers of the distant past as he told the fairy tales. These fairy tales were not of the same kind as those conceived from light, superficial fantasy, as today's are, but in these fairy tales the great truth of existence lived and breathed. And even if the truth was not expressed conceptually in them, it was not the conceptual that descended into your souls with the figures and persons of the fairy tale, but rather the intuitive perception. The fairy tales that you read in the Grimm's Fairy Tale Collection mostly contain such teachings of wisdom. When they were absorbed into the human soul, you learned them in such a way that today you are able to grasp the truths that were once contained in the fairy tale. It is the greatest untruth to say that fairy tales contain no truths. They contain the most ancient truths of the human race. The soul that allows the fairy tale to flow into it receives the seed of feeling for the truth, which later unfolds. In our youth, because everything in the world must repeat itself that has been there in the past, we must briefly relive those souls and states of mind that we went through in earlier times when we heard the eternal words of the saints of humanity. And when today a mother tells her child a fairy tale from the treasure of ancient times, then truth flows into the soul of the child. Thus the child is repeatedly prepared for his later age, when he is then able to absorb these truths with his mind.

If we look at it this way, we understand the course of time. We hear about the time that we have described, when the great mysteries of humanity were given, down to our time. Our time should become great through what man himself can produce. It had to gradually develop out of what was wrapped up in fairy tales, just as a child develops into greatness and independence.

It was good that humanity referred to itself, to its own soul, for a while. That is a middle state. And what has it led to? It has led to the saying: we cannot know anything about the beyond. We know nothing about what first opens up beyond death. It is a great immodesty to speak like that. Not those who know nothing about it can speak about it, but those who know something about it. Those who have correctly understood the theosophical movement in its deepest essence have also tried to grasp the right thing through this feeling. The insistence on itself has inevitably led man to ignorance. In the beginning, man's intellect sees only what lies on this side of death. So when he looks at himself, he cannot know anything of what lies beyond death. But they will get used to listening to the teachers who have already crossed the threshold of death in this life and who know how to tell about this life from their own experience.

What is happening here is giving rise to a new modesty. It is not immodesty when those who speak for the Theosophical Society emphasize time and again: “We do not speak our wisdom, no, we speak not our wisdom, we speak that which the great leaders and sages of humanity still teach us today. We do not speak of masters because we presume to draw the higher truths from ourselves, from our own source. We sit at the feet of the masters because we know that as long as we insist on our own rightness, as long as we do not make ourselves disciples of the masters, we must remain at the “I do not know” level. Out of this humility, we do not express our own thoughts. I speak through that which we want to inspire in the world, I speak the wisdom of the great, superior, wise guides who have left our stage of development behind them. And we try in every way to hear the voice of these masters. That is why teachings such as those in “Light on the Path” have been spread as the golden teachings of the theosophical movement. That sentence

Before the Masters can speak the voice, the wounding must be unlearned.

becomes our guiding principle. We try to unlearn the wounding. We try to break off the tip of each of our thoughts that wounds, because we know that words that hurt others reflect badly on the Word of the Master. Sharp thoughts that hurt reflect badly on the Master's words. But when our heart opens up like a bell flower, when our words are soft and mild and do not wound, then the voice of the masters, the word of the masters, goes through us purely and brightly like a bell.

You will hear the voice of the master when you can pass through the words that do not wound without resistance. Then you will hear the words of the master. Through such thoughts the thoughts of the masters flow. And when a person behaves in this way, the voice of the masters resounds through him, through what he thinks and says. The “masters of the harmony of thoughts and feelings” become audible to him. Those who have a true relationship with the Master speak in this sense. Only in this sense may they speak. Otherwise their word is not truth, but deception and falsehood. Everything that is brought as a message from the Master in any other sense is not true. It is true, however, that the thoughts and impulses of higher beings flow through the theosophical movement, if we do not want to spread our thoughts but make ourselves the instrument of those who today want to rekindle spiritual life in the world.

From the Questions and Answers

Can one cultivate the art of listening to the inner voice while out in nature?

The school of solitude in nature is very important. Most people cannot associate any true sensation with what was once called “silence in the forest”. And yet there is something very significant behind it. Imagine a very loud sound becoming weaker and weaker, and then imagine it falling completely silent. Otherwise, think of nothing. Then you will hear nothing around you. Imagine the same with light. You see light. The light grows dimmer and dimmer; then you see darkness. And yet, the darkness is not nothing. Darkness is as positive a sensation as whiteness. But you see, the nothingness of hearing and seeing is caused by the gradual weakening of light and sound. The complete darkness and soundlessness has occurred gradually. Ask yourself now, could this weakening and weakening of the sound not be continued even further? Below this nuance, down to where it is even quieter than when you hear nothing. In ordinary life, everyone admits this. One who always and always spends his money has nothing; but he can still have even less. He can get into debt. Then he has even less than nothing. When the tone goes deeper and deeper, you come to the point where you hear the tone again on the other side of nature. But first you have to learn to live the voice. In the beginning, this can be felt as a mood. If you did such exercises, you would already find that on the other side of the mental world, the new day is born for spiritual ears. Those who can do this are on the right track. A lot can be achieved with it. In our cities, however, it is almost impossible. It is easy in nature, where spring really greens, where the trees, the leaves and the forest look different every day. It is not for nothing that the occult sites where culture was cultivated were located in nature.

Are plant colors audible? I read a sentence from Stifter: “I heard the blue color of the flower.

Sounds in colors, and not just colors in sounds, also appear to have a less extensive sensitivity. This goes even further, that when another 'I' is pronounced, certain people have a certain color in their consciousness. The beginning of the Ninth Symphony has already been recomposed in colors. The physiologist Nussbaumer has studied this, as have French physiologists.

Do cities also have certain colors?

Yes, Berlin is gray, Vienna is red. The Gothic church is a piece of music in the astral, a sound structure in the mind.

Interchanging activity of Thoth-Hermes and Moses, as reflection of a cosmic process. The secret of the Hebrew people. Human thought the reflection of divine vision. The power of ancient clairvoyance passes into the inner organization of man. The law of numbers in respect of heredity in the sequence of generations

Before passing on to our main theme, I should like to make a slight addition to something mentioned yesterday. This was, that when human evolution, especially the most important events in our existence, are described, this can best be done in a language drawn from cosmic events. I showed how impossible it was to clothe these mighty mysteries in ordinary words, or to give any clear idea of the wonderful interchanging activities of Hermes or Thoth and Moses, the two great pupils of Zarathustra. We represent them best when we treat them as a repetition of cosmic events, accepting them altogether in the sense of Occult Science

Let us glance back in thought to the separation of the earth from its sun, after which each pursued its further life in the cosmos with an independent centre. In a primeval past the whole substance of earth and sun may be pictured as forming one whole, one great cosmic body, which later divided into sun and earth. Parallel to this, other cosmic events took place, namely, the separation of the other planets of our solar system. These need not be considered here; for our present purpose it is sufficient to consider such a separation as the Sun forming the one centre, and the Earth the other.

In those remote times, it must be remembered, the earth still contained the substance of the present moon, so that really the sun and the earth-moon confronted one another. All the spiritual and physical forces that had existed as one heavenly body were now divided—the coarser elements, the denser, grosser activities, remaining with the earth, the finer, more spiritually-etheric ones, going out with the sun. It must be realized that for long ages the earth and sun continued each to develop its separate life, and that what streamed from the sun towards the earth was quite different from what comes from it to-day. There was at first a kind of earthly existence and earthly life of an inward nature, secluded, contracted, and receiving little from the life of the sun—little of that which spiritually (though expressed physically) streams from the sun to the earth to-day. The earth, in this first period of the separation between sun and earth, experienced a drying-up, hardening, mummifying process. If this had continued, if the earth had retained the moon within it, the human life of to-day would never have evolved. As long as the earth contained the moon within it, the life of the sun could not fully manifest its activities. This it could only do later when the earth had parted with the moon and its substance, and the spiritual moon-beings. But something else was bound up with the separation of moon and earth.

We must clearly realize that life on the earth has evolved very slowly and gradually. The stages of this evolution are described in Occult Science: first, the existence of ancient Saturn, then that of the ancient Sun, followed by that of the ancient Moon, and lastly that of the Earth. What has just been described as the separation of the sun from the earth or the earlier union of sun and earth was preceded by all these other evolutionary states which were of a quite different kind. When the earth first came into existence in its present form, it still had united with it the substances of all the planets of our solar system, these only differentiated from the earth later, which differentiation was the result of forces active during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods of existence.

Now we know that during the ancient Saturn existence, matter or substance, as it is to-day, did not exist; neither solid bodies, fluid, nor watery bodies, misty, nor even gaseous nor atmospheric bodies, existed on Saturn. In its whole composition Saturn consisted merely of warmth it was nothing but differentiated warmth. Saturn had a body of heat, and everything that developed upon it was within this element of warmth. It is hardly necessary to repeat that such a statement is not made without recognition of the attitude of modern physics, which regards the existence of a body consisting solely of heat as an impossibility. Heat to modern physics is a condition, not a substance but our concern here is not with modern physics, but with truth.

Evolution continued from the heat body of the Saturn-evolution, and passed on to the next state, that of the ancient Sun. As described in my book, Occult Science, the heat body now in part condensed to the gaseous vapoury condition found on ancient Sun, and a part of it became more rarefied, evolving upwards towards light, where there was not only a process of condensation but one of rarefication. Passing on from the condition of ancient Saturn to that of the ancient Sun, we find a globe containing air, heat, and light. At the next stage, that of the ancient Moon, a further densification took place, and a further rarefication, a densification, on one hand, to water, and a rarefication, on the other, to sound-ether or chemical-ether.

This sound-ether is not what we are aware of in physical sound, which is but its reflection. Sound-ether is known to clairvoyant perception as the harmony of the spheres, the etheric tone which lives within and permeates all space. It is something much more spiritual, more etheric, than ordinary sound.

From the condition of ancient Moon, evolution passed on to that of the earth. Here condensation to solid matter took place for the first time, and also a corresponding rise to life-ether. So on the earth there was now warmth, gaseous or atmospheric bodies, watery or fluid bodies, and solid bodies; and on the other hand light-ether, sound-ether, and life-ether. All this has come to pass in the evolution of the earth. While on Saturn there was but one condition—the middle one, that of warmth—on the earth there are seven elemental conditions.

We must picture the earth as living and weaving within these seven conditions of elemental life when at the beginning of its present existence it emerged from cosmic night, wherein it was still one with the sun and the other planets. With its separation from the sun, something very remarkable took place.

Among the influences and conditions streaming to-day from the sun to the earth, and affecting external life, we certainly find heat and light, but among these influences which belong to the world of sense-perception, the externalization and manifestation of sound-ether and life-ether do not belong. This is also the reason why the activities of sound-ether are only manifested in the chemical combinations of material existence. What we call the forces of life-ether streaming down as they do from the sun, cannot be perceived directly by sense perception, that is, by the means employed by man to distinguish between light and darkness. Life is perceived by him in its results, in living beings; he cannot see the downward streaming life-ether directly. Hence science is forced to state that life, as such, remains a riddle.

So we find that the two highest etheric manifestations, life-ether and sound-ether, though proceeding directly from the finest substances of the sun, are not directly perceptible on earth. We have here something which, though proceeding from the sun, is hidden from ordinary perception. Yet, even under present conditions, there is something corresponding to what lives in sound and life-ether; something in man's inner being that is perceptible. Though the direct effects of these life-ethers and sphere harmonies are not seen, what is at work on the whole constitution of man is perceptible.

This can be explained most simply by referring to man's evolution on earth. It is known to Spiritual Science that in ancient times, down to the Atlantean age, man was gifted with direct clairvoyance, and beheld not merely the world of the senses, but also the whole spiritual background of physical existence. This was possible because for the man of those times there was an intermediate condition between our present-day waking consciousness and our sleeping consciousness. When awake, man perceives the physical world of the senses when asleep, nothing is perceptible—at least to the majority. Man then merely lives. But the spiritual investigator makes strange discoveries about the life of man during sleep, discoveries especially strange to those who only regard life externally. During sleep the astral body and ego of man are outside his physical and etheric bodies, but these should not be pictured as resembling a nebulous cloud floating near the physical body. That which is compared to a ‘cloud’ and is apparent to lower astral clairvoyance, and is sometimes called the ‘astral body,’ is merely the coarsest, first beginnings of what is revealed of a human being during sleep. If this cloud is accepted as the whole of what can be seen, then it is certainly viewed from the lowest form of astral clairvoyance. The reality of man's being during sleep extends to far distances. The fact is that at the moment of falling asleep, the inner forces in the astral body and ego begin to expand over the whole solar system; they become part of the solar system. From the whole of this solar system the man draws into his astral body and ego during sleep, forces for the strengthening of his life and on awakening, when he again passes within the confines of his own physical body, he bears with him what he has absorbed during the night from the solar system.

It was because of this that mediaeval occultists named this spiritual body of man, the astral body; for it is associated with the world of the stars whence it draws its forces. So we can say that during the night man is actually extended over the whole solar system.

What is it that permeates our astral body while we sleep? It is the music of the spheres. The sphere-harmonies live and move within the human astral body when at night man is outside his physical and etheric sheaths; harmony which otherwise can only be found in the sound-ether. As a metal disc, on which sand has been scattered, responds to the vibrations in the air when it is struck by a violin bow, disclosing in the sand what are known as the Chiadnic sound-forms, so man trembles and pulsates nightly in response to the sphere-harmonies, which bring form and order into what, through his sense-perceptions, he has brought into disorder during the day. And that which lives in the life-ether is also active in man during sleep, but he is quite unaware of this inner life of his sheaths when separated from his physical and etheric bodies. Normally he is only conscious when he plunges down again into his two lower sheaths, and can use the external organs of his etheric body for thought, and those of his physical body for sense-perception.

But in ancient times there were intermediate conditions between waking and sleeping which can only be induced to-day by abnormal means; and these ought never to be employed in ordinary life, for they are fraught with danger. In Atlantis these intermediate conditions of perception were evolved normally. Through them man was able to place himself within that which lived and moved in the harmony of the spheres and the life-ether. In other words, the man of ancient times, through his clairvoyance, could perceive the harmony of the spheres streaming to him from the sun, and life as it pulsates through space, even though the sphere-harmonies were only manifest in the earthly effects and life was only perceptible in living beings. The possibility of this experience gradually diminished. With the closing of the door on the old clairvoyance, these revelations disappeared, but something else appeared in their place—the capacity for inner knowledge and the inner powers of understanding. All that in waking life is called contemplation and the thought connected with sense-perception—the whole of the individual inner life—began to evolve with the disappearance of clairvoyance. The inner life of to-day, our feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and ideas, which are fundamentally the origin of all that is creative in our civilization, were not yet possessed in the earliest Atlantean times. Man lived in the intermediate states between sleeping and waking, poured out into a spiritual world, and the sense-world he beheld as in a mist; he lived entirely without the power of human understanding, or any inner reflected images of external life.

With the gradual disappearance of the old clairvoyance, external life came more and more into prominence. Slowly something developed in man's nature that was a feeble reflection of the harmony of the spheres and the activities of the life-ether. In the same measure as man became inwardly aware of feelings and perceptions reflecting the outer world and forming his inner life as it is to-day, the music of the spheres sounded ever more faintly to him. As his realization of himself, of his ego-hood became clearer, his perception of the divine life-ether filling all space became fainter. Present conditions had to be paid for by the loss of a certain part of what had been man's outer life. As earthly being he felt life enclosed within himself, he ceased to feel it streaming to him from the sun; and in his inner life there remains to-day but a faint reflection of that mighty cosmic life, of sphere-harmony and life-ether.

What gradually evolved as human understanding was like a recapitulation of the earth's evolution. When separated from the sun, the earth would have become enclosed within itself and hard, had it retained all the substances left within it. The influences of the sun could not penetrate at first into the development of the earth they failed to do so until the moon had separated from it. In ‘Moon’ we must recognize those rejected substances that made it impossible for the earth to receive the direct influences of the sun. By ejecting the moon, the earth really opened her whole nature and being for the first time to the influences of the sun, from which she had been parted. She sent part of her being back towards the sun, in the opposite direction to that from which she had herself gone forth from it, and this part—the moon—reflects back the sun-nature to the earth as outwardly it reflects its light.

The separation of the moon from the earth must be regarded as an event of the greatest importance; it was a voluntary opening of the earth to the influences of the sun. This cosmic event had now to be enacted again in the life of humanity. A long time after the earth had thus opened herself to the reception of the sun-forces, the moment arrived when man himself had to be cut off from these forces.

By means of their clairvoyance, the direct solar influences could still be perceived by the Atlanteans; but just as at a certain stage in its evolution the earth began to harden, so a time came when man withdrew within himself and began to develop an inner life of his own. Like the earth, he became unable to open himself to the direct influences of the sun. The process of developing an inner life by ceasing to be susceptible to solar influences, and only of developing in himself what was a faint reflection of the activities of the life-ether and sound-ether, continued for long into post-Atlantean times. Direct perception of the solar forces, which was characteristic of the early Atlanteans was eventually lost. As the effects of these forces could no longer penetrate to the consciousness of mankind, his inward life continued blossoming more and more. Then came the time when it was only in the Mysteries that man's spiritual powers could be developed. There, by means of Yoga, a pupil of the Mysteries could be withdrawn from earthly conditions and made directly aware of the solar influences. Therefore, during the second half of the Atlantean period what were rightly called ‘Oracles’ appeared. They were places where a class of people, who no longer perceived the activities of the higher ethers normally, were received as pupils and trained, in sacred wisdom. Here, through training, they learnt to suppress mere sense-perceptions and to become conscious of the revelations of the sound-ether and life-ether. The power to do this was preserved in the true centres of occult science. Indeed, the possibility of this endured so powerfully that even external science, without understanding it, still retains a tradition from the school of Pythagoras that one can hear the harmony of the spheres. Science, ignorant however of what the true ‘Harmony of the Spheres’ was, has changed it into a mere abstract idea. The pupils of Pythagoras understood as the power to perceive the harmony of the spheres, the actual reopening of a man's being to the tone-ether and the divine life-ether.

Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, was the first who taught in the most sublime way that behind the activities of the sun streaming to the earth as light and warmth, there was something else, something which as the activity of sound-ether and life-ether is feebly reflected in the inner life of man. Were we to translate his teaching into modern words, it might read: ‘When you look up to the sun you are aware of its beneficial warmth and light flowing down to earth; but when you have evolved higher organs, when you have developed spiritual perception, you will behold the Being of the sun Who lives behind the physical sun. You will then perceive the activities of sound, and within these the meaning of life!’ This, the first thing of a spiritual nature to be perceived behind the physical activity of the sun, was described by Zarathustra to his pupils as Ormuzd, or Ahura Mazdao, the mighty aura of the sun.

Therefore Ahura Mazdao is sometimes translated as ‘The Great Wisdom,’ to distinguish it from the little wisdom evolved by men to-day. Man perceives ‘The Great Wisdom’ when he perceives the spiritual being of the sun, the great sun aura.

‘The sun-orb sings, in emulation,
‘Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round:
His path predestined through Creation,
He ends with step of thunder-sound.’

FAUST—Prologue in Heaven.

In these words a poet, gazing back into the ancient days of human evolution, refers to what is a fact to the spiritual investigator. But the ‘resounding’ of the sun is to some people not a fact but a pleasing fancy, a poetic licence. They do not realize what a poet, in the sense in which Goethe was a poet, really is. He describes reality when he says, ‘The sun-orb sings his ancient round,’ that is, as ancient humanity heard it, and as it still sounds to-day for those who are initiates. Truths such as these were given by Zarathustra to his pupils, and above all to his two most intimate disciples, those who later incarnated as Hermes and Moses. But to each he gave a separate and different instruction concerning the sun aura. Hermes was instructed in a way that led him to remain within the influence that emanated directly from the sun: Moses was inspired so that he retained the secret of the sun-wisdom as in a memory.

If, in accordance with occult science, we picture the earth after her separation from the sun and the moon, and see her opening her being to greet the sun, we have in Venus and Mercury that which stands in between the sun and the earth. If we now divide the whole space between the sun and the earth into three parts, we might say: The earth parted from the sun; she then thrust out from her the moon towards the sun, then Venus and Mercury separated from the sun and came towards the earth. We have to see therefore in Venus and Mercury, something which approaches the earth from the sun, and in the moon, something that approaches the sun from the earth.

The conditions of human evolution are thus seen to resemble the conditions of cosmic relationships; they reflect them as in a mirror. If we regard the teaching of Zarathustra as ‘sun-wisdom,’ which he imparted, on one side to Hermes, and on the other to Moses, then because Hermes had received the astral sheath of Zarathustra, the wisdom which dwelt in him may be likened to the streaming out of the sun-wisdom; while the wisdom that lived in Moses was, as it were, cut off, like a separate planet of wisdom, and had to go through a further development before it could receive those outpourings coming directly from the sun.

Just as with the moon's departure the forces of the earth opened to receive those coming from the sun, so the wisdom of Moses opened to receive the direct sun-wisdom as it streamed from Zarathustra. These two, the earth-wisdom of Moses, and the sun-wisdom of Zarathustra as given to Hermes, met in Egypt; where the teaching of Moses came into contact with that of Hermes. The wisdom developed by Moses, which he acquired through being separated from Zarathustra, might be compared with the throwing-off of the moon-substance by the earth. The wisdom he imparted to his people can also be called the wisdom of Jahve or Jehovah, for when rightly understood this name is like a resumé of the whole Moses-wisdom. Accepted in this sense you can understand why, according to ancient tradition, Jehovah is called the Moon Deity. This fact is to be found in many records, but is only comprehensible when we begin to realize these far-reaching connections.

As the earth thrust what it contained within it as moon, towards the sun, so the earth-wisdom of Moses had to go out to meet that of Hermes, who possessed in his astral sheath the direct wisdom of Zarathustra, and afterwards had to carry on its own evolution.

It has already been explained how after the meeting with Hermes, Mosaic wisdom continued to develop up to the time of David, and how a revised form of Hermetic or Mercury-wisdom appeared in the kingly warrior and divine singer of the Hebrew people. And we have seen how once more the content of the teaching of Moses came in touch with the sun-element during the Babylonian captivity when the reincarnated Zarathustra or Nazarathos taught the initiates among the Hebrews.

So in the course of the development of the wisdom of Moses we have to see a repetition of cosmic events; the separation of the earth from the sun and all its subsequent development. Such correspondences were regarded with deep veneration and awe by the wise men of the Hebrew race, and by all, who had understanding. They felt something like a direct revelation streaming towards them from cosmic spaces and cosmic life. To them, a personality such as Moses seemed like a messenger from the cosmic powers themselves. They felt him to be this, and as such he must be regarded by us if we would rightly understand these ancient times, otherwise it all remains an empty abstraction.

It was supremely important that the wisdom of Zarathustra, which had developed through Hermes and Moses, should evolve further and afterwards appear at a higher stage and in another form. In order that this might come to pass, Zarathustra, the individuality who had already offered up his astral and etheric bodies, had himself to appear again in a physical body, so that this might also be sacrificed. What he thus experienced was an ascent, a beautiful ascending progress. First, in very ancient times, Zarathustra lived in his own being and gave the impulse to post-Atlantean civilization in ancient Persia and Iran; he then sacrificed his astral body so that through Hermes the next civilization might be established, and to Moses he bequeathed his etheric body. These two sheaths he had already sacrificed. An opportunity for the sacrifice of his physical body had yet to come, for the great mystery of human evolution demanded that one individual should sacrifice his three bodies. The sacrifice of the physical body required special preparation, and to this end the physical body of Zarathustra had to be specially prepared.

I showed in the last lecture how, through the peculiar life of the Hebrew people, this special physical body had been in preparation for many generations. This was then offered up by Zarathustra as his third great sacrifice. In order that this could happen it was necessary that all the force formerly employed by the Hebrew people for direct spiritual perception, the forces that had fallen into decadence among the Turanian peoples, should be turned inwards and become inwardly constructive. This is the secret of the Hebrew people. While among the Turanians the ancient forces, lingering as an heirloom, served to prepare external organs of clairvoyance, in the Hebrews they turned inwards and organized their inner physical nature, so that this people was chosen to perceive and feel inwardly what in Atlantean times had been seen behind the different objects of the sense-world. Jehovah, as he was consciously named by the Hebrews, focussed to a single point, was the ‘Great Spirit’ who was seen by an earlier clairvoyance, behind all things and all beings. I also showed how the progenitor of the Hebrew people—as Father of the race—had been endowed with this inner organization in a very special way.

I have often remarked, and may well repeat it again, that myths and legends, telling in a pictorial way of long-ago events, come nearer the truth than many results of modern anthropological investigations which piece together tales of the origin of the world drawn from recent excavations and fragmentary remains. For the most part ancient legends are corroborated by the facts of Spiritual Science. I say, ‘for the most part,’ for I have not investigated them all, though the content of all really old legends is probably true. Research into the origin of the Hebrew people leads us, not to the conjectures of modern anthropological research, but to an original progenitor, to the Father of the Hebrew race mentioned in the Bible. Abram, or Abraham, is a real figure, and what the Talmud legends relate of him is true. We are told in these legends that the father of Abraham was a captain in the service of that legendary but real person, described in the Bible as Nimrod. To Nimrod it was foretold, by those who could read the signs of the times in dreams, that the son of his captain would dethrone many kings and rulers. Nimrod was afraid when he heard this, and ordered that his captain's son should be killed. After presenting another man's child, not his own, to Nimrod, the father of Abraham fled; his own child was reared in a cave. Occult investigation confirms this legend; it contains the truth. It indicates that Abraham was actually the first to turn inward the powers formerly used in external clairvoyance and transform them into organizing forces which led to an inward consciousness of God. This reversal of the whole sum of forces is indicated in the legend which tells that during the three years the child dwelt in the cave it sucked milk, by the grace of God, from the fingers of its own right hand. This self.. nourishment, this turning inwards of the forces formerly used in ancient clairvoyance, and the employment of them for organizing man inwardly, is explained to us wonderfully in the story of Abraham, the ancestor of the Hebrew people. Such legends, when experienced profoundly, have a powerful effect, making us realize that the ancient teachers of mankind could communicate true wisdom in no other way than by images. Such images were able to give rise, if not to a consciousness, yet to a feeling, for these mighty events, and this was sufficient for those ancient times.

Abraham was thus the first to develop the inward reflection of divine wisdom, of divine perception in a truly human way, as human thoughts concerning the Godhead. Abram, or Abraham as he was called later, had actually a different physical organization from other men living at that time. This is always insisted upon by occult investigation. The men around him were neither capable of nor organized for forming thoughts inwardly, by means of a special instrument. They could form thoughts when free of the body, through the forces of their developed etheric bodies, but they had no instrument for the formation of thoughts within the physical body. Abraham was the first to develop such an instrument; hence he is not wrongly called the inventor of arithmetic—though this statement must naturally be taken cum grano salis—as arithmetic is pre-eminently the science of physical thought. Arithmetic, on account of its inner certainty, approaches closely to clairvoyant knowledge; but it is dependent upon a physical organ.

Thus we have here a deep inward connection between the external forces, employed until then for the purpose of clairvoyance, and those now employed by an inner organ, for thought. This is what is referred to when Abraham is described as the inventor of arithmetic. He must be regarded as the man in whom the physical organ of thought was first implanted, that organ by which man was able to raise himself through his physical thinking to the contemplation of divinity. Before this time men could only learn of God and of divine existence through clairvoyance. In order that they might rise in thought to the divine, a physical instrument was necessary, and this organ was implanted for the first time in Abraham. The fact that thoughts had now to be apprehended through a physical organ, meant that the whole relationship of these thoughts concerning divinity to the objective world, and to the subjective nature of man, was completely changed.

Formerly, thoughts concerning God were conceived in the divine wisdom of the Mystery Schools, and from there were passed on to others able to receive them, that is, to those who had been freed from the organs of the physical body and rendered capable of etheric perception. There is but one way of passing on a physical instrument from one to another: through physical descent. In order that a physical organ of such importance as that possessed by Abraham could be preserved, it had to be propagated through physical inheritance from one generation to another. It can be easily realized why the handing down of this physical attribute through the blood of the race mattered so much to the Hebrew people. The organ, that in the first place had been shaped and crystallized in Abraham for the comprehension of divinity, had to be established. As it was handed down from generation to generation, it entered ever more deeply into human nature, and it grasped this the more deeply, the more it was inherited. For a physical organ can only be perfected when through inheritance it is passed on from one generation to another.

If he whom we have learnt to know as Zarathustra was to have the most perfect body possible (and this means a body with a physical organ capable of becoming an instrument for the conceiving of thoughts of God), the physical instrument implanted in Abraham had to be brought to the highest degree of perfection. It had to be so fully established and developed inwardly through inheritance that a fitting instrument could be evolved for Zarathustra. The development of such a perfect physical body through inheritance, inevitably meant the perfection not only of one but of the other sheaths as well, the etheric and the astral sheaths. They too had to be perfected through inheritance.

Now there is a certain fixed law in evolution which has often been described. From birth to his seventh year is a very special time in the development of man—in it he develops his physical body; from the seventh to the fourteenth–fifteenth, his etheric; and from then to the twenty-first—twenty-second year, his astral body. The evolution of the individual man is expressed in a law that is governed by the number seven. A similar law exists for the evolution of humanity as a whole, and affects the outer sheaths of men as they pass from one generation to another. The more profound working of this law will be considered later.

Whereas the individual man undergoes a stage of evolution every seven years and as the physical body becomes more perfect during the first seven years, so the whole structure of the physical body improves throughout the generations until the seventh generation, when it attains a certain state of perfection. But qualities are not transmitted directly from a man to his next descendant inheritance does not work in this way, but from father to grandson. Important qualities do not pass directly from father to son, or mother to daughter, but to the second generation, then to the fourth, and so on. Inheritance is of necessity connected with the number seven, but as every other generation is missed, it is really the number fourteen that has to be considered. It was only after fourteen generations that the physical qualities implanted in Abraham could reach perfection.

If the etheric and astral bodies were to be associated with this advance, their evolution had also to continue through seven, or rather, fourteen generations, in the same way as the etheric and astral bodies of the single individual evolves from the seventh to the fourteenth year, and from the fourteenth to the twenty-first. This means, therefore, that the physical organization which had been implanted in Abraham, the father of the race, had to pass through three times seven (or rather three times fourteen) generations, for not until then could it completely lay hold of the physical, etheric and astral bodies. After forty-two generations it was possible for a man to have developed perfectly in his physical, etheric and astral bodies, the aptitude first received by Abraham. Only such a body as this would be suitable for Zarathustra. This is the fact given out by the writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew. In his table of descent, he points expressly to this by enumerating fourteen generations from Abaham to David, fourteen from David to the Babylonian captivity, and fourteen from the captivity to Christ. During this long period the mission of the Hebrews, which began with Abraham, reached full development; by then it had been indelibly impressed on the different principles of the people of the race, so that from them a body meet for Zarathustra could be found in an age when something entirely new was to be revealed to men.

From such profound depths as these the Gospel of Matthew has its beginning—depths that can only be realized when they are understood. We must recognize that in the story of these three times fourteen generations we are shown that in the body inherited from Joseph by Jesus of Nazareth there dwelt the essence of what in its first beginnings existed in Abraham; that this essence then spread from him through the whole Hebrew people, and was then concentrated in a single instrument—in a single sheath. This was the sheath for Zarathustra, in which the Christ could incarnate.

for the inauguration of the Novalis branch

Due to the circumstances, a number of our friends here in Strasbourg have founded a second branch in addition to the already existing one, which is to bear the significant name “Novalis Branch”. Our friends from other places, who have lovingly gathered in Strasbourg today, have shown through their visit how they understand that branches can also exist side by side in one city and that the diversity of work in different fields need not preclude what we must call harmony and concord, which must prevail among all those who consider themselves members of our society spread across the globe. And so this branch should also be part of the great current that we call spiritual science.

You, my dear friends of the Novalis branch, have chosen a significant name for your signature, a sign of your work. The name Novalis belongs to a personality who last, that is, in her last incarnation, was active only in the 18th century; a personality whose whole being is permeated, spiritualized, by what we regard as a spirit-knowing sense, as spirituality. And so you showed from the very beginning that you want spiritual science to be something directly alive, that you seek it wherever it can be found, not just in this or that time, but as it lives through all times, and how it can pour out into the world through one or the other personality in many different ways. In Novalis, we can see how the striving for spiritual knowledge is something that can permeate and interweave our ordinary everyday lives. Of course, if we wanted to point to the sources of the theosophical spirit in Novalis, we would have to look into earlier incarnations of this lofty spirit, and from these earlier incarnations it would become clear to us how what can only be the most profound form of theosophical spiritual life was lived in the incarnations that preceded Novalis's own. But even if we consider only that Novalis, who was barely thirty years old and lived at the end of the 18th century, if we consider only that one incarnation, then we can already see in him how spiritual knowledge is not something that takes people up into a dreamy, fantastic world, something that draws him away from immediate reality. On the contrary, in the most diverse ways, we can see in Novalis how the spirit of reality, how real life acquires its value and true content by permeating it with spiritual science.

Novalis came from a noble family in central Germany in which there was a certain, I might say materialistic piety – for such a thing also exists – but not really that which one can describe as the yearning of the heart for a real, living spirit. In order to fulfill the karma of Novalis in the right way, it happened that the father of Novalis, the old Hardenberg, even in his later age - although he was not imbued with spiritual life, but because he came into the Herrnhut sect, a pietistic sect - was interspersed with pious impulses from a certain side. And from this middle-class, German-speaking environment – which, as I said, had enough of the spirit in it to enable even old Hardenberg, in his later life, to achieve a certain spirituality, even if it was sectarian – our Novalis emerged. He grew into – not into what was destined for him according to the will of his family, for that would have been some military or diplomatic position – he grew into a great time; into that time in which great, powerful minds worked at the chair of the Central German University of Thuringia.

So he could still hear Schiller's history being presented in Jena at that time. Contemporary history teachers may say that Schiller was not an erudite historian. But what history should be in life, a permeation of the whole of human development with spiritual life, that is what came from Schiller to those souls who were able to hear him in Jena as a history teacher. Schiller spoke as a great personality above all. Spirit spoke from this personality; it awakened the spirit.

And there was yet another teacher when Novalis was young, a teacher who, through the great energy of his spiritual life, not only created things in the field of philosophy that belong to the whole human race but are still little understood today. Fichte was working at the time when Novalis was living his life. He worked in such a way that his whole demeanour, Fichte's demeanour, had something spiritual about it. One can look at it as an externality. Those who have a sense for it will not look at it as an externality, that Fichte, when he lectured in the dark hall in the evening and the candle was burning on his lectern, first extinguished the candle by saying: So, my dear listeners, now the physical light has been extinguished, now only the spiritual light should shine in this room.

When the relationship between the spiritual and the physical is conjured up not only before the soul but also before the eyes at the right moment, this means something tremendous for receptive souls like Novalis. Such a soul can thereby become capable of maintaining an unshakable belief in spiritual life. It imbues the soul with a noble sentiment that remains for life when a Novalis comes into such an environment. One cannot say that Novalis was prone to enthusiasm. Those who believe that he was a dreamer do not understand Novalis. No, the spirit that lived in Novalis said – we can read it today in his unpublished writings –: the state of sleep is different from the state of wakefulness. When a person is awake, the inner soul – as it was called in those days, what we would call today the astral body – is united with the outer body. The body enjoys the soul. A beautiful word that Novalis used to express the relationship between the physical and astral bodies. And in sleep, the soul is released from the body, as Novalis said, and the body digests the soul when the person is asleep. This is another beautiful, short, concise expression for a relationship that we also encountered in spiritual science. It is beautiful when Novalis writes the saying in his notes: We are always surrounded by a spiritual world. Wherever we are, spiritual beings are around us. It is only up to the human being to project his or her self in such a way that he or she becomes aware of the spiritual beings that surround us wherever we are. It is wonderful how he shows a deep understanding of the course of esoteric human development and writes: In ancient times, attempts were made to lead the soul to a higher development by mortifying the body, through self-chastisement and so on. In more recent times, the strengthening of the soul must take its place: strengthening the soul. Through this strengthening, the soul must gain power over the body, must not become weaker as a result, and must then exercise a certain mastery.

We could talk about Novalis for hours. We would not find a spirit that expresses itself in words and teachings like the ones we can give in spiritual science today, but we would find a spirit that expresses exactly the same thing with its words. He was no dreamer, no fantasist. Although his lyric poetry took on the highest momentum we can imagine, leading us up to the highest warmth of feeling, Novalis – and this applies to him, who did not live to be thirty – was a practical mind, who studied at the Mining Academy, was a practical man, through and through a mathematician, who felt that mathematics was a great poem, according to whose lines the divine spirit had woven the world, but who proved himself to be practical in everything a mining engineer needs. Novalis was a spirit who, despite this practicality, knew how to implement in his emotional life, in his heart, what was for him a theosophical attitude, directly into his life. Truly, what we know of his relationship with Sophie von Kühn should not be understood as something related to sensuality. He loved a girl who died at the age of fourteen. He actually only began to love her so ardently when she was already dead. He felt that he now lives in the realm in which she has been since her “death.” He decided to die after her. His further life was a living with a physically dead personality. All this shows us what Novalis grew into through the strong pull of his spiritual being.

We can see from Novalis that, as a human being, you basically only need to have one quality in order to have a sense of this spirituality that spiritual science is supposed to bring us. You only need one quality, and this one quality becomes so difficult for people. Because it becomes so difficult for people, people do not come to spiritual science easily. When this one quality is mentioned, it seems to people as if they all have it. Nevertheless, it is this quality, the lack of which prevents people from coming to spiritual science: truthfulness, honestly confessing what really is in the deepest soul. Seemingly, they have so many people — in their own opinion. Nevertheless, Novalis in particular gives us an example of how just a moment of real honesty is needed, and how through this one moment of honesty a person should confess what spirituality can be for the human heart. Novalis' father had a certain inclination towards spirituality; otherwise he would not have joined the Moravian Church. But his soul was not as free and honest as is meant here. What lived in his soul from the external physical world prevented him from doing so. The physical world, with all its prejudices, did not allow him to ascend into the spiritual world. But his son had this truthfulness. What was more obvious than that the father could have no inkling of what lived in this son? The physical world, with its separateness, disharmony, and lack of truthfulness, erected a barrier here between what the young Novalis really was and what the old Hardenberg wanted to be , but which he could not be because of a lack of real inner truthfulness, the physical world with all that it makes of a person did not allow him to realize his son's importance as long as Novalis lived. The son had been dead for a few weeks when old Hardenberg was in his Herrnhut community. They sang a hymn in the community: “What would I have been without you, what would I not be without you.” And this hymn that was sung – old Hardenberg had not yet heard it, but in that moment everything that was spiritual in his soul ignited. He was so overwhelmed by the great impression of what flowed from this song that in that moment his soul, which had become honest, was filled with the spirit of the world, with spiritual life. And when the meeting was over, the old Hardenberg asked someone the name of the song that had so deeply moved him. Then they told him: It is your son's song. It was only necessary that for a moment everything that the physical plane brought could be forgotten, and then, without knowing it, pure truthfulness, pure objectivity, not the prejudices of the physical plane, lived in him for a moment, brought into him by him who had brought it. This is how spirit would find spirit if we, without what are the obstacles of the physical plane, were to face soul to soul. In that moment when man, given over purely to the truth, can find the soul of the other and the soul of the world, in each such moment he must be imbued with what might be called theosophical spirituality.

What could be called theosophical spirituality does not lie only in some theory, in some doctrine, although we must never forget that for us humans, who are born to think, a doctrine is indispensable. But the essence of theosophy does not lie in the doctrine. Anyone who might want to emphasize that the doctrine is superfluous and that it is only important to cultivate what is called universal brotherly love must be repeatedly and repeatedly reminded that universal brotherly love cannot be achieved anywhere in the world by preaching universal brotherly love. If we preach only of love, then for the connoisseur of life it is as if we were saying to a stove: Dear stove, it behoves you, for your stove-love, to warm the room. But the room remains cold, no matter how often we preach of love. If, however, we give it fuel, wood and fire, then the wood and fire in it are transformed into warmth, and it warms the room. The fuel for the human soul is the great ideals, the great thoughts that we can absorb, through which we recognize the context of the world, through which we can learn the secrets of human destiny and human life. These are not thoughts that only fill us with theory, but those that warm us inwardly, and the result of theosophical wisdom is love. And just as surely as the stove warms the room by heating and not by preaching, so surely the right teaching of the great thoughts that permeate the world will make the soul loving. For that is the secret of real wisdom: that it transforms itself into love in the soul through its own power. Those who have not yet found the way from wisdom to love only show that they have not yet come far enough in wisdom. But anyone who wants to believe that the thoughts we absorb about the evolution of the world, the evolution of man, about karma and so on, are unimportant for man should realize again and again in his soul that these are not just human thoughts, that they are not just thoughts that we think first, but that these thoughts, which penetrate our soul, are the thoughts according to which the divine spirits have built the world.

In spiritual science, it is not our thoughts that arise in our mind's eye, but the thoughts of the divine architects, the divine spirits of the world. What the gods of the world thought among themselves before the creation of the physical world is what we reflect on in spiritual science, and in so doing we explore that which flowed from the divine beings into the activity and becoming of the world to which we belong. But that which the gods have thought is spiritual light. And anyone who does not want to think what the gods have thought, even if he does not know it, does not give himself the direction towards the light, but towards darkness. The only possible foundation for a real development of the human soul is the one in which we start from what the divine thoughts of the world are. The abilities of the spirits of the world have not been given to us as potentialities to be left fallow. They have been given to us to develop. And since thinking is our most important and outstanding ability in this cycle of human development, we must start from thinking. But we must not stop at thinking. This gradually leads us to implement spiritual science in our attitudes, so that we learn to understand the secrets of how knowledge leads to character traits, to emotional qualities. Correctly understood knowledge leads to character traits, to real emotional qualities.

We can make this clear to ourselves by means of a single example, by realizing that we humans undergo successive, ever new embodiments, incarnations. What would be the point of these incarnations, these repeated lives on earth, if they were not meant to make man more and more perfect? We must look back from our present incarnation to earlier incarnations and say to ourselves: What we have become at the present time, we have become through the fact that, incarnation after incarnation, these or those qualities of our soul have been added, that our soul has always absorbed new and ever new forces, had new and ever new experiences, had new and ever new experiences. What is built into this soul in one incarnation then comes out in the following incarnation.

We have now become what we have been prepared to become in previous incarnations. But then we can stop for a moment and say: we are not only looking back into the past, but we are also looking up into the future, to later, more perfect lives. What would this human life be through all these many embodiments if we could not say to ourselves: The further we develop into the future, the higher the stages will have been attained by what sits within us today as our ego.

We can only guess at what we are still capable of becoming, for otherwise we would already be it. We must ascribe to ourselves the ability to rise ever higher. — But so we must look shyly and reverently into the future; we must say to ourselves, even if we can already recognize this or that today, are able to experience this or that in the world already today: with the greater abilities that we can attain, we will be able to experience and recognize many more things.

How impossible it is for someone who writes such a thought as has now been expressed in his soul, how impossible it is for him to say to himself: I can decide today what is true or false, I can ultimately judge between true and false. — It behoves him only to say: If I could decide today, then it would be impossible for even higher abilities to arise in me in the future. But when we internalize this, it gives us the great modesty, the true, dignified humility that we need to truly be human in every moment of our development. Thus, the realization of reincarnation transforms into a feeling, a character trait: into dignified humility, into true modesty.

You could put it this way: Anyone who today realizes that he is going through successive incarnations and is constantly rising higher in his development would have to be a fool if he said to himself, “I am perfect.” Or he would say, “There is no need for me to learn today, because tomorrow I will experience it quite differently.” Knowledge is transformed into a real character trait. And when viewed correctly, every spiritual-scientific insight is transformed into a character trait. But we can see that if we are unable to apply our powers at any stage of our existence, then these powers from spiritual worlds would not have been given to us. If we want to wait until the world has reached its final stage, in the belief that we must first be so perfect that we can finally recognize and experience, then we would not have to go through various incarnations. That means, we must be clear that we have to apply our powers of knowledge in every incarnation. We must not say: we want to recognize only in the following incarnation, or at the end of our existence. — We should apply the power that we have despite humility and modesty.

Thus, alongside humility and modesty, there arises a justified human sense of self, which flows directly from our being imbued with the Divine-Spiritual and which tells us: although our knowledge will only be complete when we have reached a high level, we can make it complete precisely by becoming aware of our human dignity today and applying our strength today. In this way our character will acquire something that can be compared to a pair of scales. We can put humility and modesty on one side of the scales and justified self-esteem, boldness in judgment on the other, and say: We have attained a level in knowledge and self-awareness. In short, we will find that whenever you try to introduce into your feelings what spiritual science teaches, the teachings or theories of spiritual science are transformed in our soul, because they contain thoughts of the divine spirits, are transformed in our soul into our character, our will, our feelings. This can show us that in spiritual science the teaching, the theory, is not the main thing, but that it is, so to speak, the kindling for the development of the human soul; that it is that which is to bring forth higher qualities precisely in our soul. And anyone who demands these qualities without realization lives in the worst of illusions, in self-deception, that self-deception which has entered into human evolution in that, in the course of earthly development, other beings have also entered into it, have participated in our evolution, beings who were not only harmful, but also useful. But however useful they were to us, in that they brought us freedom and self-awareness, we must nevertheless be clear about the fact that precisely these gifts of the so-called luciferic entities: freedom and self-awareness, must not be allowed to degenerate into extremes, into radicalism, for then they become pride and arrogance. And pride and arrogance in the face of knowledge lead this knowledge into darkness. Knowledge is the acceptance of divine light, of divine thoughts. Rejection of knowledge is something that leads into darkness and that cannot lead to higher qualities of the soul either. If we look at spiritual science in this way, we will recognize it as one of the most important matters for humanity. We will recognize it as something that we do not do just for our own sake, but because we are aware of our duty to humanity and to development.

We are not living in a completely unimportant time today; we are living in an important time. It is often said by people living in this or that time that they live in a transitional time. All times of human development have been called transitional times, but not all are such significant transitional times. But today we can truly say that our time is a transitional time. To what extent is this the case? Let us first realize the character of another transition period. For example, it was a transition period for human development when the predecessor of our Christ Jesus, John the Baptist, appeared. When John the Baptist appeared, he told the people what was later repeated in significant words by Christ Jesus: “Change your minds, the Kingdoms of Heaven are near.”

What does this mean? We can understand what it means if we remember that as people have developed from incarnation to incarnation, they have passed through various qualities of soul. In the distant past, people did not yet have the qualities and soul abilities that they have today. It was possible for all people in ancient times to develop a dim, twilight, dream-like clairvoyance, to look into the spiritual world. There was the possibility for all people not only to see the physical, but to look into the spiritual world. But in those days when clairvoyance was common, people did not yet have what they have today: clearly developed self-awareness. At that time, people could not yet say “I am” to themselves in a clear way. Stability in the center of the inner being could only be achieved by the old clairvoyance disappearing for a while. They had to accept, as it were, their isolation from the spiritual world in order to develop a clear self-awareness here on the physical plane. Later, this clairvoyance will develop again together with self-awareness, so that the two qualities will arise together again and people will have them once more. We can therefore look back into the distant past. At least for certain periods of time, when people were inattentive to the physical, when they closed their eyes and turned away from the physical, and left their ears inattentive to sounds, they were able to see into the spiritual world and gain direct conviction of the existence of the spiritual world. These qualities faded, but in their place came more and more the ability to think, the ability to be self-aware, to draw conclusions, to make independent judgments, which is what makes up our present-day consciousness. The time can be roughly estimated when it gradually occurred that the old clairvoyant abilities completely disappeared from the abilities of mankind. Before the year 3101, almost all people on our planet were still endowed with dim clairvoyance. Then, from that year on, it diminished more and more, became weaker and weaker. But with this, self-awareness, self-consciousness, judgment, reasoning, and self-confident thinking grew. So, as it were, the light of spirituality grew dim, and that which is the human ego dawned, became brighter and brighter. It grew brighter within, but it grew darker in spirituality. In this year begins what Oriental philosophy calls the Kali Yuga, the dark, black age. Something had come to a crisis, so to speak, at the time when John the Baptist and then Jesus the Christ appeared as forerunners. They had to say to mankind: You must now learn that spirituality exists, even though you do not see spirituality with any spiritual eye. You must learn that the Kingdoms of Heaven are there. You must grasp it from your own self. — Therefore, the Christ had to embody himself in a physical body, because only on the physical plane could self-awareness perceive spirituality during the Kali Yuga.

At that time there was a transition period. The old abilities had faded away. If the people of that time had not heard the call of the Baptist, of Christ Jesus, then they would have fallen into decline at this stage, would not have progressed. Those who heard these voices had to recognize the God who descended into the physical and carnal. They understood that the Kingdoms of Heaven had come close to the ego.

Christ was on Earth in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth for three years. That was the time when people could only see with the physical eye when a God descended to them.

Today, we are once again living in a transitional age, in a crisis. The Kali Yuga expired around the year 1899. And now, although people are unaware of it, new qualities are developing in them. New qualities are developing in the human soul in a natural way. The fact that so many people are unaware of this is no proof to the contrary. A hundred years after Christ, Tacitus was still writing about an unknown sect of Christians; and in Rome, after Christ Jesus had accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha seventy to eighty years earlier, people still talked about a sect that was said to live in a back alley and was led by a certain Jesus. But the most important events had taken place in front of countless people. If people do not perceive something, that is no proof that this most important, most decisive and most incomparable thing is not there. Since about 1899, abilities have been developing unnoticed in people that will emerge in the mid-thirties of the twentieth century, roughly between 1933 and 1937. Then, because the time has come, these soul abilities will arise in a whole series of people; abilities of etheric clairvoyance will arise. They will be there. Just as there were people with an ego consciousness carried to the highest peak when Christ Jesus was here, so in our century there will be people who will not only see with the physical eye, but who, as a natural development, will experience what strives down from spiritual levels, so that spiritual-soul abilities emerge from their soul, and they enter into the etheric existence. And the happiness of these people will be to understand the new world that they will see. One thing is true and important for our soul to know that Christ Jesus said, “I am with you until the end of our Earth cycle.” He is here. He has been within our Earth orbit since that time. And when their spiritual eyes are opened, they will see him as Paul saw him at the event outside Damascus. That is what will happen around 1933, that he will be seen as an ethereal being, as a being that does not descend to the physical plane, but can be seen in the etheric body, because a certain number of people will then ascend to etheric vision. But people will be ignorant if they are not prepared for what they will see through spiritual science. That is why we are living in a time of transition, because we are growing into a new way of seeing.

Spiritual science has the responsible task of preparing people for the great moment when the Christ will not appear in the fleshly body – for He was only once in the fleshly body – but He is there and He will come again in a form that those whose eyes are open will see Him in the world, which is only visible to clairvoyant eyes. People will grow up to Him. That will be the return of Christ: a growing up of people into the sphere in which the Christ is. But they would stand there foolishly if they were not prepared for this great moment through spiritual science. This preparation must be a serious one, for it is a responsible one. Humanity is to be prepared for the fact that more will be seen than what has been seen so far, if people do not lead this ability into darkness and cause it to wither. Because it could also happen that the whole of the twentieth century would pass without bringing the fulfillment of this goal. We have the responsible task of preparing people for the great moment through spiritual science. But we have to prepare people spiritually, to make them understand that only the spirit will meet the Christ with the spiritual eye open. A materialistic mind might believe that the Christ would appear in a carnal body again. But that would not be spiritualistic, it would be materialistic. If we humans believed that, we would not have the will to work our way up to his spirit. That is why certain prophecies from the Apocalypse will be fulfilled at that time. Relying on and building on the materialistic spirit, individuals will appear in physical bodies who will then say that they are the embodied Christ. And those who are not led to the right knowledge through spiritual science will fall prey to them, for Maya will be great and the possibility of self-deception will be enormous. Temptations will grow to gigantic proportions. Only spiritual knowledge that is aware of its responsibility will bring people to an understanding of what is to happen.

These were reflections intended to show how spirituality through spiritual science should work in the individual human soul, and that spiritual knowledge is a task for the times, because we can also say of today's times: We are facing the most important things. But because even the most important things could be completely overlooked by humanity in the darkness, because the great moment could pass without people seeing it, that is why spiritual science must work in the right way. Penetrating with our spirit what is transmitted to us by the study of the spirit will give us the spirituality we need in every branch to develop our own soul ever higher, to perform ever higher and higher services for humanity.

Let us try to remember more often that the words spoken at the time of Christ also apply to our time: “Change your minds, for the time is at hand.” At that time it was said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Today, prophetically looking into the near future, we must say: “For the human ego is close to the Kingdoms of Heaven”. Let us prepare ourselves through correct spiritual science so that we may enter worthily into the kingdom that demands something of us. And we ourselves can only flourish if we find the way to the Kingdoms of Heaven. When we process the experiences we have on earth and allow what we experience in the higher spiritual existence to arise, offering it as a great sacrifice at the altar of divine existence, then we fulfill our destiny as human beings to the fullest. Let what you are working on here be imbued with both the spirit of Novalis and the spirit of spiritual science itself, which has come before our soul, and you will see that your work will proceed in the good sense. For when our work is imbued with such an attitude, then, while we are gathered in our branches, there flows in that which we call the light of the Masters of Wisdom and the harmony of the intuitions. We are never without the help of these advanced individuals when we are united in the right attitude in one of our branches. May such spirit unite you! Such spirit, which is at the same time the spirit of the Masters of Wisdom, inspire you! Work in this spirit and your work will be a part of the great spiritual scientific work, your work will be a part of the spirit that shall go throughout the whole world.

(Given at the conclusion of the General Meeting of the German Section of the Theosophical Society)

May I once more make it known¹ that I intend to hold a lecture tomorrow morning about certain contemporary occult questions connected with Freemasonry. And that will take place, following an ancient occult practice, separately for men and for women. The lecture for men will take place at ten o'clock; for women at half past eleven. Perhaps you may ask why this custom is retained, since—only through the theosophical view of things—it will become superseded. That will become clear through the content of the lecture. I would also like to say that the Besant Branch² will have its regular meeting tomorrow evening at eight o'clock.

Now I would like to speak about the relationship of occultism to the theosophical movement and about a few other connected questions. On that topic, it is very often debated whether the theosophical movement, and the Theosophical Society in particular, should be an occult movement, or whether it must be kept distinct from all occultism.

The theosophical movement as such, in so far as it expressed in the Theosophical Society, cannot be an occult movement. An occult movement is based on different assumptions from those which can find expression in the Theosophical Society. There have been occult societies in all periods. One thing above all else has been necessary for them; namely, that, on account of the whole manner of their endeavours, they have some kind of hierarchy in their Organisation. That means that the members of such a society, of such a brotherhood, were ranked by degree. Every degree, from the first up to the ninetieth, had its quite specific task. In each degree there were quite specific tasks. Nobody could be promoted to a higher degree until he had fulfilled the tasks of the lower one.

I can only indicate very broadly why that is so. We must then speak only generally about the tasks of such occult brotherhoods. The honoured friends will understand me all the better today, who have so often heard me speak about such things. Occult brotherhoods are the guiding brotherhoods of mankind. They have the task of preparing the things of the future. Everything which is to happen in the future is indeed preparing itself now, is finding its expression now, as an idea, as a plan, and will then be realised in the future. Even when you consider the development of the human race on the outward physical plane, you would then find that things which later find fulfillment were much earlier in the bud as ideas, bursting to find expression in the minds and souls of leading personalities and individualities. Take the steam engine for example: you will find, if you trace the matter back, how the steam engine developed itself from the simplest facts; how the pan filled with boiling water already contained the idea of the steam engine, which then developed itself from this simplest form to the most complicated mechanism.

These are however trifles compared with the great structure of humanity that we confront. The most important matters are based on much greater and more significant perspectives. They presuppose that what is to happen in the far distant future is already, in a specific way, being prepared today. How can anything happen in this way? Through it being in one's grasp today already to introduce forces into the world which will take effect in the future. Whatever is going to take place here on the physical plane in the future has prepared itself on the astral and Devachanic plane, long before its physical manifestation; so that the forces bringing about really distant future events can be identified in the higher planes and worlds. However, man cannot satisfactorily influence the future unless he prepares the effect in the light of a knowledge of the influencing forces. Man is a self-aware creature, and has to take his destiny into his own hands. Therefore, there have always been advanced Brothers of our human race, who can see not only on the physical plane but also on higher planes.

Let us seek to conceive what it means to have foresight on higher planes. Let us suppose you have water in a pond. You can foresee that the pond will become frozen if the temperature falls, so that skating and so on will be possible. In a similar way do we have [foresight] with the relationship of the so-called astral plane to the physical plane, that is to the world in which we are involved. If therefore one follows events on the astral plane one could then in fact see what will be, in a later period, with the help of astral happenings, as if it were a thickening of them. And so one can watch those astral events which subsequently step forth, solidified, on the physical plane. Physical events are nothing else than such thickened occurrences which have already taken place in the higher worlds.

An example: throughout antiquity there were mysteries. These had the task of receiving individual men and initiating them into the secrets of existence, or—as John of the Apocalypse says—showing what must ‘shortly,’ that is to say in the future, come to pass. In the precincts of such temples, the pupils who were to be received into the first degree were instructed. Now there was a further instruction for each successively higher level of development in the pupils. The first stage was for the candidates to purify their astral bodies. This meant that they did not merely embrace the ordinary bourgeois ethic; the bourgeois ethic was the preliminary requirement, what was then involved had to be followed in the strictest performance of duty. For, as the pupil progressively advanced to higher ideals, passing beyond the passions and instincts of ordinary life to yearnings above human pettiness, so purifying his sympathies and antipathies that the great world-embracing affairs of the human race became his own—as he reached out beyond himself in his feelings and perceptions, then he was on the way to completing what one calls the purification of the astral body. Then he was allowed to work upon the denser bodies. He was allowed to work upon his etheric body, and was no longer restricted to reshaping the soft, flexible and compliant astral substance of his soul and spirit bodies, but was allowed to work on his etheric body. He was then what is called a Chela. Such a Chela is one who acknowledges not only higher duties, who has undertaken not only enough purification to make humanity's duties his own, but is so advanced that he has outgrown the lower and higher affairs of individual nations and even of individual creeds. His gaze is now addressed to the life of the whole of humanity. And through his by now thoroughly structured etheric body he becomes a participant in the great affairs of the building of the earth. To do all this, the following must happen.

The Chela has to immobilise all the forces which hinder his work on his etheric body. If you have a human being before you, he has indeed a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. The Chela has refined his astral body, and is allowed to work upon his etheric body. What happens when the astral body has been purified? What then penetrates the etheric body?—that which is organised in the astral body. The things which live in the astral body stamp themselves on the etheric body. The more you work at your astral body, the more you can redress its defects; the astral substance is thin and soft, you can always bring it back into balance again. However, if a person has begun to develop his etheric body as a Chela, then these qualities stamp themselves on the etheric body, and that is much more permanent. The man who made his earthly defects permanent would thereby become dangerous as a member of humanity. Hence the constant stress on necessary purification. The etheric body is stamped by the forces that work on it. Think of it separated from the physical body, it would then have quite a different elasticity. If it is fixed in [the physical body] this is held in by the form; but so long as it remains there, it is at first too weak to stamp into itself what has undergone catharsis as astrality.

Therefore throughout ancient times the following had to be done. One had to set aside those forces which impeded the elasticity of the etheric body. That was achieved by bringing the whole physical body into a lethargic condition. The human being lay down, and the etheric body was drawn out of the physical body. While the physical body lay as if dead, the astral body came to be formed by its autonomous forces. That is the entombment, the [body] concerned being kept in a lethargic state for three to three and a half days. And then he could work on the etheric body. And then, after he had formed his etheric body in conformity with his astral body, he returned into his physical body. He had thus awakened an inner life in himself; he was one of the resurrected and was given a new name.

This was a transaction on the astral plane. Everything which I have described took place on the astral plane; the physical body had nothing to do with it. This event repeated itself in all the ancient mysteries. Every initiate knew it. Now imagine it densified, translated down into the physical plane, so that something [physical] has happened, through this event, which had previously only happened astrally; analogous to, for example, your having a piece of ice where you had water before. Many such astral events must combine, must flow together, for the physical thickening eventually to become possible. Through this means the Mystery of Golgotha became historically possible, it could be translated down on to the physical plane, in that, through the appearance of Christ, things happened on the physical plane which previously had happened over and over again on the astral plane. We learn to conceive, through this example, how the future is actually prepared in the occult brotherhoods.

If we were now to ask ourselves: what then is really happening here?—then we should answer: One can certainly comprehend a great deal in thought, in ideas. But ideas have no real existence. An idea is nothing more than what has been brought down from higher planes to the physical plane. What man thinks about [something] is however the most ineffectual aspect, since this is only extant on the physical plane. It is different when such an idea is brought face to face with something which also originates from the higher spheres. Take as an example Pythagoras's teaching about the music of the spheres³ as he imparted it to his pupils. Philosophers try to make the occult music of Pythagoras out to be quite a simple notion. Reason could easily grasp it. But what was important [for Pythagoras] was that the pupil only approached this [subject] when his soul, his disposition had been prepared for it. Thus it is impossible to explain the deeper meaning of Raphael's Sistine Madonna to anyone who has no feeling for pictures which originate in the astral. One has to raise heart and soul up to it. What leaves one cold as an idea, appears in the picture as artistically full of life, as divine universal thinking, as something the divine forces followed in creating the world—and a simple line becomes something holy! Thought, by twining itself around a divine element, is brought face to face with divine influence. Thus, what matters in this sort of training is to prepare man step by step, as he is able to approach the great world thoughts, as he receives them. Then he will gradually combine with that influencing but otherwise occult power that penetrates these great world thoughts and which is already preparing, on the astral plane, the future of the physical plane. If the leading brother of mankind perhaps has pupils who follow such spirit-filled ideas, then these will be a force which also helps him forward in his work for the outward world; great centres of spiritual activity will spring up. You see, therefore, that what I have called occultism really has very much to do with the progress of humanity. And in our times we have a quite particularly important task. Let us seek just to indicate, in a few words, how we have come to this our task.

We are within the great Root Race of humanity, which has peopled the earth, since the land on which we now live rose up out of the inundations of the ocean. Ever since the Atlantean Race began slowly to disappear, the great Aryan Race has been the dominant one on earth. If we contemplate ourselves, we here in Europe are thus the fifth Sub-Race of the great Aryan Root Race. The first Sub-Race lived in the distant past in Ancient India. And the present-day Indians are descendants of that first Sub-Race, whose spiritual life is still extant in the ancient Indian Vedas.⁴ The Vedas are indeed only echoes of the ancient culture of the Rishis. At that time there was of course no writing yet—there was only tradition. Then came the second, third and fourth Sub-Races. The fourth Sub-Race adopted Christianity. Then, halfway through the Middle Ages, we see that the fifth Sub-Race formed itself, to which we and the neighbouring nations belong.

The ancient Indians of the first Sub-Race lived under conditions different from ours, and were also basically organised differently. Even the modern descendants, the Indians of today, are essentially differently organised from our European races. He who, as an occultist, investigates the difference finds that, in the ancient Indian people, the etheric body was much less closely fettered to the physical body, had not so totally submerged itself in the physical body, and that it was much easier to influence it from the astral body. The corollary of that is that the Indian race can easily transfer something from the astral to the etheric body, can easily work on the etheric body. That signifies no less than that the Indian can more easily attain to certain higher perceptions through occult training. The easier it is for the etheric body to be influenced through the astral body, the easier it is to work into the etheric body with pictures, without abstract concepts. And the easier it will be for someone who undergoes yoga training in the astral to come into contact with higher realms through pictorial concepts. These work into the etheric body, which is still pliable. One does not have to work with harsh concepts, since one can work upon the soul of an Indian person with very straightforward pictorial images; and he will [thereby] be able to arrive at very high stages of development.

The human race has undergone change through the various Sub-Races. Our etheric body is today much more strongly under the influence of the physical body than was the case with the ancient Indians. And thus it comes about that we have to work much harder and more inwardly in order to influence the etheric body. We cannot grasp half-dreamlike concepts. We must subject everything to rigorous concentration, we must work upon our inner being by strongly concentrating our soul in the purely super-sensible, not merely by means of imaginative concepts. Such a concept which brings about a strong concentration of our inner being, can then influence the etheric body fettered to the physical body much more strongly. For the astral body to be able to work upon the etheric body, it had in earlier times to be drawn out of the etheric [physical?] body. Nowadays, however, the etheric body can be influenced by the astral body even inside the physical body. Were we to make the same experiment that was customary in the ancient Mysteries, and induce a state of lethargy, we would then be in a position to influence the etheric body. But when the earthly consciousness, the mobility of thought, returned, what the astral body had imprinted on to the etheric body would immediately be erased again. We have to influence the etheric body very strongly if we want it to retain what we have impressed upon it. The occult task has become different today and is now more inward.

Thus you see also how great differences arise in the course of time in the successive occult schools. The yoga system of the Indians is something different from the instruction of the Rosicrucians. The Rosicrucian teaching takes into account what I have just explained. But something else still crops up. For such a step forward to be able to occur at all, the reasoning power had to be influenced. The reason was exerted much more than hitherto, and could then develop its process of transference towards comprehending the super-sensible. In more recent times, therefore, much more was learnt in concepts; more importance was ascribed to the development of reason and to the ability to conceptualise abstractly.

Just compare the transubstantiation in culture between the ancient Indian age and our own. In ancient India you have high intuition and very little outward expression of civilisation; nowadays, in our time, it is the other way round. The consequence is that even the position of occultism has become something quite different; the consequence is that much of what was formerly kept secret has today become a matter of common knowledge. Many, many such perceptions and concepts were formerly guarded within the occult brotherhoods, and people only came near to these things if their whole hearts had been transformed. Today this no longer lies in the hands of the occultist. Much of what was formerly reserved for the later stages of instruction must now be acknowledged as having been revealed in the culture of the outward world. The initiate in the mysteries must reckon with that. And so many of the truths which had been taught in the occult schools were perforce gradually disseminated on the physical plane.

Even what is taught in present-day elementary schools would deflect us from the spiritual, if occult backgrounds did not come into play from another side. In earlier times the pupil knew that behind what he received in school and in the academic world as precepts, there was something still higher, and that he himself might perhaps one day attain this higher knowledge. He knew that he was a cell in a spiritual organism. Today, in the democratic world, one receives many concepts which do not lead to such an insight. Therefore to the structure of outer democratic knowledge the apex of the pyramid has, as it were, to be added. The elementary knowledge of the powers hidden in the world had now been imparted; the apex was missing still, which would lead to a spiritual view of the world. To provide this, a world-embracing movement had to be founded. The theosophical movement was conceived as such. Hence, in certain brotherhoods, it was resolved, as the popularisation of the hitherto secret knowledge went still further and further, to share with the world as much as was necessary of the underlying secrets, in order to bring the knowledge of the outer world into harmony with the all-embracing occult knowledge of the brotherhoods.

We have here arrived at the point where we can see the connection of the theosophical movement and the Theosophical Society with occultism. The theosophical movement is no occult movement, no occult brotherhood, for it is formed on a democratic basis by which each member is as worthy as the next. Nevertheless, it is another matter if one is to understand the Theosophical Society's task. The Society's task is on the physical plane. If one wishes to grasp it fully one must be able to see into the higher worlds. But the point is not that the theosophist is already able to see into higher worlds, but that, within the movement, occult forces are indeed being developed, so that the Theosophical Society can be a place from which occultism can emanate and come to be discussed. It is a different question, whether a society is an occult brotherhood, or whether it says to itself: We are, indeed, no occult brotherhood, but, in our society, occultism comes to be discussed.

Today, when basically the whole of mankind longingly gazes towards the higher worlds without finding the way there, yet another installment of occult knowledge must be popularised in a form appropriate for them. And the occultism within the Theosophical Society has this task. Spiritual movements have always had a fruitful influence on cultural development, even on the physical plane. Its outward expression is nothing else than the realisation on earth of what has been spiritually prepared. What difference is there, if we contemplate, for example, the works of Michaelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci? In these works you have something spiritual conjured up on to the wall in colour and form; the picture is permeated with what first lived in the soul of the artist as something spiritual. The spiritual preceded its subsequent expression as a manifestation in the material world.

And the materialistic external culture is only the copy of the materialistic tendency in mankind's inner convictions. The purely materialistic urban culture has spread itself throughout civilised countries since 1850. We can see the great things that it has achieved on the physical plane, but we also see what it has been unable to achieve. In the realm of art, for instance, no really new style has been evolved, with one exception, and that is the style of the department store. This is something which, in relation to our outward civilisation, is inwardly real. All else, what has been inherited from the past, has no relation to the present. Only if we have formed a society whose members are seized by a spiritual power such as that which used to live in Christianity, and as it still lives as a longing in the best Christian souls, and can be won back again, then we will again have a spiritual culture. And such a culture will again produce artists in all spheres of life. Only let theosophy live in the souls of men and it will flow out of those souls again as style, as art, it will be visibly and audibly there. The world can again be an outward expression of the spiritual, if this can already be brought to life in such a society today.

In this sense the Theosophical Society could help to shape the culture of the distant [future]. If we are together, we must be clear that we are the cells that have to combine to create a future culture. In our souls, those powers will be prepared which will so transform the future world that it will be a physical copy of our present state of mind and outlook on life. Everything which is now revealed and manifest, was once occult. Just as electricity is a revealed force today, so it once used to be an occult force. And what is still occult today is destined to become a motive force for the future. Exactly as our human body has been prepared in advance millions of years ago by forces which are all around us, so a higher body is preparing itself in us today, a body of the future; however, this body of the future will only become ours in a far-off time.

Let us briefly trace the path of our evolution. What used to be there? A dim dream-like human consciousness, mirroring a world very different from our own; men had a dreaming awareness. And even when their communal existence developed, they had no parliament for the exchange of opinions; they had nothing of that kind. Everything was merely mirrored in the consciousness which was developing in man. As for present-day bodily organs, how did they originate? Through those forces having worked upon man. Just as the animals in the dark caves of Kentucky lost their ability to see⁵ because they did not use it, so too, what we possess in the way of eyes and ears was organised by outward forces. These were formed by the forces of sound and of light, and evolved out of our organism. Our spiritual organism of the future will be evolved out of what lives in us today. Those things which stand before us as the expression of our spiritual culture, the churches and so on, the works of culture which bring beauty and truth to us, these will impress themselves in the higher members of our being. And when one day these unfold themselves towards a self-developing life, then what lives in the outward culture as beauty and truth will rise up in our inner being. What eyes and ears perceive now, these will be the stones for building and organising a higher future. If we contemplate the world from this point of view, then man's inner being takes on a totally different meaning.

Here we are confronted with a fact that can explain in a simple way what is called yoga, or inner training. From the words I have spoken, you will be able to gather that the forces which have created the world, that are working and creating in the world, were formerly taken from our inner being. What is in me today was formerly outside me: that is the fundamental thought in occult training. Before our physical body existed, our etheric body was already there. Again, our etheric body is a structure which has been formed by our astral body. And that is the starting point of the yoga training. Whoever engages in yoga training descends into his etheric body, and knows that he will find forces in it which constructed it once, millions of years ago. The physical body slowly developed itself out from the basis of the etheric body.

I can only describe broadly how the descent into the etheric body takes place. Certain currents exist in the etheric body which are the precursors of the physical bodily organs. The nervous system, the nerves themselves, the sympathetic [nervous] system which extends into the back, the ganglia of the sympathetic nervous system, these are parts which were developed etherically in primeval times. That is a process which took place in the remote past. Then, after man had progressed further and further, there came a time when, within his body—which already contained within it the potentiality to develop the physical nervous system—a structure developed which gave man the ability to develop his inner bodily warmth, which prepared him for warm blood. That, again, is a later structure from the etheric body, which then was already strongly influenced by the forces of the astral body. And out of what we subsequently find to be the basic structure of the brain, the spinal column formed itself, again out of the etheric body, as the other pole of the etheric body, which on the one hand developed towards the brain, and on the other hand towards the inner warm blood. That happened in the past. It was not only natural forces that worked on this development of man, but also higher spiritual beings.

When the yogi descends step by step into his etheric body he penetrates into the times gone by in which his spiritual archetypal form was influenced by these forces and beings, times when what lives in us today was produced. When a person thus descends into life, he can then reach that point once again in his descent. He descends from the head down into the lower parts of the body, which were formed in the most ancient times, and then goes back into the head. That is a description, if only a sketchy one, of the path of occult perception. More can be imparted in the occult schools. The pupil of mystery wisdom thus developed the ability to look back into past epochs; so the time comes when he is able to undertake his occult pilgrimage. He attains to this by means of a special exercise through which he overcomes his own personal self and thereby ceases to be a small fettered ego. Only then can he accomplish his ascent into the universe. Once again he descends into the ocean of the past, taking the world forces with him. Then, taking the ascending curve, he can slowly retrace point by point the way that he has thus traveled. Slowly, gradually, the person learns to proceed [further] down into the ocean of his formative forces, and at length he arrives at a point near to [his] origin. Thus must it have been for the person in whom an eye first evolved, with which to direct his gaze into the universe. Then, for the pupil, the flowing together of his ego with the great universal ego blossoms. And now he must learn to say to the little ego: I am not thou.

It is an important moment when he realises what this means: I am not thou. That is a moment when a person begins to understand that in nature there are higher forces than thought, that there is something outside of him, which cannot be expressed in contemporary thought, but which brings it about that two people, both able to speak on the same thing, can in the case of one of them talk clearly but be dull, whereas the other's speech is vibrant with the warm light that will create the future.

When the pupil is this far, he can learn now in another way than has hitherto been possible for him. He thereby experiences something very special. A spiritual being confronts him in the super-sensible world: he meets that individuality with whom he was once, formerly, very close. It is a great and significant mystery, when particular stages of our existence recapitulate themselves. We rise consciously from Manas to the higher forces; we once descended from spiritual worlds, and at that time this same being implanted something in us, whom we now meet again at the level corresponding to that point in the past at which he was with us. It is the teacher, the so-called guru. Long ago we met him for the first time; we now meet him again, when we can grasp consciously what he implanted into us at that time, and was received by us unconsciously. And if we descend still further we meet with the spirits who shared in our creation aeons ago. We meet with the Twelve Spirits: the Spirits of Will, the Spirits of Wisdom, the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Personality or of Egoism, the Spirits of Warmth or Fire, the Spirits of Dusk or Twilight, and so on. All of this offers itself to our spiritual sense through this descent into the universe, through this pilgrimage. And this alone makes it possible for us to gaze into the future, makes it possible to anticipate what ‘shortly’—as the writer of the Apocalypse puts it—will happen.

That is the task of occultism. It is to be discharged, because that discharge is necessary. There are movements in plenty which are idealistic, which are ethical. But the movement called theosophy distinguishes itself from the others, in that occultism consciously comes to expression in this movement.

With that, the connection between occultism and theosophy is made clear. The Theosophical Society can never want to be an occult brotherhood. What must give it the strength to fulfil its task, what must give it life, can only be the things that emanate from occultism. Therefore the Theosophical Society will thrive if the cultivation of occult teaching and occult life is understood. That is stiff not a demand that the members themselves should be occultists. But if the Theosophical Society were to forget that this blood pulses in it, then it might remain an interesting society, but what was intended for it by the sublime powers who assisted at its birth would not be achieved.

Whoever understands this will never want to take away the Theosophical Society's occult character. All the same, whoever thus belongs to the Theosophical Society will be brought into a two-sided situation. He must necessarily give an ear to the side whence flow the occult truths, on the other hand he must turn his attention to the exoteric life of the Society. These aspects must be kept strictly apart; they must never be mixed together. When one talks about the outward Theosophical Society, one must never, however, even mention the occult personalities who stood over its inception. The powers who live on the higher planes and who live for the sake of mankind's evolution, outside of the physical body, never interfere in these affairs. They never impart anything other than impulses. Whenever we are engaged, in a practical way, in extending the Theosophical Society, the great individualities whom we call the Masters are standing at our side; we may turn ourselves to them and allow them to speak through us. When it concerns the propagation of occult life, it is the Masters who speak. When it only concerns the Organisation of the Society then they leave it to those who are living on the physical plane. That is the distinction between the occult current and the framework of the theosophical organisation. Allow me to express the difference between what flows as inward spiritual stream and what manifests through individual personalities, as it can perhaps best be expressed: When it concerns spiritual life, then the Masters speak; when it only concerns Organisation, since error is possible, the Masters are then silent.

• 1 . The first announcement was most probably given during the General Meeting of the German Section which had taken place beforehand.
• 2 . The then name of the Berlin Branch which held its usual evening meetings.
• 3 . The principle teaching of Pythagoras (ca. 580–500 B.C.) was that the universe was conceived in the form of a harmoniously ordered whole (the harmony of the spheres).
• 4 . Veda (Sanskrit word for ‘sacred knowledge’). The Vedas are the complete collection of the oldest religious documents of the Hindus, written in Sanskrit, to which a supersensible origin has been attributed. They contain a comprehensive literature which was handed on by word of mouth for many ages. The Vedic manuscripts are divided mainly into the following: 1. the Sanhitas; 2. the Brahmanas; 3. the Aranyakas and Upanishads. The Sanhitas are the anthologies of songs, sacrificial formulae and magical incantations. Four such anthologies are distinguished, usually referred to simply as ‘the four Vedas.’
• 5 . This example is often cited by Rudolf Steiner. The phenomenon of the rudimentary organs was first observed in the American caves. See: Darwin's Origin of Species, Chapter 5, ‘The Laws of Mutation.’

A picture will be given of this way, and we shall also consider its fruits. You know some of the main aspects already, but even those of you who have heard lectures on the subject or read Lucifer,⁶⁰ especially No. 32, will hear something that is new to you, for we are going to consider the subject in a way that is only possible when we are among ourselves like this, as students in the science of the spirit. It will essentially be a matter of considering the way in so far as it exists in the Western Rosicrucian tradition which has been spiritually guiding and directing European cultural life by means of hidden threads.

The Rosicrucian movement was working in completely hidden ways up to the last third of the 19th century. No book would tell people about true Rosicrucianism, and the matter was not for public discussion. In about the last thirty years, some of the Rosicrucian principles have been made known to the world in general through the theosophical movement; before that they were taught only in closely restricted groups. The most elementary principles are in many respects part of theosophy, as it is called today, but only the most elementary. It will only gradually be possible to let people gain deeper insight into the wisdom taught in European Rosicrucian schools from the end of the 14th century.

In the first place we have to understand that there is not just one way, but there are three to be considered. This should not be taken to mean that there are three different truths. The truth is one and one only, just as everyone has the same view from the top of a mountain. But there are different ways of getting to that mountain top. During the ascent, the view changes at every step. Only at the top and one can climb the mountain from different sides—does one have the full, open view as one sees it with one’s own eyes. It is the same with the three ways of gaining higher knowledge. One is the Oriental yoga way, the second the Gnostic Christian way, and the third the Rosicrucian Christian way. These three ways lead to the one and only truth.

There are three ways because people differ in nature here on this earth. We may distinguish three types of people in this respect. Just as it would not be right for people wanting to climb the mountain to choose a path that is not the nearest to them but a long way away, so it would not be right for people to chose a spiritual training that is not the right one for them. People still have rather confused ideas about this, even within the theosophical movement, which is still only in its early stages. Many people think that there is only one way, meaning the yoga path. But neither is the Oriental yoga way the one and only one, nor is it in fact the right one for people living within European civilization. Taking a superficial view, one might find it difficult to see what this is about, for basically speaking human nature does not seem to differ that much between the races. However someone with occult powers who considers the big differences between types of human beings, will find that something which may be right for Oriental people, and perhaps also for individual people in our own culture, is certainly not right for everyone. There are people, but only a few of them in the European context, who can follow the Oriental yoga way, but it is impossible for most Europeans. It creates illusions and destroys the soul. Eastern and Western nature may not seem that different at first sight, even to a modern scientist, but they are completely different. An Oriental brain, Oriental powers of imagination and an Oriental heart function very differently from the organs of Western people. You should never ask the things of Western people that you can ask of someone who has grown up in Oriental conditions. You'd have to believe that climate, religion and social life have no influence on the human mind and spirit to think that the external conditions under which someone goes through occult training do not matter. If you know the profound spiritual influence all these outer circumstances have on human nature, however, you will understand that the yoga way is suitable for only few Europeans, really only individuals who completely and radically tear themselves away from European conditions of life, and that it is not possible for people who remain within the European culture.

People who are still inwardly straight and honest Christians, to whom some of the main theses of Christianity still mean much, may chose the Gnostic Christian training. This does not differ much from the cabalistic way. Generally speaking, however, the Rosicrucian training is the only right one for Europeans. This will be considered today, with the different things people are asked to do and the fruits that beckon for those who choose it. No one should think that it is only for people with scientific training, or indeed academics. Any ordinary person can take it up. When one does take it up, one will soon be able to meet every objection based on European science that is raised against occultism. One of the main tasks of Rosicrucian masters was to arm those who followed the road to higher insight so that they would be able to defend occult knowledge and follow that road also in the world in general. An ordinary person who has just a few of the popular notions gained from modern sciences, or even none of them, but an honest desire to know the truth, will be able to take up the Rosicrucian way just as well as the most highly educated and academic people.

There are major differences in the three ways. The first concerns the relationship between pupil and occult teacher; the latter gradually becomes the guru or mediates the relationship to the guru. The nature of the Oriental yoga way is such that this relationship is the strictest imaginable. The guru is absolute authority to the pupil. If this were not so, the training would not give the right result. Oriental yoga training is quite impossible unless one makes oneself strictly subservient to the guru’s authority. With the Gnostic Christian and the cabalistic way, the relationship to the guru on the physical plane is less strict. The guru guides the pupils towards Christ Jesus, he acts as a mediator. With the Rosicrucian way the guru becomes more and more a friend whose authority is based on inner assent. The only possible relationship in this case is one of complete personal trust. The least bit of distrust between teacher and pupil would break the bond that has to exist between them, and then the powers that come into play between teacher and pupil would not longer be effective.

The pupil will sometimes have the wrong idea about his teacher’s role. It may easily seem to him that he simply must speak to the teacher at some point or another and often needs to be physically with him. Now it may sometimes be that a teacher must physically approach a pupil as a matter of urgent necessity, but this is not as often as the pupil may think. In the early stages a pupil cannot properly judge the influence the teacher has on him. A teacher has means that only gradually reveal themselves to the pupil. Many a word which the pupil thinks has been spoken at random is of tremendous significance. It continues to influence the pupil's soul at an unconscious level, like a guiding principle that gives him his direction. When a teacher makes rightful use of occult influences, the bond between him and his pupil will be a very real one. Then there are also influences sent from a distance, influences based on loving sympathy, which the teacher always has at hand and which the pupil will only come to recognize gradually as time goes on and he finds his way into the higher worlds. The one thing that is absolutely essential is the most complete trust; without this it would be better to undo the bond between teacher and pupil.

Brief mention will now be made of the rules that play a certain role in Rosicrucian training. They need not be exactly the way they are presented here. Depending on the person, their occupation and age, the teacher will have to select various elements from different areas and arrange them in one way or another. Only an overview will be given.

One thing that is extremely important in Rosicrucian training is not normally given much consideration in all occult training. This is clear, logical thinking, or at least the effort to do so. The first step is to give up all confused or biased thinking. One has to get used to seeing things as they are in the world, from a great, selfless points of view. The best way of doing this for an ordinary person wanting to follow the Rosicrucian way is to study the elementary things taught in the science of the spirit. There is no justification in saying: ‘What good will it do for me to study the things taught about higher worlds, human races and cultures, karma and reincarnation when I am unable to see and perceive these things for myself.’ It is not an acceptable objection, for working with these truths cleanses one’s thinking and disciplines it, so that one will then be ready for the steps that follow in occult training. In ordinary life people are generally very chaotic in their thinking. The guiding principles and stages of human development and planetary evolution made known by those able to perceive them bring order to one's thinking. All this is part of Rosicrucian training. The teacher will therefore ask the student to think himself into the elementary teaching of reincarnation and karma, the three worlds, the akashic record, the evolution of the earth and the human races. The whole elementary subject matter now taught in the science of the spirit is the best possible preparation for the ordinary person.

Those able to give greater acuity to their thinking and enter with greater intensity into the actual basic supporting structure of the human soul, may study the books that have been specially written to discipline people’s thinking. The books written for this purpose—and they may not actually include the word ‘theosophy’—are my Truth and Science and Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. One does of course write such books so that they may serve a purpose. People wishing to take their thinking through energetic training to enable them to take their studies further, will do well to subject their minds to the ‘mental and spiritual gymnastics’ these books demand. This will give them the foundation on which to build their Rosicrucian studies.

Observing the physical plane, you gain sensory impressions in colour and light, heat and cold, smell and taste, sensations of pressure and touch, and auditory perceptions. Thought and the rational mind are brought to bear on these. The rational mind and thought, are still part of the physical plane. You can perceive all these things on the physical plane. Perceptions gained on the astral plane look very different. And those made on the devachan plane are very different again, let alone those in even higher regions of the spirit. Someone who has not yet gained insight into the higher worlds can, however, picture them to himself. The way I habitually seek to describe things is also intended to provide images of those worlds. Anyone who then rises to the higher regions will see for himself how they influence him. We learn new things on each plane. One thing, however, remains the same through all worlds up to the devachan. It is trained logical thinking. Only on the buddhi plane will thinking no longer have the same value as on the physical plane, then a different way of thinking has to develop. But thinking is the same for the three worlds below the buddhi plane—the physical, astral and devachanic planes. If therefore you train your thinking well by means of study in the physical world, this thinking will prove a good guide in the higher world, so that you do not stumble as easily as someone who wants to ascend into regions of the spirit with confused thinking habits. Rosicrucian training therefore teaches people to move freely in the higher worlds by encouraging them to discipline their thinking. Reaching those worlds you will get to know ways of perceiving things that do not exist on the physical plane, but you will be able to control them with the thinking you have developed.

The second thing a student following the Rosicrucian way learns is vision in images. You prepare for this by gradually learning to enter into the kind of ideas expressed in images that represent the higher worlds in the sense of Goethe’s words ‘All things that are transient are but a likeness.’⁶¹ The way we usually move through the physical world, we take in the things as they present themselves to the senses and not the things that are behind them. We shall only be free of this physical world when we learn to take the things that surround us as allegories or symbols. We therefore have to try and develop a moral relationship to them. Teachers will give directions on how external phenomena may be seen as symbols of spiritual elements, but pupils can also do a great deal themselves. You may look at an autumn crocus, for instance, and a violet. Seeing the autumn crocus as a symbol for a melancholy state of mind, I have taken it not just the way it presents itself on the outside, but as an allegory for a quality. The violet, on the other hand, may be seen as an allegory for a quiet, godly mind. You thus move on from one thing to another, from plant to plant, animal to animal, and see spiritual qualities reflected in them. This will make your ability to form ideas flexible, freeing it from the hard outlines of sensory perception. You may begin to see a quality reflected in every animal species, taking one animal to be the symbol of strength, another of cleverness. We have to pursue this seriously, wherever we are, and not be superficial about it.

Essentially the whole of human language is in symbols. Language is nothing but speaking in symbols. It has to be used even in science, where people feel the need to be objective in referring to things, and the words act as symbols. If you speak of the ala or wings of the nose, you know they are not wings, but they are given that name. For those who wish to remain on the physical plane it will be better not lose themselves too much in such symbolism, but advanced students will not lose themselves. Going into the matter one comes to realize the depths of our language in its original form.

Deep thinkers like Paracelsus⁶² and Jakob Böhme⁶³ partly owed their development to the fact that they did not hesitate to enter into conversation with country people and tramps and study the imaginative quality of language. At their time, words like ‘nature’, ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ still had much more of an influence. A country woman plucking a feather from a goose would call the inner part of the feather its ‘soul’. The student must find such symbols in the language for himself. He then comes free of the physical world and learns to rise to seeing in images. When the world thus becomes parable, likeness, to the student, this has a powerful effect. If he practises this for long enough he'll notice the effects. Looking at a flower, for instance, something will gradually come away from the flower. The colour which at first was merely there on the flower's surface rises like a small flame and floats freely in space. The ability to see in images thus develops. It will be like this with all objects, as if their surface comes free. The whole of space fills with the colour which floats away in space like a flame. And so the whole world of light seems to withdraw and come apart from the physical reality. When such a colour image comes free to float in space, it soon begins to attach itself to something. It does not stop somewhere at random; it embraces an entity which then shows itself in the colour as a spiritual entity. The colour which the student has drawn away from the objects of the physical world clothes the spiritual entities in astral space.

This is the point where the occult teacher's counsel is needed; otherwise the pupils might easily lose the ground from under their feet, which may be for one of two reasons. One is that every pupil has to go through one particular experience. The ideas we gain of physical things, not only through colour, but also smell and sound, show themselves in peculiar, ugly and sometimes also beautiful forms—animal faces, shapes of plants and also ugly human faces. This first experience is a mirror reflection of one’s own soul. One's own passions and drives, the evil that still lies in the soul, appear in astral space before the pupil as though in a mirror. Pupils then need their occult teacher’s counsel; their teacher will tell them that this is not something objective but a mirroring of their own inner nature.

You’ll realize that the pupils depend on their teacher's counsel if we also consider the way in which such images appear. It has often been stressed that everything is the other way round in astral space, everything is in mirror images. The pupil may easily be misled by delusive visions, especially if they mirror his own nature. The mirror image of a passion not only presents itself as an animal coming towards you—that would be the least of your problems—but you also have to take something else into account. Let us assume someone has a really evil passion lying hidden within. Such a drive or an appetite will very often show itself in enticing forms in the reflection, whilst good qualities sometimes do not look at all attractive. This is something legend speaks of in a most beautiful way. You find an image of it in the myth of Hercules. As he set out on his way, his bad and good qualities presented themselves to him, with vice clad in the enticing form of beauty and virtue wearing the garment of unpretentiousness.

There is also something else. Even if a pupil is already able to see things objectively, there is always still the other possibility, which is that inner arbitrariness acts as a power that guides and directs the phenomena. Pupils have to learn to see through this and understand it, for wishes have tremendous power on the astral plane. Everything that gives direction here in the physical world will not be there when you enter into the world of images. If you’ve deceived yourself into thinking you have done something here on the physical plane when in fact you have not done it, you'll soon discover the truth of it, for the facts will show it to you on the physical plane. It is not like that in astral space. There your own wishes present illusory images to you, and you need the guidance of someone who knows how these imaginative images must be put together to show their true significance.

The third element in Rosicrucian training is to learn the occult script. What is this? There are certain images, symbols, shown in the form of simple lines or combinations of colours. Such symbols are a specific occult sign language. The following may serve as an example. There is a process in the higher world that also has an effect in the physical world—a rotating vortex. You can see this in a stellar nebula, the Orion nebula for instance. There you see a spiral. This, however, is on the physical plane. But you can also see it on all other planes. This (Fig. 8a) is a figure found in all kinds of configurations on the astral plane. If you understand this figure, you will also understand, with its aid, how one human race changes into another. When the first sub-race of our present root race came into being, the sun was in the sign of the Crab. At that time, therefore, one race swung into another; because of this the occult sign for the Crab is this (Fig. 8b). The signs of the zodiac are thus all occult signs. We only have to get to know and understand their significance.

The pentagram is another such sign (Fig. 8c). The pupils learn to connect particular inner responses and feelings with this sign. They are the counter image of things that happen in the astral world. This sign language, the occult script which pupils learn, is no more and no less than reflecting the laws of higher worlds. The pentagram thus is a sign for several things. Just as the letter B is used in many different words, so the signs of the occult script may have different meanings. The pentagram, the hexagram, the angle and other figures may be used together in occult writing which in itself is a signpost in the higher worlds. The pentagram is the sign for the five-fold human being, the sign for reticence, keeping silent, and also the sign behind the species soul of the rose. If you connect the petals of a rose in your picture, you have pentagram. Just as the letter B means something different in ‘band’ and in ‘bibber’, so do the signs signify different things in occult writing. You learn to arrange them in the right way. These are the signposts on the astral plane. Just as someone who is illiterate may be seen relative to someone who is able to read, so someone only seeing the images as images relates to someone who has learned the occult script. The letters used on the physical plane are often arbitrary, but originally they reflected the astral sign language. Take an ancient astral symbol, the staff of Hermes with the serpent. In our script it has become the sign E (Fig. 9).

Or take the W, which indicates the wave motion of water. It is the sign for the human soul and also for ‘word’. The M is nothing but the upper lip of man:

All this has grown more arbitrary in the course of evolution. On the occult planes, however, necessity rules. There you can live these things.

The fourth thing is the life rhythm, as it is called. People know very little of this in ordinary life. They go through life egoistically. Only children at school have a certain life rhythm still in their timetable, for the lessons of each day are repeated week after week. But who does such a thing in ordinary life? Yet we only progress to higher development by bringing rhythm, repetition, into our lives. Rhythm prevails everywhere in the natural world. Everything is arranged in rhythms—the movement of the planets around the sun, the annual appearance and fading away of plants, and even the animal world, the sexual life of the animals. Man alone is permitted to live without rhythm, so that he may act out of freedom. But he must bring rhythm into the chaos again by choice. A good rhythm is to do occult things at particular times each day. Pupils must therefore do their meditation and concentration exercises at the same time each day, just as the sun sends its energies down to the earth at the same time in spring. This is one way of bringing rhythm into life. Another way is to make one's breathing rhythmical, as instructed by the occult teacher. Breathing in, holding one’s breath and breathing out must be made rhythmical for a short time each day, and this is done under the occult teacher's experienced guidance. A new rhythm thus replaces the old one. Bringing such rhythm into life is one of the preconditions for ascent to the higher worlds. No one can do this without the guidance of a teacher. Here the aim is merely to tell you the principle of it.

The fifth thing is to learn the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, as it is called. It involves the teacher giving the pupils directions to concentrate their thoughts on certain parts of the body. Those of you who have heard the lecture on the way the senses relate to the higher worlds will remember that the whole world has a part in creating the physical body. The eye is created by the light, by the spirits active in the light. Every point in the physical body has a connection with a specific power in the cosmos. Consider the point at the root of the nose. There was a time when the etheric head extended well beyond the physical body. The Atlanteans still had a point on the forehead where the etheric head extended above the physical, as is still the case in horses and other animals today. The ether head of a horse still projects a long way today. In human beings, the ether body and the physical body have been made to coincide in the point I spoke of, and this allows them to develop the parts of the physical brain that enable them to say I to themselves. The organ which enables man to say I to himself is connected with a specific event during the Atlantean period of earth evolution. The occult teacher will instruct his pupil: ‘Direct your thoughts and concentrate them on this point.’ He’ll then give him a mantra⁶⁴ This awakens a power in this part of the head which corresponds to a particular process in the macrocosm. Correspondence is thus established between microcosm and macrocosm. In the same way concentrating on the eye will give understanding of the sun. The whole organization of the macrocosm is thus found in the spirit in our own organs.

When pupils have practised this for a sufficiently long time, they will be permitted to enter more deeply into the things they have discovered in this way. They can go to the akashic record for instance and choose the point in time during Atlantean evolution when the point at the root of the nose on which they have been concentrating came into existence, or they find the sun by concentrating on the eye. This sixth stage, entering deeply into the macrocosm, is called ‘contemplation’. It gives the pupils insight into the world, enabling them to take insight into their own nature beyond the personal level. This is different from le popular chit chat about self knowledge. You do not find your self by looking inside yourself, but only if you look beyond yourself. This is the same self which created the eye and brought forth the sun. To look for the part of your self that corresponds to the eye you have to look to the sun. You must perceive the world outside you to be your self Looking inside only leads to hardening in oneself, to a higher form of egoism. When people say: ‘I only have to let my self speak’, they have no idea of the danger this holds. Self knowledge must not be practised unless the pupils following the white path also practise self renunciation. If they learn to say ‘That is me’ to every thing around themselves, they are ripe to have self knowledge, as Goethe let Faust say:

Before my eyes
Opened by you, all living creatures move
In sequence: in the quiet woods, the air.
The water, ...⁶⁵

The parts of our self are everywhere out there. This is also shown in the myth of Dionysus, for example, and it is why Rosicrucian training puts such value on objective, calm contemplation of the outside world. ‘To see yourself in your reality, look in the mirror of the outside world and essence. You will perceive much more clearly what lives in your soul if you look in the eyes of your fellow human beings than if you concentrate on yourself and enter into your own soul. This is an important, essential truth, and no one who takes the white path dare ignore it. Today many people have transformed their ordinary egoism into a sophisticated egoism. They call it theosophical development when they take their ordinary, everyday self to the highest possible level. They really want to bring out the personal aspect. True occult insight will show, on the other hand, that the inner life opens up when we come to know our higher self in the world.

When the pupil has developed this attitude of mind in contemplation, with the self flowing out over all things, when he feels the flower that grows towards him just as he does the finger he moves towards himself, when he knows that the whole earth and the whole world is his body, he comes to know his higher self. He will then speak to the flower as to a part of his own body: ‘You are part of me, part of my self.’ He will gradually come to feel inwardly what is known as the seventh level of Rosicrucian training—being in harmony with God. This evolves as the element of feeling that guides the human being into the higher worlds, where he must not just think about the higher worlds but, learn to feel in these worlds. The fruits will then be apparent to him, if he endeavours to learn under the continued guidance of his teacher and he need not be afraid that this occult way might lead to an abyss. All the things referred to as dangers of occult development do not arise if development is guided along the right lines. When this happens, the occult seeker of the way becomes a true helper for humanity.

During the Imagination the possibility arises that the individual spends a particular part of the night in conscious awareness. The physical body will be asleep, as usual, but part of this sleep state will be filled with a life of dreams that have meaning and content. This is the first sign of entering into the higher worlds. Pupils will gradually bring their experiences across into ordinary consciousness. They then see the astral spirits everywhere in the world around them—also here, in this hall, among the chairs, or out in the woods and fields.

People reach three levels in the process of imaginative insight. At the first level they’ll perceive the spirits that are behind the sensory impressions gained in the physical world. There is a spirit behind the colour red or blue, behind every rose; every animal has its species or group soul behind it The individuals gain daytime clairvoyance. If the pupil waits a while longer, calmly practising the Imagination, and also entering deeply into occult writing, he will be day-clairaudient. The third level is where he gets to know all the things that are to be found in the astral world and draw human beings down, leading them astray into evil, and they are now really there to guide him upwards. You come to know kama loka.

With the fourth, fifth and sixth parts of Rosicrucian training—life rhythm, relationship between microcosm and macrocosm, contemplation of the macrocosm—pupils reach three more levels. At the first of these they gain insight into conditions of life between death and a new birth. This comes to them in devachan. The next level is the possibility of seeing how forms change into one another—transmutation, the metamorphosis of forms. Human beings have not always had the lungs they have today, for instance; lungs only go back to Lemurian times. During the preceding Hyperborean time human beings had a different form, and before that a different one again, which is because they were in the astral state, and before that because they were in devachan. One also says that at this level pupils get to know the relationship between the different globes,⁶⁶ that is, they have direct perception of how one globe, or state of form, changes into another. Finally, before they move on to even higher worlds, they have direct perception of the metamorphosis of states of life. They perceive how the different spirits move through the different realms, or rounds and how one realm becomes another. After that they must move to yet higher levels, but these cannot be discussed today.

The things that have been said today will give you enough material to work with for the time being. You really have to work on these things. That is the first step towards reaching the heights. It is good to have the Rosicrucian way presented in an orderly fashion for once. It may be possible to travel on the physical plane even if one does not have a map, but on the astral plane it is necessary to have such a map. Consider the things I have said as a kind of map; this will be useful not only in this life but also when you go through the gate to the higher worlds. Those who gain these things from the science of the spirit will find that the map serves them well after death. The occultist knows that human beings often have a miserable time as they arrive on the other side and have no idea where they actually are in life and what it is that they are experiencing. People who have gone through the teachings of spiritual science know their way about and know how to characterize the things themselves. It would be of great benefit to humanity if people were not to shrink from setting out on the road to higher understanding.

• 60. From 1904 onwards the complete title of the journal was Lucifer-Gnosis; see Rudolf Steiner, an Autobiography, tr. R. Stebbing 1977, chapter 32. The passages from issue No. 32, to which Rudolf Steiner was referring, make up the chapter on 'Imagination' in his Stages of Higher Knowledge, tr. 1930.
• 61. Goethe, J. W. von. Faust 2, last scene, Chorus mysticus.
• 62. Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541). German alchemist and physician.
• 63. Mime, Jakob (1575–1624), theosophical mystic. His first biography was written by Abraham von Franckenberg (died 1652). Later biographies in German: Fechner H.A., Jakob Böhme, sein Leben und seine Schriften, Gorlitz 1857; Claasen J. Jakob Barnes Leben und seine theosophischen Werke, 3 Bde, Stuttgart 1885; Martensen H. Jakob Böhme, London 1949; in English: Hobhouse S. Jakob Böhme, His Life and Teaching 1950.
• 64. In another set of notes it says: He then spoke a particular word for them.
• 65. Goethe, J. W. von. Faust 1, in A Forest Cavern.
• 66. Concerning 'globes', see Steiner R. At the Gates of Spiritual Science (GA 95). Tr. E. Goddard, C. Davy. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1986; The Apocalypse of St John [= The Book of Revelation] (GA 104). Tr. J. Collis. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.

This single lecture is the 7th of 21 lectures in the lecture series entitled, The Original Impulse of Spiritual Science, published in German as, Ursprungsimpulse der Geisteswissenschaft.

We shall speak today about Karma and details of the law of Karma. You know that by Karma is meant the great law of cause and effect in the spiritual life and that this law of Karma comes into consideration in Spiritual Science since it applies to repeated lives on Earth. We speak of the interrelationship of Reincarnation and Karma. Now as you certainly know, the prevailing conception of this law of Karma is somewhat superficial, as if it were simply a matter of reward and punishment extending from one incarnation into the other, so that when the individual experiences something evil or reprehensible in the present life he must say to himself unconditionally: Because of some guilt incurred in my previous life, I have deserved this—or, if I do this or that, the corresponding reward or punishment will be mine in the next life—but the matter is not as simple as that. Whosoever desires to understand this law of Karma must penetrate more deeply into the nature of man and his whole being.

The law of Karma and Reincarnation, of repeated lives on Earth, comes in for the fiercest possible attacks from the opponents of Spiritual Science, attacks often beginning with the hackneyed phrase: One life on Earth is enough for me. I have no wish to endure it more than once—and finishing with the assertion that it is a teaching which leads to inactivity and blind resignation in face of destiny. We shall go closely into this opposition and be able in the case of every objection to refute it when we study the whole course of Karma. For this purpose, we must remind ourselves once again of what Man is in the deeper sense.

We know that man consists, primarily, of the physical body that can be seen by the eyes and touched by the hands, that is investigated and examined by physical science, dissected by anatomy and is familiar in ordinary life. Many materialistic thinkers regard the physical body as being the only evidence of the existence of man. We have then to regard the etheric body, or life-body, as a second member of the human being. It is a body which consists of a substance essentially different from that of the physical body. It is by no means enough to say that the matter, the substance, of which the etheric body consists is essentially finer than the substance of which the physical body is composed. Far rather we have here a completely different ‘substantiality’. It is active matter, matter of the nature of force. This etheric matter which has no connection whatever with what is called ether in Physics, has a certain creative quality and is actually the upbuilding, constructive principle. The best mental picture you can make of the etheric body is that its form is approximately the same as that of the physical body, but it is luminous throughout, although not fully transparent—even for clairvoyants. It is also penetrable; if it were alone one could therefore pass through it. At the same time, it is creative; man's physical organs are built of it. Heart, lung, liver and so forth are created out of this etheric body. From the materialistic standpoint it could therefore be said that in a young child the etheric body must be very small. And that is so. We must think of the etheric body more as a force which in certain circumstances may occupy a smaller space than what it actually creates. Thus, we have here to do with creative life, with a creative body which underlies the physical body that can be touched in space. This etheric body is the bearer of a man's habits. Above all it is the bearer of the memory and the temperament, of the permanent qualities of soul in a human being. In speaking of the soul-nature of a human being we do not mean only the temperament and the qualities of character. But in respect of form all this comes to expression in the etheric body.

The third member of man's being is the astral body. It fills and surrounds his body as an aura of light in which the impulses, desires and passions become visible. This has often been described.

A fourth member of man's being is what comes into manifestation in self-consciousness, in the ‘I.’ The other members are germinal only and are centred in the ‘I.’

In connection with karmic evolution it is these members of man's being that are of primary interest to us. Above all we must be mindful of a very important fact of life. When you look back over your life and think of your childhood, you will be able to say that you have learnt a very great deal. There was a time when you could not write or read and knew nothing about happenings in the world, about history or literature as well as a great deal else. Now you have knowledge of all this, and it has become a possession of your soul. But you also know that a person can learn a great deal and yet no great change takes place in his original character and temperament. There are individuals who in the course of their lives have amassed a tremendous amount of knowledge and have filled their souls with science of every kind, but who must admit to themselves: I once had a violent temper and still have it today—Or again: I was phlegmatic from the beginning and have remained so. Once upon a time I had this or that habit and still have it. Admittedly there are also individuals who have changed a great deal in their own natures and characters. Perhaps indeed there is no individual who has brought about no change whatever in his fundamental disposition. When you look back to your childhood you will certainly have to admit that you have achieved many changes in your character since then. But at the same time, you will realise that realisation of your characteristics and learning how to change them are processes related to each other as the minute hand of a clock and the hour hand. The transformation of character and temperament proceeds slowly, as does the hour hand of a clock and observations of life are comparatively rapid, rather like the minute hand. This is connected with the fact that everything an individual learns can be received quickly into the soul; the astral body is its bearer and it takes effect in the astral body. When you learn something fundamentally new a feeling comes over you at the moment and is forgotten the next day. Or if you experience pain that with time disappears from your consciousness—these are things which can be seen lighting up in the astral body and then disappearing from it. The astral body is the bearer of all this.

Whatever lights up in us temporarily and disappears again has its seat in the astral body. What becomes a man's permanent stock, as it were, in so far as it comes to expression in the life of soul, everything that becomes habit so that it is noticeable in an individual for a long time—perhaps always—in his life, everything that has to do with the temperament, is situated in the etheric body which is denser than the astral body. When an individual succeeds in changing a habit, a characteristic feature of his temperament, when, for example, he rids himself of habitual indolence and becomes alert and attentive, this becomes evident in the etheric body, not only in the astral body. When a person learns a great deal, assimilating it so thoroughly that it gradually becomes an asset of his very soul and an actual constituent of his inner nature—so that he does not only know it but possesses it in a deeper sense—then he is changing the configuration of his etheric body. When someone accepts a moral principle and is obliged to say to himself repeatedly: the principle exists so that is why I obey it—then the principle is rooted in the astral body only. But if the principle is rooted so firmly in him that he simply can do no other than obey it—then it is established in the etheric body. Transition from the astral body to the etheric body takes place slowly and gradually in the course of life.

We will now pass from a study of these members of man's constitution to their connection with Karma. What takes place during the same life on Earth only slowly, that is to say the transition of something that to begin with is in the astral body into the etheric body manifests karmically from one incarnation to the other in the following way.—Someone who has tried to judge things in accordance with true morality, and who in this striving may perhaps still have been prompted by other considerations, finds the fruits of this striving in his next life as a basic quality of his etheric body, as a kind of habit, as a quality of his character. What is active in the present life in the astral body becomes in the next life an attribute of the etheric body. When you come across a person with a certain praiseworthy habit which is constantly expressed in his life, this, is an indication that in his earlier incarnation he had absorbed the corresponding ideas or closely scrutinised his own nature. Propensities and habits stem from ideas, thoughts and concepts that had been formed in previous lives. If you pay attention to this, you can make provision for the next incarnation by laying the foundation of a definite organisation of the etheric body. You can say to yourself: I shall try in this life to convince myself over and over again that this or that is good and right. Then the etheric body will ultimately show you that it is good and right in the very nature of things to follow the corresponding principles.

A certain concept that can be explained in the light of karma, is particularly important here. It is the concept of conscience. What arises from a man's conscience is equally something that has been acquired. He has a conscience, an instinct for what is good, right and true only because in his past lives, in his experiences during life, in his moral principles, he has moulded this conscience. You can provide for the strengthening and enhancement of conscience if you undertake every day to deepen your moral conceptions. Moral conceptions become conscience in the next life and the one after that.

So you see, that what the minute hand on the clock of life shows us becomes the hour hand in the next life. There must, however, be a certain strengthening of the moral principle and its realisation in one life and then they are consolidated for the next. What is established in the etheric body of one life brings to maturity the attributes of the physical body of the next life. Good habits, good inclinations, good traits of character, prepare healthiness, physical proficiency, physical strength, therefore a healthy physical body, for the next life. A healthy physical body in one life indicates that the individual concerned prepared this physical body for himself in an earlier life through self-acquired habits and qualities of character. A particularly strong connection exists between a well-developed memory in one life and the physical body in the next life.

Let us take as an example a person who forgets everything immediately and another who has a faithful memory. One need only consciously recall experiences into the memory and practise this consistently, and it will finally be noticed that not only has a good memory of things for which one has had specific training been acquired, but that this memory also becomes a quite different faculty which comes into consideration during the process of spiritual development. The capacity to survey the past develops to a very marked degree. An individual who develops his memory conscientiously will be reborn with physical soundness, with limbs that can be truly useful to him for giving effect to what his soul inwardly desires. A body that is incapable of giving effect to what the soul wishes stems from a previous life during which no care was given to the development of a good and healthy memory but when, through slovenliness, forgetfulness prevailed.

Today we are speaking only of single phenomena, but you can realise the magnitude of the domain of which we are speaking. A genuine occultist will never indulge in speculations on this subject. What I have put before you are not theories but definite cases that have been tested. What has been said here is based upon specific results of research. When it was stated that a sound physical organism which obeys the soul can be traced back to a good memory in the previous life, a number of cases had been investigated and the indications given were based upon the facts ascertained by that investigation. Facts alone have been presented.

Now what develops in the etheric body passes in the next life into the physical body. Good inclinations, qualities of character, and proficient habits in life come to expression in a healthy physical body in the next incarnation, whereas the opposite qualities produce a sickly organism in the next life. This is not to be understood in the sense that a particular disease stems from a particular quality, but certain predispositions for illness can always be led back to quite definite qualities of character and temperament in the previous life. An individual whose life in the past was fraught with tainted qualities of character has, in the present life, an organism that is more easily prone to physical illnesses than the organism of an individual who was equipped with healthy characteristics and a sound temperament. Such an individual will be reborn with a body that can be exposed to every possible form of epidemic without being infected.

You see, therefore, that things in the world are complicated and are subject to the law of cause and effect. To give an example, here is a case based on definite results of investigation. It may at first be something of a shock but in a study group it may certainly be spoken of. A certain individual had developed an entirely egoistic urge for acquisition, a veritable greed for external wealth. It was not a matter of a healthy striving for riches which may spring from an altruistic aim to be of help and engage in selfless activity in the world—that is something different—but it was a case of an egoistic longing for acquisition due to a particular constitution of the etheric body; the striving for acquisition was abnormal. Such an individual may very possibly be born in the next life with a physical body prone to catch infectious diseases. In numerous cases it has been established by occultism that individuals readily prone to infection from epidemics in the present life, were possessed of a pathological sense for acquisitions in the previous life.

Other examples could be specifically quoted. Thus, there are two characteristics which have a clearly recognisable influence upon the karmic formation of the following life. There we must speak to begin with of the strong influence exerted by a loving, benevolent attitude towards one's fellow men. There are individuals who accept everything from their fellowmen with benevolence, who deal with their environment lovingly and sympathetically. In many cases this love extends far beyond pure philanthropy. Such individuals love nature and the whole world. The more strongly this sense of all-embracing love has developed and become habit in the soul and is therefore rooted in the etheric body, the greater becomes the capacity of the individual concerned to retain the qualities of youth for a long time in a subsequent incarnation. Therefore an individual who ages very late in life, who remains youthful and mobile, has behind him an earlier life—or maybe several lives—during which he had a true love of his environment. The more strongly he expresses love for his environment, the longer he remains physically youthful in a following incarnation. An individual prone to show antipathy towards his fellowmen, ages early in the next life. A body that shows the signs of age at a physically early age, stems from the life of a perverse critic, from a life of aversion and ill-will. Thus, we see that life can be influenced by a conscious intervention in Karma. A person capable of love in the present life can rest assured that in the next life he will have a body that reveals all the traits of youth. Individuals who become harsh critics at an early age will in the next life be people who are almost born with wrinkles! That is a radical expression, but it is based upon truth.

Thus, the laws of Karma reveal the connection between health and the spiritual life. Everybody will agree that this connection cannot be immediately obvious but that individual details must doubted that a genuinely moral, sincere, conscientious soul is the future creator of a healthy body. But actual knowledge of this cannot be expected from one day to the next, nor can it be believed that a person afflicted with flaws of soul can be healed overnight. It should also be realised that one must rise above egoism and adopt a selfless mode of life that does not want to garner the fruits of its deeds immediately. What becomes habit, however, can react upon the physical body already in the present life. A proof of this is afforded by occult development which can acquire conscious influence not only upon the astral body but also upon the etheric body. An individual who achieves occult development learns how to influence not only his astral body but also his etheric body and his physical body. Through the transformation of habitual behaviour, a violent, choleric individual can become a gentle character, a highly emotional human being an equable, harmonious person. An occultist must change his habits in a comparatively short time. Genuine development pre-supposes that what a man learns does not remain mere teaching but penetrates into the etheric body. In an occultist it penetrates even into the physical body. He learns to control the heartbeat, the pulse beat and the breathing. A process that in ordinary life is distributed over many incarnations is therefore shortened. The process of Karma itself is shortened in the case of an occultist.

Much that will be discussed this Winter will become more intelligible to us when we learn of certain more intimate karmic connections, for example the difference between the karma of a beautiful and an ugly human being. What is the karma of a beautiful human being? Something comes into consideration there that at first seems incredible, nevertheless it is a fact. Beauty of the physical body is in many cases, not always but very often, a consequence of suffering endured in the preceding life. Suffering in the preceding life—physical and also soul-suffering—becomes beauty in a subsequent life, beauty of the external physical body. In these cases, it is permissible to use an analogy which I have often applied. How does the beautiful pearl in a pearl-oyster originate? Actually, as the result of an illness. Approximately speaking, therefore, there is a karmic process which represents the connection of illness, of suffering, with beauty. This beauty is often bought at the cost of suffering and illness.

Wisdom too is in many respects bought at the cost of pain. It is not without interest that a. certain example of outer investigation today confirms in many ways what occultists have said for thousands of years, namely, that wisdom is connected with pain and sufferings, with a life of earnestness and renunciation in the previous existence. It is sometimes very rewarding to consult ordinary scientific investigation. A book on the effects of thinking has recently been published. Its aim is to show how in the physiognomy of a human being there is engraved the quality and trend of his thinking. The author of the book who clearly does not know much about occultism has nevertheless discovered through outer observation that an impression of pain once endured can be recognised in the physiognomy of a thinker. Modern science is on the point of confirming ancient occult wisdom little by little. In the coming years this will be the case far more often than any learned scholar dreams of.

It will now be still easier for you to realise that one cannot give way to blind belief or submission to authority in connection with certain revelations of the history of spiritual life. Faced with the problem of understanding Karmic law in the case of a phenomenon such as Schopenhauer, whose whole world-conception was filled with a mood of pessimism, nobody possessed of deeper insight must believe that this pessimism represents the fundamental attitude of humanity in general. It is far rather the individual trait of Schopenhauer's soul, karmically forecast and brought about by a certain constitution of his etheric body. This pessimistic mood of his thinking can only be understood by examining the karmic aspect. In an earlier life—and this is an absolutely real explanation—a personality of this nature had had no opportunity of doing much good. Because of his position in life and vocation this man had been obliged to commit much evil and injustice. And this evil and injustice which he was fated—not by karma but by his vocation—to bring about, returned to him in the form of a certain feeling of antipathy towards the world he now encountered. This antipathy was the recapitulation of his own deeds. If you want to understand karma you should not adopt the fatalistic standpoint that everything is predestined. A man need not be condemned by his previous lives to carry out his present deeds. Adjustment is often made in the next life. Thus, deeds are not always the fruits of an earlier life but in certain cases find their adjustment in a future speaking of the cause of the pessimistic mood in Schopenhauer.

We must strictly differentiate between everything a man accomplishes as his own individual deeds, deeds which proceed entirely from himself, and those made obligatory by his race, family and profession. Two Councillors may do the same thing because they happen to be Councillors but that too is exempted. They may however also perform utterly different deeds because they are different human beings. And that is what we are considering now. Deeds that stem from a man's personality—that is what meets him as his outer destiny in the next incarnation. If some individual finds himself in fortunate circumstances of life, if he enjoys a favourable destiny, this leads back to the just, ingenious and good deeds of an earlier life. If a man's circumstances in life are unfavourable, if he has many failures and is surrounded by adverse conditions—external circumstances are meant, not the qualities of the physical body—this equally leads back to personal deeds of the previous life. What an individual has accomplished as the result of his vocation and family circumstances is stored in his temperament and character. Thus, the destiny of a man is determined by his personal deeds in the preceding life. Vice versa, through good, intelligent and righteous deeds, he can bring about a favourable or unfavourable destiny in the next incarnation.

An individual who comes into contact with particular personalities has himself created the conditions for this in a preceding life. He had had something to do with these individuals and has himself now led them into his environment. Here is an example from the time of the Vehmic tribunals.¹ One such tribunal was concerned with an execution. The victim was placed before masked judges who immediately gave effect to the judgment. This is a case where a man was condemned and executed. Occult investigation of his destiny in the earlier incarnations brought to light the fact that the individual who had been executed by the five judges had, at the time, when he was a chieftain, allowed these five persons to be murdered. His deed in days gone by had brought these five individuals as it were with magnetic force again into his life and they wreaked their vengeance upon him. This is a radical case, but it is founded upon universal law. You cannot come into contact with an individual who makes an impact upon your life if you have not yourself brought him into your orbit on the basis of earlier relationships. It may, of course, also he the case that through general conditions, through his vocation or family a man is led into contact with individuals he had never yet encountered. But then, through their mutual behaviour, the foundation is laid for a meeting in the next incarnation, a meeting connected with the destinies and lives of the individuals concerned. You will realise that these illustrations of Karma are in many respects complicated and by no means so easy to explain. It is important to study these examples individually because only so can we really understand life.

It must again and again be stressed that the idea of Karma, rightly understood and to be found in Christianity, must never be thought to contradict the teaching of the Redemption. To many of you I have already spoken of the compatibility of the Christian teaching of the Redemption with the idea of Karma, but there are new listeners here. Many misunderstandings are to be found, due very often to the fact that numbers of people talk about Theosophy without much understanding. It is stated that Karma means simply that a man must take upon himself all the effects of his deeds. If he has committed some offence, he alone can redeem himself from his sin. From this point of view many Theosophists declare that the thought of the Redemption through Christ Jesus is unfounded, that Theosophy could not accept the idea of Redemption through another being, for every man must redeem himself. Christian Theologians dispute this, saying: we believe in the Redemption through Christ Jesus, but you believe in self-redemption. This is irreconceivable.²

Meanwhile, Karma is a kind of life account that can quite rightly be compared with a salesman's accounts. On the one side there are the debit entries and on the other the credit entries. They are added and the balance struck. It would be a peculiar salesman who said: I will do no more business in order that my balance shall not be upset.—Just as in every moment of a salesman's life a new transaction can be made, so at every moment through a new deed, new karma can be created. When somebody says: A man has himself brought about his suffering, he has deserved it, so I may not help him—this is so much nonsense. It is just as if one thousand marks would help you, but if I were to give them to you, I should upset your account book.—That would certainly not be the case! The sum of money lent would simply be entered in the account book. It is the same with life. Compensation must be made but it need not necessarily be made by oneself. Karma does not signify self-compensation but only that compensation shall be made through a deed. Now suppose you are a wealthy, powerful person who can help not only one but two. Then you can intervene in the Karma of two human beings. Just because Karma exists you can intervene in the life accounts of both these two people. There are individuals who can help three, four, five people—indeed even hundreds. Such individuals will not say: I must not help those others because then I shall intervene in their Karma.—Far rather, they will help them.

Such help can be vouchsafed by a most mighty Being who once appeared in the world co those who account themselves His followers. This Being is Christ Jesus. The fact that the Redemption was brought about by a certain form of evil, does not contravene the law of Karma. The Redemption through Christ Jesus is perfectly compatible with the law of Karma, just as is the help given by the wealthy man to the bankrupt salesman. The misunderstandings arise from the fact that Theosophists do not basically understand Karma and Theologians have not bothered about it. It is precisely through the intrinsic nature and importance of the deed of a single sublime Being that the validity of the law of Karma is guaranteed. When, in the future, these things are rightly understood, it will become evident for the first time that Theosophy is not an opponent of any confession that has a genuine foundation and how it leads far rather to a true understanding of it. If you have discerned the law of Karma in a certain number of cases, you will feel that you have here perceived a deep necessity of spiritual life. Truth to tell, the law of Karma has been rightly understood only by one to whom it is not merely a piece of theoretic knowledge but has become part of his whole world of feeling and perception. Inner security and harmony then pervade the whole of life. And those people who again and again assert that the law of Karma leads to inactivity and lethargy, that it causes a person to abandon himself to his destiny and does not lead to freedom in life—such people have not made any endeavour to live in harmony with the law of Karma. To live in accordance with the law of Karma means to infuse courage and hope into the soul.

The law of Karma must above all throw light upon our future. We must think less about the past than about the future. It has been indicated in many ways that in compliance with the law of Karma a man can produce effects far into the future by preparing in his astral body the future configuration of the etheric body and in the course of further progress the future formation of the physical body. When you have grasped the implications of this you will realise the tremendous importance of these connections and what a deepening the idea of education, especially of that of peoples, will experience in the light of the law of Karma. If efforts are made today to induce human beings to live in conformity with the law of Karma and to prepare the configuration of their future accordingly, they are at the same time preparing the future communities of peoples. After all, life in the future will consist of the reincarnated human beings of the present. Healthy races and especially healthy leaders of the future races will come into existence if human beings live on into the future intelligently, in accordance with the law of Karma. For if the single individual achieves perfection in some degree, he has an effect upon the organisms of the peoples and of races.

The actual mechanism of Karma is a matter for early discussion. The question is concerned with which forces are being activated when the astral characteristics of the present life are transmitted to the etheric body in the next life and which forces bring it about that the qualities established in the etheric body of the present life—habits and inclinations—are carried over into the physical predisposition of the next life. It is still more difficult to answer the following question: Which forces are at work in cases where a man's deeds in the present life determine his external environment in the next incarnation when he not only gathers around him the individuals with whom he has and previously had, something to do, but also takes his place within the world of Nature that surrounds him, in the plant world and animal world, also in the conditions of the race and society which he himself has prepared? What is the character of these forces which bring all this again to the individual concerned? How does it come about that two human beings who had some connection with each other in an earlier life and of whom one is reborn in America and the other in Europe are nevertheless led together? Such are the great questions which we will endeavour to answer next time. Briefly, how do the relationships of the one life form the relationships of the next? As we shall have many guests, this question will also be suitable for study at the general Meeting. Naturally, those who have been present at this series of lectures will be at an advantage. The title of the next lecture will be: The Technique of Karma.

Thus, consideration of an important question in life will have been dealt with today and next time. I ask you to bear in mind that what has been said consisted of selected cases, based upon actual occult facts. Everything that has been disclosed today on the subject of karmic connections leads back to actual investigation of the Karma of specific individuals. The study of Karma also gives us knowledge of how to evaluate, even in the present life, the connection between illness and specific characteristics, of the life of soul, especially the awakening of certain forces of the soul. So far those who have assimilated the lectures on Karma given here, what is said in general outline in the Architektenhaus lectures about illness and death, suffering and evil, will have been amplified in greater detail. During this Winter special consideration will be given here and elsewhere to the place of the spiritual—scientific view of the world in practical life. In this way we shall strengthen the impulse and the insight ensuring that Spiritual Science is not presented as something impractical but that it is a factor in practical life itself.

• 1. A German system of irregular Tribunal prevailing in Westphalia in the 14th and 15th centuries. More serious crimes were tried in secret night sessions.
• 2. Perhaps intended to be inconceivable, or irreconcilable. The original German text is “Das vereinigt sich nicht recht.”

During the last few weeks, a number of friends from Germany have been with me on a visit to a field of theosophical work abroad—to Helsingfors, in Finland. A visit of this kind to a far-off field of work always brings a realisation of the unity of theosophical life all over the globe and also of its deep roots in the culture of the present day. It meant a great deal to me when our friends in Finland expressed the wish that I should speak to them about the venerable Finnish epic, “Kalewala.”¹ As this wish was conveyed to me some time ago, I was able to occupy myself from the vantage-point of occultism, with this remarkable poem of the Finns—who are themselves, in many respects, a unique people. And this brought to the fore once again, things of which I have spoken on other occasions, here and also elsewhere. A very definite experience comes to us when, independently of everything men have hitherto known concerning the spiritual worlds and have, in their own way, expressed in words, we ourselves strive for deeper insight into those worlds and man's relationship to them, and ask: How are we to understand what is contained in the many folk-traditions that have been preserved through the centuries? How are we to apply to these recorded traditions the knowledge we have acquired concerning the super-sensible world? Although their language differs from that in which they have to be presented today, biblical and other records clearly based upon occult foundations, are expressions, issuing from ancient times and from manifold periods of human evolution, of wisdom and knowledge which it is possible for us to rediscover today. These ancient records present a new aspect and seem to be imbued with a new power when we realise that in and from those same worlds to which we aspire along the path to spiritual knowledge and to Initiation, great revelations have been given to the world in different epochs and in multifarious ways.

We may well feel that the venerable Finnish epic, “Kalewala,” has a special and unique occult significance. My own experience was very vivid and definite. This Finnish epic has been translated into every European language but it differs fundamentally and significantly from all other epic poems; no comparison with any of them is possible.

When my book Theosophy first appeared many years ago, independent observation of the spiritual world had led me to “member” the human soul into three: Sentient Soul, Mind or Intellectual Soul, Consciousness or Spiritual Soul. Knowledge of the threefold soul was acquired purely through occult research and occult observation directed to the spiritual world quite independently of any tradition. Occult research was the only source consulted. And now, because our friends in the Finnish Section desired me to speak of the occult meaning of the Kalewala, it was necessary to make the poem the subject of spiritual investigation.

It has been emphasised repeatedly that human consciousness and the life of soul were not always as they are today. In primeval times of the evolution of mankind our present mode of perception and thinking, our present relationship to the external world, simply did not exist; in those ancient times the human being was endowed with a natural, innate clairvoyance. Turning our gaze to past epochs in the evolutionary process, we come to a period starting about the year 600 B.C. when man's life of soul began to assume the form and character which were subsequently to lead to the much more abstract, scientific mode of thinking; before that time, vestiges and remains of the old clairvoyance, or memories of it at least, persisted among certain peoples for a very long time, among others for not so long. When we look back into the development of the peoples, we find in every case that consciousness as it is at present, developed only by very gradual stages. In very ancient times, normal human consciousness was imbued with a certain form of clairvoyance: and it was during the period of twilight denoting the disappearance of the old clairvoyance and the first beginnings of “modern” consciousness that the National Epics, the Folk-Epics came to birth.

It would, of course, have been absolutely impossible for men of primeval times to know anything about the threefoldness represented by Sentient Soul, Mind Soul, Consciousness Soul. But they possessed genuine clairvoyance, although it was dim and dream-like, lacking the light of intellect and reason in their present form. Before the dawning of the consciousness we know today, there were conditions, midway as it were between our waking and sleeping states, in which living memories arose of entirely different circumstances of life, when the relation of one human being to another was determined, not by anything like consciousness as it is at present, but by the old clairvoyance. And in their great Folk-Epics the peoples depicted the experiences which arose within them during the period when the old clairvoyance was dying away and present-day consciousness was beginning to dawn.

The materialist says that man's life of soul has unfolded, by degrees, out of the material processes in the human organism—out of processes which are also to be found in lower forms of life. Spiritual Science, however, makes it clear that the elements of “soul-life” as they are in the animal would never have been able to give rise to the threefoldness of Sentient Soul, Mind Soul, Consciousness Soul, and that it is far more a matter of this inner trinity of the three “members” of the soul having flowed down from a spiritual world. Therefore when we look into the spiritual world we can speak of three down-flowing streams, with which three Beings in the spiritual worlds are connected, Beings who are the direct Inspirers of the Sentient Soul, the Mind Soul and the Consciousness Soul. We have to think of the Creators of these three manifestations of the life of soul in that super-sensible world with which, in primeval times, human beings were in direct communion.

We know that the moment our consciousness rises into the spiritual world, no matter whether this is the result of deliberate training, as will be the case today, or whether through the old clairvoyance, the human form becomes an “Imagination.” In those olden days, too, the soul attained to a form of Imagination, beholding in pictures the outpouring of the threefold human soul from the spiritual world. The Finnish epic tells of three Heroes. To begin with, these three Beings seem strange and remarkable in the highest degree; they have something superhuman about them and at the same time something that graduates into the genuinely human. But if we examine the matter more closely, and with occult means, it becomes apparent that these three figures, these three Heroes, are the Creators and Inspirers of the threefold powers of the soul in man. The Creator of the Sentient Soul is the figure to whom, in the Kalewala, the name of “Wainamoinen” is given; the Creator of the Mind Soul is “Ilmarinen,” and the Creator of the Consciousness Soul, “Lemminkainen.” And so in the National Epic of this remarkable people we find, in a form of Imagination springing from the original, ancient clairvoyance, what is rediscovered by modern spiritual research. The human being of today has the outer form we see before us, only because the foundations of this threefold life of soul were laid down in the course of evolution on Earth. (I indicated this in the public lectures given in the Berlin Architektenhaus: “The Origin of Man in the Light of Spiritual Science,” and “The Origin of the Animal World in the Light of Spiritual Science.”)²

We must picture to ourselves that there was a time in the process of the Earth's development when neither human beings nor animals were in existence, when all that was present was a kind of undifferentiated “substance”; the beings who first detached themselves were those which have reached the animal stage. When all the animals were there, man was still waiting until other conditions of Earth-existence had set in and because he had waited for these other conditions, he was able to become the recipient of his present form. In other words: while the animals developed their various forms on the Earth, man remained in the spiritual world above; his development began only when the animals had already assumed their destined forms. The foundations of the threefold soul-Sentient Soul, Mind Soul, Consciousness Soul—were laid in man and it was then possible for him to enter Earth-existence in the external form in which he now lives.

With this in mind, we can say: Man, as the created being we know today, sent down the animal kingdom before him and then followed himself, when the Earth-conditions were such that he could bring to manifestation in outer form, the threefold life of soul that had been laid into his being. What does this really mean? Knowledge of these occult truths restores to the traditions of religion, which rest upon occult foundations, their ancient value and meaning. Man received Earth-substance into himself when he was able to recast, to remould it into his present form—a form able to receive the imprint of the threefold life of soul. Thus man elaborated Earth-substance according to the laws of his life of soul, made Earth-substance subject to the plan underlying his life of soul, and became Earth-Man; he fashioned Earth-substance after the model of the threefold, prototypal soul. Think of the Biblical picture of the moulding of the substance of Earth (not the “dust” but the substance of Earth) into Man. We now discern profound meaning in this Biblical conception upon which so much scorn has been poured by modern “enlightenment”—as it is called. For the passage points to the time when the animals, having descended at an earlier period, were already in existence and when, out of Earth-substance, the being who now stands before us as bodily Man, was fashioned, at a later stage, according to the model of the soul.

In the Kalewala it is wonderful to find this process presented, with great imaginative power, as the “forging” of a mysterious instrument called the “Sampo.” The most curious explanations have been given of this mysterious instrument, the “Sampo.” In reality it is the human ether-body, forged by the interworking of the three soul-members—it is the ether-body, the imprint of which is the physical body. All that is necessary here is to give indications, without entering more closely into details. The National Epic of Finland quite obviously derives from the memory of the Finnish people in which clairvoyant perceptions of ancient times had been retained; through these perceptions, some knowledge still persisted of the descent of man as a being of soul—a threefold soul—into the physical body. What is noteworthy in such a matter is that in the old heroic sagas of humanity,we again find the truths and knowledge acquired today of the spiritual worlds. The Kalewala is an example of what is to be found in many ancient records of importance to humanity and is, moreover, one that emerged from oblivion only in the nineteenth century! For it had been entirely forgotten and was compiled during the course of that century from folk-songs extant among the Finnish people.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, nothing had been written down of the Kalewala as we possess it today; the songs were heard from the people, had lived only among them. The simple fact is that in the nineteenth century a certain doctor, realised that the people sang of many interesting things, and set about collecting the songs. Then a compilation was made and they assumed fresh importance. They attracted considerable attention and were translated into all the European languages. Scholars then proceeded to give senseless explanations of them ... but all that really matters is that they are there, having lived among the people.

Approaching the matter with the spiritual knowledge in our possession today, it becomes apparent, if we are willing to recognise it, that in what had survived there among the people and was gathered from among them, there is occult content which can be rediscovered today, just as occult content can be rediscovered in Homer's Iliad, in the Odyssey, in the songs of the Niebelung and elsewhere. Only we must be willing to seek earnestly, not applying anything in the way of allegorical or symbolical interpretation but rather allowing what is actually there to make its own impression upon us. What we ourselves have found in the realm of occultism, shines forth in Imaginations deriving from times of hoary antiquity. But in this case there is something of particular interest, as I myself discovered. When the Kalewala came into my hands, I heard that the closing runes—which make allusion to a connection between the spiritual life of ancient Finland and Christianity—must obviously have been a later addition; for whereas all the rest bears the character of ancient Paganism, the closing runes introduce an essentially Christian element—but very delicately and lightly. And then, strangely enough, I discovered that this belongs fundamentally to the Kalewala, that the poem is inconceivable without these closing runes. This means that in its origin and life among the people, the Kalewala quite naturally culminated in a delicate reference to Christianity—and, it may be added, to the most impersonal, “non-Palestinian” Christianity that it is possible to imagine, hardly recognisable by Christian concepts as they now are! Here, therefore, it is clear that from the same primeval soul there issued something that could not have been born at the same time as Christian culture among the other peoples of Europe: for Christian culture arose long after clairvoyance had been able still to look back to those primeval ages when the threefold soul was “membered” into the human form. And so here, among the Finnish people, we have an indication of the link between the ancient clairvoyance and the influence subsequently brought into play by Christian culture. This is something quite remarkable and unique—perhaps nowhere else to be found on the Earth. It may be that the veneration in which the Kalewala is held in Finland has preserved this epic from the fate that has befallen the Iliad. I do not know if many of you are aware that scholarship first of all hacked the Iliad into fragments and then declared that it was not written by a man bearing the name of “Homer”—indeed that it was not the work of a single writer but was only put together from collected songs, later on. The Kalewala, of course, was actually a compilation, but nevertheless, it forms a complete whole, one coherent whole. Possibly, in the future, a few changes here and there may be necessary, but nevertheless it is complete in itself. And so we have before us here, gathered from the consciousness of the people, a number of occult Imaginations. If we follow the matter in the Akasha-Chronicle, we find that the Kalewala leads back to the ancient and sacred Mysteries of northern Europe, and that the truths it contains were inspired by the Initiates, given forth to the people and instilled into them.

Why have I been telling you these things?

Matters of which we have been hearing for years were also spoken of in Helsingfors and will be spoken of in other parts of Europe too. But the public lecture which I was able to give on the subject of the occult content of the Folk-Epics, with particular reference to the Kalewala, was something new, especially belonging to Finland. (9th April, 1914.) One then realised that the essence of Spiritual Science will more and more make itself felt over the whole Earth. For do we not all feel that with Spiritual Science we are at home in the spiritual life? We are everywhere at home, for Spiritual Science is the light which illumines the path to the Spirit trodden by mankind all over the Earth. It is an overpowering experience to rediscover through Spiritual Science, the real content of this collection of folk-poems which form themselves into one whole. We find how right on into the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, the Folk-Soul became articulate in poetry, still possessing vital memories of the old clairvoyance once possessed by these unique Finnish peoples who to this day retain many customs and arts reminiscent of an ancient form of magic. And then we realise that Spiritual Science alone can lead to an understanding of these things, make them intelligible to us!

One of the many signs of the great spiritual happenings of the near future may be indicated in the following way. Spiritual Science has taken us into the region of an entirely unknown tongue—for the Finnish language differs from all other European languages; externally, one understands nothing of it and it is like being transported into an absolutely strange land. What knowledge does Spiritual Science bring us? How does Spiritual Science enable us to speak with this people who, so far as the last centuries are concerned, have remained remote from the other peoples of Europe? We speak with them about what is holiest and most sacred to them and is now coming to life again so strongly that people are reaching out for the Kalewala and the eyes of the whole world of culture are turning to it. In what is the most sacred possession of a people, we learn to understand the speech of the Folk-Soul!

So, too, it can be the whole world over, when we realise what must be the very root—nerve of theosophical life. We are standing on the threshold of a new disclosure of spiritual truths. Attention has often been drawn to this, above all in my Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. Reference is there made to the fact that times are approaching when the souls of men will become more and more open to receive revelations from the spiritual world which will break in upon them as a kind of natural experience. In the course of the next three thousand years, men will gradually “grow into” the spiritual world. Through Spiritual Science, however, we must learn to understand why, and to what extent this will come about.

In the first, very ancient period of the Post-Atlantean era, that of the Holy Rishis of India, culture “flowed” as it were, directly from and was inspired by the human ether-body; in the epoch of ancient Persia, culture was inspired by the Sentient Body, the Astral Body; in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch by the Sentient Soul; in the Graeco-Latin period by the Mind or Intellectual Soul; and in our own epoch by the Consciousness Soul. There will follow a form of culture inspired by the Spirit-Self, and so on. If you keep in your minds a picture of the whole course of Post-Atlantean culture, you will find as it were a descending curve until the time of the Graeco-Latin epoch. It is clearly perceptible, and permits of no denial, that this age represents the lowest point of man's descent to the physical plane; the most characteristic and remarkable feature of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch is that spiritual life is all interwoven, intertwined, entangled with life on the physical plane. But in that same epoch comes the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha—and necessarily so. You have only to think of what you already know in this connection. There is, however, something else of importance to remember. The actual course of human evolution comes to expression in manifold ways in the life of the individual. In the little book, The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science, it is said that up to the seventh year the development of the physical body is of primary importance: this phase corresponds, in the evolutionary process of mankind as a whole, to the period preceding the Atlantean catastrophe. The period of life between the seventh and the fourteenth years is a recapitulation—although veiled and obscured—of the culture connected with the ether-body which reached its highest glory in the epoch of ancient India. The period from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year of life is a recapitulation of the culture inspired by the astral body, corresponding to the epoch of ancient Persia. The Egypto-Chaldean period is reflected in the life of the individual human being from the twenty-first to the twenty-eighth year; and the Graeco-Latin epoch is reflected in the life of the individual between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years. This is a very important period; for just as at that time Post-Atlantean humanity swung over from a descending to an ascending culture, so there can be a turning-point in the life of the individual between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years. At the middle point of his earthly existence, the individual faces at one and the same time a descending and an ascending curve of life. After the thirty-fifth year he passes as it were into the period of outward decline, into a process of “withering.” In the individual human life at this time there must be something which corresponds with the swing-over from the descending to the ascending curve of culture. That the Mystery of Golgotha took place during this particular period of the life of Christ Jesus, between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years, was not a matter of chance; it could not be otherwise, as those who know anything of these connections will realise. The Mystery of Golgotha could only be enacted during the period of life connected specifically with the development of the Mind Soul. Since the end of the Middle Ages we have passed into the period of the unfolding of the Consciousness Soul. This will last for a very long time; and then will come the period of the evolution of Spirit-Self.

Now in the life of the individual there is something irregular—magnificently irregular—about the appearance or awakening of the “ I,” the Ego. At some future time I will elaborate this but at the moment I can only indicate it. The regular course of things is the development of the physical body up to the seventh year, of the ether-body up to the fourteenth year, and so on, up to the twenty-eighth year. Then, and only then—if conditions took a regular, straight-forward course, would the “ I ” awaken in the Mind Soul; for only then does the external organisation of the human being contain the proper and suitable instrument for the “ I ”. But the “ I ” awakens, actually, at a very early period of childhood, quite independently of the external organisation—at that point of time to which, in later life, the memory reaches back. Why is it that the birth of the “ I ”, instead of occurring between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years in accordance with the development of man's external organisation, actually occurs during the earliest years of childhood? It is because the Luciferic forces have brought about a certain displacement as between the inner and the outer man. The Luciferic forces are connected with “retardation” in time. The “ I ” within us is grounded upon Luciferic forces, upon remembrance of what has remained to us of our experiences in life. Lucifer emancipates the “ I ” which is thus made free and independent of the outer organisation. For a time it was necessary for man to be connected, externally, with something other than his “ I ” alone. To maintain his rightful place it was necessary to form a link with a Being who had lived during the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, had reached his thirtieth year, and was then inspired by the Christ, by a Power which could not live on the Earth beyond the thirty-third year, but which in the thirty-third year passed through Death. To begin with, it was an external, historical link. What I have often described to you from the one side, I want you now to consider from the inner side. The human being remembers back to the point in his life when consciousness awakens; his remembrance stretches back to the birth of the “ I,” the Ego: for his actual entrance into Earth-existence is shrouded in sleep. Of what precedes the birth of the “ I ” we have to be told by our parents, by our elder brothers and sisters, by our seniors. Just as the memory of the human being now reaches back to the awakening of this Ego—the Luciferic Ego—so, later on, he will see, as in an Imagination, another Ego, another “ I ” before him. This will come about during the next three thousand years as a development of great significance in the evolution of humanity. In the future, man will remember that at a certain point of time in his childhood, the Luciferic “ I ” awakened; and he will also remember back to another point of time, when the “Christ-Ego” appears, in contrast to the Luciferic Ego. Instead of the one point, there will be two. The fact that this will arise as a memory will be the proof that the Christ-Event has not still to take place, but that it has already taken place. In short, just as a man at the present time remembers back to the awakening of the “ I ”, so, in time to come, the Imagination of the second “ I ” will be within his field of remembrance, enabling him to find the way to what we describe as the new Appearance or Manifestation of Christ.

The fact that man is growing onwards to new experiences, spiritual experiences of an entirely new kind, is something that must be understood in the light of Spiritual Science; for naturally, there must be preparation for these experiences. The human soul is moving towards new experiences. That is one thing that must be realised in Spiritual Science. The second is this. These new experiences are of such a nature that they will bring peace, concord and harmony upon the Earth and among men. And it will indeed be so! That is why it is such an overpowering experience to be able to understand the Folk-Spirit in another corner of the Earth. The poetry inspired by the Folk-Spirit is illumined by Spiritual Science—but we must be willing to steep ourselves in what actually springs from this Folk-Spirit, and interpolate nothing else.—That must be the attitude of a spiritual conception of the world.

And now let us face facts.—What is the present position? Men have quarrelled, have fought and shed blood through the ages over religious opinions; but if the root-nerve of Spiritual Science is understood, there will be no more conflict in the future about particular religious opinions. Men's minds will be directed to the spiritual facts themselves, and differences of opinion on the various problems of religion will exist just as they exist in other spheres—but not in such a way as to lead to bloodshed and strife; for it will be recognised that the revelations given to the different peoples point back to vast and mighty wisdom. Men will find the foundation and ground of this wisdom and recognise the truths that are contained in the various religions. The Science of Comparative Religion has done far-reaching work in connection with the several religions and the points of resemblance to be found in them. Splendid results have been achieved—but what, in reality, is the attitude that is almost invariably adopted? The attitude, more or less clearly expressed, is that all the religions are false! The Science of Comparative Religion brings out the errors far more clearly than the truths contained in the religions. Spiritual Science, on the other hand, directs its attention to the truths, to the Initiation-Knowledge which they contain. To what does this lead? What, for instance, will be the attitude of a Christian to a Buddhist? The Christian will realise the sublimity and splendour of the Buddhist system; because Christianity itself will learn to understand Reincarnation and Karma, the Christian will recognise the greatness of this teaching of Buddhism. And he will have knowledge, too, of the existence of certain Individualities in world-evolution who rise from the rank of “Bodhisattva” to that of “Buddha.” The Christian will understand something which spiritual development alone can make clear to him, namely, that in the twenty-ninth year of his life, the son of King Suddhodana became the Buddha. The event could only take place at that particular age, as a study of Spiritual Science will show. These things are connected with what is said in the little book, The Education of the Child. With this knowledge the Christian will also realise that such a Being does not descend again to Earth in a physical body. Christians who are Theosophists, or, if you prefer, Theosophists who are Christians, do not regard these teachings of Buddhism as mythical fables, but, together with the Buddhists believe in the truth that in his twenty-ninth year the Bodhisattva became Buddha and will not return in a physical body. The Christian respects this belief; he believes what the Buddhist believes, is at home on the soil of Buddhism, does not regard it as childish phantasy. He knows that in the royal son of King Suddhodana there dwelt an Individuality who rose to such spiritual heights that he need never again descend into a physical body, but sends his influence in another way into the evolution of humanity. Understanding the truths contained in Buddhism, the Christian will never interfere in the spiritual life of a Buddhist in such a way as to alienate him from his religion.

And what will be the attitude to Christianity of a Buddhist who also happens to be a Theosophist? He will try to grasp what it signified when in a man known as Jesus of Nazareth, in the thirtieth year of his life, the “ I ” was replaced by the Being Whom the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture called the “Christ,” and Who dwelt for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. He will understand what is meant by saying that the “Substance” of Christ which passed through death with Christ Jesus has streamed over human culture; and he will try to understand that this life, from the Baptism by John in the Jordan to the Mystery of Golgotha, represents an event which took place once and once only in the evolution of mankind, and that like the Buddha, He who was once incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth can never again come down to the Earth. The Christian who is also a Theosophist understands that the Bodhisattva, having become Buddha, ascends into the spiritual worlds; the Buddhist who is also a Theosophist recognises those spiritual facts which form the essence of Christian belief, namely, that the Christ-Being descended into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, lived in that body for three years and passed through death; and that thereafter His power streams through the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth. Mutual understanding among the confessions of faith on the Earth and therewith mutual harmony—that is the essence and core of theosophical teaching. If the Christians were to say that an Individuality might appear as the reincarnated Buddha, it would be an absurdity, and the Buddhist peoples would rightly resist any such teaching being disseminated among them. Discord would inevitably arise in communities of Christians if they were informed that the Christ might incarnate again in the flesh. The task of Theosophy is to bring about mutual understanding between the religions on Earth which are founded upon Initiation. When this is understood, Theosophy* will live truly in the hearts of men; there will be no founding of new sects, no proclamations of new, physical prophets, for whom humanity no longer waits in that external sense. People will then learn to understand the Rosicrucian principle which has remained unbroken since the founding of Rosicrucianism, namely, that those who are charged with the task of teaching, may not previously speak to the outer world of their mission. Indeed it is a venerable rule in Rosicrucianism that a teacher of the Rosicrucian Order is never outwardly proclaimed as such by his contemporaries; the fact that he is such a teacher may not be spoken of until a hundred years after his death—not before—because only so can the impersonal element be preserved in a genuine spiritual movement.

Clear understanding of the fact that we are entering upon a phase of development in which the human soul will become more and more aware of the inflow of the Spiritual and thus of the super-sensible Christ-Event of which we may speak prophetically—and a clear realisation that Theosophy must always lead to an understanding of what is sacred and holy to each individual ... these are the two factors which make men true Theosophists within the Theosophical Movement. Indeed a man's very attitude to them can tell us whether he has or has not understood the task of Theosophy in the present age.

• 1. See also: The Connection of the Human Being with the Elemental World. Finland and the Kalewala. Lecture given at Dornach, 1914. Not yet published in English.
• 2. 4th and 18th January, 1912. Not yet published in English.