The Rudolf Steiner Archive

You will have sensed, my dear friends, in what I was able to tell you at the close of yesterday's lecture, concerning the old conception of Michael's conflict with the Dragon, an indication that for our time a revitalization is called for of the elements of a Weltanschauung once contained for mankind in this gigantic picture—and not even so long ago. I repeatedly drew attention to the fact that in many 18^th Century souls this conception was still fully alive. But before I can tell you—as I shall in the next lectures—what a genuine, up-to-date spiritual viewpoint can and must do to revivify it, I must present to you—episodically, as it were—a more general anthroposophical train of thought. This will disclose the way in which the conception under discussion can be revitalized and once more become a force in mankind's thinking, feeling, and acting.

If we observe our present relation to nature and to the whole world, and if we compare this with sufficient open-mindedness with that of former times, we find that at bottom man has become a veritable hermit in his attitude toward the cosmic powers, a hermit in so far as he is introduced through his birth into physical existence and has lost the memory of his prenatal life—a memory that at one time was common to all mankind. During that period of our life in which nowadays we merely grow into the use of our forces of mind and memory, and to which we can remember back in this earth life, there occurred in former epochs of human evolution the lighting up of real memory, of an actual retrospect of prenatal experiences man had passed through as a psycho-spiritual being before his earth life.—That is one factor that makes present-day man a world-hermit: he is not conscious of the nature of the connection between his earthly existence and his spiritual existence.

The other factor is this: when now he gazes into the vast cosmos he observes the outer forms of the stars and constellations, but he no longer has any inner spiritual relation to what is spiritual in the cosmos. We can go further: the man of today observes the kingdoms of nature that surround him on earth—the manifold beauty of plants, the gigantic proportions of mountains, the fleeting clouds, and so on. Yet here again he is limited to sense impressions; and often he is even afraid, when he feels a deeper, more intimate contact with the great spaces of nature, lest he might lose his ingenuous attitude toward them. This phase of human evolution was indispensable for the development of what we experience in the consciousness of freedom, the feeling of freedom, in order to arrive at full self-consciousness, at the inner strength that permits the ego to rise to its full height; but necessary as was this hermit life of man in relation to the cosmos, it must be but a transition to another epoch in which the human being may find the way back to spirit, which after all underlies all things and beings. And precisely this finding the way back to spirit must be achieved by means of the strength that can come to him who is able to grasp the Michael idea in its right sense and in its true form, the form it must assume in our time.

Our mentality, the life of our Gemüt, and our life of action all need to be permeated with the Michael impulse. But when we hear it stated that a Michael Festival must be resuscitated among men and that the time is ripe for assigning it its place among the other annual festivals, it is naturally not enough that a few people should say, Well let us start—let us have a Michael Festival! My dear friends, if anthroposophy is to achieve its aim, the superficiality so prevalent today must obviously play no part in any anthroposophical undertakings; but rather, whatever may grow out of anthroposophy must do so with the most profound seriousness. And in order to familiarize ourselves with what this seriousness should be we must consider in what manner the festivals—once vital, today so anaemic—took their place in human evolution. Did the Christmas or Easter Festival come into being because a few people had the idea of instituting a festival at a certain time of the year and said, Let us make the necessary arrangements? Naturally that is not the case. For something like the Christmas Festival to find its way into the life of mankind, Christ Jesus had to be born; this event had to enter the world-historical evolution of the earth; a transcendent event had to occur. And the Easter Festival? It could never have had any meaning in the world had it not commemorated what took place through the Mystery of Golgotha, had not this event intervened incisively for the history of the earth in the evolution of humanity. If nowadays these festivals have faded, if the whole seriousness of the Christmas and Easter Festivals is no longer felt, this fact in itself should lead to a revived intensification of them through a more profound comprehension of the birth of Christ Jesus and the Mystery of Golgotha. Under no conditions, however, must it be imagined that one should add to these festivals simply by establishing a Michael Festival with equal superficiality at the beginning of autumn. Something must be present that can be incisive in human evolution in the same way—though possibly to a lesser degree—as were all events that led to the institution of festivals.

The possibility of celebrating a Michael Festival in all seriousness must inevitably be brought about, and it is the anthroposophical movement out of which an understanding for such a Michael Festival must be able to arise. But just as the Christmas and Easter Festivals were led up to by outer events, in evolutionary objectivity, so a radical transformation must take place in the inner being of mankind before such a step is taken. Anthroposophy must become a profound experience, an experience men can think of in a way similar to that which they feel when imbued with the whole power dwelling in the birth of Christ Jesus, in the Mystery of Golgotha. As was said, this may be so to a lesser degree in the case of the Michael Festival; but something of this soul-transmuting force must proceed from the anthroposophical movement. That is indeed what we long for: that anthroposophy might be imbued with this power to transmute souls: and this can only come about if the substance of its teaching—if I may call it that—becomes actual experience.

Let us now turn our attention to such experiences as can enter our inner being through anthroposophy. In our soul life we distinguish, as you know, thinking, feeling, and willing from one another; and especially in connection with feeling we speak of the human Gemüt. Our thinking appears to us cold, dry, colorless—as though spirituality emaciating us—when our thoughts take an abstract form, when we are unable to imbue them with the warmth and enthusiasm of feeling. We can call a man gemütvoll only when something of the inner warmth of his Gemüt streams forth to us when he utters his thoughts. And we can really make close contact with a man only if his behavior toward ourself and the world is not merely correct and in line with duty, but if his actions manifest enthusiasm, a warm heart, a love of nature, love for every being. This human Gemüt, then, dwells in the very center of the soul life, as it were.

But while thinking and willing have assumed a certain character by reason of man's having become cosmically a hermit, this is even more true of the human Gemüt. Thinking may contemplate the perfection of its cosmic calculations and perhaps gloat over their subtlety, but it simply fails to sense how basically remote it is from the warm heartbeat of life. And in correct actions, carried out by a mere sense of duty, many a man may find satisfaction, without really feeling that a life of such matter-of-fact behavior is but half a life. Neither the one nor the other touches the human soul very closely. But what lies between thinking and willing, all that is comprised in the human Gemüt, is indeed intimately linked with the whole being of man. And while it may sometimes seem—in view of the peculiar tendencies of many people at the present time—as though the factors that should warm and elevate the Gemüt and fill it with enthusiasm might become chilled as well, this is a delusion. For it can be said that a man's inner, conscious experiences might at a pinch occur lacking the element of Gemüt; but through such a lack his being will inevitably suffer in some way. And if such a man's soul can endure this—if perhaps through soullessness he forces himself to Gemütlessness—the process will gnaw at his whole being in some other form: it will eat right down into his physical organization, affecting his health. Much of what appears in our time as symptoms of decline is basically connected with the lack of Gemüt into which many people have settled.—The full import of these rather general statements will become clear when we delve deeper into them.

One who simply grows up into our modern civilization observes the things of the outer world: he perceives them, forms abstract thoughts about them, possibly derives real pleasure from a lovely blossom or a majestic plant; and if he is at all imaginative he may even achieve an inner picture of these. Yet he remains completely unaware of his deeper relation to that world of which the plant, for example, is a part. To talk incessantly about spirit, spirit, and again spirit is utterly inadequate for spiritual perception. Instead, what is needed is that we should become conscious of our true spiritual relations to the things around us. When we observe a plant in the usual way we do not in the least sense the presence of an elemental being dwelling in it, of something spiritual; we do not dream that every such plant harbors something which is not satisfied by having us look at it and form such abstract mental pictures as we commonly do of plants today. For in every plant there is concealed—under a spell, as it were—an elemental spiritual being; and really only he observes a plant in the right way who realizes that this loveliness is a sheath of a spiritual being enchanted in it—a relatively insignificant being, to be sure, in the great scale of cosmic interrelationship, but still a being intimately related to man.

The human being is really so closely linked to the world that he cannot take a step in the realm of nature without coming under the intense influence exercised upon him by his intimate relations to the world. And when we see the lily in the field, growing from the seed to the blossom, we must vividly imagine—though not personified—that this lily is awaiting something. (Again I must use men's words as I did before to express another picture: they cannot quite cover the meaning, but they do express the realities inherent in things.) While unfolding its leaves, but especially its blossom, this lily is really expecting something. It says to itself: Men will pass and look at me; and when a sufficient number of human eyes will have directed their gaze upon me—so speaks the spirit of the lily—I shall be disenchanted of my spell, and I shall be able to start on my way into spiritual worlds.—You will perhaps object that many lilies grow unseen by human eye: yes, but then the conditions are different, and such lilies find their release in a different way. For the decree that the spell of that particular lily shall be broken by human eyes comes about by the first human glance cast upon the lily. It is a relationship entered into between man and the lily when he first lets his gaze rest upon it.—All about us are these elemental spirits begging us, in effect, Do not look at the flowers so abstractly, nor form such abstract mental pictures of them: let rather your heart and your Gemüt enter into what lives, as soul and spirit, in the flowers, for it is imploring you to break the spell.—Human existence should really be a perpetual releasing of the elemental spirits lying enchanted in minerals, plants, and animals.

An idea such as this can readily be sensed in its abundant beauty; but precisely by grasping it in its right spiritual significance we can also feel it in the light of the full responsibility we thereby incur toward the whole cosmos. In the present epoch of civilization—that of the development of freedom—man's attitude toward the flowers is a mere sipping at what he should really be drinking. He sips by forming concepts and ideas, whereas he should drink by uniting, through his Gemüt, with the elemental spirits of the things and beings that surround him.

I said, we need not consider the lilies that are never seen by man but must think of those that are so seen, because they need the relationship of the Gemüt which the human being can enter into with them. Now, it is from the lily that an effect proceeds; and manifold, mighty and magnificent are indeed the spiritual effects, that continually approach man out of the things of nature when he walks in it. One who can see into these things constantly perceives the variety and grandeur of all that streams out to him from all sides through the elemental spirituality of nature. And it flows into him: it is something that constantly streams toward him as super-sensible spirituality poured out over outer nature, which is a mirror of the divine-spiritual.

In the next days, we shall have occasion to speak of these matters more in detail, in the true anthroposophical sense. At the moment we will go on to say that in the human being there dwells the force I have described as the force of the Dragon whom Michael encounters, against whom he does battle. I indicated that this Dragon has an animal-like form, yet is really a super-sensible being; that on account of his insubordination as a super-sensible being he was expelled into the sense world, where he now has his being; and I indicated further that he exists only in man, because outer nature cannot harbor him. Outer nature, image of divine spirituality, has in its innocence nothing whatever to do with the Dragon: he is established in the being of men, as I have set forth. But by reason of being such a creature—a super-sensible being in the sense of world—he instantly attracts the super-sensible elemental forces that stream toward man out of nature and unites with them, with the result that man, instead of releasing the plant elementals from their spell through his soul and Gemüt, unites them with the Dragon, allows them to perish with the Dragon in his lower nature. For everything in the world moves in an evolutionary stream, taking many different directions to this end; and the elemental beings dwelling in minerals, plants, and animals must rise to a higher existence than is offered by their present abodes. This they can only accomplish by passing through man. The establishment of an external civilization is surely not man's sole purpose on earth: he has a cosmic aim within the entire world evolution; and this cosmic aim is linked with such matters as I have just described—with the further development of those elemental beings that in earthly existence are at a low stage, but destined for a higher one. When man enters into a certain relationship with them, and when everything runs as it should, they can attain to this higher stage of evolution.

In the old days of instinctive human evolution, when in the Gemüt the forces of soul and spirit shone forth and when these were as much a matter of course to him as were the forces of nature, world evolution actually progressed in such a way that the stream of existence passed through man in a normal, orderly way, as it were. But precisely during the epoch that must now terminate, that must advance to a higher form of spirituality, untold elemental substance within man has been delivered over to the Dragon; for it is his very nature to hunger and thirst for these elemental beings: to creep about, frightening plants and minerals in order to gorge himself with the elemental beings of nature. For with them he wants to unite, and with them to permeate his own being. In extrahuman nature he cannot do this, but only in the inner nature of man, for only there is existence possible for him. And if this were to continue, the earth would be doomed, for the Dragon would inevitably be victorious in earthly existence.

He would be victorious for a very definite reason: by virtue of his saturating himself, as it were, with elemental beings in human nature, something happens physically, psychically, and spiritually. Spiritually: no human being would ever arrive at the silly belief in a purely material outer world, as assumed by nature research today; he would never come to accept dead atoms and the like; he would never assume the existence of such reactionary laws as that of the conservation of force and energy, or of the permanence of matter, were not the Dragon in him to absorb the elemental beings from without. When these come to be in man, in the body of the Dragon, human observation is distracted from what things contain of spirit; man no longer sees spirit in things, which in the meantime has entered into him; he sees nothing but dead matter.—Psychically: everything a man has ever expressed in the way of what I must call cowardice of soul results from the Dragon's having absorbed the elemental powers within him. Oh, how widespread is this cowardice of the soul! We know quite well that we should do this or that, that such and such is the right thing to do in a given situation; but we cannot bring our self to do it—a certain dead weight acts in our soul: the elemental beings in the Dragon's body are at work in us.—And physically: man would never be tormented by what are called disease germs had his body not been prepared—through the spiritual effects I have just described—as a soil for the germs. These things penetrate even into the physical organization; and we can say that if we perceive man rightly in his spirit, soul, and body as he is constituted today, we find him cut off from the spirit realm in three directions—for a good purpose, to be sure; the attainment of freedom. He no longer has in him the spiritual powers he might have; and thus you see that through this threefold debilitation of his life, through what the glutted Dragon has become in him, he is prevented from experiencing the potency of the spirit within himself.

There are two ways of experiencing anthroposophy—many variations lie between, but I am mentioning only the two extremes—and one of them is this: a man sits down in a chair, takes a book, reads it, and finds it quite interesting as well as comforting to learn that there is such a thing as spirit, as immortality. It just suits him to know that with regard to the soul as well, man is not dead when his body dies. He derives greater satisfaction from such a cosmogony than from a materialistic one. He takes it up as one might take up abstract reflections on geography, except that anthroposophy provides more of comfort. Yes, that is one way. The man gets up from his chair really no different from what he was when he sat down, except for having derived a certain satisfaction from what he read—or heard, if it was a lecture instead of a book.

But there is another way of receiving what anthroposophy has to give. It is to absorb something like the idea of Michael's Conflict with the Dragon in such a way as really to become inwardly transformed, to feel it as an important, incisive experience, and to rise from your chair fundamentally quite a different being after reading something of that sort.—And as has been said, there are all sorts of shades between these two.

The first type of reader cannot be counted upon at all when it is a question of reviving the Michaelmas Festival: only those can be depended upon whose determination it is, at least within their capacities, to take anthroposophy into themselves as something living. And that is exactly what should be experienced within the anthroposophical movement: the need to experience as life-forces those ideas that first present themselves to us merely as such, as ideas.—Now I will say something wholly paradoxical: sometimes it is much easier to understand the opponents of anthroposophy than its adherents. The opponents say, Oh, these anthroposophical ideas are fantastic—they conform with no reality; and they reject them, remain untouched by them. One can readily understand such an attitude and find a variety of reasons for it. As a rule it is caused by fear of these ideas—a real attitude, though unconscious. But frequently it happens that a man accepts the ideas; yet, though they diverge so radically from everything else in the world that can be accepted, they produce less feeling in him than would an electrifying apparatus applied to his knuckle. In the latter case he at least feels in his body a twitching produced by the spark; and the absence of a similar spark in the soul is what so often causes great anguish—this links up with the demand of our time that men be laid hold of and impressed by the spirit, not merely by what is physical. Men avoid being knocked and jerked about, but they do not avoid coming in contact with ideas dealing with other worlds, ideas presenting themselves as something very special in the present-day sense-world, and then maintaining the same indifference toward them as toward ideas of the senses.

This ability to rise to the point at which thoughts about spirit can grip us as powerfully as can anything in the physical world, this is Michael power. It is confidence in the ideas of spirit—given the capacity for receiving them at all—leading to the conviction: I have received a spiritual impulse, I give myself up to it, I become the instrument for its execution. First failure—never mind! Second failure—never mind! A hundred failures are of no consequence, for no failure is ever a decisive factor in judging the truth of a spiritual impulse whose effect has been inwardly understood and grasped. We have full confidence in a spiritual impulse, grasped at a certain point of time, only when we can say to our self, My hundred failures can at most prove that the conditions for realizing the impulse are not given me in this incarnation; but that this impulse is right I can know from its own nature. And if I must wait a hundred incarnations for the power to realize this impulse, nothing but its own nature can convince me of the efficacy or impotence of any spiritual impulse.

If you will imagine this thought developed in the human Gemüt as great confidence in spirit, if you will consider that man can cling firm as a rock to something he has seen to be spiritually victorious, something he refuses to relinquish in spite of all outer opposition, then you will have a conception of what the Michael power, the Michael being, really demands of us; for only then will you comprehend the nature of the great confidence in spirit. We may leave in abeyance some spiritual impulse or other, even for a whole incarnation; but once we have grasped it we must never waver in cherishing it within us, for only thus can we save it up for subsequent incarnations. And when confidence in spirit will in this way have established a frame of mind to which this spiritual substance appears as real as the ground under our feet—the ground without which we could not stand—then we shall have in our Gemüt a feeling of what Michael really expects of us.

Undoubtedly you will admit that in the course of the last centuries—even the last thousand years of human history—the vastly greater part of this active confidence in spirit has been disappearing, that life does not exact from the majority of men the development of such confidence. Yet that is what had to come, because what I am really expressing when I say this is that in the last instance man has burned the bridges that formerly had communication with the Michael power.

But in the meantime much has happened in the world. Man has in a sense apostatized from the Michael power. The stark, intense materialism of the 19^th Century is in effect an apostasy from the Michael power. But objectively, in the domain of outer spirit, the Michael power has been victorious, precisely in the last third of the 19^th Century. What the Dragon had hoped to achieve through human evolution will not come to pass, yet on the other hand we envision today the other great fact that out of free resolution man will have to take part in Michael's victory over the Dragon. And this involves finding the way to abandon the prevalent passivity in relation to spirit and to enter into an active one. The Michael forces cannot be acquired through any form of passivity, not even through passive prayer, but only through man's making himself the instrument of divine-spiritual forces by means of his loving will. For the Michael forces do not want to be implored: they want men to unite with them. This men can do if they will receive the lessons of the spiritual world with inner energy.

This will indicate what must appear in man if the Michael conception is to come alive again. He must really be able to experience spirit, and he must be able to gather this experience wholly out of thought—not in the first instance by means of some sort of clairvoyance. We would be in a bad way if everybody had to become clairvoyant in order to have this confidence in spirit. Everyone who is at all receptive to the teachings of spiritual science can have this confidence. If a man will saturate himself more and more with confidence in spirit, something will come over him like an inspiration; and this is something that really all the good spirits of the world are awaiting. He will experience the spring, sensing the beauty and loveliness of the plant world and finding deep delight in the sprouting, burgeoning life; but at the same time he will develop a feeling for the spell-bound elemental spirituality in all this budding life. He will acquire a feeling, a Gemüt content, telling him that every blossom bears testimony to the existence of an enchanted elemental being within it; and he will learn to feel the longing in this elemental being to be released by him, instead of being delivered up to the Dragon to whom it is related through its own invisibility. And when the flowers wither in the autumn he will know that he has succeeded in contributing a bit to the progress of spirit in the world, in enabling an elemental being to slip out of its plant when the blossoms wither and fall and become seed. But only as he permeated himself with the powerful strength of Michael will he be able to lead this elemental being up into the spirit for which it yearns.

And men will experience the cycle of the seasons. They will experience spring as the birth of elemental beings longing for the spirit, and autumn as their liberation from the dying plants and withering blossoms. They will no longer stand alone as cosmic hermits who have merely grown half a year older by fall than they were in the spring: together with evolving nature they will have pressed onward by one of life's milestones. They will not merely have inhaled the physical oxygen so and so many times, but will have participated in the evolution of nature, in the enchanting and disenchanting of spiritual beings in nature. Men will no longer only feel themselves growing older; they will sense the transformation of nature as part of their own destiny: they will coalesce with all that grows there, will expand in their being because their free individuality can pour itself out in sacrifice into the cosmos.—That is what man will be able to contribute to a favorable outcome of Michael's Conflict with the Dragon.

Thus, we see that what can lead to a Michaelmas Festival must be an event of the human Gemüt, a Gemüt event that can once more experience the cycle of the seasons as a living reality, in the manner described. But do not imagine that you are experiencing it by merely setting up this abstract concept in your mind! You will achieve this only after you have actually absorbed anthroposophy in such a way that it makes you regard every plant, every stone, in a new way; and also only after anthroposophy has taught you to contemplate all human life in a new way.

I have tried to give you a sort of picture of what must be prepared specifically in the human Gemüt, if the latter is to learn to feel surrounding nature as its very own being. The most that men have retained of this sort of thing is the ability to experience in their blood circulation a certain psychic element in addition to the material factor: unless they are rank materialists they have preserved that much. But to experience the pulse-beat of outer existence as we do our own innermost being, to take part once more in the cycle of the seasons as we experience the life inside our own skin—that is the preparation needed for the Michael Festival.

Inasmuch as these lectures are intended to present for your contemplation the relation between anthroposophy and the human Gemüt, it is my wish that they may really be grasped not merely by the head but especially by the Gemüt; for at bottom, all anthroposophy is largely futile in the world and among men if it is not absorbed by the Gemüt, if it carries no warmth into this human Gemüt. Recent centuries have heaped cleverness in abundance upon men: in the matter of thinking, men have come to the point where they no longer even know how clever they are. That is a fact. True, many people believe present-day men to be stupid; but granting that there are stupid people in the world, this is really only because their cleverness has reached such proportions that they debility of their Gemüt prevents them from knowing what to do with all their cleverness. Whenever someone is called stupid, I always maintain that it is merely a case of his not knowing what use to make of his cleverness. I have listened to many discussions in which some speaker or other was ridiculed because he was considered stupid, but occasionally just one of these would seem to me the cleverest.

Cleverness, then, has been furnished us in abundance by the last few centuries; but what we need today is warmth of Gemüt, and this anthroposophy can provide. When someone studying anthroposophy says it leaves him cold, he reminds me of one who keeps piling wood in the stove and then complains that the room doesn't get warm. Yet all he needs to do is to kindle the wood, then it will get warm. Anthroposophy can be presented, and it is the good wood of the soul; but it can be enkindled only by each within himself. What everyone must find in his Gemüt is the match wherewith to light anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is in truth warm and ardent: it is the very soul of the Gemüt; and he who finds this anthroposophy cold and intellectual and matter-of-fact just lacks the means of kindling it so it may pervade him with its fire. And just as only a little match is needed to light ordinary wood, so anthroposophy, too, needs only a little match. But this will enkindle the force of Michael in man.

We can obtain maybe the best survey of what ought to enter into our souls and hearts as a result of our efforts in spiritual science if we turn our attention for a moment to the greater part of what I have dealt with in my book Occult Science, an Outline. Leaving aside the introductory chapters, which are necessary as a preparation for the subject, we can begin with those chapters that introduce us to the being of man, his relation to birth and death, and his life in the spiritual worlds. After this comes a description of the great cosmic relationships, of course only in rough outlines; we are led through the transformations of our earth before it became the earth, through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions leading up to our present Earth evolution. Then follows a sketch in the form of brief hints giving us a glimpse of the future Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan evolutions. Finally, instead of a more detailed description of the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan evolutions we have an account of what must be undergone by the individual who wishes to set in motion within his being those inner soul experiences which must eventually lead him to initiation. These processes have been described in greater detail up to a certain stage in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved?.

It will become apparent that for us spiritual science falls into two parts. In one part we describe cosmic relationships; we describe how what we have before us today as the earth and its beings and as the rest of the cosmos has been coming into existence out of the very, very distant past, and we describe the prospect of how it will develop further. If you review the many observations that we have made, you will see that a large part of them are in a way under the influence of what we take into ourselves concerning the development and coming into being of the cosmos.

The other part of spiritual science is concerned for us with what the soul must do in order to enter the spiritual worlds or, in other words, to reach initiation. It is these inner experiences, conquests, battles, redemptions, and achievements of the soul with which we are always concerned in this second sphere of observation. Our observations always belong essentially to one or other of these two spheres.

Starting now with the first sphere of observations, we see that by describing the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions up to the present Earth evolution, we are placing something in the world which is entirely contrary to both the religious and the scientific world concepts of today; indeed the modern world for the most part considers these descriptions to be absurd. It is quite natural that to our modern minds a description of a world order appropriate, for instance, to the conditions of the Saturn evolution must appear too fantastic; the description of a cosmic order of this kind must appear to our present way of looking at things as absolute nonsense, as something that cannot exist, as the outcome of fantastic speculation. And this is just as true of the other parts of our portrayal.

Now bear in mind a remark that I have made here several times: The human being does not only sleep at night, when his conscious thoughts and ideas are dulled, but a part of his being is also asleep during the day. At night it is more the life of concepts that is asleep; but during the day, in a part of our being, the life of the will is more asleep. The will sleeps in the depths of our bodily being, or at least a large part of the will sleeps thus. This sphere of our will is much more comprehensive than the part which we develop consciously; the latter is only a small part. We may say with complete assurance that in his ordinary daily consciousness, either at work or enjoying leisure, the human being is really for the most part a sleepwalker. A vast number of things take place within him unconsciously; and even a great part of what seems to be done consciously is, in reality, done half or more than half unconsciously.

If we observe the human being exactly in what he does half or more than half unconsciously, then we may see with our spiritual eyes that during sleep he is not nearly so unbelieving as when awake. When awake his modern view of the world prompts him to say: The description of the Saturn evolution in a book like Occult Science is pure and absolute nonsense! Of course he must say this. But as a complete human being he does not speak like this; for he carries within himself something through which he—if I may say so—knows unconsciously that there was once upon a time a Saturn existence. He does something which proves that he in a certain way unconsciously remembers this Saturn existence: he becomes an architect. Architecture would never have come into being if man did not now carry within himself the laws which were imprinted on his physical body during the ancient Saturn period. Yesterday we discussed how these laws in the physical body can be projected into the space outside, where they become the laws of architecture. Man mysteriously projects into the laws of architecture all that he took into his being during the ancient Saturn period. Obviously he has to use such means as are at his disposal today; accordingly the present aspect of architecture is quite different from what we know of ‘Saturn architecture’. But the essential and living elements in our architectural activities stem from what was implanted in us during the ancient Saturn evolution.

Let us enter still deeper into the matter which we thus place before our souls. What does the human being do when he becomes totally absorbed in the creativity of architecture, either as the architect or as the observer or admirer? He lives within the Saturn laws of his physical body; if he immerses himself entirely into the laws of architecture, he forgets all about the life of his etheric body, his astral body and his ego: he becomes once more a Saturn man. All the impressions produced by architecture, its austerity, its chaste proportions, its silence which is yet so eloquent, result from the fact that, abandoning the higher members of his being, he immerses himself in what was given to him by the spirits of the higher hierarchies, the Thrones and Archai, who were active at the beginning of the Saturn period. It was mainly these two groups of higher spirits who were active then, assisted by the other beings belonging to the higher hierarchies.

So when he creates or enjoys architecture (where it is a case of real art of course), the human being really lifts himself not only out of the present Earth existence but also out of the more distant past and places himself once more into the period of Saturn existence.

Let us now pass on to sculpture. Yesterday we saw that the laws of sculpture are the laws of the etheric body which have been pressed down one step into the physical body. Just as that which lives in the physical body, when compelled into the space outside, becomes architecture, so sculpture appears when what lives in the etheric body is made to descend into the physical body. In enjoying sculpture we abandon the astral body, the ego, and all the higher members of our being, living as though we had only the physical body, and in the physical body an expression of the etheric body; in such a condition we are once more participants of the ancient Sun condition. All that the ancient Sun evolution planted in us reappears when we enjoy or create works of sculpture. On the one hand these works appear so congenial to us because they give us back our own very distant past which is still creative within us, our Sun period; and on the other hand they are so smooth and cold in their marble because what rays out to us from them is like light coming to us from the far distances of the cosmos.

Now let us pass on to painting. We know that painting comes about when the inner impulses of the astral body are pressed down into the etheric body; in painting we abandon the ego and live as though we were only in the astral, but were pressing it down into the etheric body. We experience ourselves in all that the ancient Moon evolution has implanted in us, this being our inner astral nature as human being. Painting is, as it were, the outward projection of this inner astral nature of ours. Just as we experience in our astral nature sorrow or joy, things that affect or impress us, whatever fate brings us, so do we experience what the painter conjures upon the canvas for us, which is a reflection of our own inner astral being.

If you try to enter a little into what is described in Occult Science as the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions, you will discover that an architectural mood underlies the description of the Saturn evolution, a sculptural mood underlies the description of the Sun evolution, and a pictorial mood underlies the description of the Moon evolution; an attempt was made to express these moods by choosing suitable words. The presentation of occult events definitely requires more than the current literary equipment of today. It would be an entire misconception of the style of an occult description to believe that it could be achieved by the dreadful literary devices of our time.

We now come to the Earth evolution. Here we are in the immediate present, in the reality appointed for us; what we experience here we do not immediately feel the need to place before ourselves in the form of art. But the need the human being feels of projecting his inner life outward in the form of art is not exhausted by, as it were, recreating his cosmic past in architecture, sculpture, and painting out of the memory implanted in him.

Our need for art progresses further and we can find the spiritual foundation for this if we turn again to the book Occult Science. After the descriptions of the Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth evolutions and after the brief outline of the future Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolutions, we come to the description of the processes of initiation, which are essentially at first inner human processes. These initiation processes are, in the form in which we encounter them today, the beginning of important changes for the life of human beings on earth and for the whole of future humanity.

Is it not so that our deeper experience of the life of humanity on earth is expressed in the words: Alas, in so far as man is consciously aware during life on earth he appears to be but an orphan in the cosmos, a child abandoned by the cosmos, or even a traveller who has lost his way in the cosmos!

For his everyday waking consciousness man does not know the origin of what lives in him as a result of the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions; nor does he know what will become of him in the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan evolutions. Knowing neither his origin nor his future he wanders about at the edge of the abyss that bounds our earthly valley. Sometimes his consciousness may give him a feeling of assurance or he may feel secure as to his future; nevertheless, neither the past nor the future can be determined objectively and competently by man on earth. But something capable of giving him clear guidance in his life will appear before his soul. This will come about when man makes himself acquainted with the guidelines given him in the laws of initiation. Initiation, in ancient times, took the form of a kind of inheritance left to men by the gods, which manifested itself as atavistic clairvoyance; but in the course of our progress towards the future it must take hold of man more and more firmly and actually shape his inner soul life.

The path to initiation has two sides. The one side leads man to discover the secrets, the riddles of life so that he can enter into the spiritual experience of existence. The other side may be called the more subjective side of initiation that takes place more within the soul itself. It is, at the same time, the side from which men shrink the most, because it presents in fact something which does not fit in with the comfortable indolence of experience to which the soul so easily yields or wants to yield. An extremely wide and detailed range of inner experiences awaits the one who is to be gradually led by his inner experience to initiation. Conquest and liberation, hindrance and redemption alternate in manifold ways with inner experience on the way to initiation. One goes through everything the soul experiences when it suddenly feels it has become an entire stranger to itself; as though it had been cast into an abyss where it cannot help feeling that it is eternally lost and can never recover anything which it may have acquired during any lifetime. It may feel an unlimited dismay and grief at the loss of the existence already won. Then the soul may feel itself forced into complete fragmentation, as though it must disintegrate into an endless multiplicity and dissolve into all the beings out of which the cosmos is composed. Further the soul may feel itself wandering through the beings of the cosmos, becoming akin to one of them, then leaving it again and becoming akin to another, in the way I have described it in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World, in the part dealing with experiences that are always attended by painful privations, painful loneliness as they are passed through one by one. Then comes the experience of the most radical transformation of all, when the soul must decide to undergo what can be expressed with the words: Now you must lose yourself for a while, you must thrust yourself away from yourself; but you must have faith that while you are losing yourself, while you are thrusting yourself away from yourself, beings reposing in the wide expanses of the divine hierarchies will protect you, will cause you to find yourself again after you have lost yourself. This is the passage through births and deaths. This is to be undergone among the inner experiences which lead to initiation.

At last comes the awful passage through all the forces which are not necessary for life on earth, but which are necessary for the life of the extra-terrestrial cosmos and which become the forces of evil when they are brought without justification into the life of the earth by Lucifer or Ahriman. It is the dreadful passage through the forces of evil, together with all the disruptive, devouring, engulfing forces they represent throughout the cosmos. And finally man passes through a stage when he ought to feel himself to be only an instrument, a tool through which the spiritual beings speak; he becomes symbolically what his larynx is as a single organ, he becomes the larynx of the divine spiritual beings, he feels himself to be resting in the all-powerful divine world. And then at last a condition will be reached in the future in which this feeling emerges into sharing the experience of the divine will, working in the cosmos itself.

Only single stages have been described here. But the grades of experience through which the soul passes are infinite. In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved? and, more descriptively, in The Threshold of the Spiritual World, you will find set forth as far as is necessary for the present time, how the soul is able to adjust itself to all these states and how, at each stage, it advances one step further into the spiritual world. All that the soul passes through on the path to initiation is consciously undergone and consciously experienced.

This is why this path of knowledge is so beset with pain and yet so full of liberation. But long, long before the human being enters consciously into all that I have described to you as the stages of the path to initiation, he is able to express these experiences in his own way in pictures, and this is done through music! In the last analysis genuine music is essentially a process of life taking its course in tones, which is an external picture of what the soul experiences consciously in initiation.

If he remains in the everyday sphere, the human being cannot at once accomplish what we described yesterday as the submerging of the ego in the astral body. To submerge the ego in the astral body in the right way is to enter into the divine world, and this is the passage through initiation. A picture of this is given to us in the processes we perceive in musical compositions. When he surrenders himself to musical creativity, either as the composer or the listener, the human being abandons his ego, he pushes it back; but at the same time he surrenders it to those divine spiritual powers who are to work upon his astral body when he has ascended to existence on Jupiter.

Please observe how we are entering upon a consideration of the creative art of music which links us with the future of mankind. It is almost, one feels, lacking in modesty to say that musical creativity is called upon to perfect itself more and more in the world, to become continually more profound, and that the musical creativity that has entered into our world so far is still more or less at the experimental stage, even though so much greatness and so much genius has already been involved. So far we have made attempts at what will be infinitely more meaningful in the musical creativity of the future. And this musical art of the future will be most significantly stimulated when human beings begin to engage in learning to know the inner nature of the path of initiation.

When one day what can be described concerning the path of initiation will no longer be experienced by human beings as it is today, but will be experienced in such a way that the description of what the soul must feel will cause human beings to go through bliss and bitter disappointment; when the knowledge that can be gained by reading about the path of initiation has become a complete inner experience: only then will it be possible for human souls to be so deeply moved through their participation in the destinies of all those beings who take part in the events of the cosmos outside the human realm, that they will feel within themselves the shocks, privations and liberation that will impel the soul to express in tonal relationships what is experienced through the description of the path of initiation.

In time to come there will be individuals who will feel what is described as the path of initiation; they will feel that things which are put before us in such an apparently abstract way can be intensely experienced, much more intensely than is the case with our outward physical experience. Then a moment will come when those who are able to experience the truth of what is described as the path of initiation will say to themselves: Now I feel that what I am experiencing does not connect me with the realm of nature that surrounds me on the earth but with all that lives and weaves in the cosmos; not only can I experience all this, but I am able to sing it, to set it to music!

In what can thus be described we have an indication of what spiritual science is to become for human beings. Spiritual science must be a living stimulus for the human soul; it should be more than mere theory, mere understanding, mere knowledge. Spiritual science must live in the soul, taking hold of all its powers, transforming the human being into another being. Or vice versa, the human being must transform himself into another being when he becomes devoted to spiritual science.

In ancient times, even in the case of the Greeks who were Sun men, an atavistic clairsentience led men to abandon their astral and their ego beings completely and only to express the laws of the physical human form created during the Saturn and Sun evolutions. Thus Greek statues were made, those works of sculpture that really stand before our physical eyes as the mankind of the Sun evolution must stand before our spiritual eyes, when we understand that the human being of that period consisted only of the physical human body which contained within it the living etheric forces but not as yet the astral.

Indeed, a work of Greek art such as the Venus of Milo stands before us as the personification of absolute chastity, since unchastity is only possible in the astral body, in all that permeates the astral body as passion and desire. Unchastity is not yet possible in the etheric body. It was a heritage from the gods bestowed upon men which caused them to create such works of art. The human being has lost this ability to feel himself within the etheric and physical bodies alone, without the ego or the astral body.

When he awakes and submerges his ego and his astral body into his etheric and physical bodies, he feels and experiences only what is present in his ego. Even the processes in the astral body are in the subconscious realm, and he has no inner knowledge at all of what takes place in the etheric and physical bodies. The ancient Greeks were still dimly aware of all this. But today, when we seek to bring spiritual knowledge to life once more within ourselves and cause it to embrace not only our abstract and theoretical thoughts but also the whole of our soul life, we gradually penetrate the different members of our being and learn to know what permeates our astral and etheric bodies in rhythmical and harmonious cycles. Then we become able to follow with the soul the etheric forces which pulsate through the body and through space, calling forth forms out of the etheric.

An attempt of this kind was made in the creation of the columns and architraves in our Goetheanum building; it was a diving down into the spheres made accessible to us by spiritual science which have been forgotten by mankind. In this we must indeed take deeply seriously what spiritual science can mean to us. You can glean from all that has so far been said about spiritual science that when we enter consciously into the spiritual world (and one must enter the spiritual world consciously), in other words when with understanding we give form to what lives in the etheric world and in the human etheric body and wish to enjoy what we have thus formed, then we must inevitably make the acquaintance of those beings which are called the luciferic and ahrimanic spirits.

Now consider how much of what we create today has an ahrimanic character. You will remember¹ what I have said with regard to our modern technical environment; and of course we cannot do otherwise than use modern technical methods in our work. If we wished to do without them we would produce the equivalent of hothouse plants. So it afforded me a certain satisfaction that we were able to use concrete, one of the most modern building materials, for part of our building here. For progress consists not in shutting oneself off, as in a hothouse, from the life around one, but in using what is offered by it. By grasping the spiritual nature of the world through spiritual science, we try to use modern materials in such way that what we know through spiritual science finds a living expression in them.

Of course this is only possible up to a certain point, and you will understand why this is so when you perceive all the implications of what has been said about the technical environment. For it is not possible to separate technical methods from ahrimanic forces, for instance, if we wish to create something in architecture or sculpture for ourselves. Thus it was a difficult task to take what of necessity had an ahrimanic nature in our building and, as it were, banish it from the building as something rendered harmless. It really was a difficult task, for we know that the ahrimanic element is inseparable from modern technology. For a while it seemed that Ahriman would easily gain the upper hand. Then we should have been compelled to incorporate into our main building all the technical equipment necessary for running it. As a result, Ahriman would have been permanently installed within the building. We had to think of a way of excluding the ahrimanic forces from the building, and the only possibility was to take the boiler house out and make it a separate unit. This has been done, as you can see for yourselves, and with great success.

It has been possible to create, in the most modern building material, forms that truly express the following: Here, near the building, but outside it, stands the part that must not be included in it, though it must be present outside; and the material out of which it has been formed represents an architectural structure that is truly in keeping with spiritual-scientific knowledge.

It was of immense importance that this should be achieved, particularly as the most modern building materials were employed. For if you look more deeply into what I have written about spiritual science, taking in this case the last chapter of The Portal of Initiation, you will find expressed there the fact that Lucifer and Ahriman are at their most harmful when they are not seen, when they remain invisible. Let us suppose that somebody is tormented by ahrimanic forces; what would be the best remedy? The best remedy would be for him to have some kind of picture made of Ahriman which he could place in his room. The best remedy against an astral being which torments one, is to place it before oneself in a physical form. It is incorrect to suppose that if we have Ahriman before us we will be persecuted by him; the contrary is true. Things must be made visible. But we must not let the matter get on our nerves; we must not develop a condition in which, if we happen to pass by the picture of Ahriman and look at it unconsciously, we then carry the image within ourselves. For this image will then be invisible inside us, thus making us nervous or excited.

You will also see, if you study our ahrimanic chimney along with the whole boiler house, how it is indeed possible to make an architectural structure of what belongs, one might say, to the most blatant elements of ahrimanic civilisation in our time. Certain defects of this civilisation will not vanish until mankind resolves to give architectural form to the things that concern the ahrimanic elements of our civilisation. Apart from all else, apart from our having a building for our own purposes, it is simply important that the first step should be taken in relating our present culture to art and in relating spiritual science to our present culture. Our boiler house is a first small step in this direction, and will lead, it is hoped, to the solution of other problems later. One enormous problem, for instance, would be to find a suitable form for the modern railway station; for the horrors and abominations which perform that function today are a contradiction of all decent human requirements. In its entire form our boiler house is not only suited to its specific purpose but also corresponds to the whole relationship of Ahriman to our building; in the same way the form of a railway station must correspond to what happens through it, with it, and in it within the framework of our modern civilisation.

Such things as these should indicate the way in which spiritual science can provide inspiration for artistic creativity and for many other fields. And we may rest assured, if we enter into the true sense and spirit of what is to develop for us out of spiritual science, that one day, when human beings immerse themselves in the nature of the Saturn condition, then the deeper laws of architecture will reveal themselves; and if people immerse themselves in the nature of the Sun condition, the the deeper laws of sculpture will reveal themselves; and if they immerse themselves in the nature of the Moon condition, then the deeper relationships between form and colour and the nature of chiaroscuro will become apparent, creating inspiration for the art of painting.

And from the description of the path of initiation will spring inspirations and intuitions for the creation of music and yet further for the creation of poetry. Then the time will come when poetic creativity in the true sense of the word will reappear in the world. For poetic creativity has to a certain extent died away. The ‘divine dreams’ incorporated in the work of the true poets were the last vestiges of the ancient heritage from the gods. But a time must come when, out of an understanding of the mysteries of initiation, poets will speak in dramatic or epic or lyric poetry about those intimate processes which take place in the soul when the human being is not alone with himself, but lives together with the gods of the higher hierarchies. In the not too distant future people will be saying: Stop bothering me with your perpetual jingles about men's experiences in the physical world; your daily routine of love and hate and enjoyment is your own affair. It is about what they experience together with the gods when they have found their way outside earthly experience, that men will sing in their music and in their dramas, epics, and lyrical poems. For we know that all men's experiences with the extra-terrestrial world must be brought into these arts through true creativity that is not involved in everyday life.

We have now seen what impulses of transformation lie in the knowledge brought to us by spiritual science, even in the field of artistic appreciation. And we have now seen how, if we enter into spiritual-scientific knowledge, we can dimly perceive the forces which must reign over the spiritual culture of future humanity. Indeed, we may believe that without achieving a profound inner transformation nobody can really make contact with spiritual science; and we may believe that spiritual science is something which can grasp man in a deeply inward way, leading beyond the narrow connections of physical life alone. If we bear in mind this ideal of spiritual science, if we bear in mind that spiritual science can lead out into a sphere that is different from ordinary experience, then it is always an event of immense significance to see somebody within the spiritual-scientific movement, really igniting within himself the spark that leads him out of and beyond the narrow limits of ordinary personal experience. In a way, the only joyful experience which is so far made possible for us through the spiritual-scientific movement is, that as a result of this movement, individuals can appear among us who really find their way out of their personal sphere into those spheres where the personal element ceases to exist.

In our everyday life we must, of course, cultivate the personal element; but in so far as we are together as students of spiritual science, all personal willing and feeling is changed into something impersonal if we take hold of spiritual science in the right way. And every victory over personal feelings and over the weight of personal feelings and over the weight of personal matters in life is of immense significance and value. But on the other hand it is one of the bitterest disappointments if something that is striven for in spiritual science with a will that is purely spiritual, becomes entangled again in the merely personal will and purpose of human beings, and if personal matters begin to play a role within a society whose object it is to unite us in striving for spiritual-scientific knowledge.

I shall not elaborate on these concluding remarks or go into more detail because I believe that there are a good many among you who will perhaps understand much of what is meant by them, who will understand that they were intended as an indication of a number of things that are satisfactory and a number that are disappointing. Today, having tried for a while to walk together along a path of spiritual science, it is good to think about these things for a moment; for there are various reasons why we should reflect and ask ourselves to what extent our own soul is participating in the sincere and honest effort to achieve the spiritual purposes which are nourished by the current of spiritual science. What a superb perspective unfolds before us when we say: Life, science, religion, and also art can receive impulses of transformation from spiritual science when it is truly understood. In the case of the pictorial and plastic arts the impulses come from what we learn in spiritual spheres about the past; and in the case of the arts involving music and speech the impulses come from that which we are striving for inwardly, in order to be able to approach the future. This perspective is so immense and so powerful that we cannot bring enough realisation to bear on it, in order to make it more intensely clear to ourselves. And the more we succeed in making clear to ourselves the inner mood resulting from this vision, the better we shall be as true members of that great organism known to us as spiritual science, an organism which is small today, but which has within it great possibilities. With this today I not only want to appeal to your reason and your understanding, but I also want to sow it as a seed in your souls and in your hearts.

• 1. see lecture ‘Technology and Art’, p. 5 et seq. of this volume.

The musical element

When speaking of the arts, Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) emphasizes that the musical element increasingly belongs to the future of humanity.¹ In the following words he points to the mission of music:

Fundamentally speaking, music is the human being, and indeed it is from music that we rightly learn how to free ourselves from matter. For if music were to become materialistic, it would actually be false: it is not ‘there’! Every other form of matter is present in the world and is insistent. But musical sounds are not to be found in the material world in their original form. We have to devise a means of producing them; they must first be made. The soul element that lives in the human being lies between the notes. But today, because the world has become so unmusical, people are scarcely aware of it.²

This passage also witnesses to Steiner's own particular mission at the beginning of the twentieth century: to sow seeds in the cultural life which could enable humanity to find its way from estrangement to cooperation with the world of spirit. This concept is of immense practical importance in a century which has allowed the forces of technology and finance to encroach into the realm rightly belonging to the free human spirit. About the time of these lectures, Steiner was responding to requests from many professional quarters for advice which would provide creative stimuli. Lecture courses were given to experts seeking renewal in their particular fields: science, medicine, agriculture, religion, the arts, education and therapeutic education. ‘The development of anthroposophical activity into the realm of art resulted out of the nature of anthroposophy.’ The art of eurythmy, however, occupies a unique position as the newly-born daughter of anthroposophy itself.³

For Steiner, it is not only music; all the arts are to become more musical. Steiner is concerned with living, creative activity. He communicated this vision most succinctly in a far-reaching lecture in Torquay. (See Note 1) Like J. M. Hauer (1883–1959), whose theoretical writings were known to him, Steiner uses the Greek Melos (‘tune’) for pure pitch (Melodie—‘melody’, of course, includes rhythm and beat. See also Steiner's own lecture notes, p. 10). Both Hauer and Steiner use Melos to indicate the actual creative principle in music. ‘Melos is the musical element,’ Steiner claims (Lecture 4). In this translation I have retained Melos where it is employed.

In speech, Melos only ‘peeps through’. But it ‘poured into’ oriental architecture, which ‘really did transpose music into movement’. ‘Oriental architecture has within it a great deal of eurythmy,’ we read in Lecture 5. The word ‘rhythm’ comes from the Greek rhuthmos (measured motion, time rhythm), from rhe-ein (to flow). The word ‘eurhythmy’ is an architectural term: ‘beautiful proportion, hence beautiful, harmonious movement’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Laurens van der Post mentions the ‘eurhythmic grace’ of certain beautiful animal movements in his African writings. ‘Eurythmy’ and Melos, accordingly, have existed and do still exist both in nature and in human culture. Both worlds unite in the art of eurythmy, which cultivates Melos, and was brought to birth through Rudolf Steiner. (Otto Fränkl-Lundborg claims the spelling of ‘eurythmy’ without the ‘h’ is philologically correct; rho as suffix loses its aspirate. See Das Goetheanum, 49. Jg., Nr. 30, 26.7.70, p. 246).

Steiner, like Hauer, uses the expression das Musikalische (‘the musical’) more often than die Musik (‘music’), and in this way emphasizes the inner activity before the technicalities of the craft come into consideration. This is a supremely important detail. In English we have to extend this to phrases like ‘the musical element’, or ‘the realm of music’, which may be clumsy, but they are accurate. What Steiner has in mind and continuously refers to is the musical essence. This is not only the concern of musicians but it is the underlying creative, transforming force of life itself, present in all vital human expression. Moreover, it bears a direct relationship to the path of mankind's inner development. This development can be prepared and assisted by the inner activity of individuals on the path of initiation, which is described by Steiner as a process of development through God's grace, involving Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition (spiritual vision, inner hearing and a higher life).⁴

Long, long before the human being enters consciously into the stages of initiation, he is able to express these individual experiences in images, and this is done through music! In the last analysis genuine music is essentially a developing drama of life taking its course in musical sounds, which are an external picture of what the soul consciously experiences in the life of initiation.⁵

We may sense that Steiner channelled his own musicality into his work as a teacher of humanity, and this he confirmed more than once:

It gave me particular pleasure to be told one day by one of our artistically-gifted friends that some of the lecture cycles I have given could be transcribed into symphonies purely on the basis of their inner structure. Some of the courses are indeed based in their structure on something very like this. Take for instance the lecture course given in Vienna on life between death and a new birth: you will see that you could make a symphony of it.⁶

The art of eurythmy has been given to us as a gift from the future. Its evolution depends upon each individual eurythmist, musician and speaker developing an inner listening with his or her artistic feeling. This must be developed, not in an ecstatic way, but as a spiritual path the individual undertakes while within the body. This inner activity, Steiner insists (in answer to Hauer), can be revealed in art by raising sensory experience.⁷ The present lecture course may prove to be the best companion on such a path, which is akin to the practising of a musician. This is a demanding exercise, but however small the progress, it forms the substance of true art, and can be offered as nourishment to a world in need.⁸

One of the questions today concerns recorded sound (see Appendix 6). After following the arguments concerning recordings, it can be refreshing to return to the present course of lectures. Though modestly described as ‘only a beginning’, Steiner begins where many of the great musicians of his time, and the ensuing decades, leave off.⁹

Music's turning point

Steiner characterizes music as the art which ‘contains the laws of our ego’.¹⁰ If we could consciously dive down into our astral body, the musician in us, we could perceive the cosmic music that has formed us: ‘... with the help of the astral body, the cosmos is playing our own being ... The ancients felt that earthly music could only be a mirroring of the heavenly music which began with the creation of mankind.’ Modern humanity has been led into the muddy, materialistic swamp of darkness and desire, which obscures this music. But there is a path of purification leading to perception of the music of the spheres once again. When we hear a symphony we dive with soul and spirit into the will, which is usually asleep in daytime consciousness. Art—‘even the nature of major and minor melodies’ - can bring life to the connection between man and cosmos (in other words, anthroposophy); to what might appear as dead form. Steiner warns ‘that these things are not a skeleton of ideas!’ hinting that his Theosophy was written musically, not schematically.

The present lectures on eurythmy represent Steiner's greatest contribution to musical studies. When he gave them in 1924, he advised the eurythmists to study Hauer's theoretical writings. Hauer was a musician who discovered atonal melody, or twelve-note music, at the same time (or even just before) as Schönberg did by a different route. Both composers endeavoured to get beyond the materialistic swamp through spiritual striving.¹¹ By 1924 Hauer had published his own attempt at a Goethean theory of music,¹² and his Deutung des Melos (Interpretation of Melos, questions to the artists and thinkers of our time) includes an appreciation of Goethe's Theory of Colour.¹³ In these eurythmy lectures, Steiner appears to agree with Hauer's diagnosis of the modern situation as ‘noise’; Wagner's music, for example, is ‘unmusical music’, though it has its justification. Steiner seems to agree with Hauer's spiritual principle of Melos, ‘the actual musical element’ (to Hauer ‘movement itself’, or the ‘TAO’, the interpretation of which is ‘the only true spiritual science’). He reproduces Hauer's correspondence of vowels and intervals, writing in his notebook Hauer's list of examples (Notebook, p. 10), and he retells the story of the Arab listening to a contrapuntal piece, who asks for it to be played ‘one tune at a time’. But Steiner certainly does not agree with Hauer's answer to the challenge of materialism. ‘Those who deride materialism are bad artists, bad scientists,’ Steiner declares.¹⁴ Instead of criticism, he offers help.

In his profound study on Bach, Erich Schwebsch suggests that eurythmy arrived just at the right time in the evolution of mankind.¹⁵ His justification of music eurythmy is unlikely to be supplanted. With the founding of music eurythmy, a new beginning opens up for the art of music too. This thought was also expressed by the musician and eurythmist Ralph Kux.¹⁶ It remains for me to draw attention to the counter-phenomenon accompanying this new beginning.

The counter-tendency, so strongly marked in Hauer's thought and life, artificially separates itself from the human roots of music. Steiner's answer to Hauer's dissatisfaction with western culture was to give a further impetus to music eurythmy (already born but still in its infancy) by tracing the origin of music back to the human being. Through a conscious ‘turning inside out’ within the organism, at the point of departure in the collar-bone, the cosmic music that formed us (flowing in between the shoulder-blades) is released and made available for artistic ends.¹⁷ Music today, he implies, is not a purely spiritual, meditative affair, leading (as later in Hauer's career) a reclusive life. The music of the spheres sought along the old paths ‘out there’ in the cosmos leads to an abstract caricature today. The living connection is to be found on earth, in the human being.¹⁸ Steiner was in all things concerned with living, creative activity. The arts are the means whereby inner activity and experience become outer expression: ‘to present the soul and spirit in fullest concentration ... is basically the highest ideal of all art.’¹⁹ The arts remind us of the meaning in our earthly destiny. Steiner's meditative verse, written for Marie Steiner at Christmas 1922, begins: ‘The stars once spake to man’—but what leads to the future is ‘what man speaks to the stars’.²⁰

Albert Steffen expresses it clearly: there is a splitting of the way ‘concerning the life or death of music as such ... The whole of humanity stands before this alternative. There is no way back. Every individual has to go through it or come to grief.’²¹ In one of his most inspired articles, H. Pfrogner (a musicologist and authority on twentieth-century developments) characterizes the one path of experience as the way of ‘universal concord’, and the other as ‘ego concord’.²² The former path leads to universal spirituality, to a dissolving of the self. The latter path leads to a maturing of the self. Pfrogner accociates the former spirituality with the impulse emanating from the conspiracy of Gondishapur (seventh century AD - further details can be found in Ruland).²³ which echoes on in Islamic culture; the maturing spirituality he associates with the Christian west. All inclination to ‘dissolve the ego’, whose new richness of content was brought by Christ, spiritually subscribes to Arabism, whereas all steps toward strengthened responsibility follow the latter path. But this latter path leads to an extension of the diatonic system, ‘that resounding image of the human being pure and simple’ (Pfrogner).

The path to overcome materialism, further elucidated by Pfrogner,²⁴ will not be reached by avoiding the swamp of man's egotism and hastily ‘reaching for the stars’ (the arrangement of twelve) to the exclusion of the diatonic system (based on the number seven). Lurking in such a counter-reaction to romanticism (which, like Viennese classicism, arose in the age of materialism as a protest) is an implied denial of the Christ-event. ‘Christ Jesus inaugurated an evolution in human nature, based on the retention of the ego's full consciousness. He inaugurated the initiation of the ego,’ Steiner explains.²⁵ ‘With Christ,’ F. Rittelmeyer reminds us in his last book, ‘the whole orientation of humanity is changed. And from now on we no longer look back with longing to the past, to a "golden age" of the primal beginning, but look forward toward fulfilment, creating the future ...’²⁶ There is a path through the swamp which has been trodden by composers such as Bartok, Hindemith, Messiaen, Martinu, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, Britten, Tippett, Hartmann, Henze, Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Pärt and many others (following in their own ways the example of the modern ‘Prometheus’, Beethoven).²⁷

Musical art of the future

On more than one occasion, Steiner, speaking of the future of music, pointed to ‘finding a melody in the single note’.²⁸ In the eurythmy lectures he points out that this does not mean listening to the acoustic ‘chord of overtones’ in a single note—on which Hauer and Hindemith base their theoretical work. It is a supersensible experience. One of the climaxes of the investigations of Pfrogner and H. Ruland (one of the former's successors), is the working out of Steiner's hints of a development of our tonal system.²⁹

Here mention should be made of two other pioneers in musical studies whose work is acknowledged by Ruland in his Expanding Tonal Awareness. Ernst Bindel developed the relationship between mathematics and music.³⁰ (Without some mathematics there can be no responsible step towards a musical future.) The other pioneer is H. E. Lauer,³¹ whose account of the evolution of tonal systems has subsequently been considerably developed by Ruland.

We conclude with a suggestion regarding ‘artistic longing’, made by Steiner some months before the lectures translated here:

‘If someone feels that here on earth he does not fulfil what lies in his archetype, with its abode in the heavens, there arises in him an artistic longing for some outer image of that archetype. Whereupon he can gain the power to become an instrument for expressing the true relation of man to the world by becoming a eurythmist. The eurythmist says: All the movements which I ordinarily carry out here on earth do less than justice to the mobile archetype of man. To present the ideal human archetype I must begin by finding a way to unite with its movements.’ These movements, through which the human being endeavours to imitate in space the movements of his heavenly archetype, constitute eurythmy.³²

Steiner wrote in his Notebook (see p. 131 below) for the present eurythmy course:

In the musical element the spatial human being is transformed into the non-spatial human being—the spiritual human being is the inner origin of the musical element.

Artistic people often think more naturally in evocative images, rather than with philosophical or technical concepts about ‘the spiritual human being’ or ‘the heavenly archetype’. And ultimately the inner life cannot express itself other than in images. Artistic readers looking for direction to surmount materialism may be able to grasp the necessity for decisive action more directly in the form of a picture. It may be appropriate to recall a passage from one of Selma Lagerlöf's novels to show the precision of Steiner's statement. An image of the Christ-child is kept in a basilica run by Franciscan monks. An Englishwoman plans to steal this image and replace it with a cheap imitation.

When the copy was ready she took a needle and scratched into the crown: ‘My kingdom is only of this world.’ It was as if she was afraid that she herself would not be able to distinguish one image from the other. And it was as if she wished to appease her own conscience. ‘I have not wished to make a false Christ-image. I have written in his crown: “My kingdom is only of this world”.’³³

Stourbridge, Michaelmas 1993
Alan Stott

• 1. R. Steiner, True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigation, GA243, (RSP 1975). An accurate translation of the section on music (last part of the final lecture of 24.8.22) appears in Lea van der Pals, op. cit., p. 71ff. Compare: ‘The basic mood of the new world-conception [since the Mystery of Golgotha] is musical, whereas the basic mood of the old world was sculptural. The basic mood of the new age is really musical, and the world will become ever more musical. In order to continue rightly on the path of human evolution, we must know the importance of striving towards a musical element and not repeating the old sculptural one’ (R. Steiner, Der Baum des Lebens and der Baum der Erkenntnis des Guten and Bosen [‘The tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil’], lecture Dornach 31.7.15, GA162 [translation A. S.]; see also Appendix 4, ‘R. Steiner, Torquay, 22.8.24’, in Vol. 2).
• 2. R. Steiner, Eurythmy as Visible Singing, GA278, Lecture 3.
• 3. The name ‘anthroposophy’ (‘wisdom of the human being’) is not used in any of Steiner's basic books. It appeared before the world for the first time one year after the founding of the Anthroposophical Society (1913), in the final chapter of R. Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy [original edition 1914, English translation AP 1973], ‘A brief outline of an approach to anthroposophy’. In this chapter, reference is made to the author's Truth and Science (1882), The Philosphy of Freedom (1894), and the lecture ‘The psychological foundations and epistemological position of spiritual science’, delivered before the Philosophical Congress, Bologna, 18.4.11.
  
  ‘Eurythmy has grown out of the soil of the anthroposophical movement, [originating] like a gift of destiny’ (R. Steiner, ‘Eurythmy, what it is and how it originated’, lecture Penmaenmawr 26.8.23 in Eurythmy as Visible Song [London and New York 1932], p. 1). ‘The artistic element will be an elixir of life of the anthroposophical movement’ (R. Steiner, introduction to a eurythmy performance on the occasion of the founding of the General Anthroposophical Society, Dornach 5.1.24, in GA277, p. 423). See also R. Steiner, Das Goetheanum in seinen zehn Jahren’ (‘The Goetheanum, ten years in retrospect’), essay of 14.1.24 in GA36, and Tb635 p. 131. For a detailed account, see R. Steiner, Die Entstehung and Entwicklung der Eurythmie (‘The origin and development of eurythmy’, translation in progress) GA277a (Dornach 1965), and R. Steiner, Eurythmie—die Offenbarung der Sprechende Seele (‘Eurythmy—revelation of the speaking soul’) GA277 (Dornach 1972), a collection of introductions to performances, and so on; a paperback mainly consisting of selections is published: Eurythmie, Tb642 (Dornach 1986). Some introductions are translated in R. Steiner, Eurythmy, an Introduction (AP 1984); the lecture 14.2.20 is translated in The Inner Nature of Music, op. cit.
• 4. Rational thinking is not jettisoned in favour of ‘mysticism’ or something else. The spiritual activity within thinking itself can be strengthened for investigating and creating within the realm of the spirit. The spiritual activity of pure thinking, the higher union of science and religion demonstrated by Steiner, was prophesied, for example, by Emerson: ‘No man ever prayed heartily without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation’ (R. W. Emerson, tract on ‘Nature’, Chapter VIII, [1836]. See also a recent study on Emerson, Richard G. Geldard, The Esoteric Emerson [The Lindisfarne Press, West Stockbridge, Mass., 1993]).
• 5. R. Steiner, Art as seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom, GA275, Lecture 30.12.14 (RSP 1984).
• 6. R. Steiner, Practical Advice to Teachers (RSP 1976), GA294. The lecture course referred to is R. Steiner, The Inner Nature of Man and the Life Between Death and a New Birth, Vienna 9-14.4.14, GA153 (RSP 1959). Steiner aimed at a marriage of form and content in his work, which is the lofty artistic ideal. After the Christmas Foundation of 1923/4, he reached a new level in this respect. In connection with the subject matter of GA153, compare: ‘Contrary to the works of architects, sculptors and painters, musical works must be repeatedly generated anew; they flow onwards in the surge and swell of their melodies, a picture of the soul, which in its incarnations always has to experience itself afresh in the progressive stream of time. The soul flows down from its spiritual homeland and returns thither—likewise its shadow-images: notes and harmonies. Hence the intimate effect of music on the soul’ (R. Steiner, lecture Berlin 12.11.06, The Inner Nature of Music [AP 1983]).
  
  Steiner confirmed that: ‘For anyone who would read my Occult Science as today one would read a novel or any other book, passively giving oneself to it, it is really only a thicket of words—and so are my other books. It is only someone who knows in every moment of reading that he must create out of his own soul's depths, and through his most intimate will—which the books should stimulate—only this person is able to regard these books as musical scores from which he can experience the true music. This active experience of the individual soul, moreover, is what we need’ (R. Steiner, Heilfaktoren fir den sozialen Organismus, lecture Dornach 2.7.20, GA198). See also R. Steiner, The Gospel of St John, Lecture XI, Hamburg 30.5.08, GA103 (RSP 1978); GA278, Lecture 6, Endnote 39 in Vol. 2.
  
  The implications for the musician are discussed by Erich Schwebsch in his pioneer study on anthroposophy and music. He concludes: ‘The cosmology of Occult Science contains in its thoughts the best exercises for a meditative musician who is searching for new forms today’ (E. Schwebsch, J. S. Bach and Die Kunst der Fuge [Stuttgart 1988], Chapter 4 ‘Musik als Offenbarung des Geistes. Aphoristische Betrachtungen’, p. 193 [J. S. Bach and ‘The Art of Fugue’; translation of Chapter 4 in manuscript, ‘Music as revelation of the spirit. Aphoristic observations’]).
• 7. In his first lecture, before the Goethe Society, Vienna 1888, Steiner said: ‘Beauty is not the divine in a cloak of physical reality; no, it is physical reality in a cloak that is divine. The artist does not bring the divine on to the earth by letting it flow into the world; he raises the world into the sphere of the divine’ (R. Steiner, Goethe as Founder ofa new Science of Aesthetics [Rudolf Steiner Pub., Co., London c.1927]). Steiner claims that this lecture, already in 1888, contains ‘a sound foundation for anthroposophy and the anthroposophical way of thinking’ (Preface to the second edition, 1919). The lecture suggests an acid test for what is truly new. Movements exist today which bear the adjective ‘spiritual’ but do not attempt any transformation. Indeed, it is often stated that ‘no musical knowledge is necessary’! Is not the call for courage against despondency and inadequacy met right here with every individual?
• 8. See Schwebsch, Endnote 6. Pfrogner, in the chapter ‘und was nun? (‘and what now?’) in his extensive study on The living world of music’, presents a clear vision of tasks for the future: ‘No longer l'art pour l'art, but simply and solely: l’art pour l’homme will be the saying of the hour. This “art for human beings”, however, will have to be an art totally “from human beings”, an art in the above-mentioned sense “raised” from the human being, if it should be true “nourishment for life” ’ (H. Pfrogner, Lebendige Tonwelt [Langen Müller, München/Wien 1981], p. 474, trans. A.S.).
• 9. For example: Bruno Walter, Theme and Variations (Hamish Hamilton, London 1947), and On Music and Music-Making (Faber, London 1957); W. Furtwängler, Concerning Music (Boosey and Hawkes, London 1953); Artur Schnabel, My Life and Music (C. Smythe, New York and Gerrards Cross 1988), and Music and the Line of Most Resistance (Princeton 1942); Edwin Fischer, Reflections on Music (Williams & Norgate, London 1951); R. Vaughan Williams, National Music and other Essays (OUP 1987); J. Ma. Corredor, Conversations with Casals (Duddon, New York 1956).
• 10. R. Steiner, Art as seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom, lecture 29.12.24, GA275 (RSP 1984).
• 11. For the best introduction to this perspective, see H. Pfrogner Zwölfordnung der Töne (Zürich/Leipzig/Wien 1953), reprinted in H. Pfrogner, Zeitwende der Musik (Langen Müller, München/Wien 1986), translation in manuscript, ‘Music's turning point of time’.
• 12. J. M. Hauer, Vom Wesen des Musikalischen (1920, later editions Robert Lienau, Berlin-Lichterfelde), translation in progress, ‘The essence of music’.
• 13. J. M. Hauer, Deutung des Melos (Tal & Co. Verlag, Leipzig/Wien/Zürich 1923), translation in manuscript ‘The interpretation of Melds’.
• 14. R. Steiner, The Arts and Their Mission, lecture Oslo, 18.5.23, GA276 (AP 1964), p. 111.
• 15. Schwebsch presented his eloquent conclusion already in 1930: ‘But all inner experience of the soul when it is ripe to that end, wishes to become visible, perceptible. The soul world desires to become objective. The first beginning for this becoming visible of vitally filled musical movement, from the All rising up behind the Nothing [an echo from Goethe's Faust, Part 2, 6256. Translator's note.] of the vanishing past, at the exact nadir of time, is the art of music eurythmy: visible singing, newly created by Rudolf Steiner’ (E. Schwebsch, op. cit., p. 211). Chapter 4 is more than the title suggests. It is an anthroposophical musician's ‘credo’, which applies to Steffen's essay (see Endnote 21 below), too.
• 16. R. Kux and W. Kux, Erinnerungen an Rudolf Steiner and R. Kux, Eurythmie and Musik (Mellinger Verlag, Stuttgart 1976), translation in manuscript ‘Recollections of R. Steiner, and eurythmy and music’.
• 17. See R. Steiner, The Essentials of Education, lecture 10.4.24 a.m. (RSP 1982), p. 58. The physiology is explained in A. Husemann, The Harmony of the Human Body (Floris Books, Edinburgh 1994; German edition, Der musikalische Bau des Menschen [Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart 1989]). Note, for example, with what careful scholarship Dr Husemann explores what ‘beim Aufireten’ (‘by stepping’, or ‘with the first step’) from Lecture 7 must mean (Section 31, p. 189ff.). See also Endnote 43 on Ansatz, in Vol. 2.
• 18. Compare Steiner: ‘Since the Mystery of Golgotha we cannot speak of the music of the spheres as did Pythagoras, but we can speak of it in another way. An initiate might even today speak as Pythagoras did, but the ordinary inhabitant of the earth in his physical body can speak of the music of the spheres and of the cosmic life only when he experiences in his soul, "Not I, but Christ in me", for the Christ within him has lived in the music of the spheres and in the cosmic life. But we must go through this experience in ourselves; we really must receive Christ into our souls’ (R. Steiner, lecture Norrköping, 16.7.14, in Christ and the Human Soul GA155 [RSP 1984], pp. 69-70). The harmony of the spheres is heard ‘in deep sleep’ by the initiate ‘as if they were the notes of trumpets and the rolling of thunder’ (R. Steiner, An Esoteric Cosmology GA93a [St George Publications, Spring Valley, New York 1978], lecture Paris 30.5.1906, reported by E. Schure, p. 45. Steiner's proclamation of Christ rests on knowledge. By the turn of the century, he could say: ‘The unfolding of my soul rested upon the fact that I had stood in spirit before the Mystery of Golgotha in most inward, most earnest solemnity of knowledge’ (R. Steiner, The Course of my Life [New York, 1951], closing sentence of Chapter XXVI, p. 276). ‘Spiritual science is concerned not merely to talk about the Christ, but to declare what the Christ wishes to say to people in our time, through the medium of human thoughts.’ R. Steiner, lecture Zürich 4.2.19., in The Inner Aspect of the Social Question GA193, (RSP 1950), p. 16.
  
  Steiner indicates what amounts to 84 (= 7 x 12) meditations for musicians: ‘You have in the fixed stars a wonderful cosmic instrument, and the players of this instrument of the zodiac and fixed stars are the gods of the planets beyond’ (lecture Dornach, 2.12.22, in The Inner Nature of Music GA283 [AP 1983], pp. 42-3); see also R. Steiner, The Gospel of St Matthew (especially lectures Berne, 3,4, 10 and 12.10.10), GAl23 (RSP 1965); R. Steiner, Universe, Earth and Man, lecture Stuttgart 12.8.08 [RSP 1987], p. 118ff. See also Appendices 3 and 5 in Vol. 2.
• 19. R. Steiner, GA277, op. cit., p. 320.
• 20. R. Steiner, Verses and Meditations (RSP 1961), pp. 96-97 In this connection, compare Beckh's definition of ‘cosmic’: ‘the revelation of the spirit within the earthly realm’ (H. Beckh, Die Sprache der Tonart [Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1977], p. 20, English translation ‘The language of tonality’, in manuscript).
• 21. Albert Steffen, ‘Musik’ in Der Künstler and die Erfiillung der Mysterien (Dornach 1964), translation in the British Newsletter, forthcoming. An artist could base his life on this astonishing essay. 21
• 22. H. Pfrogner, Chapter 17 in Zeitwende..., op. cit.
• 23. Compare: ‘Absolute objectivity ultimately demands the sacrifice of the personality’ (Hauer, Vom Wesen des Musikalischen [Leipzig/Wien 1922], p. 40), with: ‘When the human being became a personality, God also had to become a personality in order to save him, to give him the possibility of rising again’ (R. Steiner, Egyptian Myths and Mysteries [AP 1971], p. 139). Another twentieth- century scientist, comparing his life to that of Goethe's, declared that his goal was ‘to penetrate into the secret of the personality’; the ‘central concept’ of his psychology is ‘the principle of individuation’ (C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections [Fontana, London 1967], pp. 232 and 235, italics original). Sir Julian Huxley summarizes Teilhard de Chardin, the scientist-seer: ‘persons are individuals who transcend their merely organic individuality in conscious participation’ (Introduction to Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man [Collins 1959/Fontana 1965], p. 20/21). A vague pantheism is avoided: ‘Union differentiates’, and ‘the more "other" [grains of consciousness] become in conjunction, the more they find themselves as "self" as they make for the ‘Omega point’ of evolution (op. cit., p. 261/288). See Endnote 20 in Vol. 2.
• 24. See H. Pfrogner, Zeitwende..., op. cit., and Lebendige Tonwelt, op. cit., for informed views on musical development right up to the twentieth century.
• 25. R. Steiner, The Gospel of St Matthew, lecture Berne 9.10.10 (RSP 1965). Steiner explains the meaning of the atonement: ‘The One sufferred for all, so that through the world-historic initiation a substitute has been created for the old form of initiation ... Through inner vision, through true mysticism, community with Christ is possible’ (R. Steiner, Foundations of Esotericism, lecture Berlin, 27.9.05 [RSP 1983], p. 14)
• 26. F. Rittelmeyer, Christus (Urachhaus, Stuttgart 1936), p. 38 (translation in MS). Rittelmeyer's mature relationship to John's Gospel, with its hidden music, informs his major works. For Rittelmeyer on music, see A. Stott: ‘Friedrich Rittelmeyer and the "Song of the earth's perfecting"’ in The Threshing Floor, May/June 1988 (Floris Books, Edinburgh). Another study on the Christ- Impulse is C. E. Raven, Jesus and the Gospel of Love (Hodder & Stoughton, London 1931/49), see especially Chapter XV, ‘Christ in the Twentieth Century’.
• 27. The following reference to Beethoven's entelechy is the only one that has come to my notice: ‘I was deeply impressed when a while ago I heard from a famous musician that in a personal conversation Rudolf Steiner said "Beethoven is Prometheus"’ (E. Kolisko, ‘Beethoven’, from a series of articles under the title ‘Reincarnation’ in The Modern Mystic, September 1938).
• 28. See Endnote 17 in Vol. 2.
• 29. See H. Ruland, Expanding Tonal Awareness (RSP 1992).
• 30. Ernst Bindel, Die Zahlgrundlagen der Musik im Wandel der Zeiten (Stuttgart 1985); translation in progress ‘The numerical basis of music in its development’.
• 31. H. E. Lauer, ‘The Evolution of Music through Changes in Tone-Systems’ in Cosmic Music, edited by J. Godwin (Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont 1989). Lauer also wrote Musik and Musiker (Selbstverlag, undated).
• 32. R. Steiner, The Arts and Their Mission, lecture Dornach 27.5.23, GA276 (AP 1964).
• 33. Selma Lagerlöf, The Miracles of Antichrist (Gay & Bird, London 1899), p. 14.

Rudolf Steiner's lecture at the Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society

Those who portray the spiritual life of Germany from the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century usually see, alongside the high point of art in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Mozart, Beethoven and others, only an epoch of purely speculative thinking in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and a few less important philosophers. It is frequently held that the latter personalities are to be recognized as mere laborers in the field of thought. It is admitted that they have done extraordinary work in the speculative field; but one is all too easily inclined to say that these thinkers were quite far removed from actual occult research and real spiritual experience. And so it happens that the theosophically striving person expects little gain from delving into their works.

Many who attempt to penetrate the thought-web of these philosophers give up the work after a time because they find it fruitless. The scientific investigator says to himself: These thinkers have lost the firm ground of experience under their feet; they have built up in the nebulous heights the chimeras of systems, without any regard for positive reality. And anyone interested in occultism will find that they lack the truly spiritual foundations. He comes to the conclusion: They knew nothing of spiritual experiences, of supersensible facts, and merely devised intellectual constructs.

As long as one stops at merely observing the outer side of spiritual development, it is not easy to come to a different opinion. But if one penetrates to the undercurrents, the whole epoch presents itself in a different light. The apparent airy-fairy notions can be recognized as the expression of a deeper occult life. And Theosophy can then provide the key to understanding what these sixty to seventy years of spiritual life mean in the development of mankind. During this time in Germany, there are two sets of facts, one of which represents the surface, but the other must be regarded as a deeper foundation. The whole thing gives the impression of a flowing stream, on the surface of which the waves ripple in the most diverse ways. And what is presented in the usual [literary histories] are only these rising and falling waves; but what lives in the depths is left unconsidered, and from which the waves actually draw their nourishment.

This depth contains a rich and fertile occult life. And this is none other than that which once pulsated in the works of the great German mystics, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius. Like a hidden power, this life was contained in the worlds of thought that Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel found. The way in which, for example, Jakob Böhme had expressed his great spiritual experiences was no longer at the forefront of the leading literary discussion; but the spirit of these experiences continued to live. One can see how this spirit lived on in Herder, for example. Public discussion led both Herder and Goethe to the study of Spinoza. In the work that he called “God”, the former sought to deepen the conception of God in Spinozism. What he contributed to Spinozism was nothing other than the spirit of German mysticism. One could say that, unconsciously to himself, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius were guiding his pen. It is also from such hidden sources that we can explain how, in the “Education of the Human Race”, the ideas of reincarnation emerged in a mind as rationally inclined as Lessing's was. The term “unconscious” is, however, only half accurate, because such ideas and intuitions led a full life within Germany, not on the surface of literary discussion, but in the most diverse “occult societies” and “fraternities”. But of the above, only Goethe can be considered as having been initiated into the most intimate life of such “fraternities”; the others had only a more superficial connection with them. Much of it found its way into their lives and work as inspiration, without them being fully aware of the real sources.

In this respect, Schiller represents an interesting phenomenon of intellectual development. We cannot understand the real intellectual nerve of his life if we do not delve into his youthful works, which can be found in his writings as “Correspondence between Julius and Raphael”. Some of the material contained in it was written by Schiller while he was still at the Karls School in Stuttgart, while some of it was only written in 1785 and 1786. It contains what Schiller calls the “Theosophy of Julius,” by which he means the sum of ideas to which he had risen at that time. It is only necessary to cite the most important thoughts from this “theosophy” to characterize the way in which this genius assembled his own edifice of ideas from the rudiments of German mysticism that were accessible to him. Such essential thoughts are, for example, the following: “The universe is a thought of God. After this [idealized] image of the spirit entered into reality and the born world fulfilled the plan of its creator – allow me this human representation – so the task of all thinking beings in this existing whole is to find the first drawing again, the rule in the machine, the unity in the composition, the law in the phenomenon and to transfer the building backwards to its ground plan... The great composition that we call the world now only remains strange to me because it exists to symbolically describe the [manifold] expressions of that [being]. Everything in me and outside of me is only a hieroglyph of a force that is similar to me. The laws of nature are the ciphers that the thinking being combines to make itself understandable to the thinking being – the alphabet by means of which all spirits negotiate with the most perfect spirit and with themselves... A new experience in this [realm of truth], gravity, the discovery of blood circulation, Linnaeus's system of nature classification: these things seem to me to be, in their very origin, what an antique, unearthed in Herculaneum, reveals to me – both mere reflections of a spirit, a new acquaintance with a being similar to myself. [...] There is no longer any wilderness in all of nature for me. Where I discover a body, I suspect a spirit. Where I perceive movement, I guess a thought... We have concepts of the wisdom of the supreme being, of his benevolence, of his justice – but none of his omnipotence. To express its omnipotence, we help ourselves with the piecemeal idea of three successions: nothing, its will [and] something. It is desolate and dark – God calls: light – and there is light. If we had a real idea of its active omnipotence, we would be creators, like Him.” Such were the ideas of Schiller's theosophy when he was in his early twenties. And from this basis he rises to the comprehension of human spiritual life itself, which he places in the context of cosmic forces: “Love, then, the most beautiful phenomenon in the creation of the soul, the almighty magnet in the spiritual world, the source of devotion and the loftiest virtue. Love is only the reflection of this one primal power, an attraction of the excellent, based on an instantaneous exchange of personality, a confusion of beings. When I hate, I take something away from myself; when I love, I become richer by what I love. Forgiveness is the recovery of a lost possession; hatred of men is a prolonged suicide; egotism is the greatest poverty of a created being.” From this starting-point Schiller seeks to find an idea of God corresponding to his own feeling, which he presents in the following sentences: ”All perfections in the universe are united in God. God and nature are two entities that are completely equal to each other... There is one truth that runs like a fixed axis through all religions and systems: Approach the God you mean.

If one compares these statements of the young Schiller with the teachings of the German mystics, one will find that in the latter, there are sharply defined contours of thought, which in Schiller's works appear as the exuberant outpourings of a more general world of feeling. Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme, Angelus Silesius have as a certain view of their intuitive mind what Schiller has in mind in the vague presentiment of feeling.

What comes to light in such a characteristic way in Schiller is also present in other of his contemporaries. Intellectual history only has to present it in the case of Schiller because it has become a driving force of the nation in his epoch-making works. It can be said that in Schiller's time, the spiritual world of German mysticism as intuition, as direct experience of spiritual life, was hidden as if under a veil; but it lived on in the world of feeling, in the intuitions. People had retained devotion and enthusiasm for that which they no longer saw directly with the “sense organs of the spirit”. We are dealing with an epoch of veiling of spiritual vision, but of a kind that is based on feeling, on an intuitive sense of this world.

This entire process is based on a certain law-governed necessity. What entered the hidden world as spiritual insight emerged as artistic life in this period of German spiritual life. In occultism, one speaks of successive cycles of involution and evolution. Here we are dealing with such a cycle on a small scale. The art of Germany in the epoch of Schiller and Goethe is nothing more than the evolution of German mysticism in the realm of outer, sensual form. But in the creations of the German poets, the deeper insight recognizes the intuitions of the great mystical age of Germany. The mystical life of the past now takes on a completely aesthetic, artistic character.

This is clearly expressed in the writing in which Schiller reached the full height of his world view, in his [letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”]. The dogmatist of occultism will perhaps find nothing in these “letters” either but the spirited speculations of a fine artistic mind. In reality, however, they are dominated by the endeavour to give instructions for a different state of consciousness than the ordinary one. A stage on the way to the “higher self” is to be described. The state of consciousness Schiller describes is indeed far removed from the life of experience of the astral or devachanic, but it does represent something higher than our everyday life. And if we approach it with an open mind, we can very well recognize in what can be called the 'aesthetic state', according to Schiller, a preliminary stage of those higher forms of intuition. Schiller wants to lead man beyond the standpoint of the 'lower self'. This lower self is characterized by two qualities. Firstly, it is necessarily dependent on the influences of the sensual world. Secondly, it is subject to the demands of logical and moral necessity. It is thus unfree in two directions. The sensual world rules in its drives, instincts, perceptions, passions, and so on. In his thinking and in his morality, the necessity of reason prevails. But only the person who has ennobled his feelings, drives, desires, wishes, etc., so that only the spiritual is expressed in them, and who, on the other hand, has so completely absorbed the necessity of reason within himself that it is the expression of his own being, is free in the sense of Schiller. A life led in this way can also be described as one in which a harmonious balance has been established between the “lower and higher self”. Man has so ennobled his desire nature that it is the embodiment of his “higher self”. Schiller sets this high ideal in these “Letters”; and he finds that in artistic creation and in pure aesthetic devotion to a work of art, an approach to this ideal takes place. Thus, for him, life in art becomes a genuine means of educating the human being in the development of his “higher self”. For him, the true work of art is a perfect harmony of spirit and sensuality, of higher life and outer form. The sensual is only a means of expression; but the spiritual only becomes a work of art when it has found its expression entirely in the sensual. Thus, the creative artist lives in the spirit; but he lives in it in a completely sensual way; through him, everything spiritual becomes perceptible through the senses. And the person who immerses himself aesthetically perceives through his external senses; but what he perceives is completely spiritualized sensuality. So one is dealing with a harmony between spirit and sensuality; the sensual appears ennobled by the spirit; the spiritual has come to revelation to the point of sensual vividness. Schiller would also like to make this “aesthetic state” the model for social coexistence. He regards as unfree a social relationship in which people base their mutual relationships only on the desires of the lower self, of egoism. But a state in which mere legislation of reason is called upon to rein in the lower instincts and passions also seems no less unfree to him. As an ideal, he presents a social constitution within which the individual feels the “higher self” of the whole to be so strong that he acts “selflessly” out of his innermost urge. The “individual ego” should come to the point where it becomes the expression of the “total ego”. Schiller perceives social action that is driven by such impulses as the action of “beautiful souls”; and such “beautiful souls”, which bring the spirit of the “higher self” to revelation in their everyday nature: for Schiller, they are also the truly “free souls”. He wants to lead humanity to “truth” through beauty and art. One of his core statements is: “Only through the dawn of the beautiful does man penetrate into the realm of knowledge.”

Thus, from Schiller's view of the world, art is assigned a high educational mission in the evolutionary process of humanity. One can say: What Schiller presents here is the mysticism of the older period of German intellectual life that has become aesthetic and artistic.

It might now appear that it is not easy to build a bridge from Schiller's aestheticism to another personality of the same time, but who is no less to be understood as coming from an occult undercurrent, to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. On superficial examination, Fichte will be seen as a mere speculative mind, as an intellectual thinker. Now it is true that thought is his domain and that anyone seeking spiritual heights above the world of thought will not find them with Fichte. Those who want a description of “higher worlds” will look for them in vain with him. Fichte has no experience of an astral or mental world. According to the content of his philosophy, he is concerned only with ideas that belong to the physical world. But the matter presents itself quite differently when one looks at his treatment of the world of thoughts. This treatment is by no means a merely speculative one. Rather, it is one that corresponds completely to occult experience. Fichte considers only thoughts that relate to the physical world; but he considers them as an occultist would. It is for this reason that he himself is thoroughly conscious of living in higher worlds. We have only to refer to his lectures in Berlin in 1813, where he says: “Imagine a world of the blind-born, who know only those things and their relations that exist through the sense of touch. Stand among them and speak to them of colors and the other qualities that are only present through light for those who can see. Either you speak to them of nothing, and that is fortunate if they say so; for in this way you will soon notice the error and, if you are unable to open their eyes, stop the futile talking. Or they want to give your teaching a reason for some reason: so they can only understand it from what they know through touch: they will want to feel the light and the colors and the other relationships of visibility, feel that they are feeling, and lie to themselves about something they call color. Then they misunderstand, distort, and misinterpret it.” At another time, Fichte states directly that for him his contemplation of the world is not merely a speculation about that which the ordinary senses give, but that a higher sense, one that reaches beyond them, is necessary for it: ”The new sense is is the sense for the spirit; for which there is only spirit and absolutely nothing else, and to which even the other, the given existence, takes on the form of the spirit and is transformed into it, to which therefore existence in its own form has in fact disappeared... It has been seen with this sense ever since man has existed, and all that is great and excellent in the world, and which alone makes humanity endure, comes from the visions of this sense. But that this sense should have seen itself, and in its difference and contrast to the other ordinary sense, was not the case. The impressions of the two senses merged, life disintegrated into these two halves without a unifying bond.” These last words are extremely characteristic of Fichte's place in the world of intellectual life. It is indeed true of the merely external (exoteric) philosophical striving of the West that the sense of which Fichte speaks “did not see itself”. In all mystical currents of intellectual life that are based on occult experience and esoteric contemplation, it is clearly mentioned; but its deeper basis was, as has already been explained, unknown in Fichte's time for the prevailing literary and scholarly discussion. For the means of expression of German philosophy at that time, Fichte was indeed the scout and discoverer of this higher meaning. That is why he took something quite different as the starting point of his thinking than other philosophers. As a teacher, he demanded of his students, and as a writer, of his readers, that they should, above all, perform an inner act of the soul. He did not want to impart knowledge of anything outside themselves, but rather he called on them to perform an inner action. And through this inner action they should ignite the true light of self-awareness within themselves. Like most philosophers of his time, he started from Kant's philosophy. Therefore, he expressed himself in the form of Kant's terminology, just as Schiller did in his mature years. But in terms of the height of inner, spiritual life, he surpassed Kant's philosophy very far, just like Schiller. If one attempts to translate Fichte's demands on his readers and listeners from the difficult philosophical language into a more popular form, it might go something like this. Every thing and every fact perceived by a person imposes its existence on that person. It is there without any action on the part of the person, at least as far as their innermost being is concerned. The table, the flower, the dog, a luminous apparition and so on are there through something foreign to man; and it is only for him to establish the existence that has come about without him. For Fichte, the situation is different for the “I” of man. The “I” is only there to the extent that it attains being through its own activity. Therefore, the sentence “I am” means something completely different than any other sentence. Fichte demanded that one become aware of this self-creation as the starting point for any spiritual contemplation of the world. In every other realization, man can only be receptive; in the “I” he must be the creator. And he can only perceive his “I” by looking at himself as the creator of this “I”. Thus Fichte demands a completely different way of looking at the “I” than at all other things. And he is as strict as possible in this demand. He says, “Most people would be more easily persuaded to consider themselves a piece of lava in the moon than an ego... Anyone who is not yet at peace with himself on this point does not understand fundamental philosophy, and does not need it. Nature, of which he is a machine, will guide him in all his affairs without any effort on his part.” To philosophize requires independence: and this one can only give oneself. We should not want to see without an eye; [but should] also not claim that the eye sees.

This very sharply defines the boundary where ordinary experience ends and the occult begins. Ordinary perception and experience extend as far as the human being's objective perception organs are built in. Occultism begins where man begins to build higher organs of perception for himself through the dormant powers within him. Within ordinary experience, man can only feel like a creature. When he begins to feel like the creator of his being, he enters the realm of so-called occult life. The way Fichte characterizes the “I am” is entirely in line with occultism. Even if he remains in the realm of pure thought, his contemplation is not mere speculation, but true inner experience. But for this very reason, it is also so easy to confuse his world view with mere speculation. Those who are driven by curiosity into the higher worlds will not find what they are looking for by delving into Fichte's philosophy. But for those who want to work on themselves, to discover the abilities slumbering in their souls, Fichte can be a good guide. He will realize that what matters is not the content of his teachings or dogmas, but the power that grows in the soul when one devotedly follows Fichte's lines of thought. One would compare this thinker to the prophet who did not enter the promised land himself, but led his people to a summit from which they could see its glories. Fichte leads thought to the summit from which entry into the land of occultism can be made. And the preparation that one acquires through him is as pure as can be imagined. For it completely transcends the realm of sense perception and the realm of that which originates from the nature of human desire and covetousness (from the human being's astral body). Through Fichte, one learns to live and move in the very pure element of thought. One retains nothing of the physical world in the soul except what has been implanted from higher regions, namely thoughts. And these form a better bridge to spiritual experiences than the training of other psychic abilities. For thought is the same everywhere, whether it occurs in the physical, astral or mental world. Only its content is different in each of these worlds. And the supersensible worlds remain hidden from man only as long as he cannot completely remove sensual content from his thoughts. If the thought becomes free of sensuality, then only one step remains to be taken and the supersensible world can be entered.

The contemplation of one's own self in Fichte's sense is so significant because, in relation to this “self”, man remains without any thought content at all if he does not give himself such a content from within. For all the rest of the world's content, for all perception, feeling, will and so on, which make up the content of ordinary existence, the outer world fills man. He needs - according to Fichte's words - basically nothing but the “machine of nature”, which “manages its business without his intervention”. But the “I” remains empty, no outside world fills it with content, if it does not come from within. The realization “I am” can therefore never be anything other than the human being's most intimate inner experience. So there is something speaking in this sentence within the soul that can only speak from within. But this apparently quite empty affirmation of one's own self is how all higher occult experiences take place. They become more meaningful and full of life, but they retain the same form. Through the ego experience as presented by Fichte, one can get to know the type of all occult experiences, initially in the purely intellectual realm. It is therefore correct to say that with the “I am” God begins to speak in man. And just because this happens in a purely mental form, so many people do not want to recognize it.

Now, however, a limit to knowledge had to be reached precisely by the keenest minds that followed in the footsteps of Fichte. Pure thinking is namely only an activity of the personality, not of the individuality, which passes through the various personalities in recurring reincarnations. The laws of even the highest logic never change, even if in the stages of re-embodiments the human individuality ascends to the stage of the highest sage. The spiritual perception increases, the perceptive faculty expands when an individuality that was highly developed in one incarnation is re-embodied, but the logic of thought remains the same even for a higher level of consciousness. Therefore, that which goes beyond the individual incarnation can never be grasped by any thought-experience, no matter how refined, even if it rises to the highest levels. This is the reason why Fichte's way of looking at things, and also that of his contemporaries who followed in his footsteps, could not bring them to a realization of the laws of reincarnation and karma. Although various indications can be found in the works of the thinkers of this epoch, they arise more out of a general feeling than out of a necessary organic connection with their thought-structures. It may be said that the mission of these personalities in the history of thought was to present pure thought experiences as they can take place within an incarnation, excluding everything that reaches beyond this one embodiment of the human being.

The evolution of the human spirit proceeds in such a way that in certain epochs portions of the esoteric original wisdom are transferred into the consciousness of the people. And at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century it fell to the German national consciousness to shape the spiritual life of pure thought in its relation to the individual personal existence. If we consider what has already been said in connection with Schiller's personality, that art at this time was to be brought to the center of spiritual life, then we will find the emphasis on the personal point of view all the more understandable. Art is, after all, the living out of the spirit in sensual-physical forms. But the perception of these forms is conditioned by the organization of the individual personality living within the one incarnation. What extends beyond the personality into the supersensible realm will no longer be able to find immediate expression in art. Art does cast its reflection into the supersensible realm, but this reflection is only carried over as the fruit of artistic creation and experience by the abiding essence of the soul from one reincarnation to another. That which enters into existence directly as art and aesthetic experience is bound to the personality.

Therefore, in the case of a personality of the marked epoch, a theosophical world view in the most eminent sense also has a thoroughly personal character. This is the case with Friedrich von Hardenberg, who as a poet bears the name Novalis. He was born in 1772 and died as early as 1801. What lived in this soul, which was entirely imbued with a theosophical attitude, is present in some of his poetry and in a series of poetic-philosophical fragments. This attitude flows from every page of his creations to the reader; but everything is so that the highest spirituality is coupled with an immediate sensual passion, with very personal drives and instincts. A truly Pythagorean way of thinking lives in this young man's nature, which was further nourished by the fact that Novalis worked his way up to become a mining engineer by undergoing thorough mathematical and scientific training. The way in which the human mind develops the laws of pure mathematics out of itself, without the help of any kind of sensory perception, became for him the model for all supersensible knowledge in general. Just as the world is harmoniously structured according to the mathematical laws that the soul finds within itself, so he thought this could be applied to all the ideas underlying the world. That is why man's relationship to mathematics took on an almost devotional, religious character for him. Sayings such as the following reveal the peculiarly Pythagorean nature of his disposition: “True mathematics is the actual element of the magician... The highest life is mathematics... The true mathematician is an enthusiast per se. Without enthusiasm, there is no mathematics. The life of the gods is mathematics. All divine messengers must be mathematicians. Pure mathematics is religion. One can only attain mathematics through a theophany. Mathematicians are the only happy people. The mathematician knows everything. He could do it even if he didn't know it. ... In the East, true mathematics is at home. In Europe, it has degenerated into mere technique. He who does not grasp a mathematical book with devotion and read it like the word of God does not understand it. ... Miracles, as unnatural facts, are amathematical, but there is no miracle in this sense, and what is called that is precisely understandable through mathematics, because there is nothing miraculous about mathematics."

In such sayings, Novalis has in mind not merely a glorification of the science of numbers and spatial dimensions, but the realization that all inner soul experiences should relate to the cosmos as the purely sensual-free mathematical construction of the mind relates to the outer numerical and spatially ordered harmony of the world. This is beautifully expressed when he says: “Mankind is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this limb with the upper world, the eye that looks up to heaven.” The identity of the human ego with the fundamental essence of the objective world is the leitmotif in all of Novalis's work. Among his “Fragments” is the saying: “Among people, one must seek God. In human affairs, in human thoughts and feelings, the spirit of heaven reveals itself most brightly.” And he expresses the unity of the ‘higher self’ in all of humanity in the following way: ”In the I, in the point of freedom, we are all in fact completely identical – only from there does each individual separate. I is the absolute total place, the central point.” At Noyalis, Noyalis's position is particularly evident, which was dictated by his awareness of art and artistic feeling at the time. For him, art is something through which man rises above his narrowly defined “lower self” and connects with the creative forces of the world. In the creative artistic imagination, he sees a reflection of the magical forces at work. Thus he can say: “The artist stands on man as the statue stands on the pedestal.” “Nature will be moral when, out of true love for art, it surrenders to art and does what art wills; art, when, out of true love for nature, it lives for nature and works after nature. Both must do it at the same time, out of their own choice for their own sake and out of the other's choice for the sake of the other.... When our intelligence and our world are in harmony, then we are equal to God.” Novalis's lyrical poems, especially his ‘Hymns to the Night,’ are imbued with such sentiments, as are his unfinished novel ‘Heinrich von Ofterdingen’ and the little work ‘The Apprentices at Sais,’ which is rooted entirely in mystical thinking and feeling.

These few personalities show how German poetry and thought in that period were based on a theosophical-mystical undercurrent. The examples could be multiplied by numerous others. Therefore, it is not even possible to attempt to give a complete picture here, but only to characterize the basic note of this spiritual epoch with a few lines. It is not difficult to see that individual mystical and theosophical natures with a spiritual and intuitive mind found the theosophical basic ideas in their own way. Thus, theosophy shines out beautifully from the creations of some personalities of this epoch. Many could be cited where this is the case. Lorenz Oken could be mentioned, who founded a natural philosophy that on the one hand points back to Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme through its mystical spirit; on the other hand, through ingenious conceptions about evolution and the connection of living beings, it is a forerunner of the justified parts of Darwinism. Steffens could be cited, who sought reflections of a cosmic spiritual life in the processes of earth development; Eckartshausen (1752–1803) could be referred to, who sought to explain the abnormal phenomena of nature and soul life in a theosophical-mystical way ; Ennemoser (1787–1854) with his “History of Magic”, Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert with his works on dream phenomena and the hidden facts in nature; and the brilliant works of Justinus Kerner and Karl Gustav Carus are rooted in the same school of thought. Schelling moved more and more from pure Fichteanism to theosophy, and then, in his “Philosophy of Mythology” and “Philosophy of Revelation”, which were not published until after his death, traced the developmental history of the human spirit and the connection between religions back to their starting point in the mysteries. Hegel's philosophy should also be viewed in theosophical light, and then one would see how wrong the history of philosophy is in regarding this profound spiritual experience of the soul as mere speculation. All this would require a detailed work if it were to be treated exhaustively. Here, however, only a little-known personality is to be mentioned, who, in the focus of his mind, combined the rays of theosophical world-view and created a structure of ideas that in many respects completely coincides with the thoughts of theosophy that are being revived today. It is I. P. V. Troxler, who lived from 1780 to 1866 and whose works, in particular, the “Blicke in das Wesen des Menschen” (Glimpses into the essence of man), published in 1812, come into consideration. Troxler objects to the usual division of human nature into soul and body, which he finds misleading because it does not exhaust nature. He initially differentiates between four parts of the human being: spirit, higher soul, soul (which he considers the lower soul) and body. One need only see this classification in the right light to recognize how close it is to the one commonly found in theosophical books today. The body in his sense coincides completely with what is now called the physical body. The lower soul, or what he, in contrast to the body, calls the body, is nothing other than the so-called astral body. This is not just something that has been inserted into his world of thought, but he himself says that what is subjectively the lower soul should be characterized objectively by falling back on the term used by the ancient researchers, the astral body. “There is therefore,” he explains, ”necessarily something in man which the sages of ancient times foresaw and proclaimed as a σῶμα αστροιδες (Soma astroeides) [and ομραγιον σῶμα (Uranion soma)], or as a σχημα πνευματιχον ([scheme] pneumatikon) [sensed] and proclaimed, and what is the substrate of the middle sphere of life, the bond of immortal and mortal life.” Among the poets and philosophers who were Troxler's contemporaries, theosophy was alive as an undercurrent; but Troxler himself became keenly aware of this theosophy in the intellectual world around him and developed it in an original way. Thus, he himself comes upon much of what is found in the ancient wisdom teachings. It is all the more appealing to delve into his thought processes, since he does not directly build on old traditions, but rather creates something like an original theosophy out of the thinking and attitudes of his time.

Have you perhaps noticed something, gentlemen?

Mr. Dollinger: I wanted to ask about the fate of human beings. Millions of people died in the great world war. Did they bring this with them into the world as their fate? What does it look like in the spiritual world in connection with world development?

Dr. Steiner: We can also talk about this in connection with other things, because it is absolutely necessary that one does not simply explain things in anthroposophy as people sometimes do. What is said must be scientific. Now, with this in mind, I would like to tell you something that will help us to understand how the great catastrophe, this terrible world misery of so many people, could have been possible at all. Nowadays, people no longer pay attention to how one person is actually connected to another. It is the case that today all people actually stand isolated in the world. Even if, out of habit or some lingering superstition, you know and observe the things I have told you about in the last lesson, you usually explain them wrongly.

Now I want to tell you a simple story that can show you how today no one even considers the fact that one person is connected to another in any way. Once upon a time, the following occurred, which is well documented, like a scientific fact. In one family, a younger family member, an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl, was ill, not so ill that she was bedridden, but she had to lie down again and again. Now, for a while, her mother was with her, taking care of her. She was lying on the sofa, so her mother was caring for her. When she had almost fallen asleep, her mother went into another room and read something out of a book to her husband and other family members. It was in a room quite a distance from the one where the sick woman was lying.

The sick woman now had the following realization. When her mother had gone out the door, she suddenly had the urge to get up. She got up and followed her mother through two rooms into the third room, where she found her reading. She was extremely surprised that they were not at all surprised. The sick woman, who could hardly walk and had just been left asleep, now appeared in the room where the mother only wanted to be for a while because she also wanted to take care of the others. She was a bit strangely touched by the fact that they remained completely calm. Now the mother, who was reading, suddenly said: “But now I have to see what is wrong with my daughter!” — and went out of the room. But the daughter followed. The mother went through these two rooms again and found the daughter lying on the sofa, but terribly pale. She did not speak to her at first. But then, when she spoke to her, the daughter did not answer, she was very pale. So the daughter had always followed her mother and now she saw her mother walking along and she, the daughter, saw herself lying on the sofa. And the daughter was again very surprised about it, first that she saw herself lying on the sofa, secondly that the mother was addressing her. At that moment it is as if the daughter receives a terrible blow, and what is lying on the sofa becomes of a slightly better complexion, and the matter is back to the old one.

This is a well-established story; the event actually took place. But now all kinds of people are coming who want to explain it. Yes, they then explain it as follows, for example: Well, this daughter also has an astral body in addition to her physical body. People talked about the astral body until the 16th century, that is, until four hundred years ago, just as we talk about the nose or the ear. But that is not something that has been preserved to this day; it has been generally forgotten. So those people can talk about the astral body and can say: Well, the astral body went out, walked around the rooms, experienced what the others were reading and so on, went back in and slipped in at the moment the mother addressed the girl.

But, gentlemen, you must realize that when you explain it this way, you explain it as if there were a second physical person inside you, as if there were a circle around you, and as if you could slip out of it and go for a walk like a physical person. It is a strong superstition to explain it in this way. This superstition is very common among learned people today, otherwise things like those of Oliver Lodge, which I have told you, would not happen. It always depends on knowing what really happened there.

Now, what really happened is as follows. The mother is sitting with her daughter and caring for her. Right, something is taking place that is called loving care, and the daughter is very, very comfortable being cared for by her mother. She feels her mother's love. At such a moment, gentlemen, when one feels the love of the other so strongly and is also very weak, the strange thing happens that one no longer thinks with one's own astral body. It becomes dull and the astral body of the other person gains power over one's own astral body. Then it even happens that one begins to think with the thoughts of the other person who is next to one. Now it so happened that while the mother was still caring for the daughter, this feeling that developed was transferred to the daughter in such a way that the daughter felt and thought exactly like her mother. Now the mother is leaving. Just as a ball that I push then rolls away, so the daughter now thinks not with her own thoughts, but with the thoughts of the mother. And while the mother goes through the two rooms, the daughter always thinks with the thoughts of the mother. And while the mother reads aloud, the daughter thinks with the thoughts of the mother.

So the daughter naturally remains lying quietly on the sofa, but she is constantly thinking with her mother's thoughts. And when the mother then becomes restless, going back again, the daughter thinks, she also goes back. And now you need not be surprised that the daughter has turned pale. Because just consider: if you lie as if in a deep swoon for a while, you will also turn pale. Because something like that naturally causes a faint-like state when you think with the thoughts of the other person. And when the mother returns, it has the effect on the daughter that she is shaken and can have her own thoughts again. So you see, the correct explanation in this case is that a person has an extraordinarily strong effect on the other, especially in his spiritual part. But this occurs especially when the person upon whom the effect is being exerted is himself very weak. If he cannot develop strength of soul himself, then the strength of soul of the other person can very easily have an influence on him.

But that is how it is in life in general. Often we do not even think about the great influence people have on each other. Do you think that when someone tells you something and you believe it, that you always have reasons, reasonable reasons, that convince you? That is not true at all. If you like someone, you believe them more than you believe someone you hate. The story is that the soul of one person has an extremely strong influence on the soul of another person. So you have to say to yourself: I have to know how strongly one person influences another. I have to know exactly how things are with spiritual things if I want to talk about them at all.

I will now give you another example, which I am telling you about for a specific reason. Because someone could say: Yes, Dr. Steiner does not believe at all that a person can step out of themselves, he only believes that one person can influence another. — No, I just gave you an example where you could see very clearly how one person influenced another, here the mother influenced the daughter.

Now another example where there can be no question of one person having been influenced. Two students live together in a room. That happens to students all the time. One is a math student, the other is a philology student and understands nothing about math, understands nothing about math at all. But now, one evening, they are working away furiously, as they say in student slang, one with his Latin grammar, the other with his arithmetic problem that he wants to solve and just can't figure out. He can't do anything. The one with the language is doing reasonably well and goes to bed quite satisfied. But the math student doesn't go to bed satisfied, because he hasn't mastered his task. With languages, you usually don't know whether you have mastered something or not. At most, you make mistakes, but you think they are right. In mathematics, however, if you haven't mastered anything, nothing comes of it. That's the difference. Well, they go to bed; so at around half past twelve or twelve o'clock, the two go to bed.

When it is about three o'clock, the math student — the language student has looked at the clock — gets up, sits down at his desk again and starts calculating, calculating, calculating. The language student is extremely surprised, but he has enough presence of mind to wait quietly and see what happens. The other calculates, calculates, then gets up from his chair again, lies down in bed and continues sleeping.

At eight o'clock the next morning, they both get up. The math student says: Gosh, I have a real headache today, like when we had a few drinks the whole evening, and we were at home! The other one said: That doesn't surprise me! Why did you get up during the night and work? - What, I worked? That didn't even occur to me! I just laid in bed the whole night, - says the math student. “But you did get up!” says the other. ‘You picked up the pencil and did the sums, over and over!’ ‘Well,’ says the first student, ‘that's not the point!’ ‘Well, let's have a look,’ says the language student. ‘It must say what you wrote!’ The math student checks. The whole calculation was there, everything he hadn't been able to do that evening was done.

Now you see, there you have an example where there is absolutely no question that the other person did not cheat, because he would not have been able to solve the problem. He was merely a student of languages and, furthermore, he saw how everything went. So the person in question, without knowing it himself, got up and solved the whole calculation. So there is no question of any kind of influence from someone else. The person in question actually got up during the night.

But now, when you explain this, something very strange comes out. You see, as you know, we first have our physical body, then the etheric body, the astral body and the ego body. I call everything a “body”; of course they are not external bodies, but I call these four parts of the human being “bodies”. Now, gentlemen, when we sleep, only our physical body and etheric body are in bed; the astral body and the ego body are outside. We see them around the physical body and etheric body. I have already explained all this to you. This is what happened to the math student. He goes to bed. He can sleep well, so he brings his astral body and his ego body out, but he is still disturbed by the fact that he has not solved his arithmetic problem. If the astral body and the ego body had now slipped into his physical body and into his ether body, then he would have woken up and would have been unable to do anything again, probably not solving the task again. But the astral body and the ego body did not do that at all; instead, the restlessness into which he fell only made him puff. The astral body can puff, it can even puff the skin a little. But that can only happen through the air, not physically, because the astral body is not physical. But it can set the air in motion. And that has a particular effect on the eyes, something on the ears, especially on the nose and mouth. Wherever there are sensory organs, this puff of the astral body has a very strong effect. So the student goes to bed, but his astral body keeps pushing from the outside, but does not enter. But because it is pushing, the physical body with the etheric body automatically feels pushed like a machine to get up. However, the astral body remains outside, because if it had been inside, the student would have become conscious. So he sits down. It does not even occur to his astral body and his ego to enter. Yes, who is doing the calculating now? Now the physical body and the etheric body are doing the calculating, and the etheric body is capable of doing the whole calculation, which it cannot do if the astral body and the ego are inside.

From this you can see, gentlemen, that you are all much cleverer in your etheric body than in your astral body and in your ego. If you could do everything you can do in your etheric body, then you would be clever chaps! Because the whole point of learning is actually to bring up what we already have in our etheric body into our astral body.

So what actually happened to the math student? You know, in the old days there were almost no teetotallers or anti-alcoholics among students, but they usually drank quite a lot. And so the two guys didn't just drink every night, they also sat in pubs a lot, and as a result — through the influence of alcohol on the blood — the astral body was ruined. The etheric body was less ruined. And the consequence of this was that the student of arithmetic would have been able to solve the problem quite well if he had gone to the pub less, but because he had so strongly influenced his astral body, he could not solve the problem while awake. He first had to get rid of the corrupted astral body; then he could sit down at the table and his ether body, which had remained cleverer, solved the arithmetic problem. So we can do with the etheric body precisely what the mind does. We cannot love with the etheric body; that has to be done by the astral body, but everything that the mind does, can be done with the etheric body. So we can say: This example shows us very clearly that there is no influence from another side, but that the student of arithmetic is only dealing with himself.

Now imagine this very clearly: we have (see diagram) the physical body, here the etheric body (yellow), which passes through the physical body. And now, to make it easier for us to see the whole person, I will draw the astral body, which is there at night, outside (red). It is very small at the top and huge at the bottom. Then the I, the ego body (violet). So that's what we're like at night. So actually we are two people at night. You don't have to imagine this as a second physical person here, but it is quite spiritual, what is out there. Otherwise you would fall back too much into materialism if you did not imagine it spiritually. But from this you can certainly have the opinion that man is actually this two-part being in himself, a spiritual-soul part and a physical part with the etheric body. The person who is awake is only through this as he is, that every morning the astral body and the I-body are properly integrated into the physical and etheric bodies (arrows).

Now you might think that this could not always happen properly. There are, in fact, some very strange cases. There was once a girl – such things always happen when they happen of their own accord, that is, when they do not happen through practice. They happen when a person becomes a little weak, for example in young girls who have just reached maturity, in the early stages of female maturity. So there was a girl of nineteen or twenty who had the following experience. She had days when she talked, but those who belonged to the family could not understand anything she said, nothing at all. She talked about completely unknown things. It was very strange. For example, she could say: Ah, good afternoon, I am very pleased that you are visiting me. We saw each other two days ago in... - ah yes, we went for a walk in the beautiful forest. There was a spring there. Then she waited. It was just like on the telephone, you couldn't hear the other person, but then you heard the answer. It was as if she was answering something: “Well, yes, you took the glass and drank.” And so it was that you always heard what the person concerned said in response to something someone else had said. Those around could not see the others. But the girl was in a completely different world and talked in it. It happened, for example, that Well, it's not true, she couldn't move, she just stayed very quiet on days like that. But when she was sitting like that and someone puffed at her, she didn't say, “Why are you puffing at me?” Instead, she said, “It's a terrible wind! Close the window, it's drawing so terribly!” She had completely different ideas about what would happen when someone puffed at her, for example. Well, she stayed like that for a day or two. Then came a few days or a longer period when she was quite calm, knew everything, spoke properly with people, knew nothing of what had happened in these other days. She remembered nothing. When people told her about it, she said she knew nothing about it. It was just as if she had been asleep. But something else occurred. When she was in this other state, she remembered everything that happened in this other state and nothing at all of what happened in her ordinary state. She could see the whole of the life she had led in what others called a dream world.

What was it with this girl? What I am telling you now happens countless times, of course, and sometimes in a gruesome way. You see, I had an acquaintance with whom I worked together for a while. He then became a professor at a German university and one day he just disappeared. Nobody knew where he had gone. All the investigations led nowhere in the end. The only thing they could find out was that he had come from his place of residence to the train station and had bought a ticket. But since a large number of people were boarding, they didn't know where he had bought his ticket. He left. He just didn't come back for a very long time. Then it happened that a stranger came into the vagabonds' shelter in Berlin, wanted to be admitted, and when he was asked for his papers, it turned out: that was Professor XY from there and there. He ended up in Berlin in a shelter for the homeless. He came back and was able to resume his professorship quite well. Isn't that right, it automatically continues; it doesn't hurt to have a little break. So he continued to do that. But his relatives – he was even married – continued to investigate what had happened in the meantime. And it was something like this: the person in question had bought a ticket to a certain station, not very far away. He had done all this very cleverly. He then got off, bought another ticket – it was not yet the time when passports were needed – and traveled to a completely different country, then to yet another country, then a completely different route – was stationed in a town in southern Germany – to Berlin, lived in a homeless shelter, was admitted there, knew absolutely nothing about it all, was in a completely different state of consciousness.

What happens to such a person? You see, with such a person it is the same as with such a girl. With such a person, when he is supposed to wake up, the astral body and the ego body do not quite come in, only push from the outside, and then the physical body and the ether body go through all that. Such people behave tremendously cleverly. This is also a well-documented story, similar to one that I myself experienced with an acquaintance.

Another story: A person first buys a train ticket, does the same with it, and travels to a station not far away. Then he has to think of all kinds of ruses; his etheric body does all this. He gets as far as India and stays there for a few years. And then, after he has forgotten everything, he lives on as before.

Yes, you see, these things are really so that one must say: there you see deep into the whole being of man. - For what happened now to the man whom I knew so well, who made his journey through two countries and ended up in the homeless shelter? He had now returned to his college, and had even been appointed to a different college to replace a famous professor. One day I happened to be in the city in question. He no longer associated with me, as indeed happened in general: during the time I was giving anthroposophical lectures, many people who had previously associated with me no longer wanted to associate with me. One day they said: Yes, Professor XY has left again. But this time he did not reappear, but was found dead. He had drowned himself. Yes, what had happened? You see, this had happened: he had again reached the same state where the astral body was just puffing him. Then he remembered the earlier events in his etheric body and was so frightened by them that he committed suicide. So you can see quite a lot about a person's nature when you know how the various parts of the human nature interact.

Now, however, the matter is as follows: there was once a person who also came into such states, and there he told the story in such a way as if he were a completely different person than he was now, so that the other people understood nothing at all. He described how he was active in the French Revolution (the story took place in the 19th century). He described entire scenes. What had happened to him? It was something like the case of those people I told you about. But what had happened to him?

In ordinary consciousness, man does not know very much about what is going on in the astral body and in the ego body, but he still experiences a great deal in them. Now, imagine the following happens. You see, I want to describe to you what happens when a person wakes up. When a person wakes up, this astral body splits first. Here (see drawing p. 112) it breaks off, and one part goes into the head, the other, the lower part, goes into the other body. This also happens sometimes. Now imagine: if the head takes up the astral body and the ego more easily than the lower part, then the astral body can be in the head earlier, but not yet in the lower part. In that case the person starts talking as if he were a completely different person. What is entering then? You see, for a moment the ability to look back into a past life enters. One learns to look back into a past life. But one cannot interpret it properly, one does not understand it, and so one invents something that one has learned in history. The one who was in a different state because his astral body and his ego came into his head earlier said that he was French and experienced the French Revolution. He had learned that, it is just a reinterpretation. But he experienced himself in a past incarnation, in a past life, and he could not understand that right away; so he interpreted it in this way.

You just have to realize that until the 16th century – so only four centuries ago – people talked about such things, even if it was rather foolish and rather vague. It was something extremely important to people. Wherever people came together – not that they told each other ghost stories, but it was the case that they took this just as seriously as the other events of life – they told each other such things and knew that they existed. It is not true that people did not know about this. Today – yes, please, gentlemen, just try it once and tell such stories as I have told you now in your party meetings, you will soon see how you are dismissed – today it is not possible to talk about these things in a natural, reasonable way. They are no longer even mentioned. And scholars talk about them least of all. I will prove to you that they know the least about it.

Now think of one of the most important scientific facts that occurred in the 19th century. A resident of Heilbronn became a doctor. And since the people at the University of Tübingen considered him to be a rather unqualified person, he could not become much, and so in 1839 he allowed himself to be recruited as a ship's doctor and went to Hinterindien with a very full ship. The ship had quite a mishap. It was a rather rough sea and the people became seasick. When they arrived in Hinterindien, almost the entire ship's crew was sick. The ship's doctor was constantly very busy. Now, in those days, if someone had this or that, the usual thing was to have his blood drawn. That was the first one.

Now, a person has two types of veins. In one vein, the blood that squirts out during bloodletting is reddish. Right next to it is another vein. When the blood squirts out of that vein, it is bluish; then bluish blood squirts out. When you bleed an ordinary human child, you don't get the red blood out, of course. The body needs that. You get the bluish blood out. The doctor knows that very well. He also knows where the blue veins run and does not prick into the red ones. So the good Dr. Julius Robert Mayer, who was a ship's doctor, had to bleed a lot. But everywhere he pricked people, the blood that came out was not a bluish color, but a light reddish color. “Gosh,” he thought to himself, “I must have missed again!” But when he did it to the next person and paid more attention, light reddish blood came out again. Finally, he can no longer help but say to himself: Well, when you come to the tropics, to the hot zone, it is not as usual, the blue blood turns reddish from the heat. — Of course, this was something that Julius Robert Mayer considered a very important discovery, and rightly so. He saw something extraordinarily important.

But now we have to make a hypothesis, an assumption. Imagine that, not in the 19th century, but in the 12th century, it had happened to someone. He had traveled somewhere with people. They didn't make such long journeys back then, but the fact that an entire crew almost perished could have happened to anyone. So let's assume that a whole crew had fallen ill at the time, the doctor had bled them and found that the blood, which should actually be blue, was reddish. So there must be some kind of heat. What would he have said? Yes, in the 12th century, he would have said: What is it that makes blood blue? And he would have said, since he knew all the things I have told you, even if only vaguely – because anthroposophy did not yet exist and things were still hazy – he would have said, because he at least had an inkling of the answer: Yes, by Jove, the astral body does not sink as deeply into the physical body as it does in those in whom the blood is completely blue! He would have known that the astral body is what makes the blood blue. But warmth keeps the astral body out. Therefore the blood becomes less blue and remains similar to the red blood. — He would have said: That is an important discovery, because now I understand why the ancient Orientals had such great wisdom. In them, the astral body has not yet penetrated so deeply into the physical and etheric bodies. He would have had enormous respect for the wisdom of the ancient Orientals and would have said to himself: Now the Orientals are only infected by people who have a lot of bluish blood, and it is no longer possible for them to bring their ancient wisdom to light. A ship's doctor from the 12th century would have said that.

A 19th-century ship's doctor knew nothing at all of what I have now told you. What did he say to himself? He said to himself: Well, there is the heat. This causes combustion. A stronger heat causes stronger combustion. So the blood burns more strongly when you are in the hot zone. - And he found the law of heat transformation in force, which plays such an important role in today's physics, a very abstract law. He was not interested in any of the others. He finds the law that plays a major role in the steam engine, for example, where heat is converted into work. And he said: I can see from the fact that red blood comes out of it that the organism in the hot zone simply works harder, therefore generates more heat. - So now Julius Robert Mayer finds something completely mechanical.

You see, that is the big difference. In the 12th century, people would have said: the blood is redder there because the astral body does not sink as deeply. In the 19th century, however, nothing was known about the spiritual, and it was simply said that the human being works like a machine, and the fact is that heat produces more work and thus more heat is transformed in the human organism. Yes, gentlemen, what Julius Robert Mayer did as a great scholar is roughly the way of thinking of all people today. That is the case. But because man can only think and feel in this way about what is no longer spiritual, he has lost touch with other people. And at most, when he becomes ill and weak like the girl I told you about, then he empathizes with other people to such an extent that he even goes with his thoughts to another room. That is, of course, a big difference! Of course, we have come an enormous way and have made great progress, but our humanity has not progressed; it has regressed. We speak of the human physical organism only as if it were a machine. And even the greatest scholars like Julius Robert Mayer speak of it only as if it were a machine.

Yes, gentlemen, if things continue like this on earth, then all thinking will become a chaos. All horrors and catastrophes would occur. Even now people no longer know what they should actually do. Therefore, they approach something with all their might and say: Yes, our reason no longer holds us together, so nationality must hold us together. These nation states arise only because people no longer know how to hold together. And that, gentlemen, that one no longer knows anything about the spiritual world, that is what has actually caused the immense misery – the other is the external appearance – that has caused the immense misery. And to say: People deserve this because they did bad things in their previous life – that is nonsense, of course, because that is not the fate of each individual, but it is the common fate of each individual. But everyone experiences it in this life. Just think of how much misery people experience in their present life. It does not come from a past life. But in the next life, they will suffer the consequences of the misery they experience now. The result of this will be that they will become wiser and that the spiritual world can enter them more easily. So the present misery is already an education for the future.

But something else can be concluded from this. Imagine that anthroposophy had already begun in 1900 and had really become very well known. But people opposed it and did not want to hear about the spiritual world. Now, gentlemen, if you had a schoolboy in the old days who didn't want to learn anything – now they have changed their minds about that; I won't say whether it's right or wrong – then you gave him a good thrashing! Some of them then started to learn after all. It helped some of them. Yes, people didn't want to learn anything spiritual until 1914. Now they have been beaten by the fate of the world, by their common destiny. Now we will see if they help.

Yes, that is indeed the case, gentlemen, you have to see this as a common human destiny! Because what has happened? You see, the girl I told you about was thinking with her mother's thoughts. People have gradually completely given up thinking for themselves and only think with the thoughts of those they have as authorities. People must start again, every single one of them, to think for themselves, otherwise they will, especially if they know nothing of the spiritual world, be continually influenced by it, but in a bad sense. And then one can say: One can really see that what has come over humanity as misery is, I would say, a beating of fate, and one can still learn from it. No matter how many congresses are held, none of it helps. The people who want to support the mark with today's intellect will cause it to fall by half, because this intellect, which is completely of the earth, is of no use, absolutely no use. When a body does not have enough fluid in it, it becomes sclerotic, calcified. And when the soul knows nothing of the spiritual world, then in the end it gets the mind, which is no longer useful. And humanity is heading for this fate if it does not continually receive nourishment from the spiritual world.

Therefore, the only real remedy is that people begin to take an interest in the spiritual world. You see, that is how you have to answer the question that Mr. Dollinger asked. You have to express things a bit radically, but that is how the connections are.

I have to go to Stuttgart next week, but I will be back very soon. I will let you know the time and date of the next lesson.

My dear Friends,

In our last lecture we were going into certain matters of principle which I will now try to explain more fully. For if we start from the experiences we can gain in the realm of light, it will also help us observe and understand other natural phenomena which we shall presently be studying. I will therefore begin today with these more theoretical reflections and put off the experimental part until tomorrow. We must determine still more exactly the method of our procedure. It is the task of Science to discern and truly to set forth the facts in the phenomena of Nature. Problems of method which this task involves can best be illustrated in the realm of Light.

Men began studying the phenomena of light in rather recent times, historically speaking. Nay, the whole way of thinking about the phenomena of Physics, presented in the schools today, reaches hardly any farther back than the 16th century. The way men thought of such phenomena before the 16th century was radically different. Today at school we get so saturated with the present way of thought that if you have been through this kind of schooling it is extremely difficult for you to find your way back to the pure facts. You must first cultivate the habit of feeling the pure facts as such; please do not take my words in a too trivial meaning. You have to learn to sense the facts, and this takes time and trouble.

I will now take my start from a particular instance wherein we may compare the way of thought prevailing in the schools today with that which can be gained by following the facts straightforwardly. Suppose this were a plate of glass, seen in cross-section (Figure VIa). Through it you look at a luminous object. As I am drawing it diagrammatically, let me represent the latter simply by a light circle. Cast your mind back to what you learned in your school days. What did they teach you of the phenomenon you see when you observe the luminous object,—with your eye, say, here—looking through the glass? You were no doubt told that rays of light proceed from the luminous object. (We are imagining the eye to be looking in this particular direction,—see the Figure). Rays, you were told, proceed from the shining object. In the direction of the “ray” I am now drawing, the light was said to penetrate from a more tenuous into a denser medium. Simply by looking through the glass and comparing what you see with what you saw before the plate of glass was there, you do indeed perceive the thing displaced. It appears at a different place than without the glass. Now this is said to be due to the light being “refracted”. This is how they are wont to put it:—When the light passes from a more tenuous into a denser medium, to find the direction in which the light will be refracted, you must draw the so-called “normal at the point of incidence”. If the light went on its way without being hindered by a denser medium, it would go on in this direction. But, they now say, the light is “refracted”—in this case, towards the normal, i.e. towards the perpendicular to the glass surface at the point of incidence. Now it goes out again,—out of the glass. (All this is said, you will remember, in tracing how the “ray of light” is seen through the denser medium.) Here then again, at the point of exit from the glass, you will have to erect the normal. If the light went straight on it would go thus: but at this second surface it is again refracted—this time, away from the normal—refracted just enough to make it go on parallel to its original direction. And now the eye, looking as it is from here, is said to produce the final direction of the ray of light and thus to project the luminous object so much the higher up. This then is what we are asked to assume, if we be looking through such a plate of glass. Here, to begin with, the light impinges on the plate, then it is twice refracted—once towards the normal, a second time away from the normal. Then, inasmuch as the eye has the inner faculty to do so (.... or is it to the soul, or to some demon that you ascribe this faculty ....) the light is somehow projected out into space. It is projected moreover to a position different from where it would appear if we were not seeing it through a refracting medium;—so they describe the process.

The following should be observed to begin with, in this connection. Say we are looking at anything at all through the same denser medium, and we now try to discriminate, however delicately, between the darker and lighter portions of what we see. Not only the lighter parts, the darker too will appear shifted upward. The entire complex we are looking at is found to be displaced. Please take this well into account. Here is a darker part bordering on a lighter. The dark is shifted upward, and since one end of it is lighter we see this shifted too. Placing before us any such complex, consisting of a darker and a lighter part, we must admit the lighter part is displaced simply as the upper boundary of the darker. Instead, they speak in such a way as to abstract the one light patch from all the rest that is there. Mostly they speak as though the light patch alone were suffering displacement. Surely this is wrong. For even if I fix my gaze on this one patch of light, it is not true that it alone is shifted upward. The part below it, which I am treating as if it were just nothing when I describe it thus, is shifted upward too. In point of fact, what is displaced in these optical phenomena can never be thus abstractly confined. If therefore I repeat Newton's experiment—I let into the room a cone of light which then gets diverted by the prism—it simply is not true that the cone of light is diverted all alone. Whatever the cone of light is bordering on—above it and below—is diverted too. I really ought never to speak of rays of light or anything of that kind, but only of luminous pictures or spaces-of-light being diverted. In a particular instance I may perhaps want to refer to some isolated light, but even then I still ought not to speak of it in such a way as to build my whole theory of the phenomenon upon it. I still ought to speak in such a way as to refer at the same time to all that borders on the light. Only if we think in this way can we begin to feel what is really going on when the phenomena of colour comes into being before our eyes. Otherwise our very habit of thought begets the impression that in some way the colours spring from the light alone. For from the very outset we have it settled in our mind that the one and only reality we are dealing with is the light. Yet, what we have before us in reality is never simply light as such; it is always something light, bordered on one side or other by darkness. And if the lighter part—the space it occupies—is shifted, the darker part is shifted too. But now, what is this “dark”? You must take the dark seriously,—take it as something real. (The errors that have crept into modern Physics since about the 16th century were only able to creep in because these things were not observed spiritually at the same time. Only the semblance, as appearing to the outer senses, was taken note of; then, to explain this outer semblance, all kinds of theoretical inventions were added to it). You certainly will not deny that when you look at light the light is sometimes more and sometimes less intense. There can be stronger light and less strong. The point is now to understand: How is this light, which may be stronger or weaker related to darkness? The ordinary physicist of today thinks there is stronger light and less strong; he will admit every degree of intensity of light, but he will only admit one darkness—darkness which is simply there when there is no light. There is, as it were, only one way of being black. Yet as untrue as it would be to say that there is only one kind of lightness, just as untrue is it to say that there is only one kind of darkness. It is as one-sided as it would be to declare: “I know four men. One of them owns £25, another £50; he therefore owns more than the other. The third of them is £25 in debt, the fourth is £50 in debt. Yet why should I take note of any difference in their case? It is precisely the same; both are in debt. I will by all means distinguish between more and less property, but not between different degrees of debt. Debt is debt and that is all there is to it.” You see the fallacy at once in this example, for you know very well that the effect of being £25 in debt is less than that of being £50 in debt. But in the case of darkness this is how people think: Of light there are different degrees; darkness is simply darkness. It is this failure to progress to a qualitative way of thinking, which very largely prevents our discovering the bridge between the soul-and-spirit on the one hand, and the bodily realm on the other. When a space is filled with light it is always filled with light of a certain intensity; so likewise, when a space is filled with darkness, it is filled with darkness of a certain intensity. We must proceed from the notion of a merely abstract space to the kind of space that is not abstract but is in some specific way positively filled with light or negatively filled with darkness. Thus we may be confronting a space that is filled with light and we shall call it “qualitatively positive”. Or we may be confronting a space that is filled with darkness and we shall judge it “qualitatively negative” with respect to the realm of light. Moreover both to the one and to the other we shall be able to ascribe a certain degree of intensity, a certain strength. Now we may ask: How does the positive filling of space differ for our perception from the negative? As to the positive, we need only remember what it is like when we awaken from sleep and are surrounded by light,—how we unite our subjective experience with the light that floods and surges all around us. We need only compare this sensation with what we feel when surrounded by darkness, and we shall find—I beg you to take note of this very precisely—we shall find that for pure feeling and sensation there is an essential difference between being given up to a light-filled space and to a darkness-filled space. We must approach these things with the help of some comparison. Truly, we may compare the feeling we have, when given up to a light-filled space, with a kind of in-drawing of the light. It is as though our soul, our inner being, were to be sucking the light in. We feel a kind of enrichment when in a light-filled space. We draw the light into ourselves. How is it then with darkness? We have precisely the opposite feeling. We feel the darkness sucking at us. It sucks us out, we have to give away,—we have to give something of ourselves to the darkness. Thus we may say: the effect of light upon us is to communicate, to give; whilst the effect of darkness is to withdraw, to suck at us and take away. So too must we distinguish between the lighter and the darker colours. The light ones have a quality of coming towards us and imparting something to us; the dark colours on the other hand have a quality of drawing on us, sucking at us, making us give of ourselves. So at long last we are led to say: Something in our outer world communicates itself to us when we are under the influence of light; something is taken from us, we are somehow sucked out, when under the influence of darkness.

There is indeed another occasion in our life, when—as I said once before during these lectures—we are somehow sucked-out as to our consciousness; namely when we fall asleep. Consciousness ceases. It is a very similar phenomenon, like a cessation of consciousness, when from the lighter colours we draw near the darker ones, the blue and violet. And if you will recall what I said a few days ago about the relation of our life of soul to mass,—how we are put to sleep by mass, how it sucks-out our consciousness,—you will feel something very like this in the absorption of our consciousness by darkness. So then you will discern the deep inner kinship between the condition space is in when filled with darkness and on the other hand the filling of space which we call matter, which is expressed in “mass”.

Thus we shall have to seek the transition from the phenomena of light to the phenomena of material existence. We have indeed paved the way, in that we first looked for the fleeting phenomena of light—phosphorescence and fluorescence—and then the firm and fast phenomena of light, the enduring colours. We cannot treat all these things separately; rather let us begin by setting out the whole complex of these facts together.

Now we shall also need to recognize the following, When we are in a light-filled space we do in a way unite with this light-filled space. Something in us swings out into the light-filled space and unites with it. But we need only reflect a little on the facts and we shall recognize an immense difference between the way we thus unite with the light-flooded spaces of our immediate environment and on the other hand the way we become united with the warmth-conditions of our environment,—for with these too, as human beings, we do somehow unite.

We do indeed share very much in the condition of our environment as regards warmth; and as we do so, here once again we feel a kind of polarity prevailing, namely the polarity of warm and cold. Yet we must needs perceive an essential difference between the way we feel ourselves within the warmth-condition of our environment and the way we feel ourselves within the light-condition of our environment. Physics, since the 16th century, has quite lost hold of this difference. The open-mindedness to distinguish how we join with our environment in the experience of light upon the one hand and warmth upon the other has been completely lost; nay, the deliberate tendency has been, somehow to blur and wipe away such differences as these. Suppose however that you face the difference, quite obviously given in point of fact, between the way we experience and share in the conditions of our environment as regards warmth and light respectively. Then in the last resort you will be bound to recognize that the distinction is: we share in the warmth-conditions of our environment with our physical body and in the light-conditions, as we said just now, with our etheric body. This in effect—this proneness to confuse what we become aware of through our ether-body and what we become aware of through our physical body—has been the bane of Physics since the 16th century. In course of time all things have thus been blurred. Our scientists have lost the faculty of stating facts straightforwardly and directly. This has been so especially since Newton's influence came to be dominant, as it still is to a great extent today. There have indeed been individuals who have attempted from time to time to draw attention to the straightforward facts simply as they present themselves. Goethe of course was doing it all through, and Kirchhoff among others tried to do it in more theoretic ways. On the whole however, scientists have lost the faculty of focusing attention purely and simply on the given facts. The fact for instance that material bodies in the neighbourhood of other material bodies will under given conditions fall towards them, has been conceived entirely in Newton's sense, being attributed from the very outset to a force proceeding from the one and affecting the other body—a “force of gravity”. Yet ponder how you will, you will never be able to include among the given facts what is understood by the term “force of gravity”. If a stone falls to the Earth the fact is simply that it draws nearer to the Earth. We see it now at one place, now at another, now at a third and so on. If you then say “The Earth attracts the stone” you in your thoughts are adding something to the given fact; you are no longer purely and simply stating the phenomenon.

People have grown ever more unaccustomed to state the phenomena purely, yet upon this all depends. For if we do not state the phenomena purely and simply, but proceed at once to thought-out explanations, we can find manifold explanations of one and the same phenomenon. Suppose for example you have two heavenly bodies. You may then say: These two heavenly bodies attract one another,—send some mysterious force out into space and so attract each other (Figure VIb). But you need not say this. You can also say: “Here is the one body, here is the other, and here (Figure VIc) are a lot of other, tiny bodies—particles of ether, it may be—all around and in between the two heavenly bodies. The tiny particles are bombarding the two big ones—bombarding here, there and on all sides;—the ones between, as they fly hither and thither, bombard them too. Now the total area of attack will be bigger outside than in between. In the resultant therefore, there will be less bombardment inside than outside; hence the two bodies will approach each other. They are, in fact, driven towards each other by the difference between the number of impacts they receive in the space between them and outside them.”

There have in fact been people who have explained the force of gravity simply by saying: It is a force acting at a distance and attracts the bodies towards each other. Others have said that that is nonsense; according to them it is unthinkable for any force to act at a distance. They then invite us to assume that space is filled with “ether”, and to assume this bombardment too. The masses then are, so to speak, for ever being sprayed towards each other. To add to these explanations there are no doubt many others. It is a classical example of how they fail to look at the real phenomenon but at once add their thought-out explanations.

Now what is at the bottom of it all? This tendency to add to the phenomena in thought—to add all manner of unknown agencies and fancied energies, presumed to be doing this or that—saves one the need of doing something else. Needless to say, the impacts in the theory of Figure VIc have been gratuitously added, just as the forces acting at a distance have been in the other theory. These adventitious theories, however, relieve one of the need of making one fundamental assumption, from which the people of today seem to be very much averse. For in effect, if these are two independent heavenly bodies and they approach each other, or show that it is in their nature to approach each other, we cannot but look for some underlying reason why they do so; there must be some inner reason. Now it is simpler to add in thought some unknown forces than to admit that there is also another way, namely no longer to think of the heavenly bodies as independent of each other. If for example I put my hand to my forehead, I shall not dream of saying that my forehead “attracts” my hand, but I shall say: It is an inner deed done by the underlying soul-and-spirit. My hand is not independent of my forehead; they are not really separate entities. I shall regard the phenomenon rightly only by recognising myself as a single whole. I should have no reality in mind if I were to say: There is a head, there are two arms and hands, there is a trunk, there are two legs. There would be nothing complete in that; I only have something complete in mind if I describe the whole human body as a single entity,—if I describe the different items so that they belong together. My task is not merely to describe what I see; I have to ponder the reality of what I see. The mere fact that I see a thing does not make it real.

Often I have made the following remark,—for I have had to indicate these things in other lectures too. Take a crystal cube of rock-salt. It is in some respect a totality. (Everything will be so in some respect). The crystal cube can exist by virtue of what it is within the compass of its six faces. But if you look at a rose, cut from the shrub it grew on, this rose is no totality. It cannot, like the cube of rock-salt, exist by virtue of all that is contained within it. The rose can only have existence by being of the rose-bush. The cut rose therefore, though you can see it just as you can see the cube of rock-salt, is a real abstraction; you may not call it a reality by itself.

The implications of this, my dear Friends, are far-reaching. Namely, for every phenomenon, we must examine to what extent it is a reality in itself, or a mere section of some larger whole. If you consider Sun and Moon, or Sun and Earth, each by itself, you may of course invent and add to them a force of gravity, just as you might invent a force of gravity by means of which my forehead would attract my right hand. But in considering Sun and Earth and Moon thus separately, the things you have in mind are not totalities; they are but parts and members of the whole planetary system.

This then is the essential thing; observe to what extent a thing is whole, or but a section of a whole. How many errors arise by considering to be a whole what is in fact only a partial phenomenon within a larger whole! By thus considering only the partial phenomena and then inventing energies to add to these, our scientists have saved themselves the need of contemplating the inherent life of the planetary system. The tendency has been, first to regard as wholes those things in Nature which are only parts, and by mere theories then to construe the effects which arise in fact between them. This therefore, to sum up, is the essential point: For all that meets us in Nature we have to ask: What is the whole to which this thing belongs? Or is it in itself a whole? Even then, in the last resort, we shall find that things are wholes only in certain respects. Even the crystal cube of rock-salt is a totality only in some respect; it too cannot exist save at certain temperatures and under other requisite conditions. Given some other temperature, it could no longer be. Our need is therefore to give up looking at Nature in the fragmentary way which is so prevalent in our time.

Indeed it was only by looking at Nature in this fragmentary way that Science since the 16th century conceived this strange idea of universal, inorganic, lifeless Nature. There is indeed no such thing, just as in this sense there is no such thing as your bony system without your blood. Just as your bony system could only come into being by, as it were, crystallizing out of your living organism as a whole, so too this so-called inorganic Nature cannot exist without the whole of Nature—soul and Spirit-Nature—that underlies it. Lifeless Nature is the bony system, abstracted from Nature as a whole. It is impossible to study it alone, as they began doing ever since the 16th century and as is done in Newtonian Physics to this day.

It was the trend of Newtonian Physics to make as neat as possible an extract of this so-called inorganic Nature, treating it then as something self-contained. This “inorganic Nature” only exists however in the machines which we ourselves piece together from the parts of Nature. And here we come to something radically different. What we are wont to call “inorganic” in Nature herself, is placed in the totality of Nature in quite another way. The only really inorganic things are our machines, and even these are only so insofar as they are pieced together from sundry forces of Nature by ourselves. Only the “put-togetherness” of them is inorganic. Whatever else we may call inorganic only exists by abstraction. From this abstraction however present-day Physics has arisen. This Physics is an outcome of abstraction; it thinks that what it has abstracted is the real thing, and on this assumption sets out to explain whatever comes within its purview

As against this, the only thing we can legitimately do is to form our ideas and concepts in direct connection with what is given to us from the outer world—the details of the sense-world. Now there is one realm of phenomena for which a very convenient fact is indeed given. If you strike a bell and have some light and very mobile device in the immediate neighbourhood, you will be able to demonstrate that the particles of the sounding bell are vibrating. Or with a pipe playing a note, you will be able to show that the air inside it is vibrating. For the phenomena of sound and tone therefore, you have the demonstrable movement of the particles of air or of the bell; so you will ascertain that there is a connection between the vibrations executed by a body or by the air and our perceptions of tone or sound. For this field of phenomena it is quite patent: vibrations are going on around us when we hear sounds. We can say to ourselves that unless the air in our environment is vibrating we shall not hear any sounds. There is a genuine connection—and we shall speak of it again tomorrow—between the sounds and the vibrations of the air.

Now if we want to proceed very abstractly we may argue: “We perceive sound through our organs of hearing. The vibrations of the air beat on our organ of hearing, and when they do so we perceive the sound. Now the eye too is a sense-organ and through it we perceive the colours; so we may say: here something similar must be at work. Some kind of vibration must be beating on the eye. But we soon see it cannot be the air. So then it is the ether.” By a pure play of analogies one is thus led to the idea: When the air beats upon our ear and we have the sensation of a sound, there is an inner connection between the vibrating air and our sensation; so in like manner, when the hypothetical ether with its vibrations beats upon our eye, a sensation of light is produced by means of this vibrating ether. And as to how the ether should be vibrating: this they endeavour to ascertain by means of such phenomena as we have seen in our experiments during these lectures. Thus they think out an universal ether and try to calculate what they suppose must be going on in this ethereal ocean. Their calculations relate to an unknown entity which cannot of course be perceived but can at most be assumed theoretically.

Even the very trifling experiments we have been able to make will have revealed the extreme complication of what is going on in the world of light. Till the more recent developments set in, our physicists assumed that behind—or, should we rather say, within—all thus that lives and finds expression in light and colour there is the vibrating ether, a tenuous elastic substance. And since the laws of impact and recoil of elastic bodies are not so difficult to get to know, they could compute what these vibrating little cobolds must be up to in the ether. They only had to regard them as little elastic bodies,—imagining the ether as an inherently elastic substance. So they could even devise explanations of the phenomena we have been showing,—e.g. the forming of the spectrum. The explanation is that the different kinds of ether-vibrations are dispersed by the prism; these different kinds of vibrations then appear to us as different colours. By calculation one may even explain from the elasticity of the ether the extinction of the sodium line for example, which we perceived in our experiment the day before yesterday.

In more recent times however, other phenomena have been discovered. Thus we can make a spectrum, in which we either create or extinguish the sodium line (i.e., in the latter case, we generate the black sodium line). If then in addition we bring an electro-magnet to bear upon the cylinder of light in a certain way, the electro-magnet affects the phenomenon of light. The sodium line is extinguished in its old place and for example two other lines arise, purely by the effect of the electricity with which magnetic effects are always somehow associated. Here, then, what is described as “electric forces” proves to be not without effect upon those processes which we behold as phenomena of light and behind which one had supposed the mere elastic ether to be working. Such discoveries of the effect of electricity on the phenomena of light now led to the assumption that there must be some kinship between the phenomena of light and those of magnetism and electricity.

Thus in more recent times the old theories were rather shaken. Before these mutual effects had been perceived, one could lean back and rest content. Now one was forced to admit that the two realms must have to do with each other. As a result, very many physicists now include what radiates in the form of light among the electro-magnetic effects. They think it is really electro-magnetic rays passing through space.

Now think a moment what has happened. The scientists had been assuming that they knew what underlies the phenomena of light and colour: namely, undulations in the elastic ether. Now that they learned of the interaction between light and electricity, they feel obliged to regard, what is vibrating there, as electricity raying through space. Mark well what has taken place. First it is light and colour which they desire to explain, and they attribute them to the vibrating ether. Ether-vibrations are moving through space. They think they know what light is in reality,—it is vibrations in the elastic ether. Then comes the moment when they have to say: What we regarded as vibrations of the elastic ether are really vibrations of electro-magnetic force. They know still better now, what light is, than they did before. It is electro-magnetic streams of force. Only they do not know what these are! Such is the pretty round they have been. First a hypothesis is set up: something belonging to the sense-world is explained by an unknown super-sensible, the vibrating ether. Then by and by they are driven to refer this super-sensible once more to something of the sense-world, yet at the same time to confess that they do not know what the latter is. It is a highly interesting journey that has here been made; from the hypothetical search for an unknown to the explanation of this unknown by yet another unknown.

The physicist Kirchhoff was rather shattered and more or less admitted: It will be not at all easy for Physics if these more recent phenomena really oblige us no longer to believe in the undulating ether. And when Helmholtz got to know of the phenomenon, he said: Very well, we shall have to regard light as a kind of electro-magnetic radiation. It only means that we shall now have to explain these radiations themselves as vibrations in the elastic ether. In the last resort we shall get back to these, he said.

The essence of the matter is that a genuine phenomenon of undulation—namely the vibrating of the air when we perceive sounds—was transferred by pure analogy into a realm where in point of fact the whole assumption is hypothetical.

I had to go into these matters of principle today, to give the necessary background. In quick succession we will now go through the most important aspects of those phenomena which we still want to consider. In our remaining hours I propose to discuss the phenomena of sound, and those of warmth, and of electro-magnetics; also whatever explanations may emerge from these for our main theme—the phenomena of optics.

It is to be hoped that my discussions of the boundaries of natural science have been able to furnish at least some indications of the difference between what spiritual science calls knowledge of the higher worlds and the mode of knowledge proceeding from everyday consciousness or ordinary science. In everyday life and in ordinary science our powers of cognition are those we have acquired through the conventional education that carries us up to a certain stage in life and whatever this education has enabled us to make of inherited and universally human qualities. The mode of cognition that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science terms knowledge of the higher worlds has its basis in a further self-cultivation, a further self-development; one must become aware that in the later stages of life one can advance through self-education to a higher consciousness, just as a child can advance to the stage of ordinary consciousness. The things we sought in vain at the two boundaries of natural science, the boundaries of matter and of ordinary consciousness, reveal themselves only when one attains this higher consciousness. In ancient times the Eastern sages spoke of such an enhanced consciousness that renders accessible to man a level of reality higher than that of everyday life; they strove to achieve a higher development, similar to the one we have described, by means of an inner self-cultivation that corresponded to their racial characteristics and evolutionary stage. The meaning of what radiates forth from the ancient Eastern wisdom-literature becomes fully apparent only when one realizes what such a higher level of development reveals to man. If one were to characterize the path of development these sages followed, one would have to describe it as a path of Inspiration. For in that epoch humanity had a kind of natural propensity to Inspiration, and in order to understand these paths into the higher realms of cognition, it will be useful if First we can gain clarity concerning the path of development followed by these ancient Eastern sages. I want to make it clear from the start, however, that this path can no longer be that of our Western civilization, for humanity is in a process of constant evolution, ever moving forward. And whoever desires—as many have—to return to the instructions given in the ancient Eastern wisdom-literature in order to enter upon the paths of higher development actually desires to turn back the tide of human evolution or shows that he has no real understanding of human progress. In ordinary consciousness we reside within our thought life, our life of feeling, and our life of will, and we initially substantiate what surges within the soul as thought, feeling, and will in the act of cognition. And it is in the interaction with percepts of the external world, with physical-sensory perceptions, that our consciousness First fully awakens.

It is necessary to realize that the Eastern sages, the so-called initiates of the East, cultivated perception, thinking, feeling, and willing in a way different from their cultivation in everyday life. We can attain an understanding of this path of development leading into the higher worlds when we consider the following. In certain ages of life we develop what we call the soul-spirit toward a greater freedom, a greater independence. We have been able to show how the soul-spirit, which functions in the earliest years of childhood to organize the physical body, emancipates itself, becomes free in a sense with the change of teeth. We have shown how man then lives freely with his ego in this soul-spirit, which now places itself at his disposal, while formerly it occupied itself—if I may express myself thus—with the organization of the physical body. As we enter into ever-greater participation in everyday life, however, there arises something that initially prevents this emancipated soul-spirit from growing into the spiritual world in normal consciousness. As human beings, we must traverse the path that leads us into the external world with the requisite faculties during our life between birth and death. We must acquire such faculties as allow us to orient ourselves within the external, physical-sensory world. We must also develop such faculties as allow us to become useful members of the social community we form with other human beings.

What arises is threefold. These three things bring us into a proper relationship with other human beings in our environment and govern our interaction with them. These are: language, the ability to understand the thoughts of our fellow men, and the acquisition of an understanding, or even a kind of perception, of another's ego. At first glance these three things—perception of language, perception of thoughts, and perception of the ego—appear simple, but for one who seeks knowledge earnestly and conscientiously these things are not so simple at all. Normally we speak of five senses only, to which recent physiological research adds a few inner senses. Within conventional science it is thus impossible to find a complete, systematic account of the senses. I will want to speak to you an this subject at some later time. Today I want only to say that it is an illusion to believe that linguistic comprehension is implicit in the sense of hearing, of that which contemporary physiology dreams to be the organization of the sense of hearing. just as we have a sense of hearing, so also do we have a sense of language. By this I do not mean the sense that guides us in speaking—for this is also called a sense—but that which enables us to comprehend the perception of speech-sounds, just as the auditory senses enable us to perceive tones as such. And when we have a comprehensive physiology, it will be known that this sense of speech is analogous to the other and can rightfully be called a sense in and of itself. It is only that this sense extends over a larger part of the human constitution than the other, more localized senses. Yet it is a sense that nevertheless can be sharply delineated. And we have, in fact, a further sense that extends throughout virtually all of our body—the sense that perceives the thoughts of others. For what we perceive as word is not yet thought. We require other organs, a sensory organization different from that which perceives only words as such, if we want to understand within the word the thought that another wishes to communicate.

In addition, we are equipped with an analogous sense extending throughout our entire bodily organization, which we can call the sense for the perception of another person's ego. In this regard even philosophy has reverted to childishness in recent times, for one can often hear it argued: we encounter another man; we know that a human has such and such a form. Since the being that we encounter is formed in the way we know ourselves to be formed, and sine we know ourselves to be ego-bearers, we conclude through a kind of unconscious inference: aha, he bears an ego within as well. This directly contradicts the psychological reality. Every acute observer knows that it is not an inference by analogy but rather a direct perception that brings us awareness of another's ego. I think that a friend or associate of Husserl's school in Göttingen, Max Scheler, is the only philosopher actually to hit upon this direct perception of the ego. Thus we must differentiate three higher senses, so to speak, above and beyond the ordinary human senses: the sense that perceives language, the sense that perceives thoughts, and the sense that perceives another's ego. These senses arise within the course of human development to the same extent that the soul-spirit gradually emancipates itself between birth and the change of teeth in the way I have described.

These three senses lead initially to interaction with the rest of humanity. In a certain way we are introduced into social life among other human beings by the possession of these three senses. The path one thus follows via these three senses, however, was followed in a different way by the ancients—especially the Indian sages—in order to attain higher knowledge. In striving for this goal of higher knowledge, the soul was not moved toward the words in such a way that one sought to arrive at an understanding of what the other was saying. The powers of the soul were not directed toward the thoughts of another person in such a way as to perceive them, nor toward the ego of another in such a way as to perceive it sympathetically. Such matters were left to everyday life. When the sage returned from his striving for higher cognition, from his sojourn in spiritual worlds to everyday life, he employed these three senses in the ordinary manner. When he wanted to exercise the method of higher cognition, however, he needed these senses in a different way. He did not allow the soul's forces to penetrate through the word while perceiving speech, in order to comprehend the other through his language; rather, he stopped short at the word itself. Nothing was sought behind the word; rather, the streaming life of the soul was sent out only as far as the word. He thereby achieved an intensified perception of the word, renouncing all attempts to understand anything more by means of it. He permeated the word with his entire life of soul, using the word or succession of words in such a way that he could enter completely into the inner life of the word. He formulated certain aphorisms, simple, dense aphorisms, and then strove to live within the sounds, the tones of the words. And he followed with his entire soul life the sound of the word that he vocalized. This practice then led to a cultivation of living within aphorisms, within the so-called “mantras.” It is characteristic of mantric art, this living within aphorisms, that one does not comprehend the content of the words but rather experiences the aphorisms as something musical. One unites one's own soul forces with the aphorisms, so that one remains within the aphorisms and so that one strengthens through continual repetition and vocalization one's own power of soul living within the aphorisms. This art was gradually brought to a high state of development and transformed the soul faculty that we use to understand others through language into another. Through vocalization and repetition of the mantras there arose within the soul a power that led not to other human beings but into the spiritual world. And if, through these mantras, the soul has been schooled in such a way and to such an extent that one feels inwardly the weaving and streaming of this power of soul, which otherwise remains unconscious because all one's attention is directed toward understanding another through the word; if one has come so far as to feel such a power to be an actual force in the soul in the same way that muscular tension is experienced when one wishes to do something with one's arm, one has made oneself sufficiently mature to grasp what lies within the higher power of thought. In everyday life a man seeks to find his way to another via thought. With this power, however, he grasps the thought in an entirely different way. He grasps the weaving of thought in external reality, penetrates into the life of external reality, and lives into the higher realm that I have described to you as Inspiration.

Following this path, then, we approach not the ego of the other person but the egos of individual spiritual beings who surround us, just as we are surrounded by the entities of the sense world. What I depict here was self-evident to the ancient Eastern sage. In this way he wandered with his soul, as it were, upward toward the perception of a realm of spirit. He attained in the highest degree what can be called Inspiration, and his constitution was suited to this. He had no need to fear, as the Westerner might, that his ego might somehow become lost in this wandering out of the body. In later times, when, owing to the evolutionary advances made by humanity, a man might very easily pass out of his body into the outer world without his ego, precautionary measures were taken. Care was taken to ensure that whoever was to undergo this schooling leading to higher knowledge did not pass unaccompanied into the spiritual world and fall prey to the pathological skepticism of which I have spoken in these lectures. In the ancient East the racial constitution was such that this was nothing to fear. As humanity evolved further, however, this became a legitimate concern. Hence the precautionary measure strictly applied within the Eastern schools of wisdom: the neophyte was placed under an authority, but not any outward authority—fundamentally speaking, what we understand by “authority” First appeared in Western civilization. There was cultivated within the neophytes, through a process of natural adaptation to prevailing conditions, a dependence on a leader or guru. The neophyte simply perceived what the leader demonstrated, how the leader stood firmly within the spiritual world without falling prey to pathological skepticism or even inclining toward it. This perception fortified him to such an extent on his own entry into Inspiration that pathological skepticism could never assail him.

Even when the soul-spirit is consciously withdrawn from the physical body, however, something else enters into consideration: one must re-establish the connection with the physical body in a more conscious manner. I said this morning that the pathological state must be avoided in which one descends only egotistically, and not lovingly, into the physical body, for this is to lay hold of the physical body in the wrong way. I described the natural process of laying hold of the physical body between the seventh and fourteenth years, which is through the love-instinct being impressed upon it. Yet even this natural process can take a pathological turn: in such cases there arise the harmful afflictions I described this morning as pathological states. Of course, this could have happened to the pupils of the ancient Eastern sages as well: when they were out of the body they might not have been able to bind the soul-spirit to the physical body again in the appropriate manner. One further precautionary measure thus was employed, one to which psychiatrists—some at any rate—have had recourse when seeking cures for patients suffering from agoraphobia or the like. They employed ablutions, cold baths. Expedients of an entirely physical nature have to be employed in such cases. And when you hear on the one hand that in the mysteries of the East—that is, the schools of initiation, the schools that led to Inspiration—the precautionary measure was taken of ensuring dependence on the guru, you hear on the other hand of the employment of all kinds of devices, of ablutions with cold water and the like. When human nature is understood in the way made possible by spiritual science, customs that otherwise remain rather enigmatic in these ancient mysteries become intelligible. One was protected against developing a false sense of spatiality resulting from an insufficient connection between the soul-spirit and the physical body. This could drive one into agoraphobia and the like or to seek social intercourse with one's fellow men in an inappropriate way. This represents a danger, but one which can and should—indeed must—be avoided in any training that leads to higher cognition. It is a danger, because in following the path I have described leading to Inspiration one bypasses in a certain sense the path via language and thought to the ego of one's fellow man. If one then quits the physical body in a pathological manner—even if one is not attempting to attain higher cognition but is lifted out of the body by a pathological condition—one can become unable to interact socially with one's fellow men in the right way. Then precisely that which arises in the usual, intended manner through properly regulated spiritual study can develop pathologically. Such a person establishes a connection between his soul-spirit and his physical body: by delving too deeply into it he experiences his body so egotistically that he learns to hate interaction with his fellow men and becomes antisocial. One can often see the results of such a pathological condition manifest themselves in the world in quite a frightening manner. I once met a man who was a remarkable example of such a type: he came from a family that inclined by nature toward a freeing of the soul-spirit from the physical body and also contained certain personalities—I came to know one of them extremely well—who sought a path into the spiritual worlds. One rather degenerate individual, however, developed this tendency in an abnormal, pathological way and finally arrived at the point where he would allow nothing whatever from the external world to contact his own body. Naturally he had to eat, but—we are speaking here among adults—he washed himself with his own urine, because he feared any water that came from the outside world. But then again I would rather not describe all the things he would do in order to isolate his body totally from the external world and shun all society. He did these things because his soul-spirit was too deeply incarnated, too closely bound to the physical body.

It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Goetheanism to bring together that which leads to the highest goal attainable by earthly man and that which leads to pathological depths. One needs only slight acquaintance with Goethe's theory of metamorphosis to realize this. Goethe seeks to understand how the individual organs, for example of the plant, develop out of each other, and in order to understand their metamorphosis he is particularly interested in observing the conditions that arise through the abnormal development of a leaf, a blossom, or the stamen. Goethe realizes that precisely by contemplating the pathological the essence of the healthy can be revealed to the perceptive observer. And one can follow the right path into the spiritual world only when one knows wherein the essence of human nature actually lies and in what diverse ways this complicated inner being can come to expression.

We see from something else as well that even in the later period the men of the East were predisposed by nature to come to a halt at the word. They did not penetrate the word with the forces of the soul but lived within the word. We see this, for example, in the teachings of the Buddha. One need only read these teachings with their many repetitions. I have known Westerners who treasured editions of the Buddha's teachings in which the numerous repetitions had been eliminated and the words of a sentence left to occur only once. Such people believed that through such a condensed version, in which everything occurs only once, they would gain a true understanding of what the Buddha had actually intended. From this it is clear that Western civilization has gradually lost all understanding of Eastern man. If we simply take the Buddha's teachings word for word; if we take the content of these teachings, the content that we, as human beings of the West, chiefly value, then we do not assimilate the essence of these teachings: that is possible only when we are carried along with the repetitions, when we live in the flow of the words, when we experience the strengthening of the soul's forces that is induced by the repetitions. Unless we acquire a faculty for experiencing something from the constant repetitions and the rhythmical recurrence of certain passages, we do not get to the heart of Buddhism's actual significance.

It is in this way that one must gain knowledge of the inner nature of Eastern culture. Without this acquaintance with the inner nature of Eastern culture one can never arrive at a real understanding of our Western religious creeds, for in the final analysis these Western religious creeds stem from Eastern wisdom. The Christ event is a different matter. For that is an actual event. It stands as a fact within the evolution of the earth. Yet the ways and means of understanding what came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha were drawn during the first Christian centuries entirely from Eastern wisdom. It was through this wisdom that the fundamental event of Christianity was originally understood. Everything progresses, however. What had once been present in Eastern primeval wisdom—attained through Inspiration—spread from the East to Greece and is still recognizable as art. For Greek art was, to be sure, bound up with experiences different from those usually connected with art today. In Greek art one could still experience what Goethe strove to regain when he spoke of the deepest urge within him: he to whom nature begins to unveil her manifest secrets longs for her worthiest interpreter—art. For the Greeks, art was a way to slip into the secrets of world existence, a manifestation not merely of human fantasy but of what arises in the interaction between this faculty and the revelations of the spiritual world revealed through Inspiration. That which still flowed through Greek art, however, became more and more diluted, until finally it became the content of the Western religious creeds. We thus must conceive the source of the primeval wisdom as fully substantial spiritual life that becomes impoverished as evolution proceeds and provides the content of religious creeds when it finally reaches the Western world. Human beings who are constitutionally suited for a later epoch therefore can find in this diluted form of spiritual life only something to be viewed with skepticism. And in the final analysis it is nothing other than the reaction of the Western temperament [Gemüt] to the now decadent Eastern wisdom that gradually produces atheistic skepticism in the West. This skepticism is bound to become more and more widespread unless it is countered with a different stream of spiritual life.

Just as little as a creature that has reached a certain stage of development—let us say has undergone a certain aging process—can be made young again in every respect, so little can a form of spiritual life be made young again when it has reached old age. The religious creeds of the West, which are descendants of the primeval wisdom of the East, can yield nothing that would fully satisfy Western humanity again when it advances beyond the knowledge provided during the past three or four centuries by science and observation of nature. An ever-more profound skepticism is bound to arise, and anyone who has insight into the processes of world evolution can say with assurance that a trend of development from East to West must necessarily lead to an increasingly pronounced skepticism when it is taken up by souls who are becoming more and more deeply imbued with the fruits of Western civilization. Skepticism is merely the march of the spiritual life from East to West, and it must be countered with a different spiritual stream flowing henceforth from West to East. We ourselves are living at the crossing-point of these spiritual streams, and in the further course of these considerations we will want to see how this is so.

But first it must be emphasized that the Western temperament is constitutionally predisposed to follow a path of development leading to the higher worlds different from that of the Eastern temperament. Just as the Eastern temperament strives initially for Inspiration and possesses the racial qualities suitable for this, the Western temperament, because of its peculiar qualities (they are at present not so much racial qualities as qualities of soul) strives for Imagination. It is no longer the experience of the musical element in mantric aphorisms to which we as Westerners should aspire but something else. As Westerners we should strive in such a way that we do not pursue with particular vigour the path that opens out when the soul-spirit emerges from the physical body but rather the path that presents itself later, when the soul-spirit must again unite with the physical organism by consciously grasping the physical body. We see the natural manifestation of this in the emergence of the bodily instinct: whereas Eastern man sought his wisdom more by sublimating the forces at work between birth and the seventh year, Western man is better fitted to develop the forces at work between the time of the change of teeth and puberty, in that there is lifted up into the soul-spirit that which is natural for this epoch of humanity. We come to this when, just as in emerging from the body we carry the ego with us into the realm of Inspiration, we now leave the ego outside when we delve again into the body. We leave it outside, but not in idleness, not forgetting or surrendering it, not suppressing it into unconsciousness, but rather conjoining it with pure thinking, with clear, keen thinking, so that finally one has this inner experience: my ego is totally suffused with all the clear thinking of which I have become capable. One can experience just this delving down into the body in a very clear and distinct manner. And at this point you will perhaps allow me to relate a personal experience, because it will help you to understand what I really mean.

I have spoken to you about the conception underlying my book, Philosophy of Freedom. This book is actually a modest attempt to win through to pure thinking, the pure thinking in which the ego can live and maintain a firm footing. Then, when pure thinking has been grasped in this way, one can strive for something else. This thinking, left in the power of an ego that now feels itself to be liberated within free spirituality [frei und unabhängig in freier Geistigkeit], can then be excluded from the process of perception. Whereas in ordinary life one sees color, let us say, and at the same time imbues the color with conceptual activity, one can now extract the concepts from the entire process of elaborating percepts and draw the percept itself directly into ones bodily constitution.

Goethe undertook to do this and has already taken the First steps in this direction. Read the last chapter of his Theory of Colors, entitled “The Sensory-Moral Effect of Color”: in every color-effect he experiences something that unites itself profoundly not only with the faculty of perception but with the whole man. He experiences yellow and scarlet as “attacking” colors, penetrating him, as it were, through and through, filling him with warmth, while he regards blue and violet as colors that draw one out of oneself, as cold colors. The whole man experiences something in the act of sense perception. Sense perception, together with its content, passes down into the organism, and the ego with its pure thought content remains, so to speak, hovering above. We exclude thinking inasmuch as we take into and fill ourselves with the whole content of the perception, instead of weakening it with concepts, as we usually do. We train ourselves specially to achieve this by systematically pursuing what came to be practiced in a decadent form by the men of the East. Instead of grasping the content of the perception in pure, strictly logical thought, we grasp it symbolically, in pictures, allowing it to stream into us as a result of a kind of detour around thinking. We steep ourselves in the richness of the colors, the richness of the tone, by learning to experience the images inwardly, not in terms of thought but as pictures, as symbols. Because we do not suffuse our inner life with the thought content, as the psychology of association would have it, but with the content of perception indicated through symbols and pictures, the living inner forces of the etheric and astral bodies stream toward us from within, and we come to know the depths of consciousness and of the soul. It is in this way that genuine knowledge of the inner nature of man is acquired, and not by means of the blathering mysticism that nebulous minds often claim to be a way to the God within. This mysticism leads to nothing but abstraction and cannot satisfy anyone who wishes to become a man in the full sense of the ward.

If one desires to do real research concerning human physiology, thinking must be excluded and the picture-forming activity sent inward, so that the physical organism reacts by creating Imaginations. This is a path that is only just beginning in the development of Western culture, but it is the path that must be trodden if the influence that streams over from the East, and would lead to decadence if it atone were to prevail, is to be confronted with something capable of opposing it, so that our civilization may take a path of ascent and not of decline. Generally speaking, however, it can be said that human language itself is not yet sufficiently developed to be able to give full expression to the experiences that one undergoes in the inner recesses of the soul. And it is at this point that I would like to relate a personal experience to you.

Many years ago, in a different context, I made an attempt to give expression to what might be called a science of the human senses. In spoken lectures I succeeded to some extent in putting this science of the twelve senses into words, because in speaking it is more possible to turn language this way and that and ensure understanding by means of repetitions, so that the deficiencies of our language, which is not yet capable of expressing these super-sensible things, is not so strongly felt. Strangely enough, however, when I wanted many years ago to write down what I had given as actual anthroposophy in order to put it into a form suitable for a book, the outer experiences an being interiorized became so sensitive that language simply failed to provide the words, and I believe that the beginning of the text—several sheets of print—lay for some five or six years at the printer's. It was because I wanted to write the whole book in the style in which it began that I could not continue writing, for the simple reason that at the stage of development I had then reached, language refused to furnish the means for what I wished to achieve. Afterward I became overloaded with work, and I still have not been able to finish the book. Anyone who is less conscientious about what he communicates to his fellow men out of the spiritual world might perhaps smile at the idea of being held up in this way by a temporarily insurmountable difficulty. But whoever really experiences and can permeate with a full sense of responsibility what occurs when one attempts to describe the path that Western humanity must follow to attain Imagination knows that to find the right words entails a great deal of effort. As a meditative schooling it is relatively easy to describe, and this has been done in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. If one's aim, however, is to achieve definite results such as that of describing the essential nature of man's senses—a part, therefore, of the inner makeup and constitution of humanity—it is then that one encounters the difficulty of grasping Imaginations and presenting them in sharp contours by means of words.

Nevertheless, this is the path that Western humanity must follow. And just as the man of the East was able to experience through his mantras the entry into the spiritual nature of the external world, so must the Westerner, leaving aside the entire psychology of association, learn to enter into his own being by attaining the realm of Imagination. Only by penetrating into the realm of Imagination will he acquire the true knowledge of humanity that is necessary in order for humanity to progress. And because we in the West must live much more consciously than the men of the East, we cannot simply say: whether or not humanity will gradually attain this realm of Imagination is something that can be left to the future. No—this world of Imagination, because we have passed into the stage of conscious human evolution, must be striven for consciously; there can be no halting at certain stages. For what happens if one halts at a certain stage? Then one does not meet the ever-increasing spread of skepticism from East to West with the right countermeasures but with measures that result from the soul-spirit uniting too radically, too deeply and unconsciously, with the physical body, so that too strong a connection is formed between the soul-spirit and the physical body.

Yes, it is indeed possible for a human being not only to think materialistically but to be a materialist, because the soul-spirit is too strongly linked with the physical body. In such a man the ego does not live freely in the concepts of pure thinking he has attained. If one descends into the body with pictorial perception, one delves with the ego and the concepts into the body. And if one then spreads this around and suffuses it throughout humanity, it gives rise to a spiritual phenomenon well known to us—dogmatism of all kinds. Dogmatism is nothing other than the translation into the realm of the soul-spirit of a condition that at a lower stage manifests itself pathologically as agoraphobia and the like, and that—because these things are related—also shows itself in something else, which is a metamorphosis of fear, in superstition of every variety. An unconscious urge toward Imagination is held back through powerful agencies, and this gives rise to dogmatism of all types. These types of dogmatism must gradually be replaced by what is achieved when the world of ideas is kept within the sphere of the ego; when progress is made toward Imagination, the true nature of man is experienced inwardly, and this Western path into the spiritual world is followed in a different way. It is this other path through Imagination that must establish the stream of spiritual science, the process of spiritual evolution that muss make its way from West to East if humanity is to progress. It is supremely important at the present time, however, for humanity to recognize what the true path of Imagination should be, what path must be taken by Western spiritual science if it is to be a match for the Inspiration and its fruits that were attained by ancient Eastern wisdom in a form suited to the racial characteristics of those peoples. Only if we are able to confront the now decadent Inspiration of the East with Imaginations which, sustained by the spirit and saturated with reality, have arisen along the path leading to a higher spiritual culture; only if we can call this culture into existence as a stream of spiritual life flowing from West to East, are we bringing to fulfillment what is actually living deep within the impulses for which humanity is striving. It is these impulses that are now exploding in social cataclysms because they cannot find other expression.

In tomorrow's lecture we will speak further of the path of Imagination and of how the way to the higher worlds is envisaged by anthroposophical spiritual science.

In these lectures I should like to bring forward some details about the connections existing between the spiritual life of nations and their destiny in history.

Natural Science is an especially important element in our civilization to-day because of the constitution of our present day souls, and I shall therefore select from the many different points of view from which the theme can be treated, the scientific element, and show that the entire historical development of nations is the deep basis for our present day inclination towards the scientific view. It will be necessary first to give an introduction and treat the theme itself on the basis of to-day's observations.

If we turn our attention to the historical development of nations—and for the moment we will remain within what is historic—we will see that by the side of external political and economic destinies, spiritual endow¬ments, acquisition and accomplishments are forced upon us. You know that to-day two modes of thought oppose each other strongly. I have pointed out these opposing tendencies of thought in an earlier lecture held here in Stuttgart. First there exists the view proceeding more from the Ideal, the supporters of which are of the opinion that a spiritual basis, merely in the form of an abstract idea, prevails in the evolution of a nation. Accord¬ing to this view external events are produced from out of such a spiritual basis. One can say that ideas prevail in history which express themselves from epoch to epoch, but usually one is not clear regarding the shadowy relation between the real spiritual basis and the sequence of ideas which are brought to expression in the course of history.

The other view, which at present exercises great sway, considers that all spiritual phenomena, including Morals, Rights, Science, Art, Religion, etc., are simply a result of material events, or rather, as a great portion of mankind would say to-day, of the economic life. It is thought, in this case, that certain dim forces which are not investi¬gated further, have brought about this or that economic system or method of co-operation in the time sequence of history ; and so, through purely material economic processes, what men regard as Ideas, Morals, Rights, etc., have arisen.

One can produce if desired convincing reasons for the one view as well as for the other. Both are capable of proof in the sense in which ' proofs' are often spoken of to-day. Whether a proof is regarded as decisive for the one or the other view depends on the way one is placed in the world with reference to one's ordinary interests or what one has experienced in life through mode of philosophic thought. Everything in this Wundt characterization is built up, is constructed. Some observations are made about the way in which modern uncivilized tribes show their way of thinking through their language. The hypothesis is continued and the primaeval population of the world is shown to have been like these primitive tribes which have remained in this earlier condition, only perhaps more decadent. From the ideas found here one can see how they have arisen. They are not gained from experience, but their originator who built them up uses the modern concepts of Causality, Cognition, Natural Causes, etc., and then he reflects how these would appear in more primitive conditions. Then he proceeds to carry over to primitive races what he has thus constructed.

There is but little possibility to-day for looking into the soul of another human being. There is absolutely nothing in Wundt's exposition of which one can say, one can recognize that it has arisen from insight into the soul conditions, even those of primitive races to-day. The renowned Wundt merely revolves about his own ideas which he simplifies and applies to the human creatures he is studying.

Because nothing correct exists to-day connecting primaeval races and the races with developed outlook upon the world, we see these things placed historically side by side without regard to the fact that it is, one might say, logically offensive to find highly developed views of the world supported by wonderful intuitions of the Hindus and Chinese placed immediately after such a description of primitive man as given by Wundt. What is so lacking to-day is this power of penetrating feelingly into other modes of thought. We go back with what we are accustomed to think in the 19th or 20th centuries to the 15th and 16th centuries and then to the middle ages. We do not feel allied to them and cannot understand them and so we say they were dark ages and that human civilization came to a certain pause. Then we go back to Greece and here one feels the necessity for close contact while retaining the same ideas one holds regarding the ordinary life of culture to-day. At best, men of fine feeling, like Hermann Grimm, speak differently. He has emphasized the fact that, with our modern ideas, we can only go as far back as the Romans. Generally speaking, we can understand them, we can grasp with modern ideas what transpires with the Romans. If we go back however to the Greeks we see that already Pericles, Alcibiades, even Socrates or Plato, Aeschylus or Sophocles are shadowy beside our modern understanding; there is something foreign about them, if we approach them with modern ideas. They speak to us as if from another world. They speak to us as if history itself starts with them as a fairy-tale world. Hermann Grimm has spoken in this way of facts. But one must add something if we proceed from another point of view, from the view existing in the world through the spirit of Natural Science (this was not the view of Hermann Grimm.) One cannot go back in thought even to the Romans so as to make them appear really objectively before us.

Grimm, who did not have an education in Natural Science but only received what existed as a continuation from the Roman epoch into modern times, is still able to enter into, the spirit of Roman times but not into the Greek. And if the concepts of Rights of the State which are copied from Rome were not known to us, if we possessed nothing of that singular feeling for Art which arose again in the Renaissance and into which Grimm entered deeply, but if instead of all this we lived in purely scientific ideas we should be as little at home in the Roman world or even in the medieval world as Grimm felt himself at home in the Greek world. This is one point that must be added, and the other is that Grimm paid no attention either to the World of the East. With his whole observation of the world he only traces back as far as the Greeks. Consequently he does not attain to what he would have attained according to his own suppositions if he had applied himself to, let us say, the Vedas, to Vedantic philosophy. He would then have said: If the Greeks meet us as shadows, those men whose special conditions have found expression in the Vedas, in Vedanta, meet us not even as shadows but as voices from out of a quite different world, a world which does not resemble ours even in its shadow-images. But this is only valid if we have so taken up the present mode of thought and condition of spirit that we are able to understand these as soul content.

Quite different is it if we adopt the methods which to-day are alone purposeful. Because of a certain entanglement in natural-scientific education, we are to-day imprisoned in a system of ideas which appear to be almost absolute. It is only through Spiritual science that one can to-day enter with one's feelings and one's life into past epochs of time. From the standpoint of Spiritual science the single epochs of human evolution appear absolutely different from each other; indeed, it is only in Spiritual Science that the possibility arises of entering into the spirit of what men in past epochs of historical development possessed as soul-constitution. How does this possibility arise? It is possible in the following way. I have often explained in lectures that Spiritual Science rests on a definite development of our soul powers. The cognition which we apply in Natural Science and in ordinary life and which in recent times we have carried over into History and into Social Science and even into the science of Religion, I have called in my books 'Objective Cognition.' This is namely what every human being who belongs to our modern civilized life is aware of. We observe the external world through the senses and combine sense impressions through the medium of the intellect. We thereby gain serviceable rules for life, a certain survey over life or over the laws of nature. In this consists what one calls objective cognition.

As characteristic of this we acquire a clear distinction between ourselves and the surrounding world. Ignoring for the moment the different theories of knowledge, the different psychological and physiological hypotheses, we know that we face sense-perception as an Ego. Through the intellect, in which we clearly know ourselves to be active, we gain a kind of synthesis of what is given through the senses. We thus distinguish active, intellectual activity from passive perception. We feel ourselves as an Ego in the environment which reveals itself through sense experience. In other words, man distinguishes himself as a thinking, feeling and willing being from the environment which imparts itself to him through sense revelation.

But I have continually pointed out that beyond this method of cognition other methods can be developed and I have shown in my books How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science how such methods are attained.

The first steps for such cognition—whether one calls it 'higher' or something else does not matter—is Imaginative Cognition. This is distinguished chiefly from objective cognition by its working, not with abstract ideas, but with pictures which are as pregnant and as evident as ordinarily perceived images but which are not transformed into abstract thoughts. In our rela-tion to these pictures, as I have often emphasized, we produce and dominate them just as one does mathematical ideas.

The method of raising oneself to Imaginative Cognition has a quite definite effect on the constitution of the soul. But this result—and I say this with emphasis—lasts only during the time given to Imaginative Cognition. For when the spiritual investigator finds himself once again in ordinary life he makes use of ordinary knowledge, or objective cognition, like anyone else. He is then in the same disposition of soul as another man who is not a spiritual investigator.

During spiritual investigation, within that condition of looking into the spiritual world, the investigator is actually in his imaginative world. But there imaginations are not dreams, they are experienced with as much presence of mind as are mathematical ideas.

With regard to this presence of mind the condition of soul is not changed during imaginative experiences, but with regard to ordinary working experience in the world it is changed. During imaginative experience the feeling is at first that of being one with all that runs its course in our own soul life in time apart from space. Space does not come into question here, only time. I have already explained how, with this entry into imaginative representations, our experiences since birth or since some definite time later stand before us as a tableau arranged in time, a time picture made perceptible. This is difficult for the ordinary intellect to conceive because we are dealing with a picture which is not spatial but must be thought of only in time in which, however, simultaneity is an inherent factor. In ordinary consciousness one has always to do with the single moment. From this one looks back into the past. During this moment the world is seen surrounding us in space and we see ourselves existing in a definite epoch in time distinct from this surrounding world.

In Imaginative Cognition this is different. Here there is no sense in saying: I am living in the definite moment now; for when I behold this picture of life I flow with my life, I am just as much in the time of 10 or 20 years ago as in the present. To a certain degree the Ego is absorbed in the state of 'becoming' which is here perceived. One is united with this perception in time to the state of 'becoming.' It is as if the Ego which usually is experienced in the present moment is spread out over the past. As you can imagine, a transformation of the whole soul life is thus involved during the moments of such experiences. We have to deal with a world of pictures in which we are living. We feel ourselves to a certain extent to be a picture among pictures.

Whoever understands this in the right frame of mind will no longer talk foolishly about the spiritual investigator being subject to some kind of suggestion or hypnosis; for he himself is absolutely clear about the picture and the character of his experience; clear that he is a picture among pictures. But just because of this he knows also that the pictures in his consciousness are just like other ordinary representations, they are copies of a reality; images which he does not yet perceive as reality but the pictures of which he beholds inwardly.

One is in the condition of suggestion or hypnosis only if one has pictures and believes them to be realities like the realities perceptible through the senses. As soon as we are clear regarding the character of our experiences in consciousness, then it is simply a question of an inner possession of the same faculties that one uses in mathematics.

The essential thing that I want especially to emphasize to-day is this merging into what is objective-temporal, into this 'becoming' so that one no longer clings to the 'Now' in time but feels alive in the stream of happenings.

The next stage obtained through exercises, which I have also described in the books named, is that of Inspiration. This is distinguished from the Imagination stage by the picture element almost vanishing. One must first have the pictures in order to obtain correct ideas of Spiritual Science, but one must also be able to extinguish them from consciousness, one must obliterate them arbitrarily. And then the possibility comes for a holding back of something and what is held back is actually a revelation from the spiritual world. In my books named above I speak of inspired ideas of the spiritual world. But even with such experiences one has not yet attained the spiritual world. At first one had pictures, now one has the revelation to a certain extent of the spiritual world, but one stands independent and facing it, recognizing its reality in that one stands outside it.

To-day I should like to consider especially the soul condition when, from out of one's own will, such Inspiration is evolved. The ordinary objective world is then renounced, one knows then what it means to have outside one's body a revelation of the spiritual world. In other words, we can now float in unison not only with time, but with all that is spiritually objective, external to man; we no longer feel the distinction between cosmic existence and Ego existence in the way pertaining to objective cognition, but we experience the Ego and in the Ego the Cosmos in its concrete variety and multiplicity. It is fundamentally the same, at this stage of knowledge whether I say 'I am in the world' or 'The world is in me.' Ordinary methods of expression cease to have validity. Prepositions such as 'in' or 'outside' can only be used when one connects them with another condition. One feels poured out in the whole world not only in the 'becoming' but in everything that appears anew in consciousness as spiritual. One no longer feels this 'outside you' and 'in you.' This is the soul condition which holds us during Inspiration. It is not as if the Ego were submerged, not as if the outpouring of the Ego were identical with a suppression of the Ego, but the Ego in all its activity feels that it has become one with the concrete, manifold varied world it now experiences.

We know ourselves apart from our ideas, our feelings and our will impulses in spite of the fact that these are one with ourselves. So also through Inspiration we feel the manifold nature of the world in spite of knowing that we are really merged together with this world.

In the present epoch of human evolution, these stages of cognition must be evoked by such energies as I have described in my books How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science. They have to be reached consciously. But we can distinguish what constitutes the feeling of the soul in these conditions from what we con-sciously evoke there as content. One can distinguish how one feels in the state of Imagination and Inspiration from what one gains there by working and from what one finally apprehends there.

I do not want to indicate this soul condition through abstract considerations; I would like to describe it concretely. You see, when Goethe learnt to know Herder he, together with Herder, buried himself deep in the work of Spinoza. Whoever knows anything of Herder's biography knows to what an enthusiastic degree Herder admired Spinoza. But if one reads again such a work by Herder as, for instance his 'God,' in which he records his feelings regarding Spinoza's works, one must realize that Herder speaks about Spinoza, from out of Spinoza, but quite differently from Spinoza the philosopher himself. In one point Herder is similar to Spinoza and that is in the soul condition from which he reads Spinoza. Herder's soul was very similar to the soul condition from which Spinoza's Ethics, for example, were written. This condition passed over to Herder and, in a certain way, passed over also to Goethe while he plunged into the study of Spinoza with Herder. But while Herder had a certain satisfaction in this soul condition, Goethe had none. Goethe felt deeply that passing over into the object, that merging together of the Ego into the outer world, so magnificently alluded-to by Spinoza when he speaks in absolute passionless contemplation, as if the Cosmic ALL itself spoke, as if he would forget himself and as if his words were merely the means through which the Cosmos itself were speaking. Goethe could experience what can thus be experienced in objectivity, and in this connexion he felt just as Herder felt: but he was not satisfied. He still felt a longing for something else and it seemed to him that in spite of the depth of feeling acquired, Spinoza's philosophy cannot by any means fill the whole of man's needs. Fundamentally, what Goethe felt in this way towards Spinoza is but another 'nuance' of his feeling towards the northern world. The civilization accessible at Weimar dissatisfied him, and, you know how he was driven south, to Italy through this feeling.

In Italy he at first saw only what the Italians created on the basis of Greek art, but something like a reconstruction of the Greek spirit and method in Art arose in his soul. One can feel deeply what is characteristic of Goethe at this period if one reads what he wrote to his Weimar friends while standing before those works of art which called up before his soul the creative art faculty of the Greeks. 'There is Necessity, there is God' (with reference to Herder's work' God' inspired by Spinoza). Goethe did not find in Spinoza that Necessity he wanted: he found it in what was presented to his soul during his Italian journey. Out of what fashioned itself then there arose in him the possibility of developing his own special outlook on Nature. One knows how he brought to expression his longing for an exposition of Nature in abstract, lyrical words in a 'Prose-Hymn,' before he travelled south. And one sees how what was poured out in abstract lyrical form in this prose hymn 'Nature' became in Italy concrete perception. How for example, the plant nature appeared before his soul as supersensible perceptible pictures and how he then discovered the 'primal plant archetype' among the manifold plant forms. This archetype is an ideal-real form which can only be seen spiritually, but in this spirit form it is real, lying at the base of all individual plants.

We can see how from now on the object of his search is to bring before his soul those archetypes for all nature which are one and many. We can see how his knowledge rests on the transforming pictures, from the single plant's leaf-sequence on to the blossom and the fruit. He wishes to hold fast in pictures what is in process of becoming. From Spinoza's ethics which he read with Herder there streamed something that seemed invisible, resounding from out of another world, a world in which man can immerse himself with his feelings if he attains a passionless contemplation. But with Spinoza this was not perceptible. The longing for vision lived in Goethe's soul and this longing was fulfilled in a certain way when he was stimulated by those pictures appearing like resurrected art creations of the Greeks. And it was also satisfied when he was able to conjure pictorially before his soul the primal archetypes of Nature.

What was it that Goethe thus experienced in sequences? It was that soul feeling—not soul content, not that which one can investigate—but the soul feeling which, on the one hand is Inspiration and on the other hand is Imagination. Neither Goethe nor Herder had the possibility in their time of looking into the spiritual world as can be done to-day through spiritual Science, but as a premonition of this spiritual science the feeling prevalent in them was the feeling which appears in special strength and intensity in Inspiration and Imagination. Herder and Goethe felt themselves in the mood of Inspiration while they read Spinoza and Goethe felt himself in the mood of Imagination when lie formulated an outlook on nature through the Italian works of Art. Out of this Inspiration mood of Spinoza Goethe experienced the longing for the Imaginative mood. What he discovered as the archetype of plant and animal, this was not yet real Imagination, for Goethe did not possess the method of acquiring real imagination. What he possessed was the mood for Imagination. He could kindle the mood in himself, not because lie strove towards real, pure imaginations freely created inwardly, but because he experienced in himself sensible supersensible pictures stimulated by what plants, animals and what the cloud world express. He could find himself in the mood which accompanies Imagination just as in reading Spinoza he found himself in the mood of Inspiration. He recognized the soul condition in which man experiences what he utters in such a way that he uses words so as to allow the secrets of the Cosmos to be uttered, to a certain extent, by the Cosmos itself.

Whoever has really felt the transition in the soul which can take place through reading Spinoza's Ethics as a mathematical treatise, becoming immersed in the ideas as mathematical ideas so as to rise to the Scientia Intuitiva which speaks in Spinoza as consciously as though the world were using him as its mouthpiece,—any one who has felt thus will realize what Goethe and Herder felt in Spinoza. How the one, Herder, was satisfied and how the other lived with longing more in a mood of Inspiration. And we can say that a certain soul mood proceeds from what spiritual scientific investigation offers to-day as methods to attain Imagination and Inspiration. We can follow historically how Goethe, without having Inspiration or Imagination, tends towards these moods.

Now if we go further we can regard Spinoza more exactly. When we study him historically (not as is often done to-day by the historians of philosophy) one is led from Spinoza to know who stimulated him. These were the adherents of Arabism, living in the South-west of Europe, adherents to the Arab-Semitic outlook on the world. He who understands such things will be able to experience once again that which flowed from the Kabbalah into the ideas of Spinoza. One is then led further back beyond Arabism to the East and one learns to know what comes forth in Spinoza is the conception of an ancient view of the world. In the old Eastern world what appears is the same as in Spinoza only not in intellectual form but as ancient Eastern inspiration. This inspiration was not acquired as ours is to-day, but it existed among certain oriental races as a natural gift and went through an especially profound development there.

If we go back to the Egypt from which Moses created his views, to the sources from whence the Greeks created, we find that what came to Egypt from the Asiatic east is developed to a very high degree. The Egyptians before the 8th pre-Christian century lived instinctively in their environment so that they felt themselves one with it, so that what they discerned of their environment they experienced in inner contemplation.

Now let us turn to the Imagination, to what Goethe longed for when he felt the mood of Inspiration. At first he recognized this to a certain degree in the art of Greece. He sensed in vision what Herder felt in concepts, in the world of perceptions as these appeared contemplatively with Spinoza. And what Goethe realized he deepened into a view of outer Nature so that later on he could utter, from out of his spirit, this deep saying:

'He to whom Nature reveals her manifest secret, yearns for Art, Nature's worthiest interpreter.'

In Art, Goethe saw through to the basis of Imagination, and by relying on evolution in Nature he sought that soul mood which a man enters if he become one with this evolution. This conquest of oneself, together with maintaining oneself in Imagination, was revealed to Goethe through the art of the Greeks, and he sought it not only in Art but as the basis for a view of Nature. And if we follow on to further consequences this special element which Goethe thus developed, we attain in a fully conscious manner Imaginative Perception.

If we follow this method of Goethe back to its origins, as we follow Spinoza's method, we are led to the Greeks, and from them further East. From the Greeks we come back to that view of the world which existed in the development of the so-called Chaldees, who again created from out of the Persian world and out of the entire Asiatic world. And just as we look back through the soul mood of Spinoza to ancient Egypt, so we look through the Goethe-Greek view of Art to that view of evolution which obtained in ancient Chaldea. One can follow, even into the details, this opposition of Chaldea and Egypt in Goethe and Spinoza.

We can thus go back in feeling to earlier epochs of time if we do not entangle ourselves in what alone is regarded to-day as absolutely correct and exact. If we attempt to press forward to other kinds of ideas, to Imagination, to Inspiration, if we know the moods of soul pertaining to Imagination and Inspiration, then we can go back in cognition to earlier epochs. Whoever reads Spinoza today merely with the intellect which has been so strongly developed with us, and as if everything previous were fundamentally but childish ideas, he cannot feel how in Spinoza there lived as a mood what was productive intuitively and creatively as the highest blossom in ancient Egyptian civilized life. He cannot feel how the soul mood of the ancient Chaldeans lived on in that which ensouled Goethe as he uttered the words: 'There is Necessity. There is God,' or 'He to whom Nature reveals her manifest secret yearns for Art, Nature's worthiest interpreter.' Whoever bases himself merely on the abstract thought content of to-day, does not come back to the earlier historical epochs. Therefore there results for him that abyss to which I pointed at the beginning of this lecture. Only he can come into ancient epochs of humanity who immerses himself in this basic mood as it appears in Spinoza and Goethe. No Egyptian Myth, least of all the Osiris-Isis Myth, can be really experienced in its import if one does not base oneself in this mood. People may be ever so clever and give ever so many allegorical, symbolical interpretations. This is not the point. It is a question of feeling with one's entire being what was felt in ancient times. One may think this or that about ancient ideas, one may choose clever or foolish symbols, it is not a question of choice but of experiencing a basic mood. Through this we can come to what lived in an earlier epoch. One cannot find what existed in ancient Chaldea by the present means of investigating, but only by being able really to immerse oneself in the mood of Imagination which actually appeared to a certain extent with the Chaldeans as a view of the world. They lived in a 'becoming.'

One understands what contrasts existed between the Chaldeans and Egyptians, for instance, as contemporary races. Trade relation went from Chaldea to Egypt and from Egypt to Chaldea. Their culture was so fashioned that they could write letters to each other. Everything consti-tuting external life stood in regulated interchange.

Their inner soul constitution was however quite different. An Imaginative element lived with the Chaldeans, an Inspirational one with the Egyptians. There was, with the Chaldeans, an external perception, such as reappeared, intensified, in Goethe. With the Egyptians, from what proceeded out of inner being, the soul, there was that which later on appeared at a higher stage from out of the inner being of Spinoza. One can follow this into minute details. I will give an instance and one will see how such details are to be understood on the basis of these general moods.

The Chaldeans had fundamentally a highly developed astronomy. They developed it by means of cleverly devised instruments, but above all by a quite definite kind of perception which was an instinctive Imagination. They came thereby to divide the course of time into Day and Night so that each was regarded as 12 hours long. But how did they divide the days and nights? They made the long summer day into 12 hours and they also made the short summer night into 12 hours. In winter they similarly divided the short day into 12 hours and the long night also into 12 hours, so that the winter hours by day were short and the summer day hours were long. Thus with the Chaldeans the hours in the different seasons had quite different lengths of time. This means that the Chaldeans so lived in the sense of 'becoming' that they carried this 'becoming' into Time. When they lived in the outer world in summer they could not let the hours run as they let them run in winter. In summer the course of time, the 'becoming' was drawn out. This "becoming was inwardly moveable, not rigid as it is with us. Time was elastic with them.

How was it with the Egyptians? The Egyptians reckoned 365 days to the year. Through this they were obliged to add supplementary days at definite times, but they could not decide to depart in any way from their 365 days to the year. In reality the year is longer than 365 days, but this length remained immoveable with them up to the third pre-Christian century, and thereby the perceptible outer world got beyond their control. Through this the Festivals changed. For instance, a festival of early autumn became a festival of late autumn, and so on. Thus the Egyptians so lived into the course of time that they had a conception of time which was not applicable to outer perception. Here we see an important contrast. The Chaldeans lived so intensely in the externally perceptible that they made time elastic. The Egyptians made time so rigid, experiencing what lives subjectively from within, that they could not even correct it through intercalary days in order to make the feasts of the year harmonize with the seasons; and so they let the external festivals fall on the wrong months while the whole external world thus became unsteady. They did not find themselves in the outer world, they remained in their own inner being. That is the mood of Inspiration which we must have in order to come to real cognition. The Egyptians had it as instinctive Inspiration.

As a man knowing the higher worlds one should be as mobile on the one hand as the Chaldeans and on the other hand be able to enter deeply to inner being as the Egyptians could. A rigid system of time was the basis of their whole life, even of their social and historical life. This contrast between the mood of naïve Inspiration and naïve Imagination thus comes to expression in History.

Goethe, as a complete being, re-experienced the experience of Spinoza as a continuation of Orientalism and Egypt. Goethe experienced his longing for a complete adaptation to the external world from out of his inner feeling where everything is invisible, from whence a man looks out into the world and does not recognize things because he judges them according to what the inner being offers, so that the things are beyond his control. While Goethe felt the mood of Egypt, he sought to experience in himself the mood of Chaldea, as that of the other pole. If a man re-create out of his own nature historical moods, one can then see the threads extend from a newer over to an earlier epoch, and one hopes to reunite the different epochs of time through this observation.

This now is essential, that one does not merely designate from documents what happened in this or that epoch, but that one learns as a complete human being to immerse oneself in these epochs, in what was felt and inwardly experienced by men and by races in the different epochs, in what mood of soul they existed. Their external fate was the result of this inner experience, of this peculiar soul constitution.

This is the way that will lead us above such ideas as 'Does the egg come first or the hen?' and can lead us into the deeper regions of reality. It is the way which shows us how each time we observe the reality we must press forward beyond what is given by external objective cognition.

And if it is often emphasized that one must learn from history about our activities to-day and in the future, then attention must be directed to the manner in which we should learn. We should so learn that what we experienced with our soils in past epochs should become living. The abyss of which I have spoken is bridged through this consideration. We are able to look hack into the metamorphosis of the soul constitution of men during the different epochs of time, and ardour and thoughtfulness will flow into our present soul constitution, so that we find the necessary thoughtfulness to build those ideas which are needed for the healing of the social relationships of to-day. But the necessary ardour must be kindled to have the force to attain full consciousness and to express in ideas that Imagination and Inspiration which formerly were developed instinctively.

[ 1 ] My dear friends! Today we need to pursue what we had started yesterday, by adding details to some of the requests. Above all questions, as difficult as they may be—be it in the religious sense, or anthroposophic sense—will be those related to knowledge which reaches into the future. Such knowledge into the future can only be understood if one is able to discuss all prerequisites for such knowledge, so to speak. You know, of course, that outer materialistic science also has certain knowledge of the future which is quite possible.

[ 2 ] Solar and lunar eclipses can be predicted to the second, and these predictive calculations depend upon having a definite insight into the details of the phenomena. In outer materialistic science it relates to this insight of the context of the phenomena being hidden, because it is presented in formulae; the formulae are learnt and one no longer really knows where they came from; they actually originate from observations made in the very same area to which they are applied. Nobody would be able to calculate the solar and lunar eclipse predictions if solar and lunar eclipses were not originally observed, forming a basis for observation and formulas obtained from these, which now continue as based on the belief of a regularity applied to these phenomena. The psychological process which takes place here is far more complicated than one is often aware of today. Things start becoming particularly complicated if they are not applicable only to outer, spatial mechanical or mathematical kinds of laws, but if they deal with what happens inwardly, in the intrinsic sense, in the course of the world. Because these questions are based on the prerequisites of modern consciousness they can barely be studied, that's why we find modern Bible explanations—and the priest must also be a Bible explainer—so difficult, like chapter 13 of the Mark Gospel and everything relating to this chapter. Besides that, in later translations this particular chapter has become extraordinarily difficult to understand because it relates to circumstances which have become the most corrupt.

[ 3 ] Now I would like, before I proceed into the situation of this chapter, to say something about the predictions in the Christian sense. You have the feeling that within the development of Christendom there had already been, especially in olden times, references to future events, and future events of the most important kind had already played a major role. You also get the feeling that present day people hardly believe such indications, and that they actually can hardly reckon with such indications being anything but illusion. One always gets the feeling, when such things do happen—in modern language use it would be called prophesy—that something else must play along, other than real knowledge of what will happen in the future. You must however make yourself familiar with it, it is after all also present in our time, in the time of intellectualism—and rightly so in this time—it has eradicated certain traditional, inherited, atavistic clairvoyance. There are clairvoyant people of the older kind who are still serving certain theorists, also of the 19th century, as examples from which they wanted to prove the existence of a supernatural world they could not experience for themselves. We only need to consider such a type of prediction, then we will see—quite equitably, whether we believe it or not—what is actually meant. Such cases could happen, and it has, if I take it as typical, and still occurred numerous times in the course of the last century, whereas in the present time it shows a certain decline. Such abilities are still common in country people. It could happen that someone sees in an advantageous moment in a dream, how he, riding a horse, falls and hurts himself. Such seeing is certainly a sight into the future and one can, even by being careful, find out everything with all the scientific chicaneries that exclude an influence on following events, one cannot speak otherwise but admit a true looking into the future exists. This is something which had been recorded by the most earnest theorists everywhere, up to the middle of the 19th century. You can find this writing originating from otherwise quite serious natural scientists from the first half of the 19th century, discussed in numerous journals. As I've said, whoever observes people today must see that such atavistic abilities have gone backwards and become drowned out by intellectual life; a condition which completely excludes looking into the future.

[ 4 ] Now, as we've said, we must at least familiarise ourselves with such abilities which can be called looking into the future, abilities present in ancient times and certainly understood in the surroundings of Christ Jesus, when he spoke in a certain way about the future. In order not to be misunderstood, I want to call your attention straight away to something else. When you take literature which appears as Christian literature according to the actual Gospels, according to the letters of Paul and others, of direct disputes attributed to the disciples, and you take the later literature of the so-called church fathers—under 'church father' it is meant those who were still students of disciples or at least scholars or the apostles not too long ago—when you take the literature of the church fathers, then you will often discover three characteristics.

The first characteristic is that these writings have become dried up of an actual living understanding for the Old Testament. You will clearly notice how everywhere in these writings, up to the "Shepherd of Hermas," the craving comes to the fore to depict the Old Testament intellectually, in this case interpreting it allegorically, therefore it is pulled out of a real encounter to a mere concept, into what is, so to say, intellectual. The restyling of concepts into allegory puts up with the tradition of the Old Testament as a tradition of facts, told as facts—in reality these are to be understood through the intellect. That is the first essential characteristic. [ 5 ] The second essential characteristic is that the Second Coming of the Christ is clearly mentioned everywhere in the writings, that is to say, exactly what is referred to in the 13th chapter of Mark's Gospel in the most delicate sense of the word. It was certainly, one must admit, the belief in the entire spirit of the church fathers' writings from the 4th century that the Second Coming of Christ can be predicted in the near future. They called people's attention to how the old world would fall apart and how the Christ would reappear, and added to this, the imagination was created that Christ would appear in a similar way, in the most wonderful way, strolling over the earth, as it had been the case before.

[ 6 ] The third element in the writings of the church fathers is what actually contributed a great deal to the church doctrine. Everywhere a kind of legal element developed, a warning to obey the bishops, the dogmas, to submit to the constitution in the developing church. So everywhere something was taking place which one could be referred to as this: To the believers it was said that they will fall into bad luck if they develop anything which comes from within themselves, while they are searching for a religious path.—The religious path given by the church's constitution and the legal constitution, which ordered obedience to the church, was something that has continued particularly in Catholicism to the widest extent, which even as an experience today can still oppose one very forcefully.

[ 7 ] I once, for example, had a conversation in Rome with a priest brought up in quite the Jesuit manner—it was very hard, to get this conversation going—indicating all the sources which gave him the basis of his teaching and also showing the way in which he was to arrive at the teaching content. He pointed out that one then had the written words containing the dogmatic church content, and those were all things which needed no proof, they simply had to be believed, in as far as dogma was concerned. He pointed out that only interpretation was allowed, one was not to criticise or prove anything in the Gospels, while reading them again and again; one had the church tradition which flowed into the breviary, and then one had a living example of the life of the saints.

[ 8 ] The former could not very well form the subject of a discussion involving this cleric because one had to admit that what the Catholic Church wanted to protect was presented in such an ingrained sense, that there was no way around it. But the latter, the relationship of the Catholic clerics to the saints, that of course is something which creates certain difficulties even with the Catholic clergy when they think about it, and here an objection could be used. Saints are fixed personalities valued by the church for their faultless manner in their direct, vital relationship to the supersensible worlds, either through the understanding of how they had found the revelation out of the supersensible world through their inner experience, or that they performed deeds which can only be understood through accepting these deeds as having been performed with divine assistance.

You may know that such a canonization in the Catholic Church requires a very detailed ceremony, preceded by the exact determination of how the relevant person lived and what he thought, a process which should not last years, but centuries. Further, this examination must end with a ceremony which exist of all those who come forward, who have something well founded to present regarding the living exchange the personality has in relation to the divine, and to some extent always enter into what is said in such a way, that the so-called Advocatus diaboli, the representative of the demonic world, who has to refute everything that the other side has to say for the relevant canonisation, is brought to attention. So there will be an extensive trial, at which the being who should be regarded as the Diabolus, the devil, will have on the other side, the Christ representative, for the Christ-like will always be drawn into the discussion with the devilish representative, when a saint is to be recognised.

[ 9 ] Now of course I could have interrupted this conversation with him, regarding the church always admitting to the possibility of lively exchanges with the divine, so that supersensible experiences were possible. It is however the dogma of the Catholic Church that such supersensible experiences which could take place, are devilish and that they must be avoided, one must be forced to flee from them. Of course, it is certainly the Catholic Church's dogmatism which says that all of Anthroposophy is objectionable from the basis that it claims to touch on insights in the supersensible worlds. For this reason, Anthroposophy is rejected because such an insight can only be arrived at with the help of the Devil; it is therefore evil. That is something which is judged by the Catholic Church as quite necessary, quite consistent. Things are already such that they must not be blurred. Whoever thinks reconciliation between Anthroposophy and the Catholic Church can without further ado be brought about, is mistaken. The Initiate knows, for the Catholic Church to be consequent from their side, it will regard Anthroposophy as devilish, and more than ever, the Catholic church today has allowed such consequences to become its custom.

[ 10 ] As an answer from the priest I received his claim that any exchange with the supersensible worlds may in no way be wished for; if it happens in this world it must be made clear that the divine principle has been besieged by the devil.—So, I said to him: If you now have such an exchange with the supersensible worlds, would you consider that as devilish?—He answered: Yes, he has on his side the talent to merely work with literature of the saints in order to know that something like that exists; but he doesn't desire to become a saint himself.—This is now the last sentence which would be expressed by these people, this person also did not express it because if he did, then the last sentence would be that he says: To regard me as a saint, the church has the right to wait for two to three centuries.

[ 11 ] We can draw all kinds of conclusions from this. You could for example connect all kinds of evil thinking habits to it which is relevant particularly at present, when someone says that everything which can be said about the causes of the war, one would only really know about after decades when all the archives have been combed through. If you have any sense for reality you would know that in a couple of decades everything would be so blurred that no truth would be discovered in the archives in order to determine something as some tradition, and you would know that one, I could call it, very insidious step could renounce what has been said out of the consciousness of the present. This is also something which must be considered more deeply, but it only belongs in parenthesis here: I only want to draw your attention to it, that with the proclamation of a saint, waiting for such a long time, things in question could have become thoroughly blurred, and you can have insight into the Catholic Church's extraordinarily difficult burden towards its real progress.

[ 12 ] These three characteristics you will find in post apostolic literature during the first four centuries: the allegoric explanation of the Old Testament, the reference to the Second Coming of Christ and the destruction of the old world, and the admonition of obedience to the superiors. We need to focus our present interest primarily on the middle one, the reference to the Second Coming of Christ, because to this reference we need to link line 6 of the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Mark: Many will come as though they came in my name and say: I am he, and will lead many astray.—In this chapter you find a remarkable reference; many will come and appear in the name of Christ, and they will forthwith be referred to one or another person who also designate themselves as Christ. Here you see something extraordinary. On this basis it is extraordinary to see—I will speak more closely about these things but I'm leading up to it—that already at this point in the Mark Gospel the reference is linked to the view of the church fathers of the post apostolic time. By presenting it thus, that the Christ will reappear in this way, it is at the same time the fulfilment of the prophecy that tempters will come who all want to be designated as Christs; and this is what also happened in the first centuries, in this sense many came to the fore, who actually referred to themselves as Christ. An astonishing amount of literature has been lost in the first centuries—these things can actually only be found through spiritual science.

[ 13 ] So we must say - and I have expressly spoken about it—if we look at the totality of facts, the Christian church fathers lived in a misunderstanding of the Gospels, perhaps even a really bad misunderstanding of the Gospels. When we actually bring our feelings into the Gospels, as I have shown you yesterday, when we really with our whole heart and entire soul find ourselves with ever more wonder towards the Gospels, then we would find it inordinately difficult to find our way with our intellect to the first church fathers. We discover with the first church fathers that we relatively early come to the end of understanding because the Gospel itself leads us into immeasurable depths, and we very clearly experience that in a certain way we actually feel uncomfortably touched when after our wonder at the Gospels we now turn to something which appeared in the church fathers.

[ 14 ] Now, this leads us on to something else. Later we will talk about the justification of prophecy but now we want to find our way into the situation in terms of contemporary history and so it appears to me, that if we want to understand the 13th chapter of Mark's Gospel, before anything else, we need to pose this important question: Can the fulfilment of the prophecy be asserted from a correct pursuit of the facts? Surely you first need to be able to understand in what way the prophecy should be fulfilled, and then you could ask, what are the facts? Then, isn't it true, that with something like the destruction of Jerusalem it is easy to raise a question, but when it comes to the destruction of the world which we are still expecting, and regarding the coming of the kingdom of God, modern thought only has information that it still has not happened, that under all circumstances it must have been an illusion, that you had in all cases to do with false prophesies; and then you only have the choice to either interpret these things out of the Gospels, or to follow what the first church fathers did with the Old Testament through allegorizing, or even to do anything as long as it is abstract. All of this is being done against the total feeling which is necessary in relating to the Gospels, which does not arise here. The most important question seems to me to be the impact of the prophecy, because that helps towards understanding the process of prophecy.

[ 15 ] I tell you, my dear friends, for me, the destruction of the world and the coming of the kingdom of God have simply already been fulfilled. We must swing around to look at the world in such a way that we learn to represent this statement as having been fulfilled. Towards this we certainly must penetrate more deeply with spirit into the words of Christ Jesus, as opposed to what usually happens.

[ 16 ] Those who were around Jesus knew exactly, just as the poor shepherds in the fields knew in their inner sight: Christ had arrived. They still knew precisely that the entire life of human beings on earth would have been different in ancient times and it would become something different at this historical moment, even if little by little. Gentle feelings are still around at present, but only gentle feelings. I have such a quiet feeling about it but that must be trained in an intensive manner, for example, as found in the art historian Herman Grimm, and perhaps it will interest you to look into something like this as well because psychologically it leads to what we need to attain, little by little.

The art historian Herman Grimm had roughly the following view: when we go back with our examination of history, from our time to the Middle Ages and further back to the migration of peoples, back to the Roman empire, we still may have the possibility to understand the history. We have such feelings today, we could say, through which we can understand the roman imperial age and roughly the roman republic. We are still capable today, to understand this. When we go back into Greek history with the same kind of soul understanding then we enter into the highest form of illusion if we believe we can understand an Alkibiades, Sophocles, Homer or someone similar. Between grasping the Roman world and the Greek world there is an abyss, and what has been inherited from the Greek world, so Herman Grimm says, is basically a fairy tale; here starts the world of fairy tales, a world into which we no longer can enter with our present day understanding. We must be satisfied with the inherited images presented to us, but we must take these in a general sense as a world of fairy tales, without intellectual understanding.—It still has a soft echo of something which human beings need to create; an inner feeling towards the historical development of mankind.

[ 17 ] This sensitivity of feeling will of course become completely distorted by those whose opinions are according to modern evolutionary theories, which simply go back from the present and consider modern human beings as the most perfect now than what was initially achieved. Here one arrives at a perspective from which one no longer can understand those who were around Christ. One also understands why, out of what soul foundations, such experiences and imaginations of today have become clothed in the scientific view when for instance you look at the answers the imminent thinker, Huxley, gave an archbishop; his words are quite understandable according to the modern perspective. The archbishop said the human being descended from this divine being; the godhead placed him without sin in the world, and that's who has descended into the present human condition.—This archbishop's opinion couldn't but let Huxley reply to this sentence with: I would surely be ashamed as a human being if I have descended so far from my divine origin, but I can be very proud from my animal standpoint of how far I have worked towards who I now am.—

Here you can precisely see the moral impulses entering into what we call objective science. The need to revert to moral impulses is everywhere for those who tinker with science, if this tinkering it is to be believed.

[ 18 ] You must be very clear about the ancient human being before the time of Christ, the heathen person, who without sin, was aware that everywhere, when he observed nature or when he looked into human life, he encountered the divine and nature simultaneously. In the rock spring he didn't just hear the rushing sound we hear today, but he heard what he perceived and interpreted as the voice of the divine. In every animal he saw something that had, so to speak, been brought about from a supersensible world, but despite its deep fall from the supersensible world, if one really understands it, still totally leads back to the contemplation of this supersensible world. In this way the ancient people could not imagine the supersensible world without the divine, being part of it.

[ 19 ] In Judaism, quite an intense feeling came to the fore. It was this: In whatever form or way the divine appears, man may not claim himself to also have the divine appearing in himself in a perfect form, but only at most as an inspiration, but not in its complete form. This was something the orthodox Jew didn't even want to touch in his thoughts; that which he still permitted for the rest of nature, that everywhere the divine may be revealed, and what he considered facts in his Old Testament, this he didn't allow to happen in people. For the surrounding heathen world, for the old way of observation, it was self-explanatory that the mineral kingdom, the plant and animal kingdoms were consequentially built on one another, and so, just like the rest of nature was divine, so also the human being is an incarnation of the divine. At the same time thousands had a firm belief that the human being was ever more losing the possibility through his outer life, to realize God within.

So, it had been an original human ability to create the divine within, but people gradually lost this ability. Those who surrounded Christ experienced that the divine, which had been in humanity earlier and which also appeared in the outer world, this divine element no longer could appear in humanity; it was given to the earth, it appeared everywhere through the Son of God but stopped appearing in mankind and can no longer appear in human children. It must come once again from elements outside the earth so that the last incarnation of the divine, which actually becomes a new time, can catch up, but it must come from outside—if I might express myself roughly—from the stock out of that which the earth had originally loaned.

[ 20 ] From this point of view—knowledge, at that time, my dear friends, was filled with feeling, which as such took place in immediate experience—from this point of view those around Christ looked on with feeling at that which had invaded the Roman Empire and was now being fulfilled in Asia. What was this, which was accomplished through the invasion of the Roman Empire into Asia? You need to look at what actually penetrated the consciousness of that time. The ongoing war was at that time outer events which in their final dependency were also derived from divine will. However, this was not the most important aspect; the most important thing was that those who sat on the thrones were Roman Caesars who through religion presented themselves as incarnations of gods, and that, as lawful. Caesar Augustus was according to law a recognised incarnation of the godhead. Some Caesars tried, through ceremonies which had been fulfilled in ancient times, to bring about a ritual action which was so close to human truths, to inner human truths, that the Caesars could allow these ceremonies to be fulfilled but transformed into earthly existence, in order for the divine to actually act, for the divine to be made real.

Penetration of these secret divine mysteries into the world can perhaps not be more strongly symbolized than through relating the story of (the Roman Emperor) Commodus, (son of Marcus Aurelius) when he searched for initiation and allowed the ceremony to be fulfilled, because the ceremony also included the symbolic slaughter of an uninitiated person; at his mystery initiation a man was really killed, murdered. In brief, one felt that by this penetration of the Roman Empire, the divine disappeared, and the divine is presumed to be that, thus in the presumption of the divine there is an incarnation of the ungodly, for man must incarnate into something. The divine was not incarnating, it had stopped, so if the divine was not incarnating then in meant the ungodly was incarnating, the enemy of the divine. You could interpret it as you wish, but you will only be right if you understand that those who surrounded Christ Jesus, had said: In the Roman Empire, which is spreading in the world, is the incarnation of the enemy of the divine.

[ 21 ] This is elementary, this is truly a discerning feeling and discernment in Christianity for those who were around Christ Jesus. Never again, from the Christian point of view, would that which had developed further as a dependence on the Roman Empire, be seen as anything other than an earthy bound realm, an empire of the world in opposition to the realm of Heaven. This means in other words: this world which existed then, the divine world, perished, it went under due to the Roman Empire. The downfall was accomplished in the first three centuries up to the middle of the 15th century, as I've mentioned to you. The downfall was accomplished. It is a perished world that now exists, a world that is no longer divine, a world that only gives news of the divine. One must turn to the last, who had become the first, to the divine incarnation of Christ in Jesus, who through his own power gave the possibility, through the handling—if I could use such an expression—through the handling of that which is associated with the fulfilment of the Holy Spirit in one, not by nature, but in a direct way to reach the divine-spirit world, which one can also find in nature when one has found the following of Christ Jesus through the spirit.

The world is coming to an end. The Christ is no longer coming as an earth dweller, but out of the clouds, out of the cosmos he will come again. In this way he comes to everyone who has the awareness of what was meant by the world before, which perished with the Roman Empire.

[ 22 ] My dear friends! It is an unpleasant truth for those who want to be within today's consciousness; they don't know what to do about it; it is an unpleasant truth certainly for those who from an erroneous view want to apologize for Christianity before the present time. It is an extraordinary chapter in the involvement of today's world when people come and say Christianity is impractical, Christianity is something which allows escape from the world, Christianity has a mystical atavistic element which makes it unworldly. Then others come along who want to excuse Christianity by discussing away what some are saying who considered the world in a strong spiritual light and who still have a relationship to the world. The excuse is given that things don't need to be understood, they are really not meant so badly regarding fleeing from the world and with it coming to an end, it has continued its progress from the first centuries up to now; the world is just and anything some fanatical priest or fanatical pastor claims about the downfall of the world from God, is really not so seriously meant, it has only come about through the Catholic influence; one must wipe it out.

In brief, my dear friends, the largest part of pastoral and theological work exists in this. Place your hand on your heart and learn through it, feel out of your heart what I have said regarding the necessity for the renewal of Christianity, for the Christian impulse, because the biggest part of what is being preached and discussed exists in the continuous retreat from the recognition of gross intellectualism and the piecemeal eradication of everything out of Christianity, which actually should be understood in a profound way through strong thinking, through such a powerful thinking that the world finds God through Christ, and when God has been discovered through Christ, which can also become practical because in the discovery of the divine, the divine grasped in thought, the godless world can be included to bring about the re-introduction of the divine.

[ 23 ] These powers must be carried in those of you who today want to speak about the renewal of Christianity, you must be able to say: Yes, today we have to look at the divinized world which started with the Roman Empire and goes back to the Roman Empire; but in this world we must not look for the divine. The world, however, can't remain without the divine. We must grasp that which does not come from the earth, something—speaking symbolically—which comes from the clouds, in a spiritual manner. We must find the Kingdom of Heaven in the place of the divinized earth kingdom. The Kingdom of Heaven has opened up and is to be found; and for this reason, we must be there to bring the divine into our earthly world. The downfall of the earth has taken place and continues to happen more and more. When we look at this earthly realm, we are then looking at the heavenly realm which Jesus Christ has brought. You must see, my dear friends, the realm of Heaven spiritually. We must see its arrival; we must be able to feel the fulfilling of what Christ meant when he spoke about the coming of his kingdom, the kingdom which he had to bring into the world and which does not speak out of nature; when it can however work into nature, then one can speak about this kingdom. This is primarily the feeling he stimulated in those who directly surrounded him. This is also what we must strive for in our words, when we really want to speak about these things.

[ 24 ] We see how it is stated in about the first 3 sentences of the Mark Gospel: After Christ left the temple—the temple in which one also heard something within the outer world of the divine—one of his disciples says to him: 'Look, what magnificent stones, and wonderful buildings.' Jesus however said to him: 'You see only the large buildings. There will not be one stone left on top of another, without man taking part in the process of destruction because from now on, all of the outer, ungodly world begins to become a world of destruction.' And he went away and spoke intimately. On the Mount of Olives, he spoke either intimately by himself through teaching people how to pray, or he spoke only to his most intimate disciples, to Peter, James, John and Andrew. To Peter, James, John and Andrew he only spoke about spiritual events as observed from the perspective of divine realms in contrast to destructive events in the world facing destruction.

[ 25 ] You see, I'm neither speaking allegorically, nor symbolically. If you felt that way, you would be putting it in my words. I'm speaking directly out of the situation experienced as it occurred, by me trying, certainly in the words of current speech, to indicate these things. I ask you to now take note of the situation. In order to experience the content of the 13th chapter of St Mark we are taken up the Mount of Olives. It ends with the word: "Awake!"—immediately followed by us being taken to the Last Supper—we are led to the first impetus for the coming of the divine kingdom through Christ placing it in front of us.

[ 26 ] Tomorrow we will continue speaking about it. What I'm saying to you is quite new, by addressing our current consciousness. I certainly want to speak honestly, as these things present themselves to me, because I believe that by only pointing to the very first elements can one come to a true and honest conviction of what is necessary today.

My dear friends! There is something that we must do before we can introduce and cultivate worship, and this is something that is not easily understood, especially in Protestant circles, because in these circles religion is not based on worship and what worship stands for is less understood, felt and appreciated. Worship naturally stands as a revelation of the spiritual. Now I assume that what you have either heard directly from me here in discussions that were actually always meant for you in the esoteric sense, or what has come to you from such discussions through others, that this is already bearing on your soul with a certain power, with a certain force, and that you are aware of how seriously this movement must be meant if it is to take place at all. Therefore, under these circumstances, I would like to say what needs to be said today.

In the true sense of the word, churches and religious communities should always be founded out of the spiritual world in accordance with the order of the world. And in essence, churches and religious communities have been founded out of the spiritual order of the world. This spiritual order of the world underlies, of course, everything that appears here on earth as a manifestation of the spiritual, even if, for example, a spiritual mission is not necessarily present in sectarian movements. In the case of a particular sect there may even be the illusion of a spiritual mission, or perhaps the whole justification is more or less conscious or even unconscious. But you will always notice, even in such cases where untruthfulness instead of truth is present, that those who found such a thing usually invoke at least an alleged impulse from the spiritual world. In any case, however, what goes out into the world as a religious community, as it is meant here, must derive the impulse for it from the spiritual world. This must be particularly emphasized for the reason that both the Catholic communities, that is, the Roman Catholic and also the Eastern Catholic communities, and the Protestant communities have failed in this respect, only in two different directions: The Catholic community, which essentially, though transformed beyond recognition, has retained the cultus that is older than Christianity on earth and also older than its present form, the Catholic community has failed by gradually allowing the center of gravity to shift into a secular institution built on external domination, into which, of course, the personal impulses of the individual rulers then always play a role. You only have to go back to the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite to see clear evidence that the community of priests – if I may put it this way, the hierarchy of priests on earth – is intended as an image of the spiritual hierarchy above. It is intended only as an image, and this, according to the view of the early Christian period, precludes the church from exercising power in the sense of a secular imperial principle here on earth. It is true that the Catholic Church has the possibility within itself of placing one or other of its priests in an objective position and of making the cult there or there true; on the other hand, as an institution, it has completely lost the possibility of being an be an image of a spiritual reality, although there are priests within the Catholic Church through whose own purity, I might say, the impurity that enters the cultus through the personal element is in turn thrown out. So in a sense, the Catholic Church has brought down into the secular institution what should be felt as the original impulse of the spiritual worlds.

The Evangelical Protestant churches – we need not speak of the Russian Orthodox Church here for the time being because it has no current significance for Central Europe – have, by completely discarding ritual, brought the entire religious practice down to the individual human individuality with their subjective conviction of the truth of so-called “propositions”. What I mean is that the individual represents before the community what he, subjectively, can believe to be true. This counteracts the formation of communities, since such subjective belief is the beginning of the atomization of the community. The convictions of individuals will, of necessity, always take on a personal and subjective coloration if they are inwardly honest and sincere, and so every pastor will have to have his own opinion, especially if his religious conviction is related to a theology that engages in discussions of propositions about the spiritual world. In addition, there is something that you must all carefully, deeply and seriously consider if you really want to practice pastoral care: You must be aware that in the Protestant church regulations today, the necessary contrast between the lay believer and the pastor has actually disappeared. The disappearance of this contrast is seen as something excellent by certain modern convictions, but it can never be a real impulse for pastoral care. Almost everything that arises within the Protestant clergy today in discussions and debates about religion is such that the clergy speak in such a way that the simple religious person must speak. Of course, they speak in a more educated, scientific way, but they speak about the recognition or non-recognition of this or that religious impulse; they also speak about: What is religion at all? What is the relationship of the soul, the heart of the religious person to God, to the supersensible world? and so on. The discussions take on this coloration. But these discussions can have this coloring with simple religious people, but not with those who exercise a priestly office. The priest must be clear about the fact that he is not the one who is protected, but the shepherd of souls, that he therefore cannot put the question in the foreground: How does the soul of man relate to God or to the supersensible world? but must ask himself: How can I teach these people, how can I care for the souls of those entrusted to me? — If religious questions are of concern to him, they must, so to speak, have only an esoteric character for him, which he never brings up for discussion before a lay audience.

This is, of course, a somewhat radical statement, but it must be stated so radically so that it is felt: If you want to establish such a community today, as your group wants to do, where you want to become priests and not simple lay believers, then you have to be aware that the questions of the special character of religion and religious life do not play a role, but rather the esoteric community of soul shepherds must be felt from the outset. Of course, one can say that this contradicts the democratic feeling. But every church, every real religious community, contradicts the democratic feeling. And if something is to become purely democratic, as is attempted within the Protestant Church, the result is the absurdity that the religious community is completely atomized by the fact that the community elects its pastor according to democratic considerations. This introduces a completely unspiritual principle, the principle of an unspiritual choice, into the religious current, and this further atomizes it. Each individual shepherd of souls must receive his special mission from the spiritual world, and the result must be that the whole procedure of [democratic] election [of the shepherd of souls by the community] is regarded as a farce, which it actually is.

It is essential that we look at these things in complete earnest and not cast a veil over them, because otherwise there would be no need to found a new community, otherwise one could still hope that the old communities could be improved. But this new community is based on the conviction that the old one can no longer be improved. Only on this rock can that which you want to found rest. But then you must have such a sense of coherence that you perceive it directly as coming from the spiritual world itself.

Now, of course, you may object: Anthroposophy speaks in such a way that it derives its insights from experiences in the spiritual world; but it is difficult to maintain a direct connection with the spiritual world in such a way that this religious community can truly speak from an awareness of this connection with the spiritual world. — But, my dear friends, here we have something that must not be left untouched. The education of Western humanity has, of course, brought forth many human virtues in the field of outer activity. There have been brave people in the outer world, even in recent centuries, of course. But what has been rooted out by Western education – I mean the whole Ahrimanic education of the last centuries – is the courage of the soul. If we are to be blunt about it, we must say that souls have become cowardly, and that the souls of the spiritual leaders of Western human development have become cowardly. That is to say, they do not dare to bring the active soul forces into real activity; they shrink from calling upon the spiritual that lies in the human soul to such an activity that the connection with the spiritual world is established. In this case they rely on the passive, they rely on passively receiving visions to which they surrender, while the real connection with the spiritual world must be sought in activity. And so I cannot say otherwise than that this enormous burden, which rests on the spiritual life of Western humanity, has gradually caused such an eclipse of the soul that these souls are indeed little inclined to courageously and bravely unfold the activity to ascend to the spiritual world through the path of exercises.

My dear friends, take only what has been given to you as a breviary; after all, this is just one of many things you have received. If you simply apply with the appropriate spiritual courage what has been given to you as a breviary, you have every opportunity to gain a connection to the spiritual world. What is then still missing is merely the inner spiritual courage. Of course, today there is nothing else for it but to take the, I would say paradoxical path, to achieve courage through humility, to say to ourselves: We human beings live in community; that which is general lives in each and every one of us, and so , what is general, has also initially paralyzed our courage; we must wait in humility until we have the opportunity to awaken this courage in our soul through practice, and we must use the first steps of our priesthood to wait in humility until this courage awakens in our soul. But we must understand humility in the sense that it is a detour to courage, which consists in man really knowing himself in spiritual community with spiritual beings. Actually, this knowledge is the prerequisite for any priesthood. In this respect, perhaps a model can be gained from the Catholic Church, albeit a daunting one, but a real one. Those who become clergy within the Catholic Church are trained in such a way that the consciousness of their connection with the spiritual world is awakened in them, that the intellectual principle, which makes man so passive, is first extinguished, paralyzed. This is actually something that the Catholic Church has been doing since the fourth century AD: sweeping away the burgeoning intellectuality, paralyzing it, so that the deeper powers of the soul can develop more easily. One could say, in fact, that for a person who has gone through what you all went through in elementary school, before you had even really become human, through an education colored by intellectualism, for such a person, choirs of angels could appear on any occasion. These revelations of the angelic choirs would have no connection to the person, because intellectuality simply paralyzes the ability to receive. In contrast to this, the Catholic Church adorns the authoritative clergy in such a way that it may be enough for a person thus liberated from his intellectuality to hear the “Ite missa est” just once at the end of a mass, intoned in the way it is in some churches, for the gates of the spiritual world to be opened to such a person through what comes from the words of the mass. You may need to speak to such a person only a single word, a single sentence, and the connection with the spiritual world is there.

Of course, this is most eminently difficult for you all, because it is impossible for you to de-intellectualize yourself. You have to go through everything that is taught about all kinds of ecclesiastical concepts that are not needed at all in the sense of the Catholic Church, and that are even harmful in its sense. But this must be pointed out in order to draw attention to the fact that those powers of activity, which a priest does need if he wants to feel the connection with the spiritual world, are covered with a thick layer. But at the same time, the principles of priestly ordination are implied, and the principles for the practice of worship are implied. But for that you must understand something else.

In the spiritual world, the validity of human language begins to fade at a relatively low level. It is simply the case that when one establishes contact with a dead person, one must first learn the language through which one can communicate with the soul in the spiritual world. After a relatively short time, this soul loses all understanding of nouns, of everything that is crystallized in nouns. But it still retains the ability to understand verbs, that is, everything that points to what is becoming, to what is active. But the more the soul grows into the spiritual world, the more it loses the ability to even feel that the way of human speech is its property, and one must, in speaking, pass over to what can be expressed in interjections, to come to a common ground between people here on earth and those in the spiritual world, of course also with such spiritual entities that never appear in a human body on earth. Language is an earthly product, and it is more or less so in different degrees, according to the particular language. And so we must realize that what is put into words, what is expressed in words — such as the pulpit or the theological — can indeed only ever be a one-sided presentation of the reality of the spirit. It is impossible for you to tell people higher spiritual truths in a single unequivocal sentence if you do not present the things from different sides. This is not a triviality, but it even applies to the relationship of human thought, not only of human language, to the higher spiritual world. If I say “Christ in me”, that is one truth, but we can also turn it around and say “I am in Christ”, that is also a truth. Both are truths in the sense in which one can establish a human theory of knowledge, but they contradict each other. You cannot elaborate the image: Christ in me - I am in Christ. How do you want to elaborate the image that the Christ can be in you by being in him? And yet both are truths, that is to say, they are truths with regard to the world and not truths with regard to the supersensible world. The truth with regard to the supersensible world lies between the two statements, which, of course, need not be in complete opposition to each other, but can be at a different angle to each other.

What is impossible in this way – to bring religious substance to people – is possible to bring to people in worship. It is also possible if you are able to carry what you gain from the cult into your preaching. For the lay believer, the cult is an edification, a revelation; for the one who practices the cult, the cult must be a constant source of inspiration. It is a true cultus when it is this source of inspiration, when the one who practices the cultus – and in the highest degree this applies of course to the cultus of the Mass – feels in the act of saying the words: You can only preach in this way when you say the Mass; you would not have the spiritual substance within you from which you speak if you did not say the Mass. There must be a real relationship between the person performing the service and the reality of the cult, especially the cult of the Mass. For the cult of the Mass actually contains everything that connects man with the spiritual world, and it contains it in such a way that it can work as a continuous inspiration, in which one stands when the Mass is experienced in the right way.

It is therefore necessary, my dear friends, to grasp the concept of the Mass in such a way that you say to yourselves each time: the day brings sunrise, the day brings sunset; between sunset and sunrise there is then the night; but there is also a period of time between the daylight and the light that comes into the world when the Mass is celebrated. This belongs to the course of events in the cosmos, just as the course of the sun belongs to it. Reading or celebrating the Mass is a real thing. Perhaps it can be expressed in another way: when we look at our earth and its surroundings, we have minerals, plants, animals, and further afield we have stars, sun and moon, clouds, rivers, mountains; but although physicists dream of the constancy of matter, all this will one day no longer be there. All this is a temporary phenomenon in the universe, that is, in place of what we have on earth in our minerals, plants, animals, and so on, there will be nothing, less than nothing. But if you then look back at the events that took place on this earth as a sacrifice, their effects would always be present. The cult is more real than nature, if it is practiced in the right way. It is more real than nature. If you do not just take this theoretically, but grasp it in its full severity, it means something tremendous. It deepens the words: Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away, whereby, of course, by “words” is not meant what any Chinese, Japanese or German language has as a random formulation in relation to the cosmos. If the Christ is understood as speaking in Aramaic, then of course this is also a random formulation. But the Logos is that which lives in reality and in reality passes over into the evolution of the world, so that one is indeed standing in a reality with the sacrificial act, which is a reality that is more real than any natural process. This gives us a sense of responsibility, and this sense of responsibility is needed if we wish to be mediators between the spiritual world and people who are in great need of such mediation, but cannot receive it through a mere teaching, however edifying it may be. This does not mean, however, that no teaching should be given; it should certainly be given, but this teaching acquires its special power and authority through its appearance in the context of the cultic. Thus the things that are given as teaching are precisely integrated into what lives as reality in the cult.

One could say that the greatest contribution to the spread of materialism was the rejection of the cultic, because it simply limited humanity to views of the divine that only appear in the guise of the earthly. One speaks about the Divine in earthly words, in poor earthly words. These earthly words can become rich when they are backed by inspiration, which is effectively evoked by the cult. It is indeed the case that the action should carry the word. And so the word of reading the Gospel should also be carried by the action. Therefore, we incorporate the reading of the Gospel into the Mass action, and in doing so, we acquire the right to understand and also to feel and sense the reading of the Gospel in such a way that the message from the spiritual world, which the Gospel represents, introduces that which then prepares for the actual sacrificial action in the offertory. For it is through the offertory, which, as one of the main acts of the Mass, follows the reading of the Gospel, that the setting for the Mass is actually only given. If you let the content of the ritual, which you all became well acquainted with during your stay in Breitbrunn, sink in, you will see that the entire spirit of the Gospel particularly sets the scene for the offertory, and that even the utensils and so on are purified to such an extent that the next step can take place. Naturally, within the Catholic Church, the view that one should have towards these things has actually been materialized. There they consecrate a chalice or a monstrance once and for all, so that the monstrance is once and for all the Holy of Holies. They even consecrate the water there. That is not a spiritual reality, but a spiritual reality has actually been externalized, materialized. The essential thing is that the spiritual reality is carried by the human soul, and that with every single sacrifice of the Mass, the chalice and what goes with it, the bread and the wine, must first be consecrated during the sacrifice of the Mass. So consecration is an ongoing act that must be maintained in perpetual liveliness, so that only during the offertory is the consecration venue created for the following one. And when the transubstantiation follows, the transubstantiation, one is indeed in the midst of a real, spiritual transformation.

Now it is simply the case that the views of the first Christian centuries, that is, of the people on whom it depended, could not actually be disputed, but were only begun to be disputed and discussed in later centuries, since the approach of Wycliffe and others, because these discussions were all already influenced by materialism. Just think, if we take the dispute in the most crude way, it is the case that people said: The bread cannot contain the body of the Lord, it cannot be the body of the Lord!

Yes, my dear friends, only someone who sees a gross reality in this external appearance before him would speak in such a way. What you have before you as bread is not real in the true sense of the word. You must first go to the real thing if you want to discuss such things as transubstantiation. Because it is a matter of getting beyond the trivial view that what appears as a whitish or yellowish color filling the space or what meets the sense of taste is a reality. As long as it is supposed to be a reality, in which even all kinds of little demons are supposed to be present, corresponding to the imperishability of matter, one can raise all kinds of objections in a discussion. But that does not address the issue. The issue here is such things as were hinted at here yesterday with the expression “spiritual chemistry”, which is also used in the new era. For transubstantiation must be considered in such a way that what is actually taking place outwardly at the altar for the eye is Maya, appearance, but that the process that is taking place spiritually is nevertheless a reality within this community, and not only within this community, but within this place. Transubstantiation is there. And only because the spectators have ahrimanically configured eyes, which make them believe that the outer sensual reality is a reality, they do not see what is going on. This is something we must have in our consciousness. You must feel this in what I am saying and what I am now saying here and there to characterize the full seriousness of the present spiritual situation of humanity.

I said in a lecture in London recently that one must get used to the fact that the things said for the physical plane may sound contradictory when the same things are said from the spiritual world. I used the example that it is quite correct, when speaking for the physical plane, to say that Rousseau was a great man for this or that reason; that is quite all right for the physical plane. But seen from the spiritual world, one can only say: Rousseau was the general babbler of modern civilization, because everything he said is, seen from the spiritual worlds, the shallowest chatter. That is, today one must become accustomed in an intensive way to the fact that the spiritual world is something different than this physical world. This must be seen if one wants to gain a connection with the spiritual world.

Now you might say that this is just the old grumbling about the spiritual world, as it was in the Middle Ages. That is not right. The physical world becomes something completely different when viewed in the way I have just characterized it. Every flower becomes different; but it loses nothing, it only gains the fact that it becomes a mediator to the spiritual world. Does the flower lose something when I admire it as it stands in the field, when I can say all kinds of beautiful things about it, right up to the revelations of a good lyrical poet, and when it then becomes clear to me: yes, but that is not all the flower is, the flower also reveals that it merges upwards into an ethereal substance? This astral substance runs in coils (he draws on the blackboard), and through these coils one can ascend to the world of the planets. What underlies the flower is a kind of spiritual ladder into the supermundane world, and by ascending this ladder one encounters the forces that make flowers grow out of the earth and up towards heaven. Yes, if you add this to what you can say about the flower based on sensory observation, will you live in a medieval asceticism? Your view of the flower will only be enriched by it. The soul must immerse itself in this mood if it wants to receive what worship can bring it, if it simply learns to see what the physical eye does not see.

You must bring these feelings and perceptions with you to the ritual; only then will what happens become what it should be; and only then can it be said that you really enjoy with the host what the ritual speaks of. And only then are the four parts of the mass fulfilled: the gospel, the offertory, the transubstantiation or consecration, and communion.

These are things that you should not take as theory, but which I am telling you today for the reason that you approach the matter with the right feeling and only by doing so make things the truth; because without this feeling they are not truths. A mass can be a sacrifice to the devil just as easily as it can be a sacrifice to God. It is not the insignificant thing that the Protestant mind would like to make of it. A mass celebrated by a priest may be a sacrifice to God today within the

table of the Catholic Church, but it is never the nothing that the Protestants would like to make of it. They certainly do not succeed in making the Mass an insignificant material act, but they can make it a sacrifice to the devil under certain circumstances. Because what happens [in the Mass] is a reality, that is, the action in question is oriented either in the right or in the wrong direction, but not in a direction that leads to nothingness. However, it can also lead in a very bad, harmful direction. You must be aware that you can say to yourself: I cannot actually remain neutral, I can only serve God or the devil – with all possible intermediate stages, of course. Serving the devil is a very difficult task, for that you must be a consciously bad person; but there are all kinds of powers between the divine and the ahrimanic world.

This is part of the state of mind that one must have for the whole of the cult. When one has this state of mind, this inner liveliness that places one in the spiritual world, then the degree of consciousness that one attains is simply a matter of time. Do not forget that what you can achieve during the sacrifice of the Mass always draws your soul into the spiritual world, that your soul is drawn into the scene of the spiritual world, that you are not just saying something with your mouth and doing something with your hands, but that you are standing within the spiritual world. You must be aware of this when you consider the concept of worship. That means you must be very clear in your own mind that in the act of worship you are performing something that is a reality, and that when you speak as the celebrant, you are also speaking as a messenger from other worlds. You must feel as such a messenger. You must not feel as one who only establishes a connection between what is here on earth and heaven, but also as one who brings something from heaven into the earthly. That is your difference from the mere lay believer, and that is the tone that you must bring to the world if you want to found a justly existing priestly community. The world must feel that you, as priests, are attuned to the impulses from the spiritual world. You do not have to tell the world this in theory, for that would stir it up. But you must do what you do with your consciousness; then you will do the right thing. And then you can say, for example, that the words spoken at the ordination or at other ceremonies are the reflection of what takes place beforehand in the spiritual world, because you yourself have this connection to the spiritual world in your state of mind. What then appears as an outward act visible to the eyes is, of course, the legitimate reflection of the spiritual event; but one must not see it as a mere symbol when one stands before the believer. For the believer, what takes place outwardly in relation to the religious is really the same as - take any human being whom you say is a great painter, but he has never painted a picture. It may well be that he is a great painter for the spiritual world, but here in this world a painter must have actually painted a picture. They may all be priests for the spiritual world, but here in the physical world they must practice a cult in order to be true priests; then they behave in the same way as a painter behaves in order to paint. That is the great error of Protestantism today, when it says, figuratively speaking, that it does not matter that pictures are painted, but only that painters are there, so one should abolish painting, so that such terrible sensual elements do not enter into the treatment of the spiritual. It is really so. Only, when one says it, today things are such that they seem quite paradoxical to man, because even within the Catholic Church the self-evident, organic nature of worship is no longer felt, although even today one can still find naive Catholics who already have a feeling for the reality that lies in worship. Sometimes this is even more intense in the faithful than in the Catholic priesthood.

That is what I wanted to tell you, because anything I could add to what has been said so far can only be a deepening of the feeling and the state of mind. During the time we are gathered here, we must become priests, so to speak, through what is said and done among us. After all, everything that needs to be said to become a priest has already been said. Basically, not much needs to be added, except perhaps to clarify one or other sentiment.

So now we have reached the point that tomorrow at the beginning of the lesson I will first explain how we in this community now have to relate to this whole thing in practice, because of course some kind of consecration of the community will have to be carried out. To do this, it will be necessary for what has so far been described as necessary in theory to become immediately real in practice within this community. So tomorrow we will first deal with the question: How does an individual become a priest, and how do the individual members of the community relate to one another, so that those sitting here today become a priestly organism? Then we must move on to the practical exercise, to the demonstration of what I have said about celebrating a cult, and we will see that we can then really bring about the sacrifice of the Mass in a practical way.

I would like to have said this today for the strengthening of your souls. If you take it in the right way and bring with you the necessary mood for it, you will really be able to become what you want to become. You must leave as different people than when you came. You have not needed that so far, but you must have it now. You must leave here not only with the feeling that you have taken something in, but with the feeling that you have truly become something else. Consider what that means for human consciousness. If you have thought about it properly, we will be able to proceed in the right way tomorrow.