The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I want to look back once more at our recent observations. We have tried to get some picture of how the human life of spirit, the human soul life, and the human life of the body are to be comprehended. When we visualize the human soul life, that is, what the human being feels occurring within himself as thinking, feeling, and willing, then of course we find that the thinking component, or what we experience directly as the content of our thoughts, occurs between the physical body and the etheric body, that feeling occurs between the etheric body and the astral body, and willing between the astral body and the I. We thus see that our thoughts, insofar as we are fully conscious of them, represent only what glimmers up to us from the depths of our own being and really can give the waves of the soul life only their form. Something like shadows is cast upward from the depths of the human being, filling our consciousness and constituting the content of our thoughts.

Were we to depict the matter schematically, we could render it in this way: physical body (see diagram, blue), etheric body (orange), astral body (red), and I (violet). Then we would have the thought content between the physical body and the etheric body. From my descriptions in the last lectures, however, you have realized that this thought content in its true nature is something much more real than what we experience in consciousness. What we experience in consciousness is, as I have said, only something that generates waves from the depths of our being up to the I. They rise up to the I. The feeling content lies between the etheric body and the astral body and in turn also rises up to the I; and the will content is located between the astral body and the I. It lies the closest to the I. We can say that the I has its most immediate experience of itself in the will, while feeling content and thought content rest in the depths of our being and only send their waves lapping upward into the I.

Now we also know, however, that the content of our willing, as experienced by us, is experienced dully. Of the will, as it manifests itself in an arm movement, in a leg movement, we know as little as we do of what happens between going to sleep and awaking. The will lives in us dully, and yet it lives really within the I as the I's most immediate neighbor. If we perceive the will consciously or, let us say, in an awake manner, we do so only through the projected thought shadows that come up from the depths of our being. The mental images that we experience consciously are the shadow pictures of a deep weaving of the soul but they are still only shadow pictures, while we experience the will in a most immediate way, though dully. We can have a waking, conscious perception of the will, however, only through the shadowy thought pictures.

This is how the matter appears to us when we study our human nature while focusing in particular on the inner depths. We see, I would like to say, how little of ourselves we contain in our consciousness, how little rises upward from our inner being to our consciousness. We understand, as it were, only little of what we are like on the inside in terms of our I, and we really perceive only the hue that our thought content casts upward into this dull, will-oriented I.

With our ordinary consciousness, we can actually see as an immediate reality little more of this thought-filled, dull I than what we feel of it shortly before awakening or shortly after dropping off to sleep. It is precisely into this dull I, however, that the world of sense perceptions breaks upon awakening. Just try to become aware once of how dull your life is between going to sleep and awakening, so that you experience this dullness almost as a void. Only upon awakening, when you open your senses to the outside world, will you be in a position—thanks to your sense impressions—really to experience yourself as an I. Now the appearance [Schein] of the sense perceptions penetrates the I. Now the appearance of the sense perceptions fills that dull being that I have just described, so really the I lives as a fully conscious entity in the earthly human being only when we are in a state of interaction with the outside world through our sensory pictures and through all that has penetrated our senses; and coming from within as the most illuminating response we can muster is the shadowed content of our thoughts.

One can say, then, that the sense perceptions penetrate in from without. The content of our willing is perceived only dully. The feeling content rises upward and unites with the sense impressions. We see red, and it fills us with a particular feeling; we see blue, we hear the notes C-sharp or C and have an accompanying feeling. Then, however, we also reflect on what these sense impressions are. The thought content, which comes from within interweaves itself with the sense impressions. Something from within unites with something from without. That we live in the fully awake I, however—this we actually 'owe to the appearance of the senses (Sinneschein), and to this our I contributes just so much by way of response from within as I have been able to describe here.

Let us note well this appearance of the senses. Let us look upon it and realize clearly that it is entirely dependent on our physical existence. It can fill us only as we, in waking condition, put forward our physical body to meet the outer world. This appearance of the senses ceases at the moment we lay down our physical body upon passage through the portal of death, as we have already discussed in the previous studies.

Our I, then, is awakened, as it were, between birth and death through the appearance of the senses. Of our actual nature as awake, earthly human beings, we can possess only so much as is enlivened by the appearance of the senses. Imagine vividly how the being that is the human I grasps this appearance of the senses—which is, after all, only an appearance—and interweaves it with our actual human being. Now consider how there an outer becomes an inner—you can see it, for example, when you dream; consider how a delicate tissue is spun inside of us, as it were, into which the sense impressions weave. The I appropriates what comes in through the sense impressions. The outer becomes inner. Only what does become inner, however, can carry the human being through the portal of death.

It thus is only a delicate tissue to begin with that the human being carries through the portal of death. His physical body he lays down. It had mediated the sense impressions for Therefore the sense impressions are only appearance, for the physical body is laid aside. Only so much of the appearance as the I has taken up into itself is borne through the portal of death. The etheric body is also laid aside a short time after death. When that happens, however, our being also lays aside what is between the physical body and the etheric body. This at first dissolves, as we have seen, in the cosmos at large, constituting only the seed for further worlds, but it does not really continue to live together with our human essence after death. Only what has crested upward like waves and has combined itself with the appearance of the senses continues to live. When this is pondered, one can acquire an approximate mental image of what the human being carries through the portal of death.

Because this is so, one must answer the question, “How can someone build a connecting bridge to a departed person?” in the following way: this connecting bridge cannot be built at all if we send abstract thoughts, non-pictorial mental images over to the departed human being. If we think of the departed one with abstract mental images—what is that like? Abstract mental images retain almost nothing of the appearance of the senses; they are faded, but also there lives in them nothing of an inner reality but only what is cast up to them from the inner reality. Only a tinge of the human essence resides in mental images. Therefore, what we grasp with our intellect is in truth much less real than what fills our I in the appearance of the senses. What fills our I in the appearance of the senses makes our I awake, but this wakeful content is only interspersed with the waves that crest upward from our inner being. If we therefore direct abstract, faded thoughts to a departed person, he cannot have community with us; he can do so very well, however, if we picture to ourselves quite intimately and concretely how we stood with him on such-and-such a spot, how we talked with him, how he asked us for this or that in his particular way. The thought content, the pallid thought content, will not yield much, but it will be much more effective if we develop a fine sensitivity for the sound of his speech, for the special kind of emotion or temperament with which he held conversation with us, if we feel the living, warm togetherness along with his wishes—in short, if we picture these concrete things but in such a way that our mental images are pictures: if we see ourselves, as we stood or sat together, as we experienced the world with him. One might easily believe that it is precisely the pallid thoughts that arc across death's gap. This is not the case. The vivid pictures arc across. In pictures from the appearance of the senses, in pictures that we have only owing to the fact of our eyes and ears, our sense of touch, and so on—in such pictures there stirs something that the dead person can perceive. For at death he has laid aside everything that is only abstract, pallid, intellectual thinking. Our pictorial mental images, insofar as we have made them our own, we do take with us through death. Our science, our intellectual thinking, all of that we do not take along through death. A person may be a great mathematician, may have myriad geometrical conceptions—all this he lays aside just as he does his physical body. The person may know a great deal about the starry skies and the surface of the earth. Insofar as he has absorbed this knowledge in pallid thoughts it is laid aside at death. If, as a learned botanist, a person crosses a meadow and entertains his theoretical thoughts about the flowers of the meadow, then this is a thought content that fulfills him only here on earth. Only what strikes his eye and is colored by his love for the flowers, what is given human warmth by the union of the pallid thought with the I experience, is carried through death's portal.

It is important that one know what can be acquired here on earth as real, human property in such a way that one can carry it through the portal of death. It is important that one know how the whole of intellectualism, which has comprised the centerpiece of human civilization since the middle of the fifteenth century, is something that has significance only in earthly life and that cannot be borne through the portal of death. One thus can say: the human race has lived throughout the past ages of which we have spoken—beginning with the Atlantean catastrophe, throughout the long ages of the ancient Indian civilization, the ancient Persian civilization, through the Egyptian-Chaldean times, and then through our era up to our time—the human race has not lived in all this time, that is to say up to the first third or so of the fifteenth century, such an outspokenly intellectual life as the one we hold so dear today as our civilized life. Before the fifteenth century, however, human beings experienced much more of everything that could be borne through the portal of death. Precisely what they have become proud of since the fifteenth century, precisely what makes life worth living for the cultured, the so-called cultured, world today, is something that is obliterated upon death. One could really ask, what is the characteristic feature of modern civilization? The most characteristic feature of all, which is so praised as having been brought about through Copernicanism, through Galileanism, is something that must be laid aside at death, something that the human being really can acquire only through earthly life, but also something that can be only an earthly possession for him. By developing himself up to modern civilization, man has attained precisely this goal of experiencing here between birth and death all those things that have significance only for the earth. It is very important for modern man to understand thoroughly that the content of what is regarded most highly, and especially in our schools, has an actual significance only for earthly life. In our ordinary schools, we instruct our children in everything that is modern civilization, not for their immortal soul but only for their earthly existence.

Intellectualism can be grasped correctly in the following manner. When the human being awakens in the morning, the sensory pictures come streaming in to him. He notices only that the thoughts interweave these sensory pictures like a delicate net, and he is actually living in pictures. These pictures vanish immediately when he falls asleep in the evening. His thought life vanishes too, but the appearance of these sensory pictures is nevertheless essential, for he takes with him through death as much of this as his I has made its own. What comes from within—the thought content—remains, as you know, for a few days after death in the form of a brief recollection, so long as the human being still bears the etheric body. Then the etheric body dissolves itself into the far reaches of the cosmos. There is a brief experience for the human being immediately after death regarding his pictures that contain the senses' appearance, insofar as his I has made it his own: he feels these pictures interwoven then by strong lines with what he has made his own through his knowledge. He lays this brief experience aside, however, along with his etheric body, a few days after death. Then he lives into the cosmos with his pictures, and these pictures become interwoven into the cosmos in the same way in which they were interwoven into his own being before death. Before death, the pictures in the sense perceptions are formed from within. They are grasped by the human being, I might say, insofar as it is delimited by his skin. After death, after passage of the few days when one still experiences the thought life—because one still has the etheric body, before the etheric body's dissolution—after these days the pictures become in a certain way larger. They expand in such a way that they now are absorbed from without, as it were, while during earthly life they were absorbed from within. Schematically one could draw the entire process, as shown below.

If this is the bodily boundary of the human being (see drawing, bright) acid he has his impressions in the waking state, then his inner experiences are formed by the sense impressions within his being. After death, the human being experiences his boundary as an encompassing feeling; but his impressions wander out of him, as it were. He senses them to be in his surroundings (red). Thus a person who during earthly life could say, “My soul experiences are inside of me,” now says to himself, after death, “My soul experiences are in front of me,” or, said better, “They are all around me.” They merge with the surroundings. Because of this they also become inwardly different. Let us say, for example, that this person, because he loves flowers, has strongly impressed upon himself in ever-repeated sense impressions a rose, a red rose; then, when after death he experiences this wandering out, he will see the rose larger, visibly larger, but it will appear to him greenish in color. The inner content of the picture also changes. Everything that the person has perceived of nature's green, insofar as he really has experienced this green nature with human participation, not merely with abstract thoughts, now becomes for him after death a gentle reddish environment of his whole being. The inner, however, wanders out: what the person calls his inner being he will have after death in his environment outside.

These realizations, then, which concern the human being, insofar as he in turn is connected to the world itself, we can acquire through spiritual science. Only by acquiring these insights do we receive a picture of what we ourselves actually are. We cannot get a picture of what we ourselves really are if we know ourselves only as we are between birth and death, with our inwardly woven thoughts. For these are the things that as such fall away at death. Of the senses' appearance there remains only what I have just depicted to you, and it remains in the way I have described.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the materialistic outlook and world conception of civilized humanity had reached a culmination, as I have often emphasized, there was much talk of how the human being, when he founds a religion or when he speaks of something divine-spiritual in the outer world, really only projects his inner being to the outside. You need only read such a thoroughly materialistic writer as Feuerbach,¹⁵ who had a strong influence on Richard Wagner, in order to recognize how this materialistic thinking sees nature as being all there is out there. That is to say, this materialistic attitude sees only the appearance of nature in the form in which it presents itself to us between birth and death and then believes that all thinking about the divine-spiritual is only the inner being of man projected outward. The result is that man feels comfortable only with the concept of the divine-spiritual as a projection of his inner being. This seeming insight received the name anthropomorphism. It was said that the human being is anthropomorphic; he pictures the world according to what lies within him. Then, of course, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the more representative among these materialistic thinkers coined a slogan that was meant to illustrate how splendidly advanced the world of human beings had now become in our modern age. They said: “The ancients believed that God created the world. We moderns, however, know that man created God; that is, God is a projection of man's inner being.” They said and believed this precisely because all they knew of our inner side was what has significance between birth and death. I reality it was not just an erroneous opinion that they formed; rather, they had formed a world view that was in fact anthropomorphic, for they had no other notions of the divine-spiritual than those that the human being had managed at last to cast, to project, out of himself.

Compare with that everything that I have described, for example, in my book, An Outline of Occult Science. There you will not see the world described like our human mental images from within. What I describe there as Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth evolutions the human being does not carry within him. One must first treat what the human being experiences after death, that is, what he can place in front of himself. There is nothing anthropomorphic here. This Occult Science is presented cosmomorphically; that is, the impressions are such that they are actually experienced as existing outside of the human being. These things therefore cannot be understood by those people who can experience in their conceptions only what lies within the human being, as has come to be the case especially in the intellectual age since the middle of the fifteenth century. This age perceives only what resides in the inner being of man and projects it outward. Never will one be able to describe an outer world as I do in that chapter of my Occult Science where the Saturn evolution is treated—not even in the simplest, most elementary phenomenon—if one only projects outside what exists in the inner being of man.

You see, the human being lives, for example, in warmth. Just as he perceives the world in color through his sense of sight, so he also perceives the world in warmth through his sense of warmth. He experiences the warmth in his human inner being, I might call it, insofar as it is delimited by his skin. Already, however, he is abstracting in his perception. Warmth perceived in the life of the world really cannot be pictured otherwise than by grasping it in its totality. There is always something adhering to warmth, however, which in terms of human experience can be expressed only by referring to the sense of smell. Warmth, perceived objectively outside ourselves, always has something of scent associated with it too.

Now read the chapter in my Occult Science about that process of our earth that lives chiefly in warmth: where these things are described you will find simultaneous mention of scent impressions. You see from this that warmth is not described in the same way in which man experiences it in intellectualism. It is placed outside the human being, and what he experiences here between birth and death as warmth comes back after death as a scent impression.

Light is something that the human being experiences really quite abstractly here on earth. He experiences this light by surrendering to a continuous deception. I'd like to point to it here too: I have written—let me see, it must be thirty-eight years ago now—a treatise, very young and green, in which I attempted to describe how people speak of light. But where is the light anyway? Man perceives colors; those are his sense impressions. Wherever he looks: colors, he perceives some shadings of colors even when he knows it is a shade. But light—he lives in light, and yet he doesn't perceive the light; through the light he perceives colors, but the light itself he does not perceive. You may gauge the degree of the illusions in which we live in this regard in the age of intellectualism when you consider that our physics offers a “theory of light”; then we attempt to give it some substance by considering it “a theory of light.” It has no substance. Only a theory of color has substance, not a theory of light.

Only the entirely healthy nature-appreciation of Goethe could suffice to create not a science of optics but a theory of color. We open our physics books nowadays and there we see light being created from scratch, as it were. Rays are constructed and reflected, and they perform all kinds of tricks. But it isn't real! One sees color. One can speak of a theory of color but not of a theory of light. One lives in light. Through the light and in the light we perceive color, but nothing of the light. No one can see the light. Imagine being in a space with light streaming through it, but there is not a single object in this space. You might as well be in the dark. In a space that is completely dark you would perceive no more than in the naked light, nor would you be able to differentiate between the two. You could differentiate only through an inner experience. As soon as a human being has gone through the portal of death, however, then, just as he perceived the scent that accompanied warmth he now perceives something about the light for which we in our present-day intellectual language do not even have an appropriate word. We would have to say: smoke [Rauch]; a flooding forth—he really perceives it. Hebrew still had something like that: Ruach. This flooding forth is perceived. That which alone could justifiably be called air is perceived there.

If we now consider what appears everywhere in our earthly circumstances as chemical reactions, we perceive them in their appearances, these chemical workings, these chemical etheric workings. Spiritually seen, without the physical body—again, therefore, after death—they provide what is the content of water.

And life itself: it is what comprises the content of the earth, of the solidity. Our entire earth is perceived from the viewpoint of the dead person as a large, living being. When we walk about here on earth, we perceive its separate entities, insofar as they are earthly entities, as being dead. On what do we base our perception of dead things at all, however? The entire earth lives, and it reveals itself immediately to us in its life if we glimpse it from the other side of death. If that is our earth, we only see a very small portion of it at any one time and are oriented to seeing just this small portion—only when we hover about it in spirit and moreover have outwardly an ability to perceive from without, so that the impressions are enlarged, do we perceive it as a whole being. Then, however, it is a living being.

With this, I have directed your attention to something that is extraordinarily important to call to mind

You see, I had a conversation once with a gentleman who said that we now know, finally, thanks to the theory of relativity, that we could just as well imagine the human being to be twice as large as he really is; it's all relative, everything just depends on the human viewpoint.

This is a completely unrealistic way of looking at the matter. For let us say—the picture doesn't quite fit, but let us say—if a ladybug is crawling about on a person, it has then a particular size in relation to that person. The ladybug doesn't perceive the entire human being but, in keeping with its own size, just a small portion of the person. And so for the ladybug the person on which it is crawling about is not living but rather is just as dead to the ladybug as the earth is to the human being. You must also be able to think this thought the other way around. You must be able to say to yourself: in order to be able to experience the earth as being dead, the human being must be of a particular size upon the earth. The size of the human being is not a coincidence in relation to the earth but is completely appropriate to man's entire life upon the earth. Therefore you cannot think of man—for example, in keeping with the relativity theory—as being big or little. Only if you think and imagine quite abstractly, quite intellectually, that man is big or little; only then can you say, “If we were organized a bit differently, man might appear twice as big,” and the like.

This stops when we take up a conception that goes beyond the subjective and that can keep in mind man's size in relation to the earth. After death the whole human being expands out into the universe and after a time following death man becomes much larger than the earth itself. Then he experiences it as a living being. Then he experiences chemical workings in everything that is water. In the airiness he experiences light, not light and air separately from one another but light in the air, and so on. The human being experiences, then, different pictures from those of our waking life between birth and death.

I said that we can take with us through death nothing of all that our soul has acquired in an intellectual way. Before the fifteenth century, however, man still possessed a kind of legacy from ancient times. You know, of course, that in ancient times this legacy was so great that the human being still had an atavistic clairvoyance, which then paled and dulled, withered away, and which has passed over into complete abstraction since the middle pf the fifteenth century. What the human being took with him through death of this divine legacy, however, is what actually gave man his being. Just as the human being here assimilates physical matter when he enters earthly existence via birth, or rather conception, so also was it the divine essence that he brought with him and carried again through death that gave him—the expression, if I may use it at all, is unusual, but will help make this clear to you—gave him a certain spiritual weight (a polar opposite, naturally, of any physical weight). The divine essence which he brought along and took with him through death gave him a certain spiritual weight.

The way people are being incarnated now, if they are really members of civilization, they no longer have this legacy with them. At most you can still detect it here and there: those people who are not really of our civilization (and they are becoming ever fewer) still have it in them. And it is a serious matter indeed for the evolution of humanity that the human being essentially loses his being through what he acquires through intellectual civilization. He is heading toward this danger, that after death he will, to be sure, grow outward so as to have the aforementioned impressions, but he can lose his actual being, his ‘I’, as I have already described yesterday from a different viewpoint. There is really only one avenue of rescue for this being, for modern and future man, and it may be recognized in the following: if we wish, here in the sense world, to take hold of a reality that makes thinking so powerful that it is not merely a pale image but has inner vitality, then we can recognize such a reality issuing from within the human being only in the kind of pure thinking that I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as forming the basis for action. Otherwise we have in all human consciousness only the senses' appearance. If we act freely out of pure thinking, however, such as I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom, if we really have in pure thinking the impulses for our actions, then we give to this otherwise “appearance” thinking, to this intellectual thinking—in that it forms the basis of our actions—a reality. And that is the one reality that we can weave purely from within out into the senses' appearance and can carry with us through death.

What, then, are we really taking with us through death? What we have experienced here between birth and death in true freedom. Those actions that correspond to the description of freedom in my Philosophy of Freedom form the basis for what man can carry through death in addition to the senses' appearance, transformed in the way that I have described. Thereby he regains his being. By freeing himself from being determined in the world of the senses, he regains a being after death; he is thereby a real being. If we acquire this being, it is freedom that saves us as human souls from soul-spiritual death, saves us especially for the future.

Those people who abandon themselves only to their natural forces, that is, to their instincts and drives—I have described this from a purely philosophical standpoint in my Philosophy of Freedom—live in something that falls away with death. They then live into the spiritual world. To be sure, their pictures are there. They would gradually have to be taken by other spiritual beings, however, if the human being did not develop himself fully along the lines of freedom so that he might again acquire a being such as he had when he still possessed his divine-spiritual legacy.

The intellectual age thus is inwardly connected with freedom. That is why I could always say: the human being had to become intellectual so that he might become free. The human being loses his spiritual being in intellectualism, for he can carry nothing of intellectualism through the portal of death. He attains freedom here through intellectualism, however, and what he thus acquires in freedom—this he can take through the portal of death.

Man may think as much as he wants in a merely intellectual way—nothing of it goes through death's portal. Only when the human being uses his thinking in order to apply it in free deeds does that amount of it that he has acquired from his experiences of freedom go with him through death's portal as soul-spiritual substance, which makes him a being and not a mere knowing. In thinking, through intellectualism, our human essence is taken from us, in order to let us work through to freedom. What we experience in freedom is in turn given back to us as human essence. Intellectualism kills us, but it also gives us life. It lets us arise once again with our being totally transformed, making us into free human beings.

Today I have presented this as it appears in terms of the human being himself. What I have thus characterized today in terms of the human being alone I shall connect tomorrow with the Mystery of Golgotha, with the Christ experience, in order to show how in death and resurrection the Christ experience can now pour into the human being as inner experience. More of this tomorrow.

• 15. Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804–1872.

Yesterday we concentrated on the condition of the human astral body and I between going to sleep and waking up. Let us pick up the thread again. I said that if we consider the human physical and ether body during sleep and compare this to the I and astral body we have to say: The will-endowed or will-related I is given form out of the relationship it develops to the spirits of the other world during sleep. Using a diagram to show the I being given form, I said that if we see the furrowing given to the I (Fig. 42, light colour - white in diagram) as a kind of photographic negative—ignoring aspects of scale—the structure of the human brain would be like the Positive. The astral body would have to be envisaged as coloured by the soul element in its environment; I have shown this schematically by using a number of different colours (Fig. 43).

As I said yesterday, this does not cover the behaviour of the physical and ether bodies during sleep. Let us add this today. The human physical body is seemingly known in modern science, but it really and truly is only seemingly. Scientists take little account of the great difference between the human being in limbs and metabolism and the human being in the head. The constitution of the head person is a reflection of what the individual has been between death and rebirth. Again all aspects of scale are left aside.

Modern scientists take the structure of the physical brain to derive from the paternal and maternal organizations. Considering the matter from a number of different points of view, we have already realized that this is not the case. Put somewhat crudely and in radical terms, human beings develop in the physical world because initially substance is thrown into chaos in the maternal body. Into this chaotic matter, which is now outside the laws of both chemistry and physics, the powers to make the embryo what it will be are implanted out of the universe. The powers the individual has gained in the time between death and rebirth are inoculated, if I may put it like this, into these powers. The way I’d really like to put it is: With regard to form, the human being is implanted in the maternal body. Only the bed for the new human being is created in the maternal body, and the universe is constituted in such a way that if the opportunity is created for something specific to evolve, then this specific something will evolve.

The inner structure of the human head is such that in the first place it reflects what has been furrowed and coloured here during the previous life on earth, but in addition the whole universe may also be said to be re-created in this head. Modern science really does not have a very good grasp of the process by which insight and perception is gained. It is better to say: The complexity of the human brain really is a recreation of the universe. The form principles existing in the head cannot be penetrated by the 1 and astral body. They live an independent life in the human head, as I have shown before. Human beings know themselves to be I and astral body exactly because these two have an independent life. I and astral body can really only connect with the human being in limbs and metabolism. There they flourish, making us essentially into will-endowed creatures. This means that the human being of limbs and metabolism is essentially the dwelling place of the principle which on death returns to the world of the spirit. That world receives the individual human I and astral body and takes them onwards to new stages of existence. The human head, on the other hand, holds everything that comes from earlier lives, and from lives between death and rebirth, elements which have taken form in the head organization, as it were, and made themselves at home in it. The human head relates to the past, the human limbs and metabolism to the future. The rhythmical human being moves to and fro between past and future.

We need to see the physical human being in this light if we are to understand the form and structure of the limbs and their inner life. We then understand why the organization of the head is actually always breaking down, paralysing itself, whilst the organization of limbs and metabolism is always building itself up. We shall also understand why the organization of limbs and metabolism has to be connected with the chemical and physical nature of the earth, a connection which comes to expression in nutrition.

The human being of limbs and metabolism takes in elements which have a real need to develop further. In waking life, however, this human being needs to reckon with the forces that come from the earth itself. In this aspect we are subject to the earth’s gravity and to other earth forces. We are subject to the forces which enter into us with the food we eat. In this regard, therefore, we may be said to be entirely creatures of the earth. The evolution of form in limbs and metabolism had no part in what the individual lived through between death and rebirth, before entering into the present life on earth. This is the reason why the human being of limbs and metabolism also is not able to adapt to the spiritual universe outside when we are awake in life. In the waking state this aspect of the human being is given up to the physical earth.

This is not the case during sleep, however, for the human head contains the form principles of everything connected with the individual’s past, including life between death and rebirth. The forms of the organs in the human head contain subtle, fleeting images of the whole cosmos.

In waking life, the head, being all these images of the universe, is not able to influence the human being of limbs and metabolism. As the seat of the major sense organs, the head is continuously communicating with the earth world outside. In waking life, everything we see or hear influences us via the head. During sleep, the human head is not merely provided with physical nourishment. Physical nutrition, which essentially also happens in waking life, is not what matters most; something else is most essential for the human physical body during sleep.

The eye, for example, is not only the organization which provides for vision but at the same time it is also an image of the spiritual powers of the cosmos. Between death and rebirth the individual lives in the cosmos of soul and spirit. Like all organs in the head, the eye has a double function. The first is to enable communication with the outside world through vision, which happens during waking life. In the life of sleep, the eye and its surrounding parts, above all the surrounding nerves and blood, influence the physical organism in its metabolic and limb aspects. The powers of the eye closed in sleep influence the kidney system, for example, imbuing it with the cosmic image. Other organs in the head imprint other aspects of the cosmos on the human system of metabolism and limbs. For the physical body, therefore, the time we spend in sleep serves mainly to let the powers of the head structure the human being of metabolism and limbs (Fig. 42, reddish arrows). It is particularly during sleep that structuring powers radiate continually from the head to the lower human being, so that in sleep the soul and spirit aspect of the head is indeed the structurer of the human being of metabolism and limbs.

We have quite the wrong idea of creation if we see it as being limited to particular moments. We are in fact being created all the time. We are created out of the spirit every night; our system of metabolism and limbs is given structure and life out of the spirit night after night.

As you know, in modern materialistic science only the opposite of this is known, i.e. that the powers of the metabolism influence the used-up brain. That is only half the story, however, for as this effect is brought to bear from below upwards, the human being is enlivened out of soul and spirit in a process that takes the opposite direction. It is important to realize that these marvellous processes working from above downwards are governed by a high level of consciousness as we sleep, a level we human beings will not achieve until evolution on the planet Vulcan. It is the level of consciousness of the spirit human being. This level of consciousness is truly present in the human being today. It takes effect during sleep in the way I have just described. At our present level of consciousness we are not able to know our true nature well enough to be aware, under normal conditions, of the reality and activity of a level of consciousness which is infinitely higher than the conscious awareness we have of our daytime activities.

Real appreciation of such things is certainly dependent on human beings becoming more deeply religious through the science of the spirit. If people pursue activities in life that allow their true nature to be neglected so that it withers away, if they do not seek to implant in their physical bodies what can be implanted in them during life on earth, they bring destruction to something in themselves which, unknown to them in ordinary conscious awareness, is a much higher form of consciousness than they themselves are able to have.

Looking out into the universe we perceive a world which, if we gain real understanding, makes us go down on our knees in admiration. We must have the same attitude as we look, with real understanding, into the working of powers in our own inner nature that are greater than human powers. This, then, gives you an approximate indication of the situation in which the human physical body finds itself during sleep.

Apart from the physical body we also have an ether body (Fig. 42, hatched area). In the waking state this is continuously exposed to influences coming from the I, which is active in the world, and the astral body, which is connected with the I. In the waking state we always see the colours arising and fading away again and the other colouring effects which take place in the astral body and go across into the ether body. In fact, we see the ether body adapt itself to the astral body. We also see something enter into the ether body which is the I in its structuring. In short, in the waking state we see I and astral body play into the ether body. When asleep, the human being as I and astral body is outside the ether body, and the colouring of the astral body and structuring of the I do not enter into it. The ether body is then left to its own structuring principles. The way this comes to expression is that in sleep, the ether body assumes a structure that is an image of the universe and does so in a truly magnificent way.

The main substance of the etheric body is taken up by human beings as they move from pre-birth life to physical life on earth. Its composition depends on how the individual lived between death and rebirth. Everything the human being receives into himself from the universe—shown in symbolic form, as it were, in spiritual science as something the human being has taken in of the heavens from North, South, East, West—all this the etheric body bears within it. For the reasons given above, the ether body is unable to make this apparent in the waking state, but it does so in sleep. The human being is all memory then, to begin with memory of life on earth.

Occasionally people are aware that on entering into their etheric body they enter into a sea of images; they consider it part of their dreams. Anyone who has made the effort, however, to observe the sea of images which a person passes through, as it were, in the process of waking up, and observe the experiences made at that time, discovers that this ether body really contains the whole of our life on earth when we are asleep. In our sleep we are really alive and active in everything we have gone through in the ether body from the time we were born. It has however been structured for the ether body by cosmic powers. As astral body and I are not playing into it at this time, the ether body radiates what has been inculcated, inoculated into it at birth. The human ether body grows radiant (Fig. 43, yellow arrows).

This radiance of the human being in sleep is something truly significant. When the sun has gone down and the earth world is immersed in darkness of night, it represents the soul radiance of humanity, quite distinct from the physical radiance of the sun. Unfortunately, however, this soul radiance also contains everything the human being implants into the ether body via the astral body and I during life because he is bad, elements which are destructive and cause the ether body to wither. The evolution of the earth could not progress, however, without this radiance coming from human beings.

Someone equipped with the necessary organs who was out there in the cosmos, observing the earth from out there, would say: During the day you see the sunlight reflected from the part of the earth where the sun is shining; but when night covers part of the earth, the earth phosphoresces. The phosphorescence comes from the human ether bodies. The earth needs all this to progress in its evolution. If no human beings were asleep on earth, the vegetative powers of the earth would die down much more rapidly than they actually do. Human beings certainly do not exist on earth just for their own sake; they are not without significance for the way the earth as a whole is structured. For the whole of their life on earth, sleeping human beings radiate from their ether bodies into earth evolution what they have taken up in the world of the spirit between death and rebirth.

Thus we are able to say: For the physical body, radiation is from above downwards; for the ether body it is from the inside outwards. Human sleep definitely also has cosmic significance.

This is why I had to tell you yesterday that when an I and astral body return to the ether body it feels like autumn, and when they are free of the body in sleep it feels like spring or summer. It is indeed true that human beings become more sun-like or wintry in soul and spirit as the astral body goes in and out.

We may say, therefore, that during sleep the nature of the human ether body is such that the powers human beings gather between death and rebirth in the cosmos have a structuring effect on the earth. Again the level of consciousness is higher than that normally available for people’s waking activities. The consciousness of the life spirit is at work in the ether body’s activity during sleep. This is a level of consciousness human beings will only develop when our planet earth has reached its Venus metamorphosis.

We can see, therefore, that the relationship of I and astral body on the one hand, and physical body and ether body on the other, is such that they do not work together during sleep, but only from the time we wake up until we fall asleep. The relationship changes, with the swing of the pendulum moving between collaboration and non-collaboration. It is also the case that at the moment when I and astral body approach the physical and ether bodies on waking, and at the moment when they withdraw again on going to sleep, the interaction which occurs is governed by yet another level of consciousness which is above that used in human waking activity. We are able to influence our waking up and going to sleep in a certain, indirect way. But the subtle processes between I and astral body on the one hand and physical and ether bodies on the other as we go to sleep and wake up again are something our conscious human mind is not able to perceive.

I’d like to show this interaction with these arrows going in opposite directions (Fig. 43, blue). In this direction, in this interaction, as it comes to expression especially on waking up and going to sleep, though in a certain way it also continues in waking life and even during sleep, a principle comes into its own which we can say applies mainly to the astral body. We are able to say that the situation is such that the astral body is stimulated in a cosmic sense. Remember that from going to sleep to waking up the astral body is coloured in accord with its moral reactions, as I have shown yesterday. On waking up it enters into an ether body structured by the cosmos. It has to follow it and adapt to it. And we are able to say that cosmic astral powers influence human astral powers. This can be observed quite clearly in a specific case.

Imagine someone who has not gone through life between death and rebirth—which is true in the case of animals—and was newly created at birth, which is what Aristotelian philosophy postulates. This individual would not bring the effects of earlier lives on earth and between death and rebirth into the new life. His eyes, his senses would roam over experiences in the outside world, but he would have no concepts based on geometry and mathematics to make connections between them. This is just one instance, one of those where geometry, which holds true for the cosmos, enters into interaction with principles that apply only in the earth environment. Rational concepts of mathematics and geometry enter into empirical experience gained on earth. This interaction is continuous, and it takes place in such a way that the spirit self is the consciousness active in it. Observing the world from a mathematical point of view, people have no idea, of course, that as they do so, the spirit self has them by the scruff of the neck. They fail to take note of this because they limit themselves to the reflection of it which exists in ordinary human consciousness.

When the human being is finally neither sleeping nor in the process of waking up or going to sleep, when I and astral body have entered fully into ether body and physical body, we have the ordinary level of present-day conscious awareness, when we are given up to everything that is outside of spirit human being, life spirit and spirit self. When humanity will have reached the level of existence which it will have when the earth has gone through its metamorphosis into Jupiter existence, as described in my Occult Science, it will no longer be the case that people use geometry to create a cube in an external way, and then discover that this ideal cube form fits a salt crystal. Human beings will be given up to the outside world to such an extent that they will be in the salt themselves, as it were. There won’t be any salt of this kind on Jupiter, of course, but analogies like this help us to get a clearer picture of human life as it will be in the future.

Using the method we used yesterday to consider astral body and I, we can therefore also gain an idea of how physical and etheric body are during sleep. The physical body is actually self-structuring in limbs and metabolism during sleep, the ether body world-structuring.

Thinking back to what we were considering yesterday, we have to say: The human astral body moves out of the physical and ether bodies during sleep. The powers of soul in the universe stream into it, and the way they enter into it depends on the inner life of mind and soul. If someone is in sympathy with all that is good, the most beautiful powers of the universe will be able to enter. If people develop their inclinations towards evil, their astral bodies will wither away. During sleep, the astral body assumes different nuances of colour for different levels of feeling and inner responsiveness (Fig. 43, reddish, yellow, pink, mauve). We may say that individual people sparkle up in their astral bodies during sleep depending on the way they are. The astral body represents our inner state of heart and soul during waking hours. This, as it were, pours into the soul universe, and human beings experience themselves in this pouring-out process in so far as their inner state has changed, but in a situation where they encounter the world of the spirit in that inner state.

If human beings were able to enter into the consciousness of the life spirit when their astral bodies are active and alive out there, they would be able to speak to that which happens with their astral bodies. This actually happens, but at an unconscious level. Who would be speaking, if humans beings suddenly achieved the level of consciousness of the life spirit in their sleep? The only way of putting this is to say: The human astral body would be speaking, as judge over good and evil in the human being. So that we really have to say: In sleep, the astral body becomes the judge of the soul. Rightly understood, this statement is important for human life. It is a truth that shines out as if from beyond the threshold of the world of the spirit, a truth human beings should call to mind as often as possible.

Take the corresponding situation for the I. The I moves out of the physical and ether bodies, structuring itself in accord with the powers of the universal entities in the sphere of the spirit. It becomes what it can become in the light of how it lives in the physical body. If it were to come awake to the spirit human being level of consciousness, it would not merely speak to itself, as the astral body would if suddenly given the life spirit level of consciousness; the I would be given the level of consciousness which is active in the physical body it has left behind, sending powers from above downwards. If, then, human ‘I’s had this level of consciousness when out of the body during sleep, human beings would know not only the totality of judgements passed on them but they would see that which they are in the process of becoming, now as images, which will be the seed for future lives on earth.

I cannot think of any other way of putting this in a sentence than this: The I becomes its own sacrifice, a sacrifice brought by the spirit which is active in the body. A sacrifice may be such that it is accepted with pleasure, which may also be the case for the I when it is given structure out there. A sacrifice may also be such that it is rejected. These are the extremes. Mostly, of course, human beings experience something which lies more in the middle. But a sacrifice may be rejected, having been found unworthy. If human beings present themselves to the spirits of the universe in such a way that they have to wither away greatly because of experiences they had in their physical and etheric bodies during waking hours, they become rejects.

You see, therefore, that the idea of sacrifice is certainly applicable in this case. And it seems to me that these two statements: In sleep, the astral human being becomes the judge of the soul, and: The I becomes its own sacrifice, are extraordinarily important if we are to understand human nature fully.

If we consider what the instinctive judgements of humanity have achieved in the past, judgements made not with the clarity of mind we must use today to search for anthroposophical knowledge of the spirit, but from instinct, we become aware of images representing significant original wisdom possessed by humanity. I have spoken of this before. They come to expression in ancient myths and sayings and also in the rites which have survived in different religious systems.

This is why we feel profound reverence for traditional religious paintings and images of ancient rites if we understand them rightly. Essentially it is true to say that religious feeling can only come alive again in human hearts if insight into the world gained through the science of the spirit—insight that is more than mere words, but perceived in its deepest meaning—takes hold not only of the head, but of the whole human being. The science of the spirit must not only provide us with insight into the world but make us feel reverence for the spirit which is at work in the world. This has been particularly evident to us today.

This science of the spirit will be able to quicken religious feeling in human hearts. Humanity has however also gone through a time when people lived only for intellectualism, rationalism and the materialism connected with this—we know this had to be, for the sake of achieving independence. Today the greater part of humanity is still caught up in these things. There has to be a return, however, to perception of the spiritual in the world, to living beyond mere intellectual understanding of the world, beyond experience limited to the purely head aspect of the human being.

If we go back beyond the age of the intellect to the days when the religious images of old were still alive—also serving as images to convey insight well into the Medieval period of modern humanity—if we consider the images created in the performance of religious rites, we find something in all of these which is enormously similar, except that it was gained through instinct, to the insights we are now able to gain in the worlds of the spirit, though now in the light of clear conscious awareness.

I really have to say that if the idea expressed in the words: “In sleep, the astral body becomes the judge of the soul” comes from Inspiration, we find this well represented in Michelangelo’s fresco The Last Judgement on the altar of the Sistine Chapel. Here we have something that comes from time immemorial. It has merely assumed Christian form and with this become more traditional. Pictures like these were painted out of tradition. There were times in human evolution, however, when they were seen in a living way, when instinct made people see the inspired Imagination of human souls pass judgement on themselves in sleep.

Again, if we consider the image of the Lamb of God, which touches us so deeply, the image of the Christ uniting himself with the human I, entering into it, the thought of the I becoming the sacrifice as it enters into sleep arises in heart and mind—particularly when we contemplate the Lamb sacrificing itself—we discover how fittingly the image of the Lamb expresses the sacrificial nature of the human being in sleep. We discover that an instinctive, wisdom-filled consciousness gave rise to this image, which the I needs in its life on earth, because during sleep it becomes the sacrifice of its own selfhood.

We can do no other but again and again point out that the anthroposophical science of the spirit, as it evolves, seeks to develop completely clear concepts, the kind of clear concepts which otherwise exist only in mathematics, or geometry. But because the concepts gained in the science of the spirit have their roots in the living life of the cosmic spirits they are always such that they do not leave us cold, the way mathematical concepts do, but also fill us with the warmth of inner feeling and with will impulses to fire us. Here we see the close relationship between clear thinking, warmth of feeling and energy-laden will impulses. This, then, is a point of view which allows us to perceive human nature in its fullness.

Many aspects of history, too, only find their explanation if we are able to base ourselves on such a perception of the human being. Well into the Middle Ages, as I said, many people still understood the ancient images, in which the world is seen sub specie aeternitatis, in the light of eternity, a kind of understanding that still existed in the old instinctive life of wisdom and which has to be regained in clarity of mind, seeking to achieve it through the anthroposophical science of the spirit.

We sometimes see strange individuals come up in history, people who seem rather out of place in the present-day situation. Travelling in Italy, I once talked to a priest belonging to the Benedictine order in Monte Cassino. He told me that the list of saints in his breviary included the Saxon German emperor Henry II,⁴¹ also called “the Saint”—I do not know how far this is still mentioned in the history books. What Henry II was after was an Ecclesia catholica non Romana, that was his true aim, though he is called a saint. In his day, that is, in the 10th, 11th century, it was certainly still possible to speak out of real experience of old traditional wisdom and say that what had come into the world through Christianity should be an Ecclesia catholica, meaning a church for the whole of humanity in which the spirit reigns which was intended to come into the world through Christianity. But he wanted an Ecclesia catholica non Romana, for the Roman Catholic Church had become a worldly kingdom. Truth is that everywhere where kingdoms of the spirit become worldly kingdoms the ahrimanic principle takes hold of what lives as a holy of holies and has lived as such in the ancient wisdom possessed by humanity. In the days of Henry II, people were still strongly aware that it was possible to separate Ecclesia catholica and Ecclesia catholica Romana and that the desirable aim was an Ecclesia catholica non Romana.

As I said, Henry II is out of place as a saint in the breviary. The Ecclesia catholica Romana has not the least cause to include him among the saints, for he was one of the people who in a fiery, holy enthusiasm for a catholic church actually wanted to vanquish the Roman Catholic Church.

Historical facts like these ought to be brought to mind especially when reference is made to the tremendously important truths which can be brought back again to the surface of human awareness through anthroposophical science of the spirit. It is very necessary to point this out today, for individual instances which may disgust us as they come up from the Ecclesia catholica Romana right here on our doorstep⁴² allow us to see how the ahrimanic spirit was able to enter into it. On the one hand we must not let this ahrimanic spirit deceive us into thinking that the Ecclesia catholica Romana does not hold the light-filled wisdom of eternity. When I was able to give a course here for theologians, it was evident that with the longing felt by Protestants to deepen Protestantism in its spiritual aspects, to get out of rationalism, out of intellectualism, it came as a real liberation for some of those present to hear the words: Ecclesia catholica non Romana. For today we have definitely reached a point where rationalism must be overcome just as much as the worldly nature of the Catholic Church has to be overcome; humanity must come together again in a life of the spirit that is for all, a life of the spirit to which none may lay claim who have any kind of desire to rule the world.

The ahrimanic spirit is a lying spirit. It may happen that lying minds fall so low in this lying spirit as to declare falsehood to be truth. It is necessary, therefore, that out of the depths of what is happening in the world we come to abhor lies utterly. We truly come to abhor lies if we are able to say, in full awareness: In sleep, the astral body becomes the judge of the soul. The I in sleep becomes the sacrifice of its selfhood.

Darkness is thrown on these profound truths by the ahrimanic spirit, which has also entered into the religious creeds of recent times. It will be up to people who in all honesty, and with some energy, profess themselves to be followers of anthroposophy not just to develop a superficial, intellectual liking for the wisdom anthroposophy is able to offer, but to develop real inner energy of feelings and will, and to let this energy unite with what mind and spirit are able to perceive of the world of the spirit through the science of the spirit which takes its orientation from anthroposophy.

This, my friends, is also intended to teach you how important it is to distinguish between the element to be found even in the traditional continuation of religious images and images created in religious rites and the way in which these are sometimes used today.

Surely all of us must feel the deepest reverence for something which is contained in the ritual of the Russian Orthodox Church, something which as it were shines out to us from the spiritually grey-haired ancient Orient. Our approach to these ritual acts can always be such that we penetrate through what is happening there to the tremendous depth which comes to revelation. Millennia and millennia of wisdom evolved from instinct come to expression in these ritual acts.

Years ago I attended such a ritual in Helsingfors.⁴³ It was at Easter and it is fair to say this was one of the saddest events in my life to remember, to see how the popes, the most terrible inner liars, acted out their comedy based on eternal truth. That is how it is in the world today. Under the influence of ahrimanic materialism, lies are presented on the outside, and the deepest truth lies within, and the two are brought together in a truly dreadful way. You have to have a real feeling for this, or you will not develop the right energy in your understanding of the nature of the human being.

That was an extreme case, but the same happens everywhere today, with differing degrees of intensity. Anthroposophical awareness should be such that we see these things, and are able to distinguish clearly between truth and falsehood, a falsehood which under the pressures of external circumstances is very much hidden. We must always gain something from entering deeply into anthroposophy—for the human being as a whole and above all for the conscious awareness belonging to our age. This is what I wanted to say to you in connection with what we have been considering here.

• 41. Henry the Saint (973–1024).
• 42. Diatribe entitled “The Secrets of the Dornach Temple” published by M. Kully in Basle, 1920-21.
• 43. Helsingfors, Easter 1912. See letter Marie Steiner wrote on 13 April 1912 to Mieta Waller: “There was an Easter celebration in the church ...”. Nachrichten der Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung Easter 1967, No. 7, p. 12.

IN 1913 on the hill in Dornach near Basel, Switzerland, construction had begun on the building then known as the Johannesbau and later to be called the Goetheanum, the central headquarters of the anthroposophical movement. Members of the Anthroposophical Society from all parts of the world had been called upon to work on the building, and they were joined by a growing number of others who moved to Dornach, either permanently or temporarily, on their own initiative. Thus a unique center of anthroposophical activity developed in Dornach, a center that was, understandably enough, burdened with the shortcomings and problems unavoidable in such a group.

In the summer of 1914, these difficulties escalated when World War I broke out, since people from many different nations, including those at war, had to work together and get along with each other. Isolation from the rest of the world and, last but not least, both local and more widespread opposition to the building and the people it attracted, further complicated the situation. In spite of all obstacles, however, the building continued to grow under the artistic leadership of Rudolf Steiner, who was well-loved as a teacher and felt by all to be a bulwark of constancy. But in the summer of 1915 all this changed as a result of incidents that threatened to test the Dornach group, and thus the Anthroposophical Society as a whole, to the breaking point.

Rudolf Steiner's marriage to Marie von Sivers at Christmas of 1914 had provoked not only general gossip, but also some bizarre mystical behavior on the part of a member named Alice Sprengel. [ Note 1 ] Heinrich Goesch (see below) and his wife Gertrud seized upon her strange ideas and made use of them in personal attacks on Rudolf Steiner. Since this was done publicly in the context of the Society, Rudolf Steiner asked that the Society itself resolve the case. This resulted in weeks of debate, at the end of which all three were expelled from the Society. Rudolf and Marie Steiner did not take part either in the debates or in the decision to rescind their membership.

The documents that follow reconstruct the events of the case in the sequence in which they occurred.

Alice Sprengel (b. 1871 in Scotland, d. 1949 in Bern, Switzerland) had joined the Theosophical Society in Munich in the summer of 1902, at a time when Rudolf Steiner had not yet become General Secretary for Germany. She joined the German Section a few years later. In a notice issued by the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society in the fall of 1915 informing members about the case, Miss Sprengel is described as having undergone unusual suffering in her childhood. At the time of her entry into the Society, she still impressed people as being very dejected. In addition, she was unemployed at that time and outwardly in very unfortunate circumstances. For that reason, efforts were made to help her.

Marie Steiner, then Marie von Sivers, sponsored her involvement in the Munich drama festival in 1907 and arranged for her to be financially supported by members in Munich. In order to help her find a means of supporting herself in line with her artistic abilities, Rudolf Steiner advised her on making symbolic jewelry and the like for members of the Society. It was also made possible for her to make the move to Dornach in 1914. She, however, interpreted this generous assistance to mean that she had a significant mission to fulfill within the Society. Having been given the role of Theodora in Rudolf Steiner's mystery dramas fed her delusions with regard to her mission, as did the fact that toward the end of the year 1911, in conjunction with the project to construct a building to house the mystery dramas, Rudolf Steiner had made an attempt to found a “Society for Theosophical Art and Style” in which she had been nominated as “keeper of the seal” because of her work as an artist. She imagined having lived through important incarnations and even believed herself to be the inspirer of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual teachings. In addition, having been asked to play Theodora gave rise to the delusion that she had received a symbolic promise of marriage from Rudolf Steiner, and she then suffered a breakdown as a result of Rudolf Steiner's marriage to Marie von Sivers at Christmas 1914. Her letters to Rudolf Steiner and Marie Steiner, reproduced below, clearly reveal that she was deeply upset.

Letter from Alice Sprengel to Rudolf Steiner
(undated; received December 25, 1914. Cf. p. 159.)

“Seven years now have passed,” [ Note 2 ] Dr. Steiner, since you appeared to my inner vision and said to me, “I am the one you have spent your life waiting for; I am the one for whom the powers of destiny intended you.”

You saw the struggles and doubts this experience occasioned in me; you knew that in the end my conviction was unshakable—yes, so it is. And you waited for my soul to open and for me to speak about this. Yet I remained silent, because my heart was broken. Long before I learned of theosophy, but also much more recently, I had had many experiences that made me say, “I willingly accept whatever suffering life brings me, no matter how hard it may be. After all, I have been shown by the spirit that it cannot be different.” But this is something that seems to go beyond the original plan of destiny; I lack the strength to bear it, and so it kills something in me, destroys forces I should once have possessed. These experiences were mostly instances of people deliberately abusing my confidence, and all in the name of love. But I had the feeling that this was not only my own fault; it seemed as if the will of destiny was inflicting more on me than I could bear.

I had some vague idea of why that might be so. Once, some years ago, I heard a voice within me saying, “There are beings in the spiritual world whose work requires that human beings sustain hope, but they have no interest in seeing these hopes fulfilled—on the contrary.” At that point I was not fully aware of what we were later to hear about the mystery of premature death, of goals not achieved, and so forth.

Then, however, I bore within me a wish and a hope that seemed like a proclamation from the spiritual world. This wish and this hope had made it possible for me to bear the unbearable; they worked in me with such tremendous force that they carried me along with them. My soul was in such a condition, however, that it could neither relinquish them nor tolerate their fulfillment, or, to put it better, it could not live up to what their fulfillment would have demanded of it. Thus I could not come to clarity on what the above-mentioned experience meant for me as an earthly human being. Neither the teaching nor the teacher was enough to revive my soul; that could only be done by a human being capable of greater love than any other and thus capable of compensating for a greater lack of love.

I can no longer remain silent; it speaks in me and forces me to speak. Years ago I begged you for advice, asked for enlightenment, and your words gave me hope and comfort. I am grateful for that, but today I would no longer be able to bear it. Why did you say to me recently that I looked well, that I should persevere? Did you think I was already aware of the step you are taking now, and that I had already “gotten over it”? I was as far from that as ever.

In conclusion, I ask that you let Miss von Sivers read this letter.

Alice Sprengel

* * *

Letter from Alice Sprengel to Rudolf Steiner

Arlesheim
February 3, 1915

Dear Dr. Steiner,

This will probably be my last letter to you; I will never turn to you again, neither in speaking nor in writing. I only want to tell you that I see no way out for myself; I am at my wits' end. As the weeks gone by have showed me, it is inconceivable that time will alleviate or wipe out anything that has happened; it will only bring to light what is hidden. Until now I have more or less managed to conceal how I feel, but I will not be able to do so indefinitely. I feel a melancholy settling in on me; being together with others and feeling their attentiveness is a torment to me, but I also cannot tolerate being alone for any length of time. I feel that everything that was to develop in me and flow into our movement through me has been buried alive.

My life stretches ahead of me, but it is devoid of any breath of air that makes life possible. And yet, in the darkest hour of my existence, I feel condemned to live—but my soul will be dead. Desolation and numbness will alternate with bouts of pain. I cannot imagine how the tragedy will end. It is likely, though, that I will show some signs of sorrow in weeks to come, and it may well be that I will say and do things that will surprise me as much as anyone else. I do not have the feeling that my words will arouse any echo in you. I feel as if I were talking to a picture. Since that time early on in those seven years when I stood bodily in front of you and you appeared to me as the embodiment of the figure that had been revealed to my inner vision, you have become unreal to me. Then, your voice sounded as sweet and comforting as my own hopes. You restored my soul with mysterious hints and promises that were so often contradicted in the course of events. And when my soul wanted to unfold under that radiant gaze of yours in which I could read that you knew what had happened to me, something looked at me out of your eyes, crying “This is a temptation.”

The most terrible thing was to have what stood before me in visible human form become unreal to me. And yet, I had the feeling that there was something real behind all this. I do not know what power makes your essential being a reality for me. You know that I have struggled for my faith and will continue to do so as long as there is a glimmer of life in me. You also know how I have pleaded with that Being whose light and teachings you must bring to those who suffer the terrible fate of being human, pleaded that whatever guilt may flow on my account may not disturb you in your mission, and I have the feeling that I have been heard. Nevertheless, the shadow of what has happened to me will fall across your path, just as it will darken my future earthly lives. That shadow will also fall across the continued existence of our movement and upon the destiny of our building. If the mystery dramas are ever performed again, you will have to have another Theodora, and since I will never be able to come to terms with what has happened, the very doors of the temple are closed to me in future. I wonder if, under these circumstances, there will ever again… I do not need to finish the sentence.

I sense that, on an occult level, this is a terrible state of affairs. Is there no way out?

Only a miracle can help in this case.

I am well aware that deliverance is possible, and if it were not to come, it would be terrible, and not only for me.

Let me tell you a story by way of conclusion, the story of the “sœur gardienne.” [ Note 3 ]

During the preparations for the plays during the summer of 1913, I noticed that you were not satisfied with me, and when it was all over I felt like a sick person who knows the doctor has given up on her. That feeling never left me from then on, and I could tell you of many instances, especially in recent months, when I felt a deathly chill come over me although your words actually sounded encouraging. The feeling grew stronger whenever I encountered anyone who knew what lay ahead. Why do I feel as if someone had slapped me in the face? Don't they all look as if they were part of a plot? That's what came to mind on many occasions, but I was relatively cheerful then and put it out of my mind. But all this is just a digression.

Two summers ago, shortly before the rehearsals began, I read La Sœur Gardienne. I had always assumed that Miss von Sivers would play the title role. On reading it, however, I began to doubt that the role would suit her; in fact, it seemed to me that she would not even want to play that part. And then I noticed how the figure came alive within me—it spoke, it moved in me. It was my role. If only I were allowed to play it! I saw what it would mean to me, and it was too beautiful to be true. Then invisible eyes looked at me, and I heard, “They will not give you that part, so resign yourself.” In my experience, that voice had always been correct. In view of the existing situation, I said to myself, “Dr. Steiner knows as well as I do that I had this experience; he must have good reasons for arranging things this way in spite of it—and as far as Miss von Sivers is concerned, I must have been mistaken—the whole thing must simply be another one of the incomprehensible disappointments that run like a red thread through my life.”

My soul collapsed; I behaved as calmly as I could, but that did not seem to be good enough. Your behavior as well as Miss von Sivers' was totally incomprehensible to me. They were looking everywhere for someone, anyone, to take the title role, and no one seemed to think of me; anyone else seemed more desirable. And yet people were making comments about how strange it was that I had nothing to do in that play. I held back, because at one point I was really afraid I would have to play a different role. Performances have been more or less the only occasions in my life where I could breathe freely, so to speak, where I could give of myself. But that was only true when I played parts that lived in me, like Theodora and Persephone. But when a role didn't sit well with me, it increased the pressure I was living under for quite some time. That is why I was not as unconcerned about these things as others might be; for me it was a matter of life and death. In the midst of all this tension something befell me that I had already experienced countless times before in many different situations and against which I have always been defenseless. My soul crumples as soon as it happens. Once again, “it” looked at me and said, “This is a lesson for you!” (or sometimes it said “a test” or “an ordeal”).

I felt the effects in my soul of countless experiences, repeated daily, hourly, going back to my earliest childhood. I do not know why my surroundings have always been tempted to participate wrongfully in my inner life. Only here and only very recently have I been able to ward this off, but it has forced me into complete isolation. What my foster parents, teachers, playmates, friends, and even strangers used to do to see what kind of a face I would make or to guess at how I would react! And much more than that. As I said, these experiences were so frequent that I could not deal with them; they suffocated me. Mostly I took it all calmly, thinking they didn't know any better. Now, however, in the situation I described, these semi-conscious memories played a trick on me—and I was overcome by anger. And then this summer, a year later, I had to relive the whole thing. And it occurred to me that I should have told you about what went before it.

As I said, those words “This is a lesson for you” always made me stiffen and freeze. When I look back on my life, it seems as if a devilish wisdom had foreseen all the possibilities life would bring to me in these last few years, and as if this intelligence had done its utmost to make me unfit for them. I could watch it at work, and yet was powerless to do anything. Much could be said about why that happened. But nothing in my own soul or in any single soul could ever help me over this abyss. Only the spark leaping from soul to soul, the spark that is so weak now, so very weak, can make the miracle happen now…

February 5

I have just read over what I wrote, and now I wonder, is it really all right for everything to happen as I described? That is how it would have to happen if everything stays as it is now. But don't we all three feel how destiny stands between us? Can it really be that there is one among us who does not know what has to happen next? That will bring many things to light; the course of events to come depends on what had been one person's secret. This is truly a test, but not only for me. What was hidden shall be revealed.

I still have one thing to say to you, my teacher and guide: even though the tempter looks out of your eyes, there have been times when I experienced with a shudder that what was revealed to me also meant something to you, something that has not been given its due. However, this must happen and will happen—you know that well, and so does

The Keeper of the Seal

* * *

Excerpt from a letter from Alice Sprengel to Marie Steiner
(undated; received on August 21, 1915. Cf. p. 139 and p. 160.)

I know that people who have “occult experiences” are a calamity as far as the people in positions of responsibility in our movement are concerned, and understandably so, but still, that is what our movement is there for—to come to grips with things like that.

The relationship between you and Dr. Steiner is not the point right now; no, it is the relationship between you and myself. However, your civil marriage unleashed a disaster for me, one that I had feared and seen coming for years—not in its actual course of events, you understand, but in its nature and severity. That is to say, for years I had seen something developing between my teacher and me, something to which we can indeed apply what we have heard in the last few days, though not for the first time. It has a will of its own and laws of its own and cannot be exorcised with any clever magic word. As I said, I had sufficient self-knowledge to know what had to come if nothing happened to prevent it.

Three years ago, like a sick person seeking out a physician, I asked Dr. Steiner for a consultation. There was something very sad I had to say during that interview, and I have had to say it frequently since then: Although I could follow his teachings, I could not understand anything of what affected me directly or of what happened to me. I must omit what brought me to the point of saying this, since I do not know how much you know about my background and biography. I was not able to express my need, and Dr. Steiner made it clear that he did not want to hear about it. The following summer, however, we were graced with the opportunity to perform The Guardian of the Threshold; in it a conversation takes place between Strader and Theodora, a conversation that reflected in the most delicate way the very thing that was oppressing me. Perhaps Dr. Steiner did not “intend” anything of the sort; nevertheless, it is a fact. Perhaps it was meant as an attempt at healing. I do not understand…

* * *

The next letter, written by an Englishwoman who was living at the Goetheanum at the time, characterizes Alice Sprengel from a different point of view:

Letter from Mary Peet to Alice Sprengel [ Note 4 ]

Arlesheim,
October 1915

Dear Miss Sprengel,

I cannot let the time pass without writing to tell you how greatly shocked I am at your disgraceful behavior to Doctor Steiner—and also to Mrs. Steiner.

I have truly always thought of you as a rather delicate and hysterical looking [sic] person, but I little imagined to what depths your evidently hysterical nature could lead you.

Your illusive hope of becoming a prominent person in our society not having been realized has been too much of a disappointment for your nature. This kind of thing happens every day, in that disappointed young women fall into all sorts of hysterical conditions, which give rise to all sorts of fantastical dreams. In this case the most holy things have been mixed with false illusions arising from much vanity, self-pride, and the desire for greatness!

To one who pictures herself to be the reincarnation of David, and of the Virgin Mary, very little can be said, for if one starts with such suppositions, one necessarily places oneself almost beyond the pale of reason and logic.

A dog will not bite the hand that has fed it for years—you have not shown the fidelity of a dog in that you have turned all your hatred and spite against the one who has given you all that has brought life into your existence, both spiritually and physically, for you have been beholden to him and his friends for your subsistence.

And now, because you are thoroughly disappointed, you have tried and are trying your best to injure him with every subtle untruth and insinuation, engendered by those thoughts which have entered your imaginative brain.

Doctor Steiner is beloved, revered, and respected; his life is an example to all. He has been able through his power of logic and clear and right thinking to feed us with the bread of Wisdom and Life, and has truly been a Light-bringer to us all.

I implore you to listen to reason before it is too late! Try to examine yourself for one hour and perceive the cause of all the fearful self-deception from which you are suffering. Beware of the awful figure of HATE, called up by your jealousy and consequent disappointment!

You cannot undo the past, but you can try to redeem the lost opportunities you have had by refraining from showing more and more clearly the picture that many can see—to which you are apparently quite blind up till now—namely, that of jealous woman suffering from ingratitude, disappointment, and hysterical illusions!

O Man! Know Thyself!

Truly,

[signed Mary Peet]

* * *

Heinrich Goesch (b. 1880 in Rostock, d. 1930 in Konstanz) was a man of many talents and interests who was already a Ph.D. and LL.D. at age twenty. His name also appeared once in December 1900 on the list of those present at a meeting of the Berlin literary society Die Kommenden. Financial support from parents and relatives enabled him to lead a life that allowed him to pursue numerous interests. Except for the last years of his life, when he lectured on art at the Dresden Academy of Arts and Crafts, he had never actually practiced a profession, presumably for reasons of health. According to a report by the psychiatrist Friedrich Husemann, Goesch had suffered from a very early age from epilepsy or seizure substitutes (absences). An expert witness reports having experienced one of Goesch's heaviest seizures. [ Note 5 ]

Goesch had come into contact with psychoanalysis in 1908 or 1909 while living with his wife (a cousin of Kathe Kollwitz) and his brother Paul, a painter, in Niederpoyritz near Dresden, where they were engaged in studying architecture, aesthetics, and philosophy. Paul Fechter, a journalist who was a friend of the Goeschs at that time, reports the following in his memoirs: [ Note 6 ]

Such was the world that greeted the dawning of psychoanalysis. One day Heinrich Goesch made the acquaintance of one of its earliest adepts, the son of a professor in Graz, who had made the teachings of Sigmund Freud, which at that time had not yet been widely popularized, the basis of his whole life. Goesch took him along to Niederpoyritz, where in endless nightly sessions the young doctor initiated the two brothers into the secrets of the new doctrine. As a result, Heinrich and Paul Goesch, consistent and logical in all their intellectual pursuits, were not content with the theory, but set about putting it into practice. They not only listened to what their guest had to offer, they tried it out on themselves and anything else they could get their hands on. They analyzed themselves and others and staged complex-resolutions by night until Niederpoyritz rebelled and their reputation rivaled that of young Schlegel in Jena.

All that would have made no difference; rumors get started and then fade away again. The effect on Paul Goesch, however, was disastrous—his thin-skinned psyche cracked under these experiments. Analysis, it seems, had eliminated certain inhibitions he needed in order to maintain a secure hold on life. Shortly after the doctor's visit, he entered a mental hospital for the first time…

The “doctor” whose name Fechter does not reveal was Otto Gross, private lecturer in psychopathology at the University of Graz and one of Freud's first pupils. Unlike Freud, who used psychoanalysis simply as a method of medical treatment, Gross, by applying it in social and political contexts as well, tried to make it the underlying basis of everyday life. His efforts eventually brought him into conflict with all existing social structures. As a drug addict, he became a patient of C. G. Jung at the Burghoelzli in Zurich and in that capacity played a certain role in the professional disagreements between Jung and Freud. Later, at the instigation of his father, Hans Gross (professor of criminology at Graz), he was declared legally incompetent and spent most of the rest of his life in mental hospitals. [ Note 7 ]

In his obituary of Heinrich Goesch, Fechter has this to say about Goesch's relationship to psychoanalysis:

When Otto Gross first introduced him to the as yet relatively unknown psychoanalytic method of Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Goesch recognized it immediately as a means of extending his personal experience into unfathomed depths. He took up this new subject passionately, not as a theoretical, conceptual, or abstract object of study and experience, but plunging with his whole being and all the strength he possessed into this stream that opened up before him and led into new depths. He did not study psychoanalysis, he experienced it through and through, making himself the object of his own analysis, descending into the shocks and ecstasies of the darkness that opened up in front of him with a total disregard for how it might affect his everyday existence. At once, he began to pull the theory out of the realm of science and into his immediate personal experience. It was a very dangerous experiment… [ Note 8 ]

Goesch became acquainted with Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy around 1910. Shortly thereafter, he became a member of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, led at that point by Rudolf Steiner as General Secretary. He had been recommended by the physician Max Asch, who wrote to Rudolf Steiner on April 27, 1910. [ Note 9 ]

For the last two weeks or so, I have been involved in a lively and personal exchange of ideas with a Mr. Heinrich Goesch, Ph.D., who seems to me predestined for occult training. He is one of the most highly gifted people I have ever met, and about one year ago had unusual inner experiences that occurred as part of a state of ecstasy lasting about a week, which leads me to assume that his case would be of particular interest to you, too. He has recently immersed himself in the study of your works Theosophy, An Outline Of Occult Science, etc.), and the unbelievable quickness with which he grasps these things leads me to suspect that he has undergone some form of occult schooling in an earlier incarnation—apparently a specifically Christian one, given the nature of his ecstatic experiences. Mr. Goesch will attend your lecture tomorrow evening; if you wish, I will introduce him to you. He wants to become a member of the Theosophical Society immediately.

The lecture in question took place on April 28, 1910, in the Berlin House of Architects. Its title was “Error and Mental Disorder.” [ Note 10 ] On April 30, 1910, Asch wrote to Rudolf Steiner again:

Heinrich Goesch, Ph.D., about whom I wrote to you, would be very grateful if you would find an opportunity to speak with him soon. He would like to attend your lectures in Hamburg, since they are related to an area he has researched with particular interest in the last few years. Therefore, he would like to become a member of the Theosophical Society as soon as possible. Mr. Goesch lives in Charlottenburg…

A short time after Heinrich Goesch and his wife Gertrud became members, the construction of a building to serve as its central headquarters became a focal point of the Society's activity. Goesch was very interested in architecture and in 1912 made some suggestions about the design of the building. This interest, it seems, was also what led him to come in the spring of 1914 to Dornach, where work on the Johannesbau (first Goetheanum) had begun in fall of 1913.

These facts from the biography of Goesch, who, as Paul Fechter puts it, displayed “a personal and unique combination of logic and mysticism,” make it somewhat understandable why he would jump into the Sprengel case with typical passionate energy. According to the psychiatrist Friedrich Husemann, epileptics characteristically combine egocentricity with a disproportionate sensitivity to personal affront and a tendency to complain. On the basis of these changes in their affective life, it is easy for them to develop delusions, and a certain affinity must have developed between Goesch's delusions and those of Alice Sprengel. Goesch formulated his thoughts in a long and elaborate letter (dated August 19, 1915) to Rudolf Steiner, who read it to the Dornach circle on August 21, 1915, in place of his usual Saturday evening lecture.

Let us turn our thoughts, my dear friends, as we do continually, to the guardian spirits of those who are absent from us, taking their place where the great destinies of the time are being fulfilled:

Spirits ever watchful, Guardian of their souls
May your vibrations waft
To the Earth-men committed to your charge
Our souls' petitioning love:
That, united with your power,
Our prayer may helpfully radiate
To the souls it lovingly seeks!

And to the Spirits of those, who have passed through the gate of death:

Spirits ever watchful, Guardians of their souls!
May your vibrations waft
To the Men of the Spheres committed to your charge
Our souls' petitioning love:
That, united with your power,
Our prayer may helpfully radiate
To the souls it lovingly seeks!

And that Spirit, Who for the healing of the Earth and for her progress, and for the freedom and salvation of mankind, passed through the Mystery of Golgotha; that Spirit Whom in our Spiritual Science we seek, to Whom we would draw near, May He be at your side in all your difficult tasks! (These meditations were repeated at the beginning of each lecture in the series.)

Let me first give expression to the deep satisfaction I have in being able to be once more in your midst. I would have come earlier, but for an urgent need, that kept me in Dornach until the work at the Group had reached a point whence it could be continued without me. You have often heard me speak of this Group, that is to stand in the East end of the Dornach Building and that sets forth the Representative of mankind in relation on the one hand to the Ahrimanic, and on the other to the Luciferic forces. In these days one needs to have forethought for the future, and it seemed to me absolutely necessary, in consideration of what may happen, to make that progress with the Group before leaving Dornach that has now been possible. Furthermore the times are bound to bring home to us with especial intensity the fact that meeting with one another here on the physical plane is not the only thing that keeps us upheld and strengthened in the impulse of Spiritual Science, but that we must be up-borne through this difficult time of sorrow and trial through being together in our anthroposophical strivings, even if together in spirit only; and indeed this very thing is to be the test for our anthroposophical strivings.

Since we were here together last, we have had to lament the loss from the physical plane of our dear Fräulein Motzkus, and of other dear friends who have left the physical plane in consequence of the terrible events through which we are passing. It is particularly painful no longer to see Fräulein Motzkus among the friends who have shared here for so many years in our anthroposophical strivings. She had been a member of our movement since its beginning. From the first day, from the first meeting of a very small circle, she showed throughout the deepest and most heart-felt devotion to our movement, and took an intimate and earnest part in all the phases it went through, in all its times of trial and testing. Above all, she preserved, through the events and changes through which we had to pass, an invincible loyalty to the movement, in the deepest sense of the word, a loyalty in which she set an example to all those who would wish to be worthy members of the anthroposophical movement. And so we follow with our gaze this beloved and pure soul into the spiritual worlds whither she has ascended, feeling towards her still the bond of trust and confidence that has grown stronger and deeper with the years, knowing that our own souls are linked with hers for ever ... Recently Fräulein Motzkus herself suffered the loss of a dear friend, whom she has now so quickly found again in the spiritual world. She bore the sad blow in a manner that such a blow can be received and borne by one who is conscious of an actual hold on the spiritual world. It was marvelous with what keen and intense interest Fräulein Motzkus shared in the great events of our time, right up to the last days of her life. She told me repeatedly that she would like to remain here on the physical plane until the momentous events, in the midst of which we are living, should have come to a decisive conclusion. With still freer vision, with still firmer impulse for the evolution of mankind, will she now be able to follow these happenings to which she has been so closely and intimately linked. May it be laid on all our hearts to unite ourselves in thought and in activity of soul, when-so-ever we are able, with this faithful spirit, this faithful and well-loved member of our movement. Then shall we, who have been united with her here on the physical plane in such a remarkable way, be able still to know that we are one with her in the years to come, when she will be among us in another form.

The times in which we live are such, that it becomes more and more a matter of pressing interest to know what the struggle to obtain Spiritual knowledge will signify to the human race of the present day and of the immediate future. The events in the midst of which we are now standing are such as to call forth in many people today, though little noticed, a sort of benumbment. Those souls who survive the catastrophe on the physical plane will awake only later to be able to recognise fully what is taking place and to realise how deeply this catastrophe has cut into human evolution. All the more should we feel obliged to call up in our souls thoughts of an illuminating nature, thoughts able to throw light on the objects and aims of the Spiritual movement so necessary to humanity. And as we have now come together after a long time, it will perhaps be useful to specify the views of this Spiritual Science of ours in a few short thoughts,—or rather the views which naturally come as the result of this Spiritual Science which we have now had before our souls for some years. It is noticeable that in all parts of the world there are some members of humanity who are developing a longing to draw nearer to the Spiritual world, notwithstanding the fact that materialism, alas, is not decreasing and because of the various forms which this longing for the Spiritual is taking. For these reasons we must specify and bring before the soul, our own search for the life of the spirit. In England at the present time, the research into the Spiritual world made by one of the most prominent and learned men is making a very great impression in large circles, even of cultured people. It is a very extraordinary phenomenon that a man reckoned among the first scientists of that country should have written a comprehensive book about the relationship of man on earth with the Spiritual world, and that this should have taken such a remarkable form. Sir Oliver Lodge—who for some years has certainly striven in various ways so to extend the scientific knowledge he has acquired that it may be applied to the Spiritual world,—describes in this book a series of episodes, in which he asserts that he has come in touch with the Spiritual world. The case is as follows.

Sir Oliver Lodge had a son, Raymond, who in 1915 took part on the English side, in the war in Flanders. At a time when his parents knew him to be at the front, they received some remarkable news from America, which, to people possessing what I might call materialistic-Spiritualistic tendencies, must certainly have appeared very striking. This message was supposed to come from the English psychologist, Frederick Myers who, before his death many years ago, had studied the relationship between the physical world and the Spiritual worlds, and who himself now in the Spiritual world, pronounced that world to be prepared to receive young Lodge in the near future. At first it was not very clear to what the message referred. There was some delay in its reaching Sir Oliver Lodge; it reached him after his son had fallen. I think it was a fortnight later but I am not quite sure as to this. Then came other messages given through mediums in America, advising the parents to go to an English medium; consequently, Sir Oliver went to one, but preserved a critical attitude towards her. I shall have more to say presently on the significance of this—Sir Oliver is a scientist, and is trained to the scientific testing of such cases. He went to work just as he would in his laboratory and what follows was given not through one but several mediums. The soul of Raymond wished to communicate with the Lodge family. All sorts of communications followed through automatic writing and table-turning, communications so surprising that not only Sir Oliver himself but the rest of the family, who had till then been extremely sceptical in such matters, were now quite convinced. Among other statements, the soul of Raymond stated that Myers was with him, acting as a Guardian; he told them several things about his last days on earth, and much that was of significance to the parents and family, and made a great impression upon them, especially as various things communicated by Raymond through mediums were intended for the family and particularly for Sir Oliver. The way the sittings were held afforded great surprise to the family, and strangely enough, they also caused great surprise to a wide public. They would not have surprised anyone who had experience of such things, for in reality, the nature of the communications concerning the dead which comes through mediums, and the manner of the communication, is very familiar to the investigator. One thing, however, made a profound impression in England, and was well calculated to impress and convince the civilised world of England and America, and to bring conviction hitherto lacking to many of our sceptical age; this factor which converted many and will convert many more, made a very strong impression on the Lodge family and particularly on Sir Oliver, and also impressed a large public. It was the following incident. A description was given through a medium of some photographs taken while Raymond was still alive. Raymond himself described them to the medium, by means of rappings. In this way a photographic group was described; that is to say the soul of Raymond was by means of the medium evidently trying to describe this photograph taken of him in a group shortly before he passed through the gates of death. From the other side he told them that he had sat in two groups with his companions, and that these were taken one after the other, and that his position in the groups was such and such. Further he described the differences in the two different photographs, saying that he sat on the same chair and in the same attitude in both, but that the position of the arm was a little different, and so on. All this is minutely described. Now the family knew nothing of these photographs, they did not know that any such had been taken. Thus indirectly through the medium, the fact was made known that there was in existence a photographic group representing Raymond Lodge with several companions. Some few weeks later, a photograph was sent over to Sir Oliver from France, corresponding exactly to the one described by the soul of Raymond through the medium. This would naturally make a strong impression on anyone who approaches such things in a dilettante way—as all those concerned clearly did. It was an experimental test. The case in point is that of a soul from the other side, describing a photograph of which several copies were taken, and which reached the family some time later, and was then found to correspond in every detail to the description given. It was quite impossible that either the medium or anyone present at the sittings could have seen this photograph. Here we have a case which must be reckoned with both scientifically and historically, for not only might one say that such a case would naturally make a great impression, but it really did occur and did make an enormous impression. As far as could be seen, this photographic proof, which has nothing to do with thought-transference, was very convincing.

It is necessary for us to bring the whole of this case before our mental vision. We must be quite clear as to the fact that when a man passes through the gate of death, the human individuality is at first for a short time, enshrouded in the astral body and etheric body; and that the latter after a more or less brief period—varying in different cases, but never lasting more than a few days—passes out into the etheric world and there pursues its further destiny; so that the individuality enters the Spiritual world with the astral body only, and continues its further wanderings in that world. The etheric body is severed from the human individuality just as the physical body was on earth. Now we must clearly understand that in Spiritualistic seances,—and the whole work of Sir Oliver Lodge is based on these,—only one who has real knowledge is able to distinguish whether the communications come from the actual individuality, or only from the cast-off, forsaken etheric corpse. This etheric corpse still remains in continual communication with the individuality. Only, when one gets into connection with the spiritual world in a round-about way through a medium, one comes in touch with the etheric corpse first, and so can never be sure of reaching in this way the actual individual. It is certain that there is in our age a striving to find for Spiritual existence some sort of proof such as is found by experiments in the laboratory, something which can be grasped with hands and that one can see before one in the world of matter. Our materialistic age does not care to follow the inner path the soul must take in the Spiritual worlds, the purely Spiritual path. It wants the spirit to descend into the material world and be discovered there. We are experiencing all kinds of materialistic Spiritualism, a materialistic turning to the worlds of the spirit. Now, it is quite possible for the etheric body, which has been separated from the actual human individuality, to manifest a certain life of its own which, to the uninitiated, may easily be mistaken for the life of the individual himself. We must not think that the etheric body when given over to the etheric world only manifests reminiscences and recollections, mere echoes of what the man passes through here; it manifests a real continuous individuality. It can relate incidents and say quite new things, But we should be going quite off the track if we thought that because a connection is established with the etheric body, we are necessarily in connection with the individual himself. It is very possible in the case of people sitting in a small circle—all being members of the family as was the case with the Lodges, all thinking in one way or another about the dead man, and all filled with thoughts and memories of him,—that their thoughts may be conveyed to his etheric body through the medium, and that this etheric body may occasionally give striking replies, which may really produce the impression of being spoken by the individuality of the dead. Yet, perhaps, they may only proceed from his etheric corpse. Those who are acquainted with such things actually find this to be the case, and when Raymond Lodge was supposed to come to his family through the medium, in reality it was the etheric corpse speaking; Raymond Lodge had not really held communion with the circle at all. Hence, as I have said, to those accustomed to the course of events in such seances, the communications do not appear very remarkable. It is probable that the whole story would not have made so much impression on a wide public, nor would it continue to do so, if it were not for the incident of the photographs. For this story of the photographs is very remarkable, indeed exceptionally so. For here it was impossible that any transference of thoughts should take place,—passing through the medium to the etheric body of Raymond, as might have been the case in the other instances. Nobody in England could have known of the photographs; they had not yet come over at the time when the communications were made. But still it is very strange that such a learned scientist as Sir Oliver Lodge, who had for so long been interesting himself in these matters, should not know how such a circumstance is to be regarded. I have taken particular trouble to look more minutely into this case. Sir Oliver Lodge is a learned man, and a scientist upon whose descriptions one can rely; we are not dealing with any ordinary document produced by ordinary Spiritualistic seances but with the communications of a man describing with the certainty of a scientist, who has developed the conscientiousness customary to a scientist in the laboratory and, therefore, it is possible to form a complete picture of what happened, from the descriptions he gives. It is remarkable that such a learned man as Sir Oliver Lodge, who was for so many years interested in the subject, although in this case he was specially interested because it was a question of his own son, yet should not have known what has often been referred to in our Spiritual science, when giving descriptions of the atavistic forms of clairvoyance, which appear as presentiments. For this is none other than a very special case of Deuteroscopia. The case is as follows.

We have a medium. To this medium the Spiritual world is in a certain respect accessible; of course, as we know—through atavistic forces—such mediums can in their vision reach beyond space, but not only does their so-called second sight extend beyond space it also extends beyond time. Let us take a special case; one quoted hundreds of times. You may read descriptions of it, if you have not experienced it yourself through your acquaintances.

The case I mean, is when some one who has that tendency sees as in a dream, half in vision, his own coffin or funeral. He dies a fortnight afterwards. He saw in advance what was to occur fourteen days later. Or perhaps, one may see not his own funeral or coffin, but that of a complete stranger, an event to which the dreamer is quite indifferent. To instance a particular case, one may see oneself leaving the house and falling from horseback. This thing did occur—someone saw that happen, and tried to avert it,—but, notwithstanding all precautions, it still came to pass. That is a case of a vision extending in time, and what Sir Oliver Lodge describes is precisely this second-sight in time. His descriptions are given so accurately that it was possible to investigate the case. The medium through her forces was able to see an event still in the future. At the time she spoke, the photograph was not there; but it arrived a fortnight later, or thereabouts. It was then shown round to friends and relatives. This happened some time after but the medium saw it in advance, it was a prophetic vision, a case of Deuteroscopia. It was a pre-vision; that is the explanation. It had nothing to do with a communication between those on the physical plane and one in the Spiritual world.

You see how greatly one may be misled by striving to give a materialistic explanation of Spiritual circumstances in the world, and how blind one may be to the actual facts; such a vision is, of course, none the less a proof of the reality of a world behind the ordinary world of sense. The case is an interesting one; only it should not be quoted as proving a connection between the dead and the living. We must seek for the dead—if indeed we should or ought to seek for them at all—by following a really Spiritual path. In the near future I shall have many things to say on this subject; for it is my intention to give much consideration to the subject of the relation between the living and the dead.

I have brought up the subject of this book of Sir Oliver Lodge to show you how, although the longing after the Spiritual world does exist, it may here be said to have taken a materialistic form. Sir Oliver Lodge is a learned scientist; even although he strives after the Spiritual world he tries to gain knowledge of it by methods of the chemical world or of physics. Just as he experiments in his laboratory according to the laws of chemistry, so he wants ocular proof of what relates to the Spiritual world. But the way we must recognise as the right one is very far from his; our way leads the soul by an inner method to the Spiritual world, as we have often described, and no less often have we described what the soul first becomes acquainted with there and which immediately concerns us at the present time and underlies the world of physical sense, in which we live. We learn to recognise the whole materialistic character of our age, in the materialistic strivings that are directed to the Spiritual world. If our movement is to have any meaning at all, a meaning which it should eventually have in accordance with the necessary evolutionary laws of mankind, it must sharply define and emphasise the Spiritual inwardness of true Spirituality, as compared with these materialistic and absurd strivings after a world of spirit.

Why is it necessary in the present age that an entirely new method should hold the hearts of men, a purely spiritual method, one very different from the materialistic methods? This question must be considered in connection with the fact to which we have often alluded in the course of past years, and which must closely concern us at this time of sorrow and trial. We have indicated that this twentieth century must bring to humanity the Vision of the etheric Christ. Just as it truly happened—as we have often said—that at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha Christ walked among men in a physical form, in one known part of the earth, so will the etheric Christ walk among men in the twentieth century, the whole earth over. This event must not pass unobserved by humanity, for that would be sinning against the salvation of the world. Humanity must have its attention roused, so that a sufficient number of persons may be ready really to see the Christ Who will come and Who must be seen.

Now, such an event as this cannot come quite suddenly, even as the event of Golgotha did not come suddenly but was prepared for during thirty-three years. The point of time when the event is to occur—this time spiritually—is very near and will have a like significance for man as the event of Golgotha on the physical plane. Hence, if you consider the facts alluded to above, you will not find it difficult to believe me when I say that He is already present in the form in which He will be seen in the great moment of evolution in the twentieth century, that the great moment is being now prepared. You will not consider it incredible, when I say that moment is now being prepared. Yes, we may say that although humanity seems as regards its present actions far from being permeated with the Christ-Spirit on the physical plane, yet if men's souls will but open themselves to Him, the Christ, Who is now approaching, is very near. The occultist is able to point out that since the year 1909 or thereabouts what is to come is being distinctly and perceptibly prepared for, that since the year 1909 we are inwardly living in a very special time. It is possible today, if we do but seek Him, to be very near to Christ, to find Him in a quite different way than has been hitherto possible.

There is one thought that occurs to me, and simple as it may seem I must give words to it, from a profound feeling for the times. People do not, alas, as a rule, think with sufficient clearness on the events of the past; especially with respect to what took place in the souls of men in bygone centuries; they no longer have any conception of the strength of the impression made by the Gospels in their existing form upon a circle which was then but small. People now have no conception of how powerfully these ideas filled the souls of men at that time. As the centuries rolled by the impression made by the inner content of the Gospels grew weaker and weaker. At the present day if we see things as they are, it may be said that although individual persons, if they possess certain powers of intuition and forces of divination, may be so permeated by the words of the Gospels as to form some idea of what took place at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, yet the immense force once possessed by the Gospel-words themselves, is growing weaker and weaker, and we cannot but see that the Gospels make but little impression now on the majority of people.

This is not willingly admitted; but it is the truth, and therefore it would be well if people would realise it. How did this state of things come about?

Well, just as it is true that what pulsated in the Gospels is no earthly language but Cosmic words, Heavenly words, possessing an immeasurably greater force than anything else on earth,—so it is also true that mankind in the present age has become estranged from the form in which these words were laid down in the Gospels at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just reflect how enormously difficult it is to understand the language of even four or five hundred years ago, if you come across it anywhere. It is not possible to draw out of it what it really contains. The Gospels, in the form accessible to us today, are really not the original Gospels, they do not possess their original force. It is possible to penetrate into them, as I have said, by means of a certain intuition; but they no longer have the same force. Christ spoke the word which should be deeply engraved in the human soul: ‘I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth time.’ That is a truth, a reality. He will be with us, during the time indicated, in the twentieth century, in various forms near to the human soul.

From what I have said, you will understand that one who feels himself standing in the centre of these things, one who is an occultist, should say: He is here, He makes His presence felt in such a way that we know clearly that He will now expect more of His human children than in centuries gone by. Till now the Gospels have spoken an inner language to man. They had to lay hold of the soul-men should, therefore, be satisfied with faith alone and had not to progress to knowledge. That time is now over, it lies behind us. Christ has something different in view for His human children. His present purpose is that the kingdom to which He referred when He said: ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ should really draw into that part of the human being which is not of this world but which is of another world. In each one of us there is a part which is not of this world. That part of man which is not of this world must seek with intensity that kingdom of which Christ spoke, of which He said, that it was not of this world.

We are living at a time when this must be understood. Many such things in human evolution announce themselves through contrasts. In our own age something great and significant is announced by a great contrast. For with the coming Christ, with the presence of Christ, will come the time when men will learn to enquire of Him, not only concerning their souls, but concerning their immortal part on earth. Christ is not merely a Ruler of men, but their Brother, Who, particularly in the near future, wishes to be consulted on all the details of life. In anything we undertake today we act in the opposite way. Events seem to be accomplished today, in which men appear to be as far removed as possible from any appeal to Christ. We must ask ourselves this question: Who is there today who stops to enquire: ‘What would Christ Jesus say to what is now taking place?’ Who puts such a question to himself? Many say they do, but it would be sacrilegious to believe that they put the question in the form in which it is put here, addressing it directly to Christ Himself. Yet the time must come and cannot be far distant, when men's souls will, in their immortal part, ask of Christ, when they think of undertaking something: ‘Ought we to do this or not?’ Then human souls will see Christ standing by them as the beloved Companion and they will not only obtain consolation and strength from the Christ-Being, but will also receive instruction from Him as to what is to be done. The kingdom of Christ Jesus is not of this world, but it must work in this world and the human souls must be instruments of the Kingdom that is not of this world. From this point of view we must consider the fact of how few today have asked themselves the question which, as regards individual acts, as well as events, must be put to the Christ. Humanity must, however, learn to ask of Him. How is that to come about? It can only become possible if we learn His language. Anyone who comprehends the deeper purpose of our Spiritual Science, realises that it not only gives out a theoretical knowledge about different problems of humanity, the principles of human nature, reincarnation and karma, but that it contains a quite special language, that it has a particular way of expressing itself about spiritual things. The fact that through Spiritual Science we learn to hold inner converse with the spiritual world in thought, is much more important than the mere acquiring of theoretical thoughts. For Christ is with us always, even to the end of the earth-epochs. And we must learn His language. By means of the language—no matter how abstract it may seem—in which we hear of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth and of the different periods and ages of the earth, and of many other secrets of evolution—we teach ourselves a language in which we can frame out the questions we put to the spiritual world. When we really learn inwardly to speak the language of this spiritual life, the result will be that Christ will stand by us and give us the answers Himself. This is the attitude that our work in Spiritual Science should bring about in us, as a sentiment, a feeling. Why do we occupy ourselves with Spiritual Science? It is as though we were learning the vocabulary of the language through which we approach the Christ. If we take the trouble to learn to think the thoughts of Spiritual Science, and make the mental effort necessary for an understanding of the Cosmic secrets taught by Spiritual Science, then, out of the dim, dark foundations of the Cosmic mysteries, will come forth the figure of Christ Jesus, which will draw near to us and give us the strength and force in which we shall then live. The Christ will guide us, standing beside us as a brother, so that our hearts and souls may be strong enough to grow up to the necessary level of the tasks awaiting humanity in its further development.

Let us then try to acquire Spiritual Science, not as a mere doctrine but as a language, and then wait till we can find in that language, the questions which we may venture to put to the Christ. He will answer, yes, indeed, He will answer! Plentiful indeed will be the soul-forces, the soul-strengthening, the soul-impulses, which the student will carry away with him from the grey spiritual depths through which humanity in its evolution is now passing, if he is able to receive instructions from Christ Himself; for, in the near future He will give them to those who seek.

Yesterday I gave you a description of the starry sky nearest to us. If you think back to this description, you will have to say to yourselves above all: if we draw such a picture of the starry heavens from spiritual knowledge, it looks quite different from what is otherwise said in this field today. Yesterday, precisely in order to make this emerge clearly, I spoke in the way I have just done. I had to speak in a way that must seem absurd, perhaps even ridiculous, to anyone who acquires knowledge about these subjects today through contemporary education. And yet, the fact of the matter is that a kind of healing of our sick spiritual life can only take place if this total change of perspective — especially of such things as we discussed yesterday — can take place.

And one would like to say: Wherever thinking takes place today, but thinking takes place in such a way that it runs into the old, conventional ideas, one sees on the one hand how thinking everywhere points to this new kind of spiritual knowledge. But one also sees how people are not able to keep up with such spiritual insight, and how they therefore actually remain at a loss everywhere and - which is perhaps the worst thing in the present moment of history - are not aware of their helplessness, indeed do not want to be aware of it.

Let us imagine how what I described yesterday from a completely different point of view is described today. Yesterday I spoke about the moon, Saturn, Jupiter and so on, and I presented the individualities, the spiritual individualities that can be associated with these words. I showed you, as it were, our planetary system as a gathering of spiritual beings that work out of different impulses, but in such a way that these impulses also have something to do with earthly events. We saw living beings appearing in the universe with a certain character. We could speak of living beings in Saturn, the Moon and so on. But the whole way of speaking differs from what is said about such things today. There is the assumption – I repeat it again – of a primeval nebula that existed once, which was in a rotating, circling motion and from which the individual planets split off, which today one looks at with complete indifference as more or less luminous physical bodies that rush along in space.

This view that the heavenly bodies are such indifferent bodies, to which nothing else can be applied than physics, especially mathematics, to calculate their orbits, to possibly explore whether the substances found on Earth are also present there, this indifferent view of the heavenly bodies, is something that has actually only become common among mankind in the last three to four centuries. And it has become customary in a very definite way. Today things are just not understood. Because man has lost the possibility of looking into the spiritual, or, as it was only the case in the later Middle Ages, at least to have a presentiment of it, it has also become possible to completely lose the spiritual. Then the physical concepts that arose on earth, the mathematical and computational concepts, were regarded as something certain, and now that was revealed out there in the celestial space was also calculated. A certain assumption was made here – I must already present these theoretical considerations today – we have learned how to calculate something on earth, how to do physical science on earth, and have now extended this calculation on earth, this physical science, to the whole of the heavens and believed that the calculation results that apply on earth also apply to the heavens.

On earth, we speak of time, of matter, of motion; for physicists, one could say, of mass, also of speed and so on: all concepts that have been gained on earth. Since the time of Newton, these have also been extended to the heavens. And the whole conception that one has of what is going on in the world is nothing more than a mathematical result obtained on earth and then projected into the heavens. The whole of Kant-Laplace's theory is indeed an absurdity the moment one realizes that it is valid only on the assumption that the same laws of calculation apply out there in space as on earth, that the concepts of space, time and so on are just as applicable out there as on earth.

But now there is a strange fact, a fact that is causing people a lot of headaches today. We live in a very strange time, which is announced by manifold symptoms. In all popular gatherings held by monists and other bundlers, people are presented with the fact that the stars shine out there through the known processes. The whole beautiful doctrine of spiral nebulae and so on, as presented to the outer eye, is presented to a believing audience by popularizing speakers and writers. And today's man has his education from these popular speakers and popular writers. But this education is actually, basically, only the result of what physicists and other so-called learned people thought and devised decades ago. In such popular gatherings, everything that was considered important by experts decades ago is reheated. But today the experts are being shaken up by something completely different. That which is shaking them up is, for example, the so-called theory of relativity.

This theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of relativity, is what concerns the thinking physicists today. Now, the details of this theory of relativity can be discussed, as I have already done here and there; but today we are not concerned with its inner validity, but with the fact that it exists and that physicists are talking about it. Of course there are physicists who are opposed to it, but there are many physicists who simply talk about the theory of relativity. But what does that mean?

Yes, it means that this theory of relativity destroys all the concepts on which our view of the movements and nature of celestial bodies in space is based. For decades, what is written in astronomy books today, what is still presented to a lay audience in popular lectures and books, has been valid; it has been valid. But physicists are working to dismantle and destroy the most popular concepts – time, movement, space – and declaring: none of it is as we thought it was. — You see, at least for physicists today it is already something of a matter of conscience to say, for example: I point my telescope at a distant star. But I have calculated that it takes so much time for the light from that star to reach the Earth. So when I look through my telescope, the light that enters my telescope has taken so many light-years. The light that enters the telescope must therefore have started out up there so many light-years ago. The star is no longer there, it is no longer there at all. I get the beam of light into my telescope, but what is in the extension of the telescope is not the star at all. And if I look at a star next to it, from which the light now takes much fewer light-years, it still arrives at the same time. I turn my telescope: the star comes to a point of light that was perhaps there so-and-so many years ago. Now I turn my telescope again: a star falls into my telescope that is not there at all, but was there a completely different number of years ago. And so I form views of my starry sky! Everything is there from the time when it was there, but actually it is not there at all. Actually nothing is there: everything is thrown over and under.

This is exactly how it is with space. We perceive a distant sound somewhere. When we approach it, it appears to us at a different 'pitch' than when we move away from it. Space becomes decisive for the way we perceive things. And of course that makes people scratch their heads. Time, which plays a role in all calculations, has suddenly become something quite uncertain, something merely relative. And of all that is so popularly drawn out into space, the modern physicist – and he is aware of this – can only say: There is something that was once there, is still there, will once be there. Well, there is something there. And that something that is there causes its light emissions to coincide with the crosshairs of my telescope at a certain point in time. — That is the only wisdom that remains, the coincidence of two events. So, what once happened somewhere, sometime, coincides with what is happening today in the crosshairs of my telescope. Only of such coincidences can one speak – says today's physicist – it is all relative; the concepts from which the world building has been theoretically constructed are actually of a merely relative, not at all absolute value. That is why physicists today are talking about a radical revolution in all the concepts of physics. And if you went straight from a popular lecture for laypeople to a lecture by a relativity theorist today, you would find that the popularizer is handing down to people something that is built on the ideas that the experts say: “It's all melted like snow in the sun!”

You see, we cannot just say that a physical world view has been built up out of certain concepts over the past three to four hundred years; rather, we have to say that today there are already enough people who have dissolved these concepts out of these concepts, who have destroyed them. After all, this world view, which is considered certain, no longer exists for a large number of thinkers. So the matter is not quite so simple that what is said from a completely new point of view may be ridiculed. Because what is said from the other point of view melts away in the present like snow in the sun. It is actually no longer there for those who understand something of the matter, or at least want to understand something. So that one actually stands before the fact that people say: What is described here from the point of view of spiritual science is absurd because it does not agree with what we consider to be right. But if they now take the relativity point of view, then these people must say: That is absurd, what we have considered to be right! That is how things stand today. But actually the majority of humanity is asleep, watching as if asleep as these things unfold and letting them happen. But it is important to realize that the worldview that has celebrated such great triumphs as such is actually in ruins today.

The facts of the spiritual world will only become clear to a wider public when people at least begin to loosen the pointy cap they sleep under. So, one does not just have the option of thinking that what speaks out of such a tone as I did yesterday is absurd in the face of today's science, because this science is, for example, quite negative in its theory of relativity; it actually says everywhere what is, and humanity will have to steer towards an understanding of that which is.

These things should be explained by such representations, as I tried to give them yesterday with regard to individual stars in our planetary system. But what do we see there? We see that, to a certain extent, it is precisely following the course of world development. What would an old-fashioned physicist, not a newcomer to physics (because most newcomers are relativists), what would an old-fashioned physicist say if he heard something as outrageous as what I said yesterday? If he did not immediately say that it is all crazy and twisted, and that is perhaps what he would say at first, he would still claim: That contradicts the firm foundations of science. But what are the firm foundations of science? They are the concepts of space, time and so on that have been gained on earth. Now the relativity theorists are destroying these concepts for the universe, declaring them invalid.

Anthroposophy, however, takes a practical approach: it disregards earthly concepts when talking about the moon and Saturn and Jupiter and so on. It no longer speaks in earthly terms, but attempts – however difficult it may be – to characterize Venus and Mars in a way that is no longer possible with earthly concepts. And so, in order to penetrate into the cosmos, we must be willing to lose our earthly concepts. I wanted to show you how the cosmos fits into contemporary spiritual life and how things stand in contemporary spiritual life. There is only a relationship with earthly concepts when one reaches out into the cosmos. Just imagine, when we go to the moon, as I characterized it yesterday, to those entities that are anchored in the moon as in a world fortress and actually live behind the surface of the moon - where they, if may I put it, their world business, when we come to these entities, which can only be approached with a clairvoyantly sharpened gaze, we find that these entities work in secret. Because what is inside the moon does not go out into the world, and everything that comes from the moon is reflected out of the world. Just as the moon does not absorb sunlight but reflects it, so it also reflects everything else that happens in the universe. Everything that happens in the universe is reflected back by the moon as if by a mirror. Processes take place within it that remain hidden.

But I have told you: the spiritual beings who are entrenched in this lunar fortress, as in the universe, and who conduct their world business in there, were once on earth before the moon split off from the earth. They were the first great teachers of human souls on earth. And the great ancient wisdom that is spoken of is basically the heritage of these lunar beings, who now live in secret within the moon. They have withdrawn themselves.

When one speaks in this way about the universe, moral concepts enter into the ideas that one develops. One forgets the physical concepts of the earth; moral concepts enter into the description. We ask ourselves: Why have these lunar entities withdrawn, why do they work in secret? Yes, when they were still on earth, they did indeed suggest an enormous wisdom to people. If they had remained on earth, they would have continued to suggest this wisdom to people, but people would never have been able to enter the age of freedom.

These entities had, so to speak, made the wonderful decision to withdraw from Earth, to retreat to a secluded place in the universe, far from human existence, in order to carry out their world business there, so that people would no longer be influenced by them, so that people could all absorb the impulses of the universe and become free beings. These entities have chosen a new dwelling place in the universe to gradually make freedom possible for people.

Yes, that speaks differently than is spoken of by the physicist, who, if he heard that the moon had split off from the earth, would simply calculate the speed at which it happened, the forces by which it happened, and would only ever have the earthly forces and the earthly speeds in mind. They are completely disregarded when we speak of the moon as I did yesterday. But if we leave aside the physical, what remains are such resolutions, such great cosmic-moral impulses. The important thing is that we move from physical verbiage, which applies to the physical conditions of the earth, to a discourse in moral ideas about the universe.

The important thing is that one does not merely put forward theories that are to be believed, but that there is a moral world order. This has completely confused the human soul in the last three to four centuries, that one has said: One can know some things about the earth, and, based on what is known on earth, calculate the universe and construct theories such as the Kant-Laplace theory, but with regard to the moral and divine order of the world, one must believe. This has greatly confused people, because the insight has been completely lost that one must speak in earthly terms about the earth, but that one must begin to speak cosmically the moment one rises up to the universe. There, physical speech gradually gives way to moral speech. What is otherwise at most imagined is practically carried out.

If you find a description of the sun by a physicist today, it is some kind of gas ball steaming out there, and its eruptions are described like terrestrial eruptions. Everything is projected onto this cosmic body in the same way as what happens on earth, and with the same calculations that we have acquired here, we then calculate how a ray of light passes the sun or the like. But the calculations we use here on Earth no longer apply when we go out into space. And just as the strength of light decreases with distance in a square, the laws no longer apply in outer space. We are only related to the universe in our morality. By rising above the physical as human to the moral, we here on earth become similar to what works in outer space as realized morality.

Thus we must say: in the ultimate sense, Anthroposophy is a science. It actually implements what arises as a demand. It no longer speaks in earthly concepts, except for the moral ones, which, however, are already supermundane on earth. It speaks in such moral concepts when it soars to the universe. This must be taken into account. And from this point of view, the concepts that we need to understand on earth must be gained, which cannot be understood just now.

You see, the beings that are anchored in the moon, I said, only work as if in a fortress. There they do their world business. For everything that the moon gives to the world, that the earth gives, is reflected and mirrored. But this is a state that has only just occurred in the course of evolution in the cosmic becoming. It used to be different. And into the, I would like to say, soft, slimy form that the earth itself and all beings once had, these beings worked when they still walked on earth. And it is in connection with these effects that the spinal cord column develops in both humans and animals. So that the spinal cord column in humans and in animals is an inheritance from very ancient times, when the moon beings were still connected with earthly existence. This can no longer arise today. The spinal column is an inheritance; it can no longer arise today.

But with regard to the four-footed animals, these entities made the spine so strong that it remains horizontal. In the case of humans, they made it so that it could become vertical, and the human being could then become free through the vertical spine for the universe and its influences at the moment when these lunar beings retreated to the lunar fortress.

And so we will gradually come to explaining the earthly from the universe, and to judging spiritual forces and impulses in the right way in earthly existence as well. It is the case that human minds have been invaded by ideas that have only emerged in the last three or four hundred years. And all of them under the influence of the view that the only thing one can apply to the whole universe to explain it is what one has gained from physical events and from the physical things of the earth. One has made the whole universe into a physical image of the earth. Now, however, people have realized: Something coincides with my crosshairs, but that was there once! The whole story does not apply in this way. And if one takes into account stars that are far enough away, today's physicist can say: What I record as a map is not there at all. I draw two stars next to each other: one of them was there, say, a thousand years ago, the other was there six hundred years ago. No, the stars were never there, side by side, as I see them in my crosshairs, coinciding as the rays of light.

So it all melts away, it is not really like that at all. With these concepts, you do not get what is out there. You calculate, calculate, calculate. It is just as if the spider weaves its web and then imagines that this web weaves through the whole world.

The reason for this is that these laws, according to which one calculates, no longer apply out there, but at most one can use the morality that is within us to get concepts of what is out there. Out there in the starry sky, things happen morally, sometimes also immorally, ahrimanically, luciferically, and so on. But when I take morality as a generic term, things happen morally, not physically. But this is something that must be rediscovered, because the other has become so firmly entrenched in people's minds over the last two or three centuries that even doubts such as those of the relativity theorists — for their negations have a great deal to be said for them — cannot dislodge it from people's minds. It is also understandable, because if even this last chimera, the time-space calculation that they perform, if even this still disappears from their minds for the starry sky, then there is nothing left in these minds, and people do like to retain something in them. For something else will only be able to be in it if one rises to the possibility of looking at the starry sky as we did yesterday.

Now we must realize that all this points to the fact that it is necessary for people of the present time to form clear ideas about what has actually happened in the last three to four centuries, and what has found its preliminary expression in the greatest of all wars that have ever taken place on earth, and in the chaotic conditions that will become even more chaotic in the near future. What is required of humanity is to really come to terms with these issues. And in this respect it is interesting to take a look beyond the Earth with its present level of intellectual development.

Within the civilization in which the Westerner with his American followers live, everything that has been developed in the last three to four centuries under the influence of a phenomenally magnificent technology and a magnificent world traffic - which is only now breaking down - is considered so solid that, of course, anyone who does not adopt the same concepts is a fool. Now it is true that the Orient is in a state of decadence, but one must also say: What one has to express again today from the sources of our own anthroposophical research, as I did yesterday, was, albeit in a completely different way, once in ancient times, still oriental wisdom.

We cannot accept this oriental wisdom in its old form today, as I have often discussed. We have to regain it from the Western mind, from the Western soul. But it was once, I would like to say, the custom to speak about the stars in the way that I began to speak about them yesterday, based on the old clairvoyance, on this dream-like old clairvoyance. Only that has been completely lost to humanity, and European humanity today considers all of this to be absurd, which was once considered the highest human wisdom.

Now, as I said, although this was once a great and original wisdom in the Orient too, today people there are in a state of decadence. But in a certain sense, at least externally and traditionally, something of such a way of looking at the universe has been preserved in the Orient, I would even say a soulful way of looking at the universe. And the technical culture of Europe impresses the Orientals very little. These souls, who today in the Orient lovingly engage with the ancient wisdom, fundamentally disdain what has developed in Europe as a mechanical culture and civilization. They study what concerns the human soul from their ancient scriptures. In this way, some inwardly experience an, albeit decadent, enlightenment, so that something of the soul's view of the world still lives in the Orient. And it is not unnecessary to also look at the way in which these people, who still have some kind of reflection of an ancient culture, look at the European-American intellectual scene. Even if it is only for the sake of comparison, it is still interesting.

A remarkable book has been published by a certain Rãmanãthan, an Indian from Ceylon, entitled “The Culture of the Soul among the Western Nations” [the title was written on the board]. This Rãmanãthan speaks in a remarkable way. He obviously belongs to those people over there in the Orient who, within Indian civilization, have said to themselves: These Europeans also have very strange scriptures, for example the New Testament. Now these people, to whom Rãmanãthan also belongs, have studied the New Testament - but of course in the way that the soul of these people can study the New Testament - and have absorbed this New Testament, the work of Christ Jesus, through the New Testament according to the state of their soul. And there are already people over there – as this book by Rãmanãthan shows – who now speak of the Christ Jesus and the New Testament from the remnants of an ancient culture. They have formed very specific ideas about the Christ Jesus.

And now this man writes a lot about these ideas of Christ Jesus, and of course he addresses the book - he wrote it in English - to the Europeans. He addresses the book, which is written by the Indian spirit about Jesus in the Gospels, to the Europeans, and he says something very strange to the Europeans. He says to them: it is quite extraordinary that they know nothing at all about the Christ Jesus. There are great things in the Gospels about Christ Jesus, but the Europeans and Americans know nothing about it, really know nothing about it! And he gives the Europeans and the Americans a strange piece of advice. He says to them: “Why don't you have teachers of the New Testament come from India, they will be able to tell you how it actually is with Christ Jesus.

So these people in Asia, who are dealing with European progress today and who then read the New Testament, tell these Europeans: If you want to learn something about the Christ Jesus, then you must have teachers come to you from us, because all the teachers who speak to you understand nothing about it, it is all misunderstood! —And he explains this in detail. He says: In Europe, at a certain time, a certain understanding of words took the place of an understanding of spiritual essence. The Europeans cling to a certain understanding of words with regard to all things. They do not carry a spiritual understanding in their heads, but the words they learn from their individual populations rise up into their heads, and then they think in words.

It is a remarkable way in which these Indians, despite their decadence, still come to this insight, because so far the story is quite striking. Even in physics and mathematics, thought is done in words today, not in things. In this respect, people today are quite strange. If someone wants to be very clever, then he quickly quotes: “For just where concepts are missing, a word comes at the right time.” But today it happens mostly out of the urge that the person in question has run out of all concepts: then the Goethean saying quickly comes to mind. But then he does not notice that. He does not realize that he is quite bitter in this vice at the moment when he criticizes it.

So this Indian says to the Europeans: You have only a word-understanding of all things, and you have extended this word-understanding over the New Testament, and thereby you have killed the Christ for four centuries. He no longer lives among you, he has been dead for four centuries. Get teachers from India so that he can be awakened again.

He says: For three to four centuries, the Europeans have known nothing at all about Christ. They cannot know anything because they do not have the concepts and ideas through which one can know something about Christ. — The Indian says to the Europeans: You need a renaissance of Christ Jesus. You have to rediscover the Christ, or someone else has to discover him for you, so that you have him again! - So says the Indian, after he has come to read the Gospel. He realizes that strange things have happened in Europe in the last three to four centuries. And then he says: If the Europeans themselves want to find out which Christ lives in the New Testament, they would have to go back a long way. Because this lack of understanding of Christ has been slowly prepared, and actually the Europeans would have to go back to Gnosticism if they still wanted to learn something from their own scriptures about the Christ.

A strange phenomenon! There is an Indian, who is only representative of many, who reads the New Testament and says to the Europeans: There is nothing that helps you more than going back to the Gnostics.

But the Europeans only have the Gnostics in the counter-writings. The Europeans know nothing of the Gnostics. It is a strange fact: the writings of the Gnostics have all been destroyed, only the polemics of the Christian church fathers against the Gnostics have survived, with the exception of the 'Pistis Sophia' and a few others, but these cannot be understood as they are, any more than the Gospels themselves can be understood. '

But now, if you are not a Gnostic but rediscover the Christ through modern spiritual science, the theologians come along and say: There the Gnosis is being warmed up again - the Gnosis, which they do not know, however, because they cannot know it from any external things. But 'warming up Gnosticism' is what it is, and that must not be done, because it distorts Christianity. This is also a divergence between East and West. Those who study the New Testament in the East find that one must go back to the first centuries. When theologians of the present day are confronted with something that appears as the description of Christ in today's anthroposophy, and which, to them, sounds like an unknown gnosis, they say: He wants to revive gnosis, that must not be allowed, it distorts Christianity.

Yes, the judgment of the Indian is quite remarkable. This Rãmanãthan actually says: What the Europeans now call their Christianity is falsified. The Europeans say: The Rãmanãthan falsifies our Christianity. But the Rãmanãthan comes quite close to the right view, albeit with his decadent view. The right thing is always a falsification of the wrong. It is only important to call these things by their right name. The right thing is always a falsification of the wrong, because if one did not falsify the wrong, one would not arrive at the right.

But that is the way things are today. Just think of the abyss you are looking into when you take this example from Rammanathan. For example, someone might say: Read the Gospels impartially. — It is difficult for a European today to read them impartially, after having been presented with the mistreated translations for centuries and having been educated in certain ideas. It is difficult to read them impartially. But if someone reads them impartially, even from his point of view, then he discovers a spiritual Christ in the Gospels. For that is what Ramanathan discovered in the Gospels, even if he cannot yet see it in the anthroposophical sense. But Europeans should still take note of this advice from the Ceylonese Indian: Let preachers of the Christ come to you from India, for you have none.

In these matters, one must have the courage today to look into the development that has taken place over the last three to four centuries, and only through this courage is it possible to truly emerge from the immense chaos into which humanity has gradually plunged. This tendency towards ambiguity clouds all concepts and ultimately also causes social chaos. For that which takes place between people does take place after all out of their souls, and there is already a connection between the highest truths and the destruction of external economic conditions. And so one must again be willing to lose one's earthly concepts if one wants to penetrate into the cosmos.

In yesterday's lecture I wanted to give you an example of how the cosmos fits into present-day spiritual life and how things stand in present-day spiritual life. A relationship with earthly concepts only exists when one comes out into the cosmos.

Our studies of karma, which have led us lately to definite individual examples of karmic relationships, are intended to afford a basis for forming a judgment not only of individual human connections, but also of more general historical ones. And it is with this end in view that I would like now to add to the examples already given. Today we will prepare the ground, and tomorrow we will follow this up by showing the karmic connections.

You will have realised that consideration of the relation between one earth-life and the next must always be based upon certain definite symptoms and facts. If we take these as our starting-point, they will lead us to a view of the actual connections. And in the case of the individualities of whom I have ventured to tell you, I have shown where these particular starting-points are to be found.

Today I want, as I said, to prepare the way, placing before you problems of which we shall find the solutions tomorrow.

Let me first draw your attention to the peculiar interest that one or another personality can arouse. I shall speak of personalities of historical interest as well as of personalities in ordinary life; the very interest that some persons arouse in us will often urge us to find a clue to their life-connections. Once we know how to look for these clues in the right way, we shall be able to find them. As you will already have noticed from the way in which I have presented the cases, it is all a matter of seeking in the right way. Let us then not be deterred, but proceed boldly.

Whatever one's attitude to the personality of Garibaldi may be in other respects, there can be no doubt that he is an interesting figure in the history of Europe; he played, as we all know, a remarkable part in the events of the 19th century. Today, then, we will make a preparatory study of Garibaldi, and to begin with I will bring to your notice certain facts in his life which, as we shall find, are able to lead the student of spiritual science to the connections of which we shall learn tomorrow.

Garibaldi is a personality who participated in a remarkable way in the life of the 19th century. He was born in the year 1807 and he held a prominent and influential position on into the second half of the century. This means that the way he expresses himself as a man is highly characteristic of the 19th century.

When we come to consider the features of his life, looking especially for those that are important from a spiritual aspect, we find Garibaldi spending his boyhood in Nice as the son of a poor man who has a job in the navigation service. He is a child who has little inclination to take part in what the current education of the country has to offer, a child who is not at all brilliant at school, but who takes a lively interest in all sorts and varieties of human affairs. What he learns at school has indeed the effect of inducing him very often to play truant. While the teacher was trying in his own way to bring some knowledge of the world to the children, the boy Garibaldi much preferred to romp about out-of-doors, to scamper through the woods or play games by the riverside. On the other hand, if he once got hold of some book that appealed to him, nothing could tear him from it. He would lie on his back by the hour in the sunshine, absolutely absorbed, not even going home for meals.

Broadly speaking, however, it was the great world that interested him. While still quite young he set about preparing himself for his father's calling and took part in sea voyages, at first in a subordinate, and afterwards in an independent position. He made many voyages on the Adriatic and shared in all the varied experiences that were to be had in the first half of the 19th century, when Liberalism and Democracy had not yet organised the traffic on the sea and put it under police regulations, but when some freedom of movement was still left in the life of man! He shared in all the experiences that were possible in times when one could do more or less what one wanted! And so he also had the experience—I believe it happened to him three or four times—of being seized by pirates. As well as being a genius, however, he was sly, and every time he was caught, he got away again, and very quickly too!

And so Garibaldi grew up into manhood, always living in the great world. As I have said, I do not intend to give you a biography but to point out characteristic features of his life that can lead us on to a consideration of what is really important and essential. He lived in the great world, and there came a time when he acquired a very strong and vivid impression of what his own inner relationship to the world might be. It was when he was nearly grown up and was taken by his father on a journey through the country, as far as Rome. There, looking out from Rome as it were over all Italy, he must have been aware of something quite remarkable going through his soul. In his voyages he had met many people who were, in general, quite alive and awake, but were utterly indifferent to one particular interest—they were asleep as regards the conditions of the time; and these people made an impression on Garibaldi that nearly drove him to despair. They had no enthusiasm for true and genuine humanity, such as showed itself in him quite early in life—he had indeed a genius for warm, tender-hearted enthusiasm.

As he passed through the countryside and afterwards came to Rome, a kind of vision must have arisen in his soul of the part he was later to play in the liberation of Italy. Other circumstances also helped to make him a fanatical anti-cleric, and a fanatical Republican, a man who set clearly before him the aim of doing everything in his power to further the well-being of mankind.

And now, taking part as he did in all manner of movements in Italy in the first half of the 19th century, it happened one day that for the first time in his life, Garibaldi read his name in the newspaper. I think he was about thirty years old at the time. It meant a good deal more in those days than it would do now, to read one's name in the newspaper. Garibaldi had, however, a peculiar destiny in connection with this reading of his name in the newspaper, for the occasion was the announcement in the paper of his death-sentence! He read his name there for the first time when his sentence to death was reported. There you have a unique circumstance of his life; it is not every man who has such an experience.

It was not granted to Garibaldi—and it is characteristic of his destiny that it was not, considering that his whole enthusiasm was centred in Italy—it was not granted him at first to take a hand in the affairs of Italy or Europe, but it was laid upon him by destiny to go first to South America and take part in all manner of movements for freedom over there, until the year 1848. And in every situation he showed himself a most remarkable man, gifted with quite extraordinary qualities. I have already related to you one most singular event in his life, the finding of his name in the newspaper for the first time on the occasion of the announcement of his own death-sentence. And now we come to another quite individual biographical fact, something that happens to very few men indeed. Garibaldi became acquainted in a most extraordinary way with the woman who was to be the mainstay of his happiness for many years. He was out at sea, on board ship, looking landwards through a telescope. To fall in love through a telescope—that is certainly not the way it happens to most people!

Destiny again made it easy for him to become quickly acquainted with the one whom he had chosen through the telescope to be his beloved. He steered at once in the direction in which he had looked through the telescope, and on reaching land he was invited by a man to a meal. It transpired, after he had accepted the invitation, that this man was the father of the girl he had seen! She could speak only Portuguese, and he only Italian; but we are assured by his biographer, and it seems to be correct, that the young woman immediately understood his carefully phrased declaration of love, which seems to have consisted simply of the words—in Italian of course—“We must unite for life.” She understood immediately. And it really happened so, that from this meeting came a life-companionship that lasted for a long, long time.

Garibaldi's wife shared in all the terrible and adventurous journeys he made in South America, and some of the recorded details of them are really most moving. For example, the story is told of how a report got about that Garibaldi had been killed in battle. His wife hurried to the battlefield and lifted up every head to see if it were her husband's. After a long time, and after undergoing many adventures in the search, she found him still alive. It is most affecting to read how on this very journey, which lasted a long time, she gave birth to a child without help of any kind, and how, in order to keep it warm, she bound it in a sling about her neck, holding it against her breast for hours at a time. The story of Garibaldi's South American adventures has some deeply moving aspects.

But now the time came, in the middle of the 19th century, when all kinds of impulses for freedom were stirring among the peoples of Europe, and Garibaldi could not bring himself to stay away any longer in South America; he returned to his fatherland. It is well-known with what intense energy he worked there, mustering volunteers under the most difficult circumstances—so much so that he did not merely contribute to the development of the new Italy: he was its creator.

And here we come to a feature of his life and character that stands out very strongly. He was, in every relationship of life, a man of independence, a man who always thought in a large and simple way, and took account only of the impulses that welled up from the depths of his own inner being. And so it is really very remarkable to see him doing everything in his power to bring it about that the dynasty of Victor Emmanuel should rule over the kingdom of Italy, when in reality the whole unification and liberation of Italy was due to Garibaldi himself. The story of how he won Naples and then Sicily with, comparatively speaking, quite a small force of men, undisciplined yet filled with enthusiasm, of how the future King of Italy needed only to make his entry into the regions already won for him by Garibaldi, and of how, nevertheless, if truth be told, nothing whatever was done from the side of the royal family or of those who stood near to them to show any proper appreciation of what Garibaldi had accomplished—the whole story makes a deep and striking impression. Fundamentally speaking, if we may put it in somewhat trivial language, the Savoy Dynasty had Garibaldi to thank for everything, and yet they were eminently unthankful to him, treating him with no more than necessary politeness.

Take, for example, the entry into Naples. Garibaldi had won Naples for the Dynasty and was regarded by the Neapolitans as no less than their liberator; a perfect storm of jubilation always greeted his appearance. It would have been unthinkable for the future King of Italy to make his entry into Naples without Garibaldi, absolutely unthinkable. Nevertheless the King's advisers were against it. Advisers, no doubt, are often exceedingly short-sighted; but if Victor Emmanuel had not acted on his own account out of a certain instinct and made Garibaldi sit by him in his red shirt on the occasion of the entry into Naples, he himself would most certainly not have been greeted with shouts of rejoicing! Even so, the cheers were intended for Garibaldi and not for him. He would most assuredly have been hissed—that is an absolute certainty. Victor Emmanuel would have been hissed if he had entered Naples without Garibaldi.

And it was the same all through. At some campaign or other in the centre of Italy, Garibaldi had carried the day. The commanders-in-chief with the King had come—what does one say in such a case, putting it as kindly as one can?—they had come too late. The whole thing had been carried through to the finish by Garibaldi. When, however, the army appeared, with its generals wearing their decorations, and met Garibaldi's men who had no decorations and were moreover quite unpretentiously attired, the generals declared: it is beneath our dignity to ride side by side with them, we cannot possibly do such a thing! But Victor Emmanuel had some sort of instinct in these matters. He called Garibaldi to his side, and the generals, making wry faces, were obliged to join with Garibaldi's army as it drew up into line. These generals, it seems, had a terribly bad time of it; they looked as though they had stomach-aches! And afterwards, when the entry into a town was to be made, Garibaldi, who had done everything, actually had to come on behind like a rearguard. He and his men had to wait and let the others march in front. It was a case where the regular army had in point of fact done absolutely nothing; yet they entered first, and after them, Garibaldi with his followers.

The important things to note are these remarkable links of destiny. It is in these links of destiny that we may find our guidance to the karmic connections. For it has not directly to do with a man's freedom or unfreedom that he first sees his name in print on the occasion of his death-sentence, or that he finds his wife through a telescope. Such things are connections of destiny; they take their course alongside of that which is always present in man in spite of them—his freedom. These are the very things, however—these things of which we may be sure that they are links of destiny—that can give a great stimulus to the practical study of the nature and reality of karma.

Now in the case of a personality like Garibaldi, traits that may generally be thought incidental, are characteristic. They are, in his case, strongly marked. Garibaldi was what is called a handsome man. He had beautiful tawny-golden hair and was altogether a splendid figure. His hair was curly and gleaming gold, and was greatly admired by the women! Now you will agree, from what I have told you of Garibaldi's bride—whom he chose, you remember, through a telescope—that only the highest possible praise can be spoken of her; nevertheless, it seems she was not altogether free from jealousy. What does Garibaldi do one day when this jealousy seems to have assumed somewhat large proportions? He has his beautiful hair all cut away to the roots; he lets himself be made bald. That was when they were still in South America. All these things are traits that serve to show how the necessities of destiny are placed into life.

Garibaldi became, as we know, one of the great men of Europe after his achievements in Italy, and traveling through Italy today you know how, from town to town, you pass from one Garibaldi memorial to another. But there have been times when not only in Italy but everywhere in Europe the name of Garibaldi was spoken with the keenest interest and the deepest devotion, when even the ladies in Cologne, in Mainz and in many another place wore blouses in Garibaldi's honour—not to mention London, where Garibaldi's red blouse became quite the fashion.

During the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870, Garibaldi, now an old man, put himself at the disposal of the French, and an interesting incident took place. His only experience, as we know, had been volunteer fighting, such as he had conducted in Italy and also in South America, yet on a certain occasion in this full-scale war he was the one to capture a German flag from under a pile of men who were trying to protect it with their bodies. Garibaldi captured this flag. But he had such respect for the men who had hurled themselves upon the flag to guard it with their own bodies, that he sent it back to its owners. Strange to relate, however, when he appeared in a meeting at some place or other soon afterwards, he was received with hisses on account of what he had done.

You will agree—this is not merely an interesting life, but the life of a man who in very deed and fact is lifted right above all other greatness in evidence in the 19th century! A most remarkable man—so original, so elementary, acting so evidently out of primitive impulses, and at the same time with such genius! Others working with him may perhaps have been better at leading large armies and doing things in an orderly way, but none of them in that deeply materialistic period had such genuine, spontaneous enthusiasm for what they were aiming at.

Here, then, is one of the personalities whom I would like to place before you. As I said, I shall give preparatory descriptions today, and tomorrow we will look for the answers.

Another personality, very well-known to you by name, is of exceptional interest in connection with investigations into karma. It is Lessing.

The circumstances of Lessing's life, I may say, have always interested me to an extraordinary degree. Lessing is really the founder of the better sort of journalism, the journalism that has substance and is really out to accomplish something. Before Lessing, poets and dramatists had taken their subjects from the aristocracy. Lessing, on the other hand, is at pains to introduce bourgeois life, ordinary middle-class life, into the drama, the life concerned generally with the destinies of men as men, and not with the destinies of men in so far as they hold some position in society or the like. Purely human conflicts—that is what Lessing wanted to portray on the stage. In the course of his work he applied himself to many great problems, as for example when he tried to determine the boundaries of painting and of poetry in his Laocoon. But the most interesting thing of all is the powerful impetus with which Lessing fought for the idea of tolerance. You need only take his Nathan the Wise and you will see at once what a foremost place this idea of tolerance has in Lessing's mind and life. In weaving the fable of the three kings in Nathan the Wise, he wants to show how the three main religions have gone astray from their original forms and are none of them really genuine, and how one must go in search of the true form, which has been lost. Here we have tolerance united with an uncommonly deep and significant idea.

Interesting, too, is the conversation between Freemasons, entitled Ernst und Falk, and much else that springs from Freemasonry. What Lessing accomplished in the way of critical research into the history of religious life is, for one who is able to judge its significance, really astounding. But we must be able to place the whole Lessing, in his complete personality, before us. And this we cannot do by reading, for example, the two-volume work by Erich Schmidt which purports to be a final and complete study of Lessing. Lessing as he really was, is not portrayed at all, but a picture is given of a puppet composed of various limbs and members, and we are told that this puppet wrote Nathan the Wise and Laocoon. It amounts to no more than an assertion that the man portrayed here has written these books. And it is the same with the other biographies of Lessing.

We begin to get an impression of Lessing when we observe, shall I say, the driving force with which he hurls his sentences against his opponents. He wages a polemic against the civilisation of Middle Europe—quite a refined and correct polemic, but at every turn hitting straight home. You must here observe a peculiar nuance in Lessing's character if you want to understand the make-up of his life. On the one hand we have the sharpness, often caustic sharpness, in such writings as The Dramatic Art of Hamburg, and then we have to find the way over, as it were, to an understanding, for example, of the words used by Lessing when a son had been born to him and had died directly after birth. He writes somewhat as follows in a letter: Yes, he has at once taken leave again of this world of sorrow; he has thereby done the best thing a human being can do. (I cannot cite the passage word for word, but it was to this effect.) In so writing, Lessing is giving expression to his pain in a wonderfully brave way, not for that reason feeling the pain one whit less deeply than someone who can do nothing but bemoan the event. This ability to draw back into himself in pain was characteristic of the man who at the same time knew how to thrust forward with vigour when he was developing his polemics. This is what makes it so affecting to read the letter written when his child had died immediately after birth, leaving the mother seriously ill.

Lessing had moreover this remarkable thing in his destiny—and it is quite characteristic, when one sets out to find the karmic connections in his case—that he was friends in Berlin with a man who was in every particular his opposite, namely, Nikolai.

Of Lessing it can be said—it is not literally true, but it is none the less characteristic—that he never dreamed, because his intellect and his understanding were so keen. On this account, as we shall see tomorrow, he is for the spiritual researcher such an extraordinarily significant personality. But there is something in the very construction of his sentences, something in the home-thrusts with which he lays his opponent in the dust, that really makes every sentence a delight to read.

With Nikolai it is just the opposite. Nikolai is an example of a true philistine. Although a friend of Lessing, he was none the less a typical philistine-bourgeois; and he had visions, most strange and remarkable visions.

Lessing, genius as he was, had no visions, not even dreams. Nikolai literally suffered from visions. They came, and they went away only after leeches had been applied. Yes, in extremity they actually applied leeches to him, in order that he might not be for ever tormented by the spiritual world which would not let him alone.

Fichte wrote a very interesting essay directed against Nikolai. He set out to give a picture of the typical German-bourgeois as shown in the personality of Nikolai. For all that, this same Nikolai was the friend of Lessing.

Another thing is very remarkable in Lessing. In his own Weltanschauung, Lessing concerned himself very much with two philosophers, Spinoza and Leibniz. Now it has often attracted me very much, as an interesting occupation for spare hours, to read all the writings in which it is proved over and over again that Lessing was a Leibnizian, and on the other hand those in which it is proved on still more solid ground that he was a Spinozist. For in truth one cannot decide whether Lessing, acute and discerning thinker as he was, was a Leibnizian or a Spinozist, who are the very opposite of each other. Spinoza—pantheist and monotheist; Leibniz—monadist, purely and completely individualistic. And yet we cannot decide whether Lessing belongs to Leibniz or to Spinoza. When we try to put him to the test in this matter, we can come to no conclusive judgment. It is impossible.

At the close of his life Lessing wrote the remarkable essay, The Education of the Human Race, at the end of which, quite isolated, as it were, the idea of repeated earth-lives appears. The book shows how mankind goes through one epoch of development after another, and how the Gods gave into man's hand as a first primer, so to speak, the Old Testament, and then as a second primer the New Testament, and how in the future a third book will come for the further education of the human race. And then all at once the essay is brought to a close with a brief presentation of the idea that man lives through repeated earth-lives. And there Lessing says, again in a way that is absolutely in accord with his character (I am not quoting the actual words, but this is the gist of it): Ought the idea of repeated earth-lives to seem so absurd, considering that it was present in very early times, when men had not yet been spoilt by school learning? The essay then ends with a genuine panegyric on repeated earth-lives, finishing with these beautiful words: “Is not all Eternity mine?”

One used to meet continually—perhaps it would still be so if one mixed more with people—one used to meet men who valued Lessing highly, but who turned away, so to speak, when they came to The Education of the Human Race. Really it is hard to understand the state of mind of such men. They set the highest estimation on a man of genius, and then reject what he gives to mankind in his most mature age. They say: he has grown old, he is senile, we can no longer follow him. That is all very well; one can reject anything by that method! The fact is, no one has any right to recognise Lessing and not to recognise that this work was conceived by him in the full maturity of his powers. When a man like Lessing utters a profound aphorism such as this on repeated earth-lives, there is, properly speaking, no possibility of ignoring it.

You will readily see that the personality of Lessing is interesting in the highest degree from a karmic point of view, in relation to his own passage through different earth-lives. In the second half of the 18th century the idea of repeated earth-lives was by no means a commonly accepted one. It comes forth in Lessing like a flash of lightning, like a flash of genius. We cannot account for its appearance; it cannot possibly be due to Lessing's education or to any other influence in this particular life. We are compelled to ask how it may be with the previous life of a man in whom at a certain age the idea of repeated earth-lives suddenly emerges—an idea that is foreign to the civilisation of his own day—emerges, too, in such a way that the man himself points to the fact that the idea was once present in very early times. The truth is that he is really bringing forward inner grounds for the idea, grounds of feeling that carry with them an indication of his own earth-life in the distant past. Needless to say, in his ordinary surface-consciousness he has no notion of such connections. The things we do not know are, however, none the less true. If those things alone were true that many men know, then the world would be poor indeed in events and poor indeed in beings.

This is the second case whose karmic connections we are going to study.

There is a third case I should like to open up, because it is one that can teach us a great deal in the matter of karmic relationships. Among the personalities who were near to me as teachers in my youth there was a man to whom I have already referred; today I should like to speak of him again, adding some points that will be significant for our study of karma.

There are, of course, risks in speaking of these matters, but in view of the whole situation of the spiritual life which ought to proceed from Anthroposophy today, I do not think such risks can be avoided.

What I am now going to tell you came to my notice several years after I had last seen the person in question, who was a greatly beloved teacher of mine up to my eighteenth year. But I had always continued to follow his life, and had in truth remained very close to him. And now at a certain moment in my own life I felt constrained to follow his life more closely in a particular respect.

It was when, in another connection, I began to take a special interest in the life of Lord Byron. And at that same time I got to know some Byron enthusiasts. One of them was the poetess, Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, of whom I shall have much to say in my autobiography. During a certain period of her life she was a Byron enthusiast. Then there was another, a most remarkable personality, a strange mixture of all possible qualities—Eugen Heinrich Schmidt. Many of you who know something about the history of Anthroposophy will be familiar with his name.

Eugen Heinrich Schmidt first became known in Vienna during the eighties, and it was then that I made his acquaintance. He had just written the prize essay that was published by the Hegel Society of Berlin, on the Dialectics of Hegel. Now he came to Vienna, a tall, slight man filled with a burning enthusiasm, which came to expression at times in very forcible gestures and so on. It was none the less genuine for that. And it was just this enthusiasm of Schmidt's that gave me the required “jerk,” as it were. I thought I would like to do him a kindness, and as he had recently written a most enthusiastic and inspired article on Lord Byron, I introduced him to my other Byron enthusiast, Marie Eugenie delle Grazie. And now began a wildly excited discussion on Byron. The two were really quite in agreement, but they carried on a most lively and animated debate. All we others who were sitting round—a whole collection of theological students from the Vienna Catholic Faculty were there, who came every week and with whom I had made friends—all we others were silent. And the two who were thus conversing about Byron were sitting like this.—Here was the table, rather a long one, and at one end sat delle Grazie and at the other end, Eugen Heinrich Schmidt, gesticulating with might and main. All of a sudden his chair slips away from under him, and he falls under the table, his feet stretching right out to delle Grazie. I can tell you, it was a shock for us all! But this shock helped me to hit upon the solution of a particular problem.

Let me tell you of it quite objectively, as a matter of history. All that they had been saying about Byron had made a strong impression upon me, and I began to feel the keenest need to know how the karmic connections might be in the case of Byron. It was, of course, not so easy. But now I suddenly had the following experience.—It was really as if the whole picture of this conversation, with Eugen Heinrich Schmidt being so terribly impolite with his foot!—as if this picture had suddenly drawn my attention to the foot of Lord Byron, who was, as you know, club-footed. And from that I went on to say to myself: My beloved teacher, too, had a foot like that; this karmic connection must be investigated. I have already given you an example, in the affliction of the knee from which Eduard von Hartmann suffered, of how one's search can be led back through peculiarities of this kind. I was able now to perceive the destiny of the teacher whom I loved and who also had such a foot. And it was remarkable in the highest degree to observe how on the one hand the same peculiarity came to view both in the case of Byron and of my teacher, namely, the club-foot; but how on the other hand the two persons were totally different from one another, Byron, the poet of genius, who in spite of his genius—or perhaps because of it—was an adventurer; and the other a brilliant geometrician such as one seldom finds in teaching posts, a man at whose geometrical imagination and treatment of descriptive geometry one could only stand amazed.

In short, having before me these two men, utterly different in soul, I was able to solve the problem of their karma by reference to this seemingly insignificant physical detail. This detail it was that enabled me to consider the problems of Byron and my geometry teacher in connection with one another, and thereby to find the solution.

I wished to give these examples today and tomorrow we will consider them from the point of view of karma.

To-day we shall begin to consider the inner activities of the soul which can gradually lead man to acquire conceptions, to acquire thoughts, about karma. These thoughts and conceptions are such that they can ultimately enable a man to perceive, in the light of karma, experiences which have a karmic cause.

Looking around our human environment, we really see in the physical world only what is caused by physical force in a physical way. And if we do see in the physical world something that is not caused by physical forces, we still become aware of it through external physical substances, through external physical objects of perception. Of course, when a man does something out of his own will, this is not caused by physical forces, by physical causes, for in many respects it comes out of the free will. But all that we perceive outwardly is exhausted in the physical phenomena of the world we thus observe. In the entire sphere of what we can thus observe, the karmic connection of an experience we ourselves pass through cannot reveal itself to us. For the whole picture of this karmic connection lies in the spiritual world, is really inscribed in what is the etheric world, in what underlies the etheric world as the astral world, or as the world of spiritual beings who inhabit this astral outer world. Nothing of all this is seen, as long as we merely direct our senses to the physical world.

All that we perceive in the physical world is perceived through our senses. These senses work without our having much to do with it. Our eyes receive impressions of light, of colour, of their own accord. We can at most—and even that is half involuntary—adjust our gaze to a certain direction; we can gaze at something or we can look away from it. Even in this there is still much of the unconscious, but at all events a fragment of consciousness. And, above all, that which the eye must do inwardly in order to see colour, the wonderfully wise, inner activity which is exercised whenever we see anything—this we could never achieve as human beings if we were supposed to achieve it consciously. That would be out of the question. All this must, to begin with, happen unconsciously, because it is much too wise for man to be able in any way to help in it.

To attain a correct point of view as regards the knowledge possessed by the human being, we must really fill our thoughts with all the wisdom-filled arrangements which exist in the world, and which are quite beyond the capacity of man. If a man thinks only of what he can achieve himself, then he really blocks all paths to knowledge. The path to knowledge really begins at the point where we realise, in all humility, all that we are incapable of doing, but which must nevertheless come to pass in cosmic existence. The eye, the ear—yes, and the other sense-organs—are, in reality, such profoundly wise instruments that men will have to study for a long time before they will be able even to have an inkling of understanding of them during earthly existence. This must be fully realised. Observation of the spiritual, however, cannot be unconscious in this sense. In earlier times of human evolution this was possible even for observation of the spiritual. There was an instinctive clairvoyance which has faded away in the course of the evolution of humanity.

From now onwards, man must consciously attain an attitude to the cosmos through which he will be able to see through into the spiritual. And we must see through into the spiritual if we are to recognise the karmic connections of any experience we may have.

Now it is necessary for the observation of karma that we at least begin by paying attention to what can happen within us to develop the faculty of observing karmic connections. We, on our part, must help a little in order to make these observations conscious. We must do more, for example, than we do for our eye in order to become conscious of colour.

My dear friends, what we must learn first of all is summed up in one word: to wait. We must be able to wait for the inner experiences.

About this “being able to wait”, I have already spoken. It was in the year 1889—I tell about this in the Story of my Life—that the inner spiritual construction of Goethe's “The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” first came before my mind's eye. And it was then, for the first time, that the perception as it were of a greater, wider connection than appears in the Fairy Tale itself presented itself to me. But I also knew at that time: I cannot yet make of this connection what I shall some day be able to make of it. And so what the Fairy Tale revealed to me at that time simply remained lying in the soul.

Then, seven years later, in the year 1896, it welled up again, but still not in such a way that it could be properly shaped; and again, about 1903, seven years later. Even then, although it came with great definition and many connections it could not yet receive its right form. Seven years later again, when I conceived my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation—then only did the Fairy Tale reappear, transformed in such a way that it could be shaped and moulded plastically.

Such things, therefore, demand a real waiting, a time for ripening. We must bring our own experiences into relation with that which exists out there in the world. At a moment when only the seed of a plant is present, we obviously cannot have the plant. The seed must be brought into the right conditions for growth, and we must wait until the blossom, and finally the fruit, come out of the seed. And so it must be with the experiences through which we pass. We cannot take the line of being thrilled by an experience, simply because it happens to be there, and then forgetting it. The person who only wants his experiences when they are actually present will be doing little towards ultimate observation of the spiritual world. We must be able to wait. We must be able to let the experiences ripen within the soul.

Now the possibility exists for a comparatively quick ripening of insight into karmic connections if, for a considerable time, we endeavour patiently, and with inner activity, to picture in our consciousness, more and more clearly, an experience which would otherwise simply take its course externally, without being properly grasped, so that it fades away in the course of life. After all, this fading away is what really happens with the events of life. For what does a man do with events and experiences, as they approach him in the course of the day? He experiences them, but in reality only half observes them. You can realise how experiences are only half observed if you sit down one day in the afternoon or in the evening—and I advise you to do it—and ask yourself: ‘What did I actually experience this morning at half-past nine?’ And now try to call up such an experience in all details before your soul, recall it as if it were actually there, say at half-past seven in the evening—as if you were creating it spiritually before you. You will see how much you will find lacking, how much you failed to observe, and how difficult it is. If you take a pen or pencil to write it all down, you will soon begin to bite at the pen or the pencil, because you cannot hit upon the details—and, in time, you want to bite them out of the pencil!

Yes, but that is just the point, to take upon oneself the task of placing before the mind, in all precision, an experience one has had,—not at the moment when it is actually there, but afterwards. It must be placed before the soul as if one were going to paint it spiritually. If the experience were one in which somebody spoke, this must be made quite objectively real: the ring of the voice, the way in which the words were used, clumsily or cleverly—the picture must be made with strength and vigour. In short, we try to make a picture of what we have experienced. If we make a picture of such an experience of the day, then in the following night, the astral body, when it is outside the physical body and the etheric body, occupies itself with this picture. The astral body itself is, in reality, the bearer of the picture, and gives shape to it outside the body. The astral body takes the picture with it when it goes out on the first night. It shapes it there, outside the physical and etheric bodies.

That is the first stage (we will take these stages quite exactly): the sleeping astral body, when outside the physical and etheric bodies, shapes the picture of the experience. Where does it do this? In the external ether. It is now in the external etheric world; it does this in the external ether.

Now picture to yourself the human being: his physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, and the astral body is outside. We will leave aside the ego. There outside is the astral body, reshaping this picture that has been made. But the astral body does this in the external ether. In consequence of this the following happens—think of it: the astral body is there outside, shaping this picture. All this happens in the external ether which encrusts, as it were, with its own substance that which is formed as a picture within the astral body. So the external ether makes the etheric form (dotted (dark) outline) into a picture which is clearly and precisely visualised by the eye of spirit.

In the morning you return into the physical and etheric bodies and bear into them what has been made substantial by the external ether. That is to say: the sleeping astral body shapes the picture of the experience outside the physical and etheric bodies. The external ether then impregnates the picture with its own substance. You can imagine that the picture becomes stronger thereby, and that now, when the astral body returns in the morning with this stronger substantiality, it can make an impression upon the etheric body in the human being. With forces that are derived from the external ether, the astral body now stamps an impression into the etheric body.

The second stage is therefore: The picture is impressed into the etheric body by the astral body.

There we have the events of the first day and the first night. Now we come to the second day. On the second day, while you are busying yourself with all the little things of life in full waking consciousness, there, underneath the consciousness, in the unconscious, the picture is descending into the etheric body. And in the next night, when the etheric body is undisturbed, when the astral body has gone out again, the etheric body elaborates this picture.

Thus in the second night the picture is elaborated by the man's own etheric body. There we have the second stage:—The picture is impressed into the etheric body by the astral body; and in the next night the etheric body elaborates the picture. Thus we have: the second day and the second night.

Now if you do this, if you actually do not give up occupying yourself with the picture you formed on the preceding day—and you can continue to occupy yourself with it, for a reason which I shall immediately mention—if you do not disdain to do this, then you will find that you are living on further with the picture. What does this mean—to continue occupying yourself with it? If you really take pains to shape such a picture, vigorously, elaborating it plastically in characteristic, strong lines on the first day after you had the experience, then you have really exerted yourself spiritually. Such things cost spiritual exertion. I don't mean what I am going to say as a hint—present company is, of course, always excepted in these matters!—but after all, it must be said that the majority of men simply do not know what spiritual exertion is. Spiritual exertion, true spiritual exertion, comes about only by means of activity of soul. When you allow the world to work upon you, and let thoughts run their course without taking them in hand, then there is no spiritual exertion. We should not imagine, when something tires us, that we have exerted ourselves spiritually. Getting tired does not imply that there has been spiritual exertion. We can get tired, for instance, from reading. But if we have not ourselves been productive in some way during the reading, if we merely let the thoughts contained in the book act on us, then we are not exerting ourselves. On the contrary, a person who has really exerted himself spiritually, who has exerted himself out of the inner activity of his soul, may then take up a book, a very interesting one, and just “sleep off” his spiritual exertion in the best possible way, in the reading of it. Naturally, we can fall asleep over a book if we are tired. This getting tired is no sign at all of spiritual exertion.

A sign of spiritual exertion, however, is this: that one feels—the brain is used up. It is just as we may feel that a demand has been made on the muscle of the arm when lifting things. Ordinary thought makes no such strong claims upon the brain. The process continues, and you will even notice that when you try it for the first time, the second, the third, the tenth, you get a slight headache. It is not that you get tired or fall asleep; on the contrary, you cannot fall asleep; you get a slight headache from it. Only you must not regard this headache as something baleful; on the contrary, you must take it as actual proof of the fact that you have exerted your head.

Well, the process goes on ... it stays with you until you go to sleep. If you have really done this on the preceding day, then you will awake in the morning with the feeling: “There actually is something in me! I don't quite know what it is, but there is something in me, and it wants something from me. Yes, after all it is not a matter of indifference that I made this picture for myself yesterday. It really means something. This picture has changed. To-day it is giving me quite different feelings from those I had previously. The picture is making me have quite definite feelings.”

All this stays with you through the next day as the remaining inner experience of the picture which you made for yourself. And what you feel, and cannot get rid of through the whole of the day—this is a witness to the fact that the picture is now descending into the etheric body, as I have described to you, and that the etheric body is receiving it.

Now you will probably experience on waking after the next night—when you slip into your body after these two days—that you find this picture slightly changed, slightly transformed. You find it again ... precisely on waking the third day you find it again within you. It appears to you like a very real dream. But it has undergone a transformation. It will clothe itself in manifold pictures until it is other than it was. It will assume an appearance as if spiritual beings were now bringing you this experience. And you actually receive the impression: Yes, this experience which I had and which I subsequently formed into a picture, has actually been brought to me. If the experience happened to be with another human being, then we have the feeling after this has all happened, that actually we did not only experience it through that human being, but that it was really brought to us. Other forces, spiritual forces, have been at play. It was they who brought it to us.

The next day comes. This next day the picture is carried down from the etheric body into the physical body. The etheric body impresses this picture into the physical body, into the nerve-processes, into the blood-processes. On the third day the picture is impressed into the physical body. So the third stage is: The picture is stamped into the physical body by the etheric body.

And now comes the next night. You have been attending throughout the day to the ordinary little trifles of life, and underneath it all this important process is going on: the picture is being carried down into the physical body. All this goes on in the subconscious. When the following night comes, the picture is elaborated in the physical body. It is spiritualised in the physical body. First of all, throughout the day, the picture is brought down into the processes of the blood and nerves, but in the night it is spiritualised. Those who have vision see how this picture is now elaborated by the physical body, but it appears spiritually as an altogether changed picture. We can say: the physical body elaborates the picture during the next night.

1st Day and 1st Night:

When outside the physical and etheric bodies, the astral body shapes the picture of the experience. The outer ether impregnates the picture with its own substance.

2nd Day and 2nd Night:

The picture is stamped by the astral body into the etheric body. And the etheric body elaborates the picture during the next day.

3rd Day and 3rd Night:

The picture is stamped by the etheric body into the physical body. And the physical body elaborates the picture during the next night.

Now this is something of which you must make an absolutely correct mental picture. The physical body actually works up this picture spiritually. It spiritualises the picture. So that when all this has really been gone through, it does happen—when the human being is asleep—that his physical body works up the whole picture, but not in such a way that it remains within the physical body. Out of the physical body there arises a transformation, a greatly magnified transformation of the picture. And when you get up in the morning, this picture stands there, and in truth you hover in it; it is like a kind of cloud in which you yourself are. With this picture you get up in the morning.

So this is the third day and the third night. With this picture, which is entirely transformed, you get out of bed on the fourth day. You rise from sleep, enveloped by this cloud. And if you have actually shaped the picture with the necessary strength on the first day, and if you have paid attention to what your feeling conveyed to you on the second day, you will notice now that your will is contained in the picture as it now is. The will is contained in it! But this will is unable to express itself; it is as though fettered. Put into somewhat radical terms, it is actually as if one had planned after the manner of an incredibly daring sprinter, who might resolve to make a display of a bravado race: I will run, now I am running to Ober-Dornach, I make a picture of it already, I've got it within me. It is my will ... But in the very moment when I want to start, when the will is strongest, somebody fetters me, so that I stand there quite rigidly. The whole will has unfolded, but I cannot carry out the will. Such, approximately, is the process.

When this experience of feeling yourself in a pillory develops—for it is a feeling of being in a pillory after the third night—when you again awake in it, feeling in a pillory as it were, with the will fettered through and through, then, if you can pay attention to it, you will find that the will begins to transform itself. This will becomes sight. In itself it can do nothing, but it leads to our seeing something. It becomes an eye of the soul. And the picture, with which one rose from sleep, becomes objective. What it shows is the event of the previous earth-life, or of some previous earth-life, which had been the cause of the experience that we shaped into a picture on the first day. By means of this transformation through feeling and through will, one gets the picture of the causal event of a preceding incarnation.

When we describe these things, they appear somewhat overpowering. This is not to be wondered at, for they are utterly unfamiliar to the human being of the present time. They were not so unknown to the men of earlier culture-epochs. Only, according to the opinion of modern men who are clever, those other men—in their whole way of living—were stupid! Nevertheless, those ‘stupid’ men of the earlier culture-epochs really had these experiences, only modern man darkens everything by his intellect, which makes him clever, but not exactly wise.

As I said, the thing seems somewhat tumultuous, when one relates it. But after all, one is obliged to use such words; for since the things are utterly unknown to-day, they would not appear so striking if they were worded more mildly. They must appear striking. But the whole experience, from beginning to end, throughout the three days, as I have described it to you, must take its course in inner intimacy, in rest and peace of mind. For so-called occult experiences—and these are such—do not take their course in such a way that they can be bragged about. When one begins to brag about them, they immediately stop. They must take their course in inner repose and quietude. And it is best when, for the time being, nobody at all notices anything of the consecutive experiences except the person who is having them.

Now you must not think that the thing succeeds immediately, from the outset. One always finds, of course, that people are pleased when such things are related. This is quite comprehensible ... and it is good. How much there is that one can learn to know! And then, with a tremendous diligence people start on it. They begin ... and it doesn't succeed. Then they become disheartened. Then, perhaps, they try it again, several times. Again it does not succeed. But, in effect, if one has tried it about 49 times, or, let us say, somebody else has tried it about 69 times, then the 50th or the 70th time it does succeed. For what really matters in all these things is the acquisition of a kind of habit of soul concerning them. To begin with, one must find one's way into these things, one must acquire habits of the soul. This is something that certainly ought to be carefully observed by the Anthroposophical Society which, since the Christmas Foundation, is intended to be a complete expression of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Really a very great deal has been given within the Anthroposophical Society. It is enough to make one giddy to see standing in a row all the Lecture-Courses that have been printed. But in spite of it, people come again and again, asking one thing or the other. In the majority of cases this is not at all necessary, for if everything that is contained in the Lecture-Courses is really worked upon, then most of the questions find their own answer in a much surer way. One must have patience, really have patience. Truly, there is a great deal in anthroposophical literature that can work in the soul. We must take to heart all that has to be accomplished, and the time will be well filled with all that has to be done. But, on the other hand, in regard to many of the things which people want to know, it must be pointed out that the Lecture-Courses exist, that they have been left lying there, and after they have been given many people trouble about them only inasmuch as they want a “new” Course; they just lay the old ones aside. These things are closely connected with what I have to say to-day.

One does not reach inner continuity in following up all that germinates and ripens in the soul, if there is a desire to hurry in this way, from the new to the new; the essential point is that things must mature within the soul. We must accustom ourselves to inner, active work of the soul, work in the spirit. This is what helps us to achieve such things as I have explained to you to-day; this alone will help us to have, after the third day, the inner attitude of soul in connection with some experience we may wish to see through in the light of karma.

This must always be the mode of procedure if we are to learn to know the spiritual. To begin with, we must say to ourselves: the first moment when we approach the spiritual in thought in some way, was the first beginning; it is quite impossible to have any kind of result immediately; we must be able to wait. Suppose I have an experience to-day that is karmically caused in a preceding incarnation. I will make a diagrammatic sketch. Here I am, here is my experience, the experience of to-day (right). This is caused by the quite differently-constituted personality in the same ego in a previous earth-life (left). There it is. It has long ceased to belong to my personality, but it is stamped into the etheric world, or into the astral world, which lies behind the etheric world. Now I have to go back, to retrace the way backwards.

I told you that at first the thing appears as if some being were really bearing the experience towards me. This is so, on the second day. But after the third day it appears as if those who have brought it to me, those spiritual beings, withdraw, and I become aware of it as something of my own, which I myself, in a previous incarnation, laid down as cause. Because this is no longer within the present, because this is something I must behold in the past earth-life, I seem to be fettered. This state of being fettered ceases only when I have perceived the thing, when I have a picture of what was in the previous incarnation, and when I then look back to the event which I have not lost sight of through the three days. Then I become free, as I return, for now I can move about freely with the effect. As long as I am only within the cause, I cannot move about with the cause. Thus I go back into a previous incarnation, there become fettered as it were by the cause, and only when I now enter right into this present earth-life, is the thing resolved.

Now let us take an example: suppose somebody experiences at a certain time on a certain day that a friend says something to him that is not altogether pleasant—perhaps he had not expected it. This friend says to him something not altogether pleasant. He now ponders what he experiences in listening to what his friend says. He makes a vivid picture of what he has experienced, how he got a slight shock, and how he got vexed, perhaps he was also hurt, or the like. This is an inner working, and as such it must be brought into the picture. Now he lets the three days elapse. The second day he goes about and says to himself: ‘This picture which I made yesterday has had a strange effect upon me. The whole day long I have had within me something like an acid, as it were, something that comes from the picture and makes me feel inwardly out of sorts ...’ At the end of the whole process, after the third day, he says to himself: ‘I get up in the morning and now I have the definite feeling that the picture is fettering me.’ Then this event of the previous incarnation is made known to me. I see it before me. Then I pass over to the experience which is still quite fresh, which is still quite present. The fettering ceases, and I say to myself: ‘So this is how it was in the previous earth-life! This is what caused it; now there is the effect. With this effect I can live again ... now the thing is present again.’

This must be practised over and over again, for generally the thread is broken on the very first day, when we make the first effort. And then nothing comes.

It is particularly favourable to let things run parallel, so that we do not stop at one event, but bring a number of. events of the day into picture-form in this way. You will say: ‘Then I must live through the next day with the greatest variety of feelings.’ But this is quite possible. It is not at all harmful. Only try it; the things go quite well together. ‘And must I then be fettered so and so often after the third day?’ This does not matter either. Nothing of this matters. The things will adjust themselves in time. What belongs, from an earlier incarnation, to a later one, will find its way to it. But it will not succeed at once; it will not succeed at the first attempt; the thread breaks. We must have patience to try the thing over and over again. Then we feel something growing stronger within the soul. Then we feel that something awakens in the soul, and we say to ourselves: ‘Until now you were filled with blood. You have felt within you the pulsation of the blood and the breath. Now there is something within you besides the blood. You are filled with something.’

You can even have the feeling that you are filled with something of which you can say quite definitely that it is like a metal that has become aeriform. You actually feel something like metal, you feel it in you. It cannot be described differently; it really is so. You feel yourself permeated with metal, in your whole body. Just as one can say of certain waters, that they ‘taste metallic’, the whole body seems to ‘taste’ as if it were inwardly permeated by some delicate substance, which, in reality, is something spiritual.

You feel this when you come upon something which was, of course, always in you, but to which you only now begin to pay attention. Then, when you begin to feel this, you again take courage. For if the thread is always breaking and everything is as it was before—if you want to get hold of a karmic connection, but the thread is always breaking—you may easily lose courage. But when you detect within yourself this sense of being inwardly filled, then you get courage again. And you say to yourself: it will come right in time.

But, my dear friends, these things must be experienced in all quietude and calmness. Those who cannot experience them quietly but get excited and emotional, spread an inner mist over what really ought to happen, and nothing comes of it.

There are people to-day in the outside world who know of Anthroposophy only by hearsay. Perhaps they have read nothing at all of it, or only what opponents have written. It is really very funny now.—Many of the antagonistic writings spring out of the earth like mushrooms—they quote literature, but among the literature they quote there are none of my books at all, only the books of opponents! The authors admit that they have not really approached the original sources, that they know only the antagonistic literature. Such things exist to-day. And so there are people outside who say: “The Anthroposophists are mad.” As a matter of fact, what one can least of all afford to be in order to reach anything at all in the spiritual world is to be mad. One must not be mad in the very slightest degree if one hopes to come to anything in the spiritual world. Even the tiniest fragment of madness is a hindrance to reaching anything. This simply must be avoided. Even a slight fancifulness, slight capriciousness, must be avoided. For all this giving way to the moods of the day, the caprices of the day, forms obstacles and handicaps on the way to progress in the spiritual world. If one desires to progress in the field of Anthroposophy, there is nothing for it but to have an absolutely sane head and an absolutely sane heart. With doting sentimentality (Schwärmerei) which is already the beginning of madness, one can achieve nothing.

Things such as I have told you to-day, strange as they sound, must be experienced in the light of absolute clarity of mind, of absolute soundness of head and heart. Truly, there is nothing that can more surely save one from very slight daily madness, than Anthroposophy. All madness would [disappear] by means of Anthroposophy if people would only devote themselves to it with real intensity. If somebody were to set himself to go mad through Anthroposophy, this would certainly be an experiment with inadequate means!

I do not say this in order to make a joke, but because it must be an integral part of the mood and tenor of anthroposophical endeavour. This is the attitude that must be adopted towards the matter, as I have just explained to you, half in joke, if we want to approach it in the right way, with the right orientation. We must set out to be as sane as possible; then we approach it in the right spirit. This is the least we can strive for, and above all, strive for in respect to the little madnesses of life.

Once I was friends with a very clever professor of philosophy, now long since dead, who used to say on every occasion: “We all have some point or other on which we are a little mad!” He meant, all people are a little mad ... but he was a very clever man. I always believed there was something behind his words, that his assertion was not altogether without foundation! He did not become an Anthroposophist.

In the last lecture we spoke of how the seed of karma is formed in the period immediately following a man's death. And I tried to describe to you with what living force and intensity the experiences undergone during this period work upon him and also upon one who is able to follow the life of a human being through this period—which, as you know, lasts for about a third of the time of the earthly life. We must, of course, bear in mind how the terrestrial world in which the fulfilment and development of karma take place, works upon man, and in what a different way he is influenced by the extra-terrestrial world.

When we survey the scene of our karma—the earth—it is obvious that everything belonging to the earth, all the beings of the kingdoms of nature, exercise a very real influence upon man. This influence makes itself felt in his life even when his cognition is not directed to his earthly surroundings. He must be nourished, he must grow; to this end he must take into himself the substances of the earth. These substances work upon him through their qualities and inner forces quite independently of anything he may know about them. And expressing it rather radically, we may say that no matter what attitude a man adopts in his life of soul towards the kingdoms of nature surrounding him in earthly existence, he is related in a very definite way to the facts and realities of his physical environment.

This can be observed in many domains of life. How would it be, for instance, if the quantity of foodstuffs we consume were determined by what we know about the effects of the various foodstuffs upon the organism? Obviously we cannot wait until we possess such knowledge; we are obliged to eat. Our relationship to our earthly environment is entirely independent of our knowledge, independent too, in a certain sense, of our life of soul.

But now think of the utterly different character of our relationship to the world of stars. Influences of the world of stars cannot be said to have the same instinctive basis as the influences of the kingdoms of nature. The starry worlds fill man with wonder, he can be moved and inspired by them. But just think to what an extent his life of soul is involved in everything that concerns the world of stars, how his life of soul is affected. Take the nearest heavenly body that is related to man—the moon. That the moon has an influence upon man's life of phantasy and imagination is common knowledge. And even those people who repudiate everything else in respect of influence of the celestial bodies upon the human being will not deny that the ‘magic of moonlight’—to use a romantic phrase—has an effect upon phantasy.

But it is impossible to imagine that even this crudest and most obvious influence of the world of stars could take effect if man had no life of soul. Without the life of soul there could be no such relationship as exists between man and his earthly environment, where in truth nothing essential depends upon whether he admires or does not admire, shall we say, a cabbage—it is simply there to be eaten—or upon what he knows of its effect upon his organs; what he has to do is to eat it! In this case, knowledge is merely an accessory. Knowledge does indeed, raise man's life of soul above the life of nature; but man lives his life within the realm of nature, and the spiritual life itself is an accessory. But if the spiritual life is excluded we cannot conceive that any influence could be exercised upon man by the world of the stars—let alone by the world lying still further beyond: the world of the Hierarchies, of the higher Spiritual Beings.

On the lowest level, so to speak, of the Hierarchies are those Beings of whom I said in the last lecture that inasmuch as they themselves live within the experiences of man after death, they impart tremendous power and intensity to these experiences. If these Moon Beings who were once the great primeval Teachers of humanity on earth did not live, as it were, within man's very being after death, his experiences would be like dreams. But they are anything but dreamlike; they are stronger, more full of reality than the so-called normal experiences of earthly life. Karma is actually prepared by means of these experiences, because we live with such intensity in others, not in ourselves, and have to establish the balance for our deeds. We experience things as the others experienced them, and with tremendous intensity. In this way our karma is prepared. And then comes a transition. Having shared these experiences with the Moon Beings, man passes on to experiences shared with Beings who have never been on the earth. The Moon Beings of whom I spoke in the last lecture were at one time on the earth. But now, in a later period between death and a new birth, man ascends to Beings who were never on earth. The Beings belonging to the first group of the higher Hierarchies are those we know by the name of the Angels. These Beings guide and accompany us from one earthly life to another. Among the ranks of the higher Beings they are the nearest to us and they are also very near to us throughout our earthly life.

When we reflect about the external circumstances of our earthly life, about things we have seen or heard, about what we have gleaned from the world of nature or from history, or about what other people have said to us ... when our thinking is occupied exclusively with what comes to us from outside during earthly life, then that Being of the Hierarchy of the Angels to whom we belong has little to do with our thoughts; for the Angels never dwelt on the earth—unlike the primeval Teachers who although they were present in etheric bodies only, did nevertheless inhabit the earth. The Angels were never earth-dwellers. Our relation to them is therefore different from our relation to the Moon Beings of whom I have been speaking to you.

But for all that, as we follow the paths which lead us after death in a certain sense past the planets, and come, first of all, into the domain of the Moon Beings, we are also in the realm of the Angels. Thus while we are living together with the primeval Teachers of humanity who have now become Moon-dwellers, we are living, too, with the Angels.

Then, as our path leads further, we enter the sphere which in all spiritual science that has ever existed, is known as the sphere of Mercury. None of the Beings in this region were ever on the earth. Here live only Beings who were never earth-dwellers. When we pass into the sphere of Mercury between death and a new birth, we come into the realm of the Archangels. And when subsequently we pass into the sphere of Venus we come into the realm of the Archai.

In passing through these realms of the Third Hierarchy we approach what is in reality the spiritual sphere of the Sun. And the spiritual Sun-sphere is truly, in the most sublime sense, the dwelling-place of those Beings who in the ranks of the higher Hierarchies are named Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. Thus it is the Second Hierarchy which, in reality, is the soul, the spirit, of the Sun-existence. We enter this sphere and spend in it the greater part of the time between death and a new birth.

Now these Beings can of a truth be understood only when we remember that their existence is entirely remote from what makes us into earth-men and holds us within the bounds of natural law. In the realm of true Sun-existence there are no natural laws as we know them on earth. In the realm of spiritual Sun-activity, spiritual laws—including, for example, the laws of will—and natural laws, are one. In that realm, natural laws do not in any way run counter to spiritual laws, for natural law and spiritual law are completely at one.

Let us be quite clear as to the consequences of this.—We live here on earth and have our various experiences. Perhaps we strive for goodness, we endeavour not to deviate from a path we consider morally right. With these intentions we perform certain deeds. We see someone else to whom such intentions cannot possibly be ascribed, to whom we can attribute only evil purposes. We wait a few years, continuing to unfold side by side with the other man's evil purposes, what we consider to be our own good intentions. But now we perceive that nothing has been achieved; our good intentions have had no effect and, in addition, ill-luck may have befallen us, whereas the other man whose purposes we deemed evil is living by our side in what appears to be good fortune.

This is something that leads so many people who have eyes only for earthly life, to rebel against it and to declare that in this earthly life there is no evidence of a power that deals justly with good and evil. And indeed no really unbiased observer will be able to say that a man who says this is entirely in the wrong. For would any reasonable person be prepared to insist that every occurrence in a man's life is connected, in respect either of merit or guilt, with what has come from his intentions in this earthly life? When we consider how earthly life takes its course we can only say that it is impossible to find any kind of balance there for the moral impulses issuing from the soul. Why is this impossible?

It is because we are not in a position, of ourselves, to translate our intentions, those innermost forces which by freely willed assent hold sway in our life of soul, into the reality wherein we live on earth. There, in the outer world, natural laws prevail and events occur for which the influences of many different human beings are responsible. We cannot but realise that in earthly life there is an abyss between the impulses of will in our souls and what we see taking effect in external life as our destiny.

Just ask yourselves how much of what is destiny in this external life and therefore significant for you is a direct realisation of the intentions you bear within your soul? The terrestrial world is not the realm in which the spiritual laws in accordance with which man allows himself to be governed, or governs himself, are at the same time natural laws. In this earthly world, spiritual laws are not identical with natural laws; spiritual laws hold sway in man's inner being only. And if we face the world fairly and squarely, we can only say: if someone misconstrues my good intentions, deeming them evil, if he does not recognise my good intentions and judges them by what my destiny may be after a few years ... if, therefore, someone says that my good intentions are, in reality, bad, and when ill-luck befalls me a few years later justifies himself by saying: ‘See what has happened now; I said all along that his intentions were bad ...’ then this would be an impossible way of living. The spiritual must work from soul to soul. But in the external, earthly world, the spiritual does not yet work as a force of destiny.

Thus we must keep vividly in mind that in earthly life there is an abyss between the moral and psychical on the one side and the natural and physical on the other. This abyss is caused by the fact that spiritual laws are not identical with natural laws.

Now if men leave entirely out of account the world which leads on from terrestrial existence—the world from B to C, from death to a new birth—whether they simply disregard it or whether they think that owing to the boundaries of cognition nothing can be known of it—what will such men say? They will say: ‘Natural laws and what the human being does and experiences because his life is involved in them—that is actually, that is real. Our knowledge, our science can encompass it. But the outcome of the intentions which are present within us as experiences of soul-and-spirit—that we cannot know.’ Nothing, indeed, can be known, if the life from B to C is ignored. That these things living within the soul will in some way find fulfilment can only be a matter of belief. In the measure in which, since ancient times, knowledge of the span from B to C has faded, in that same measure has this separation arisen between knowledge and belief.

But we cannot speak of karma as we speak of knowledge and belief. For karma is the expression, the manifestation, of law—not of something that is mere belief—just as is the case with natural law.

Returning now to man's life between death and a new birth, after the earliest period which I have already described to you, our study brings us to a world where dwell the Beings of the Second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, and instead of earthly existence we have a Sun-existence. For even when we pass beyond the region of the stars, the sun still radiates, though not in the physical sense; and it continues to radiate as we live through the time between death and a new birth. Whereas here on earth the sun shines down upon us with its physical influences, in the life between death and a new birth the sun shines upwards to us; that is to say, we are borne and sustained by the Beings of the sun, by Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. But in the world wherein we are then living, the natural laws which obtain in earthly life have no meaning at all, for everything is governed by spiritual laws, laws of soul-and-spirit. In that world there is no need for grass to grow; no cow needs grass to eat; for neither cows nor grass exist. Everything is spiritual. And within this Spirit-realm we can bring to realisation the intentions in the soul which cannot be realised in the earthly realm, so little realised that in extreme cases the good can lead to unhappiness and the evil to happiness. Everything in the realm of the sun finds fulfilment and expression according to its inner worth, its intrinsic nature, and it is therefore impossible for the good not to take effect in proportion to its power of goodness and the evil in proportion to its power of evil.—There is a very special reason why this is so.—From the Sun-existence which enshrines the Second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, a kindly, gracious welcome is extended to all the good intentions and purposes that were harboured in our life of soul on earth. This could also be expressed by saying that whatever has lived in a man's soul with any nuance of goodness is received in this Sun-existence with graciousness, but the evil is utterly rejected; it cannot enter.

In a series of lectures¹ I was able to give in the Goetheanum before its destruction by fire—the French Course as it is called—I spoke of how a man must leave behind his bad karma before a certain point of time is reached between death and a new birth. Evil cannot enter the realm of Sun-existence. There is a proverb which, to the modern mind, refers of course only to the physical effects of the sun. This proverb says that the sun shines equally upon the evil and the good. That is indeed so; but the sun does not admit evil into its realm. If you can perceive spiritually what is good in a man's soul, you will see it bright as sunlight—bright in the spiritual sense. If you perceive what is evil in him, it is dark, like a spot where no sunlight can penetrate. Whatever is evil in a man must be left behind when he enters the Sun-existence. It cannot go with him.

But think of it: in his earthly life man is one whole. His physical existence and his existence of soul-and-spirit are linked together, they form a unity. Although it cannot be proved with crude instruments, it is a fact that not only does the blood of a man who harbours only evil, flow differently, but the very composition of the blood is different from that of a man who has goodness in his soul!

Picture to yourself that in the life between death and a new birth a really evil man arrives at the threshold of the Sun-existence. He must leave behind him all that is evil. Yes, but this means that a considerable part of him remains behind, for the evil is bound up with him, is one with him. In so far at least as the evil is one with him, he must leave part of himself behind. But if at this threshold a man has to leave behind something of his own being, what is the consequence? The consequence is that he is maimed, stunted, and he passes into the Sun-existence as a kind of spiritual cripple. The Sun-existence can have an effect only upon what a man brings of himself into this realm. And in this realm those Beings who can work together with him between death and a new birth are led to him.

Let us take an extreme case—the case of someone who was so evil, so utterly inhuman that he wished ill to all men. Let us imagine him to have been evil to a degree in which evil does not really exist ... but hypothetically at any rate we will imagine him to have been an unmitigated villain. What will become of such a man who has identified his whole being with evil? What will become of him when he arrives at the point where he must leave behind everything of himself that is evil, or connected with evil? He will be obliged to leave the whole of himself behind! He will have passed through the realm of the Moon Beings, will have encountered the Being of the Hierarchy of the Angels who is specially connected with him, and also other Beings of that Hierarchy. But now, having reached the end of this realm, and pursuing his way through the spheres of Mercury and Venus, he approaches the realm of the Sun. Before entering this realm of Sun-existence he must leave all of himself behind, because he was wholly evil.—What is the consequence? The consequence is that he does not pass into the Sun-existence at all. And if he is not to disappear from the world altogether he must at once prepare to reincarnate, to enter again into an earthly life.

In the case of a hardened evil-doer, therefore, you will find that very soon after his death he comes back again to earthly life.

There are, in reality, no such unmitigated villains in existence, because in a certain sense there is some good in every human being. All of them, therefore, can enter a little way into the realm of Sun-existence. Whether a man penetrates far or only a little way into this realm depends upon the extent to which he has crippled himself in soul-and-spirit. And this also determines what measure of power he is able to draw from the Sun-existence for his next earthly life. What a human being has within him can be founded only upon forces gathered from the Sun-existence.

You know the scene in the second part of Faust, where Wagner produces Homunculus in the retort.—Now to be able actually to create a being like Homunculus, Wagner would have needed the knowledge possessed by the Sun Beings. But Goethe does not depict Wagner as such a man; if Wagner had possessed that knowledge, Goethe would not have used the words “soulless groveller” in connection with him. Wagner is undoubtedly very clever but he lacks the knowledge possessed by the Sun Beings. That is the reason why Mephistopheles—a spirit-being who has this knowledge—must come to his aid. Wagner could have achieved nothing without the help of Mephistopheles. Goethe divined quite clearly that only so could there be produced in the retort a being like Homunculus who can then himself actually accomplish something.

We must be quite clear that the human cannot proceed from the earthly but only from the Sun-nature. What is earthly in man is only an image. Man bears the Sun-nature within him; the earthly is but an image, a picture, of his true being.²

So you see, the World Order commits us into the care of the sublime Sun Beings during our life between death and a new birth. And together with us, these Sun Beings work upon as much of our being as we have been able to bring into the realm of Sun-existence. The rest remains behind and must be gathered in again when we return to earthly life.

Man passes out into cosmic existence—I shall describe the further stages in the lecture the day after tomorrow—and then he returns to the earth. On the path of return he passes once more through the Moon region. There he finds the evil he left behind and he must receive it into his being, it must again become part of himself. He receives it in the form in which he experienced it immediately after having passed through the gate of death; and now he makes it so truly a part of himself that it comes to realisation in earthly existence.

Let us think once again of the rather unpleasant example I gave a little while ago.—If during my life on earth I have given someone a box on the ears, then after my death, in the course of the backward journey, I live through the pain he felt. This experience too I find again on my return and strive for its realisation. If, therefore, something befalls me that is the consequence of what the other human being experienced, I myself have striven to this end on departing from the last life on earth. And when I return to the earth I bring with me the impulse for its realisation.—But let us leave that for the time being.—I shall speak in the next lecture about the fulfilment of karma. What I want to impress upon you now is that what I find again as I return, has not passed through the Sun-existence. I have taken through the Sun-existence only that in me which was related to the good.

Having built up in the realm of the Sun a somewhat stunted human being, I now take into myself once again what I left behind. What I now take into myself forms the basis of my earthly-bodily organisation. As I brought into the realm of Sun-existence only the part of myself that was able to enter this realm, I can only bring back, quickened and spiritualised by the Sun-existence, the part of my human being that was able to accompany me through that realm.

Let us therefore make this distinction:

1. A part of man that has passed through the realm of Sun-existence appears on earth.

2. A part of man that has not passed through the realm of Sun-existence appears on earth.

What I have been saying hitherto concerns man's life between death and a new birth and its after-effects in the earthly life. But the sun also works upon the human being while he is on the earth. And the other realms too, especially the realm of the Moon, work upon man in earthly existence. There is, firstly the influence of the Sun-existence between death and a new birth, and, secondly, the influence of the Sun-existence during life on earth. Similarly, if we take together the workings of Moon, Mercury and Venus, we have, firstly, the influence of the Moon-existence between death and a new birth, and, secondly, the influence of the Moon-existence upon the human being while he is on earth.

During earthly life we need the sun, in order that we may have a head-life. What the sun sends to us in its rays calls forth the head-life from our organisation. This is the part of man that is conditioned by the Sun-existence, that is dependent upon the workings of the head. I say “the head”, meaning the whole life of the senses and of ideation. The other part of man, the part that is dependent upon the influences of the spheres of Moon, Mercury, Venus, is connected, not with the head-life, but with the life of procreation in the widest sense.

There you have something very remarkable. The Sun-existence works upon man between death and a new birth, making him truly ‘man’, elaborating in him what is connected with the good. During earthly life, however, the sun can work only upon what is connected with the head. Of a truth this head-life has not very much to do with the good, for a man can also use his head to make himself into an out-and-out scoundrel. He can let his very cleverness make him an evil-doer.

Everything in earthly existence that promotes continuity of evolution is based upon the life of procreation. This life of procreation is under the influence of the moon and during the period between death and a new birth is connected with the part of man that does not share his existence in the cosmic spheres.

If you keep this in mind it will be easy for you to understand how what is connected with it makes its appearance in the human being during his earthly life.

We have, firstly, the part of man that has passed through the Sun-existence. In earthly life the Sun-existence works upon the head only; nevertheless what is connected with the Sun-existence remains in the being of man as a whole; it remains as his predisposition to health. That is why the predisposition to health is also connected with the head. The head becomes ill only when the illness is projected into it from below, by the metabolic process or by the workings of the rhythmic system.

On the other hand, the part of man that does not pass through the Sun-existence is connected with his predisposition to illness.

And so it will be clear to you that illness is woven into man's destiny below the realm of Sun-existence and is connected with the effects of the evil which are experienced as soon as he has passed into the life between death and a new birth. The realm of the Sun is connected with the predisposition to health. And only when influences from the Moon-sphere penetrate into the Sun-sphere in man's organism can that part of him which in earthly life is connected with the Sun-sphere—namely, the head—suffer any condition of illness. You see now that real insight into those great karmic connections is possible only when we follow the human being into the realm where spiritual laws are natural laws, and natural laws are spiritual laws.

You must forgive me for using trivial words in describing matters that are anything but trivial, and for speaking the language of ordinary life. To do so is not unnatural for one who stands within the spiritual world. When we talk with human beings here on earth, we recognise by the way in which they speak that they stand within the realm of nature. Their very language betrays it. But when one comes into the realm I described in the last lecture—the realm into which man passes directly after death—and has converse there with the Beings who were once the primeval Teachers of mankind, or with the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angels, then there is something strange in this converse. For in that realm—how shall I put it?—folk talk as though they were speaking of natural laws, but these are natural laws in which magic is operating and which are governed by the spirit. These Beings understand magic; but of natural laws they know only that men have such laws on earth. They themselves are not concerned with these natural laws. Nevertheless the processes and happenings in yonder realm appear in pictures which resemble the processes taking place on the earth. Hence the spiritual workings resemble the workings of nature, but are stronger, of greater intensity, as I have described.

When man leaves this sphere and enters the realm of Sun-existence, then no more at all is heard of the natural laws belonging to the earth. The language of the Beings in this realm has reference to spiritual workings, spiritual causes only. In that world nothing is heard of natural laws.

After all, my dear friends, these things must be made known some time or other. For when on earth it is constantly insisted that natural laws are absolute, universal—or even, foolishly enough, eternal—one would fain reply: But there are realms in the universe through which man has to pass in the life between death and rebirth where these natural laws are passed over with a smile because they have no significance there; they exist at most as tidings from the earth, not as any real factor in life. And when man passes through this realm between death and a new birth, and has lived long enough in a world where there are no natural laws but only spiritual laws, he ceases to think of natural laws as something to be taken seriously. Natural laws are not taken seriously between death and rebirth. Man lives in a realm where his spiritual intentions can be realised, where realisation is insight.

But if in the realm of Sun-existence there were only the Second Hierarchy, if we were to experience in that realm only the kind of realisation that is possible there, then, having passed through this state of existence and desiring to enter earthly life again, we should stand at this point (see diagram) burdened with our karma, knowing that no progress is possible unless what has been brought, spiritually, to realisation, can be led over into the physical. Spiritually, our karma has been brought to realisation when we descend to earth; but the moment we enter earthly existence, the spiritual laws and spiritual aspects must be transformed into the physical. Here is the region where the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones transform the spiritual into the physical.

And so in the next earthly life, what has already been brought to spiritual realisation comes also to physical realisation in karma. Such is the onward course of karma.

• 1. Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion. Ten lectures, September, 1922.
• 2. Man as Picture of the Living Spirit. Lecture given by Rudolf Steiner, 2nd September, 1923, in London.

To-day I wish to continue with the subject I placed before you the day before yesterday. We were tracing the thread of evolution which enters into the spiritual life of the present time, and we left off with the individuality of Julian the Apostate. I told you that this individuality was next incarnated in one who is only known by legendary accounts, whose secret is contained in the Parsifal legend, in the name of Herzeleide. In this life as Herzeleide, the soul of Julian the Apostate entered into a far deeper inner life. The soul-life of the individuality was deepened, as was indeed necessary after the many storms and inner moods of opposition which he had undergone in his life as Julian the Apostate.

But this later life of which I told you—this life as Herzeleide—spread itself out over the former life as Julian the Apostate like a warm embalming cloud. Thus the soul grew more intense and deep and inward, and grew richer, too, in manifold impulses of the inner life.

Now this soul was among those who had carried over something of the ancient Mysteries. Julian had lived within the substance of the ancient Mysteries at a time when their light was still radiant in many ways. Thus he had received into himself much spirituality of the cosmos. All this had been as it were pressed back during the incarnation as Herzeleide; but it was none the less pressing forth in the soul, and thus we find the same individuality again in the 16th century; we find arising in him once more, in a Christianised form, what he had undergone as Julian the Apostate. For the same individuality reappears in the 16th century as Tycho de Brahe, and stands face to face with the Copernican world-conception which emerges within Western civilisation at that time.

The Copernican world-conception pictures the universe in a way, which if followed to its logical conclusions would tend to drive all spirituality out of the cosmos in man's conception of it. The Copernican world-picture leads at length to a mechanical, machine-like conception of the universe in space. It was after all in view of this Copernican picture of the world that the famous astronomer said to Napoleon: he had searched through all the universe and he could find no God. It is, indeed, an entire elimination of spirituality.

The individuality of whom I am now speaking, who had now returned as Tycho de Brahe, could not submit to this. Thus we see Tycho de Brahe accepting in his world-conception what is useful of Copernicanism, but rejecting the absolute movement of the earth ascribed to it according to the Copernican world-picture. In Tycho de Brahe we see these things united with true spirituality. When we consider the course of his life, it is indeed evident how a karma from ancient time is pressing its way forth with might and main into this life as Tycho de Brahe, seeking to enter the substance of his consciousness. Such is his spirituality. We remember how his Danish relatives sought to hold him fast at all costs in the profession of a lawyer, and we see how, living as a tutor, he steals the hours by night in which to commune with the gods. And here an extraordinary thing appears. All this is contained in his biography. We shall see presently how deeply significant it is for a true estimate of this individuality of Tycho de Brahe—Julian—Herzeleide. With the most primitive instruments contrived and manufactured by himself, he discovers considerable errors in calculation which had entered into the determination of the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. We have this remarkable scene in the life of Tycho de Brahe. As a young man with the most primitive instruments with which other people would not dream of trying to accomplish anything, he feels impelled one day to seek the exact places of Saturn and Jupiter in the heavens. In his case all these things are strongly permeated with spiritual content. And this spiritual content leads him to a conception of the universe such as we must have if we are striving once again to the modern science of Initiation, when at length we come to speak of spiritual beings as we speak of physical men on earth. For in reality we can ever meet them, and there is in fact only a difference in quality of being as between those individualities who are now on the physical plane and those who are discarnate, living between death and a new birth.

These things kindled in Tycho de Brahe an extraordinarily deep and penetrating vision of spiritual connections. I mean the connections which appear when we no longer regard everything on earth as though it were caused by earthly impulses alone, and on the other hand consider the stars only in mathematical calculations, but when we perceive the interplay of impulses from the stars with the historic impulses within mankind. In Tycho de Brahe's soul there lived instinctively what he had brought with him from his life as Julian the Apostate. In that former life it had not been permeated with rationalism or intellectualism. It had been intuitive, imaginative—for such was the inner life of Julian the Apostate. With all this he succeeded in doing something that made a great sensation.

He could make little impression on his contemporaries with his astronomic opinions, differing as they did from Copernicus, or with his other astronomical achievements. He observed countless stars and made a map of the heavens which alone made it possible for Kepler afterwards to reach his great results. For it was on the basis of Tycho de Brahe's mapping of the stars that Kepler discovered his famous laws. But none of these things could have made so great an impression on his contemporaries as a discovery relatively unimportant in itself, but very striking. He foretold almost to the day the death of the Sultan Soliman, which afterwards occurred as he had foretold it. Here we see ancient perceptions working into a later time in a spiritual intellectuality. Perceptions which Julian the Apostate had received light up again in modern time in Tycho de Brahe. Tycho de Brahe is indeed one of the most interesting of human souls. In the 17th century he passed on through the gate of death and entered the spiritual world. Now in the spiritual currents which I have described as those of Michael, this being, Tycho de Brahe—Julian the Apostate—Herzeleide, constantly emerges. In one or another of the super-sensible functions he is in fact always there. Hence too we find him in those great events in the super-sensible world at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century which are connected with this stream of Michael.

I told you already of the great super-sensible School of instruction in the 15th, 16th centuries which stood under the aegis of Michael himself. Then there began for those who had been within this School a life which took its course in such a way that activities and forces unfolded in the spiritual world worked down into the physical, worked in connection with the physical world. For example, in the time that immediately followed the period of the super-sensible School of Michael, an important task was allotted to an individuality of whose continued life I have often spoken—I mean the individuality of Alexander the Great.

I have already spoken, here at Dornach too, of Lord Bacon of Verulam as the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid. We know how intense and determining an influence Bacon's conceptions had on the whole succeeding evolution of the spiritual life, notably in its finer impulses and movements. Now the remarkable thing is this, that in Lord Bacon himself something took place which we may describe as a morbid elimination of old spirituality. For such spirituality he had after all possessed when he was Haroun al Raschid.

And thus we see, proceeding from the impulse of Lord Bacon, a whole world of daemonic beings. The world was literally filled supersensibly and sensibly with daemonic beings. (When I say “sensibly” I meant not, of course, visibly, but within the world of sense.)

Now it chiefly fell to the individuality of Alexander to wage war against these daemonic idols of Lord Bacon, Francis Bacon of Verulam. And similar activities, exceedingly important ones, were taking place on earth below. For otherwise the materialism of the 19th century would have broken in upon the world in a far more devastating way even than it did. Similar activities, taking place in the spiritual and in the physical world together, were allotted to the stream of Michael, until at length at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century there took place in super-sensible regions what I have already described as the enactment of a great and sublime super-sensible ritual and ceremony.

In the super-sensible world at that time a cult was instituted and enacted in real imaginations of a spiritual kind. Thus we may say: At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century there hovers in the immediate neighbourhood of the physical world of sense a great super-sensible event, consisting in super-sensible acts of ritual, an unfolding of mighty pictures of the spiritual life of beings of the universe, the Beings of the Hierarchies in connection with the great ether-workings of the universe and the human workings upon earth. I say“in the immediate neighbourhood,” meaning of course, adjoining this physical world in a qualitative, not in a spatial sense. It is interesting to see how at a most favourable moment a little miniature picture of this super-sensible cult and action flowed into Goethe's spirit. Transformed and changed and in miniature we have this picture set down by Goethe in his fairy story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily ...

There was, then, a great super-sensible action in which those above all took part who had partaken in the stream of Michael, in all the revelations super-sensible and sensible, of which I told you. Now here again and again the individuality who was last present upon earth in Tycho de Brahe, plays a very great part. And it was his constant striving to preserve the great and lasting impulses of what we call paganism, of the old life of the Mysteries. It was his striving to preserve it in effect towards a better understanding of Christianity. He had entered Christianity when he lived as the soul of Herzeleide. Now it was his striving to introduce into the Christian conception all that he had received through his Initiation as Julian the Apostate. For it was this especially which seemed so important to the souls of whom I have spoken. The many souls who are now to be found in the Anthroposophical Movement or strive towards this Movement with sincerity are united with all these spiritual streams. By its very essence and nature they feel themselves attracted by the School of Michael, and Tycho de Brahe had a great influence in this. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, especially at the end of the 19th century, these souls have descended to the earth, prepared not only to feel the Christ as He is felt in the various Confessions, but to feel Him and behold Him as the Cosmic Christ in His universal majesty and glory. The souls were prepared for this even supersensibly, between death and the new birth. They were prepared by such influences as that of Tycho de Brahe, of the soul who was last incarnated in Tycho de Brahe.

This individuality therefore played an extraordinarily important part continuously within the stream of Michael.

You see, the souls were constantly looking towards the approaching dominion of Michael. They were looking towards it in the old super-sensible School of the 15th and 16th centuries, and they were looking towards it again during the enactment of that super-sensible ceremony which was to introduce and, as it were, to consecrate from the spiritual worlds the subsequent Michael dominion upon earth. Now as I have already indicated, a large number of Platonically gifted souls have remained in the spiritual worlds since the time they worked in Chartres. (I have placed here for your inspection to-day other pictures of the series from Chartres which I received. They are pictures of the Prophets and also of the wonderful architecture of Chartres.) The individualities of the teachers of Chartres, who were of a Platonic tendency, remained in the spiritual world. It was more the Aristotelians who descended to the earth, finding their way largely into the Dominican Order. Then, after a certain time, they united again with the Platonists in the spiritual world and went on working together with them supersensibly, from the spiritual world. Thus we may say: the souls of Platonic character have remained behind. They have not appeared again on earth, not at any rate the more important individualities among them. They are waiting till the end of this century. But on the other hand, many who felt themselves drawn to what I have described as the Michael deeds in the super-sensible, have come down and entered the stream of the Anthroposophical Movement inasmuch as they have felt sincerely drawn on earth to such a spiritual Movement.

We may say in truth: what lives in Anthroposophy was kindled first by the Michael School of instruction in the 15th, 16th centuries, and by the great religious act that took place in the super-sensible at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. It was in vision of that super-sensible action that my Mystery Plays came into being, and for this reason the first Mystery Play, different as it is from Goethe's fairy story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, nevertheless reveals distinctly similar features. For a thing that would contain real impulses of a spiritual kind cannot be arbitrarily conceived. It must be seen and worked out in harmony with the spiritual world.

Thus we stand here within the Anthroposophical Movement to-day, having entered into the dominion of Michael which has now begun. We stand here in this Movement, called to understand the essence of this reign of Michael, called to work in the spirit of his working through the centuries and the thousands of years. At this moment of great significance he has begun his earthly rulership once more and we are called to work in his direction. Such is the inner esoteric impulse of this stream of Michael, whose working to begin with for this century, is very clearly foreshadowed.

But you must see that if we take Anthroposophy in its present content and trace it backward, we find little preparation for it upon earth. Go back just a little way from what appears as Anthroposophy and try to find its sources in the course of the 19th century, for instance. If you do so open-mindedly, if your vision is not clouded by all manner of philological contrivances, you will not find the sources. You will find isolated traces of a spiritual conception which it was always possible to use like little germinating seeds, though very sparingly, within the great texture of Anthroposophy. But you will find no real preparation for it within the earthly sphere.

All the greater was the preparation in the super-sensible. You are well aware how Goethe's working (even after his death, though in my books it may not seem so) contributed to the forming and shaping of Anthroposophy. It is indeed true that the most important things in this respect took place within the super-sensible. Nevertheless we can trace the spiritual life of the 19th century backward in a living way till we come to Goethe, Herder, and others, nay even to Lessing. And we find after all that what was working in isolated spirits of the end of the 18th and first half of the 19th century was, to say the least of it, imbued with a strong spiritual atmosphere, even if it appeared in great abstractions as in Hegel, or in abstract pictures as in the case of Schelling.

You may read in my Riddles of Philosophy how I described Schelling and Hegel. I think you will recognise that I was seeking to point to something of the soul and spirit in this evolution of world-conceptions which could then enter into the Anthroposophical stream. In the book Riddles of Philosophy, I tried indeed to take hold of those abstractions of the philosophers with full heart and mind. Perhaps I may specially draw your attention to the chapter on Hegel, and to the things I said of Schelling.

But we must go still deeper to perceive the origin of certain remarkable phenomena that appeared in the spiritual life of the first half of the 19th century. They were lost sight of, they were obliterated in what then came forth as the materialistic spiritual life of the second half of the century. Nevertheless, in however abstract conceptions, there did appear something that contained a hidden spiritual life and being.

Most interesting, and increasingly so the more one enters into him, is the philosopher Schelling. He begins almost like Fichte, with pure, clear-cut ideas, saturated through and through with will. For such was Fichte. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was one of the few figures of world-history—indeed in a certain respect he is perhaps unique—who combined the greatest conceptual abstractions with enthusiasm and energy of will. He is an extraordinarily interesting figure. Short and thick-set, under-grown a little owing to the privations of his youth, one would see him marching along the street with extraordinary firmness of step. He was all will, and will and will again, and his will lived itself out in the description of the most abstract concepts. And yet with these most abstract concepts he could achieve such a thing, for instance, as his Addresses to the German Nation, with which he inspired countless people most wonderfully.

Schelling appears in an almost Fichte-like way, not with the same power, but with a similar way of thought. But we very soon see Schelling's spirit expand. In his youth he speaks like Fichte of the“I” and the “Not I” and other such abstractions and inspires the people of Jena with these things. But he soon departs from them. His spirit grows and widens and we see entering into him conceptions, albeit fanciful, which nevertheless tend almost to spiritual imaginations. Thus he goes on for a while. Then he enters deeply into such spirits as Jacob Boehme, and writes something altogether different in style and tone from his former works. He writes The Foundations of Human Freedom—which is a kind of resurrection of the ideas of Jacob Boehme.

Then we see almost a kind of Platonism springing up in Schelling's soul. He writes a philosophic dialogue entitled Bruno which is truly reminiscent of Plato's Dialogues, and deeply penetrating. Interesting too is another short work Klara, wherein the super-sensible world plays a great part. Then for a very long time Schelling is silent. His fellow philosophers begin to look on him, if I may put it so, almost as a living dead man. He published only his extraordinarily deep and significant work on the Samothracian Mysteries, once again an expansion of his spirit; but he lives on in simple retirement at Munich, until at length the King of Prussia summons him to lecture on philosophy at the University of Berlin. And of the philosophy he now proclaimed Schelling said that he had gained it in the silence of his retirement through the course of decades.

Now, therefore, Schelling appeared in Berlin, proclaiming that philosophy which was afterwards included in his posthumous works as the Philosophy of Mythology, and the Philosophy of Revelation. He made no great impression on the Berlin public, for the whole tenor of his lectures in Berlin was really this: Man, however much he thinks and ponders, can attain nothing in the sphere of world-conceptions; something must enter his soul, inspiring and imbuing his thought with life as a real, spiritual world.

Suddenly, in place of the old rationalistic philosophy there appears in Schelling a real awakening of the ancient philosophy of the gods of mythology, a reawakening of the old gods in a very modern way, and yet with old spirituality quite evidently working in it. All this is very strange. And in his Philosophy of Revelation he evolves ideas of Christianity which do contain, in however abstract a form, important inspirations and suggestions for what must afterwards be said by Anthroposophy, directly out of spiritual vision, on many points of Christianity.

Schelling is most certainly not to be passed over in the easygoing way of the Berlin people. Indeed he cannot be passed over at all, but the Berlin folk passed him over quite easily. When one of his descendants got engaged to the daughter of a Prussian minister (an external, but at any rate a karmically connected event) a Prussian functionary who heard of it remarked:“I never knew before why Schelling ever came to Berlin. Now I know.”

Nevertheless one can well come into inner difficulties and conflicts in following Schelling thus through his career. Moreover the last period in his life, dreadfully as it is generally treated in the histories of philosophy, is always dealt with in a chapter by itself, under the title: Schelling's Theosophy.

I myself again and again returned to Schelling. For me a certain warmth always proceeded from what lives in him, in spite of the abstract form. Thus at a comparatively early age I entered deeply into the above-mentioned philosophic dialogue, Bruno, or On the Divine and Natural Principle of Things.

Since the year 1854, Schelling was in the spiritual world again. And he came especially near to one through this dialogue, Bruno, if one entered into it, and lived through it, also through his Klara, and notably through his essay on the Samothracian Mysteries. One could easily come really near to him in spirit.

And at length, as early as the beginning of the eighteen nineties, it became fully clear to me: However it may have been with the other personalities who worked in the sphere of philosophy during the first half of the 19th century, in Schelling's case it is absolutely clear that a spiritual inspiration did really enter in. Spiritual inspiration worked and entered into his work continually.

Thus one might attain the following picture.—To begin with, down in the physical world, one could see Schelling, as he passed through the manifold vicissitudes of life, through a long period, as I said above, of loneliness and isolation, treated in the most varying way by his fellow men, now with immense enthusiasm, and now again with scorn and derision; Schelling, who really always made a significant impression whenever he appeared again in public—the short, thick-set man, with the immensely impressive head, and eyes which even in extreme old age were sparkling with fire, for from his eyes there spoke the fire of Truth, the fire of Knowledge. And this Schelling whom one can distinctly see—the more so, the more one enters into him—had certain moments when inspiration poured into him from above.

Most clear and visible it became to me when I read Robert Zimmermann's review of Schelling's book on the Ages of the World. From Zimmermann, as you know, is derived the word Anthroposophy, though his Anthroposophy is a tangled undergrowth of abstract concepts. I had the very greatest regard for him, and yet, when I read this review, I could not help breaking out into the sigh—“Pedant that you are!”

Then I returned to the book itself, Schelling's Ages of the World, which is indeed somewhat abstractly written, but in which one may clearly recognise something like a description of ancient Atlantis—quite a spiritual description, containing spiritual realities, however much distorted by abstractions.

Thus you see in Schelling's case again and again there is something working in from higher worlds, so that we must say: Down there is Schelling, but in the higher worlds something is taking place which influences him from above. In Schelling's case what is a general truth becomes most visible, namely that in spiritual evolution there is a perpetual interplay of the spiritual world above with the earthly world below. And once in the eighteen nineties I was most intensely concerned in finding the spiritual foundations of the age of Michael and of other things.

At that time I myself was entering a phase of life in which I could not but experience intensely the world immediately adjoining our physical world of sense. I could only hint at these things in my autobiography, but I have hinted at them there. That adjoining world is separated, if I may so describe it, only by a thin wall from the physical, and in it the most gigantic facts are happening, nor are they at all powerfully separated from our world. It was at the time when I was in Weimar. On the one hand I entered most intensively into the social life of Weimar in all directions; but at the same time I felt the inner necessity to withdraw into myself. These two sides of my life went parallel with one another. And at that time, in the very highest degree, it happened that my experience of the spiritual world was always more intense and strong than my experience of the physical. Already as a young man I had no great difficulty in quickly comprehending any philosophy or world-conception that came into my sphere. But a plant or a stone, if I had to recognise it again, I had to look at, not three or four times, but fifty or sixty times. I could not easily unite my soul with that which in the physical world is named by physical means. And this had reached its highest point during my Weimar period.

It was long, long before the Republican Constituent Assembly took place in Weimar, and at that time Weimar was really like a spiritual oasis, quite different from any other place in Germany. In that Weimar, as I said in my autobiography, I did indeed experience intense moments of loneliness. And once again—it was in 1897—wishing to investigate certain matters, I put my hand on Schelling's Divinities of Samothrace, and his Philosophy of Mythology, simply to receive a stimulation, not in order to study in the books. (Just as one who researches in the spiritual world, if for instance, he wishes to make researches on the periods of the first Christian centres, in order to facilitate matters may lay the writings of St. Augustine or of Clement of Alexandria under his head for a few minutes in succession. You must not laugh about these things. They are simply external methods to assist one, external technicalities that are not directly connected with the real thing itself. They are an external stimulation, like any technical mnemonic.) Thus at that time I took into my hand Schelling's Divinities of Samothrace, and his Philosophy of Mythology. But the real subject of my study at that moment was that which was taking place spiritually in the course of the 19th century, and which afterwards poured down so as to become Anthroposophy.

And at that moment, when I was really able to trace Schelling's life, his biography, his evolution through his life, it was revealed to me—not yet quite clearly, for these things only became clear at a far later date, when I wrote my Riddles of Philosophy—it was revealed to me, I could already perceive, although not quite clearly, how much of Schelling's writing was written down by him under inspiration, and that that inspiring figure was Julian the Apostate—Herzeleide—Tycho Brahe. He has not appeared again himself on the physical plane, but he worked with tremendous strength through the soul of Schelling. Then I became aware how greatly Tycho Brahe had progressed in his life as Tycho Brahe. Through Schelling's bodily nature little could penetrate; but once we know how the individuality of Tycho Brahe hovered over him as an inspirer, we read the lightning-flashes of genius in the Divinities of Samothrace quite differently. We read the flashes of genius above all in the Philosophy of Revelation, and in Schelling's interpretation of the ancient Mysteries, which is, after all, magnificent of its kind. And especially if we enter deeply enough into the curious language he uses in these passages, then presently we hear, no longer the voice of Schelling but the voice of Tycho Brahe! Then indeed we become aware how, among other spirits, this Tycho Brahe, especially the individuality who was in Julian the Apostate, played a great part, and contributed many things. For by his genius many a thing arose in the spiritual life of modern time which worked in turn as a stimulus, and whence we were to borrow at least the external form and expression for the spirit and teachings of Anthroposophy.

Another of the writings of German philosophers which made a great impression on me was Jakob Froschhammer's book, Die Phantasie als Welt-Prinzip, a brilliant book at the end of the 19th century, brilliant because this courageous man, having been driven from the Church, and his writings placed in the Index, was no less courageous in the face of science, for he revealed the kinship of the creative principle of fancy working purely in the soul when man creates artistically, with the force that works within as the force of life and growth. In that time it was indeed an achievement. Froschhammer's book on fancy or imagination as a world-principle, as a world-creative power, is indeed a work of great importance.

Thus I was greatly interested in this man, Jakob Froschhammer. Once more I tried to get at him in a real sense, not only through his writings, and once again I found that the inspiring spirit was the same who had lived in Tycho Brahe and in Julian the Apostate. And so it was in a whole number of personalities in whose working we can see a certain preparation for what then came forth as Anthroposophy.

But in each case we need the spiritual light behind, the light which works within the super-sensible. For what came to earth before remained, after all, in a world of abstraction. It is only now and then, in a spirit such as Schelling, or in a man of courage like Jakob Froschhammer, that the abstractions suddenly grow concrete.

And to-day, my dear friends, we may look up to what is working there in spiritual realms, and we may know how Anthroposophy stands in relation to it. And well we know how we are being helped by that which we perceive when we extend our spiritual research into the detailed realities of spiritual life in the course of history. Well may we know it. Here upon earth, striving honestly towards Anthroposophy, there are numbers of souls who have always stood near to the stream of Michael. Added to these, in the super-sensible world, are numbers of souls who have remained behind, among them the teachers of Chartres. And between those who are here in the world of sense, and those who are above in the spiritual world, there is a decided tendency to unite their work with one another.

And now if we would find a great helper for those things which we must investigate for the future of the 20th century, if we would find one who can advise us in relation to the super-sensible world, if we need impulses that are there within that world, it is the individuality of Julian the Apostate—Tycho Brahe who can help us. He is not on the physical plane to-day; but in reality he is always there, always ready to give information on those matters especially which concern the prophetic future of the 20th century.

Taking all these things together it does indeed emerge that those who receive Anthroposophy in a sincere way at the present time are preparing their souls to shorten as far as possible the life between death and a new birth, and to appear again at the end of the 20th century, united with the teachers of Chartres who have remained behind.

We should receive into our souls this consciousness: That the Anthroposophical Movement is called to work on and on, and to appear again not only in its most important, but in nearly all its souls, at the end of the 20th century. For then the great impulse will be given for a spiritual life on earth, without which earthly civilisation would finally be drawn into that decadence, the character of which is only too apparent.

Out of such foundations, I would fain kindle in your hearts something of the flames that we require, so that already now within the Anthroposophical Movement we may absorb the spiritual life strongly enough to appear again properly prepared. For in that great epoch after shortened life in spiritual worlds we shall work again on earth—in the epoch when for the salvation of the earth the spiritual Powers are reckoning in their most important members, in their most important features, on what Anthroposophists can do.

I think the vision of this perspective of the future may stir the hearts of Anthroposophists to call forth within themselves the feelings which will carry them in a right way, with energy and strength of action and with the beauty of enthusiasm, through the present earthly life; for then this earthly life will be a preparation for the work at the end of the century when Anthroposophy will be called upon to play its part.

Let us look back at an earlier scene from the second part of Goethe's Faust, the scene in which I have often mentioned how it was made possible for Faust to unite with Helena. How is this possibility of Faust's union with Helena presented within the whole of the Faustian legend?

We know that in order to be united with Helena, Faust must first go to the region where even Mephistopheles cannot enter, to the realm called “the realm of the Mothers”. We have emphasized several times that Mephistopheles-Ahriman is only able to give Faust the key to the realm of the “unentered, unenterable”. We have also mentioned how in this realm of the Mothers we can find the eternal aspect of Helen of Troy, and we have mentioned how Goethe tried to solve the mystery of Helen's re-entry into the world. We have found that Goethe expressed this secret by allowing the homunculus to come into being, by allowing the homunculus to pass through the evolution of the earth's development, to catch up with this evolution of the earth's development, as it were, and that the homunculus, by dissolving itself dissolves in the elements, passes over into the elementary spiritual world, so that, by uniting with the archetype of Helen, which Faust brings from the mothers, he, as it were, “gives the re-embodiment with which Faust can now unite. Faust has, as it were, been elevated to the great arena of history; he seeks Helena. What does he need to seek Helena? Helena, the type of Greek beauty; Helena, the woman who brought so much ruin to the Greek world, but whom Goethe nevertheless presents to us in such a way that she also appears to us — and here I am referring to Gretchen — as being innocently guilty in the Greek sense. For thus Helen appears at the beginning of the third act: innocently guilty. Much guilt has been caused by her act. But Goethe seeks the eternal in every human nature and cannot reckon with guilt where he wants to present the evolution of humanity in the higher sense, but he can only reckon with the necessity of

If we now ask ourselves how Faust is put in a position to ascend to those spiritual realms where he can find Helena, we are confronted with the answer:

It is the mothers!
Mothers!

And Mephistopheles hands him the key to the Mothers. In a very characteristic way, we are shown that Faust is to descend to the Mothers; one could just as easily say ascend, because in this realm it is not important to distinguish between going up and going down in the physical sense.

The Mothers! Mothers! - it sounds so strange!

We hear the word from “Faust”. And when we recall how this realm of the Mothers is described, how they sit around the golden tripod, when we envision the entire scene of the realm of the Mothers, how could this journey of Faust into the realm of the Mothers be expressed? What are they, the Mothers, who reign eternally, but who are depicted as feminine and represent the forces from which Faust has brought forth the eternal, the immortal of Helen? If one wanted to express the whole fact at the point where Faust is sent to Helena, one would have to say: Faust will have to express his urge to Helena and to the Mothers by saying: The eternal feminine pulls us up or down – it does not matter now. We might just as well apply this last motive, which confronts us at the end of Faust, to the point where Faust descends to the Mothers. But with Faust on his journey to the Mothers and to Helen, we are standing on the soil of the old pagan world, the pre-Christian world, the world that preceded the Mystery of Golgotha. And at the end of Faust? We are confronted with a similar journey by Faust, the journey of the loving Faust, who wants to approach Gretchen's soul, but we are now with him on the ground of evolution after the mystery of Golgotha. And what does he strive for now? Still for the mothers? Not for the threesome of mothers. To the one mother, to the Mater gloriosa, who is to pave the way for him into the untrodden, the un-treadable, where Gretchen's soul dwells. The mothers, the eternal feminine too, are in the plural. The mother, the Mater gloriosa, is in the singular. And the striving towards the Mothers, in that it transports us into the time of evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha, and the striving towards the Mother, towards the gloriously magnificent Matter, in that it transports us into the evolution after the Mystery of Golgotha — does it not show us in a wonderful way, poetically magnificent, overwhelmingly magnificent, that which the Mystery of Golgotha has brought to humanity? From the threefold nature of still astral thinking, feeling and willing, humanity in Faust strives upwards towards the threefold nature of the eternal feminine. We have often described how the unity of the human soul in the I has come to humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. The three Mothers become the one Mother, the Mater gloriosa, through the fact that the human being has progressed in the way we know to an inner interpenetration with the I.

The entire secret of humanity's transition before the Mystery of Golgotha is embodied in the Faust legend. And this transition from the eternal feminine of the trinity to the eternal feminine of unity is one of the greatest, most wonderful, most beautiful intensifications in the artistic realization that is found in this second part of “Faust”. But however deeply we penetrate the secrets of Faust, we find everywhere what I have said pedantically, but not meant pedantically, in that I have said: Everything sounds so appropriate and professional.

I have already pointed out that if we want to fully understand the human context, we must point out that the human being is first of all connected to the macrocosm as a whole human being, just as the macrocosm is reflected in the human being as the microcosm. We must only remember that man's development on earth remains incomprehensible if we do not know that man bears within him that which is initially transitory for this earthly development, but which is permanent for man's development, and which has developed into human nature through the old Saturn, Sun and Moon developments. We know that the human physical body was already formed in the first stage during the old Saturn evolution. We know that it then continued to develop through the sun and moon evolution up to the earth evolution. As I have already pointed out, what united with man in the three preliminary stages of evolution, the pre-earthly evolution, has now entered into the outer earthly formation of man in various ways.

I could only briefly hint at what was said about the matter earlier, and it must remain a brief hint. I have said: We touch here on a momentous mystery. — And it is only natural that these things can only be hinted at. He who wishes to follow them up must undertake a meditation on what has been suggested. He will then find what he still desires, even if it takes a little time.

We must realize, however, that man, by completing the lunar evolution, has begun the terrestrial evolution, and has, as it were, passed through a kind of dissolution, spiritualization, a world night, in this transition from the lunar evolution to the terrestrial evolution, and only now has he emerged again into the material. Certainly, the tendencies he formed through the evolution of Saturn, Sun and Moon remained with him, including the tendencies towards the physical body. But he also absorbed them into the spiritual and then developed them out of the spiritual again, so that we have to think of a time during the evolution of the earth when man was not yet physical.

If we disregard everything else that contributed to the development of the fact that man forms himself physically and sexually in his earthly existence, we can say in general: Just as man entered in the first place as an ethereal human being, so too did he enter as an etheric human being. To be sure, in this ethereal human being the tendencies towards the physical human being, which developed during the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, were already present, but nevertheless they were formed in the etheric. I have already indicated this more precisely in Occult Science. And the physical must first develop out of the etheric. But Lucifer and Ahriman have their part in this whole process of development. For Lucifer and Ahriman intervene even before this, although their influence is repeated during the development of the earth, during the development of the moon and already during the development towards the moon in the whole development of mankind.

Now I have something to say here that is difficult to understand – not so much for the human intellect as for the entire human soul, I believe – but which really must be understood one day. Let us imagine: Man was once in the course of the earth before he gradually formed physically since the Lemurian and Atlantean times, ethereally, and - I will suggest this schematically - out of this ethereal, his physical gradually formed. Thus man was ethereal. Now we know that the etheric is a fourfold entity. We know the ether as a four-fold entity, so to speak. As we ascend from below, we know the ether as: heat ether; light ether; the ether with a material nature or also chemical ether, which, however, has its material nature in that the substance still fills the tone inwardly, the world harmony, the harmony of the spheres, for substances are substances because they are an expression of the world harmony. First of all, we have to imagine the world harmoniously. One tone, as it resonates through the world, causes, let us say, gold; the other tone causes silver; the third tone causes copper, and so on. Every substance is the expression of a certain tone, so that we can, of course, also speak of tone-ether. However, we must not represent the ether as it is perceptible on earth, but as a tone that fades away in the ether-spiritual sphere. And the last ether is the ether of life. So that man, if we still imagine him as ethereal, is formed ethereally by these four types of ether interlocking. We can therefore say: Man appears where the evolution of the earth is preparing to gradually allow the etheric human being to emerge from the etheric human being, as an etheric organism before becoming physical, where there is a mixed organization of warmth ether, light ether, material or tone ether, and life ether.

Now Lucifer and Ahriman are part of this whole process of the human becoming physical. They are always there. They take part in this whole evolution. They exert their influence. Of course there are special points where they exert this influence quite strongly, but they are always there, these special points, as you will find emphasized in “Occult Science”. Just as, I might say, the whole vegetative power is always in the plant, but asserts itself now as green foliage, now as a flower, so too have Lucifer and Ahriman always been present while man has developed through the various epochs of the earth's evolution, they are, so to speak, present in everything.

If you now disregard everything else (you can't always list everything), you can imagine this physical aspect of the human being, which arises from the etheric organization, in such a way (including everything else that I have described in 'Occult Science' and elsewhere, of course) that female and male forms arise. We are now disregarding everything else that contributes to this, but female and male forms arise. If Lucifer and Ahriman had not been involved, then the female and male forms would not have come into being, but rather what I once described in Munich: a middle form. So that we can truly say: it is due to Lucifer and Ahriman that the human form on earth was differentiated into a male and female form. And this is when we now imagine the state of approaching the earth, which is gradually solidifying through the mineral kingdom, when we also imagine that the earth is forming, physically solidifying, that in the earth's orbit there is also , we can imagine that the human being develops out of the ether of the whole earth and thus his character also approaches the physical of the earth, that in him, as it were, the etheric-mineral-physical meets with the mineral-physical of the earth. But Lucifer and Ahriman are at work, are truly at work. They have many means of exerting their influence on the evolution of mankind. And they use these various means for these or those processes, which they evoke.

Above all, Lucifer tends to develop the spirit of the ethereal; he actually does not want to let man become truly earthly, does not want to let him descend completely to earth. Lucifer is, after all, left behind in the development of the moon, and he wants to win man for himself, not letting him enter into the development of the earth. He seeks to achieve this by first of all seizing control of the forces of the heat and light ethers. He uses these forces in his own way in the processes that are now taking place as man becomes physical. Lucifer has power mainly over the heat and light ethers, and these he rules preferentially. He has already prepared himself well for this during the development of the moon, which he organizes in his own way. In this way he can influence the human becoming in a different way. By allowing man to become physical out of the ether, he can bring about the human form in a different way than would otherwise have happened, by taking hold of the warmth and light ether and exerting his power in a different way than would otherwise have happened. Just as he now rules and weaves in the warmth-light ether, it is not the human being that would otherwise come into being through this rule and weaving, but the female form of the human being. The female form of the human being would never have come about without Lucifer. It is already the expression of the emergence from the ether, in that Lucifer has just taken possession of the warmth-light ether.

Ahriman, in particular, has power over the ether of sound and life. Ahriman is at the same time the spirit of gravity. Ahriman endeavors to counteract Lucifer. In a certain way, this essentially brings about balance, in that the wise, progressive gods of luciferic power, who want to lift man above the earthly, oppose the ahrimanic power. Ahriman now actually wants to pull man down into the physical. He wants to make him more physical than he would otherwise be as a human being. Ahriman is prepared for this by the fact that he has particular power over the ether of sound and of life. And Ahriman works and weaves in the ether of sound and of life. And so the human physical form, as it emerges out of the ether into the physical, becomes physical in a different way from the way it would have become through the mere progressing gods, becoming the male form. Without the influence of Ahriman, the male form would be inconceivable, impossible. Thus we may say that the female form is woven out of the warmth and light of the ether by Lucifer, who instills in this form a certain upward striving. The male form is shaped by Ahriman in such a way that a certain striving towards the earth is implanted in it.

We can observe this, which is now so willed out of the macrocosmic world evolution, in a truly spiritual scientific way in the human being. If we take the female form, schematically drawn, we must say: Lucifer's warmth and light are woven into it in his own way. — Thus the physical female form is so woven that not only have the steadily progressing gods developed their forces in the light and warmth ether, but that Luciferic forces are also woven into this female etheric body. Let us now assume that in this female etheric body, that which the earth has given particularly, the consciousness of self, the consciousness that holds together, is tuned downwards; let a kind of tuned-down consciousness enter, which some people already call “clairvoyance”, a kind of dream-like, tr Then, in such a case, that which Lucifer has woven into light and heat ether emerges in a kind of aura, so that when female visionaries are in their visionary states, they are surrounded by an aura that has luciferic powers within it, namely that of heat and light ether. Now the point is that this aura, which now surrounds the female body when visionary states occur in a mediumistic way, is not seen as such. Because of course, when the female body is now in the midst of this aura (it is drawn), then the female organism sees into this aura and projects around it what it sees in this aura. It sees what is in its own aura. The objective observer sees something that he can name: the human being radiates imaginations, he has an aura that is formed from imaginations. This is an objective process that does not harm the observer. That is to say, when this imaginative aura is observed from the outside, by another person, it is simply an aura seen objectively, as something else is seen; but when this aura is seen from within, by the visionary herself, she sees only what Lucifer spreads within herself. There is a great difference between seeing something oneself and having it seen by others. An enormous difference!

This is why there is a great danger for a woman when visionary clairvoyance sets in if this visionary clairvoyance takes the form of imaginations. In this case, the woman needs to be especially careful. And it must always be assumed that the development must be taken firmly in hand, that it is a healthy one. Not to stop at all that one sees, not true, because that can simply be the actually luciferic aura, viewed from the inside, which was necessary to form the female body. And much of what female visionaries describe is interesting for a completely different reason than the reason why the female visionaries consider it interesting. If they describe or view it as if it were an interesting objective world, then they are quite wrong, then they are quite in error. But if this corresponding aura is seen from the outside, then it is what the ether has made possible for the female form in the development of the earth. So that we can say: A woman must take particular care when her visionary, imaginative clairvoyance begins to develop or manifests itself, because danger can very easily lurk there, the danger of falling into error.

The male organism is different. When we consider the male organism, Ahriman has woven his power into its aura, but now into the tone and life ether. And just as it is primarily the warmth ether in the case of woman, so it is primarily the life ether in the case of man. In woman it is primarily the warmth ether in which Lucifer works, and in man the life ether in which Ahriman works. When the man comes out of his consciousness, when the cohesion that expresses itself in him as ego consciousness is dampened, when a kind of passive state occurs in the man, then it is the case that one can see again how the aura asserts itself around him, the aura in which Ahriman has its power.

But now it is an aura that primarily contains the life ether and the tone ether. There is vibrating tone in it, so that one does not actually see this aura of the man so directly imaginatively. It is not an imaginative aura, but something of vibrating spiritual tone that surrounds the man. All this has to do with the form, not with the soul, of course; it has to do with the man in so far as he is physical. So that the one who looks at this form from the outside can see: the human being radiates — one can now say intuitions. These are the same intuitions from which his form was actually formed, through which he is there as the man in the world. There is a living, vibrant sound around you. Therefore, there is another danger for man when consciousness is dulled to passivity, the danger of only hearing this own aura, hearing inwardly. Man must be especially careful not to let himself go when he hears this own aura spiritually, for then he hears the Ahriman within him. For he must be there.

You see now how there would be no masculine and feminine in humanity on earth if Lucifer and Ahriman had not been at work. I would like to know how woman could escape Lucifer, how man could escape Ahriman! The sermon: one should flee from them, these powers – I have often emphasized this – is quite foolish, because they belong to that which lives in evolution, since evolution is already as it is.

But we can now say: Yes, by standing on earth as a man, in a male incarnation, he goes through his life, and what he is as a man, what he can experience as a man, what is the male experience, he has of it that this sounding life ether is in him, that he always has, so to speak, in himself, albeit mixed with Ahriman, chords of life that actually build up his male form. He has chords of life around him, in him, which only become visible and audible around him when he becomes medial.

Now let us assume that we are dealing with people who died at birth and want to express that they did not become “men” here during their incarnation. What would they say? They would say that this did not work at their birth, that they had the potential to become men in this incarnation, but that which makes a man a man did not work. They have been removed from what would have made them men in physical incarnation. In short, they will say:

We were removed early
From Lebechören.

That's what the blessed boys say.

We were removed early
From living choirs;
But this one has learned,

that is to say: he has gone through the experience, Faust. He has gone through the long life, through the long life on earth. He can convey something to us about this life on earth.

He will teach us.

So, in a sense, we have to look into the deepest depths of occult knowledge if we want to understand why a particular word is used in this particular poem. The commentator then comes along and says: Well, the poet chooses such a word: Lebechöre and so on. - Anything is fine with him, as long as he does not have to subject himself to the inconvenience of learning something. Through such things I would like to point out to you how appropriate and professional this Goethean poetry is in terms of the spiritual world view, what actually rests in this Goethean poetry.

Now, I may have made it difficult for you to understand something that is difficult for the human mind to grasp, in one direction or another, by pointing out characteristic points where Ahriman and Lucifer work in the world in such a way that we cannot escape them. For, however we may arrange it, when we prepare for an incarnation — for we must prepare for a male or female incarnation — if it is not Lucifer, then it is Ahriman. So it really is not possible to carry things so far as to say: one must escape both. — Not true, I have, so to speak, also made your heart heavy by showing you that there is a certain danger in observing one's own aura, as it were, looking into one's own aura. But therein lies the infinite wisdom of the world, that life is not like that, that it is a resting pendulum, but that it swings. And just as the pendulum swings to the right and to the left, so the life not only of humanity, but of the whole world swings to the Ahrimanic and Luciferic side. And only because life swings back and forth between Ahrimanic and Luciferic influences, maintaining its balance in between, is life possible. Therefore, something is set against what I have now described as dangerous. If it is a Luciferic influence, it is opposed by the Ahrimanic. If it is Ahrimanic, it is opposed by the Luciferic.

So let us take the female organism again. It radiates, as it were, a Luciferic aura. But by radiating it, it pushes back the life or tone ether, thus forming a kind of Ahrimanic aura around the female organism, so that the female organism then has the Luciferic aura in the middle, and further out the Ahrimanic aura. But this female organism can now, if it is not so inactive that it remains with its own aura, develop further. And that is precisely what is important: not to remain in an unhealthy way with the first imaginations that arise, but to apply all one's will power to penetrate through these imaginations. For one must ultimately bring it so far that one's own aura does not appear, but that it appears as if reflected back from a mirror plate, which is now an Ahrimanic aura. One must not look into one's own aura, but one must have what is in one's own aura reflected back from the outer aura. Thus you see, it is the case for the female organism that it receives the Luciferic mirrored back from the Ahrimanic and is thereby neutralized, thereby brought precisely into balance. Thus it is now neither Ahrimanic nor Luciferic, but it is defeminized, it becomes universally human. Truly, it becomes universally human.

I only ask you to feel this as it really is, how man, by ascending into the spiritual, by escaping the luciferic or ahrimanic power of his own aura, does not look into the luciferic or ahrimanic, but lets the one be reflected and thereby receives it back, asexually, without it being male or female. The feminine is neutralized into the masculine in the Ahrimanic, the masculine is neutralized into the feminine in the Luciferic. For just as the feminine-Luciferic aura surrounds itself with the Ahrimanic aura, so the masculine-Ahrimanic aura surrounds itself with the Luciferic aura, and there, just as in the case of the feminine, what one has within oneself is reflected back. You see it as a mirror image.

Now let us assume that someone wanted to describe this process. When would they be able to describe it? Well, what happens during clairvoyance also happens after death. The person is in the same situation. During clairvoyance, the feminine must neutralize itself into the masculine, the masculine into the feminine. This is also the case after death. What kind of images must arise then? Well, let us assume that a soul that was in a female organism has died, it would have to go through a lot after death, which is supposed to be a form of compensation for earthly guilt. Such a soul will then slowly strive towards neutralization from what it was bound to on earth. It will, as it were, strive towards the masculine after neutralization through the feminine. This neutralization should be such that striving towards the highest masculine is a release for it. If we find penitents after death, then it must be characteristic of them that in the spiritual world their yearning is to strive towards the masculine, the balancing element. The three penitents – the Magna peccatrix, the Mulier Samaritana, the Maria Aegyptiaca – are indeed in the wake of the Mater gloriosa, but they should strive for neutralization, for compensation. Therefore, the Mater gloriosa does work in the aura; it is very clearly expressed to us that the Mater gloriosa can work in her aura, has her own aura. Just listen:

Around them swirl
light clouds,
They are penitents,
a delicate folk,
around your knees
sipping the ether,
needing mercy.

You, the untouchables,
Do not find it strange
That the easily seduced
Come to you in confidence.

But they become aware of this only as a consciousness. It does not confront them as something that resounds like the heights of life. What resounds for them is what they are to experience in connection with the Mater gloriosa through the Christ. Therefore, we see the speeches of the three penitent women directed towards the masculine, Christ:

By the love that was at the feet
of Thy Son glorified by God...

And with the Samaritan woman, Mary:

By the well to which already of old
Abram led his flock...

And here it is spiritualized:

At the pure, abundant spring
That now flows forth from there....

The Christ calls Himself to the Samaritan woman: the true water.

And with Mary of Egypt we are already dealing with the Entombment:

At the most hallowed place,
Where they laid the Lord to rest....

We see how, in these three, that which lives in the aura wants to go out to that which neutralizes itself.

And if we ask what the man finds as that which neutralizes him, which lifts him out of masculinity, then it is the longing for the feminine that pervades the world.

Here the view is unobstructed,
the spirit uplifted.
There women pass by,
floating upwards;
the glorious center
in a halo of stars,
the Queen of Heaven,
I see it in the radiance.

He is not attracted directly by the Christ-male, as the penitents are, but he is first attracted by that which, as the female, belongs to the Christ. And that leads him in turn to the karmically connected Gretchen soul, again to the woman. There you see delicately interwoven into the poetry this deep mystery of man's relationship to the spiritual world. For how could it not, I would like to say, be felt with dismay when the occult facts are revealed to us: the disembodied soul, which still has the elements within it - nature, which must first be separated - which must neutralize itself through the feminine. And we see how, in the striving towards neutralization, because we are dealing with the masculine, Faust, the feminine must assert itself as “pulling towards”. Something quite wonderful is presented in this poem. And it is clearly and distinctly suggested to us that it should be so. Thus, through the mouth of Doctor Marianus, Faust will strive towards the feminine, that is, the spiritual eternal feminine, but the secret, the mystery. When he spiritually beholds the gloriosa mater, he says:

Supreme Ruler of the world!
Let me in the blue,
stretched out heavenly canopy
see your secret.

Now let us imagine: Faust striving for the spiritual world, longing to see the secret of the feminine in the Mater gloriosa. How can this be? Well, it will be possible for the light to be neutralized by its counter-radiation, that is, the female aura of light and warmth will appear, but radiated in the opposite direction, not as it flows directly. This must be neutralized, must be connected with the fact that this light has a counter-radiation. In the stretched-out canopy of heaven, the secret is seen: the woman with the aura, with the sun. When the light is reflected back from the moon: the woman standing on the moon. You know this image, at least you should be familiar with it. Thus we see Faust bearing desire, in the stretched-out canopy of heaven, to finally see the mystery: Maria, the woman clothed with the sun, the moon at her feet, reflecting back. And together with this secret, with this mystery in the expansive heavenly canopy, what he otherwise knows of the Mater gloriosa then forms the emotional and sensory content of the Chorus mysticus. For even that which is still human form in the Mater gloriosa is a parable, for that is the transitory thing about her human form, and all that is a parable. That which is inadequate, that is to say, that which is inadequate in human longing, only becomes adequate here. Here one receives the vision of the aura radiation in a sun-like way, the light of which reflects back from the moon, shines back: the ineffable, here it is done. That which cannot be grasped in physical life – that is sought, that which radiates out of the self in selfless return: here it is done. – Then, according to feeling, the whole thing said out of the mouth of man or said for the ears of man:

The eternal feminine draws us up.

One must say: to let 'Faust' take effect on oneself really means, with regard to many parties of 'Faust', directly entering into an occult atmosphere. - And if I wanted to tell you everything that could be said about 'Faust' in occult terms, we would have to stay up late for a long time. You would have to attend many lectures on it. But that is not necessary at all for the time being, because it is not so much a matter of absorbing as many concepts and ideas as possible, but rather, for us, it is really very important that our feelings deepen. And if we deepen our feelings and perceptions of this world literature to such an extent that we have a deep reverence for the working of genius on earth, in whose actions and creations the occult is truly present, then we will do the world and ourselves a great service. If we can feel the greatness of the spirit in the right reverent way, then this is a meaningful path to the gate of spiritual science.

Once again, it is less about raving and more about deepening our feelings. —- And I would give little to be able to tell you, for example, that the blessed boys' saying about being carried away from Lebechören leads to such occult depths; I would give little for the sake of these mere ideas if I could only know that your heart, your soul, your inner being is so touched when you express such a truth that you feel something of the sacred, profound forces that live in the world and pour into human creativity when that creativity is truly connected to the secrets of the world. If one can tremble at the fact that such depths can lie in a work of art, then this shuddering, which our soul, our mind, our heart has once experienced, is worth much more than the mere knowledge that the blessed boys say they are not united with living creatures. It is not the joy at the spiritual depth of the idea that should move us, but the joy that the world is so interwoven from the spiritual, that the reign of the spirit in the human heart has such an effect that such creativity can live in the spiritual development of humanity.