The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I would like to continue our examination of the things we began eight days ago. Not long ago, one of our Theosophical friends showed me a letter written in response to an invitation from a southern German pastor to the Theosophical friend. Our friend thought it might be a good idea to invite the gentleman in question to the lecture on the wisdom teachings of Christianity because he believed that the gentleman was actually preaching Theosophy and that a connection could be made between Theosophy and the pastor's understanding of Christianity. The answer given by the person concerned was interesting. He refused to come that evening. He was prevented by external circumstances. But he said that he had studied Theosophy and had also tried to read some issues of “Lucifer - Gnosis” and that he could see from them that the purpose of Theosophy is to renew certain old Gnostic ideas. He could not really see anything special in all these efforts, because he preferred to gain a direct relationship with his God and not to be satisfied with a relationship with divinity that was mediated by many intermediate beings. This is a very characteristic answer, which I mention because it is given by so many people today. A great many people say this, and I say this not as a criticism of our contemporaries, but simply as an observation, for the phenomenon is as justified as can be. It arises entirely from our sense of the times. I say that this answer is given frequently today. People think that one is actually doing something that does not quite correspond to today's consciousness and feelings if one assumes, in addition to the sensual world in which we live and the divinity that permeates the world, a whole series of intermediate beings, let us say gods or spiritual entities. For four centuries, humanity has been educated in this view. It is therefore not surprising that such a feeling has become general today, and that people believe that Theosophy has a little too much to do with all the different spirits and spiritual entities, with a whole hierarchy of spiritual entities between people, and of which one can have no consciousness, but only an inkling.

The doctrine of such a large number of spiritual beings is not new, but as old as humanity itself. The time in which one believes one can ignore this feeling of the spiritual is actually short in relation to the great time of development. Where there was an awareness of the real significance and depth of the spiritual world, there was never the widespread opinion that one can disregard spiritual beings and their knowledge. I have often mentioned here that Theosophy as such is nothing particularly new, that it only represents the popularization, the generally understandable proclamation of teachings, which have always been cultivated in the so-called brotherhoods. Only the way in which people came by these teachings was different in the past centuries than it is today. Fifty years ago, one could not have spoken of all the things we are talking about today. At that time, anyone who wanted to know something like that was definitely required to seek admission to a so-called occult school, and no one was introduced to such significant and far-reaching ideas as can be found today in every little manual of Theosophy. You had to acquire the ability to become acquainted with such things slowly and gradually, you had to complete and study degree after degree. Each new degree one acquired first entitled one to take in certain higher views. And the education within such a degree consisted in one getting the feeling that what one received in the ascending development of mankind from the teachers of occult schools was the true, correct and essential. This was not because it was forbidden - no criticism of the occult teacher - but because one gradually became convinced that it would be nonsense to criticize the occult teachers, just as it would be absurd for a child to criticize the multiplication table before he could do so, or for a student of geometry if he was not yet ready to understand it. In the same way, in the past one would never say, “I don't like that, it doesn't suit me,” and so on. One took it for granted because one was prepared for it.

Today we are obliged to introduce a further circle without such preparation and to speak of the elementary teachings of occultism. I have often explained the reasons why spiritual teaching is proclaimed before all people. Do not think that what we are allowed to proclaim of these occult teachings is the whole teaching of occultism. It is the very first. And the times will not come for a long time yet when the deeper teachings can be communicated. But these too will come, when it will also be possible to open up higher spiritual worlds. Today it is only necessary to proclaim and introduce people to as much as the course of time requires of us. Those who are sitting here have, for the most part, been here often, and for this reason assertions and communications can be made here all the time, which appear grotesque and paradoxical to those on the outside, to those who come to a public lecture, fantastic, if not crazy. But the deeper truths, especially those that constitute the very nerve of life, the deepest laws of world knowledge, these teachings appear at first to those who are only captivated by external sensuality and to what is otherwise said to them about the spiritual world as illusory, as paradoxical. For those who penetrate deeper and deeper into today's world, it is precisely what our senses teach us in our ordinary lives and what our minds can convey to us that appears as an illusion. Now, for centuries, humanity has lost the power to truly distinguish between spiritual things, and that, my esteemed audience, is something you consider to be essential in the introduction to today's lecture, that humanity's powers of discernment have somewhat diminished over the last four centuries.

This is why objections can be made as in the letter mentioned. Imagine what such an objection means. It is exactly the same as if you wanted to make someone a suggestion that they should come to a lecture on botany and they wrote back: I have read a little about botany, read that it distinguishes between different plants - orchids, oaks, palms and so on - but it does not interest me further. I don't want to distinguish between individual plants, I want to be content with a general, direct feeling of plant life as such. I know that the world has plants: oaks, lilies, tulips, poplars - these are plants; but it is an exaggerated gnosis for me to first have to distinguish between lilies, firs, tulips, poplars. I am content with the fact that in general there is something spiritual, something divine that permeates the world. What are people talking about with such entities? Such a person is in the same situation as the one who objects to the distinction in botany. Humanity has lost some of this discernment over the centuries. But this discernment must be awakened again today. That is precisely the purpose of the theosophical worldview. For one who knows the spiritual connections, it is really not an easy decision to go before the world and speak of the great connections between the great spiritual beings, because he knows how hard it is to achieve understanding in this time and how man can be misled by such discussions about the spiritual beings. But at the same time, one must look into the course of the spiritual world.

It is little known that the phenomena of the world occur in so-called cycles. Today, in materialistic times, the regular, rhythmic course of even fatal phenomena in the world is overlooked. But he who looks into the hustle and bustle of the great human spiritual life sees something approaching, something that is revealing itself more and more to humanity. What I am about to say is also paradoxical, but it will only be recognized all too clearly in some time, perhaps in the not too distant future. What is in store for humanity, must be in store simply because of the materialism that has been preparing itself for four centuries, that is a certain loss of spiritual life, a confusion in spiritual life, which would most certainly develop into a kind of spiritual disease, into a kind of epidemic, if the teachers of spiritual life did not work to counteract this spiritual epidemic through their teachings. We would be facing that today. It is slowly preparing itself. Those who do not have eyes do not see, and those who do not have ears do not hear, even if they are in psychiatry. But those who can observe spiritually know the danger that man is in. This danger need not come, but it would come if the human spirit is not strengthened again through life, that is, if it does not receive a true center. The purpose of Theosophy is to produce firm, strong character in the depths of the soul, and not to allow any spiritually vacillating nature to arise. He who scurries about with his knowledge, flitting like a will-o'-the-wisp through the outer material phenomena of existence, today inclined to this person and tomorrow to that, is exposed to the great danger of losing his spiritual center. And it does not help if we imbue this scurrying with general ideas of divinity and spirituality. Just as the only ruler and safe in the plant kingdom is he who has learned botany, so only he can be sure of the spiritual beings — which are there after all — who has knowledge of the spiritual world.

In the past, no one ever said anything about higher spiritual entities. Those who were mature enough sought and found it. They came to people who could initiate them by no mere coincidence. It was the great spiritual human magnetism that necessarily draws the student to the teacher. They may seemingly encounter an innocent person, in the waiting room or on the train, where they may have to sit for hours. Then you will enter into conversation with such a person. It seems to be by chance, but in reality it is a necessity for you. You may find in such a person the one who has the most significant influence on you, who may be your occult teacher. So it has come about that this inner psychic magnetism has diminished to such an extent that this power no longer plays. You no longer find it so easy to connect with the actual spiritual teachers.

Therefore, it has become necessary to develop the occult teachings in an elementary way through the spoken word to the larger masses of our contemporaries, so that everyone can say to themselves, there and there is a center; if I want, I can join. Actually, no one should be asked to join any secret science current. How far the individual goes must be his absolutely free decision. One should never act under the sign of occultism, as is the view today. Such agitation brings about what should not be in this field. Those who join without actually being seekers say, “I like this and I don't like that – and this is not the right thing.” Actually, the principle of social union is not the right one, as in Buddhism. It is only a surrogate today because people join together socially for everything. What is right in occultism is the grouping.

Nor is there any sense in joining a society for the purpose of occultism, just as there is no sense in joining in relation to geometry. You can learn geometry from someone who knows geometry, but you cannot discern the truth of geometry in a society. The occult is a small circle within our society. The Theosophical Society is an administrative matter. But the occult life cannot be cultivated in any other way than the one I have tried to explain. Those who have settled into the occult life know that the great security of the inner soul character can only be achieved if one has the power of discernment within the spiritual world.

I had to presuppose this because, with teachings such as we will now develop, we will encounter the same contradictions over and over again.

Now I would like to expand on what we discussed last time. I have already indicated that there are four levels of knowledge. These four steps have always been cultivated wherever there have been occultists. Not arbitrarily, my esteemed audience, through deliberation, through reasoning, through speculation, has humanity gained knowledge of the higher spiritual worlds and their beings, but by forming the spiritual organs through which one can gain experience in these higher worlds.

Now let us briefly bring these stages of higher life before our soul. The ordinary knowledge that is peculiar to all people in the world is called material knowledge. This material knowledge is almost the only thing that people today know. Almost no other form of knowledge is known today than this material knowledge. You seek it in everyday life, whether you are dancing, cooking or doing something else, and you recognize in this way. But even in the anatomical dissecting room, in the laboratory and in all of science, there is nothing but material knowledge. It is the first step of knowledge. It is not the case that the occultist wants to criticize material knowledge. Material knowledge has its full justification in life. It must be said, however, that there are higher levels of knowledge. You have to be aware of this material knowledge in its individual parts.

There are four elements involved in material cognition. Now, please follow me closely. What belongs to ordinary material cognition? Imagine that you are to look at this flower from the point of view of material cognition. Four things are necessary for this material cognition to come about. First, the flower, which is the object. Secondly, the image of the object. If you want to appreciate something like this at all, you have to engage in such subtle things. Thirdly, the concept. This is something different from the image. The concept is attained through inner spiritual work. The image remains as an impression of the object on your soul. But the concept is something else. I will make it even clearer.

Imagine: many people have looked at the starry sky. They either had the image without the concept or the concept and also the image. The astronomer has a concept of the starry sky and the image; the farmer has an image of it, but no concept. You can see here that the concept and the image are different. Let's take the concept of a circle. The circle is a line that extends equally from the center.

The fourth is the I, yourself. If you consider these four things, you have the components of ordinary material knowledge. That by which the image comes about in material cognition is called sensation.

The second level of knowledge, which also exists, differs from the first in that the external object is absent, and with it the sensation. That which gives you the stimulus for the image is gone. All that you recognize in this way, that an object has an effect on you, is precisely not the second level of knowledge. You have to imagine that the whole world is gone. Now, the materialistic person says that there is nothing left at all. But that is what matters, that you still have something. Indeed, the one who does not undergo development has nothing left when he closes his eyes. He has the empty, dark space around him. The second stage of realization is developed through so-called meditation. The external object has gone. What is still present is the image, the concept and the I. These three are still there. The fact that there is no external object, only the image, tempts many to say: this is fantasy.

It can be, and it will always be fantastic if it is not systematically developed. To regard it as fantastic just because one has only an image would be foolishness. If someone could invent the dirigible balloon in a dream and then realize it, it does not matter whether he made the discovery while dreaming or while awake. If you can become convinced that what appears to you in dreams is true, then it is right – and that is what it is about. The object that otherwise causes sensation must be replaced. What occurs is what in occultism is called illumination. And this whole cognition, which again has four parts – namely image, concept, I and illumination – is now called imaginative cognition. This imaginative cognition is trained through meditation. I have often described how this is done. One cannot meditate without the guidance of someone who has experience in this field. Meditation proceeds in such a way that the meditator really loses sight of the objects around him, that he makes himself blind and deaf and then also loses his memory, so that the soul is completely empty of external objects. You have to be able to fire a cannon without paying attention, then you have achieved the stillness of the soul.

Then, through practice, illumination must be stimulated. You can recognize that you have achieved something by noticing that your dreams no longer have a chaotic character. You have to pay attention to the fact that the dream world is calm and steady. In the case of ordinary people, their dream world is usually one in which they have reminiscences or in which they experience the moods of their external lives in their dreams. So when he meditates, the dream world begins to take on a regular character. He then gets to know things he does not know. Dreams speak in symbols first. This must be felt. But that is where people usually go too far. They try to interpret these dream images. But they should not be interpreted intellectually. The legend of digging for treasure also refers to this fact. It says that when you dig a treasure, you must not speak, otherwise it cannot come out. Even if you say something inwardly, that is, quibble, that is already a danger. You can only speak to someone who has precise experience of this matter. But if you quibble, then the intellect begins to act like a scorching, burning fire on the fine spiritual life.

One should experience dreams very intimately, treat them like very delicate things to which one surrenders with intuition, and not interpret things in sharp, rough lines of the mind. One must do this for the reason that the dream images, when they occur with a reality value, then have such a rich and comprehensive reality value that the ordinary powers of the mind are not sufficient to grasp them. They destroy their inner life when they approach the cobweb-like inner structures with the outer mind. This is how this wonderful life begins, how the inner illuminations begin, and soon you become aware that a new world is opening up in them. Through them you get to know something that is quite different from this ordinary, material world around you.

I would like to understand how it is structured in terms of a way of perceiving within the illumination. Take this flower, for example. It is yellow and has green leaves. Let's look at the colors first. These colors are spread over the surface of the object, so to speak. Think about the fact that you usually perceive color as appearing spread over the surface of the body. Try to consider how seldom it happens that you see colors separate from objects. At most, you have this with a rainbow. You can roughly imagine this when you see a sunbeam entering a dusty room. You have a rough sense of a color. Now imagine that the yellow is not attached to the object, but is free like flakes of color floating through space. Now imagine a room like this, filled in all directions with these color flakes and color formations, and you will have something approximating what you will see when you visualize the world of illumination in terms of colors.

Occult students with a softer nature than Westerners do very special exercises. Westerners are much too compact for that. But because of their soft nature, the Orientals have the opportunity to do these exercises. The Oriental yogi sits down and looks at the color of such a flower, turns all his attention to that color, lives in that color so that he is able to withdraw his attention completely from the object and fix it only on the color, then he acquires the ability to hold the color even when the object is gone. Then it becomes possible for him to gradually bring this floating world of color into consciousness.

The same can be said for the world of sound and for other forms of the world. You see: Man conquers a whole new field of perception. This world and these color flakes are always and everywhere there. These color flakes are not irregular, they are not just clouds flying around, but just as objects on the physical earth plane are not just blocks, but also entities, so too do entities reveal themselves in this flaky world of colors. They have no bones and no flesh, they are incarnated in the substance that I have just described.

So these are the bodies of certain entities. The forms of the entities that you can get to know, once you have generated the illumination so that you can perceive them in this space, are mostly the bodies of the spirits of the twilight. So you can perceive them as the outstanding spirits of this sphere: the spirits of the twilight, the lunar or moon Pitris. Such beings people themselves once were on the planet preceding our Earth. They have only attained their present form through their condensation. Those beings who have not attained human condensation, who have remained at that level, stand today in that world as Lunar Pitris, as spirits of the twilight.

Just as one has to become familiar with each realm in turn, ascending from the mineral realm to the plant realm to the animal realm, and one must not lump all three realms together, so too can we now ascend further to the realm of the lunar Pitris, who can manifest themselves in this so-called elemental realm. This is the first elemental realm - actually the third.

We have not been talking in vague terms, but have indicated a path that leads to the perception of a type of being that you will get to know in planetary development. These twilight spirits play a very special role in this. These are the beings that are closest to man in the spiritual world. Next time I will share something about the relationship between man and these spiritual beings. These entities are present around you and influence you continuously.

At the next level of realization, the image also disappears. So only the concept and the ego remain. This state is achieved through concentration. This consists of the person associating certain parts with certain parts of the organism. That which prevents him from blindly fantasizing, from inventing concepts, is something similar to the illumination of the previous level and the sensation of the level before that. So we have sensation, illumination and now, at the third stage, inspiration. Here, the object and the image are absent, and the concept acquires content through the inspiration that occurs. So here you are dealing with the I, the concept and inspiration.

Illumination has something light-like about it, which is why it is also called illumination. Inspiration is completely free of all these pictorial representations. Here the human being floats in the purely spiritual world. That is why it is also said that his ideas take on a content without the need for them to be images first. It is the word 'imageless' that can be used to compare it to. That is why it is also said that at this stage, a person receives the inner word, that is, he is able to find truths through inspiration, in that the spiritual world works into his understanding in such a way that it is not the image that affects him, but that the spirit speaks directly to him. The language of the spiritual world itself flows into his concepts. That is inspiration. It is the conversation with the beings of a spiritual world. The person is quietly closed in on himself, rejects everything visionary, everything pictorial, keeps quiet and still, and the spirits tell him the truth. That is the level of inspiration, the inner word. This level of inspiration makes it possible for a person to not only see objects wherever he goes, but for them to tell him something everywhere, so that he can hear everywhere what is buzzing around in a new space. This level of knowledge is what Goethe means when he speaks the words at the beginning of the prologue in heaven: “The sun resounds in the old way in the brother spheres of value singing.” This is not a phrase, it is reality. He speaks of the spiritual sun that resounds. The whole world becomes a resounding world that teaches us significantly about the inner core of our being. In this world, we then make acquaintance with a higher group of spiritual beings, which we call the sun spirits or also the fire spirits. Just as we got to know the spirits of twilight there, we get to know the spirits of fire here.

So we have: mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, spirits of twilight, spirits of fire. The realization at this level is a volitional realization, because the power that one must particularly develop is the will. A special training of the will through concentration, through inner willpower and will education. One then makes the acquaintance of the beings that are growth-producing power, power of reproduction and so on. We get to know this in this way. That which exists everywhere of these fire spirits lives in all growing entities. The one who rises to an inspired realization is one who 'hears the grass growing'. The proverbs are often tremendous words of wisdom. At this level, all growth is heard. That which makes the beings grow is the power that lives in the fire beings.

Finally, there is still the [fourth] stage. The concept is still missing. Then there is only the I. There is no more recognition in the concept, there is a recognition without concept, a pure life in the spiritual. You creep into the beings you want to recognize. The coarsest form of recognition is in the material. Think how little you are able to penetrate a flower. You have to stay outside. In imaginative cognition, you have the images around you. In inspired cognition, the sounds from the outside world come to you. But now you enter into the beings. You are every being you recognize. Space and time cease to exist. You are where you recognize the corresponding being. You are no longer different from that being. Your ego has submerged in that being. And that is the realization through intuition – intuitive realization.

These are the four stages of realization. Through this intuitive realization, you get to know not only the outer appearance of the beings, but the beings in their inner being. The I expands to include the whole environment. The person who has attained this higher realization is called the “swan”. Lohengrin is led from a spiritual world into the physical world by a swan. Through this gift, one attains a knowledge that is only accessible to those who have the gift of transformation into these beings. If you want to rise to the level at which intuitive recognition stands, you must present yourself in such a way that intuitive recognition can transform into you. That is why Zeus had to transform himself into a swan so that he could be grasped. The legends all have a great relationship to this world existence.

Through this intuitive knowledge, you rise to the level of entities called the spirits of personality or the spirits of selfishness. Everything that lives in us as a principle, as an essence of selfishness, comes from this spiritual realm, the realm of the spirits of selfishness or personality. The spirits of selfishness have always been at work. First, the physical body is worked on by the spirits of selfishness, then the etheric body, and then the astral body. Therefore, as a kama-manasic being, man is an egoist. What he thinks is what is independent and also what is selfish. What these beings are can only be recognized when one stands at the stage that one can crawl into the being, into the ego of the beings. There you get to know the spirits of the personality.

So you see that it is not just talk when you find something like this in my 'Lucifer' or in Mrs. Besant's books, even if perhaps not under the same names. The spirits are not invented, but gained through the stages of knowledge. Therefore, we distinguish: mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, human, lunar Pitris or spirits of twilight, fire spirits or solar Pitris, spirits of egoism or spirits of personality - Suras and Asuras. Then the higher realms: spirits of form, spirits of movement and spirits of wisdom. We will talk about these four spiritual levels next time.

But you can already apply what I have said today in practice, namely that if you know something about this nature, even if you do not yet rise to the level of direct experience in this way, you will gain inner strength if you know even just a little. Man would completely lose his center in the coming decades if the knowledge of these things did not come. These entities do not exist in cloud-cuckoo-land, but surround us continually. The person standing in front of me is not just a human being, but interrelated with him is the Lunar-Pitri, the Solar-Pitri, the spirits of selfishness and so on. And they are constantly active in this person. I recognize something incompletely when I only have the outer person in front of me. Just imagine how insecure you would become if you were to go blind. Orientation in the new world is only made possible by new senses. In the same way, knowledge in the world is only made possible by knowing what is there. It makes us feel secure to know that such things exist, that such things are there. It is therefore necessary for humanity to know such things. In the fourth century, higher spiritual beings still led man, unconsciously. That is the higher development. The meaning of the materialistic time is that the spirits have fled to reappear in his consciousness. Man has descended into darkness to consciously ascend to the light again. That would be the greatest harm if man remained down here in darkness and did not find his way back to the light. The theosophical doctrine has not been brought out of mere caprice, but because it is a necessity for humanity. There have always been individuals in secret societies who had the realization. But it must become much more general. That is why the popular way in which these teachings are spread in theosophy.

The last lecture dealt with the subject of how the Christ Impulse will unfold in future times, and also, of course, in our own epoch. We heard that sheaths will weave themselves as it were around the Christ Impulse: Wonder into an Astral Body; feelings of love or Compassion into an Ether-Body; the power of Conscience into what corresponds to a Physical Body. Thereby that Ideal Being Whose “ I ”—the Christ Impulse Itself—passed into the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha, will reach completion in the course of the time still remaining to Earth-evolution. The fundamental character of the future Ideal of humanity was described in one of its aspects and the present lecture will endeavour to add yet another, different picture.

The Christ Impulse came, so to say, in the middle of the epoch following upon the great Atlantean catastrophe. This epoch may be said to extend from the time of the Atlantean catastrophe to the next great catastrophe of which you may read in the lectures on the Apocalypse. (Nuremburg, 1908.) In the middle of this period, the most important of all events in Earth-evolution takes place—the coming of the Christ Impulse. As the last lecture indicated, it is not necessary to turn our eyes to Palestine in order to realise that something of the highest importance was taking place at that time in Earth-evolution. We have only to study the Graeco-Latin epoch of culture, lying as it does in the middle of the Post-Atlantean period, and recall one of its characteristic features; this again can be compared with a similar feature in the preceding Third epoch and in our own epoch.

The essential and fundamental character of a Greek Temple has often been described. Its form stands there as a complete, self-contained, independant whole, even when it is not actually before our eyes, even when we conceive of no human being anywhere near it. Inside a Greek Temple, human beings always seem to be a disturbing element; they do not really belong to it, they do not belong inside it. For what, in reality, is a Greek Temple? We can only understand it in its whole form and structure, if we think of it as the dwelling-place of a living, invisible God who has come down to the physical plane. That is the reason why every Temple is dedicated to one particular God. And when we picture the God in the Temple—with no human beings present—the God for whom a dwelling-place has been built on Earth ... then we have grasped the “idea” embodied in the Greek Temple. Human beings really have no place there. This was the idea underlying the whole architecture of a Greek Temple. Such architecture could only arise in an epoch when the Divine Spiritual was known to pervade all existence on the physical plane. Men whose paths appeared to be everywhere steeped in the Divine could feel all the depth of meaning contained in words uttered by one of themselves: “Better it is to be a beggar in the Upper World than a king in the realm of the Shades!” ... that is to say, in the world lying on the other side of the Gate of Death. It was the period when human beings experienced, in greatest intensity, their union with the physical plane and with the Spiritual pervading the physical plane.

Let us compare a Greek Temple with a building of the same character in the preceding epoch—and with buildings which, in our own epoch, indicate its fundamental attitude and trend. Think of an Egyptian Temple, even of the Pyramids: they become intelligible only when we see them as expressions of man's aspiration to the Divine—to the Divine Godhead who has not yet descended to the physical plane. In the architecture of the Egyptian time, every line, every form, expresses the striving of man towards the Divine-Spiritual. But these mysterious and deeply symbolical buildings indicate in themselves that men must have undergone preparation before the architectural forms could help them to find the way to the Divine-Spiritual. They needed preparation: they must have reached the first stage of Initiation. The same applies to the architecture of Asia Minor. In our own epoch, Gothic architecture gives the keynote. This is an occult fact. It is impossible to have the same conception of a Gothic Cathedral as of a Greek Temple; for a Gothic Cathedral is incomplete without the congregation of believers. It is simply not complete without the human beings within it! All its forms seem to convey that they are there to receive the prayers of the believers—the “believers,” in contrast to the “Initiates” in ancient Egypt. Anyone who can discern what these things mean, realises from the course taken by the evolution of Form from the Egyptian Temple, through the Greek Temple, to the Gothic Cathedral, that the impulse leading to the unfolding of the human “ I ” entered at a certain point into the process of earthly existence. Wherever we look we can perceive how the Christ Impulse lays hold of man, leaves its stamp and signature upon all happenings, all development, and it seems grotesque when philosophical or theological thought declares that acceptance of such an Impulse rests upon the basis of historical records. It does not rest upon any historical record whatever, but simply and solely upon a discerning, clear-sighted observation of human evolution; for no matter where we look, we see that development follows the same course as that revealed in Architecture. The Initiate who alone was capable of understanding the architectural forms of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch—the Third Post-Atlantean epoch—knew that he must raise himself above the level of ordinary manhood: then and only then could he ascend into the region of Divine Spiritual life. The Initiate of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch knew that in the physical world he was living together with the Divine, but he had very little connection with what the Greeks called the World of Shades, because by that time man had descended more deeply into physical existence. And when the Gods did not mingle with men in the Temples, the Greeks felt no connection with that other world.

Since the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch these conditions have changed—changed in the sense that it is possible now for every single soul to find the path to the Divine-Spiritual. It is extremely important to realise this for it is the most concrete expression of the fact that in ancient times men were much nearer to the Spiritual in their consciousness, in their knowledge and in their life of soul. Then came the descent to the physical plane and now there must be a gradual re-ascent. We are living in the age when the re-ascent must be undertaken consciously—whereas, to begin with, the Christ Impulse worked unconsciously in men.

Our own epoch is a kind of recapitulation of the Egypto-Chaldean period. Of the Graeco-Latin epoch there is no recapitulation, for it lies in the middle of the seven consecutive periods. The Third epoch is being recapitulated, in a certain form, in our own age; the Second epoch, that of ancient Persian culture, will be recapitulated in the Sixth epoch by which our own will be followed; and in the far distant Seventh epoch, before a stupendous catastrophe, the First epoch, that of ancient Indian culture, will be recapitulated—not, of course, in the same form, for the recapitulation will everywhere bear the imprint of the Christ Impulse.

A certain consciousness existed, especially in olden times, of what has come to pass in the evolution of mankind. Olden times, of course, were paramountly conscious of the descent of humanity, the descent to the physical plane from the heights of Divine-Spiritual existence. But for every process there must be preparation. There had been preparation, too, for the Impulse given by the Mystery of Golgotha in the Fourth epoch—the Impulse for the re-ascent. This Impulse had its “forerunners”—in Elijah, John the Baptist and others. But consciousness of the fact that mankind has descended from Divine-Spiritual existence and in the future must re-ascend into the worlds of Divine Spirit, was present not only in the culture which eventually made its way into the West; evidences of such consciousness are to be found in every civilisation.

A very widespread and characteristic idea finds expression in the traditions of practically all the peoples—an idea which may, it is true, have very ramified applications, but can finally be associated with a definite and specific tradition. It is a tradition upon which there has been much reflection and upon which occult knowledge alone can shed light, namely, the tradition of the “Flood.” Much that is connected with this tradition refers, of course, to far earlier times, but the following is brought clearly to light by occult investigation. Nearly all the peoples who have left reliable historical records or legends refer to the Flood as having taken place about three thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha; that is the period indicated by the legends. There is not enough time today to explain why this last Flood which was supposed to have occurred three thousand years before our era, cannot be taken to indicate a great physical catastrophe or deluge. Obviously it does not refer to the Atlantean catastrophe, for that took place very much earlier. The “Flood,” therefore, must mean something entirely different. Yet the fact should not be lost sight of that the traditions of all the peoples in question place the Flood in the fourth millennium before our era. Although the dates vary a little, they tally in the main essentials.

At this point I will ask you to remember that in the First Post-Atlantean epoch, when the Holy Rishis were the great teachers of men, culture was inspired, paramountly, by the human ether-body; during the ancient Persian epoch, culture was inspired by the astral body, the sentient body; in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch by the sentient soul; in the Graeco-Latin epoch by the mind or intellectual soul; in our present epoch by the consciousness soul (or “spiritual soul”). And now the time is approaching when the powers of the Spirit-Self will gradually be imbued into culture. In that development proceeded in this way, the experiences arising in man's life of soul underwent deep and far-reaching change. Just think of it. The picture of the world presented to a man of the earliest Indian epoch, of which even the Vedas have no knowledge, received its essential character and stamp from the working of the ether-body. Through the ether-body man cannot direct his gaze to the outer world in the way that is customary in our time. His perception, his picture of the world cannot be as they are today; where the forces of the ether-body are in operation, everything arises from within. A man of today can only have an idea—dim and lifeless at that—of perception which derives from the ether-body, when he recalls the character of his dreams. But the dreams and visions through which, during the ancient Indian epoch, one human being became known to another, were living and real in the very highest degree. To imagine that when one human being met another, the outer perception of him was the same as it is today, would be quite erroneous. The man of ancient India saw pictures—but in those times the other human being physically before him was enveloped in an auric cloud, shrouded in a kind of mist. The character of perception was altogether different compared with perception as it is at the present day, these pictures, although full of the greatest spiritual import, were blurred and hazy. The forces streaming down from Cosmic Space, from the world of the stars—it was these forces that were seen in such clarity and brilliance in those ancient times. In the Second Post-Atlantean epoch the power to look outwards gradually unfolded but, strangely enough, the faculty for gazing into the great Cosmic Spaces remained. Whereas perceptions of the world below were still hazy and without definition, the ancient Persian gazed with lucid clarity into the world of the stars. It is therefore intelligible that Zarathustrianism should point directly to Cosmic Space, to the light of the Sun, to “Ahura Mazdao” or Ormuzd. This was because the astral body was paramountly active. By the end of the ancient Persian epoch, the faculty of looking outwards into the physical world was already in its preparatory stage. The impulses leading to perception as it is in our day have been developing for long, long ages. Thus the impulse to look out into the physical world was gradually instilled into man, leading him to the entirely new mode of perception which began to light up by slow degrees.

When the ancient Persian epoch was drawing to its close and the next period was glimmering like a dawn of the future, men felt: “We shall no longer be able to experience with such intensity the Divine heritage that has come to us from the olden days of Atlantis, when with their power of inner, clairvoyant vision, men lived in communion with the worlds of Divine Spirit ” ... The gaze was turned back to the past. What mattered most for these men were their remembrances in which living pictures arose like dreams—dreams of how the Gods had fashioned the world through the ages of Lemuria and Atlantis. They felt that these remembrances were withdrawing, were fading away from humanity and that conditions were approaching when man must work with a faculty which tells him of the outer world, clouds the bright light of the inner world of the Spirit, and compels him to look from within-outwards, if he is to master the external world. This age was drawing nearer and nearer. Those who had the deepest, clearest perception of the dawn of the new epoch were men who at that time were the knowers and sages in ancient India. They felt it in the form, as it were, of a Divine Impulse, compelling the human being to think for himself, through inner activity, about what confronts him in the physical world to which he was descending. Picturing this Impulse as a Divine Being, the successors of the first, very ancient Indian culture—those who were living now during the Second Post-Atlantean epoch—called this Being “Pramathesis.” These men felt: “The God Pramathesis is drawing near, snatching human beings away from the guidance given by the ancient Gods; God Pramathesis is causing the disappearance of all that ancient clairvoyance revealed concerning the world and is forcing man to look outwards into the physical plane. Darkness is creeping over the world of the ancient Gods. A time is approaching when in their life of soul men will no longer be able to gaze into the world of the Gods, but when their eyes will be turned to the outer world. Kaliyuga, the ‘Black Age’ is approaching; the bright age of ancient Divinity is giving place to the age when the Gods of old withdraw. It is the age inaugurated by the God Pramathesis!”

Kaliyuga was said to begin at a time which lies 3,101 years before our own era; this is the time of the “Flood” according to Indian tradition. For it was said that the Flood coincides with the coming of Kaliyuga, and Kaliyuga was conceived to be the offspring of the God “Pramathesis”.

Kaliyuga broke in upon the world, reaching its close in our own age. Now that the ascent to the spiritual world must begin, a spiritual science has come to mankind. Kaliyuga began 3,101 years before our era, and ended in the year 1899 A.D. That is why 1899 is a year of such importance. The re-ascent to the spiritual worlds—this must be the ideal of the future.

The age preceding the onset of Kaliyuga was, however, an age characteristic of the ancient Persian epoch when the old remembrances rose up within man via the astral body. Now he was to turn to the world outside. This was a great and epoch-making transition. In the case of many human beings it came about in such a way that for a time all vision departed from them and darkness spread over their souls. This condition of darkness did not last for long periods, actually only for weeks. But men passed into this condition of sleep, and many never came out of it. Many of them perished and only relatively few were left in widely scattered regions. There is not enough time today to describe the conditions actually prevailing at that time. It can only be said briefly that owing to so large a number of human beings having succumbed, conditions were dark and sinister in the extreme and at only a few scattered places did men awaken from the great spiritual deluge that spread over their souls like a sleep. This condition of sleep was felt by most souls as a kind of “drowning” and by only a few as a re-awakening. And then came the “Black Age,” the age devoid of the Gods.

Were these things known to other human beings on the Earth? They were indeed. To our astonishment we find widespread evidence of knowledge among the peoples that a deluge had submerged the consciousness of men and that in the Third Post-Atlantean epoch, through the development of the sentient soul—in other words, outward-turned vision—an entirely new power must have been inaugurated. The Indians divined this when they said: Kaliyuga is the offspring of Pramathesis. And what did the Greeks say? In Greece, “Pramathesis” becomes, “Prometheus”—which is exactly the same. Prometheus is the brother of Epimetheus. The latter represents one who still “looks back” into ancient times. Epimetheus is the one whose thoughts turn backward; Prometheus sends his thoughts forward, to the world outside, to what takes place there. Just as Pramathesis has his offspring in Kaliyuga, so, too, Prometheus has his offspring. The Greek form of “Kaliyuga” is “Kalion.” And because the Greeks felt it to be the age of Darkness, the “ d ” is prefixed and the word becomes “Deukalion”—which is really the same word as “Kaliyuga.” This is not ingenious fancy, but an occult fact. It is clear, therefore, that the Greeks possessed the same knowledge as the Indian sages. This is quoted merely as an example, indicating that in their conditions of old clairvoyance, knowledge of these truths came to men and they were able to express them in majestic pictures. The Greek legend tells how, on the advice of his father Prometheus, Deukalion builds a wooden chest; in this he and his wife Pyrrha alone are saved from destruction, when Zeus proposes to exterminate the human race by a deluge. Deukalion and Pyrrha land on Parnassus, and from them issues the new human race. Deukalion is the son of Prometheus—and in the intervening period comes the flood, denoting among manifold peoples, a condition of consciousness.

These wonderful pictures which have been preserved in the traditions of so many of the peoples, show us how truths concerning the evolution of mankind have survived among them.

As men lived on gradually into the age of Kaliyuga, into the Third Post-Atlantean epoch, the ancient clairvoyant knowledge faded away. We who have to recapitulate the Third epoch, must bring this kind of knowledge to life once again, but in an entirely new form. The lecture given a fortnight ago (The Idea of Reincarnation and its Introduction into Western Culture) dealt with this subject. Western culture, the beginnings of which were mingled with the ancient Hebrew culture, has to concentrate primary attention on the single personality living on the physical plane between birth and death; Western culture cannot focus its main attention on the Individuality who passes through the different epochs, but concentrates upon the existence of the one personality, whose life between birth and death runs its course on the physical plane, not in the higher worlds. Now that Kaliyuga has come to an end, consciousness must be imbued with the forces necessary for the further evolution of the human race; what was lost during Kaliyuga must be raised again from the depths. Our eyes must be directed more and more to the onflowing life of the Individuality. I have spoken of a series of lives in the West—Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael, Novalis—and have shown how by the addition of knowledge derived from the spiritual worlds, we can perceive the continuous thread of the soul, the onflowing life of the one Individuality in Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael, Novalis.

In our Movement, development of this insight must be a conscious aspiration, for it is a necessity in the evolution and culture of the Earth. No progress would be possible by the mere continuation of the old experiences, the old knowledge. I have emphasised often enough all that it means for the minds of men to enrich and make fruitful the heritage of ancient times by means of the new knowledge now available. It must, however, be realised that just as the transition from life inspired by the astral body to a spiritual life of soul, primarily in the sentient soul, was fraught with deep significance, so, now, we must work our way from life in the consciousness soul to life in the Spirit-Self. I have intimated how this will take place by saying that during the next three thousand years, an increasing number of human beings will experience the Appearance of the Christ Impulse, will be able to experience the Christ Impulse in the spiritual worlds. But actual realisation of the influences streaming in from the spiritual world will have to unfold in greater intensity in the times lying ahead of us. It will not suffice to know, in theory, that “generally speaking” the human being lives on after death; man's whole picture of life must carry the sure conviction that when the human being passes through the Gate of Death, he lives on still, death being merely a transition. We must realise, not as a theory, but as actual knowledge, that while a human being is alive, he works upon us physically, through his body; after his death he works spiritually, out of the spiritual world, upon our physical world. He is present in very truth. We must learn to see life in the light of such a fact and to reckon with what it involves.

Suppose it is our task to educate children.—Anyone acquainted with these things is well aware that to educate children who up to their twentieth year still have parents living, is a very different matter from having to educate children whose fathers died when they were four or five years old. When education is taken in deep earnestness, and the individuality of the child really studied (it is not a matter of speculation!)—especially in the case of a child whose father is dead, we shall often discern that there is something unusual at work here, something we cannot, at first, quite get hold of. Moreover we shall not succeed in getting to the root of it, if we adopt the modes of thought drawn from materialism. But here and there the thought may occur: “Here is a strange current of the times. Most people regard those who belong to it as fools; but it may be worth while to find out what these Theosophists have to say about the destiny of human beings after death. The Theosophists tell us that although human beings discard their physical bodies at death, the content of their life of soul, their hopes, aspirations and so forth, live on, and are not inactive. Indeed they are often more active after death than when the human being was living on the physical plane, enclosed in his body” ... Those who speak like this, have paid attention to the results of spiritual research and will realise that the father is working upon the child from the spiritual world; moreover that he has definite hopes and longings which make their way into the life of the child! With this knowledge, success may come where it was not possible before, and we know how to deal with sympathies and antipathies which may express themselves in the child. To succeed with children we need to know more than that the air affects them, and that when the air is chilly they may catch cold. We must have knowledge of the influences playing from the spiritual world into the physical, and of the form they take.

These things are still regarded as nonsense, but the time is not far distant when the very facts of life will compel people to take account of them and to reckon with what endures in the form of live and potent impulses after human beings have passed through death. Not until then will the concrete reality contained in the spiritual conception of the world be grasped.

Naturally, these influences from the spiritual world are not at work in the case of children only; influences also come from individualities in the spiritual world who were connected with human beings at a later age of life. To begin with, a man may be quite unaware of these influences. (Again I am not inventing but telling you of actual observations, confirmed by spiritual investigation.) After a time a man may say to himself: “I do not know why I am impelled to this or that action, why I have this impulse; something is urging me to think quite differently now, about certain things.” Subsequently he may have a very striking dream. Little heed is paid to things of the kind nowadays, but men will gradually become aware that it is not the “form” but the content of the dream that is of importance. From this you may conclude that if Edison had made his discoveries in a dream, they would have been just as effective! Suppose a man dreams that some unknown person comes to him, someone he cannot even think of as an acquaintance, indeed cannot place at all. This person comes into his life of dream and various things happen ... Finally he realises that this person whom he cannot recall, who died perhaps fifteen years before, is working into and influencing his life. Whereas previously he felt that certain impulses were urging him on, he is now fully aware that these impulses, in the form of a dream-picture, are working into his night-consciousness. This is often characteristic of the connection between impulses within us and influences working upon us in the shape of dreams. Such experiences will become increasingly familiar.

And now, in conclusion, let us see how they will become familiar.

Suppose someone today reads one of the many biographies of Raphael. He will get the impression that in a certain respect Raphael stands there as a phenomenon, complete in himself, giving forth the highest and best that was in him, but so enclosed within his particular sphere of work that it is difficult to imagine him rising still higher or transcending the level he had actually reached. And again: Raphael's creative genius seems to have been alive in him from the the very beginning ... On the subject of its phenomenal manifestation in Raphael's early boyhood the biographies have nothing to say. And why?

The biographies give the information that Raphael's father was Giovanni Santi who, among other activities, was also a writer; he died when Raphael was eleven years old, but before his death he had placed the boy under the tuition of a painter. It is also known that Giovanni Santi was himself a talented painter but that there was something in him which he could not bring to expression. We feel that there was something in the soul of Giovanni Santi which did not make itself manifest because his outer nature frustrated it. He died when the boy Raphael was eleven years old. From the very way in which Raphael develops we can discern the source of the powers which enabled him to reach maturity and perfection so rapidly they are the influences playing into him from his father, forces coming from the spiritual worlds. Anyone who tries to write a true biography of Raphael in the future will have to emphasise the point that Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael, died in 1494, when the boy was only eleven years old. Giovanni Santi was a distinguished man, who during his life on Earth aspired to great things. And his aspirations continued when, living on without frustration in the spiritual world, he was sending down to his beloved son—in the form of delicate and intimate spiritual influences—forces which his own constitution had prevented him from bringing to expression in the physical world.

To say this is no disparagement of Raphael's genius, for the ground must naturally have been there. We know that he was the reincarnation of John the Baptist and had only to receive into himself those forces which it was his particular mission to bring into manifestation at that time. Thinking of this, we can perceive the interplay between the spiritual world and the physical plane. Future study of the life of Raphael will have, at every turn, to concern itself with the influences which poured from the Spiritual into the Physical. Then we shall have a picture of “wholeness”—of forces working around us, through us, in us. Thus will spirituality again be instilled into culture. But it must not surprise us if those who are unwilling today to listen to any suggestion of the introduction of spirituality into culture, are contemptuous of this spiritual conception of the world; for it is something completely new. It is a dawning of the new power of the Spirit-Self. And a time will come—I ask you to write this deeply into your souls—when men will think of the materialistic culture which is now on the way to its close, as they once thought about the age preceding the Flood, yearning and longing for the future culture which, when it came, was something wholly and essentially new. Theosophists, however, should not merely strive for this ideal in theory, but receive it into their very souls; they should regard it as their good Karma to know about the course of human evolution and therewith of human culture.

These things will have to be pondered over for a time, because I am not yet in a position to say exactly when the next lecture can take place.¹ But we know well that time is required to make Spiritual Science an integral force and impulse in our hearts and minds; and we know, too, that it is part of spiritual development not only to understand the truths but actually to unfold all that the great ideas born from a spiritual conception of the world can say to our hearts.

• 1. Between the date of this lecture and the next of the series (18th June, 1912), Dr. Steiner had given two lectures in Copenhagen: On the Meaning of Life, 23rd and 24th May, 1912; three lectures in Norrköping: Anthroposophical Ethics, 28th and 29th May, 1912; and two lectures in Christiania: Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy, 2nd June to 12th June, 1912.

We have heard how in accordance with anthroposophical knowledge, the being of man must be viewed in relation to the whole universe. We considered the human form and figure and its relation to the fixed stars, or rather to the representative of the fixed stars—the Zodiac. We heard how certain forces proceed from the constellations of these stars when combined with the Sun forces, and how the shape and structure of the human head and the organs connected with it, are related to the upper constellations of the Zodiac: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer. The structure of the human chest-organisation is connected with the middle constellations; Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio. Finally the metabolic-and-limb system is connected with the lower constellations: Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces—that is to say with their forces when they are, in a sense, covered by the Earth. So that we can say: The fixed stars—for the Zodiac is only the representative of the fixed stars—work upon the human form and structure.

The planetary spheres work upon man's stages or forms of life. It must indeed be quite clear to us that man has various kinds of life in him. We should not be able to think, the head would not be an organ of thought, if life were as rampant there as it is in the metabolic system, for example. When metabolism becomes too strong in the head, consciousness is extinguished; we lose our consciousness of self.

From this it may be concluded that for consciousness, for mental presentation, a damped-down, suppressed life, a declining life is necessary; while a thriving life, vehement and intense, is necessary for what works more from out of the unconscious, to become will.

We have therefore among the various stages of life some which tend towards self-extinction, and some in which strong, intense organic activity manifests, as in a child, in whom thought is not yet operating. We have this child-like life continually within us; but into this child-like life, the life that is involved in a gradual process of death, inserts itself.

These different stages of life are connected with the planetary spheres. Whereas the fixed stars work in man through his physical forces, the planetary spheres work through his etheric forces. The planetary spheres, therefore, work upon man in a more delicate way. But the human physical body has already received its form, its shape from the fixed stars, not from anything earthly; and its stages of life from the planetary spheres.

We have thus considered the form of man's physical body, the life-stages of his ether-body. We can now proceed to consider his life of soul-and-spirit. But here our mode of study must be different. What is it that our physical and our ether-body provide for us in waking life? They provide what we perceive through our senses and what we can work over in our thoughts. We are only really awake in our acts of sense-perception and when we work over them in thought.

On the other hand, consider the life of feeling. It is obvious, even to superficial study, that feeling does not indicate a state of awakeness as complete as that of thinking and sense-perception. When we wake in the morning and become aware of the colours and sounds of the outside world, when we are conscious of the conditions of warmth around us, we are fully awake and then, in our thoughts, we work over what is transmitted by the senses. But when feelings rise up from the soul, it cannot be said that we are conscious in them to the same extent. Feelings link themselves with sense-perceptions. One sense-impression pleases us, another displeases us. Feelings also intermingle with our thoughts. But if we compare the pictures we experience in dreams with what we experience in our feelings, then the connection between dream-life and the life of feeling is clearly noticeable.

Dreams have to be grasped by the waking life of thought if they are to be valued and understood aright. But feelings too must be observed, as it were, by our thought-life if we are to understand them. In our feelings we are, in reality, dreaming. When we dream, we dream in pictures. When we are awake, we dream in our feelings. And in our will we are asleep, even when fully awake. When we raise an arm, when we do this or that, we can perceive what movements the arm or hand is making, but we do not know how the power of the will operates in the organism. We know as little about that as about the conditions prevailing from the time we fall asleep until we wake up. In our willing, in our actions, we are asleep, while in our sense-perceptions and our thoughts, we are awake. So we are not only asleep during the night; we are asleep, in part of our being, during waking life too. In our will we are asleep and in our feelings we dream. What we experience during actual sleep is withdrawn from our consciousness. But in essence, the same is true of feeling and willing. It is therefore obviously important to realise what it is that the human being experiences in these realms of which ordinary life is quite unaware.

You know from many anthroposophical lectures that from the time of going to sleep until that of waking, the Ego and astral body are outside the physical body and the ether-body. Now it may be of very great importance to learn about just those experiences which the Ego and the astral body pass through from the time of falling asleep to that of waking up. When we are awake, we are confronted by sense-perceptions of the material world. To a certain extent we reach out and encounter them; but with our sense-perceptions, our waking thoughts, we reach no further than the surface of things.

Of course someone may object, saying that he can get further than the surface of things, that if he cuts a piece of wood which is there before him as a sense-perception, then he has penetrated inside it. That is a fallacy, however, for if you cut a piece of wood, you have again only a surface, and if you cut the two pieces again, still you have only surfaces; and if you were to get right to the molecules and atoms, again you would have only surfaces. You do not reach what may be called the inner essence of things, for that lies beyond the realm of sense-perception. Sense-perceptions can be conceived as a tapestry spread out around us. What lies this side of the tapestry we perceive with our senses; what lies on the other side of the tapestry we do not perceive with the senses. We are in this world of sense from the time we wake up until we fall asleep. Our soul is filled with the impressions made upon us by this world of sense. Now when we pass into sleep, we are not in the world this side of the senses, we are then in reality inside things, we are on the other side of the tapestry of sense-perceptions. But in his earthly consciousness, man knows nothing of this and he dreams of all sorts of things lying beyond the realm of sense-perception. He dreams of molecules, of atoms; but they are only dreams—dreams of his waking consciousness. He invents molecules, atoms and the like, and believes them to be realities. But study any description of atoms, even the most recent... you will find nothing but minute objects which are described according to the pattern of what is experienced from the surface of things. It is all a tissue woven from the experiences of waking consciousness on this side of the tapestry of sense.

But when we fall asleep, we emerge from the world of sense and penetrate to the other side. And whereas we experience Nature here with our waking thoughts, in yonder world, from the time of falling asleep until the time of waking, we live in the world of Spirit, that world of Spirit through which we also pass before birth and after death. In his earthly development, however, man is so constituted that his consciousness is extinguished when he passes beyond the world of sense; his consciousness is not forceful enough to penetrate to the spiritual world. But what Spiritual Science calls Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition—these three forms of super-sensible cognition—give us knowledge of what lies on the other side of the tapestry of sense. And what we discover first, is the lowest stage of the world of the Hierarchies.

When we wake from sleep we pass over into the world of animals, plants, minerals—the three kingdoms of Nature belonging to the world of sense. When we fall asleep, we pass beyond the world of sense, we are transported into the realm of the first rank of Beings above man—the Angels. And from the time of falling asleep until waking, we are connected with the Being who is allotted to man as his own Angel, just as through our eyes and ears we are connected with the three kingdoms of Nature here in the world of sense. Even if at first we have no consciousness of this connection with the world of the Angels, it is nevertheless there. This connection extends into our astral body.

If, living in our astral body during sleep, we were suddenly to wake up, we should contact the world of the Angels, in the first place the Angel who is connected with our own life, just as here in the earthly world we are in contact with animals, plants, and minerals.

Now even in the earthly world, in the world of sense, if a man is attentive and deliberately trains his thinking, he sees much more than when he is unobservant and hasty. His connection with the three kingdoms of Nature can be intimate or superficial. And it is the same with regard to the world of spiritual Beings. But in the world of spiritual Beings, different conditions prevail.

A man whose thoughts are entirely engrossed in the material world, who never desires to rise above it, or to acquaint himself with moral ideas extending beyond the merely utilitarian, who has no desire to experience true human love, who in his waking life has no devotion to the Divine-Spiritual world—on falling asleep, such a man has no forces which enable him to come into contact with his Angel. Whenever we fall asleep, this Angel is waiting as it were for the idealistic feelings and thoughts which come with us, and the more we bring, the more intimate becomes our relation to the Angel while we are asleep. And so throughout our life, by means of what we cultivate over and above material interests, we garner, in our waking life, forces whereby our relation to the Angel becomes more and more intimate.

When we die, all sense-perceptions fall away. The outer world can no longer make any impression upon us, for this must be done via the senses, and the senses pass away with the body. In like manner, the thinking that is connected with sense-perception is extinguished, for its realm is the ether-body. This ether-body only remains with us for a few days after death. We see it at first as a tableau—a tableau which under certain circumstances can be glimpsed during life but which will inevitably arise before us after death.

This ether-tissue dissolves away into the universe, just as the ordinary thoughts acquired from the world of sense pass away from us. They do not remain. All purely utilitarian thoughts, all thoughts connected with the material world, drift away from us when we pass through the Gate of Death. But the idealistic thoughts and feelings, the pure human love, the religious feelings which have arisen in our waking life and have united us with our Angel, these accompany us when we pass through death.

This has a very important consequence during the period lying between death and a new birth. Even during earthly life we are connected with the higher Hierarchies and it is correct to say that when we fall asleep and our idealistic experiences reach to the Angel, this Angel is in turn connected with the Archangels, the Archangels with the Archai, and so on. Our existence continues in a rich and abundant world of Spirit. But this spiritual world has no special significance for us between birth and death. This world of the higher Hierarchies acquires its real significance for us when it becomes our environment between death and a new birth. The more we have delivered over to our Angel, the more conscious life is this Angel able to infuse into us after death when we are beings of soul-and-spirit, the more gifts are bestowed by the Hierarchies upon the conscious life of soul. What our Angel unfolds, together with the higher Hierarchies (that is to say, what the Beings of the First Hierarchy unfold together with higher Hierarchies through our Angel) is for our consciousness in the spiritual world between death and rebirth what our eyes and ears are in the physical world. And the more idealistic thoughts and feelings, human love and piety we have brought to our Angel, the clearer does our consciousness become.

Now between death and a new birth there comes a time when the Angel has a definite task in connection with us. The Angel has now to achieve a more intimate relation with the hierarchy of the Archangels than was formerly the case. I have described the time through which man lives between death and a new birth from many different points of view, notably in the Lecture-Course given in Vienna in 1914, entitled The Inner Nature of Man and the Life between Death and a new Birth. I will now describe certain other aspects.

When a somewhat lengthy period has elapsed after death, the important moment comes when the Angel must as it were deliver up to the Archangels what he has received from us through the ‘idealistic’ experiences described. It is as though man were placed before the world of the Archangels, who can then receive these experiences he has unfolded in his soul and Spirit during his life between birth and death. There are great differences among human souls living between death and a new birth. In our epoch there are persons who have brought very little in the way of idealistic thoughts and feelings, of human love, of piety, when the time comes for the Angel to pass on to the Archangel for the purposes of cosmic evolution, what has been carried through death. This activity which unfolds between the Angel and the Archangel must, under all circumstances, take place. But there is a great difference, dependent upon whether we are able to follow consciously, by means of the experiences described, what takes place between the Angels and the Archangels or whether we only live through it in a dull, dim state, as must be the lot of human beings whose consciousness has been purely materialistic. It is not quite accurate to say that the experiences of such human beings are dull or dim. It is perhaps better to say: they experience these happenings in such a way that they feel continually rejected by a world into which they ought to be received, they feel continually chilled by a world which should receive them with warmth. For man should be received with loving sympathy into the world of the Archangels at this important moment of time; he should be received with warmth. And then he will be led in the right way towards what I have called in one of my Mystery Plays: “The Midnight Hour of Existence.”

Man is led by the Archangels to the realm of the Archai where his life is interwoven with that of all the higher Hierarchies, for through the Archai he is brought into relation with all the higher Hierarchies and receives from their realms the impulse to descend to the Earth once again. The power is given him to work as a being of soul-and-spirit, to work in what is provided, later on, in material form, by the stream of heredity.

Before the Midnight Hour of Existence man has become more and more estranged from earthly existence, he has been growing more and more into the spiritual world—either being received lovingly (in the sense described above) by the spiritual world, being drawn to it with warmth, or being repelled, chilled by it. But when the Midnight Hour of Existence has passed, man begins gradually to long for earthly life and once again, during the second part of his journey, he encounters the world of the Archangels. It is really so: Between death and a new birth, man ascends, first to the world of the Angels, Archangels, Archai, and then once again descends; and after the world of the Archai his most important contact is with the world of the Archangels.

And now comes another important point in the life between death and a new birth. In a man who has brought through death no idealistic thoughts or feelings, no human love or true piety, something of the soul-and-spirit has perished as a result of the antipathy and chilling reception meted out by the higher world. A man who now again approaches the realm of the Archangels in the right way has received into him the power to work effectively in his subsequent life on Earth, to make proper use of his body; a man who has not brought such experiences with him will be imbued by the Angels with a longing for earthly life which remains more unconscious. A very great deal depends upon this. Upon it depends to what people, to what language—mother-tongue—the man descends in his forthcoming earthly existence. This urge towards a particular people, a particular mother-tongue may have been implanted in him deeply and inwardly or more superficially. So that on his descent a man is either permeated with deep and inward love for what will become his mother-tongue, or he enters more automatically into what he will have to express later on through his organs of speech.

It makes a great difference in which of these two ways a man has been destined for the language that will be his in the coming earthly life. He who before his earthly life, during his second passage through the realm of the Angels, can be permeated with a really inward love for his mother-tongue, assimilates it as though it were part of his very being. He becomes one with it. This love is absolutely natural to him; it is a love born of the soul; he grows into his language and race as into a natural home. If however a man has grown into it the other way during the descent to his next earthly life, he will arrive on the Earth loving his language merely out of instinct and lower impulses. Lacking the true, inward love for his language and his people, he will be prone to an aggressive patriotism connected with his bodily existence. It makes a great difference whether we grow into race and language with the tranquil, pure love of one who unites himself inwardly with his folk and language, or whether we grow into them more automatically, and out of passions and instincts express love for our folk and our language. The former conditions never come to expression in chauvinism or a superficial and aggressive form of patriotism. A true and inward love for race and language expresses itself naturally, and is thoroughly consistent with real and universal human love. Feeling for internationalism or cosmopolitanism is never stultified by this inner love for a language and people. When, however, a man grows into his language more automatically, when through his instincts and impulses he develops an over-fervid, organic, animal-like love for language and people, false nationalism and chauvinism arise, with their external emphasis upon race and nationality.

At the present time especially, it is necessary to study from the standpoint of life between death and a new birth what we encounter in the outer world in our life between birth and death. For the way we come down into race and language through the stream of heredity, through birth, depends upon how we encounter, for the second time, the realm of the Archangels.

Those who try to understand life to-day from the spiritual vantage-point, know that the experience arising in the period between death and a new birth when man comes for the second time into the realm of the Angels, is very important. All over the Earth to-day the peoples are adopting a false attitude to nationality, race and language, and much of what has arisen in the catastrophe of the second decade of the twentieth century in the evolution of the Western people, is only explicable when studied from such points of view. He who studies life to-day in the light of anthroposophical Spiritual Science must assume that in former earthly lives many men became more and more deeply entangled in materialism. You all know that, normally, the period between death and a new birth is lengthy. But especially in the present phase of evolution, there are many men whose life between their last death and their present birth was only short, and in their former earthly life they had little human love or idealism. Already in the former earthly life their interests were merely utilitarian. And as a result, in their second contact with the realm of the Angels between death and a new birth, the seeds were laid for all that arises to-day in such an evil form in the life of the West.

We shall have realised that man can only be understood as a spatial being when it is known that his form and structure derive from the realm of the fixed stars and his life-stages from the planetary spheres. As a spatial being, man draws the forces that are active in him, not only from the Earth but from the whole Cosmos. Now just as it is necessary to go beyond what is earthly in order to understand man as a spatial being, so it is necessary to go beyond life between birth and death in order to understand social life, racial life on the Earth.

When we carefully observe the life of to-day we find that although men claim their right to freedom so vociferously, they are, in reality, inwardly unfree. There is no truly free life in the activities which nowadays manifest such obvious forces of decline; instincts and lower impulses are the cause of the misery in social life. And when this is perceived we are called upon to understand it.

Just as a second meeting with the Archangels takes place, so when man once again approaches earthly life, he enters into a more intimate union with his Angel. But at first he is somewhat withdrawn from the realm of the Angels. As long as he is in the realm of the Archangels, his Angel too is more strongly bound with this realm. Man lives as it were among the higher Hierarchies and as he draws near to a new birth he is entrusted more and more to the realm of the Angels who then lead him through the world of the Elements, through fire, air, water and earth, to the stream of heredity. His Angel, leads him to physical existence on Earth. His Angel can make him into a man who is in a position to act freely, out of the depths of his soul-and-spirit, if all the conditions described have been fulfilled by the achievements of a former earthly life.

But, the Angel is not able to lead a man to a truly free life, if he has had to be united automatically with his language and his race. In such a case the individual life also becomes unfree. This lack of freedom shows itself in the following way. Instead of forming free concepts, such a man merely thinks words. He becomes unfree because all his thinking is absorbed in words. This is a fundamental characteristic of modern men.

Earthly life in its historical development, especially in its present state, cannot be understood unless we also turn with the eyes of soul, to the life which runs its course between death and a new birth, to the world of soul-and-spirit.

To understand the human form, we must turn to the heaven of the fixed stars; to understand the stages of life in man we must turn to the planetary spheres. If we wish to understand man's life of soul-and-spirit, we must not confine our attention to the life between birth and death, for as we have seen, this life of soul-and-spirit is rooted in the world of the higher Hierarchies and belongs to the higher Hierarchies just as the physical body and ether-body of man belong to the physical and etheric worlds.

Again, if we wish to understand thinking, feeling and willing, then we must not merely confine our attention to man's relation to the world of sense. Thinking, feeling and willing are the forces through which the soul develops. We are carried as it were through the Gate of Death by our idealistic thoughts—by what love and religious devotion have implanted in these thoughts. Our first meeting with the Archangels depends upon how we have ennobled our thinking and permeated it with idealism. But when we have passed through the Midnight Hour of Existence, our thinking dies away. It is this thinking which now, after the Midnight Hour of Existence, is re-moulded and elaborated for the next earthly life. And the forces which permeate our physical organs of thinking in the coming earthly life are shaped by our former thinking. The forces working in the human head are not merely forces of the present life. They are the forces which have worked over into this life from thinking as it was in the last life, and give rise to the form of the brain.

On the other hand, it is the will which, at the second meeting with the Archangels, plays its special part in man's life of soul-and-spirit. And it is the will which then, in the next life on Earth, lays hold of the limb-and-metabolic organism. When we enter through birth into earthly life, it is the will which determines the fitness or inadequacy of the limbs and the metabolic processes.

Within the head we really have a physical mirror-image of the thoughts evolved in the previous life. In the forces of the metabolism and limbs we have the working of the newly acquired forces of will which, at the second meeting with the Archangels, are incorporated into us as I have described—either in such a way that they are inwardly active in the life of soul, or operate automatically.

Those who realise how this present life which generates such forces of decline in humanity of the West, has taken shape, will look with the greatest interest towards what was active in man between death and a new birth during the period of existence preceding this present earthly life. And what they can learn from this will fill them with the impulse—now that the dire consequences of materialism are becoming apparent in the life of the peoples—to give men who already in their last incarnation were too materialistic, that stimulus which can lead once again to a deepening of inner life, to free spiritual activity, to a really intimate, and natural relation to language and race which does not in any way run counter to internationalism or cosmopolitanism.

But first and foremost our thinking must be permeated with real spirituality. In the Spirit of modern man, there are, in reality, only thoughts. When man speaks to-day of his Spirit, he is actually speaking only of his thoughts, of his more or less abstract thinking. What we need is to be filled with Spirit, the living Spirit belonging to the world lying between death and a new birth. In respect of his form, his stages of life, his nature of soul-and-spirit, man must regard himself as belonging to a world which lies outside the earthly sphere; then he will be able to bring what is right and good into earthly life.

We know how the Spiritual in man is gradually absorbed by other domains of earthly existence, by political life, by economic life. What is needed is a free and independent spiritual life; only thereby can man be permeated with real spirituality, with spiritual substance, not merely with thoughts about this or that. Anthroposophy must therefore be prepared to work for the liberation of the spiritual life. If this spiritual life does not stand upon its own foundations, man will become more and more a dealer in abstractions, He will not be able to permeate his being with living Spirit, but only with abstract Spirit.

When a man here, in physical life, passes through the Gate of Death, his corpse is committed to the Earth, or to the Elements. His true being is no longer within this physical corpse. When a man passes through birth in such a way that through the processes described he has become an ‘automaton’ in his relation to his nation, language and conduct—then his living thinking, his living will, his living nature of soul-and-spirit die when he is born into the physical world and within physical existence become the corpse of the Divine Being of soul-and-spirit.

Our abstract, rationalistic thinking is verily a corpse of the soul-and-spirit. Just as the real human being is no longer within the physical corpse, so we have in abstract thinking, a life of soul that is devoid of Spirit—really only the corpse of the Divine-spiritual. Man stands to-day at a critical point where he must resolve to receive the spiritual world once again, in order that he may pour new life into the abstract thinking that is a corpse of the Divine-Spiritual, opening the way for instincts, impulses and automatism.

What I said at the end of my lecture to students here (On the Reality of Higher Worlds. 25th November, 1921.) is deeply true: If he is to pass from a decline to a real ascent, man must overcome the abstraction which, like a corpse of the soul is present in the intellectualistic and rationalistic thinking of to-day.

An awakening of the soul and spirit—that is what is needed! The social life of the present day points clearly to the necessity for such an awakening. Anthroposophy has indeed an eternal task in regard to that living principle in man which must continue beyond all epochs of time. But Anthroposophy has also a task to fulfil for the present age, namely to wean man from externalisation, from the tendency to paralyse and kill the Divine-Spiritual within him. Anthroposophy must bring back this Divine-Spiritual life. Man must learn to regard himself not merely as an earthly but as a heavenly being, realising that his earthly life can only be conducted aright if the forces of heavenly existence, of the existence between death and a new birth, are brought down into this earthly life.

To the outwardly perceptible, visible world there belongs the invisible world, and these, taken together, form a whole. The marked degree to which this is the case first appears in its full clarity when we turn our attention away from the animals to the plants.

Plant-life, as it sprouts and springs forth from the earth, immediately arouses our delight, but it also provides access to something which we must feel as full of mystery. In the case of the animal, though certainly its will and whole inner activity have something of the mysterious, we nevertheless recognize that this will is actually there, and is the cause of the animal's form and outer characteristics. But in the case of the plants, which appear on the face of the earth in such magnificent variety of form, which develop in such a mysterious way out of the seed with the help of the earth and the encircling air—in the case of the plant we feel that some other factor must be present in order that this plant-world may arise in the form it does.

When spiritual vision is directed to the plant-world, we are immediately led to a whole host of beings, which were known and recognized in the old times of instinctive clairvoyance, but which were afterwards forgotten and today remain only as names used by the poet, names to which modern man ascribes no reality. To the same degree, however, in which we deny reality to the beings which whirl and weave around the plants, to that degree do we lose the understanding of the plant-world. This understanding of the plant-world, which, for instance, would be so necessary for the art of healing, has been entirely lost to present-day humanity.

We have already recognized a very significant connection between the world of the plants and the world of the butterflies; but this too will only come rightly before our souls when we look yet more deeply into the whole weaving and working of plant-life.

Plants send down their roots into the ground. Anyone who can observe what they really send down and can perceive the roots with spiritual vision (for this he must have) sees how the root-nature is everywhere surrounded, woven around, by elemental nature spirits. And these elemental spirits, with an old clairvoyant perception designated as gnomes and which we may call the root-spirits, can actually be studied by an imaginative and inspirational world-conception, just as human life and animal life can be studied in the sphere of the physical. We can look into the soul-nature of these elemental spirits, into this world of the spirits of the roots.

These root-spirits, are, so to say, a quite special earth-folk, invisible at first to outer view, but in their effects so much the more visible; for no root could develop if it were not for what is mediated between the root and the earth-realm by these remarkable root-spirits, which bring the mineral element of the earth into flux in order to conduct it to the roots of the plants. Naturally I refer to the underlying spiritual process.

These root-spirits, which are everywhere present in the earth, get a quite particular sense of well-being from rocks and from ores (which may be more or less transparent). But they enjoy their greatest sense of well-being, because here they are really at home, when they are conveying what is mineral to the roots of the plants. And they are completely enfilled with an inner element of spirituality which we can only compare with the inner element of spirituality in the human eye, in the human ear. For these root-spirits are in their spirit-nature entirely sense. Apart from this they are nothing at all; they consist only of sense. They are entirely sense, and it is a sense which is at the same time understanding, which does not only see and hear, but immediately understands what is seen and heard, which in receiving impressions, receives also ideas.

We can even indicate the way in which these root-spirits receive their ideas. We see a plant sprouting out of the earth. The plant comes, as I shall presently show you, into connection with the extraterrestrial universe; and, particularly at certain seasons of the year, spirit-currents flow from above, from the blossom and the fruit of the plant down into the roots below, streaming into the earth. And just as we turn our eyes towards the light and see, so do the root-spirits turn their faculty of perception towards what seeps downwards from above, through the plant into the earth. What seeps down towards the root-spirits, that is something which the light has sent into the blossoms, which the sun's warmth has sent into the plants, which the air has produced in the leaves, which the distant stars have brought about in the plant's structures. The plant gathers the secrets of the universe, sinks them into the ground, and the gnomes take these secrets into themselves from what seeps down spiritually to them through the plants. And because the gnomes, particularly from autumn on and through the winter, in their wanderings through ore and rock bear with them what has filtered down to them through the plants, they become those beings within the earth which, as they wander, carry the ideas of the whole universe streaming throughout the earth. We look forth into the wide world. The world is built from universal spirit; it is an embodiment of universal ideas, of universal spirit. The gnomes receive through the plants, which to them are the same as rays of light are to us, the ideas of the universe, and within the earth carry them in full consciousness from metal to metal, from rock to rock.

We gaze down into the depths of the earth not to seek there below for abstract ideas about some kind of mechanical laws of nature, but to behold the roving, wandering gnomes, which are the light-filled preservers of world-understanding within the earth.

Because these gnomes have immediate understanding of what they see, their knowledge is actually of a similar nature to that of man. They are the compendium of understanding, they are entirely understanding. Everything about them is understanding, an understanding however, which is universal, and which really looks down upon human understanding as something incomplete. The gnomes laugh us to scorn on account of the groping, struggling understanding with which we manage to grasp one thing or another, whereas they have no need at all to make use of thought. They have direct perception of what is comprehensible in the world; and they are particularly ironical when they notice the efforts people have to make to come to this or that conclusion. Why should they do this? say the gnomes—why ever should people give themselves so much trouble to think things over? We know everything we look at. People are so stupid—say the gnomes—for they must first think things over.

And I must say that the gnomes become ironical to the point of ill manners if one speaks to them of logic. For why ever should people need such a superfluous thing—a training in thinking? The thoughts are already there. The ideas flow through the plants. Why don't people stick their noses as deep into the earth as the plant's roots, and let what the sun says to the plants trickle down into their noses? Then they would know something! But with logic—so say the gnomes—there one can only have odd bits and pieces of knowledge.

Thus the gnomes, inside the earth, are actually the bearers of the ideas of the universe, of the world-all. But for the earth itself they have no liking at all. They bustle about in the earth with ideas of the universe, but they actually hate what is earthly. This is something from which the gnomes would best like to tear themselves free. Nevertheless they remain with the earthly—you will soon see why this is—but they hate it, for the earthly threatens them with a continual danger. The earth continually holds over them the threat of forcing them to take on a particular form, the form of those creatures I described to you in the last lecture, the amphibians, and in particular of the frogs and the toads. The feeling of the gnomes within the earth is really this: If we grow too strongly together with the earth, we shall assume the form of frogs or toads. They are continually on the alert to avoid being caught in a too strong connection with the earth, to avoid taking on earthly form. They are always on the defensive against this earthly form, which threatens them as it does because of the element in which they exist. They have their home in the earthly-moist element; there they live under the constant threat of being forced into amphibian forms. From this they continually tear themselves free, by filling themselves entirely with ideas of the extra-terrestrial universe. The gnomes are really that element within the earth which represents the extra-terrestrial, because they must continually reject a growing together with the earthly; otherwise, as single beings, they would take on the forms of the amphibian world. And it is just from what I may call this feeling of hatred, this feeling of antipathy towards the earthly, that the gnomes gain the power of driving the plants up out of the earth. With the fundamental force of their being they unceasingly thrust away the earthly, and it is this thrusting that determines the upward direction of the plant's growth; they push the plants up with them. It accords with the nature of the gnomes in regard to the earthly to allow the plant to have only its roots in the earth, and then to grow upwards out of the earth-sphere; so that it is actually out of the force of their own original nature that the gnomes push the plants out of the earth and make them grow upwards.

Once the plant has grown upwards, once it has left the domain of the gnomes and has passed out of the sphere of the moist-earthly element into the sphere of the moist-airy, the plant develops what comes to outer physical formation in the leaves. But in all that is now active in the leaves other beings are at work, water-spirits, elemental spirits of the watery element, to which an earlier instinctive clairvoyance gave among others the name of undines. Just as we find the roots busied about, woven-about by the gnome-beings in the vicinity of the ground, and observe with pleasure the upward-striving direction which they give, we now see these water-beings, these elemental beings of the water, these undines in their connection with the leaves.

These undine beings differ in their inner nature from the gnomes. They cannot turn like a spiritual sense-organ outwards towards the universe. They can only yield themselves up to the weaving and working of the whole cosmos in the airy-moist element, and therefore they are not beings of such clarity as the gnomes. They dream incessantly, these undines, but their dream is at the same time their own form. They do not hate the earth as intensely as do the gnomes, but they have a sensitivity to what is earthly. They live in the etheric element of water, swimming and swaying through it, and in a very sensitive way they recoil from everything in the nature of a fish; for the fish-form is a threat to them, even if they do assume it from time to time, though only to forsake it immediately in order to take on another metamorphosis. They dream their own existence. And in dreaming their own existence they bind and release, they bind and disperse the substances of the air, which in a mysterious way they introduce into the leaves, as these are pushed upwards by the gnomes. For at this point the plants would wither if it were not for the undines, who approach from all sides, and show themselves, as they weave around the plants in their dream-like existence, to be what we can only call the world-chemists. The undines dream the uniting and dispersing of substances. And this dream, in which the plant has its existence, into which it grows when, developing upwards, it forsakes the ground, this undine-dream is the world-chemist which brings about in the plant-world the mysterious combining and separation of the substances which emanate from the leaf. We can therefore say that the undines are the chemists of plant-life. They dream of chemistry. They possess an exceptionally delicate spirituality which is really in its element just where water and air come into contact with each other. The undines live entirely in the element of moisture, but they develop their actual inner function when they come to the surface of something watery, be it only to the surface of a water-drop or something else of a watery nature. For their whole endeavour lies in preserving themselves from getting the form of a fish, the permanent form of a fish. They wish to remain in a condition of metamorphosis, in a condition of eternal, endlessly changing transformation. But in this state of transformation in which they dream of the stars and of the sun, of light and of warmth, they become the chemists who now, starting from the leaf, carry the plant further in its formation, after it has been pushed upwards by the power of the gnomes. So the plant develops its leaf-growth, and this mystery is now revealed as the dream of the undines into which the plants grow.

To the same degree, however, in which the plant grows into the dream of the undines, does it now come into another domain, into the domain of those spirits which live in the airy-warmth element, just as the gnomes live in the moist-earthly, and the undines in the moist-airy element. Thus it is in the element which is of the nature of air and warmth that those beings live which an earlier clairvoyant art designated as the sylphs. Because air is everywhere imbued with light, these sylphs, which live in the airy-warmth element, press towards the light, relate themselves to it. They are particularly susceptible to the finer but larger movements within the atmosphere.

When in spring or autumn you see a flock of swallows, which produce as they fly vibrations in a body of air, setting an air-current in motion, then this moving air-current—and this holds good for every bird—is for the sylphs something audible. Cosmic music sounds from it to the sylphs. If, let us say, you are travelling somewhere by ship and the seagulls are flying around it, then in what is set in motion by the seagulls' flight there is a spiritual sounding, a spiritual music which accompanies the ship.

Again it is the sylphs which unfold and develop their being within this sounding music, finding their dwelling-place in the moving current of air. It is in this spiritually sounding, moving element of air that they find themselves at home; and at the same time they absorb what the power of light sends into these vibrations of the air. Because of this the sylphs, which experience their existence more or less in a state of sleep, feel most in their element, most at home, where birds are winging through the air. If a sylph is obliged to move and weave through air devoid of birds, it feels as though it had lost itself. But at the sight of a bird in the air something quite special comes over the sylph. I have often had to describe a certain event in man's life, that event which leads the human soul to address itself as “I”. And I have always drawn attention to a saying of Jean Paul, that, when for the first time a human being arrives at the conception of his “I”, it is as though he looks into the most deeply veiled Holy of Holies of his soul. A sylph does not look into any such veiled Holy of Holies of its own soul, but when it sees a bird an ego-feeling comes over it. It is in what the bird sets in motion as it flies through the air that the sylph feels its ego. And because this is so, because its ego is kindled in it from outside, the sylph becomes the bearer of cosmic love through the atmosphere. It is because the sylph embodies something like a human wish, but does not have its ego within itself but in the bird-kingdom, that it is at the same time the bearer of wishes of love through the universe.

Thus we behold the deepest sympathy between the sylphs and the bird-world. Whereas the gnome hates the amphibian world, whereas the undine is unpleasantly sensitive to fishes, is unwilling to approach them, tries to avoid them, feels a kind of horror for them, the sylph, on the other hand, is attracted towards birds, and has a sense of well-being when it can waft towards their plumage the swaying, love-filled waves of the air. And were you to ask a bird from whom it learns to sing, you would hear that its inspirer is the sylph. Sylphs feel a sense of pleasure in the bird's form. They are, however, prevented by the cosmic ordering from becoming birds, for they have another task. Their task is lovingly to convey light to the plant. And just as the undine is the chemist for the plant, so is the sylph the light-bearer. The sylph imbues the plant with light; it bears light into the plant.

Through the fact that the sylphs bear light into the plant, something quite remarkable is brought about in it. You see, the sylph is continually carrying light into the plant. The light, that is to say the power of the sylphs in the plant, works upon the chemical forces which were induced into the plant by the undines. Here occurs the inter-working of sylph-light and undine-chemistry. This is a remarkable plastic activity. With the help of the upstreaming substances which are worked upon by the undines, the sylphs weave out of the light an ideal plant-form. They actually weave the Archetypal Plant within the plant from light, and from the chemical working of the undines. And when towards autumn the plant withers and everything of physical substance disintegrates, then these plant-forms begin to seep downwards, and now the gnomes perceive them, perceive what the world—the sun through the sylphs, the air through the undines—has brought to pass in the plant. This the gnomes perceive, so that throughout the entire winter they are engaged in perceiving below what has seeped into the ground through the plants. Down there they grasp world-ideas in the plant-forms which have been plastically developed with the help of the sylphs, and which now in their spiritual ideal form enter into the ground.

Naturally those people who regard the plant as something purely material know nothing of this spiritual ideal form. Thus at this point something appears which in the materialistic observation of the plant gives rise to what is nothing other than a colossal error, a terrible error. I will sketch this error for you.

Everywhere you will find that materialistic science describes matters as follows: The plant takes root in the ground, above the ground it develops its leaves, finally unfolding its blossoms, within the blossoms the stamens, then the seed-bud. Now—usually from another plant—the pollen from the anthers, from the pollen vessels, is carried over to the germ which is then fructified, and through this the seed of the new plant is produced. The germ is regarded as the female element and what comes from the stamens as the male—indeed matters cannot be regarded otherwise as long as people remain fixed in materialism, for then this process really does look like a fructification. This, however, it is not. In order to gain insight into the process of fructification, that is to say the process of reproduction, in the plant-world, we must be conscious that in the first place it is from what the great chemists, the undines, bring about in the plants, and from what the sylphs bring about, that the plant-form arises, the ideal plant-form which sinks into the ground and is preserved by the gnomes. It is there below, this plant-form. And there within the earth it is now guarded by the gnomes after they have seen it, after they have looked upon it. The earth becomes the mother-womb for what thus seeps downwards. This is something quite different from what is described by materialistic science.

After it has passed through the sphere of the sylphs, the plant comes into the sphere of the elemental fire-spirits. These fire-spirits are the inhabitants of the warmth-light element. When the warmth of the earth is at its height, or is otherwise suitable, they gather the warmth together. Just as the sylphs gather up the light, so do the fire-spirits gather up the warmth and carry it into the blossoms of the plants.

Undines carry the action of the chemical ether into the plants, sylphs the action of the light-ether into the plant's blossoms. And the pollen now provides what may be called little air-ships, to enable the fire-spirits to carry the warmth into the seed. Everywhere warmth is collected with the help of the stamens, and is carried by means of the pollen from the anthers to the seeds and the seed vessels. And what is formed here in the seed-bud is entirely the male element which comes from the cosmos. It is not a case of the seed-vessel being female and the anthers of the stamens being male. In no way does fructification occur in the blossom, but only the pre-forming of the male seed. The fructifying force is what the fire-spirits in the blossom take from the warmth of the world-all as the cosmic male seed, which is united with the female element. This element, drawn from the forming of the plant has, as I told you, already earlier seeped down into the ground as ideal form, and is resting there below. For plants the earth is the mother, the heavens the father. And all that takes place outside the domain of the earth is not the mother-womb for the plant. It is a colossal error to believe that the mother-principle of the plant is in the seed-bud. The fact is that this is the male-principle, which is drawn forth from the universe with the aid of the fire-spirits. The mother comes from the cambium, which spreads from the bark to the wood, and is carried down from above as ideal form. And what now results from the combined working of gnome-activity and fire-spirit activity—this is fructification. The gnomes are, in fact, the spiritual midwives of plant-reproduction. Fructification takes place below in the earth during the winter, when the seed comes into the earth and meets with the forms which the gnomes have received from the activities of the sylphs and undines and now carry to where these forms can meet with the fructifying seeds.

You see, because people do not recognize what is spiritual, do not know how gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-spirits—which were formerly called salamanders—weave and live together with plant-growth, there is complete lack of clarity about the process of fructification in the plant world. There, outside the earth nothing of fructification takes place, but the earth is the mother of the plant-world, the heavens the father. This is the case in a quite literal sense. Plant-fructification takes place through the fact that the gnomes take from the fire-spirits what the fire-spirits have carried into the seed bud as concentrated cosmic warmth on the little airships of the anther-pollen. Thus the fire-spirits are the bearers of warmth.

And now you will easily gain insight into the whole process of plant-growth. First, with the help of what comes from the fire-spirits, the gnomes down below instill life into the plant and push it upwards. They are the fosterers of life. They carry the life-ether to the root—the same life-ether in which they themselves live. The undines foster the chemical ether, the sylphs the light-ether, the fire-spirits the warmth ether. And then the fruit of the warmth-ether again unites with what is present below as life. Thus the plants can only be understood when they are considered in connection with all that is circling, weaving and living around them. And one only reaches the right interpretation of the most important process in the plant when one penetrates into these things in a spiritual way.

When once this has been understood, it is interesting to look again at that memorandum of Goethe's where, referring to another botanist, he is so terribly annoyed because people speak of the eternal marriage in the case of the plants above the earth. Goethe is affronted by the idea that marriages should be taking place over every meadow. This seemed to him something unnatural. In this Goethe had an instinctive but very true feeling. He could not as yet know the real facts of the matter, nevertheless he instinctively felt that fructification should not take place above in the blossom. Only he did not as yet know what goes on down below under the ground, he did not know that the earth is the mother-womb of the plants. But, that the process which takes place above in the blossom is not what all botanists hold it to be, this is something which Goethe instinctively felt.

You are now aware of the inner connection between plant and earth. But there is something else which you must take into account.

You see, when up above the fire-spirits are circling around the plant and transmitting the anther-pollen, then they have only one feeling, which they have in an enhanced degree, compared to the feeling of the sylphs. The sylphs experience their self, their ego, when they see the birds flying about. The fire-spirits have this experience, but to an intensified degree, in regard to the butterfly-world, and indeed the insect-world as a whole. And it is these fire-spirits which take the utmost delight in following in the tracks of the insects' flight so that they may bring about the distribution of warmth for the seed buds. In order to carry the concentrated warmth, which must descend into the earth so that it may be united with the ideal form, in order to do this the fire-spirits feel themselves inwardly related to the butterfly-world, and to the insect-creation in general. Everywhere they follow in the tracks of the insects as they buzz from blossom to blossom. And so one really has the feeling, when following the flight of insects, that each of these insects as it buzzes from blossom to blossom, has a quite special aura which cannot be entirely explained from the insect itself. Particularly the luminous, wonderfully radiant, shimmering, aura of bees, as they buzz from blossom to blossom, is unusually difficult to explain. And why? It is because the bee is everywhere accompanied by a fire-spirit which feels so closely related to it that, for spiritual vision, the bee is surrounded by an aura which is actually a fire-spirit. When a bee flies through the air from plant to plant, from tree to tree, it flies with an aura which is actually given to it by a fire-spirit. The fire-spirit does not only gain a feeling of its ego in the presence of the insect, but it wishes to be completely united with the insect.

Through this, however, insects also obtain that power about which I have spoken to you, and which shows itself in a shimmering forth of light into the cosmos. They obtain the power completely to spiritualize the physical matter which unites itself with them, and to allow the spiritualized physical substance to ray out into cosmic space. But just as with a flame it is the warmth in the first place which causes the light to shine, so, above the surface of the earth, when the insects shimmer forth into cosmic space what attracts the human being to descend again into physical incarnation, it is the fire spirits which inspire the insects to this activity, the fire-spirits which are circling and weaving around them. But if the fire-spirits are active in promoting the outstreaming of spiritualized matter into the cosmos, they are no less actively engaged in seeing to it that the concentrated fiery element, the concentrated warmth, goes into the interior of the earth, so that, with the help of the gnomes, the spirit-form, which sylphs and undines cause to seep down into the earth, may be awakened.

This, you see, is the spiritual process of plant-growth. And it is because the subconscious in man divines something of a special nature in the blossoming, sprouting plant that he experiences the being of the plant as full of mystery. The wonder is not spoiled, the magic is not brushed from the dust on the butterfly's wing. Rather is the instinctive delight in the plant raised to a higher level when not only the physical plant is seen, but also that wonderful working of the gnome-world below, with its immediate understanding and formative intelligence, the gnome-world which first pushes the plant upwards. Thus, just as human understanding is not subjected to gravity, just as the head is carried without our feeling its weight, so the gnomes with their light-imbued intellectuality overcome what is of the earth and push the plant upwards. Down below they prepare the life. But the life would die away were it not formed by chemical activity. This is brought to it by the undines. And this again must be imbued with light. And so we picture, from below upwards, in bluish, blackish shades the force of gravity, to which the impulse upwards is given by the gnomes; and weaving around the plant—indicated by the leaves—the undine-force blending and dispersing substances as the plant grows upwards. From above downwards, from the sylphs, light falls into the plants and shapes an idealized plastic form which descends, and is taken up by the mother-womb of the earth; moreover this form is circled around by the fire-spirits which concentrate the cosmic warmth into the tiny seed-points. This warmth is also sent downwards to the gnomes, so that from out of fire and life, they can cause the plants to arise.

And further we now see that essentially the earth is indebted for its power of resistance and its density to the antipathy of the gnomes and undines towards amphibians and fishes. If the earth is dense, this density is due to the antipathy by means of which the gnomes and undines maintain their form. When light and warmth sink down on to the earth, this is first due to that power of sympathy, that sustaining power of sylph-love, which is carried through the air, and then to the sustaining sacrificial power of the fire-spirits, which causes them to incline downwards to what is below themselves. So we may say that, over the face of the earth, earth-density, earth-magnetism and earth-gravity, in their upward-striving aspect, unite with the downward-striving power of love and sacrifice. And in this inter-working of the downwards streaming force of love and sacrifice and the upwards streaming force of density, gravity and magnetism, in this inter-working, where the two streams meet, plant-life develops over the earth's surface. Plant-life is an outer expression of the inter-working of world-love and world-sacrifice with world-gravity and world-magnetism.

From this you have seen with what we have to do when we direct our gaze to the plant-world, which so enchants, uplifts and inspires us. Here real insight can only be gained when our vision embraces the spiritual, the super-sensible, as well as what is accessible to the physical senses. This enables us to correct the capital error of materialistic botany, that fructification occurs above the earth. What occurs there is not the process of fructification, but the preparation of the male heavenly seed for what is being made ready as the future Plant in the mother-womb of the earth.

I have frequently referred recently to the connection the course of the year has with various aspects of human life, and during the Easter days I pointed especially to the connection with the celebration of festivals. Today I should like to go back to very ancient times and say more on this subject, just in relation to the ancient Mysteries. This can perhaps deepen in one way or another what we have spoken of before.

To the people of very ancient periods on Earth, the festivals that took place during the year formed a very significant part of their lives. We know that in those ancient times the human consciousness worked in an entirely different way from that of later times. We might ascribe a somewhat dreamy nature to this old form of consciousness. And indeed it was out of this dream condition that those insights arose in the human soul, in the human consciousness, which then took on the form of myths and in fact became mythology.

Through this dreamy, or we can also say instinctively clairvoyant consciousness people saw more deeply into the spiritual environment. But precisely through this more intensive kind of participation, not just in the sensible workings of Nature, as is the case today, but also in the spiritual events, people were all the more involved with the phenomena connected with the cycle of the year, with the differing aspects of Nature in spring and in autumn. I have pointed to this just in recent days.

Today I want to share something entirely different with you in this regard, and that is, how the festival of Midsummer, which has become our St. John's festival, and the Midwinter festival, which has become our Christmas, were celebrated in connection with the old Mystery teachings. To begin with, we must be quite clear that the humanity of the ancient times of which we are speaking did not have a full ego-consciousness, as we do today. In the dreamlike consciousness, a full ego-consciousness was lacking; and when this is the case, people do not perceive precisely that which present-day humanity is so proud of. Thus the people of that period did not perceive what existed in dead nature, in the mineral nature.

Let us keep this firmly in mind, my dear friends: It was not a consciousness that flowed along in abstract thoughts, but it lived in pictures; yet it was dreamlike. These people entered into, for example, the sprouting, burgeoning plant-life and plant-nature in spring far more than is the case today. Again, they felt the shedding of the leaves, their drying up in autumn, the whole dying away of the plant world; felt deeply also the changes the animal world lived through during the course of the year; felt the whole human environment to be different when the air was filled with butterflies fluttering and beetles humming. They felt their own human weaving in a certain way as being alongside the weaving and being of the plants and animal existence. But they not only had no interest, they had no proper consciousness for the mineral realm, for the dead world outside them. This is one side of the earlier human consciousness.

The other side is this: that no interest existed among this ancient humanity for the form of man in general. It is very difficult today to imagine what the human perception was in this regard, that people in general took no particular interest in the human figure as a space-form. They had, however, an intense interest in what pertains to race. And the farther back we go into ancient cultures, the less do we find people with the common consciousness interested in the human form. On the other hand, they were interested in the color of the skin, in the racial temperament. This is what people noticed. On the one side man was not interested in the dead mineral world, nor, on the other, in the human form. There was an interest, as we have said, in what pertains to race, rather than in the universally human, including the outer form of man.

The great teachers of the Mysteries simply accepted this as a fact. How they thought about it, I will show you graphically in a drawing. They said to themselves: “The people have a dreamlike consciousness by means of which they perceive very clearly the plant life in their environment.”—In their dream-pictures these people indeed lived with the plant life; but their dream consciousness did not extend to the comprehension of the mineral world. So the Mystery teachers said to themselves: “The human consciousness reaches on the one side to the plant life [see drawing], which is dreamily experienced, but not to the mineral; this lies outside human consciousness. And on the other side, men feel within them what still binds them with the animal world, that is, what pertains to race, what is typical of the animal. [See drawing]. On the other hand, what makes man really man, his upright form, the space form of his being, lies outside of human consciousness.”

Thus, the specifically human lay outside the interest of these people of ancient times. We can characterize the human by thinking of it, in the sense of this ancient humanity, as enclosed within this space [shaded portion in drawing], while the mineral and the specifically human lay outside the realm of knowledge generally accessible to those people who carried on their lives outside the Mysteries.

But what I have just said applies only in general. With his own forces, with what man experienced in his own being, he could not penetrate beyond this space [see drawing], to the mineral on the one side, to the human on the other. But there were ceremonies originating in the Mysteries which brought to man in the course of the year something approximating the human ego-consciousness on the one side and the perception of the general mineral kingdom on the other.

Strange as it may sound to people of the present time, it is nevertheless true that the priests of the ancient Mysteries arranged festivals by whose unusual effects man was lifted out above the plant-like to the mineral, and thereby at a certain time of year experienced a lighting up of his ego. It was as if the ego shone into the dream-consciousness. You know that even in a person's dreams today, one's own ego, which is then seen, often constitutes an element of the dream.

And so at the time of the St. John's festival, through the ceremonies that were arranged for those among the people who wanted to take part in them, ego-consciousness shone in just at the height of summer. And at this time of midsummer people could perceive the mineral realm at least to the extent necessary to help them attain a kind of ego-consciousness, whereby the ego appeared as something that entered into dreams from outside. In order to bring this about, the participants in the oldest midsummer festivals—those of the summer solstice which have become our St. John's festival—the participants were led to unfold a musical-poetic element in round dances having a strong rhythmic quality and accompanied by song. Certain presentations and performances were filled with distinctive musical recitative accompanied by primitive instruments. Such a festival was completely immersed in the musical-poetic element. What man had in his dream-consciousness he poured out into the cosmos, as it were, in the form of music, in song and dance.

Modern man can have no true appreciation of what was accomplished by way of music and song during those intense and widespread folk festivals of ancient times, which took place under the guidance of men who in turn had received their guidance from the Mysteries. For what music and poetry have come to be since then is far removed from the simple, primitive, elemental form of music and poetry which was unfolded in those times at the height of summer under the guidance of the Mysteries. For everything the people did in performing their round-dances, accompanied by singing and primitive poetic recitations, had the single goal of bringing about a soul mood in which there occurred what I have just called the shining of the ego into the human spirit.

But if those ancient people had been asked how they came to form such songs and such dances, by means of which there could arise what I have described, they would have given an answer highly paradoxical to modern man. They would have said, for example: “Much of it has been given to us by tradition, for those who went before us have also done these things.” But in certain ancient times they would have said: “One can learn these things also today without having any tradition, if one simply develops further what manifests itself. One can still learn today how to make use of instruments, how to form dances, how to master the singing voice”—and now comes the paradox in what these ancient people would have said. They would have said: “It is learned from the songbirds.”—For they understood in a deep way the whole import of the songbirds' singing.

My dear friends, mankind has long ago forgotten why the songbirds sing. It is true that men have preserved the art of song, the art of poetry, but in the age of intellectualism in which the intellect has dominated everything, they have forgotten the connection of singing with the whole universe. Even someone who is musically inspired, who sets the art of music high above the commonplace, even such a man, speaking out of this later intellectualistic age, says: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.” Indeed, my dear friends, the man of a certain period says this. The bird, however, would never say such a thing. He would never say: “The song that issues from my throat is my reward.” And just as little would the pupils of the ancient Mystery schools have said it. For when at a certain time of year the larks and the nightingales sing, what is thereby formed streams out into the cosmos, not through the air, but through the etheric element; it vibrates outward in the cosmos up to a certain boundary... then it vibrates back again to Earth, to be received by the animal realm—only now the divine-spiritual essence of the cosmos has united with it.

And thus it is that the nightingales and the larks send forth their voices into the universe (red) and that what they thus send forth comes back to them etherically (yellow), for the time during which they do not sing;

but in the meantime it has been filled with the content of the divine-spiritual. The larks send their voices out over the cosmos, and the divine spiritual, which takes part in the forming, in the whole configuration of the animal kingdom, streams back to the Earth on the waves of what had streamed out in the songs of the larks and the nightingales.

Therefore if anyone speaks, not from the standpoint of the intellectualistic age, but out of the truly all-encompassing human consciousness, he really cannot say: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.” Rather, he would have to say: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. And the song which streams forth from his throat into the cosmic expanses returns to the Earth as a blessing, fructifying the earthly life with divine spiritual impulses which then work on in the bird world and which can only work in the bird world because they find their way in on the waves of what has been ‘sung out’ to them into the cosmos.”

Now of course not all creatures are nightingales and larks; also of course not all of them send out song; but something similar even though it is not so beautiful, goes out into the cosmos from the whole animal world. In those ancient times this was understood, and therefore the pupils of the Mystery-pupils were instructed in such singing and dancing as they could then perform at the St. John's festival, if I may call it by the modern name. Human beings sent this out into the cosmos, of course not now in animal form, but in humanized form, as a further development of what the animals send out into cosmic space.—And there is something else yet that belonged to those festivals: not only the dancing, the music, the song, but afterward, the listening. First, there was the active performance in the festivals; then the people were directed to listen to what came back to them. For through their dances, their singing, and all that was poetic in their performances, they had sent forth the great questions to the divine spiritual of the cosmos. Their performance streamed up, as it were, into cosmic spaces as the water of the earth rises, forming clouds above and dropping down again as rain. Thus, the effects of the human festival performances arose and came back again—of course not as rain, but as something which manifested itself to man as ego-power. And the people had a sensitive feeling for that particular transformation which took place in the air and warmth around the Earth, just about the time of the St. John's festival. Of course the man of the present intellectualistic age disregards anything like this. He has something else to do than people of olden times. In these times, as also in others, he has to go to five o'clock teas, to coffee parties; he has to attend the theater, and so on; he simply has something else to do which is not dependent on the time of year. In the doing of all this, man forgets that delicate transformation which takes place in the Earth's atmospheric environment.

But these people of olden times did feel how different the air and warmth become around St. John's time, at the height of summer, how these take on something of the plant nature. Just consider what kind of a perception that was—this sensitive feeling for all that goes on in the plant world. Let us suppose that this is the Earth, and everywhere plants are coming out of the Earth.

The people then had a subtle feeling awareness of what is developing there in the plant, of what lives in the plant. They had in the spring a general feeling of nature, of which an after-echo is still retained in our language. You will find in Goethe's Faust the expression “es gruenelt” (It is beginning to get green). Who notices nowadays when it is growing green, when the greenness rising up out of the Earth in the spring, wells and wafts through the air? Who notices when it grows green and when it blossoms? Well, of course people see it today; the red and the yellow of the flowers please them; but they do not notice that the air becomes quite different when the flowers bloom, and again when the fruit is formed. Such living participation in the plant world no longer exists in our intellectualistic age, but it did exist for the people of ancient times.

Hence they were aware of it in their perceptive feeling when the “greening,” blooming and fruiting came toward them—not now out of the Earth, but out of the surrounding atmosphere; when air and warmth themselves streamed down from above like something akin to plant nature (shaded in drawing). And when air and warmth became thus plant-like, the consciousness of those people was transported into that sphere in which the “I” then descended, as answer to what they had sent out into the cosmos in the form of music and poetry.

Thus the festivals had a wonderful, intimate, human content. This was a question to the divine-spiritual universe. Men received the answer because—just as we perceive the fruiting, the blossoming, the greening of the Earth today—they felt something plant-like streaming down from above out of the otherwise merely mineral air. In this way there entered into the dream of existence, into the ancient dreamy consciousness also the dream of the ego.

And when the St. John's festival was past and July and August came again, the people had the feeling “We have an ego, but this ego remains up there in heaven and speaks to us only at St. John's time. Then we become aware that we are connected with heaven. It has taken our ego into its protection. It shows it to us when it opens the great window of heaven at St. John's time. But we must ask about it. We must ask as we carry out the festival performances at St. John's time, as in these performances we find our way into the unbelievably close and intimate musical and poetic ceremonies.”—Thus these ancient festivals already established a communication, a union, between the earthly and the heavenly.

You see this whole festival was immersed in the musical, in the musical-poetic. I might say that in the simple settlements of very ancient peoples, suddenly, for a few days at the height of summer, everything became poetic—although it had been thoroughly prepared beforehand by the Mysteries. The whole social life was plunged into this musical-poetic element. The people believed that they needed this for life during the course of the year, just as they needed daily food and drink; that they needed to enter into this mood of dancing, music and poetry, in order to establish their communication with the divine-spiritual powers of the cosmos. A relic of this festival remained in a later age, when a poet said, for example; “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus,” because he still remembered that once upon a time the great question was put before the deity, and the deity was expected to give answer to the question of men.

Just as these festivals at St. John's time were carefully prepared in order to pose the great question to the cosmos so that the cosmos might assure man at this time that he has an ego, which the heavens have taken into their protection, so likewise was prepared the festival at the time of the winter solstice, in the depths of winter, which has now become our Christmas festival. But while at St. John's time everything was steeped in the musical-poetic, in the dance element, now in the depths of winter everything was first prepared in such a way that the people knew they must become still and quiet, that they must enter into a more contemplative element. And then there was brought forth—in these ancient times of which outer history provides no record, of which we can only know through spiritual science—all that during the summer had been in the forming and shaping and imaging elements which reached a climax in the festivals in music and dance. During that time these ancient people, who in a certain way went out of themselves in order to unite with the ego in the heavens, were not involved in learning anything. Besides the festival, they were occupied in doing what was necessary for their subsistence. Instruction waited for the winter months, and this reached its culmination, its festival expression, at the time of the winter solstice, in the depth of winter, at Christmas time.

Then began the preparation of the people, again under the guidance of pupils of the Mysteries, for various spiritual celebrations which were not performed during the summer. It is difficult to describe in modern terms what the people did from our September/October to our Christmas time, because everything was so very different from what is done now. But they were guided in what we would perhaps call riddle-solving, in answering questions that were put in a veiled form so that people had to discover a meaning in what was given in signs. Let us say that the Mystery-pupils gave to those who were learning in this way some kind of symbolic image, which they were to interpret. Or they gave what we would call a riddle to be solved, or some kind of incantation. What the magic saying contained, they were to apply to Nature, and thus divine its meaning.

But especially there was careful preparation for what later took on the most varied forms among the different peoples; for example, for what was known in northern countries at a later time as the throwing of the runic wands so that they formed shapes which were then deciphered. People devoted themselves to these activities in the depth of winter; but above all, those things were cultivated that then led to a certain art of modeling, in a primitive form of course.

Among these ancient forms of consciousness was a most singular one, paradoxical as it sounds to modern people, and it was as follows: With the coming of October, an urge for some sort of activity began to stir in people's limbs. In the summer a man had to accommodate the movements of his limbs to what the fields demanded of him; he had to put his hands to the plough; he had to adapt himself to the outer world. When the harvest had been gathered in, however, and his limbs were rested, then a need stirred in them for some other form of activity, and his limbs took on a longing to knead. Then people derived a special satisfaction from all kinds of plastic, moulding activity. We might say that just as an intensive urge had arisen at the time of the St. John's festival for dancing and music, so toward Christmas time an intensive urge arose to knead, to mould, to create, using any kind of pliant substance available in nature. People had an especially sensitive feeling, for example, for the way water begins to freeze. This gave them the specific impulse to push it in one direction and another, so that the ice-forms appearing in the water took on certain shapes. Indeed people went so far as to keep their hands in the water while the shapes developed and their hands grew numb! In this way, when the water froze under the waves their hands cast up, it assumed the most remarkable artistic shapes, which of course again melted away.

Nothing remains of all this in the age of intellectualism except at most the custom of lead-casting on New Year's Eve, the Feast of St. Sylvester. In this, molten lead is poured into water, and one discovers that it takes on shapes whose meaning is then supposed to be guessed. But that is the last abstract remnant of those wonderful activities that arose from the impelling force in Nature experienced inwardly by the human being, which expressed itself for example as I have related: that a person thrust his hand into water which was in process of freezing, the hand then becoming numb as he tested how the water formed waves, so that the freezing water then “answered” with the most remarkable shapes. In this way the human being found the answers to his questions of the Earth. Through music and poetry at the height of summer, he turned toward the heavens with his questions, and they answered by sending ego-feeling into his dreaming consciousness. In the depth of winter he turned for what he wanted to know not now toward the heavens, but to the earthly, and he tested what kind of forms the earthly element can take on. In doing this he observed that the forms which emerged had a certain similarity to those developed by beetles and butterflies. This was the result of his contemplation. From the plastic, formative element that he drew out of the nature processes of the Earth, there arose in him the intuitive observation that the various animal forms are fashioned entirely out of the earthly element. At Christmas man understood the animal forms. And as he worked, as he exerted his limbs, even jumped into the water and made certain movements, then sprang out and observed how the solidifying water responded, he noticed in the outer world what sort of form he himself had as man. But this was only at Christmas time, not otherwise; at other times he had a perception only of the animal world and of what pertains to race. At Christmas time he advanced to the experience of the human form as well.

Just as in those times of the ancient Mysteries the ego-consciousness was mediated from the heavens, so the feeling for the human form was conveyed out of the Earth. At Christmas time man learned to know the Earth's form-force, its sculptural shaping force; and at St. John's time, at the height of summer he learned to know how the harmonies of the spheres let his ego sound into his dream-consciousness.

And thus at special festival seasons the ancient Mysteries expanded the being of man. On the one side the environment of the Earth extended out into the heavens, so that man might know how the heavens held his “I” in their protection, how his “I” rested there. And at Christmas time the Mystery teachers caused the Earth to give answer to the questioning of man by way of plastic forms, so that man gradually came to have an interest in the human form, in the flowing together of all animal forms into the human form. At midsummer man learned to know himself inwardly, in relation to his ego; in the depth of winter he learned to feel himself outwardly, in relation to his human form. And so it was that what man perceived as his being, how he actually felt himself, was not acquired simply by being man, but by living together with the course of the year; that in order for him to come to ego-consciousness, the heavens opened their windows; that in order for him to come to consciousness of his human form, the Earth in a certain way unfolded her mysteries. Thus the human being was inwardly intimately linked with the course of the year, so intimately linked that he had to say to himself: “I know about what I am as man only when I don't live along stolidly, but when I allow myself to be lifted up to the heavens in summer, when I let myself sink down in winter into the Earth mysteries, into the secrets of the Earth.”

You see from this that at one time the festival seasons with their celebrations were looked upon as an integral part of human life. A man felt that he was not only an earth-being but that his essential being belonged to the whole world, that he was a citizen of the entire cosmos. Indeed he felt himself so little to be an earth-being that he actually had first to be made aware of what he was through the Earth by means of festivals. And these festivals could be celebrated only at certain seasons because at other times the people who experienced the course of the year to some degree would have been quite unable to experience it at all. For all that the people could experience through the festivals was connected with the related seasons.

Mark you, after man has once achieved his freedom in the age of intellectualism, he can certainly not come again to this sharing in the life of the cosmos in the same way that he experienced it in primitive ages. But he can nevertheless come to it even with his modern constitution, if he applies himself once more to the spiritual.

We might say that in the ego consciousness which mankind has had for a long time now, something has been drawn in which could be attained only through the windows of heaven in summer. But just for that reason man must be learning to understand the cosmos, acquire for himself something else which in turn lies beyond the ego. It is natural today for people to speak of the human form in general. Those who have entered into the intellectual age no longer have a strong feeling for the animalistic-racial element. But just as this feeling formerly came over man, I should like to say as a force, as an impulse, which could be sought only out of the Earth, so today, through an understanding of the Earth which cannot be gained by means of geology or mineralogy but only once more in a spiritual way, man must come again to something more than the mere human form.

If we consider the human form we can say: In very ancient times man felt himself within this form in such a way that he felt only the external racial characteristics connected with the blood, but failed to perceive as far as the skin itself (red in drawing); he did not notice what formed his outline.

Today man has come so far that he does notice his outline, his bodily limits. He perceives his contour indeed as the typically human feature of his form (blue). Now, however, man must come out beyond himself; he must learn to know the etheric and astral elements outside himself. This he can do only through the deepening of spiritual science.

Thus we see that our present-day consciousness has been acquired at the cost of losing much of the former connection of our consciousness with the cosmos. But once man has come to experience his freedom and his world of thought, then he must emerge again and experience cosmically.

This is what Anthroposophy intends when it speaks of a renewal of the festivals, even of the creating of festivals like the Michael festival in autumn of which we have recently spoken. We must come once more to an inner understanding of what the cycle of the year can mean to man in this connection; it can then be something even loftier than it was for man long ago, as we have described it.

Yesterday I spoke to you about the other side of nature-existence, about those super-sensible and invisible beings which accompany the beings and processes visible to the senses. An earlier, instinctive vision beheld these beings of the super-sensible world as clearly as we behold the world of the senses. Today, these beings have withdrawn from human view. It is only because this company of gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-beings is not perceptible in the same way as animals, plants and so on, only to this is it due that man, in the present epoch of his earth-evolution, is not in a position to unfold his soul-spiritual being without the help of his physical and etheric bodies. In the present situation of earth evolution man is obliged to depend upon the etheric body when making use of his soul, and upon the physical body when making use of his spirit. The physical body, which provides the instrument for the spirit, the sense-apparatus, is not adapted to entering into connection with the beings which exist behind the physical world. It is the same with the etheric body, which man must use to develop his soul-being. Through this, if I may put it so, half of his earthly environment escapes him. He passes over everything connected with these elemental beings about which I spoke yesterday. To this world the etheric and physical bodies have no access. We gain an idea of what actually escapes the man of today when we realize what such gnomes, undines, and so on, actually are.

We have, you see, a whole host of lower creatures—lower at the present time—those beings which consist only of a soft mass, which live in the fluid element, and have nothing in the way of an articulated skeleton to give them inner support.

They are creatures which belong to the latest phase of earth-development; creatures which only now, when the earth has already evolved, develop what man—the oldest earth-being—already developed in his head-structure during the time of ancient Saturn. These creatures have not progressed so far as to form within themselves that hardening of the substance which can become the supporting skeleton.

It is the gnomes which, in a spiritual way, make good in the world what the lower orders of the animals up to the amphibians lack. This applies also to the fishes, which have only indications of the skeleton. These lower animal orders only become complete, as it were, through the fact that gnomes exist.

And just because the conditions of the beings in the world are very different, something arises between these lower creatures and the gnomes which I yesterday called antipathy. The gnomes do not wish to become like these lower creatures. They are continually on the watch to protect themselves from assuming their form. As I described to you, the gnomes are extraordinarily clever, intelligent beings. With them intelligence is already implicit in perception; they are in every respect the antithesis of the lower animal world. And whereas they have the significance for plant-growth which I described yesterday, in the case of the lower animal world they actually provide its completion. They supply what this lower animal world does not possess. This lower animal world has a dull consciousness; the gnomes have a consciousness of the utmost clarity. The lower creatures have no bony skeleton, no bony support; the gnomes bind together what works as the force of gravity and make their bodies from this volatile, invisible force, bodies which are, moreover, in constant danger of disintegrating, of losing their substance. The gnomes must ever and again create themselves anew out of gravity, because they continually stand in danger of losing their substance. Because of this, in order to retain their own existence, the gnomes are constantly attentive to what is going on around them. As far as earth-observation goes no being is more attentive than a gnome. It takes note of everything, for it must know everything, grasp everything, in order to preserve its life. A gnome must always be wide awake; if it were to become sleepy, as men often do, this sleepiness would immediately cause its death.

There is a German saying of very early origin which aptly expresses this characteristic of the gnomes, in having always to remain attentive. People say: Pay heed like a goblin. And goblins are in fact the gnomes. So, if one wishes to make someone attentive, one says to him: Pay heed like a gnome. A gnome is really an attentive being. If one could place a gnome as an object lesson on a front desk in every school classroom, where all could see it, it would be a splendid example for the children to imitate.

The gnomes have yet another characteristic. They are filled with an absolutely unconquerable lust for independence. They trouble themselves little about one another and give their attention only to the world of their own surroundings. One gnome takes little interest in another. But everything else in this world around them, in which they live, this interests them exceedingly.

Now I told you that the human body forms a hindrance to our perceiving such folk as these. The moment this hindrance is removed, these beings are there, just as are the other beings of nature for ordinary vision. Anyone who comes so far as to experience in full consciousness his dreams on falling asleep is well acquainted with these gnomes. You need only recall what I recently published in the “Goetheanum” on the subject of dreams. I said that a dream in no way appears to ordinary consciousness in its true form, but wears a mask. Such a mask is worn by the dream when we fall asleep. We do not immediately escape from the experience of our ordinary day consciousness. Reminiscences well up, memory-pictures from life; we perceive symbols, sense-pictures of the inner organs—the heart as a stove, the lungs as wings—all in symbolic form. These are masks. If someone were to see a dream unmasked, if he were actually to pass into the world of sleep without the beings existing there being masked, then, at the moment of falling asleep, he would behold a whole host of goblins coming towards him.

In ordinary consciousness man is protected from seeing these things unprepared, for they would terrify him. The form in which they would appear would actually be copy images of all those qualities in the man which work as forces of destruction. He would perceive all the destructive forces within him, all that continually destroys. These gnomes, if perceived unprepared, would be nothing but symbols of death. Man would be terribly alarmed by them, if in ordinary consciousness he knew nothing about them, and was now confronted by them on falling asleep. He would feel entombed by them—for this is how it would appear—entombed by them over yonder in the astral world. For it is a kind of entombment by the gnomes which, seen from the other side, takes place on falling asleep.

This holds good only for the moment of falling asleep. A further complement to the physical sense-world is supplied by the undines, the water-beings, which continually transform themselves, and which live in connection with the water just as the gnomes live in connection with the earth. These undines—we have learned to know the role they play in plant-growth—also exist as complementary beings to those animals which stand at a somewhat higher stage, which have assumed a more differentiated earthly body. These animals, which have developed into the more evolved fishes, or also into the more evolved amphibians, require scales, require some sort of hard external shell. The forces needed to provide certain creatures with this outer support, this outer skeleton—for these forces the world is indebted to the activity of the undines. The gnomes support spiritually those creatures which are at a quite low stage. Those creatures which must be supported externally, which must be clad in a kind of armour, they owe their protective sheath to the activity of the undines. Thus it is the undines which impart to these somewhat higher animals in a primitive way what we have in the covering of our skull. They make them, as it were, into heads. All these beings which are invisibly present behind the visible world have their great task in the economy of existence. You will always notice that, where materialistic science wishes to explain something of the kind I have just developed, there it breaks down. It is not in a position, for instance, to explain how the lower creatures manage to propel themselves forward in an element which is scarcely harder than they are themselves, because it does not know about the presence of this spiritual support from the gnomes which I have just described. Equally, the formation of an armour-like sheath will always create a difficulty for purely materialistic science, because it does not know that the undines, in their sensitivity to, their avoidance of their own tendency to become lower animals, thrust off from themselves what then appears upon the somewhat higher animals as scales or some other armour-like covering.

Again, in the case of these beings, it is only the body which hinders the ordinary consciousness of today from seeing them just as, for example, it sees the leaves of plants, or the higher animals.

When, however, man falls into a state of deep, dreamless sleep, and yet his sleep is not dreamless, because through the gift of inspiration it has become transparent, then his spiritual gaze perceives the undines rising up out of that astral sea in which, on falling asleep, he was engulfed, submerged by the gnomes. In deep sleep the undines become visible. Sleep extinguishes ordinary consciousness, but the sleep which is illumined by clear consciousness has as its content the wonderful world of ever-changing fluidity, a fluidity which lends itself in every possible way to the metamorphoses of the undines. Just as for day consciousness we have around us beings with firm contours, a clear night consciousness would present to us these ever-changing beings, which themselves well upwards and sink down again like the waves of the sea. All deep sleep in the environment of man is filled with a moving sea of living beings, a moving sea of undines.

Matters are otherwise with the sylphs. They, too, provide a completing element to the being of certain animals, but now in the other direction. The gnomes and undines add what is of the nature of the head to those animals where this is lacking. Birds, however, as I described to you, are actually pure head; they are entirely head-organization. The sylphs add to the birds in a spiritual way what they lack as the bodily complement of their head-organization. They complement the bird-kingdom in regard to what corresponds to the metabolic limb-system in man. If the birds fly about in the air with under-developed legs, so much the more powerfully developed is the limb-system of the sylphs. They may be said to represent in the air, in a spiritual way, what the cow represents below in physical matter. This is why I could say yesterday that it is in connection with the birds that the sylphs have their ego, have what connects them with the earth. Man acquires his ego on the earth. What connects the sylphs with the earth, that is the bird-kingdom. The sylphs are indebted to the bird-kingdom for their ego, or at least for the consciousness of their ego.

Now when someone has slept through the night, has had around him the astral sea, consisting as it does of the most manifold undine-forms, and then wakes up with an awakening dream, then again, if this dream on awakening were not masked in reminiscences of life or sense-pictures of the organs, if he were to see the unmasked dream, he would be confronted by the world of the sylphs. But these sylphs would assume for him a remarkable form; they would appear much as the sun might if it wished to send to men something which would affect them adversely, something which would lull them spiritually to sleep. We shall hear shortly why this is the case. Nevertheless, if someone were to perceive his dream on awakening unmasked, he would see in it an inflowing, an actual inflowing of light. He would also experience this as unpleasant, because the limb-system of these sylphs would, as it were, spin and weave around him. He would feel as though the light were attacking him from all sides, as if the light were something overwhelming, something to which he was extraordinarily sensitive. Here and there, perhaps, he might also feel this as a caress of the light. But in all these things I only wish to indicate to you how the light, with its upholding, gently touching quality, actually appears in the sylph-form.

And when we come to the fire-beings, we find that they provide the completing element to the fleeting nature of the butterflies. A butterfly itself develops as little as possible of its actual physical body; it lets this be as tenuous as possible. It is, on the contrary, a creature of light. The fire-spirits appear as beings which complement the butterfly's body, so that we can get the following impression. If, on the one hand, we had a physical butterfly before us, and pictured it greatly enlarged, and on the other side a fire-being—they are, it is true, rarely together, except in the circumstances which I mentioned to you yesterday—then, if these two were welded together, we would get something resembling a winged man, actually a winged man. We need only increase the size of the butterfly, and adapt the size of the fire-spirit to human proportions, and from this we would get something like a winged man.

This shows you again how the fire-spirits are in fact the complement to those creatures which are nearest to what is spiritual; they complement them, so to say, in a downward direction. Gnomes and undines complement in an upward direction, towards the head; sylphs and fire-beings complement the birds and butterflies in a downwards direction. Thus the fire-beings must be brought together with the butterflies.

Now in the same way that man can, as it were, penetrate through the sleeping-dream, so can he also penetrate through waking-day life. But here he makes use of his physical body in quite a robust way. This, too, I have described in articles in the “Goetheanum”. Here also man is totally unable to perceive how, in his waking life, he could continually see the fire-beings, in that the fire-beings are inwardly related to his thoughts, to everything which proceeds from the head-organization. But when a man has progressed so far that he can remain completely in waking consciousness, but nevertheless stand in a certain sense outside himself, viewing himself from outside as a thinking being, while standing firmly on the earth, then he will become aware how the fire-beings form that element in the world which, when we perceive it, makes our thoughts perceptible from the other side.

Thus the perceiving of the fire-beings can enable man to see himself as thinker, not merely to be the thinker and, as such, call up the thoughts, but actually to behold how the thoughts run their course. Only then do the thoughts cease to be bound to the human being; then they reveal themselves as world-thoughts; they work and weave as impulses in the world. Then one notices that the human head only calls forth the illusion that thoughts are enclosed inside the skull. There they are only reflected; their mirrored images are there. What underlies these thoughts belongs to the sphere of the fire-beings, one sees in these thoughts not only the thoughts themselves, but the thought-content of the world, which, at the same time, is actually an imaginative content. This is the force which enables us to arrive at the realization that thoughts are world-thoughts.

I venture to add: When we behold what is to be seen upon the earth, not from the human bodily nature, but from the sphere of the fire-beings—that is, from the Saturn-nature which has been carried into the Earth—then we gain exactly the picture of the evolution of the earth which I have described in “Occult Science—an Outline”. This book is actually so composed that the thoughts appear as the thought-content of the world, seen from the perspective of the fire-beings.

You see, these things have in themselves a deep and real significance. But they also have a deep and real significance for man. Take the gnomes and undines: they are, so to say, in the world which borders on human consciousness; they are already beyond the threshold. Ordinary consciousness is protected from seeing these beings, for the fact is that these beings are not all benevolent. The benevolent beings are, for instance, those which I described yesterday as working in the most varied ways upon plant-growth. But these beings are not all well-disposed. And in the moment when man breaks through into the world wherein they live and are active, he finds there not only the well-disposed beings but the malevolent ones as well. And so one must first form a conception as to which of them are well-disposed and which of them malevolent. This is not so easy, as you will see from the way I must describe the malevolent ones. The main difference between the ill-disposed beings and the well-disposed is that the latter are always drawn more to the plant and mineral kingdoms, whereas the ill-disposed are drawn to the animal and human kingdoms. Some, which are even more malevolent, also desire to approach the kingdoms of the plants and the minerals. But one can gain quite a fair idea of the malevolence which the beings of this realm can have, when one turns to those which are drawn to human beings and animals, wishing in particular to consummate in man what is allotted by the higher hierarchies to the well-disposed beings for the plant and mineral world.

You see, there exist ill-disposed beings from the realm of the gnomes and undines, which make for human beings and animals and bring it about that what they should really impart only to the lower animals appears physically in human beings. Certainly, these things are already present in man, but their aim is that this element should be manifested physically in human beings as well as in animals. Through the presence of these malevolent gnomes and undine-beings, animal and plant life of a low order—parasites—exist in human beings as well as in animals. These malevolent beings are the begetters of parasites. The moment man crosses the threshold of the spiritual world, he at once meets the subtleties of this world. Snares are everywhere, and he must first learn something from the goblins—namely, to be attentive. The spiritualists can never manage this! Everywhere there are snares. Now someone might say: Why then are these malevolent gnome and undine-beings there, if they engender parasites? Well, if they were not there, man would never be able to develop within himself the force to evolve the structure of his brain. And here we meet something of extraordinary significance.

I will sketch this for you in a diagram. If you think of the human being as consisting of the metabolic-limb-man, of the breast-man, that is, the rhythmic system, and then of the head-man, that is the system of nerves and senses, there are certain things about which you must be quite clear. Here below processes are taking place—let us leave out the rhythmic man—and here above processes are again taking place. If you look at the processes taking place below as a whole, you find that in ordinary life their essential function is usually disregarded. These processes are those of excretion—through the intestines, through the kidneys, and so on—all of them having their outlet in a downwards direction. They are mostly regarded simply as excretory processes. But this is a misinterpretation. Excretion does not take place merely for the purpose of elimination, but to the same degree in which the products of excretion appear, something appears spiritually in the lower man which resembles what the brain is physically above. What occurs in the lower man is a process which is arrested halfway in regard to its physical development. Excretion takes place because the process passes over into the spiritual. In the upper man the process is completed. What below is only spiritual, there assumes physical form. Above we have the physical brain, below a spiritual brain. And if what is eliminated below were to be subjected to a further process, if the changes in its condition were to be continued, then its final metamorphosis would be preliminary to the human brain.

The human brain-mass is the further evolved product of excretion. This is something which is of immense importance, in regard to medicine for instance, and it is something of which doctors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were still fully aware. Of course today people speak in a very derogatory manner—and rightly in many respects—of the old “quack-apothecaries”. But this is because they do not know that their potions still contained “mummies” of the spirit.

Naturally this is not intended as a glorification of what has figured as “quackery” in the past centuries, but I am drawing attention to many truths which have connections as deep as those which I have just cited.

It is a fact that the brain is a higher metamorphosis of the products of excretion. Hence the connection between brain illnesses and intestinal illnesses, and their cure.

You see, because gnomes and undines exist, because there is a real world in which they live, the forces are present, which, proceeding from the lower man, do indeed give rise to parasites, but yet, at the same time, bring about in the upper man the metamorphosis of the products of excretion into the brain. It would be absolutely impossible for us to have a brain, if the world were not so ordered that gnomes and undines can exist.

What holds good for gnomes and undines in regard to the destructive forces—for destruction, disintegration, also proceed in their turn from the brain—this holds good for sylphs and fire-beings, in regard to the constructive forces. Here again the well-disposed sylphs and fire-beings hold themselves aloof from men and animals, and busy themselves with plant-growth in the way I have described; but there are also those which are malevolent. These ill-disposed beings are above all concerned in carrying what should only have its place up above in the regions of air and warmth down into the watery and earthy regions.

Now if you wish to study what happens when these sylph-beings carry what belongs up above down into the watery and earthy regions, look at the belladonna. The belladonna is the plant, which, if I may put it so, has been kissed in its blossoms by the sylphs, and in it what could be beneficent juices have been changed into juices which are poisonous.

Here you have what may be called a displacement of spheres. It is right when the sylphs develop their enveloping forces up above, as I have already described, where the light touches the surface in a formative way—for the bird-world needs this. But if the sylph descends, and makes use below of what it should employ up above in the plant-world, a potent vegetable poison is engendered. Parasitic beings arise through gnomes and undines; through sylphs the poisons which are in fact a heavenly element which has streamed down too deeply on to the earth. When men or certain animals eat the belladonna, which looks like a cherry, except that it conceals itself in the calyx (in the very way it is pressed down you can see what I have just described)—when men or certain animals eat the belladonna, it is fatal to them. But just look at the thrushes and blackbirds; they perch on the belladonna and get from it the best food in the world. It is to their region that what is present in the belladonna belongs.

It is a remarkable thing that animals and man, who in their lower organs are in fact earth-bound, should experience as poison what has become corrupted on the earth in the belladonna, whereas birds such as thrushes and blackbirds, which should really get this in a spiritual way from the sylphs—and indeed through the benevolent sylphs do so obtain it—should be able to assimilate it, even when what belongs up above in their region has been carried downwards to the earth. They find nourishment in what is poison for beings more bound to the earth.

Thus you get a conception of how, on the one side, through gnomes and undines what is of a parasitic nature strives upwards from the earth towards other beings, and of how the poisons filter downwards from above.

When, on the other hand, the fire-beings imbue themselves with those impulses which belong in the region of the butterflies, and are of great use to them in their development—when the fire-beings carry those impulses down into the fruits, there arises within the species of the almonds, for instance—what appears as the poisonous almonds. This poison is carried into the fruit of the almond trees through the activity of the fire-beings. And yet the fruit of the almond could not come into existence at all if beings from this same world of the fire-beings did not in a beneficial way burn up, as it were, what is the edible part in other fruits. Only look at the almond. With other fruits you have the white core in the centre and around it the flesh of the fruit. With the almond you have the kernel there in the centre, and around it the flesh of the fruit is quite burnt up. That is the action of the fire-beings. And if this activity miscarries, if what the fire-beings are bringing about is not confined to the brown burnt-up shell, where it can still be beneficial, but something of what should be engaged in developing the almond-shell penetrates into the white kernel, then the almond becomes poisonous.

And so you have gained a picture of those beings which are just on the boundary of the world lying immediately beyond the threshold, and of how, if they carry their impulses to their final issue, they become the bearers of parasites, of poisons, and therewith of illnesses. Now it becomes clear how far man in health raises himself above the forces that take hold of him in illness. For illness springs from the malevolence of these beings who are necessary for the upbuilding of the whole structure of nature, but also for its fading and decay.

These are the things which, arising from instinctive clairvoyance, underlie such intuitions as those of the Indian Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Brahma represented the active Being in world-spheres which may legitimately approach man. Vishnu represented those world-spheres which may only approach man in so far as what has been built up must again be broken down, in so far as it must be continually transformed. Shiva represented everything connected with the forces of destruction. And in the earlier stages of the flower of Indian civilization it was said that Brahma is intimately related to all that is of the nature of the fire-beings, and the sylphs; Vishnu with all that is of the nature of sylphs and undines; Shiva with all that is of the nature of undines and gnomes. Generally speaking, when we go back to these more ancient conceptions, we find everywhere the pictorial expressions for what must be sought today as lying behind the secrets of nature.

Yesterday we studied the connection of this invisible folk with the plant-world; today we have added their connection with the world of the animals. Everywhere beings on this side of the threshold are interlocked with those from beyond it; and beings from beyond the threshold with those on this side. Only when one knows the living inter-working of both these kinds of beings does one really understand how the visible world unfolds. Knowledge of the super-sensible world is indeed very, very necessary for man, because in the moment when he passes through the gate of death he no longer has the sense-world around him, but now the other world begins to be his world. At his present stage of evolution man cannot find right access into the other world unless he has recognized, in physical manifestations the written characters which direct him over into this other world; if he has not learned to read in the creatures of the earth, in the creatures of the water, in the creatures of the air, and, indeed, in the creatures of the light, the butterflies, what leads him to the elemental beings which are our companions between death and a new birth. What we see of these beings here between birth and death is, so to speak, their crude, dense part. We only learn to recognize what belongs to them as their super-sensible nature when, with insight and understanding, we transfer ourselves into this super-sensible world.

From the foregoing lecture it will be clear to you that it is only possible to gain a correct view of the historical evolution of humanity when one takes into consideration the totally different conditions of mind and soul that prevailed during the various epochs. In the first part of my lecture I attempted to define the Asiatic period of evolution, the genuine ancient East, and we saw that we have to look back to the time when the descendants of the races of Atlantis were finding their way eastwards after the Atlantean catastrophe, moving from west to east and gradually peopling Europe and Asia. All that took place in ancient Asia in connection with these peoples was under the influence of a condition of soul accustomed and attuned to rhythm. At the beginning of the Asiatic period we have still a distant echo of what was present in all its fullness in Atlantis—the localised memory. During the Oriental evolution this localised memory passed over into rhythmic memory, and I showed how with the Greek evolution that great change came about which brought in a new kind of memory, the temporal memory. This means that the Asiatic period of evolution (we are now speaking of what may rightly be called the Asiatic period, for what history refers to is in reality a later and decadent period) was an age of men altogether differently constituted from the men of later times. And the external events of history were in those days much more dependent than in later times on the character and constitution of man's inner life. What lived in man's mind and soul lived too in his entire being. A separated life of thought and feeling, such as we have to-day was unknown. A thinking that does not feel itself to be connected with the inner processes of the human head, was unknown. So too was the abstract feeling that knows no connection with the circulation of the blood. Man had in those times a thinking that was inwardly experienced as a “happening” in the head, a feeling that was experienced in the rhythm of the breath, in the circulation of the blood, and so on. Man experienced his whole being in undivided unity.

All this was closely connected with the altogether different experience man had of his relation to the world about him, to the Cosmos, to the spiritual and the physical in the Cosmic Whole. The man of the present day lives, let us say, in town or in the country, and his experience varies accordingly. He is surrounded by woods, rivers and mountains; or, if he lives in town, bricks and mortar meet his gaze on every hand. When he speaks of the cosmic and super-sensible, where does he think it is? He can point to no sphere within which he can conceive of what is cosmic and super-sensible as having place. It is nowhere to be laid hold of, he cannot grasp it: even spiritually, he cannot grasp it. But this was not so in that ancient oriental stream of evolution. To an Oriental, the world around him which we to-day call our physical environment, was the lowest portion of a Cosmos conceived as a unity. Man had around him what is contained in the three kingdoms of nature, he had around him the rivers, mountains, and so forth; but for him this environment was permeated through and through with Spirit, interpenetrated and interwoven with Spirit. The Oriental of ancient time would say: I live with the mountains, I live with the rivers; but I live also with the elemental beings of the mountains and of the rivers. I live in the physical realm, but this physical realm is the body of a spiritual realm. Around me is the spiritual world, the lowest spiritual world.

There below was this realm that for us has become the earthly realm. Man lived in it. But he pictured to himself that where this realm ends another realm begins, then again above that another; and finally the highest realm which it is possible to reach. And if we were to name these realms in accordance with the language that has become current with us in anthroposophical knowledge—the ancient Oriental had other names for them, but that does not matter, we will name them as they are for us—then we should have above, for the highest realm, the First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; then the Second Hierarchy: Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai; and the Third Hierarchy: Archai, Archangels, Angels.

And now comes the fourth realm where human beings live, the realm wherein according to our method of cognition we to-day place the mere objects and processes of Nature, but where the ancient Oriental felt the whole of Nature penetrated with the elemental spirits of water and of earth. This was Asia. Asia meant the lowest spirit realm, in which he, as human being, lived. You must remember that the present-day conception of things that we have in our ordinary consciousness was unknown to the man of those times. It would be nonsense to suppose that it were in any way possible for him to imagine such a thing as matter devoid of spirit. To speak as we do, of oxygen and nitrogen would have been a sheer impossibility for the ancient Oriental. To him oxygen was spirit, it was that spiritual thing which worked as a stimulating and quickening agent on what already possessed life, accelerating the life-processes in a living organism. Nitrogen, which we think of to-day as contained in the atmosphere together with oxygen, was also spiritual; it was that which weaves throughout the Cosmos, working upon what is living and organic in such a way as to prepare it to receive a soul-nature. Such was the knowledge the Oriental of old had, for example, of oxygen and nitrogen. And he knew all the processes of Nature in this way, in their connection with spirit; for the present-day conceptions were unknown to him. There were a few individuals who knew them, and they were the Initiates. The rest of mankind had as their ordinary everyday consciousness a consciousness very similar to a waking dream; it was a dream condition that with us only occurs in abnormal experiences.

The ancient Oriental went about with these dreams. He looked on the mountains, rivers and clouds, and saw everything in the way that things can be seen and heard in this dream condition. Picture to yourself what may happen to the man of to-day in a dream. He is asleep. Suddenly there appears before him a dream-picture of a flaring fire. He hears the call of ‘Fire!’ Outside in the street a fire engine is passing, to put out a fire somewhere or other. But what a difference between the conception of the work of the fire-brigade that can be formed by the human intellect in its matter-of-fact way with the aid of ordinary sense-perception, and the pictures that a dream can conjure up! For the ancient Oriental, however, all his experiences manifested themselves in such dream-pictures. Everything outside in the kingdoms of Nature was transformed in his soul into pictures.

In these dream-pictures man experienced the elemental spirits of water, earth, air and fire. And sleep brought him again other experiences. Sleep for him was not that deep heavy sleep we have when we lie, as we say, ‘like a log’ and know nothing of ourselves. I believe there are people who sleep so in these days, are there not? But then there was no such thing: even in sleep man had still a dull form of consciousness. While on the one hand he was, as we now say, resting his body, the spiritual was weaving within him in a spiritual activity of the external world. And in this weaving he perceived the Beings of the Third Hierarchy. Asia he perceived in his ordinary waking-dream condition, that is to say in what was the everyday consciousness of that time. At night, in sleep, he perceived the Third Hierarchy. And from time to time there entered into his sleep a still more dim and dark consciousness, but a consciousness that graved its experiences deeply into his thought and feeling. Thus these Eastern peoples had first their everyday consciousness where everything was changed into Imaginations and pictures. The pictures were not so real as those of still older times, for example the time of Atlantis or Lemuria, or of the Moon epoch. Nevertheless they were still there, even during this Asiatic evolution. By day, then, men had these pictures. And in sleep they had an experience which they might have clothed in the following words:—We ‘sleep away’ the ordinary earthly existence, we enter the realm of the Angels, Archangels and Archai and live among them. The soul sets itself free from the organism and lives among the Beings of the higher Hierarchies.

Men knew at the same time that whereas they lived in Asia with gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders, that is with the elemental spirits of the earth, water, air and fire,—in sleep, while the body rested, they experienced the Beings of the Third Hierarchy in the planetary existence, in all that lives in the whole planetary system belonging to the Earth.

There were however moments when the sleeper would feel: An utterly strange region is approaching me. It is taking me to itself, it is drawing me away from earthly existence. He did not feel this while immersed in the Beings of the Third Hierarchy, but only when a still deeper condition of sleep intervened. Though there was never a real consciousness of what took place during the sleep-condition of the third kind, nevertheless what was then experienced from the Second Hierarchy impressed itself deep into the whole being of man. And the experience remained in man's feeling when he awoke. He could then say: I have been graciously blessed by higher Spirits, whose life is beyond the planetary existence. Thus did these ancient peoples speak of that Hierarchy which embraces the Kyriotetes, the Dynamis and the Exusiai. What we are now describing are the ordinary states of consciousness of this ancient Asiatic period. The first two states of consciousness—the waking-sleeping, sleeping-waking and the sleep, in which the Third Hierarchy were present—were experienced by all men. And many, through a special endowment of Nature, experienced also the intervention of a deeper sleep, during which the Second Hierarchy played into human consciousness.

And the Initiates in the Mysteries,—they received a still further degree of consciousness. Of what nature was this? The answer is astonishing; for the fact is, the Initiate of the ancient East acquired the same consciousness that you have now by day! You develop it in a perfectly natural way in your second or third year of life. No ancient Oriental ever attained this state of consciousness in a natural way; he had to develop it artificially in himself. He had to develop it out of the waking-dreaming, dreaming-waking. As long as he went about with this waking-dreaming, dreaming-waking, he saw everywhere pictures, rendering only in more or less symbolic fashion what we see to-day in clear sharp outlines; as an Initiate however he attained to see things as we see them to-day in our ordinary consciousness. The Initiates, by means of their developed consciousness, attained to learn what every boy and girl learns at school to-day. The difference between their consciousness and the normal consciousness of to-day is not that the content was different. Of course the abstract forms of letters which we have to-day were unknown then; written characters were in more intimate connection with the things and processes of the Cosmos. Reading and writing were nevertheless learned in those days by the Initiates; although of course by them alone, for reading and writing can only be learned with that clear intellectual consciousness which is the natural one for the man of to-day.

Supposing that somewhere or other this world of the ancient East were to re-appear, inhabited by human beings having the kind of consciousness they had in those olden times, and you were to come among them with your consciousness of the present day, then for them you would all be initiates. The difference does not he in the content of consciousness. You would be initiates. But the moment the people recognised you as initiates, they would immediately drive you out of the land by every means in their power; for it would be quite clear to them that an initiated person ought not to know things in the way we know them to-day. He ought not, for example, to be able to write as we are able to write to-day. If I were to transport myself into the mind of a man of that time, and were to meet such a pseudo-initiate, that is to say, an ordinary clever man of the present day, I should find myself saying of him: He can write, he makes signs on paper that mean something, and he has no idea how devilish it is to do such a thing without carrying in him the consciousness that it may only be done in the service of divine cosmic consciousness; he does not know that a man may only make such signs on paper when he can feel how God works in his hand, in his very fingers, works in his soul, enabling it to express itself through these letters. Therein lies the whole difference between the initiates of olden time and the ordinary man of the present day. It is not a difference in the content of consciousness, but in the way of comprehending and understanding the thing. Read my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, of which a new edition has recently appeared, and you will find right at the beginning the same indication as to the essential nature of the initiate of olden times. It is in point of fact always so in the course of world-evolution. That which develops in man at a later period in a natural way had in former epochs to be won through initiation.

Through such a thing as I have brought to your notice, you will be able to detect the radical difference between the condition of mind and soul prevalent among the Eastern peoples of prehistoric times and that of a later civilisation. It was another mankind that could call Asia the last or lowest heaven and understand by that their own land, the Nature that was round about them. They knew where the lowest heaven was.

Compare this with the conceptions men have to-day. How far is the man of the present time from regarding all he sees around him as the lowest heaven! Most people cannot think of it as the ‘lowest’ heaven for the simple reason that they have no knowledge of any heaven at all!

Thus we see how in that ancient Eastern time the Spiritual entered deeply into Nature, into all natural existence. But now we find also among these peoples something which to most of us in the present day may easily appear extremely barbarous. To a man of that time it would have appeared terribly barbarous if someone had been able to write in the feeling and attitude of mind in which we to-day are able to write; it would have seemed positively devilish to him. But when we to-day on the other hand see how it was accepted in those times as something quite natural and as a matter of course that a people should remove from West to East, should conquer—often with great cruelty—another people already in occupation and make slaves of them, then such a thing is bound to appear barbarous to very many of us.

This is, however, broadly speaking, the substance of oriental history over the whole of Asia. Whilst men had as I have described, a high spiritual conception of things, their external history ran its course in a series of conquests and enslavements. Undoubtedly that appears to many people as extremely barbarous. To-day, although wars of aggression do still sometimes occur, men have an uneasy conscience about them. And this is true even of those who support and defend such wars; they are not quite easy in their conscience.

In those times, however, man had a perfectly clear conscience as regards these wars of aggression, he felt that such conquest was willed of the Gods. The longing for peace, the love of peace, that arose later and spread over a large part of Asia, is really the product of a much later civilisation. The acquisition of land by conquest and the enslavement of its population is a salient feature of the early civilisation of Asia. The farther we go back into prehistoric times, the more do we find this kind of conquest going on. The conquests of Xerxes and others of his time were in truth but faint shadows of what went on in earlier ages.

Now there is a quite definite principle underlying these conquests. As a result of the states of consciousness which I have described to you, man stood in an altogether different relation to his fellow man and also to the world around him. Certain differences between different parts of the inhabited Earth have to-day lost their chief meaning. At that time these differences made themselves felt in quite another way. Let me put before you, as an example, something which frequently occurred.

Suppose a conquering people has made its way from the North of Asia, spread itself out over some other region of Asia and made the population subject to it. What has really happened?

In characteristic instances that are a true expression of the trend of historical evolution, we find that the aggressors were—as a people or as a race—young, full of youth-forces. Now what does it mean to-day to be young? What does it mean for men of our present epoch of evolution? It means to bear within one in every moment of life sufficient of the forces of death to provide for those soul-forces that need the dying processes in man. For, as you know, we have within us, the sprouting, germinating forces of life, but these life forces are not the forces that make us reflective, thoughtful beings; on the contrary, they make us weak, unconscious. The death forces, the forces of destruction, which are also continually active within us—and are overcome again and again during sleep by the life forces, so that not until the end of life do we gather together all the death forces in us in the one final event of death—these forces it is that induce reflection, self-consciousness. This is how it is with present-day humanity. Now a young race, a young people, such as I have described, suffered from its own over-strong life forces, and continually had the feeling: I feel my blood beating perpetually against the walls of my body. I cannot endure it. My consciousness will not become reflective consciousness. Because of my very youthfulness I cannot develop my full humanity.

An ordinary man would not have spoken thus, but the initiates spoke in this way in the Mysteries, and it was the initiates who guided and directed the whole course of history.

Here was then a people who had too much youth, too much life forces, too little in them of that which could bring about reflection and thought. They left their land and conquered a region where an older people lived, a people which had in some way or other taken into itself the forces of death, because it had already become decadent. The younger nation went out against the older and brought it into subjection. It was not necessary that a blood-bond should be established between conquerors and enslaved. That which worked unconsciously in the soul between them worked in a rejuvenating way; it worked on the reflective faculties. What the conqueror required from the slaves whom he now had in his court was influence upon his consciousness. He had only to turn his attention to these slaves and the longing for unconsciousness was quenched in his soul, reflective consciousness began to dawn.

What we have to attain to-day as individuals was attained at that time by living together with others. A people who faced the world as conquerors and lords, a young people, not possessed of full powers of reflection, needed around it, so to say, a people that had in it more of the forces of death. In overcoming another people, it won through to what it needed for its own evolution.

And so we find that these Oriental conflicts, often so terrible and presenting to us such a barbarous aspect, are in reality nothing else than the impulses of human evolution. They had to take place. Mankind would not have been able to develop on the earth, had it not been for these terrible wars and struggles that seem to us so barbarous.

Already in those olden times the Initiates of the Mysteries saw the world as it is seen to-day. Only they united with this perception a different attitude of mind and soul. For them, all that they experienced in clear, sharp outlines—even as we to-day experience external objects in sharp outlines, when we perceive with our senses—was something that came from the Gods, that came even for human consciousness from the Gods. For how did external objects present themselves to an Initiate of those times? There was perhaps a flash of lightning (to take a simple and obvious illustration). You know very well what a flash of lightning looks like to a man of to-day. The men of olden time did not see it thus. They saw living spiritual Beings moving in the sky, and the sharp line of the flash disappeared completely. They saw a host, a procession of spiritual Beings hurrying forward over or in cosmic space. The lightning as such they did not see. They saw a host of spirits hovering and moving through cosmic space.

The Initiate also saw, with the rest, this spiritual host, but he had developed within him the perception that we have to-day, and so for him, the picture began to grow dim and the heavenly host gradually disappeared from view, and then the flash of lightning could become manifest.

The whole of Nature, in the form in which we see it to-day, could only be attained in olden times through initiation. But how did man feel towards such knowledge? He did not by any means look on the knowledge thus attained with the indifference with which knowledge and truth are regarded to-day. There was a strong moral element in man's experience of knowledge. If we turn our gaze to what happened with the neophytes of the Mysteries, we find we have to describe it in the following way. When a few individuals, after undergoing severe inner tests and trials, had been initiated into the view of Nature, which to-day is accessible to all, they had quite naturally this feeling: consider the man with his ordinary consciousness. He sees the host of elementary beings riding through the air. But just because he has such a perception, he is devoid of free will. He is entirely given up to the Divine-spiritual world. For in this waking-dreaming, dreaming-waking, the will does not move in freedom, rather is it something that streams into man as Divine will. And the Initiate, who saw the lightning come forth out of these Imaginations, learned to say: I must be a man who is free to move in the world without the Gods, one for whom the Gods cast out the world-content into the void.

Now you must understand, this condition would have been unbearable for the Initiate, had there not been for him moments that compensated for it. Such moments he did have. For while on the one hand the Initiate learned to experience Asia as God-forsaken, Spirit-forsaken, he learned also to know a still deeper state of consciousness than that which reached up to the Second Hierarchy. Knowing the world bereft of God, he learned also to know the world of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

At a certain time in the epoch of Asiatic evolution, approximately in the middle—later on we shall have to speak more exactly of the dates—the condition of consciousness of the Initiates was such that they went about on Earth with very nearly the perception of the kingdoms of the Earth which is possessed by modern man; they felt it, however, in their limbs. They felt their limbs set free from the Gods in a God-bereft earthly substance.

In compensation for this, however, they met in this godless land the high Gods of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. As Initiates they learned to know, no longer the grey-green spiritual Beings that were the Pictures of the forest, the Pictures of the trees, they learned as Initiates to know the forest devoid of Spirit. Theirs, however, was the compensation of meeting in the forest Beings of the First Hierarchy, there they would meet some Being from the Kingdom of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

All this, understood as giving form to the social life of humanity, is the essential feature in the historical evolution of the ancient East. And the driving force for further evolution lies in the search for an adjustment between young races and old races, so that the young races may mature through association with the old, with the souls of those whom they have brought into subjection. However far back we look into Asia, everywhere we find how the young races who cannot of themselves develop the reflective faculties, set out to find these in wars of aggression.

When, however, we turn our gaze away from Asia to the land of Greece, we find a somewhat different development. Over in Greece, in the time of the full flower of Greek culture, we find a people who did indeed know how to grow old, but were unable to permeate the growing old with full spirituality. I have many times had to draw attention to the characteristic Greek utterance: Better a beggar in the world of the living than a king in the realm of the shades. Neither to death outside in Nature, nor to death in man, could the Greek adapt himself. He could not find his true relation with death. On the other hand, however, he had this death within him. And so in the Greek we find, not a longing for a reflective consciousness, but apprehension and fear of death.

Such a fear of death was not felt by the young Eastern races; they went out to make conquests, when as a race they found themselves unable to experience death in the right way. The inner conflict, however, which the Greeks experienced with death became in its turn an inner impulse compelling humanity, and led to what we know as the Trojan War. The Greeks had no need to seek death at the hands of a foreign race in order to acquire the power of reflection. The Greeks needed to come into a right relation with what they felt and experienced of death, they needed to find the inner living mystery of death. And this led to that great conflict between the Greeks and the people in Asia from whom they had originated. The Trojan war is a war of sorrow, a war of apprehension and fear. We see facing one another the Greeks, who felt death within them but did not know, as it were, what to do with it, and the Oriental races who were bent on conquest, who wanted death and had it not. The Greeks had death, but were at a loss how to adapt themselves to it. They needed the infusion of another element, before they could discover its secret. Achilles, Agamemnon—all these men bore death within them, but could not adapt themselves to it. They look across to Asia. There in Asia they see a people who are in the reverse position, who are suffering under the direct influence of the opposite condition. Over there are men who do not feel death in the intense way it is felt by the Greeks themselves, over there are men to whom death is something abounding in life.

All this has been brought to expression in a wonderful way by Homer. Wherever he sets the Trojans over against the Greeks, everywhere he lets us see this contrast. You may see it, for instance, in the characteristic figures of Hector and Achilles. And in this contrast is expressed what is taking place on the frontier of Asia and Europe. Asia, in those olden times, had, as it were, a superabundance of life over death, yearned after death. Europe had, on the Greek soil, a superabundance of death in man, and man was at a loss to find his true relation to it. Thus from a second point of view we see Europe and Asia set over against one another.

In the first place, we had the transition from rhythmic memory to temporal memory; now we have these two quite different experiences in respect of death in the human organisation. To-morrow we will consider more in detail the contrast, which I have only been able to indicate at the close of to-day's lecture, and so approach a fuller understanding of the transitions that lead over from Asia to Europe. For these had a deep and powerful influence on the evolution of man, and without understanding them we can really arrive at no understanding of the evolution we are passing through at the present day.

If we survey history as one great whole, we see it—in spite of the many valleys and lowlands breaking the heights of the ascending development of man—as a continuous education of the human race, as a process whereby a religious, a divine consciousness penetrates ever and again into mankind.

In every epoch of human evolution there has existed some kind of Initiation Science, analogous, in its own way, to the Initiation Science outlined in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. What I have there described is the Initiation Science of the present age, and it leads us from a mere knowledge of Nature to a knowledge of Spirit.

To this Initiation Science the course of human evolution is revealed in a threefold light. We can look back to a very ancient epoch which came to a close about the year 800 B.C. Then we see an epoch radiant in the light of the Mystery of Golgotha, when through Christ Jesus an everlasting impulse entered into human evolution; and so too, there can arise in our vision a third epoch, an epoch in which we stand to-day and which, by a new Initiation Science, we have to bring to a deeper reality.

Now over and above what is imparted to man by his natural development, intelligence, reason, will, feeling and by his earthly education, each of these three epochs has striven for something else. In each of these epochs man has sensed the existence of a mighty riddle, deeply interwoven with his destiny. And always this riddle has assumed a different form because the human race has passed through different conditions of soul in the several epochs. It is only in the modern age of abstractions, since the inception of the theory—invalid though it be—that the soul of man has evolved from the animal state, that the human soul could be thought of as having remained unchanged through the ages.

Those whom a deeper science has enabled to gaze with unbiased vision into the reality of life, realise that the constitution of the human soul in the first epoch of evolution was not by any means the same as in the epoch crowned by the Mystery of Golgotha. Again there is a difference in our own times, when we must learn to understand this Mystery of Golgotha if it is not to be lost as a fact of knowledge.

In this sense, then, let us consider the nature of the human soul in the ancient East, in an age which produced the wisdom contained in the Vedas and the Vedanta philosophy. Everywhere to-day men are turning back, and often with great misunderstanding, to the Vedas and the Vedanta. If we look at the souls of men in this ancient East, even at souls living in the old Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian civilisation and on into the earliest Greek period, we find that they were of quite a different nature from the souls of men living to-day. The souls of men in those ancient times passed through a much more dreamlike, spiritual existence than the souls of modern men, who in their waking life are wholly given up to sense impressions, to all that the intellect can derive from these sense impressions and the substance flowing into the human memory from them. What really constitutes the substance of the soul of man to-day, did not bear the same form in the souls of the ancients. These men possessed a much more instinctive wisdom of the inner life of soul and Spirit. What we to-day would speak of as the faculty of clear and conscious discernment, did not as yet exist. Man experienced a weaving, moving inner life, the shadowy echoes of which remain in our present dream-life. It was an inner life, in which man not only knew with certainty that a soul was weaving and moving through his body, forming part of his true manhood, but in which he also knew: A soul, born from a divine-spiritual existence before a body clothed me in my earthly existence, is living within me.

In those ancient times man experienced his own being in a kind of waking dream. He knew himself as soul and in this inner, living experience felt the body as a kind of sheath, merely an instrument for the purposes of earthly existence. Even in his waking hours man lived in this consciousness of soul—dreamlike though it was. And he knew with clear conviction that before a physical body clothed him on Earth, he had lived as soul in a divine-spiritual world. Direct inner perception revealed to him this life of soul and Spirit, and, as a consequence, his consciousness of death was quite different from that of modern man. To-day man feels that he is deeply linked with his body. His inner consciousness of soul is not detached from his bodily life as was the case in earlier times. He looks upon birth as a beginning, death as an end.

So living and intimate was the experience of the permanent, eternal nature of the soul in the ancients, that they felt themselves raised above birth and death in their contemplation of this life of soul. Birth and death were states of growth, metamorphoses of life. They knew the reality of a pre-earthly existence and hence with equal certainty that they would live on beyond the gate of death. Birth and death were transitory occurrences in an unceasing life.

It has, however, always been necessary for man's immediate experience to be widened and deepened by knowledge that penetrates to the spiritual world, by an Initiation Science that tells him more than can arise within his inner being or is imparted to him in ordinary life by earthly education. It fell to the old Initiates, the teachers of that ancient humanity, to give the answer to a definite riddle that arose in the souls of men. As I have said, these men knew of the soul' and Spirit in immediate experience. But there was a great riddle and it arose in the soul in this form: Through conception and birth I pass into physical life and move upon Earth; I am clothed in my physical body and this body contains the very same substances as those of dead, outer Nature. I am clothed in something that is foreign to my being. Between birth and death I live in a body—a body of Nature. I am born in a physical sense but this physical birth is foreign to my inner sense of being.

The mighty riddle before the man of very ancient times, as he gazed into his innermost being, was not a riddle connected with the soul or Spirit, but with Nature. And it arose before him as he sensed the full inner reality of soul and Spirit and then felt the need to understand why he was clothed in a physical body so foreign to his real being. It was the task of Initiation Science to teach man how he could direct the same forces which enabled him to gaze into the life of soul and Spirit, to outer Nature as well—to Nature whose manifestations are otherwise dumb and inarticulate. And if after adequate training—so it was taught by that ancient Initiation Science—man directs to stone, plant, animal, to clouds, stars, to the courses of Sun and Moon, the forces which otherwise lead only to inner knowledge, he can know and understand outer Nature as well. Then he beholds the Spiritual not only in his inner being but also in bubbling spring, flowing river and mountain, in the gathering clouds, in lightning, thunder, in stone, plant and animal.

Thus did an ancient Initiation Science speak to man: “Gazing into thine own being, thou hast living experience of soul and Spirit, thou hast found the Divine within thee. But Initiation Science trains the power which otherwise beholds the Divine in man alone, also to behold the Divine in the whole life of Nature. Thou art clothed in an outer physical body. Know that this body too is from God. Physical birth hath brought thee into an earthly existence which is itself of a Divine origin.”

And so the task of ancient Initiation Science was to give man this sublime teaching: “Know that thou art born of God not only when thine eyes gaze inwards. In the body that comes into the world through physical birth—there also thou art born of God.” And all that the old Father Initiation placed before the soul of man was expressed, in after times, in three penetrating words:

This was the first way in which Initiation Wisdom worked upon man and awakened a religious consciousness within him.

The old heathen cults assumed the form of Nature-religions because man felt the need for a justification of his physical birth in Nature. The riddle of Nature—this was what confronted his soul; and in this Ex Deo Nascimur the riddle of Nature was solved and he could feel his earthly existence hallowed, although in his waking life he still felt himself a being of Spirit and soul, transcending the Physical.

As the course of evolution continued, man's early, dreamlike experience of soul and Spirit—which was indeed a kind of innate knowledge of his true inner being—faded gradually into the background. He began more and more to use the instruments afforded by his physical body. Let me express it as follows: The dreams of a life of soul and Spirit that characterised a primal instinct in the human race, faded away into darkness, and for the first time indeed in the last few thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha, men learnt to make use of their outer senses and of the intellect bound up with these outer senses. What we to-day call “Nature” appeared before men as an actual experience. It was the task of the old wise Initiates to unfold the spirituality of Nature to the human soul. The purely physical quality of outer Nature was now there as a question before the soul. To the old riddle of man's earthly existence there was added the second great riddle in the history of evolution—that of man's earthly death.

It was only in the last few thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha that man really came to feel death in earthly existence with any intensity. Whereas in earlier times he had little sense of his body and a strong sense of soul and Spirit, he now felt and experienced his being in the physical body. And death, the enigmatic event that is bound up with the physical body, was experienced by him as the greatest riddle of existence in this second epoch. This riddle of death emerges with great intensity among the ancient Egyptians, for instance. They embalmed their corpses because they; experienced the terror of death, because they were aware of the kinship of the physical body (in which they sensed their own existence) with death. “How do I live in my earthly body?” This had been the first riddle. “How do I pass through earthly death?”—this was the second.

In the days when man had gazed upwards to the soul and Spirit, when the soul and Spirit were immediate experience to his instinctive clairvoyance, he knew: When the chains that bind me to this earthly existence fall away, I shall belong to the Earth no more. My earthly being will be changed and lo! I shall once again live in the super-earthly kingdom, I shall be united with the stars.—For the soul knew the stars spiritually in the living, instinctive existence of days of yore. Man read his destiny in the stars. He felt himself united with Sun and Moon; he knew the stars. “From the Spirit in the stars, from a pre-earthly existence I have come forth. To the stars to the Spirit in the stars—I shall return, when I pass through the gate of death.”

But now all this became a riddle. Man confronted death, beholding in death the body's end. He felt his soul inwardly bound to the body and with a deep awareness of this riddle he asked himself: “What becomes of me after death? How do I pass through the portal of death?” And to begin with, there was nothing on the Earth which could help him to solve this riddle.

The old Initiates knew how to explain to man the riddle of Nature. Ex Deo Nascimur—this was how they answered, if we translate their words into a later tongue. But now, all consciousness of the pre-earthly existence whither man would return after he had passed the gate of death, all that was so clearly revealed to the ancients, was obliterated from the human soul. The instinctive knowledge, arising in man as his life of soul and Spirit flowed upwards to the stars, was no longer there. And then a mighty event occurred.—The Spirit of the world of stars—He Whom a later age called “Christ” and an earlier Greek age, the “Logos”—descended upon Earth, descended in His Substance as a Spiritual Being and took flesh upon Himself in the human body of Jesus of Nazareth. It was given to mankind to experience the greatest event of earthly existence. He Whose life had been divined by the ancients as they gazed upwards to the stars, the Godhead of Whom the Divine-Earthly is also part, passed through earthly life and through death. For the death and resurrection of Christ were, in the first place, the most essential features for those who truly understood Christianity.

And so, this passing of the God Who in earlier times only revealed Himself from the stars—this passing of the Godhead through a human body—contained the solution of the second riddle of existence, the riddle of death, inasmuch as the mystery was revealed in the so-called Gnosis by the Initiates of the age of the Mystery of Golgotha. The Initiates could now teach men: The Being Who erstwhile dwelt in Eternity, in the stars, has descended into a human body and has vanquished death in a human body. The Christ has now become an “extract” of the Spirit, of the Logos, of the Universe. The old Initiates had pointed to Nature, saying: “Out of God is this Nature born.” Now the Initiates could teach man how he can be united with the Divine Being Who descended into Jesus of Nazareth, Who in the man Jesus of Nazareth passed, as all men pass, through the gate of death, but Who had conquered death. And once again it was possible for man to solve this second riddle of death, even as he had formerly solved the riddle of Nature.

In Buddhism we are told that the Buddha found the four great Truths, one of which awoke within him at the sight of a corpse, when he was seized by the despair of the human body in death. About six hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha, as a last remnant of ancient thought, the Buddha had the vision of death. Six hundred years after the Mystery of Golgotha, men began to gaze at the dead human form on the Cross. And just as Buddha believed that in the corpse he had discovered the truth of suffering as a last fragment of ancient thought, so now a humanity permeated with the Christ impulse gazed at the dead figure on the Cross, at the crucifix, and felt in this figure the heavenly guarantee of a life beyond death—for death had been conquered by Christ in the body of Jesus.

Because of their fear of death, the Egyptians embalmed their corpses, to preserve, as it were, the Nature-forces in man from death. This was in the age of Ex Deo Nascimur. The early Christians, in whom the impulse of esoteric Christianity was still living, buried their dead but held divine service over the grave in the sure conviction that death is conquered by the soul that is united with Christ; the tomb became an altar. From the Mystery of Golgotha flowed the certainty that if man is united with Christ, Who as the spiritual essence of the stars descended upon Earth and passed through life, death and resurrection in a human form, he himself as man, will conquer death.

Thus God the Father was the answer to the riddle of Nature. Christ was the answer to the riddle of death. Death had lost its sting. Henceforth death became a powerful argument (which formerly had not been necessary) for the metamorphosis of life.

The Gnosis—which was later exterminated, and of which fragments only have been preserved—proves that as the Christian Initiates contemplated the Mystery of Golgotha, in the certainty that Christ had descended to Earth and had awakened to new life the death-bringing forces in the Earth, they were able to instil into humanity the truth of the union of mortal man on Earth with Christ. Through Christ, man redeems the forces of death within him and awakens them to life. And so the Initiates were now able to impart a new consciousness of immortality to men, saying: “Your souls can be united with Him Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha; you can live in the life, death and resurrection of Christ. If your earthly life is more than a mere natural existence, if it is such that. Christ's Kingdom is awakened in your dealings with all your fellow-men, you live in communion with Christ Himself. Christ, the Divine Being, becomes your brother; in death and in life you die in Christ.” The truth of life in God the Son, in Christ, could now be added to the primeval truth of birth from God the Father, and to Ex Deo Nascimur was added:

In Christo Morimur

“In Christ we die”—that is to say—“As soul, we live!”

Such was the wisdom of man in the epoch that began about a thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha and came to its close in the fifteenth century A.D. We are now living in a third epoch which we must learn to understand aright. So in the education of the human race directed by the great Divine Teachers of the world, there was added to the truth “Out of God the Father we are born”—this truth—“In Christ the Son we die, in order that we may live.”

The great riddles of the first and second epochs stand clearly before us when we look back over history. The riddle of the third epoch in which we have been living for some centuries is as yet little known or felt, albeit it exists subconsciously in the feeling life of man and he yearns for its solution as deeply as he once yearned for the solution of the riddle of his earthly nature and then of his earthly death.

Since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries man has acquired a knowledge that penetrates deeply into Nature. Think only of the starry heavens which were once revealed to the dream-consciousness of the ancients and from which they read their destiny. External calculations, geometry and mechanics have taught man more and more about the stars since the approach of our present age. The science of the stars, of animals and plants has spread abroad in the form of a pure science of Nature. It was very different in the first epoch of human evolution and different again in the second, when in the depths of their souls men knew the truth of that which the old clairvoyant powers of the soul read in the stars, and which had descended in Christ into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus Christ lived among men, and men of the second epoch looked to the Christ, felt Him in their hearts and in this deep communion with Him they experienced what the Spirit of the Cosmos had once revealed to an old dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness as the justification of earthly existence. In the second epoch, man lived in cosmic spheres, as it were, inasmuch as he lived in communion with the Christ Who had descended from these cosmic spheres to Earth.

Then came the third epoch, when the world of stars was understood merely through calculation, when men looked through the telescope and spectroscope and discovered in the stars the same dead elements and substances as exist on the Earth. In this epoch men can no longer see Christ as the Being Who descended from the stars, because they do not know that the stars are the expression of the Spiritual Essence weaving through the Cosmos. And so the Cosmos is void of God, bereft of Christ, for mankind to-day.

Therefore it is that the inner consciousness of man is now menaced by the danger of losing Christ. The first signs are already visible. The ideas of Divine Wisdom, of Theology, which for centuries contained full knowledge of the Christ revelation, are now in many respects powerless to find the Christ, the God in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Many who contemplate the age of the Mystery of Golgotha no longer find Christ as a Cosmic Being, they find only the man—Jesus of Nazareth. The starry heavens are bereft of God, they are a part of Nature and men can no longer recognise in Him Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Being Whose “physical kingdom” is the whole cosmos, but Who dwelt in, the man Jesus of Nazareth in the age of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Inasmuch as these things can be deeply experienced in the inner being, there is a difference between one who treads the path of Initiation Wisdom and one who merely stands within external Natural Science. This Natural Science has lost the Spirit of the Cosmos and the danger approaches that humanity will also lose sight of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth.

Therefore it is that those who in our age penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of Nature that has blossomed forth in the third period of evolution since the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, feel the third great riddle of man's earthly development. They look back in history to the first great riddle—that of man's earthly nature; to the second riddle of his earthly death. And the third riddle arises within them, whispering something that as yet they do not like to face, although they feel it subconsciously and with a certain emphasis in their hearts. The Initiates of our age say to themselves: “We are living in the world which once spoke to man from out of the cosmos—spoke as the Spirit. In days of yore man lived a life of full wakefulness in the cosmos. Gradually this waking life in the cosmos, this feeling of oneness with the Christ Who descended to Earth as the Being Who preserves this awareness of the spiritual cosmos in man, faded away, and we are now living in a cosmos that is revealed to us merely in its outer aspect. Cosmic ideas are experienced by us only in dreams. The cosmos is weighed in the scales of a balance, observed by the telescope. Such is our dream! And instead of uniting us with the Spirit of the cosmos, this dream separates us from Him.”

And so the third great riddle of the sleep of knowledge, the sleep into which mankind has fallen, stands before those who live in the third epoch of evolution, the third epoch, not only of “uninitiated” but of Initiation Science.

Deeper spirits of the human race have felt this. Descartes felt it, for he finally began to doubt the validity of all knowledge yielded by outer Nature. But, to begin with, it was felt only dimly. More and more deeply there must enter into men the consciousness that the whole domain of knowledge of which they have been so proud for some five centuries, represents a sleep of existence. This third great riddle must stand more and more clearly before them. Why do we dwell in an earthly, physical body? Why do we pass through earthly death? And in the third epoch this question arises in the hearts of men: Why this sleep of a knowledge directed merely to outer Nature? How can we awaken from the dream that this “calculated” universe represents, how can we pass from this cosmos whose external aspect is revealed through Astro-Physics and Astro-Chemistry, and stand face to face with the cosmos that in the depths of our innermost being unites us once again with its deepest Essence? How can we wake from the dream into which knowledge has fallen in recent times?

Ex Deo Nascimur—this was the answer given by the Initiates in the earliest times to man's question, “Why do I live in an earthly body?” In the age of the Mystery of Golgotha the Initiates sought to solve the riddle of death by linking man with Christ Jesus Who had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, answering in the words of a later tongue, In Christo Morimur. And it is the task of modern Initiation Science in this our age and in the following centuries, gradually to lead mankind to a divine consciousness, to a religious life, and make it possible for him to awaken in his innermost being a spiritual knowledge of the cosmos. The Initiation Science that must arise through Anthroposophy does not wish merely to be an extension of our present sleeping knowledge—although men are proud of this knowledge and its outer successes have been so splendid. Anthroposophical Initiation Science would awaken this sleeping knowledge, would awaken man, who is fettered in the “dreams” of reason and intellectuality.

Hence, the Initiation Science that would be borne by Anthroposophy is not a mere extension of facts and discoveries of knowledge, but an impulse to an awakening, an attempt to answer the question: How can we wake from the sleep of life? And so, just as the earliest Initiates had explained Ex Deo Nascimur, and those who came later In Christo Morimur—the Initiation Wisdom which bears within itself a future life of conscious spiritual knowledge, a life leading to a deepening of religious feeling, a divine consciousness—this Initiation Wisdom would fain lead man once again to know that the Christ Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha is the Logos, weaving and working through the cosmos. And inasmuch as man will gradually grow to be conscious of his cosmic existence, the Initiation Science that is intended to inaugurate a spiritual Christology in the truest sense (as well as an Art of Education, for instance, in a narrower sphere), will strive to bring a religious mood into the practical life it ever seeks to serve.—“Out of God we are born as physical human beings”—“In Christ we die”—that is to say, “As soul, we live.” To these truths Initiation Science will ever strive to add the third: “When we press forward through the new Initiation to the Spirit, then even in this earthly existence we live in the Spirit.” We experience an awakening of knowledge whereby all our life is bathed in the light of true religion, in the light of a moral goodness proceeding from inward piety. In short, this new Initiation Science endeavours to supplement the answers to the first and second riddles of Initiation as expressed in Ex Deo Nascimur and in, In Christo Morimur—although at the same time it solves them anew and restores them to the soul of man. It endeavours to bring afresh and in full clarity to the human heart, this other truth—a truth that will awaken the Spirit in heart and soul: In the understanding of the living Spirit, we ourselves, in body, soul and Spirit, shall be re-awakened—

Just as ¹ Today, mysticism is understood to be the search for inner experiences that satisfy the human being after the longing to know one's own nature and one's relationship to the world has arisen. The not entirely conscious premise here is that man is capable of developing powers of the soul through which he can immerse himself in his own being to the point where he is connected to the roots of world-creating existence.

The path taken into the depths of the soul presents itself on closer inspection as a continuation of the path taken in ordinary memory. This reproduces the experiences of the soul in images of what the person has experienced in his or her dealings with the world. The images can be more or less faithful to the experiences, or they can be imaginatively transformed in the most diverse ways. The easiest way to visualize this process, which is naturally very complicated, is to use the comparison with a mirror. The impressions of the external world are received by the human being through the senses and processed by the powers of thought. Within the organism, they encounter processes in which they are not continued, but stopped and, in a given case, reflected like the light images from the mirror wall. However, the reflection occurs in such a way that the human organism has a more or less modifying effect on the impressions received from outside.

The mystic now penetrates deeper into his own being with intensified soul forces than is the case with ordinary memory. He pushes, as it were, through the intensified soul forces behind the mirror wall. There he encounters regions of his own organization that are not reached by the process of ordinary memory. The forces of these regions do participate when memory is formed, but they remain unconscious. Their effect only comes to light when the memory image is somewhat different from the direct experience. But what the mystic brings into his consciousness as the causes of these effects is experienced like a memory. It has the pictorial character of a memory. But whereas the latter reproduces experiences that were once present in the person's life on earth but are no longer there at the moment of experiencing them, the mystic experiences images that were never earthly experiences at all. He experiences a world of images in the form of memory thoughts, which is precisely what memory is.

When these matters are approached with anthroposophical research, it is found that the processes of one's own body reveal themselves in the mystical images obtained in the manner described. This occurs in a kind of symbolism that is also present in dream images. It can be said that the mystic dreams of the processes of his own bodily organization.

It is certainly a great disappointment for some who think differently about mysticism to discover the above. But for those who want to penetrate the mysteries of the world of reality, every kind of knowledge is welcome, including the fact that, when viewed in a certain way from the soul, the bodily processes appear as a web that is like nocturnal dreams. And if we follow this knowledge further, it shows that this fact is a guarantee of how the human body's organization ultimately has its origin in spiritual sources.

The anthroposophical researcher must know these things; he must understand the paths and prospects of mysticism. But his path is different. He does not penetrate directly behind the mirror of memory and thus into the bodily organization as the mystic does. He transforms the powers of memory while they are still soul-spiritual, while they are pure thought forces. This happens through the concentration of these powers and their meditative application. He dwells on clear images with highly concentrated soul forces. In doing so, he strengthens these forces within the soul region, while the mystic submerges into the region of the body.

The anthroposophical researcher thus arrives at a vision of a finer, more ethereal body of formative forces, which is connected to the physical human body as a higher one. The mystic enters into dreams about the physical body; the anthroposophical researcher arrives at a superphysical reality. This formative forces body no longer lives in spatial forms; it lives in a purely temporal existence. In relation to the spatial physical body, it is a time body. It initially presents the forces at work in the physical body during the earthly existence of the human being in their temporal progression, as in a tableau that can be seen all at once. It differs markedly from a mere comprehensive reminiscence of a person's previous life on earth at a particular moment. Such a memory-image represents more the way the world and people have approached the person remembering; but this characterized life tableau contains the sum and the confused interaction of the impulses coming from within the human being, through which the person has approached the world and other people in sympathy and antipathy. It thus reflects the way in which the person has shaped their life. This life tableau relates to the memory image as the impression in the seal to the imprint in the sealing wax.

This life tableau provides the first object of anthroposophical research; from there, further steps can be taken.

The arguments presented here show how little sense it makes to lump anthroposophy together with other well-known psychic research methods. In it one has not abstract idealism, but concrete knowledge of the spirit; and so one has not grasped its essential character if one identifies it with this or that form of mysticism, only in order not to engage with its very own nature, but to dismiss it with what one posits as an opinion about such a form or presupposes in the case of many. If this is taken into account, many of the misunderstandings that still circulate around the world today with regard to anthroposophy will disappear.

• 1. This article is linked to the previous ones: “Is Anthroposophy Fantasy?” and “Anthroposophy and Idealism”

Play in three acts by J. V. Widmann
Performance at the court theater, Weimar

In his latest work, the play "Beyond Good and Evil", Joseph Viktor Widmann, to whom we owe many a novella worth reading and numerous intellectual feuilletons, has taken up the fight against the intellectual current of the present, whose followers see the dawn of a new moral world order in the views of Friedrich Nietzsche. In the Swiss mountains and under the skies of Italy, Nietzsche dreamed and thought of a revaluation of all moral values, of a morality of the future that would not be based on external authority but on man's proudest self-consciousness. Good and evil are not eternal concepts that have come to us through extra-human, supernatural revelation, but ideas that have formed within humanity in the course of time, and which only prejudice and bias can regard as insurmountable limits of morality. The morally strong, who has the strength to act according to his own new impulses, cannot allow himself to be limited by the moral concepts established by a generation of the past that was unaware of the ideas and needs of contemporary mankind. Man should not realize the ideals of his ancestors, but the goals and aspirations that arise within himself. He who lives only according to the ideas of others, however excellent they may be, is morally weak. He who is master of himself, who is able to determine his own standard of morality, is the morally strong, the virtuous. The ideal of the virtuous, the strong, is the unleashing of the individual's inherent impulses; the ideal of the morally weak is the exploration of the moral laws that are supposed to have been given to them from somewhere. The weak want to be humble and submit to the commandments given to them; the strong are proud and self-important, because they know for themselves what they should do. The present is not favorable to such views; for decades the man who expressed them in a wonderful way lived unnoticed. And now that his name is that of an apostle to many, both to those who have a judgment about it and to those who monkey with every fashion, he lives in spiritual derangement in Naumburg, with no memory of the time of his spiritual work.

Widmann is directed against the spiritual seed of this man. If he had done it with Aristophanic comedy, if he had fought with wit and humor against the excesses of a school of thought he detested, no one of understanding would have thought of objecting to his tendency. If Nietzsche were mentally healthy, he himself would have turned against the baseless intellectual lumpenism that now often trails behind his abused banner and wants to live out its life in insignificance and insignificance, because that lies in his individuality. The fact that Widmann now places such an intellectual rag at the center of his drama makes it repugnant. Robert Pfeit is a professor of art history and is supposed to be a Nietzschean. Because of this attitude, he neglects his wife, who is far removed from Nietzschean pride, but whose moral worth surpasses Robert's, and throws herself away on the frivolous, frivolous young widow Viktorine v. Meerheim, who only turns her eyes to the professor because he is supposed to illegally obtain a doctorate for her foppish, limited and ignorant brother. The web into which the cunning woman has spun the weak-character follower of Nietsche's morality of the strong is to be completely pulled together at a masked ball, at which Pfeil wants to appear as Sigismondo Malatesta, Prince of Rimini, and Viktorine as Isotta degli Atti. These are figures from the Renaissance period to which Pfeil has devoted his studies and in whose purely arbitrary view of life he sees his Nietzschean ideals realized. Pfeil's wife is unhappy because of her husband's 'aberrations'. She therefore decides to stay away from the unfortunate ball at which Viktorine wants to crown her disastrous doings; indeed, she has already obtained poison from her brother Dr. Lossen's laboratory because she does not want to survive her husband's fall. As this brother, a traveling naturalist, surveys the situation, a saving thought occurs to him. He has found a substance in distant lands that lulls you into a gentle sleep. He mixes it with cigarette tobacco and lets the deceived Nietzschean smoke a suitably prepared cigarette as he prepares to go to the fateful masked ball. Of course, Pfeil now dreams the dream that cures him of all Nietzschean ills. His ideal people and their opponents are presented to him. Those who profess his doctrine are despicable tyrants, scoundrels or boors; the opponents of his doctrine are noble and good, angels in every respect. Divided into these two camps, we are presented with a disgusting, repulsive and boring picture of the court of Rimini in the form of a pickled dream. And when Robert Pfeil wakes up, behold, he has become a pious man; the dream has shown him the disgraceful deeds to which Nietzscheanism could still lead him. One need not be a follower of Nietzsche to be unpleasantly affected by Widmann's theatrical machinations. The writer of these lines knows the weaknesses and dangers of Nietzscheanism quite well, but it is contrary to his feelings to see J.V. Widmann fighting against Friedrich Nietzsche.

Now just a few words about the performance. Mr. Weiser played the main role, Professor Robert Pfeil, as well as a contradictory and unclear character can be played. If the portrayal was not that of a human being but that of a stereotyped theatrical character, the fault lay not with the actor but with the poet. Mr. Weiser deserves special recognition as director. The staging was brisk and tasteful. Mrs. Wiecke, the best-trained female force in local acting, as the professor's wife, sympathetically portrayed the representative of the humble, gentle, tolerant humanity that has to suffer under the evil Nietzscheanism; Mrs. Lindner-Orban, who as "Kluge Käthe" has already fought against Nietzsche once during this season in a splendid acting performance, this time found little opportunity to show off her skills. A character as marked as this Viktorine could not be given flesh and blood by the best actress. Also worthy of mention are Miss Schmittlein (maid in Pfeil's house), who I particularly liked in the first act, and Mr. Kökert, who played Viktorine's brother in the excellent way we have known him to play similar roles since we first saw him.