The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When we discuss the questions and riddles of life in the sense of modern spiritual science, as has been the case here for several years, it is always good to remember that great man in the developmental history of humanity, namely Copernicus, and [also] many other men who, in the same sense, contributed to the revolution in intellectual life with him. In doing so, one must remember what is rarely thought of today: what it must have meant for a thinking person of that time, when the ground literally trembled under his feet, even moved , so that it seemed as if the earth was no longer at the center of the world, but rather, as a rotating body, also orbiting the sun, while he had clung to the earlier opposite assumption with all his thoughts and ideas. Copernicus now presented a world view that reversed everything that had been believed before. Just as people gradually came to accept the essence of his proclamation, so they used to believe in the constellation of the visible stars on a moon bowl, a sun bowl, on individual planetary spheres up to the seventh, the fixed star sphere. In addition to this, they believed that there was an eighth sphere, which was supposed to form the conclusion of the spatial world. This was what Giordano Bruno already considered to be erroneous, saying that what the eye perceives as the blue vault of heaven is nothing more than what appears to be caused by the limited perceptive ability of the eye; rather, instead of such limited spheres, unlimited worlds are to be thought of, that is, infinite distances and an infinite number of worlds.

But what was it that was expressed in multiple ways? Through such views, Copernicus and Giordano Bruno, as well as their followers, pointed out that knowledge is not exclusively promoted by the perception of the senses, but that one must move beyond the sensual result to a view that is based on the supersensible element of thinking. But at that time these minds, which had passed over to a view beyond the tangible observation of the world, had to fight against many parties who wanted to hold on to the traditional and therefore rejected what the new science could offer them against the meaning of this (traditional).

The same applies to what is presented here as spiritual science. This also coincides with the world of external contemporary phenomena, insofar as the events of our own soul life take place in it and relate to the most important questions and riddles that are incorporated in the two words “death” and “immortality”.

We must be clear about the fact that only a serious striving can achieve knowledge about these two enigmatic words, because this is not possible in idle curiosity or with the so-called thirst for knowledge, but only if we lives within ourselves; for man can only fulfill his tasks in the world - whether they be of greater importance or merely those of the recurring everyday life - when he can consciously work and proceed with what essentially rests within him. This is why the question of death and immortality develops into a question about the nature of the human soul, so that in answering it we gain strength and certainty for our work in life, for life in general.

A German philosopher has rightly said: Immortality does not begin only after death, but must be able to be found at all times in the life of the soul, even during our lives. But to do that, it is necessary to get to know the nature of the soul. If we follow the progress of human spiritual development before and since Copernicus, we can see that its successes were slowly prepared. Something similar can be observed here in the questions about death and immortality in the past period of time, although it is only recently that the research methods by which such questions can be discussed and answered have become known in wider circles. In doing so, however, spiritual science must look at a comprehensive law, namely that of human development, which is fully in line with the developmental concept of modern natural science, and with all its consequences. The compulsion of Western intellectual life has long since led important minds in this direction. I would like to refer you, for example, to Lessing: when he was at the peak of his intellectual development, he wrote his 'Education of the Human Race'. He wanted to present a common concern of the entire human race, to show how a law runs through all developmental epochs of mankind, in which not only cause and effect follow one another in a pedantic sequence, but the course of development of humanity is at the same time the education of humanity. He indicated how humanity needed an elementary education in the past, and referred first to the Old Testament period, calling the “Old Testament” the first elementary book of humanity. To grasp the truth in a higher form, humanity was given the “New Testament” in the Christian era, in order to lift it up to further epochs of human development. Thus the education of humanity was carried out by a guiding divine being.

But now the question arises as to whether it makes sense to call the development of humanity an education when the individual souls completely disappear again to make way for souls born later; it only makes sense if the same souls come back for a new development, to be reborn on earth as human beings at a higher level. This is where Lessing's idea came from that the human soul does not live only once, but comes back again and again to take part in the education of the human race anew at a higher level; this is why he speaks of repeated earthly lives of the human soul. Lessing also raises objections to himself and anticipates the easily occurring thought that the soul, for example, does not remember previous lives, by saying, “What useful purpose could such a memory serve?” When the soul has become mature enough, then the memory of earlier earthly lives will also awaken; and he transforms these thoughts into a feeling by saying: When we are filled with the idea of repeated earthly lives, then we can look forward calmly to the future, where the souls will unfold in ever higher earthly lives.

Is not all of eternity mine?

It is clear to see that Lessing has emerged from Western development; his train of thought is different from that of Buddhism, which is related to his. Therefore, his, as a modern conception, must not be confused with that of the latter; because in Buddhism one asks oneself: How should the individual behave in order to reach Nirvana as soon as possible? In Lessing's work, the idea arises from a Christian motive; he regards the whole of humanity on earth as a single, unified family, connected by eternal bonds, destined to develop gradually and together, and to gradually perceive and consciously promote this as a common affair. When so-called enlightened minds speak of Lessing today, they do recognize most of his achievements, but as soon as they come to his thoughts on the education of the human race, they consider him an aging man who had set down these thoughts in his weak time. But one does not follow the necessity in the development of great minds, but only wants to accept what suits oneself.

Hebbel once wrote in his diary: “Let us assume that Plato were to return in a new life and attend a modern secondary school, where he would also have to read his own works again, then it is possible that the reincarnated Plato would understand these old writings the worst.” This is the best way to express the idea that great minds can contribute to the idea of development.

The idea of repeated lives on earth has resurfaced in the educational life of the nineteenth century, being brought to our attention by the psychologist Droßbach, who had taken it up again for scientific reasons. And when, in the in the fifties of the last century a prize was offered for an answer to the question of death and immortality, a paper was awarded in which this idea was developed in the sense of successive earth lives. It is indeed remarkable that around the middle of the nineteenth century a mind like Widenmann answered the question of the life of the soul in this way, from which one then later, out of the necessity of thinking, as one thought, one departed.

Research in spiritual science shows that these repeated lives must be a fact of life, so that it now stands on the standpoint that the human core of our being has been here before, that it once took on a beginning and will often be here again will be, so that his human life will proceed in an earthly life between birth and death and in a spiritual way between death and a new birth, in which part of life our innermost core of being continues its existence in supersensible worlds.

If we now want to see how life everywhere provides us with the results for the affirmation of this view, we must observe the beginning in the independent development of the human being from birth onwards, how gradually the hazy features and awkward body movements develop into more definite features and more purposeful movements, and after a few years the human being is increasingly able to make better and better use of his brain, the noblest tool. Then, on unbiased observation, one must admit that all this is not the result of a self-developing physical power, but that a supersensible entity is working on the striking development from within. But let us look further to see if and how we can also capture the supersensible existence of the soul through external observations. We can observe how the life and events of the soul impress themselves vividly on the physical exterior and the whole being of the human being. If, for example, a person has been eagerly occupied with questions of knowledge for ten years and his soul has been surging up and down in the most diverse moods in the struggle for certain results, then the effects of this cannot simply vanish into nothingness. This is particularly noticeable to anyone who meets someone who has been working hard in this way after quite some time: how the features of the face have changed, shaped by the efforts of the struggling soul. In this way, we can perceive the unique shaping of the soul in the body. Something else also presents itself to us here, which makes this observation a scientific experience; for everyone who struggles in this way can notice in himself, and without any contradiction, that from a certain point on he sees the fruits of his struggle ripening more and faster, as the answer to the questions he wants to answer comes down upon him like a grace. When his soul has arrived at the expression of its struggle in its ultimate consequences in the bodily, then his bodily nature no longer changes, and this is because these struggling forces now emerge fully into consciousness, whereas before they also poured into the bodily and transformed it. When the transformation reached its limit, the forces changed in order to be consciously utilized in accordance with the intention of the developed human being. We can therefore be convinced that everything that forces its way into consciousness and thereby blesses us has worked in the dark depths of the subconscious to develop the organs we needed so that the soul could be completely master of itself and its body.

Once we have directed our attention to the development of the human being, we must still point out something that everyone knows even without clairvoyant abilities, namely, when our life that lies beneath our daytime consciousness shines up into our consciousness during our dreams, which we cannot grasp firmly, however often we have experienced them, even if we experience them according to inner laws, not in random dream figures. The following dream experience may clarify this: a rather zealous, conscientious young person, who also enjoyed drawing in his other lessons, was given a difficult template to copy in his last year at school; he needed quite a long time for his precise, somewhat laborious work and therefore did not finish it by the end of the school year; it did not harm him in the judgment of his teachers, since he had worked diligently and efficiently. Nevertheless, during every lesson, especially towards the end of the school year, he was seized by the fear of not being able to finish his work, and this oppressive sensation haunted him even in his dreams. Even after many years, as an adult, the experience would still come up in his dreams, making him feel like a schoolboy again and, with intense fear, much more than in his daily life, he felt that he would not be able to finish his work, as this had once so often disturbed his school life. This repeated itself for weeks, temporarily ceased, only to recur later. If we want to examine this scientifically, we have to go back over the entire previous life. As a schoolboy, he developed his talent for drawing and also made progress, but this only manifested itself periodically, in leaps and bounds. Each such leap was already preceded by such a series of inner experiences in the schoolboy's life; when these then failed to materialize, he sensed that he had made progress. It remained the same in the development of other abilities in his later life. Now consider whether it is unreasonable to claim that the inner core of the human being was working to bring progress to this person. Before this progress occurred in his soul life, everything took place in the subconscious, but he kept pushing further and further into the physical, and shortly before the breakthrough, before his organs were developed for the external activity of the heightened mental ability, that is, before the last steps, it became apparent in the dream life described that the soul was almost finished with the development of the bodily organ, and then finally, without an accompanying dream experience, to emerge as a product of the spiritual core of the being, externally completely usable in its configured and transformed form.

From this point of view, we can gradually proceed to all the everyday events of life in their alternating states of waking and sleeping. From this point of view we can gradually proceed to all the everyday events of life in their alternating states of waking and sleeping. Through the sensory observation of sleep, one can come to such a realization. How does the moment of falling asleep occur? The person feels how all the senses become duller, the sharp contours of the images fade, everything becomes hazy. If someone who is trained observes this stage, then he comes to an idea about what he did the day before; he feels in a vivid feeling whether he can be satisfied or dissatisfied with himself. In the former case, this feeling is accompanied by such bliss and by the wish that this transition and these thoughts would not end, which fertilize him and flow through his limbs like a new invigoration. But then there is a jolt with which the spiritual and mental core of the being, as a reaction on the body, moves away, and sleep sets in.

It has been pointed out before that those who have to learn a lot soon realize and know from their own experience how good it is to be able to indulge in a revitalizing sleep. Physiologically, sleep and the refreshment it provides can be understood as a state or a process in which what has been worn down during the waking state of the day is rebuilt, and new strength is generated by the spiritual and soul core of the being working into the sleeping body during the state in which it is physically free, as indicated earlier.

When we look at a child as it gradually develops, it is a well-known fact that it lives into the existence of the later waking day life in a formal dream existence, in a sleep life that is only briefly interrupted, especially at the beginning. Everyone knows that it is only from a certain point in time that they can say “I” to themselves, and thus only from that point on that they have become aware of themselves. Anyone who recognizes the principles of physics and chemistry must admit that the mental and spiritual powers with which the child can say “I” to itself after the first years of development must have been there earlier, at a time when they developed the most important and noblest organ of the human being, when the human core formed the brain and worked it out in ever greater detail. The fact that the materialistic science cites that the left cerebral convolution is the speech center, that man cannot speak if these brain parts are not well developed, may be countered only briefly by the fact that a person cannot learn to speak if, for example, he lives on a deserted island, whereas other physiological processes, such as teething, would occur without further ado. Therefore, the mental capacity in the child must be developed to such an extent that the development of speech is initiated and the brain is trained for this purpose; therefore, speaking is not the consequence, but the accompanying and constantly effective cause for the development of the speech center. The soul and spirit must always first have an effect on the physical, working on it so that the organs can develop that are later to be used in the physical world in the sense of conscious thinking. If we summarize these individual thoughts, we are thereby shown everywhere that the process of development takes place in such a way that the whole human body is built up from a supersensible core of being. We can never come to understand this supersensible being if we only remain with its product, the physical body organization. We must always go back to what takes possession of this organization at the beginning of its formation; observation always teaches us this.

Now, in natural science, it is always particularly emphasized that in order to establish conclusive proof, the results of observation must also be obtained in an experiment. The possibility [to do so] is also present here, even if this test is not always necessary. But how [can this be done]? Man must prepare and use his own soul, himself in the fullest sense, as an instrument for grasping the spiritual world. You will find a more detailed account of how this is possible in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. Today, I would merely like to point out that man can also experience the onset of sleep while fully conscious if he makes himself capable of doing so by concentrating on his innermost soul life and through long continued meditation on suitable thoughts. If we hypothetically assume that at the beginning of sleep the spiritual core of the being steps out of the person falling asleep and, figuratively speaking, enters a higher world, then the sufficiently trained person can directly observe this core of the soul through real, experimental observation of the spiritual world. This core of being very easily eludes ordinary perception when falling asleep, since usually too little energy is present in the person to become aware of it when experiencing the soul's separate state. These latent energies must be strengthened, developed; the person must practice discarding all the hindering conditions and try [to achieve a state] in which, so to speak, physical hearing and seeing passes away. Of course, this is only possible gradually and must be initiated by first achieving lasting control over one's earlier emotional movements; grief, anger, and agitation of all kinds must be balanced out, and we must pour calmness over ourselves. When we have worked in this way for a while with sufficient success, we can begin to devote ourselves to certain thoughts of the good, the beautiful, and the true, thoughts that are not borrowed from the world of the senses, and to cultivate symbolized thoughts that express nothing external. If we are willing to move and experience enough within ourselves, then after long and strenuous devotion, we will achieve that our soul becomes an instrument of observation in the sense indicated, in that the powers that previously proved to be too weak to arrive at self-conscious perceptions when falling asleep, now push their way to ever-increasing clarity, instead of leading to a blurred consciousness in the indefinite depths of the soul. Organs are incorporated into the soul organism, which allow us to gain new possibilities of perception. Then the person developed in this way is able to perceive vividly what was previously unconscious and to suppress anything that disturbs him, thus making the soul empty and suitable for the finer impressions of the spiritual world; he will then perceive that the tired person can gather new strength in the spiritual world, which he enters when he falls asleep.

It is also possible for a person to experience a state equivalent to the generally known fatigue in this sense, [but] without the disturbance of the former, during concentration of thought, in such a way that the latter state allows one to remain fully awake and conscious, thus making an effort to ensure that all experiences occur in conscious forms and thus continue completely. Then the person will perceive that he cannot use his body and also his brain, but feels outside of them and cannot chisel into them what he experiences outside of the body. With continued practice of the appropriate exercises, the feeling and the possibility will gradually arise to influence the physical body with the inner soul processes, so that it becomes more and more docile and pliable to the demands and impressions of the soul, until it is generally so prepared and particularly the brain is so formed that it is able to express what is experienced outside of it, to communicate it to others.

This experiment can therefore be done to observe the hypothetical workings of the soul on the body itself; there is no difference in terms of the evidence of these processes compared to the method of natural science. Then we are faced with the possibility that we can say: When a person is born into earthly physical life, his supersensible core of being emerges completely from the supersensible world, and so the human being will also have emerged into life for the first time. As educators, we can observe that young people bring nothing unknown to our world into the earthly world that could never have been connected to our world. Rather, they come equipped with powers that they have already gathered at an earlier time in the physical world, in earlier stages of cultural development. If we look at life more broadly, we are immediately confronted with the fact that every morning, when we wake up, we feel confronted by our past life. When, as mentioned earlier, the human being struggles with his body and this struggle of the soul finds an end in the formation of wrinkles and furrows, the soul ceases the physical transformation, and the soul's powers then become consciously perceptible. Every morning, the soul meets the body at this boundary and can lead it further, as far as it allows with its inherent elasticity. We also see from this that we experience and learn more than we can utilize in our body, because it is, after all, largely fully formed; nevertheless, it continues to have an effect on our spiritual and soul core.

All this can be observed in everyday life, and if it is applied in healthy educational principles, the good effects will be maintained throughout the whole of life. It will be felt that the human being always feels like a student during his life, never loses the bliss of constantly letting new things take effect on him, while a wrong education makes one blasé. When the body has reached the peak of its development and maintained it for a while, but then slowly begins to degrade again, which occurs in the second half of life, we feel that the soul can no longer work on the body as it once did, but that our spiritual-soul core of being, in constant connection with the outer, physical body, now really grows in the emotions and sensations. With the destruction of the brain, the soul life of the person concerned will only cease in the physical, since it is not the brain itself that thinks and so on, but with the help of the brain, thought takes place in the physical. But what is not directly connected to the brain, we feel with increasing age and perceive the decline of the physical, which can no longer be further developed, as a relief.

Finally, the human being passes through the gate of death. The spiritual and soul essence has been enriched in many ways during earthly life and is now working on the preparation of those forces that bring about a repetition of life, in which a new life material is given to a person who has been reborn as a child.

The memory of the previous life is interrupted in an immediate way, especially the memory of details, because the physical body is completely given over to the physical world as a corpse; even that which has only superficially impressed itself on the soul is, as it were, thrown off like a second corpse, since the soul can no longer use it. Only that which the soul can use to achieve new abilities is retained, as formative powers for a new life, which are suitable for building a new body. Thus the idea of repeated earthly lives is justified in itself, and the idea of development that lies at its heart follows as a logical, necessary consequence of what the natural sciences have achieved. In this connection, however, the fact must be taken into account that not all courses of life are to be understood in the sense of a continuous ascent, but despite many fluctuations, whether rooted in man or not, the sum total of repeated lives is an upward climb, a gain.

Sleep can be delayed or even prevented altogether by vivid thoughts that arise in a person as soon as they relate to emotions, joy, fear, worry, or concerns of any kind; for these connect the spiritual and mental core of the being with everyday consciousness and therefore do not allow it to penetrate into supersensible worlds. The person can only fall asleep when this state is finally numbed by excessive tiredness, or when it is distracted from the earlier thoughts by returning to calmer thoughts, especially those of a more ideal direction in life. Similar conditions also apply to the building of a new life. This will be achieved in a downward sense if the forces for this have to be taken from selfishness, or if those who cling to it have to be drawn upon. This also makes the ascending and descending nature of the individual courses of life understandable, so that in this respect, too, life can provide us with evidence for the views presented. The spiritual soul essence enters the germinating body of the child and forms it as the builder of this body. And whoever encounters man uninhibitedly in his natural conditions of origin and growth will find such conditions confirmed as facts. We have been able to verify this, for example, in the case of a man who attained a particularly high level of clairvoyance, namely Michel Nostradamus (Notre-Dame), born in St. Remy in Provence in 1503 and died in Salon in 1566. He was a doctor who worked with the greatest devotion as long as he was left in peace. He was banned from practicing medicine and withdrew to a kind of spiritual observatory, where he studied nature and astronomy. Here he allowed the constellations in particular to take effect on him spiritually and in doing so became aware of some inner abilities of his soul that had previously remained hidden from him. He saw these as a divine gift bestowed upon him for his seclusion. Particularly when he devoted himself to the macrocosm in full tranquility, without being affected by the surging and surging of his soul life, his clairvoyant gift emerged, with which he also achieved great results in his prophecies for the future. We see how the spiritual-soul core of his being broke through the natural conditions of existence, after the forces he had previously used as a physician could no longer be expended; they asserted themselves in the way indicated, because it was not possible to to let them disappear without further ado, and entirely in line with the scientific view of the “conservation of energy”, those forces that had previously been channeled into external activity were transformed into clairvoyant powers, which in turn evoked further inner soul energies. This can also be achieved through meditation and concentration, under the influence of which the human being is prepared to overcome space and time with his perceptions and to see differently than is possible when seeing in physical everyday life. On this occasion, I would like to draw attention to the book “Das Mysterium des Menschen” by Ludwig Deinhard, which explains the complete harmony of external methods with those of spiritual science.

Thus we can look back from our time, in which spiritual science can once again draw new courage for further success, to those upheavals in world and life views, as they were indicated in the introductory words of our lecture, where new elements entered into the sphere of human feeling, just as humanity today, when observing the development of soul and spirit, is in a similar situation to that when Copernicus removed the ground from under our feet and applied thinking instead of observation. If we look only at the sciences, such as astronomy, biology and so on, which have grown not through observation alone, but mainly through thought, just as in Copernicus' time he and still Giordano Bruno Bruno dissolved the narrow-minded views of humanity into seemingly immeasurable atmospheres and spaces, breaking through the eighth sphere created only by the world of the senses.

From this point of view, spiritual science stands today when it sees people who, until now, limited their environment according to spatial-material perception and their own soul nature between birth and death according to temporal perception. However, since these living conditions could only be limited by misleading observation, this self-imposed limitation can also be broken through. Just as astronomical science, for example, must also have a future in the same sense, so must spiritual science expand the firmament of the limited soul life beyond the limits assumed by most people, and indeed beyond this life, beyond birth and death, into an eternity. Then spiritual science will open up to the world the infinity and immortality of the soul. Once Giordano Bruno was condemned to death by burning at the stake by his opponents and burnt in Rome. Perhaps some people would like to see the same thing happen to the representatives and followers of spiritual science. If this is no longer permissible today, then they try to ridicule and belittle spiritual science as much as possible. But those who cannot get enough of it will thereby pass judgment on themselves instead of on those on whom they believe they can carry it out. But that world view will also receive its judgment, and that through the further development of spiritual science, just as the time has come for the recognition of the scientific view of nature, in the face of retrogressive efforts. But spiritual science will also prove to be particularly capable of giving people real life and not just a theory, blessing them more than the natural sciences, not in opposition to them, but by expanding their healthy principles on new paths of development for humanity. Those who can then see that the world is advancing in this way will not condemn spiritual science, but will march with it to victory.

I have spoken to you about the Sibyls, pointing out how they appear as shadows of the Greek philosophers in Ionia. Through centuries they conjured up from their chaotic soul-life a mixture of deep wisdom and sheer spiritual chaos, and they exerted much more influence on the spiritual life of Southern Europe and its neighbouring regions than external history is willing to recognise. I wanted to indicate that this peculiar outpouring from the souls of the Sibyls points to a certain power of the human soul which in ancient times, and even in the third post-Atlantean epoch, had some good significance. But as one culture-epoch succeeds another in the course of human history, changes occur. The forces which the Sibyls employed to produce, at times, sheer nonsense, were good, legitimate forces in the third post-Atlantean epoch, when Astrology was studied and the wisdom of the stars worked into the souls of men, harmonising the forces which later emerged chaotically as Sibyllism.

You can gather from this that forces which prevail anywhere in the world—including those which prevailed in the souls of the Sibyls—should never be called good or bad in themselves; it depends on when and where they appear. The forces that appeared in the souls of the Sibyls were good and legitimate, but they were not adapted to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch; for the forces that were then intended to prevail in human souls were not those that come from subconscious depths, but those that speak to the soul through the clarity of the Ego. Yesterday we heard how the Hebrew prophets strove to suppress the Sibylline forces and to bring out the forces that speak through the clarity of the Ego. This indeed was the essential characteristic of the old Hebrew school of prophecy—to press back the chaotic Sibylline forces and to bring out those which can speak through the Ego.

The fulfilment of this task given to the Hebrew prophets—we could call it a task of bringing the Sibylline forces into the right path of evolution—came about through the Christ Impulse. When the Christ Impulse entered into the evolution of humanity in the way known to us, one result was that the chaotic forces of the Sibyls were thrust back for a time, as when a stream disappears below ground and reappears later on. These forces were indeed to reappear in another form, a form purified by the Christ Impulse, after the Christ Impulse had entered into the aura of the earth. Just as in human life, after we have been using our soul-forces throughout the day, we have to let them sink into nightly unconsciousness, so that they may reawaken in the morning, so it was necessary that the Sibylline forces, legitimate as they had been during the third post-Atlantean epoch, should flow for a while below the surface, unnoticed, in order to reappear—slowly, as we shall hear.

The forces—legitimate human forces—which emerged so chaotically in the Sibyls were cleansed, so to speak, by the Christ Impulse, but then they sank below the surface of the soul. Human beings in their ordinary consciousness remained entirely unaware that the Christ continued to work on these forces; but so it was.

From the standpoint of Spiritual Science, it is a superb drama to watch this impact of the Christ Impulse; to see how, from the Council of Nicaea onwards, human beings in their normal consciousness quarrel ardently about dogmas, while what was most important for Christianity takes its course in the subconscious depths of the soul. The Christ Impulse does not work where there is strife, but below the surface, and human wisdom will have to uncover a great deal that we may think strange, if we look at it superficially. Much will have to be revealed as a symptom of the Christ Impulse working below the surface. Then we shall understand that essential developments in the historical configuration of Christianity in the West could not come about through the quarrels of Bishops, but sprang from decisions which were reached below the surface of the soul and rose into consciousness like dreams, so that men were aware only of these dreamlike apprehensions and could not discern what was going on in the depths. I will mention only one symptom of this. There are events that reflect, as though through dreams, the activity which the Christ was undertaking in the depths of the soul in order to bring human soul-forces into a right alignment with the course of Western history.

Many of you will perhaps guess something of what I mean if we observe that on October 28, 312, when Constantine the Great, the son of Constantine Chlorus, was making war against Maxentius on the outskirts of Rome, a decision was taken which proved to be of the highest importance for the configuration of Christianity throughout the West. This battle in front of Rome was not determined by military orders, or by the conscious acumen of the leaders, but by dreams and Sibylline omens! We are told—and this is the significant thing—that when Constantine was moving against the gates of Rome, Maxentius had a dream which said to him: “Do not remain in the place where you are now.” Under the influence of this dream, reinforced by an appeal to the Sibylline Books, Maxentius committed the greatest folly—looked at externally—that he could have committed. He left Rome and fought the battle—with an army four times the size of Constantine's—not within the protection of the walls of Rome, but outside them. For the message received from the Sibylline Books ran thus: “If you fight against Constantine outside the gates of Rome, you will destroy Rome's greatest enemy.” A truly oracular utterance! Maxentius obeyed it and with faith and courage went outside the gates. As on an earlier occasion another Sibylline oracle had guided Croesus, so was Maxentius guided by this one. He destroyed the enemy of Rome—himself.

Constantine had a different dream. It said to him: “Carry in front of your troops the monogram of Christ!” He did so and he won the battle. A decisive event for the configuration of Europe, brought about by dreams and Sibylline sayings! There we gain a glimpse of what was going on below the surface in the soul-life of Europe. Truly, like a stream which has disappeared into mountain cavities, so that it is no longer to be seen up above and one may form the strangest conjectures about it, so the Christ Impulse works on below the surface—works, at first, as occult, i.e. hidden, reality.

My dear friends, allow me at this point to confess to you that when in my occult researches I tried to follow this stream, I often lost trace of it; I had to search for places where it reappeared. I could suppose that the stream of the Christ Impulse had reappeared slowly, and that even today it has not fully reappeared but can only give evidence of itself. But where and how did it come to the surface? That is the question. Where did it lay hold of souls sufficiently to make an impression on their consciousness?

If you follow up the various expositions in my books and lecture-courses, and if you feel about it as I do, you will find, especially in the older ones, that what I have said in connection with the name of the Holy Grail is one of the least satisfying parts. That is how I feel and I hope that others have felt it too. It is not that I have said anything that could not be upheld, but simply that when I spoke of this, I felt unsatisfied. I had to give out what could be told with confidence, but often, when I tried to trace the further course of this stream—when I tried to unravel the further occult development of Christianity in the West—then before my soul rose the admonition: “You must first read the name of Parsifal in its right place.”

I had to experience the fact that occult researches are guided in a remarkable way. So that we may not be enticed into speculation, or into realms where we can very easily be borne away from occult truth on the wings of fantasy, we have to be guided slowly and by stages, if at last our research is to bring to light the truth which can of itself impart a kind of conviction of its rightness. So I often had to be content with waiting for an answer to the injunction: “Search out where the name of Parsifal stands!” I had quite understood something you all know from the Parsifal saga—after Parsifal returns, in a certain sense cured of his errors, and again finds the way to the Holy Grail, he is told that his name will appear shining upon the Holy Vessel. But where is the Holy Vessel—where is it to be found? That was the question.

In occult researches of this kind one is often held back, delayed, so that one may not do too much in a day or a year and be driven on to speculate about the truth. Landmarks appear. For me they appeared in the course of really a good many years, during which I sought an answer to the question—Where will you find the name of Parsifal written on the Holy Grail?

I knew that many meanings can be attached to the Holy Vessel in which the Host, the holy bread or wafer, is placed. And on the Holy Vessel itself “Parsifal” was to shine. I was aware also of the deep significance of a passage such as that in St. Mark's Gospel, Chapter 4, verses 11 and 12, 33 and 34, where we are told that the Lord often spoke in parables and only gradually clarified their meaning. In occult investigation, too, one is, led gradually, step by step, and very often only in connection with karmic guidance, and on encountering something that seems to have to do with a certain matter, one very often does not know what will be made of it in one's own soul under the influence of forces coming from the spiritual world. Often one does not know in the least whether something drawn from the depths of the occult world will have a bearing on some problem that one has been following up for years. Thus I did not know how to proceed when I once asked the Norwegian Folk Spirit, the Northern Folk Spirit, about Parsifal and he said: “Learn to understand the saying that through my powers there flowed into the northern Parsifal saga ‘Ganganda greida’”—“circulating cordial”, or something like that!¹ I had no idea what to make of this. It was the same when I was coming out of St. Peter's in Rome under the strong impression made on me by Michelangelo's work that you find on the right-hand side as you enter—the Mother with Jesus, the Mother who looks so young, with Jesus dead already on her knees. And under the after-effect of looking at this work of art (this was a leading of the kind I mean), there came to me, not as a vision but as a true Imagination from the spiritual world, a picture which is inscribed in the Akashic record, showing how Parsifal, after he has gone away for the first time from the Castle of the Grail, where he had failed to ask about the mysteries which prevail there, meets in the forest a young woman who is holding her bridegroom in her lap and weeping over him. But I knew that whether it is the mother or the bride whose bridegroom is dead (Christ is often called the Bridegroom), the picture had a meaning, and that the connection thus established—without my having done anything about it—had a meaning also.

I could tell you of many indications of this kind that came to me during my search for an answer to the question: Where can I find the name of Parsifal inscribed on the Holy Grail? For it had to be there, as the saga itself tells us; and now we need to recall the most important features of the saga.

We know that Parsifal's mother, Herzeleide, bore him in great suffering and with dream-like visions of a quite peculiar character; we know that she wished to shield him from knightly exercises and the code of knightly virtue; that she arranged for the management of her property and withdrew into solitude. She wanted to bring up her child so that he would remain a stranger to the impulses that were certainly present in him; for he was not to be exposed to the dangers that had surrounded his father. But we know also that from an early age the child began to notice everything glorious in Nature; from his mother's teaching he really learnt nothing except that there was a ruling God, and he conceived a wish to serve this God. But he knew nothing of what this God was, and when one day he met some knights he took them for God and knelt before them. When he confessed to his mother that he had seen the knights and wanted to be a knight himself, she put on him a fool's garments and sent him forth. He met with many adventures, and later on—people may call this sentimental but it is of the deepest significance—the mother died of a broken heart because of her son's disappearance: he had not turned back to give her any farewell greeting but had gone forth to experience knightly adventures.

We know that after many wanderings, during which he learnt much about knightly ways and knightly honour, and distinguished himself, he came to the Castle of the Grail. On other occasions I have mentioned that the best literary account of Parsifal's arrival at the Castle is to be found in Chrestien de Troyes. There we are shown how, after often mistaking the way, Parsifal comes to a lonely place and finds two men: one is steering a little boat and the other is fishing from it. They direct him to the Fisher-King, and presently he encounters the Fisher-King in the Grail Castle. The Fisher-King is old and feeble and has to rest on a couch.

While conversing with Parsifal, the Fisher-King hands him a sword, a gift from his niece. Then there appears first in the room a page carrying a spear; the spear is bleeding and the blood runs down over the page's hand; and then a maiden with the Holy Grail, which is a kind of dish. But such glory streams forth from it that all the lights in the hall are outshone by the light of the Holy Grail, just as the stars are overpowered by the light of sun and moon. And then we learn how in the Holy Grail there is something with which the Fisher-King's aged father is nourished in a separate room. He has no need of the sumptuously appointed meal of which the Fisher-King and Parsifal partake. These two nourish themselves with earthly food. But each time a new course—as we should say nowadays—is served, the Holy Grail withdraws into the room of the Fisher-King's aged father, whose only nourishment comes from that which is within the Holy Grail.

Parsifal, to whom it had been intimated on his way from Gurnemanz that he ought not to ask too many questions, does not inquire why the lance bleeds or what the vessel of the Grail signifies—naturally he did not know their names. He then goes to bed for the night, in the same room (according to Chrestien de Troyes) where all this has happened. He was intending to ask questions in the morning, but when morning came he found the whole Castle empty—nobody was there. He called out for someone—nobody was there. He got dressed, and downstairs he found his horse ready. He thought the whole company had ridden out to hunt and wanted to ride after them in order to ask about the miracle of the Grail. But when he was crossing the drawbridge it rose up so quickly that his horse had to make a leap in order not to be thrown into the Castle moat. And he found no trace of the company he had encountered in the Castle on the previous day.

Then Chrestien de Troyes tells us how Parsifal rides on and in a lonely part of the wood comes upon a woman with her husband on her knees, and weeping for him. It is she, according to Chrestien de Troyes, who first indicates to him how he should have asked questions, so as to experience the effect of his questions on the great Mysteries that had been shown to him. We then hear that he went on, often wandering from the right road, until exactly on a Good Friday he came to a hermit, named Trevericent. The hermit tells him how he is being cursed because he has wasted the opportunity of bringing about something like a redemption for the Fisher-King by asking questions about the miracles in the castle. And then he is given many and various teachings.

Now when I tried to accompany Parsifal to the hermit, a saying was disclosed to me—a saying which in the words I have to use for it, in accordance with spiritual-scientific investigation, is nowhere recorded—but I am able to give you the full truth of it. It was spoken—and it made a deep impression on me—by the old hermit to Parsifal, after he had made him acquainted, as far as he could, with the Mystery of Golgotha, of which Parsifal knew little, although he had arrived there on a Good Friday. The old hermit then uttered this saying (I shall use words that are current among us today and are perfectly faithful to the sense of the utterance): “Think of what happened on the occasion of the Mystery of Golgotha! Raise your eyes to the Christ hanging on the Cross, at the moment when He said, ‘From this hour on, there is your mother’; and John left her not. But you”—said the old hermit to Parsifal—“you have left your mother, Herzeleide. It was on your account that she passed from this world.”

The complete connection was not understood by Parsifal, but the words were spoken with the spiritual intention that they should work in his soul as a picture, so that from this picture of John, who did not forsake his mother, he might discern the karmic debt he had incurred by his having deserted his own mother. This was to produce an after—effect in his soul.

We hear then that Parsifal stayed a short while longer with the hermit and then set out again to find the Holy Grail. And it so happens that he finds the Grail shortly or directly before the death of the old Amfortas, the Fisher-King. Then it is that the Knights of the Holy Grail, the Knights of that holy Order, come to him with the words: “Thy name shines in the Grail! Thou art the future Ruler, the King of the Grail, for thy name shines out from the holy Vessel!”

Parsifal becomes the Grail King. And so the name, Parsifal, stands on the holy, gold-gleaming Vessel, in which is the Host. It stands there.

And now, as my concern was to find the Vessel, I was at first misled by a certain circumstance. In occult research—I say this in all humility, with no wish to make an arrogant claim—it has always seemed to me necessary, when a serious problem is involved, to take account not only of what is given directly from occult sources, but also of what external research has brought to light. And in following up a problem it seems to me specially good to make a really conscientious study of what external scholarship has to say, so that one keeps one's feet on the earth and does not get lost in cloud-cuckoo-land. But in the present instance it was exoteric scholarship (this was some time ago) that led me astray. For I gathered from it that when Wolfram von Eschenbach began to write his Parsifal poem, he had—according to his own statement—made use of Chrestien de Troyes and of a certain Kyot. External research has never been able to trace this Kyot and regards him as having been invented by Wolfram von Eschenbach, as though Wolfram von Eschenbach had wanted to attribute to a further source his own extensive additions to Chrestien de Troyes. Exoteric learning is prepared to admit, at most, that Kyot was a copyist of the works of Chrestien de Troyes, and that Wolfram von Eschenbach had put the whole thing together in a rather fanciful way.

So you see in what direction external research goes. It is bound to draw one away, more or less, from the path that leads to Kyot. At the same time, when I had been to a certain extent led astray by external research, something else was borne in upon me (this was another of the karmic readings). I have often spoken of it—in my book Occult Science and in lecture-courses—and should now like to put it as follows.

The first three post-Atlantean epochs, which occur before the Mystery of Golgotha, reappear in a certain sense after the fourth epoch, so that the third epoch reappears in our epoch, the fifth; the second epoch will recur in the sixth, and the first epoch, the epoch of the Holy Rishis, will recur in the seventh, as I have often described. It became clearer and clearer to me—as the outcome of many years of research—that in our epoch there is really something like a resurrection of the Astrology of the third epoch, but permeated now with the Christ Impulse. Today we must search among the stars in a way different from the old ways, but the stellar script must once more become something that speaks to us. And now observe—these thoughts about a revival of the stellar script linked themselves in a remarkable way to the secret of Parsifal, so that I could no longer avoid the belief that the two were connected with each other. And then a picture rose before my soul: a picture shown to me while I was trying to accompany Parsifal in the spirit on his way back to the Grail Castle after his meeting with the hermit Trevericent. This meeting with the hermit is recounted by Chrestien de Troyes in a particularly beautiful and touching way. I should like to read you a little of this, telling how Parsifal comes to the hermit:

Er gibt dem Ross den Lauf
Und seufst aus tiefstem Herzen auf.
Weil er vor Gott sich schuldig fühlt
Und Reue in der Brust ihm wühlt.
Mit Weinen kommt er durch den Wald,
Doch vor der Klause macht er halt,
Steigt ab von seinem Pferde,
Legt seine Wehr zur Erde—
Und fand in einem Kirchlein klein
Den frommen Mann. In seiner Pein
Er vor ihm auf die Knie sinkt,
Das Nass, das ihm vom Auge blinkt,
Rollt endlos nieder auf sein Kinn,
Als er in kindlich schlichtem Sinn
Die Hände vor ihm faltet.
“Der Ihr des Trostes waltet,
Mein reuiges Geständnis hört:
Fünf Jahre war ich wahnbetört,
Dass ohne Glauben ich gelebt
Und nach dem Bösen nur gestrebt.”
“Sag mir, warum du das getan
Und bitte Gott, dass er dich nah'n
Dereinst noch lässt der Sel'gen Schar.”
“Beim Fischerkönig einst ich war;
Ich sah den Speer, auf dessen Stahl
Es blutig tropft. Ich sah den Gral
Und unterliess die Frage.
Was dieses Blut besage,
Und was der Gral bedeute.
Seit diesem Tag bis heute
War ich in schwere Seelennot.
Weit besser ware mir der Tod!
Und da vergass ich unsern Herrn
Und blieb von seiner Gnade fern.”
“So sage mir, wie man dich nennt.”
“Als Perceval man mich erkennt.”
Da seufzt der Greis aus tiefster Brust,
Der Name ist ihm wohl bewusst.
Er spricht: “Dem Leid hat dich vermählt,
Was ohne Wissen du gefehlt.”

[Quoted from Eduard Wechssler's
Die Sage vom Heiligen Gral
(Halle, 1898).]

He roused the steed to start
And sighed from out his deepest heart,
For guilt to God doth rack his breast,
Remorseful feelings give no rest.
With weeping comes he through the wood
Yet halts where hermitage has stood.
Makes ready to dismount,
Lays weapons on the ground—
And finds within a chapel cell
The pious man. ’Fore him he fell
Upon his knees in woeful plight,
The tear that blinked before his sight
Now rolls at last down to his chin
As he with simple childlike mien
Doth fold his hands together
That he may solace gather.
“Hear ye my sad confession:
Five years I bore delusion
While without faith my life I led
And only strove towards the bad.”
“Say me wherefore thou this hast done
And pray to God that He ere long
Will draw thee near the holy Bond.”
“I once by Fisher-King did stand.
I saw the spear upon whose steel
Hung drops of blood. I saw the Grail
Yet did forbear to put the word
What signified this blood,
This Grail, what signified—
’Twere better had I died!”
Until this day indeed
My soul's in direst need.
Our Lord I thought of never more
And from His Grace I stayed afar.”
“Now tell me what thy name may be.”
“As Parsifal men speak of me.”
Then sighs the aged man with groan,
The name to him is full well-known.
“What thou unwittingly hast left undone
Has brought this sorrow as thy doom.”

[Translation by M. Cotterell.]

Then come the conversations between Parsifal and the hermit of which I have spoken already. And when I sought to accompany Parsifal in spirit during his return to the Grail, it was often as though there shone forth in the soul how he traveled by day and by night, how he devoted himself to nature by day and to the stars by night, as if the stellar script had spoken to his unconscious self and as if this was a prophecy of that which the holy company of Knights who came from the Grail to meet him had said: “Thy name shines forth in radiance from the Grail.” But Parsifal, quite clearly, did not know what to make of the message of the stars, for it remained in his unconscious being, and therefore one cannot so very well interpret it, however much one may try to immerse oneself in it through spiritual research.

Then I tried once more to get back to Kyot, and behold—a particular thing said about him by Wolfram von Eschenbach made a deep impression on me and I felt I had to relate it to the ‘ganganda greida’. The connection seemed inevitable. I had to relate it also to the image of the woman holding her dead bridegroom on her lap. And then, when I was not in the least looking for it, I came upon a saying by Kyot: “er jach, ez hiez ein dinc der gral”—“he said, a thing was called the Grail.” Now exoteric research itself tells us how Kyot came to these words—“er jach, ez hiez ein dinc der gral.” He acquired a book by Flegetanis in Spain—an astrological book. No doubt about it, one may say: Kyot is the man who stimulated by Flegetanis—whom he calls Flegetanis and in whom lives a certain knowledge of the stellar script—Kyot is the man who, stimulated by this revived astrology, sees the thing called the Grail. Then I knew that Kyot is not to be given up; I knew that he discloses an important clue if one is searching in the sense of Spiritual Science: he at least has seen the Grail.

Where, then, is the Grail, which today must be found in such a way that the name of Parsifal stands upon it? Where can it be found? Now in the course of my researches it had been shown to me that the name—that is the first thing—must be sought for in the stellar script. And then, on a day which I must regard as specially significant for me, I was shown where the gold-gleaming vessel in its reality is to be found, so that through it—through its symbolical expression in the stellar script—we are led to the secret of the Grail. And then I saw in the stellar script something that anyone can see—only he will not immediately discern the secret. For one day, while I was following with inner sight the gold-gleaming sickle of the moon, as it appeared in the heavens, with the dark moon like a great disc dimly visible within it ... so that with physical sight one saw the gold-gleaming moon—ganganda greida, the journeying viaticum—and within it the large Host, the dark disc. This is not to be seen if one merely glances superficially at the moon, but it is evident if one looks closely—and there, in wonderful letters of the occult script, was the name Parsifal!

That, to begin with, was the stellar script. For in fact, if this reading of the stellar script is seen in the right light, it yields for our hearts and minds something—though perhaps not all—of the Parsifal secret, the secret of the Holy Grail. What I have still to say, briefly, on this subject I will give you tomorrow.

• 1. Another possible rendering is “journeying viaticum.” (See note at the end of the lectures.)

From these reflections on the segment of human life that is formed by, or associated with, a vocation, you will have seen that it is difficult to explain these things because they bring so much into consideration. We must bear in mind that everything that is brought into a life through the laws of destiny, of karma, depends on many factors, and the very multiplicity of life rests upon just this truth.

A special comment is in order here if, in the word vocation, we subsume individual human elements from a life's destiny. In other words, what is called the vocation of an individual must not be confused with what we designate, in the broadest sense, as his official position. It is obvious that all sorts of confusion would result if we directed our attention to what someone represents in his or her official position and subject this to the point of view of vocational life represented here. The very fact that people frequently have to follow their vocation within an official position causes the most complex external factors to have a bearing on their lives, and other karmic threads may, after a fashion, also weave into their vocational karmas.

To be sure, we are living today in a period that is being slowly transformed, but the things we must mention here relative to vocational karma are by no means the sole determinants in placing a person in this or that position in life. We know that today vocational karma is crossed in many ways by the karma of entire ranks and classes of human beings. The ambition, vanity, and prejudice of an individual, as well as the people around him, have a bearing on the many factors that influence the way he or she occupies a position in life within a group. All of them work into vocational karma from without and render it possible for ahrimanic influences to mingle continually in human activity. Someone in a certain position in life, who, through all sorts of means that are well-known and need not be mentioned, has become, let us say, a minister or councilor of state, does not necessarily have the mission (vocation) to occupy this post. Such a person may hold a high position, yet his or her mission may be that of a clerk, but we need not suppose that for this reason the position cannot be occupied. It is the peculiarity of our time that the materialistic interpretation of the basic assumptions, justifiable as they may be in themselves, has brought forward such a theory of life as that of the “selection of the fittest.” Even Oskar Hertwig, the student of Haeckel⁷⁰ has criticized such an interpretation by pointing out that this age of ours which has produced such a doctrine clearly selects the least fit for the most important positions, and this to an extent that is unparalleled when compared to the total scope of life in other ages. We are not simply deprecating our own times in a pessimistic way and referring to the good old times that are past, but we stand here in the presence of an actual fact. The very people who take pride now in the theory of the selection of the fittest are the ones who in reality yield to the tendency of choosing the least qualified people for the seemingly most important places in life.

This is a bitter truth today. Yet, it would be recognized if the present age were not entirely under the influence of the most far-reaching faith in authority, stupor of opportunism, and dominated by what is called public opinion, which a philosopher of the nineteenth century termed “private foolishness.” To repeat, people would see what is of real importance here if it were not for the immense influence of present public opinion that flows from such muddy sources. We must, therefore, understand that our age has to be educated to a stronger grasp of life through learning to see that we are immersed in one-sidedness, in the selection of the worst. This must come to pass in spite of so-called public opinion and its hero worship of the least qualified people.

Official positions are often filled by Ahriman-Mephistopheles and, as the Faust unfolds, you can see how Mephistopheles attends to his official responsibilities. Faust was able to free himself from Mephistopheles only at the end of his life. He comes now to the King's palace and produces paper money—an invention of extraordinary importance for the last century. But it is Mephistopheles who really invents it. Faust is then guided into the ancient world by Homunculus, who had come into existence through the help of Mephistopheles. He even becomes a commander-in-chief and conducts wars, but in the presentation used by Goethe in this act, we can see that, in reality, Mephistopheles carries on these wars. In the end we see how Faust gradually frees himself from Mephistopheles. Even though Faust, after he has abandoned the professorship he previously held, simply roams about the world without having definite official position; we must say that Mephistopheles stands beside him in the way in which the Mephistophelian force plays into the life of humanity. This is one thing we must pay attention to.

A second fact is equally important. It is extremely difficult to properly investigate what really works in man's nature in the course of karmic evolution. Indeed, we may say that in this area, too, scientific development has arrived at a point where it must be replaced by spiritual scientific observation. It is precisely in dealing with the life of the soul that scientists make the most terrible blunders. Indeed, we observe that there is a perverted scientific school of thought that ventures to confront soul life by trying to observe it in a scientific way, admitting that it is not to be found in consciousness but that much of it rises up into consciousness from the unconscious or subconscious that lies below the threshold. In previous discussions we have presented concrete examples of soul life that really lie in the subconscious and rise up into consciousness like the clouds of smoke that are produced when bits of paper are burned in the region of a solfatara.⁷¹ To be sure, a great deal lies below in the depths of consciousness.

We may say, then, that for a proper understanding of things some psychologists already presume it to be necessary to posit the presence or absence of an obscure, unconscious capacity in the soul. Since, however, they are not yet willing to adjust to a more comprehensive spiritual scientific conception of the world, they can produce only a caricature. A person holding the point of view of scientific psychology looks upon a human life as it has developed. To be sure, it is no longer supposed that what the soul feels and wills, what causes it happiness or unhappiness, joy or pain, depends only on what it has retained in consciousness. The effort is made now to quiz the soul to draw out of it what it has passed through in joy, sorrow, disillusionment in life and other things that have been forgotten. What has been forgotten, however, has not disappeared, so it is said, but has burrowed into the subconscious.

Especially the unsatisfied and subsequently suppressed appetites of an earlier time are said to agitate in the subconscious. Let us take the specific case of a woman in her thirtieth year. When she was sixteen, she fell in love, developing a genuinely erotic passion, which, so this scientific school says, would have led her life astray if she had surrendered to it and if it had been fulfilled. Under the influence of her education and the advice of her elders, however, she suppressed it—swallowed it, to use a trivial expression—down into her soul. She lives on and fourteen years pass. She is perhaps now married in keeping with her position in life. So far as her daily thinking and feeling are concerned, the matter is long forgotten; but what is forgotten has not disappeared. The content of the soul is not exhausted in what it knows, this school of thought would claim, and in the depths of her soul this incident is still present. But in spite of being outwardly happy, this lady suffers from an indefinable tendency toward pessimism, a partial weariness of life, from nervousness or neurasthenia, or something of the kind, and these symptoms are then diagnosed as an expression of her suppressed anxiety about the incident earlier in her life. The effort is then made to introduce this kind of psychology into the science of healing, to cure such souls through questioning. The patients are told that such experiences still reside in the deepest regions of the psyche, apparently forgotten by the upper level of consciousness, and that they must be drawn to the surface. If, under the influence of a skillful interrogator who, according to the views in vogue, must be a psychologist, they are thus brought to the surface, and if the person comes to understand the matter, then things will be better. Actual “cures” are frequently achieved by these means, although in most cases patients only seem to be cured. To what extent they are apparent cures, however, we can explain on some other occasion. This, then, is one example of how scientists try to penetrate the depths of the soul's life.

Another example has to do with a man thirty-five or forty, who is suffering from a certain weariness of life, from a certain vacillation in life. Neither he nor those about him know why, least of all he himself. Someone who deals with such a “science of the soul,” as we have explained, then burrows into the forgotten subterranean soul life of this man and brings to light the fact that the plan he had for his life when he was about sixteen was wrecked. He then had to turn to a different plan, one that was unrelated to the other. Certainly he seems to have been content in what he felt, thought, and willed from one day to another, but this is not the entire life of the soul; the shattered plan of life still continued to be a living force in the deepest crevices of the soul.

In this case, too, the “experts” believe the man can be cured when, through questioning, this shattered plan of life is discovered and the person can come to an understanding of it through his questioner. It is also supposed that there is much in the depth of the soul that the consciousness knows nothing of. In short, the conclusion has been reached that consciousness represents only a small part of what comprises the life of the soul. But what people are now trying to find on the bottom of the soul's life is really some sort of soulless sediment. A theologian recently called it somewhat coarsely—“the bestial slime at the bottom of the soul.” That is to say, disillusionments, suppressed appetites, ruined life plans, “the bestial slime at the bottom of the soul,” all come from the lower depths of the soul life. This refers to everything that is rooted in the life of the flesh, the blood, the animalistic; it does not come from the soul's depths in a conscious way because consciousness would, and actually does, resist all this.

There is certainly some truth in this theory of the “bestial slime at the bottom of the soul.” How often in life do we hear our consciousness say: “I really want only one thing; I would like to experience this or that, which is why I turn to this or that person.” But the slime at the bottom begins to work, and it may be only bestial appetites that are at play, disguised by what the consciousness says. It is further maintained by this “scientific” school that these unconscious regions also harbor everything that is derived from the connection of the individual with race, nation and all sorts of other historical residues that play their roles unconsciously in the soul, while the consciousness itself is behaving quite differently. In view of all that is brewing in the world today, one couldn't even say that these things cannot be confirmed by examples from all over the world. How could one deny that many people today speak of lofty ideals regarding the rights and freedom of a people while all that is really active in their souls is what burrows in the bottom slime, deriving from the connections psychoanalysis seeks to analyze.

Then the theological psychoanalysts—and I do not know how they and the scientific psychoanalysts reason with each other—also include the demonic as part of the subconscious life of the soul—in other words, that which emerges from still greater depths, the utterly irrational, as it is said. The theological psychoanalysts take great satisfaction especially in the thought that unknown demons work in the subconscious soul in order, for example, to change people into gnostics or theosophists. They think that when the soul has been psychoanalyzed, when we have penetrated its deepest regions where the “primeval slime” lies, a demonic teaching such as that of gnosis can be discovered there, or a demonic teaching such as that of psychoanalysis—excuse me, not psychoanalysis, which according to the view of these men and women is not to be found there, but theosophy and other things also mentioned in this connection. Well, I really did not want to enter into a criticism of psychoanalysis, but my purpose in explaining all this is to indicate that something in these psychonanalytical endeavors forces contemporary research into contact with what lies, works and weaves below the conscious part of the soul. Nonetheless, the most perverted findings must result from these endeavors because of the preconceptions of scientists and their unwillingness to take account of spiritual scientific investigations in this field. What they are able to discover in the life of the soul can only be analyzed in the right way with the knowledge that human life proceeds through repeated lives on earth. Yet the psychoanalysts attempt to explain what exists at the bottom of the soul on the basis of a single life on earth, and it is not surprising that the picture they paint is so highly distorted.

One who finds, for example, ruined life plans at the bottom of the soul must first investigate the significance of such a ruin in the total human life that passes through repeated lives on earth. He or she would then perhaps discover that certain aspects of such a total human life are also active in the subconscious and, as a matter of destiny, have actually hindered that particular life plan from coming to fruition. Such an individual would then observe that this ruined life plan in the depths of the soul is destined, not simply to cause illness in this incarnation, but also to be carried through the portal of death as a force in the life between death and a new birth, playing its true role only in the next life on earth. It may, indeed, be a necessity that such a ruined life plan should at first be preserved in the depths of the soul where it may be strengthened and thereby enabled to gain its true form between death and a new birth so that it may take on the shape predestined for it in the next earthly life; this it could not have done in this present earthly life because of other characteristics in the soul's life.

So the “bestial slime at the bottom of the soul”—as I have said, the expression is disagreeable—is there, to be sure; but bear in mind what I have said regarding the relationship between the head and the rest of man's organism. His body is connected with his earthly life—indeed, with his present incarnation in many respects—whereas his head is the result of earlier stages of the evolution of the earth and is connected especially with his preceding incarnations. When you take this into consideration, you will understand that from the rest of the organism, in accord with the role that it plays in the entire karmic connection, much works upward that must possess a different stage of maturity from what comes from the head and nervous system. But one who merely analyzes the slime at the bottom in the psychoanalytic way is utterly misled. He is like a person who wishes to know what kind of grain will grow in a particular soil before grain has been grown there. In analyzing the soil he finds a certain manure with which it has been fertilized. So he says, “Now I know the manure from which the next crop of grain will grow.” The grain does not by any means grow from the manure, in spite of the fact that it must be there! The essential thing is what is planted in this mud at the bottom. This is often predestined to exert its influence through the portal of death into the next development on earth. What is needed is not to investigate the bestial bottom slime, but what is planted in this muddy substance as the seed of the soul.

So-called psychoanalysis makes possible investigations in the very region where present preconceptions are working in a disastrous fashion; we are dealing here with a field from which present thinking tends strongly to take its directions, since it is not content with what conscious experiences give to the soul. The general area in which research ought to be done is no longer in dispute, but because people who cannot understand spiritual science have no true guidelines for their investigations, they burrow aimlessly in the fields assigned them through their official connections or their own agitation. They do this in the most unskillful manner, placing everything in a false position because they do not know better. Their research would yield the proper results only if they were able to follow the true karmic threads, as I have indicated at least suggestively through reference to one thing and another. This psychoanalysis is terribly unsound, especially when it stirs up the region of the elemental. Yet it is of great importance to investigate fine and intimate formations of the threads reaching into the future destiny of a human being. What takes place in a person's conscious life from waking until sleeping reveals little of those forces that continue to work as a karmic stream through various incarnations. What we experience consciously during our waking life belongs largely to the present incarnation. It is well that it is so because we should be industrious in our present incarnation. But much that will be carried through the portal of death as a germ formed from the experiences of our present incarnation—the incidents through which we have passed, the proficiencies achieved—all this plays a significant role in our life from the moment of falling asleep to that of waking, and this often influences our dreams. We must learn, however, to judge the formation of dreams in the right way. When people say that they are reminiscences, this is often true, but they do not act in the stream of our karma in a linear fashion. In fact, they often act in such a way that their significance is the exact opposite of what they are represented to be. I will give you an example from literature in order to bring out clearly what I wish to say.

The aestheticist Theodor Vischer⁷² included in his novel Auch Einer a clever little story that I will introduce here because I am speaking of vocational life in a more comprehensive way, that is, including everything that is connected with one's occupation. So I will give an illustration of this. In Vischer's novel, there is a conversation between a father and his son. They are walking together and, after the father has questioned his son about all sorts of things, the boy says, “Just think, the teacher told us that we should always ask what a person's occupation is because to have a proper occupation is important. In this way it is possible to learn whether or not the person is respectable and whether he has a good soul life.” “I see,” says the father. “Yes, indeed, and after the teacher told us this I had a dream in which I was walking by the lake over there and in my dream I asked the lake what sort of occupation it had, and the lake answered, ‘I have the occupation of being wet.’ ” “Is that so?” says the father.

This is a most clever anecdote and one that reveals that the person who thought it out had much knowledge of life. The father said, “Is that so?” because he naturally did not wish to confuse his son and tell him what a stupid thing the teacher had said. But that father no doubt had his thoughts on the subject. He really should have enlightened his son in a more intelligent way than the teacher had done, and should have said to him, “We should not form our judgments so superficially. It might well be that a person would be wrong as to what a respectable occupation is and might falsely consider a man to be disreputable; he might also be disadvantaged in some way.” In short, the father would have had to correct his son, but in this particular case it was not necessary. The boy was still young, and his dream could still work in a favorable manner on him. This dream worked in his subconscious, but in such a way as to erase the stupidity of the teacher from his soul. Thus, the dream took on a form in the boy's subconscious, which is cleverer than the superficial consciousness, in such a way that a breath of ridicule was spread over the stupidity of the teacher. The lake said its occupation, its vocation, was to be wet. This is something that will work in a wholesome way in expelling the harmful influences of such teaching. Here the dream is a reminiscence that comes the very next night, but it also serves as a corrective in life. In fact, the astral body often works in this way, and we might find, together with the residue remaining in the soul from living experiences, particularly from wrongful instruction, that a corrective is also present in the subconscious forces of the soul. This often produces its influence even in the same incarnation in young people. Above all, however, its influence is carried through the portal of death and continues further. This constitutes a means of self-correction in man, and we must pay attention to this fact.

In mentioning these things I simply wanted to indicate how much there is in a human soul and how this forces its way from one incarnation into the next. We have to do with a whole complex of forces that project from one incarnation into another. Now we must consider what relationship exists between this complex of forces and the human being insofar as his life flows along between birth and death. Here he or she is really an instrument with four strings—physical, etheric, astral bodies, and ego—on which this bow of karmic forces plays its tune. The individual life comes into being according to the measure in which one or the other—the etheric body, the astral body, or the etheric together with the ego—is swept by the bow of karma, if you allow this comparison with a violin. The tones of these four strings of life may interplay in many ways, making it difficult to speak of and decipher, not in mere empty abstractions but in lithic detail, the individual life-melodies of human beings. Thus, it is possible to decipher them only when one is able to see how the bow of karma plays upon the four strings of a human being. However, general points of view come into consideration here, and to these we must turn our attention.

If we observe a human being in those years when, as explained in my brochure Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy, the physical body and especially the etheric body are primarily coming into development, if we observe the development of children from approximately the seventh to the fourteenth years, we shall note that just at this time certain characteristics appear in them that are especially typical of this period. Certain things consolidate themselves in a way, although many things overlap one another so that much that appears during the first seven years can be more thoroughly and profoundly observed only between the seventh and the fourteenth. It will be found that something appears in a more definite way in the developing child that we may call, in a sense, the inner peculiarities that are consolidated through the character and demeanor of the corporeality. This is so, however, only insofar as they come to expression in the posture and gestures of the physical being, and in the entire bearing of his life. I refer to what is there taking solid form; not all, to be sure, but a great part of what causes a human being to be stocky and short, or to have a taller body that causes him or her to walk in a particular way such as with a firm step or a dancing gait, to mention radical contrasts. As I have said, not all, but a great part of what thus appears in the developing child is derived from karma and is the effect of the vocation of his preceding incarnation. Mistakes are often made when no attention is paid to what I have just said; that is, when, to appear clever, an effort is made to determine what a child's vocation will be from his manner and bearing. He would thus, however, mistakenly be given a vocation similar to that of his previous incarnation, and this would be detrimental to the child.

When this period of a child's life ends, or even before that time because, as I have said, things overlap one another, then the astral body manifests itself in a special way by working back on what had been developed previously. If one realizes this and has derived it from spiritual science, it can then be observed also on the physical plane. In accordance with other karmic forces, the astral body works back in such a way that it transforms what had resulted from the purely vocational karma during the seventh to the fourteenth years. In other words, two antagonistic forces struggle with each other in the child. One group of forces gives him form; these come more from the etheric body. The other group, coming more from the astral body, works against these and in part paralyzes them, so that he is compelled to transform what has been forced upon him by the vocational karma of his previous incarnation. In other words, we may say that the etheric body works in a formative way; that is, what is manifested as the bearing of the physical body, as one's carriage, is derived from the etheric body. The astral body works in a transforming way. Through the interplay of these two forces, which are really in bitter conflict with each other, much comes to expression that has to do with the working of vocational karma.

This now works together with other karmic currents, however, since we must also consider the physical body. With it, what comes primarily into consideration during the first period of life is how the human being has placed himself in the world by means of his karma. Even the kind of physical body we have depends upon this since, by reason of our karma, we place ourselves in a certain family in a specific nation. Thus, we receive a definitely formed body, but this is not all. Just think how much depends on the course of our life and on the situation into which we have entered by placing ourselves in a certain family. By that fact alone the basis is given for much in our life. As a matter of fact, during the first seven years in which the physical body is especially developing, forces are active in it—or we had better say around it—that are derived not from our vocation and all that was related to it in our previous incarnation, but from the way in which we have lived with others in previous incarnations. By this I mean how we stood in this or that relationship with this or that person during a preceding incarnation, not in any particular part of our life—this belongs to another field—but throughout our entire lifetime. Our souls work on this because they are profoundly affected by the relationships we had with human beings, and we bear with us what evolves from this process through the portal of death. Because of these forces, we bring it about that we place ourselves again in a certain particular family and situation in life. So we may say that what actually places our physical body here, in a sense, and works through it, also determines our situation in life. This continues to work further, of course, through the following lives, and meets its counterbalancing force through the ego. The ego works in a dissolving way upon life situations, but it also works in conflict with what is already determined in them. We may, therefore, say: Physical body, creative of the life situation; ego, transformative of the life situation. Through the united action of these two in this struggle, another current of karma takes hold of life since two forces are omnipresent in an individual: those that tend to keep him in a particular situation, and those that tend to disengage him from it.

That is to say, 1 and 4 work in a primary way upon one another, as do 2 and 3; but all four also work in the most manifold ways upon each other. The way we enter into relationships with new human beings during our life according to our karma depends upon the connection of 1 and 4 with each other. But this is to be traced back, in turn, to our relationships in earlier lives. The way we find our relationships in our daily work, our vocation, is connected with 2 and 3 and their reciprocal action upon each other.

I ask that you reflect upon all this for the present. We shall continue this study.

• 70. Oskar Hertwig (1849–1922) was an anatomist who served as the director of the Anatomical-Biological Institute in Berlin from 1888 through 1921. His book Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufallstheorie [The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance] appeared in 1916.
• 71. Solfatara is the vulcanic sulfurgas well near Pozzuoli.
• 72. Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–87) spelled his last name with a V, not an F, and Steiner stresses that fact in his lecture.

All problems of a conception of the Cosmos—whether that of Spiritual Science or any other—contain this basic query: What is the evolutionary path of Man within the Cosmos?

One, who has not yet had his thoughts educated through Spiritual Science, may also ask: What is the ultimate aim of human evolution! He would like to know what will happen to man when arrived at the end of all evolution! We have often indicated how a question such as this can only come from uneducated thought, and that, for the mind cultured through Spiritual Science, the aim is to find the way, to perceive rightly any particular point in evolution; for when we know the path evolution has taken, we certainly take a good step forward.

So, let us once again consider—from a certain view-point,—the above query—the query of the direction of the evolutionary way.

You all know that human evolution has arrived at the earth-stage only after passing through various previous stages, and that this earth-state was preceded by the Moon-stage. And we must remind ourselves of the fact that, in a certain sense, the former Moon-stage is preserved in a later stage, is active therein; we can put it this way: that we are earth men, but that we in a certain sense, carry the Moon man in us. We have developed from the Moon-state, yet the Moon-man lives in us,—he is, so to speak, part of us. We could show this in diagrammatic form thus:

or, in other words, we can say: we carry with us the Earth man, but the Earth man surrounds the Moon man.

We can now easily proceed further, namely that the Moon man also encloses the Sun man, and the Sin man in turn encloses the Saturn man; so we carry within us, in addition to the Moon man, the Sun man and Saturn man also.

We must, of course, not imagine that this diagram in any sense reproduces the truth. In reality, of course, the Moon man does not sit inside as if he were surrounded by a shell; but if we wish to imagine the reality related to this ‘dual’ man, the matter stands thus, for example: That, which in a specific sense, belongs to the earth, we would have to imagine as residing chiefly in the trunk, the lower and upper limbs and as far as the throat region. And if trying to imagine the Moon man we must visualize him as the surmounting head; the Sun man has certain—already disintegrating organs in the head, and the Saturn man has head organs now scarcely discernable.

And now, if we consider the evolution of the earth, we say: The first, second, third and fourth earth period (Atlantean) have passed. Now we live in the fifth—the post-Atlantean period. The three first earth periods were, in a sense, repetitions of the Saturn—Sun—and Moon period. Then comes a mean (or middle) period, a time of equalization, of which the first half again represents a repetition, and the second a preparation for the future. And only now, in the post-Atlantean epoch, do we live in a time which, compared with the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, is something quite new. Therefore, only since about the middle of the Atlantean period—though already prepared in the Lemurian become evolved in the human being that which we now call the earth man; previously we have to do with evolutions or developments that were repetitions of the Saturn, Sun and Moon man.

Only in the post-Atlantean age man begins his development as earth man, his true, active development. Hence, we find that the first three cultural periods of the post-Atlantean period—the Indian, Persian and Egypto-Chaldean—though revealing extensive new changes of organization—yet contain something of repetition. The real deciding point came with the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period in the progress of man, and in our fifth post-Atlantean cultural point we stand in a most important and significant time.

You will all be aware that in this our fifth post-Atlantean age mankind has gradually replaced the old clairvoyance inherited from the Moon with the real, outer, objective perception of things, which later became the scientific attitude that has led to a materialistic conception of the Universe,—and that, this materialism we endeavour to impregnate with the concepts of Spiritual Science. If we consider all we are able to think and know of the world,—all, that constitutes man's perceptions, conceptions and ideas today—we have all this as faculties, because our psychic-Spiritual is reflected on our physical body, so that in our waking life on earth we are able to perceive because the psycho-Spiritual in us evokes certain processes in the physical part, and that these processes become a kind of reflective medium, which, in turn, constitutes the content of our consciousness. As we thus possess a certain content of our earth-consciousness between awaking and falling asleep,—by these ‘contents’ we mean all perceptions, emotions, will impulses, etc.—so is the physical earth-man rightly the apparatus for everything that he has accumulated during his life on earth as content of his consciousness.

And so, during waking life on earth, we experience by means of our physical earth-man, but we also have in us the Moon man. This Moon man is incapable of serving us as a direct instrument of perception. Upon the Moon he could build up the old dreamlike perceptions; but today he is unsuitable to form the clear perceptions of waking life. And yet this Moon man resides in us, and he is not idle! How is he occupied? Well, he continues what he did on the Moon: he dreams. And because, during waking life, we do not usually perceive these dreams within our subconsciousness, we fail to take notice of them. As we go through the world with our waking consciousness, the burden of this dreamer also accompanies us. Even though you are perfectly unaware of this dreamer, other Beings know him, and they are the Beings of the Hierarchy of Angeloi—and the dreams of this dreamer are transposed by them into their own conceptions.

Thus, during the Moon age this dreamer developed the only possible consciousness that could evolve on the Moon. As earth man came, the dreamer entered into him; but his experiences in the earth man are developed into clear, conscious ideas, which, for them, are imaginations. Our dreams are transformed into imaginations. In other words—the dreamer in us becomes ideas for the Angeloi Beings, and they change these to imaginations: what man dreams, the Angelos imagines. (Diagram I.)

We may now go a step further to something that can be depicted by diagram, which this time is true to fact. The man in us has a still duller consciousness—one similar to that of the plants (Diagram II). Thus, we carry not only the dreamer in us, but also a kind of plant man, who always sleeps like the plants. His dull imaginations are transmitted by the Beings of the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi to inspirations. So: what the Sun man experiences in sleep, the Archangelos inspires.

In a still deeper sleep is our Saturn man; so deep is it that it can be likened to the sleep of the minerals. This Saturn man, in his turn, with his deep-sleep consciousness, gives the Beings of the Hierarchy of Archai the material—the means to create intuitions. Hence: The Saturn man in his deep sleep becomes intuition of the Spirit of Personality. (original Force) (Diagram III)

And now it is necessary to be quite clear of the fact that imaginations, inspirations and intuitions are no mere abstract things like our own thoughts, concepts or feelings. Imaginations are something very real, inspirations something still more real. For, inspirations do not remain pent up within a Being, but resound out into the universe as the music of the Spheres and are productive forces. Intuitions are actualities entering the universe and filling it. The state or condition of the Saturn man in his deep sleep is sent out into the worlds by the Spirits of Personality as intuitions.

And so it is to-day. But the earth will pass through another evolutionary period in the future. Then will the intuitions of the Spirits of Personality become more and more densified. In our own age they still are extremely attenuated forms, but as we progress from the 5th to the 6th and 7th earth-periods these intuitions become denser. The earth will pass away, but these intuitions are preserved within the Spirits of Personality. But when Jupiter begins to exist, these Spirits of Personality advance to the rank of Spirits of Form, and. the impulses they have learned to form during the earth-age now become actual forms; and because they are Saturn forms, they will be mineral. Thus: at the end of the earth period these intuitions become densified cosmic impulses and later, forms. (Jupiter) (Diagram III.) And when they become forms upon Jupiter, they constitute the mineral foundation of Jupiter. During the second evolutionary half period of the earth the Spirits of Personality continuously work there—penetrate—into our Saturn man; they win for themselves the impulses which they then ray forth into the world; and these again send out forms, but these forms are the Jupiter; Jupiter will be constituted of nothing but these forms. We have in us the Saturn man, but as this Saturn man is in close connection with the activity of the Spirits of Personality, he is the germ for Jupiter. Jupiter will obtain all his mineral foundation from the Saturn man we carry in us.

So now you have obtained a glimpse of the Spirits of Personality and their task during earth evolution. And you will realize that, if this is the fact, we, by means of everything we may develop in this direction, will be able to evolve a mineral Jupiter. But this mineral Jupiter will take shape under any circumstances. That is definitely provided for, and is a certainty, in the further evolution of the Cosmos. But consider, that this Jupiter possesses as yet nothing equivalent to our plants, animals and human beings; we ourselves—as mankind—would find it impossible to exist upon such a Jupiter, for the hidden Saturn man within us is transformed to this Jupiter, because this Saturn man in his deep sleep, dreams what the earth man consciously imagines.

You see, under these conditions the Sun man could bring it to nothing actual in us. The Archangelos would realize only inspirations; and were things to proceed as they have so far been described, a mineral Jupiter would arise and over and around it would flow inspirations—densified, certainly, but they would merely pass over Jupiter. In order that some equivalent to our vegetable kingdom shall come into existence, something additional is necessary,—we must evolve something else beyond the earth man. And this is nothing else then something that earthly man can never again experience with his physical body: it is what we can imbibe from spiritual Science. Hence, I propose to call this man the Spiritual-Scientific Man, despite its queer sound, who aspires to and reaches out for things that extend far beyond the earth

With all that we absorb from Spiritual Science, the Sun man in us can really do something. He can transmute his dim, sleeping, vegetable-like sensations and conceptions into inspirations, which will become more and more densified during the remainder of the earth period; and these will ensure, that not only indefinite sphere harmony shall enclose Jupiter, but that this harmony of the spheres definitely becomes growth of vegetation, as this took place also in the case of earthly plants: they are created by the sphere harmony and drawn out by light.

We therefore come to this conclusion: If the development which the earth itself has so far achieved, and which does not lead to the Spiritual-Scientific man, were alone to permeate the world in the future, there could arise only a mineral Jupiter in the cosmos. Toward this end all materialistic world conceptions are aiming. Materialists hate the very idea that Jupiter should produce a vegetable kingdom; in the depths of their souls they ask nothing better than that Jupiter be constructed of minerals only. If today we search through the entire materialistic science, laboratories, etc., we shall find that everything is working in the direction of a mineral Jupiter. And without Spiritual Science this would merely prove to be a dead slagheap, quite incapable of sustaining growth of plants.

The task of the (present) Beings of the hierarchy of Archangeloi on Jupiter—the production of the equivalent of our vegetable kingdom—is prepared by us when we raise ourselves to the stage of Spiritual Science. We may therefore say: The experiences of the sleeping Sun man, mature at the end of the earth period, so as to furnish cosmic impulses for the Jupiterian plant world through the Archangeloi.

And so we will not try and become conscious of the aim of Spiritual Science; we will learn to know that our Spiritual Science really does give the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi the possibility of endowing Jupiter with a cover of vegetation. What the sun man experiences through the concepts of Spiritual Science can be used by the Archangeloi in the development of vegetation upon Jupiter.

Then a time will approach in the evolution of the earth when those who have embraced Spiritual Science will say: Spiritual Science is all; it is the ultimate Good, and all those who, in their Soul, accept or practice anything else, are visionaries and dreamers!—The followers of Spiritual Science will speak of those others as the materialists do of us. And just as Spiritual Science of today stands to the materialist; so will, in future, be found a little community of people who will transcend Spiritual Science and reach out to something that will constitute something new, as spiritual Science of to-day is something new in relation to materialistic science. That will make a great many more demands upon the activities of man than our Spiritual Science, which already is found to be very uncomfortable. It will be something which the dreamer in man, the Moon man, will dream in a tremendously more intensive manner than the Sun man to-day can experience the conceptions of Spiritual Science in his sleep. But the experiences of the dreamer in a future age will be grasped and reformed by the Beings of the Angeloi and carried by them to Jupiter, to further enrich Jupiter by adding, upon the mineral and vegetable foundation, another kingdom, the equivalent of the animals. And we say: The dream conceptions of the Moon man (or the dreamer in man) becomes for Jupiter condensed imaginations, foundation of an animal kingdom through the Angeloi.

And finally, something further will appear during the evolution of the earth. We look forward into a future where we can sense something very wonderful. That which will then come to pass will produce the germ which will enable the human being of the earth himself to erect his kingdom upon Jupiter, and it will be something entirely new.

Thus, all that to-day can be developed with the help of the earthly man will progress further, and then, after the ages during which something new will have continually been developed, will arise something which this earth man can now conceive as the highest flower, the apex of the Spiritual evolution of the earth. And out of this conception will be born the power by which earth man upon Jupiter can continue his progress through himself. Thus, we can say: The conceptions of earth man become impulses—through the Soul-contents of the most evolved of humanity—for the evolution of humanity upon Jupiter.

Our Spirits of Personality will then have advanced to Spirits of Form; our Archangeloi to Spirits of Personality; our Angeloi to Archangeloi; man will have risen to the ranks of the Angeloi. Then it will be possible for man, by means of the highest and purest conceptions of earth man, in the Hierarchy of the Jupiter-angeloi which he himself will then constitute to continue his Jupiterean Spiritual development. His possession in the form of evolutionary progress will then be similar to those possessed by man at the end of the Atlantean period to enable them to inaugurate the true evolution of the earth!

Now you will see that we can look deeply into the direction taken by us in the Cosmos. And when we can consider how man will have evolved—as he has progressed up to our times—all that the earthly man can yield, and begins at a higher stage where he will no longer be able to contribute anything more as earth man—when he must aspire to things beyond the powers of earthly humanity—when we thus ponder over the subject, we know why we cultivate Spiritual Science. We then know that the pursuit of Spiritual science has a profound import, and feel how brutally abstract are the questions propounded by philosophical temperaments: What is the ultimate aim of mankind? We have quite enough to do if we aim at the next goal!

And we might ask: Can not this Science of the Spirit—conscious of its task in the Cosmos—truly move our hearts, penetrate our minds and consciousness? But we feel that in us abides something that is the seed of the future in the Cosmos! And we can truly transform what we thus carry in us as knowledge into a pure mental and soul content.

And let us be quite sure of this: All that is physical world on this earth will be destroyed, will not merely pass into a state of sleep, but of destruction—and something new must evolve. But whence will this “something new” come?

Well, from the stones of earth, from the plants and animals of earth—in short—from the physical bodies of the earth—nothing new can evolve,—they are there in order to be discarded—but from the Saturn man in you the mineral Jupiter comes into existence. So true is this, as it is true that in the fowl that runs out of your way nothing exists of this parent fowl but a tiny germ within the egg—so nothing exists upon the earth as a basis for the future Jupiter than the Saturn germs that live in the human body. That is all that will pass intact through the pralaya to Jupiter; all the rest is discarded—falls away from the physical earth. (I am now referring to the physical earth, not to souls). And should anyone harbour the notion that the physical earth will become transformed, he holds a nebulous idea, for the concrete fact is that everything is dispersed into the cosmos, with the exception of all the Saturn seeds, which are absorbed by the Archai, to be transmuted into the atoms intended to form the mineral atoms on Jupiter. Many years ago, to a small circle in Berlin, I spoke upon this subject. I endeavoured to explain how childish an idea it is, to imagine the atoms of the earth as the physicist sees them. Instead, we must think of these atoms as the most inner essence of the Moon man—i.e., the man on the old moon—but used by those Beings who were in advance of man in evolution, who transmuted this very central part of the Moon man to an earth atom. To-day this resides no longer in the Saturn man, but in the earth.

This is the atom in its reality, compared with which the physicist's atom is a very childish concept. For this atom in actual fact has come into being in a most complicated manner. Think for a moment that this atom must evolve from that which man has developed upon Saturn, and which he has preserved during the Sun, Moon and earth periods, and that later is to be changed to an atom for Jupiter by the Spirits of Personality, who, upon Jupiter, will hold the rank of Spirits of Form. Thus, is the world complicated.

I have often referred to the way we have to look at these things: I have illustrated it as follows: Suppose the time is 3 p.m. At that time, we find two persons A and B, standing together at a street corner. We go away and relate this to a third person. But let us also suppose that A has been standing there since 9 a.m. while B arrived there at 12 noon, went away again, and returned at 3 p.m.!—We discovered the same fact—two persons standing together at 3 p.m. But the one who has been standing there for six hours and the other who walked away and back again are not alike. These human beings differ fundamentally, and that is the important thing—they are not equal but different.

This will show you that it is not the observation of a fact, but rather the circumstances through which the fact is brought about that matters. For example, a man who microcosmically examines living beings cannot penetrate to their inner nature, but must be content with the outer fact. Very naturally, people will say: “I do not merely substantiate the fact, but I also trace its evolution.” But they only trace the evolution of the physical,—they always cling to the fact.

Through this has arisen the error which mixes up phenomena that have a very different value and significance for the various kingdoms of nature,—for instance, the death of an animal or man, to say nothing of plants. Death is, by no means, the same process in the human kingdom as in the animal world. When death comes to a man, it comes to a being who has behind him the earth—Moon—Sun and Saturn evolutions, while the animal has evolved through the earth evolution in part, and the Moon and Sun evolutions; therefore is the death of an animal a very different phenomenon than that of men. When one considers death in the animal and human kingdoms this abstract manner as identical, one could with equal justification, call the evaporation of a drop of Mercury “death”.

And I have already said that man in our time thinks and judges along that line: Certain biologists, thinking themselves particularly advanced, say: As many plants have the characteristic quality of consuming insects, such plants possess something akin to the animal or human soul! An outer analogy causes them to make this assert. But it is no more logical than to say that a mouse-trap possesses a soul!

It is that monstrous superficiality, this clinging to externals, that manage to give an impression of a terribly attractive logic, but which has originated only in an unreal, dead Ahrimanic thinking. And more and more will mankind submit to this kind of thinking unless impregnated by Spiritual Science.

All these considerations ultimately aim at the realisation of the importance of the incidence of Spiritual Science into the human evolution on earth. We must not ignore this simulated logic, though lifeless as it is, to which our Ahrimanic culture has brought us. This Ahrimanic culture can do nothing but pass the key, like Mephistopheles. But we must develop the Faustian attitude towards that which the Ahrimanic spirits call “the nothing” (of chaos)—the attitude that says: “within thy Nothing I hope to find the All.”

But we must permeate ourselves entirely with this idea. We must not expect that we can carry over into the future new evolution, anything of this old culture! Though we don't do so consciously, yet unconsciously can Ahriman again and again become the tempter. Of highest importance is it that we absorb the fundamentals of Spiritual Science, however uncomfortable they may appear to be. The culture of Spiritual Science demands deep earnestness in our devotion to it. Therefore must all flowers gained from the evolutionary progress of the soul be placed at the disposal of the impulses emerging from the heart of Spiritual Science.

And now I shall make—I might say—a very objective, but essential remark.

In one of my last lectures I mentioned something relative to the idea—which must be realised if we are to complete our Bau—of the Group to be erected in the east—with the representative of humanity in the centre—(you may call him the Christ, if you wish), with Lucifer above, falling with broken wings, Ahriman below in a cave, crouching down under his feeling of defeat. That is the idea. What its completion will be like, will be seen only when we have the group erected. For, to the inner significance or meaning of it, belongs not only all that has been said (in the preceding pages) but also to every characteristic in the features of the Christ, Lucifer, and Ahriman. Should anyone attempt to incorporate this concept into a composition (group), he would no doubt make use of the old materials, and that would be wrong, for the result would be a symbolical representation of an idea—part of materialistic art! Or it would have to be taken from clairvoyant perception; each separate form must be artistically created—I might say—out of the primeval elements. That, indeed, is possible only if one can really become absorbed in the impulses of Spiritual Science. But one must take time, and not work further with the old mediums of artistic production.

It is difficult to implant the germ of Spiritual Science into all our cultural impulses, but from what has here been said will emerge the necessity for that effort. Naturally this cannot be accomplished today or tomorrow, but only very gradually. A beginning must be made; if we are not conscious of the fact that our Bau represents a beginning only, we shall view it from the wrong angle. A very long time must elapse before the attainment, (the consummation of all that is intended.)

The great task is to transform the entire frame of mind and mood of the Soul from what they have up to the present become, through the contributions earthly man has been able to make towards that end. Of course, it would be entirely wrong for someone to say: Well then, all that earthly man has been able to give, is useless; away with it!... wrong because earthly men carries in him the Moon, Sun, and Saturn man, and the new man of Spiritual Science will, in his turn, carry also the earthly man in him. We must carry this in us,—this earth culture. It is therefore not unnecessary for us to learn all there is to know in this earth culture.

But little by little we must, even now, absorb a sort of Spiritual Science consciousness, not with pride or a feeling of superiority, but with humility. It will never do for people who belong to the Spiritual Science movement to keep on saying: “What we learn (or practice) is esoteric! What you learn is only exoteric! We have something, something quite new! ”

That is most undesirable, and only instigated by pride and arrogance, as so much else within our movement! The fewer of those sort of remarks the better, on the other hand, the more we try to impregnate our entire Soul moods with Spiritual Science, so much the better.

One would hardly believe how one-sided words, and everything else, are used today. We talk, without any sort of attempt to understand the other—to “think ourselves into his mind”, as it were. All this must vanish if the Spiritual impulses are really to take a place of honor in our Souls. And so much has arrived at the culminating point today which must be removed through Spiritual Science.—In our sorrowful times we see men engaged in a war of words; we see one group passing judgment upon the other. The Spiritual Scientist must realize that such arguments and judgment are of no more value than a person who says: “that is a house”, while the other disagrees and claims that “it is a villa!”

That may be expressed rather coarsely, but it indicates the worth of those discussions which are today entered into with so much vehemence. It seems singular, of course, when one tried to describe some complicated idea in so crass and simple a form as above, but it is most desirable to ponder over the relationship between great world-discussions and the simple idea! One will then discover the reality behind the comparison.

And when we look back upon much that has, during the last few years, revealed itself before our souls as Spiritual truth, we will find that we can again and again confirm ourselves in those feelings and perceptions that we can make our own, concerning the impulses of Spiritual Science. When we think that all the Spiritual culture that men can attain here will form the inner foundation of Jupiter; that the endeavours of our Spiritual Science will form the future vegetable kingdom upon Jupiter; and that future (and further) progress will be the seed of the animal kingdom on Jupiter, and, finally, seriously ponder over the truth that within the Saturn man in us lies the germ for the physical shell of Jupiter, that in our Sun man resides that which we must convert into the Jupiterean vegetation, again the Moon man holds potencies that will be transformed into the animal kingdom of Jupiter—and that everything belonging to the earth—including the stars, will cease to be—will enter into pralaya—when we ponder over these marvels, we become a pupil of Him who said:

“Heaven and earth will pass away but my words will not pass away.”

Yesterday I tried to explain how man, who as a soul-spiritual being has been living in the spiritual world during pre-earthly existence, makes his transition to the physical earth. If we want to place before our souls the very real intervention of the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha in the evolution of earth-humanity, it is absolutely necessary to acknowledge the pre-earthly existence of man and thus come to understand the eternal essence of his being. For, in order to comprehend the actual nature of this Mystery, we must be able to follow this Being, the Christ, Who belongs to the spiritual worlds, in His descent from extra-terrestrial regions right down into earth existence. This Being had lived only in those regions where we too spend our pre-natal existence until the time came when in the man Jesus He took on an earthly form and began his earthly activity.

If man wants to arrive at such an understanding of the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha in relation to the event of human birth, of which I spoke sketchily yesterday, he must bear in mind first of all that man's soul constitution and his inner experience have passed in the course of mankind's evolution on earth through most significant and important transformations. Today, people often assume that the soul constitution, and those states of consciousness in which modern man finds himself in waking and sleeping, have always belonged to humanity, at least essentially, since human history began. At most, the world view arrived at in natural scientific cosmology points back to a primitive half-animal-like form possessed by early humanity, as we shall be discussing presently. Such a being's inner nature would of course have to be pictured as different from the thinking, feeling and willing of today's human being. But the transformations that man's consciousness, his whole inner soul structure, have passed through since the primeval times of earth evolution, are rarely pointed out today; yet in these transformations there lies something immensely important and substantial.

When we go back to ancient times of human evolution—we need not go back to the most primeval but to about the second or third millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha—we find that mankind had a quite different consciousness, a quite different configuration of soul, than later on. The pronounced difference that exists between waking and sleeping in man today did exist at that time, but it was not the only aspect of the daily change in human consciousness. Today man only knows the states of waking and sleeping, and between them, dreams. While we are aware of a certain content in dreams, we must admit that it is often misleading. In any case, this dream content does not point to any reality that man can control directly with his day consciousness, although he certainly can indirectly. But apart from these three states of consciousness, of which that of dreams is most questionable, at least as far as gaining knowledge is concerned, an intermediate state existed for ancient humanity. It was neither that of dreams, nor of full wakefulness. Nor was it a condition of deep sleep, or half-conscious dreaming as we have it today. Rather, it was a pictorial “waking-dreaming,” as one might put it. Pictures flowed within it as thoughts run today through our waking consciousness. These pictures were similar in form to our dream pictures, but what they contained pointed to a pronounced supersensible reality, as our perceptions point to a physical reality. Just as we know, when we see a physical being with colors and shapes, that it is a physical reality, so did ancient man experience pictures which moved freely and lightly in his consciousness as our dream pictures move in ours, except that it was impossible to doubt that their content pointed to a spiritual reality. Just as today, when our eyes perceive something, we know with certainty that something physical is out there, so did a man of the past know that he perceived something spiritually real when such images passed through his consciousness.

Among what ancient man experienced as spiritually real there was also an echo of pre-earthly existence. The human being of that epoch simply had every day in his soul inner experiences that proved to him beyond all doubt that he had lived in a soul-spiritual condition, in a purely spiritual world, before entering earthly life. Men of this ancient time knew of this throughout their lives. They therefore accepted as fully evident the existence of an eternal core of man's being, and of an extra-terrestrial world to which they belonged as much as they belonged to the terrestrial world. Those who, as initiates of the mysteries, were initiated in the more profound aspects of these truths were able to speak to their followers out of their initiation science in such a manner that these faithful could arrive at the conviction that they looked into an after-image of their pre-earthly existence, and at the same time into a spiritual world to which man belongs with the eternal core of his being. This, they felt, was a gift of grace bestowed by that spiritual being whose physical image is the physical sun we see in the sky.

Thus, someone who accepted the old mystery wisdom could say: I look up to the sun, but this outer, physical sun is only an image of a spiritual sun being. This spiritual sun being permeates the spiritual world from which I myself descended to an earthly existence, and the power of this sun being has endowed my soul with that faculty, which brings it about that among my soul experiences during the sojourn on earth, I also have this, namely, that in looking back upon my pre-earthly existence, I can be sure of the eternal core-being in my soul.

For a man who, in ancient times felt the grace of the Sun Being, human death on earth was no special riddle. He was supported by the power of his initiates and knew of his pre-earthly existence and of his own external nature. He realized that death concerned only the physical human organism. He knew of something within him that had at the beginning of his earthly life descended into his physical organism. For him, death was an event that did not touch his inner being. He knew of it through his outer form of consciousness.

This was the soul condition of human beings in ancient epochs preceding the Mystery of Golgotha. In those epochs, the secret of birth lay open to a vision turned inward that was striving toward the grace of the Sun Being. While they could comprehend this secret of birth, the riddle of death was not yet present in the manner in which it existed for men of a later time. I shall speak in the second part of this lecture about how all this changed in the course of time.

This consciousness of ancient mankind that lived in pictures—and the way it affected the remaining soul constitution—was aware of the soul in such a way that the active, intense ego consciousness, possessed by mankind today, could not yet arise at that time. Man had insight into his own eternal essence but lacked a pronounced inner sensation of his ego-hood. Nor would he ever have achieved it if that ancient picture consciousness had remained with him as his endowment. But in fact, it ceased. Just when the time for the Mystery of Golgotha was drawing near, it gradually dimmed, to be replaced increasingly by the kind of ordinary consciousness we possess today, with its sharp contrast between sleeping and waking, and, in between, the dubious world of dreams. Mankind had lost that part of self-knowledge that looked back in direct vision to pre-earthly life and with it to the eternal core of man's being. But this was precisely what was necessary if man was to reach gradually his full ego consciousness. Although in that middle period of human evolution, around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, full ego consciousness had not yet appeared in all mankind, it was being slowly prepared. With it people were confronted in full measure and with great intensity with the riddle of death. For they no longer knew anything through direct vision about the world from which they had descended into earthly existence.

In the age when humanity passed through this stage of its evolution the Christ appeared, descending out of the same world from which the human soul always descends again to birth, and, through the events of Palestine, united Himself with the man, Jesus. At that time the old traditions, namely the old methods of the initiation centers were still preserved. Although they were but a vestige of the ancient initiation, even in their weakened form they could still lead to a knowledge concerning the way the spiritual world looks and the kind of connection man has to it. The initiates of that time could address those willing to receive their words and say: The Sun Being, He who formerly bestowed grace upon men by granting them a vision of an after-image of pre-earthly life, He whose physical reflection is the physical sun, this Sun Being has descended to earth. He lived, or has lived in the man Jesus. He took on a physical body in order not only to remain connected from this time onward with the spiritual world, in which man lives between death and a new birth, but also to live within human evolution on earth itself.

Out of the remnants of the old initiation, the initiates, who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, spoke about the secret of the Christ to those who were willing to accept it and had confidence in them. Those who had this trust could learn how the Christ had entered an earthly body, so that not through some kind of teaching but through His deed He could resolve the riddle that only then affected humanity in full intensity—the riddle of death. The initiates pointed out to the people that the Christ had come in order to solve the riddle of death on earth in a way suitable for man. For at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place in the earth-realm, those who possessed the vestiges of the ancient methods of initiation spoke above all else about the spiritual being of Christ as He appeared in the spiritual world. The path was described which the Christ, Who never before had descended to earth existence, had taken from the spiritual world down to earth. In all these descriptions given by the initiated contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, the main teaching was about the way the Christ descended into the man Jesus and Himself became man in him. At that time people did not merely refer to the historical Jesus and ask: What position does this historical Jesus occupy in human evolution?—Ordinary consciousness was, after all, faced with him. Some of his contemporaries were in direct contact with him, while those who came later were aware of him in their physical sense consciousness through historical tradition. But those who knew something about the spiritual worlds because of their knowledge of ancient initiation science could say: That Being Who was once looked upon as the lofty Sun Being, the bestower of the grace we described, has taken the path leading to the earth and to the man Jesus. He has then passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, because man could no longer consciously see into pre-earthly life and so was unable to solve the riddle of death. Indeed, he could no longer be aware of this Being at all—the lofty Sun Being Who, by giving men the vision of the after-image of the world in which they had lived before birth overcame earthly death. This Being Itself descended to earth, took on human form and went through the Mystery of Golgotha in order, through what the event signified, to give back to men on earth—but this time from outside—the after-image of pre-earthly life that in earlier times He had been able to impart to them for their inner soul life in the form of pictures. It was in a manner somewhat like this that the initiated contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha expressed themselves.

Formerly, man through grace was blessed with a capacity in his consciousness that enabled him to experience his eternal essence directly when he looked back into his life before birth. But he had to develop further. He had to develop a clear earthly consciousness that could only be kindled and developed by means of the sense world. This is what caused the old consciousness, by means of which man had formerly been able to recognize his eternal nature, to recede. But that Being, Who had earlier enabled man to perceive his own eternal being from the spiritual world, accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha after His descent to earth so that man, by perceiving and understanding this event, might himself experience from outside what earlier he had experienced from within. From the Christ on earth man is to experience further what he had earlier experienced from the spiritual world through Christ.

In the third part of this lecture I shall explain the significance this had for the further course of mankind's evolution.

The vestiges of the old initiation methods through which the initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and even their successors, were able to speak correctly about the descent of the Christ and the path He took until His embodiment in the man Jesus—these vestiges continued until the fourth century A.D., though weakening increasingly in regard to the effectiveness they had for mankind. By that time, they had ceased to call forth in the human organization the kind of capacities that afforded reliable insights into the spiritual world. Mankind now entered a period of its evolution in which it was chiefly dependent upon the perceptions and views that can be attained only in the sense world and upon a thinking based on impressions and observations in this world. This period of humanity's evolution, lasting several centuries, brought about what I have just indicated as the development, the unfolding of ego consciousness.

One cannot study history correctly unless one is able to see during the period from the fourth to about the fifteenth century A.D. how ego consciousness gradually takes form among civilized peoples. Of course, precursors of this developing ego consciousness also lived in earlier times, but fundamentally there is a great difference between even the most educated, cultured person of the fourth or fifth centuries, and one of the fifteenth or sixteenth. A person who can see—I wouldn't even say, into the soul of Augustine, whose ego consciousness can be studied quite clearly in a psychological way—but let us say someone who can look, for example, into the soul of Scotus Erigena in the ninth century, sees how the ego consciousness, possessed later by the simplest person, was only just beginning to develop and form itself. At the same time, the old kind of vision was ceasing through which it was possible, for instance, to develop alchemy, which represented an innate fusion between what the eyes see and the soul experiences when it contemplates things in the external world. Pure sense observation, as the basis of human knowledge, arose first about the fifteenth century. In this turning of man to mere sense observation—which reached a high point in the age of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno—to consciousness of the sense world, there also came into being the ego consciousness.

Ego consciousness, however, caused insight into the spiritual worlds to fall into the depths of darkness. The old perception of the mysteries, the initiation knowledge, had faded away by the fourth century A.D. and scarcely a trace of it continued in the ongoing stream of civilization. For what persisted of this knowledge was well hidden, and remained almost unknown to people in general, even to scholarly Occidental peoples. Initiation science had no real influence on general culture and civilization. It, therefore, could throw no light on the path taken by the Christ from the spiritual worlds to mankind on earth, as was still possible in the first Christian centuries, even though that had been but a vestige, but nevertheless a vestige of the old initiation science. As a result, it was only the historical Jesus who was recognized by mankind, even by learned men—that Jesus of whom history tells, a history which did not add to this historical Jesus, either by means of direct human vision or by teachings of initiation, the picture of the Christ Who was united with him.

Thus, for these centuries, the Church's development could not do otherwise than refer its believers ever and again to the historical Jesus, bringing the picture of him to life. Concerning everything, however, that those men, who knew something real about the spiritual world, could still speak about in the first Christian centuries, nothing could now be directly known. Only what was preserved by tradition from those times when there still existed human souls who really knew about the spiritual world from initiation science, only what had been preserved by tradition from old Christian knowledge—only this could be established by the Church in the form of dogmas concerning the Christ. No reference was made to those who still retained a view of the spiritual content of these dogmas, which were made the object of mere faith.

During the time when knowledge became increasingly perfected and extensive in regard to the sense world, alongside this knowledge of the sense world a content of dogmatic faith was placed, a dogmatic content that related to the Jesus figure only by means of an outward determination.

This Jesus figure had become established in mankind's ordinary consciousness and had assumed form. This attitude then continued on through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and finally led to a theology purporting to be Christian but concerned only with the man Jesus, because as a result of historical tradition ordinary consciousness was only aware of him.

Meanwhile, the consciousness that had developed experience of the ego and which had investigated the laws of the sense world had less and less inclination to abide by the established contents of faith. It was especially the leading personalities in whom the new consciousness had developed the most, who became emancipated from inclinations toward faith and thus the Christ. So it happened that in the nineteenth century the supposed Christian theology, which had completely lost all knowledge of the Christ in favor of Jesus and spoke only about “Jesus of Nazareth,” came to a special prominence. It wanted to recognize Jesus as a man only, although perhaps the most eminent one who had appeared in human evolution.

In the first Christian centuries, out of the vestiges of the old initiation wisdom, the attempt had been made to describe the path leading from the perception of the Christ Being to his incorporation in Jesus of Nazareth; in order to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, one started with Christ and later arrived at Jesus. By the nineteenth century, one began with Jesus, who was looked upon at first as a man, and tried to come from Jesus to Christ. But that was the path that as a matter of course led in the end either to the admission (or the refusal to admit) one's inability to rise to the Christ from the historical Jesus of whom ordinary consciousness alone was aware, the “simple man” Jesus who had lived in Palestine.

This situation can be changed only by modern initiation as I have characterized it in its main outlines in the past few days, which can lead to imagination, inspiration and intuition in a new form. By means of this new initiation wisdom it is again possible to go beyond the merely historical image of Jesus to a direct view of man's pre-earthly existence and the world in which this existence is spent. It thereby becomes possible to behold the Christ in His super-earthly spirituality and then, proceeding from Christ, to understand Jesus and thus the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha. The path that modern theology has taken, which, in emphasizing Jesus, has lost the Christ, can be reversed. Out of spiritual perception, men again can recognize the Christ, and through the perception of Christ behold Jesus in whom the Christ became Man. With this Christ perception, gained in the spirit, they can then contemplate the Mystery of Golgotha. Through anthroposophical perception, the Christ, Who for one branch of modern theology has already been lost, must now be recovered. I will explain in the fourth part of today's considerations what this signifies for man's inner development.

It has already been mentioned that through the lighting-up of ego consciousness the riddle of death confronted the human soul. This had to happen because, since the ego had become present in full clarity in the inner soul experience, man's physical organism thereby had become the actual basis for this ordinary human consciousness. This ego-permeated consciousness had its foundation in man's physical organism, and man learned to feel instinctively how only what has its foundation in the physical organism can be experienced by the soul. No longer did he see the eternal essence of his being through a direct picture consciousness. It was precisely his ego consciousness, his highest faculty in earth life, that drew his attention exclusively to his physical body and showed how this body, because of its constitution, could allow his ego-saturated consciousness to light up. In this state of consciousness we cannot say that there is anything in our soul that we carry through the gate of death.

It was precisely the ability of a retrospective view into pre-earthly life, which had been given to an older humanity by the grace of the lofty Sun Being, that had enabled ordinary consciousness to see forward into what is beyond death. Now, consciousness had become especially clear because, to its full extent, it had become an experience of the physical organism. But because of this man could not help saying to himself: You possess powers to brighten and illuminate your consciousness, but they come from the physical body. This body disintegrates at death. In this, of which you are aware in your ordinary consciousness, you perceive nothing of what can carry you over into another world. Something of this nature may exist—but with your ordinary consciousness you sense and know nothing of it.

This mystery of death had appeared with special intensity in the first Christian centuries when human beings were still more sensitive to these questions. The initiates, however, had drawn the attention of humanity to the Mystery of Golgotha, and in the following centuries, as Christianity evolved, its leaders had likewise directed humanity to that Mystery through their dogmas of faith. What was this Mystery to signify for man?

A person who can attain an inner person-to-person relationship to the Christ on earth, who can acknowledge and accept the Mystery of Golgotha, must take something into his consciousness that no material sense world can supply. It is precisely the person who looks most deeply into the constitution of the sense world who must deny the Mystery of Golgotha, for no understanding of this Mystery is possible to a comprehension derived from the senses. If, however, he can receive it into his heart, if he is then able, by means of a power of understanding rooted in the human soul (Gemüt), to grasp that event consummated only once in earth's evolution—an event comprehensible only out of the spirit—then, in his ordinary consciousness, he tears himself away from mere sense comprehension, which in its special clearness and intensity is precisely the essential feature of ego consciousness.

No one who wishes to remain only in the world of the senses can come to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. By contrast, if one renounces any understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha based on sense perception and acquires instead a relationship to if of faith and acknowledgement, if one looks up to the Mystery of Golgotha in an attitude of pious veneration and attains to an understanding of what Christ became for humanity when He came down from a spiritual existence into earth life, then one rises above the mere understanding of the sense world with the aid of that very power which, though it is itself a part of earthly consciousness, nevertheless constitutes man's highest faculty. Man thus generates and unfolds a force in his ordinary consciousness that does not spring from his own natural development. He must deepen himself inwardly and intensify his consciousness if he wants to go beyond his understanding of the sense world and develop enough strength to allow the spiritual significance of the Mystery of Golgotha to become a truth for his soul.

If we renounce all understanding based on the senses and acknowledge the truth of the Mystery of Golgotha; if we recognize that the Christ really did once live on earth in Jesus, and that in the Mystery of Golgotha a real, heavenly, super-earthly deed of enduring significance was accomplished in the midst of earth existence—then, by recognizing this truth we succeed in replacing that force that was once a part of ordinary consciousness but has now been lost.

In times past, the power to look back into pre-earthly life was present in ordinary consciousness, and out of this vision consciousness gained the strength to carry the soul through the gate of death. This power which now was no longer there was to enter into the soul through the Mystery of Golgotha; it was to enter through the strengthening that could occur in the soul, if, through inward soul experience, a person confessed to the truth of this Mystery. Then, as the saying of Paul, “Not I but the Christ in me,” came to life in man himself, the Christ, with the power that streamed out from His deed on Golgotha, could carry man beyond the point where, merely because of the condition of his consciousness, physical death could leave him. By these means, it was possible to regain a power of which man knew that with it he was able to reach beyond the portal of death.

How the mysteries of death, the opposite of the mysteries of birth, of which I spoke yesterday, can be described further in relation to the Christ Being, will be the topic of tomorrow's lecture.

Today, I would like to close my remarks by referring to what an old initiate said to those whose souls—as early as the first Christian centuries—were confronted with this whole riddle of death. He said: “Behold the condition of the human body, now that man has arrived at the use of ego consciousness. In this stage, the physical body conceals man's total entity. Since the unfolding of ego consciousness, man is so constituted that in and through his physical body alone he could never take hold of that element in him that belongs to the spirit. Look,” said such an initiate to his followers in the first Christian centuries, “look at the physical human organism just when the stage is reached when it is to offer the highest potentiality for ego consciousness; it turns out to be inadequate. The physical organism is therefore sick; it would be healthy only if it could give to man a consciousness of his spiritual significance. This physical organism developed in such a way that from the beginning there was sickness in it in relation to the life of the spirit. For this reason, the Christ descended and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, not only as a teacher but as the Physician of the soul, Who, through man's soul, heals him from what has fallen ill in his physical organism.” This is how those initiates of the first Christian century—who are no longer acknowledged by today's theology and who have been erased from memory—presented the Christ as the Physician of the soul, the Healer, the Savior of mankind. In presenting Him thus, they gave Him his due place as the true meaning of the whole of earth evolution. They showed how man's evolution took a descending course, descending to the point where his physical organism became completely corrupt and useless for the highest tasks of human consciousness. Then the Divine Savior as the Physician of the soul intervened to heal the relationship between man's soul condition and the divine-spiritual world. Thus, through the initiates of the first Christian centuries, a deeper understanding of the Christ came into being, namely, that of Christ as the Soul Physician of the world, the Healer of mankind, the Savior.

Because of all this one can say that in ancient times, before the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place on earth, the initiates could speak to wider circles of humanity, who were open to their teachings, about a spiritual, a divine existence that permeated and was the foundation of all sense existence. If man brings this teaching to life again in modern consciousness through imaginative insight, then, what otherwise is an abstract, thought-out philosophy is enlivened—not only in the sense I have earlier characterized it here, but by becoming permeated by Christ. By means of the knowledge through which modern imagination leads men again to an insight into the spiritual world, philosophy is filled with the Christ. What once existed in ancient humanity, namely, the awareness of the Divine-Spiritual Father of all physical existence can awaken in humanity again. It was basically toward this Divine Father-consciousness that the ancient, pre-Christian initiates strove along with the rest of mankind. In the highest grade of initiation in the mysteries, the initiate represented the Divine-Spiritual, Cosmic Father, and was called “The Father.”

If man allows this conception to arise in his mind, what may be called a Christian philosophy comes into being. Furthermore, through modern inspiration, he becomes acquainted with what was already prophetically expressed by the initiates of the early Christian centuries, who still possessed vestiges of an ancient inspiration. He learns to perceive how a Divine-Spiritual Being, the Christ, descended out of spiritual worlds, placed Himself into man's earthly development, and thus constitutes in Himself the fulcrum of this evolution. A meaningful content is thus brought into humanity's earthly evolution and its laws when man learns through the Mystery of Golgotha to link this evolution to the cosmos by means of looking up to the cosmic Christ Being. Further, man learns to recognize how earthly evolution has been a concern of heaven, how the cosmos has cared about the affairs of mankind. In this way, the nature of that cosmology, which I have always characterized here as a spiritual cosmology, is extended so as to become a Christian cosmology.

If, then, man achieves a living relationship to the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha in the sense of the words of Paul, “Not I but the Christ in me,” the Christ, by helping him solve the riddle of death, leads him into a renewed life in the spirit. He becomes acquainted with the new spirit, which once again is to make it clear to mankind that beyond the physical world there exists a spiritual world that rules, orders and permeates the physical. He learns to know the mission of the Healing Spirit, Who proceeds from Christ and is sanctified by Christ Himself. He learns to know the mystery of the Holy Spirit as the foundation for a new religious perception.

The Trinity, so long spoken of as a dogma, again comes to live for man. Looking back to the pre-Christian mysteries one can say that in these lived God the Father, Who also has a cosmic meaning for us. Through the Mystery of Golgotha, God the Son, in Christ, drew near mankind, and through what God the Son has brought to humanity, the connection was established with the Healing, the Holy Spirit. The Trinity is again a living conception; no dogma.

Through the vitalizing of the Father consciousness there arises a Christ-permeated philosophy. Through the vitalizing of the Son consciousness comes a Christ-permeated cosmology. In accordance with what the Christ referred to and has called the Healing Spirit and has mercifully poured over mankind, a new basis arises for a Christian religion, founded in knowledge.

Starting from such a Christian philosophy, a Christian cosmology and a Christian religious insight, we shall speak further tomorrow about the mystery of death in relation to the Christ Being and the course of humanity's evolution.

Das Wesen Der Anthroposophie. (The Nature of Anthroposophy. Lecture given at Elberfeld, Germany, January 24, 1922)

Goethe's observation of human beings and of humanity led him to the following short but comprehensive and significant conclusion that “the most valuable thing about history is the enthusiasm it stimulates.”

We may well be surprised at such a view of historical knowledge, for Goethe was, after all, a person who had deep insight into human life, and yet what he seems to be saying is that it is not the knowledge we acquire about the course of human history that is important, but rather the feelings and enthusiasm that history stimulates. However, the more we feel impelled to go into what is called historical knowledge, the more Goethe's judgment seems to be confirmed. We only need remember that when the catastrophic events began in which the whole of humanity is now embroiled, a number of people—and there were quite a few of them—believed from their reading of history and especially their picture of economic and other material causes in world history, that the war could last four or six months at the most. We have to admit that this conclusion was really not at all stupid. Nor, judging by the historical standards that humanity is accustomed to apply to its own historical evolution, was it in any way shortsighted. And yet, despite this—was this conclusion really founded on what was actually happening?

Let us take as another example what happened to a not insignificant person. It is true that it took place a long time ago, but it can still be mentioned. It concerns a professor of history at a university. This person gave a brilliant inaugural lecture in which he said that a study of the historical evolution of humanity suggested that the European countries would in future form a more or less united family in which there could be all sorts of differences but in which it would become impossible for the various peoples, the members of this great family, to cut each other to pieces. This judgment, the reality of which can hardly be doubted, was made on the basis of historical observation by Friedrich Schiller when he took up his professorship at the University of Jena in 1789. One has the impression that Schiller believed he could arrive at conclusions in his study of history that in a sense rise to a kind of prophecy. Immediately after Schiller had come to this conclusion there followed the events of the French Revolution and all that it brought with it. And if we take everything that has happened up to the present day we find that what even this gifted man had learned from his study of history has been completely disproved by the facts in the most terrible way. We could add hundreds and hundreds of similar examples.

This makes it imperative to take a closer look at what we normally call history and to see how far it really enables us to form judgments about what is going on around us. In such times as ours this is particularly important. History should teach us to recognize what each day brings—and today each day brings a very great deal. Catastrophic events breaking over the whole earth demand judgment from us. We must know what to think of the American West and how it can evolve in the future, and of the Asiatic East. How can we do this if history is regarded in the way we have just touched upon?

Let us take one or two examples by way of introduction to see how a view of history is attained from all the various things that happen in human life. I would like to characterize different aspects of this, starting from the various assumptions that lie close at hand.

At the beginning of our present century, when the events we are now witnessing were being prepared, it happened by what we normally call chance that two men made an historical, all embracing judgment about their country. It is most interesting to study the particular way in which these two looked at history. Although they lived not so far from each other, their two nations are quite different in character. The one is the German historian, Karl Lamprecht, who in 1904 at the invitation of Columbia University in America gave his American listeners his comprehensive judgment about the history of the German nation. The other is Wilson, who at about the same time gave a lecture in which he presented his comprehensive judgment about the American nation. It is interesting to compare these two, and it would be even more valuable to take a third, but the time is too short.—For instance, I can only recommend you to compare what I am saying today with a wonderful statement of Rabindranath Tagore about the spirit of Jesus. If the time allowed us to compare all three we would have a wonderful picture of literary, historical study.

I shall begin with the rather odd views that Karl Lamprecht, the German historian, came to about his own German nation. He has got beyond the merely factual kind of historical observation pursued by Ranke and others, for he sets out to study the inner course of human evolution. He seeks the motivating forces and directs his view to the example of his own nation. I can only give a brief picture of the views that Karl Lamprecht came to, and which he then presented in these lectures at Columbia University. He said that German history can be divided into clearly differentiated epochs according to the inner character of human deeds, of the constitution of the human soul, of the way in which human beings work.

We can go back to a period which came to an end in about the third century A.D. and we find that everything that happened in the German nation at that time arose out of a kind of activity of the imagination which felt itself stimulated to think in symbols and images. Even revered figures and personalities are often presented to the people in images and revered in images. Then there comes a time which is sharply differentiated from this. Whereas in the earlier period it is clear that the imaginative conception of life, which, according to Lamprecht's view, lies at the root of history, leads to the fact that social conditions are organized in a military structure, we see that from the 4th or 5th century to the 11th century it is superseded by a quite different way of thinking and quite different inner motives. In place of the merely comradely sort of life we find a kind of life that is more like a society. And in place of a living in images that always sees images for the things that happen, we have now, thinks Lamprecht, the concept of type. The single, eminent personality is regarded as a type of the times and revered, portrayed and characterized as such from all sides, even in the primitive art that has come down to us.

Then follows a relatively short period, from the 12th to the middle of the 15th century. Lamprecht characterizes this as arising out of all the impulses that were at work when power based on land and obedience evolved out of the old estates and the conditions on them, or being concerned with the way in which the constitution of the soul came to expression in art, with the way men were respected, with the way they acted, and finally with the way knighthood and town life evolved. Lamprecht characterizes it as the time of the conventional conception of life, for at that time life was based on conventions, agreements and a generally fixed way of doing things. For Lamprecht there is then an important break in the historical evolution of the German people which happens at around the middle of the 15th century. He believes that the individual personality that begins to break through for the first time, for the conventional relationships between human beings which are governed by considerations going beyond the merely individual, are no longer uppermost. The individual then enters decisively into historical evolution. Lamprecht shows quite justifiably how something very important begins at this time. Until then, human beings had lived an existence primarily based on deeds, on actions, founded on impulses of the will which arose out of the deepest recesses of the soul, whereas from the middle of the 15th century onward it is the intellect, the understanding, that belongs to the individual personality, that becomes the decisive factor. This lasts until the middle of the 18th century.

What then follows we should call a higher stage of individualism. Lamprecht differentiates it from the earlier period by saying that the age of subjectivism then begins in which a higher kind of understanding becomes particularly significant for human evolution. Lamprecht describes various aspects of this evolution from this viewpoint quite well. He shows, for instance, how the more rudimentary impulses of earlier centuries which prevailed in the relations of the various peoples to each other, turn into a kind of diplomacy based solely on the understanding and intellect. He gives many such examples from many aspects of life. We are still in this age of subjectivism.

From this brief description I have given you can see how an historian tries to explain what happens in history in terms of the nature and evolution of the human being himself. As we shall see in a moment, what Lamprecht put forward is intimately connected with the German way of looking at things. We can see that it is an attempt to use every possible means that are available for reaching a reality which has soul-spirit factors, for penetrating into the real nature of history. But if we then investigate how Lamprecht applies the ideas outlined in his lectures to his detailed description of history, we cannot help feeling bitter disappointment. This is because Lamprecht's views of history never convince us that the efforts he makes in observing certain inner powers of the human soul lead to any sort of convincing result. It is a struggle for a new view of history, but nowhere would we stop and say: Now we can, for instance, really see the inner reasons why the German people have evolved to what they are today. And this question constantly comes to mind when we study Lamprecht's view of history.

Let me compare it with Wilson's view of his own American people. It is something very remarkable, and in order not to be misunderstood I would point out that I am anything but an admirer of Woodrow Wilson. The actual fact of the matter will become clear in further lectures. For the moment I would only mention that my attitude toward Wilson has not arisen during the last six years, for already before the war I expressed my rejection of his approach in a lecture cycle given in Helsingfors in 1913 at a time when many in this country rejected the views expressed in his book, “Only Literature,” which was translated into German, and in his dissertations on freedom—as there were also many in Germany who were deceived and thought he was a great man for reasons which I will not go into now. It is neither chauvinism, that has grown to such proportions today, nor anything other than an entirely objective study of Wilson's approach that leads me to say what I have to say about him.

I have been particularly interested by this parallel phenomenon of Wilson speaking in his lectures about the American people. It is particularly important from one viewpoint because Wilson, when it comes to discovering the virtual factor in viewing a limited phenomenon of historical evolution and in what is needed in order to have some understanding of it, really hits the nail on the head. In this lecture Wilson says that those who live in the east, the New Englanders, do not look at the American people in the right way. And he also describes the quite wrong attitude taken by those living in the south. For he derives the nature of the American and his historical evolution from the events that took place in the 19th century in the center between the west and the east of the North American states when all sorts of people mixed with each other.—Out of their way of life there then arose what Wilson calls the American nation.

It is interesting to see how he succeeds in showing that American history really only begins when those who lived in the east looked toward the west and began to colonize it. Dutch, German, English, French and so on, all came together and formed something that did not come into being through the work of politicians but through those who tilled the land and tended the forests. And then he describes how the three most important political questions of America find their solution under the influence of these conditions. I cannot go into details but would like all the same to state what I think is the important point: the most important questions were those of the attitude of the state toward property, of tariffs and of slavery. All these arose under the influence of these conditions. As far as these conditions are concerned his view of history hits the nail on the head. And there are also further lectures in addition to this one where he speaks about history in general, where he gives his opinion as to how history ought to be studied. And something quite remarkable can happen to anyone viewing things as a whole.

I must say that I find Woodrow Wilson as a thinker and scientist an extraordinarily unsympathetic personality. On the other hand, in another person who has perhaps been too little recognized. I find an extraordinarily sympathetic personality, and this is Hermann Grimm, who applied his historical approach primarily to art, in which, however, his historical ideas are to be found. I have it from him personally because he himself described it to me on many occasions. It lived in him in a wonderfully comprehensive way. On one hand I read in “Only Literature” some of the things that Wilson laid down. On the other, I read what Hermann Grimm said about how history should be studied and how he looked at the evolution of humanity in the light of history. And one comes to the remarkable conclusion that in reading Wilson and Grimm a sentence of Grimm could often be transposed word for word into Wilson's work, and vice-versa. Sometimes there are quite short paragraphs that, from a superficial viewpoint could belong quite well to either of them. Only try to acquire the necessary knowledge, which is quite easy to do in this subject, and you will see the truth of what I say.

How are we to understand this? There is, after all, an enormous difference between these two people and the way they look at history.—There is nothing better than such an example for showing what has to be learned at the present time: that the literal content of a matter is not the whole matter! This is something our age has got to learn, but finds so difficult to learn. For however much our age imagines it lives in reality, it really loves the abstract and theoretical. When they find a few sentences the same with two different authors people are inclined to say that it is the same! The content, the purely literal content, is sometimes quite remote from the actual reality, and however odd this may sound it is proved by this example. For what are we dealing with here? Only the science of spirit can enlighten us, and only the science of spirit can detect the difference between the American historical approach of Woodrow Wilson and that of Karl Lamprecht. The abstract minds of the present time are completely taken in by what Woodrow Wilson says. Now it is not so, but before the war they were taken in. For they do not see the real point. Wilson says many excellent things. But compare them with what Hermann Grimm says, with what Karl Lamprecht says, who perhaps even make great mistakes. What Grimm and Lamprecht say, even when it sounds the same as what Wilson says, is achieved in wrestling with the matter in their souls; it always has the mark of having been permeated by the personality.

For one who is able to see through such things, Wilson's words betray the fact that the personality is possessed by its views. Of course one would have to see the details of the content of his words in the spirit in which it lives in him. Nevertheless, we can see that these things rise up from the unconscious depths of the soul and are not worked over personally by the soul, but simply push through from below. This personality is possessed by what lives below the consciousness.

I certainly do not pass this judgment lightly for I am quite aware that it has far reaching consequences. But I am also aware that it has been arrived at objectively. This is the great difference—on the one hand a personal struggle with truth, on the other a statement of something by which one is merely possessed, where one is more or less an outward medium for something rather indefinite. In this respect Wilson provides a brilliant characterization of his people, one that could hardly be bettered. I must say that some of the statements he makes about the Americans hit home. He says that it is because the American nation has come into being on the basis of work on the land and in the forests that the people have evolved what characterizes them today—the mobility of the eyes, the tendency suddenly to take up bold and adventurous ideas and the tendency to think up plans that can be realized anywhere without much feeling for one's home.

Mobility of the eyes, tendency toward bold, adventurous ideas—these are characteristic of a situation where there is no direct personal struggle, no conscious struggle with the things that are going on, but of a situation where something unconscious plays a part, where the human being is really only more or less a mediator for what is at work. Wilson could offer no greater proof of what he described as American than the history he himself wrote.

I only wanted to show by way of introduction how our view of history is dependent upon the sort of people we are, and how even today historical observation is still largely dependent upon this. I wanted to show how a study of the writing of history itself should enlighten us as to the real nature of the situation.

Now, for example, what is Karl Lamprecht's intention, for he is certainly not possessed by his ideas but, struggles personally for his ideas of history? He wants to introduce a science of soul into history. He wants to understand the historical evolution of humanity on the basis of soul impulses. He is seeking a science of soul applicable to his own times. What does he find? He looks for it in the so called psychologists, in those who investigate the soul. In these psychologists he honestly tried to find something their souls experience within themselves, something that he could then apply to his historical studies. But precisely this made him unsure, and resulted in the fact that there is nothing in his way of looking at history that can offer any convincing satisfaction. Why is this? Because what nowadays is officially pursued as psychology hardly penetrates into the true self, into the real inner soul being of man.

Now the inner soul life of man comes to expression in a quite different way when one is confronted by another person and has to act with him in this situation. And it is on this basis that the historical evolution of humanity proceeds. What proceeds there cannot be viewed in the way that historical research of the present time views it. What has modern historical research grown accustomed to? What has Karl Lamprecht found in the psychologists that can help historical research? He found what has evolved on the pattern of scientific method. And in the 19th century historical research was drawn more and more into a sphere where history is regarded in the same way as nature. The same method of acquiring knowledge, the same kind of knowledge, the same kind of judgment that are used to observe and understand the phenomena of nature were applied to the historical evolution of humanity. Karl Lamprecht sees something significant in applying to his method of looking at history what had led to sure results in natural science.

In this respect too, one can say out of an historical instinct, Hermann Grimm made an excellent observation when he gave his opinion of the famous historian Gibbon. Gibbon, who wrote a history of the decline of the Roman Empire, is an historian who really carries out in exemplary fashion the kind of method suited to studying nature, only he has applied it to history. What really happened here? Hermann Grimm observed quite correctly. Gibbon was a very shrewd, scientific observer of history, but he described all the forces, which he did excellently for the first Christian centuries, all the forces which tend toward decay, which led to the fall of the Roman Empire, which brought to an end the evolution which had been in progress for a long time. Grimm rightly reproaches Gibbon with the fact that something quite different was also happening in the centuries when the Roman Empire was declining, something positive, for the forces connected to the birth of Christianity were entering into historical evolution. These are the forces of progressive evolution, the forces which existed positively alongside the negative forces of decay. They are simply missing from Gibbon's history.

Herman Grimm came to this important observation out of his historical instinct. He did not know the basis for it, for it is only with the science of spirit that we can get to the bottom of such things—the science of spirit whose method works with forces that otherwise slumber in the soul and which will be developed thus enabling the human being really to see into the spiritual. This science of spirit discovers that we cannot grasp the progressive forces of historical evolution bearing the future if we use only the form of knowledge that happens to be excellent for natural science.

What happens when we apply to historical evolution the method that is right for natural science? We find the forces of decay. We find the part of life that becomes dead in historical evolution, in the social life of humanity. If we apply only what our understanding, our ordinary consciousness can grasp, then we find ourselves restricted to studying the impulses of decay. The impulses of growth, of forward evolution, that carry historical evolution in a positive sense, elude this kind of observation. They also elude this kind of observation when we are confronted by real life and wish to take hold of it.

It is shocking that one must say such things, but the present time must learn to grasp things as they really are. Taking care to observe what happens and not to sleepwalk through reality, we should try to get together a parliament or something similar where only people intellectually educated according to the scientific pattern have to vote on what should happen both in social life and in life as a whole; we should create a parliament of people who have fashioned their intellect according to scientific method and let no one else in except those who are fully educated in these things, and you can be quite sure that these people will come to decisions which will very quickly lead the community into decline in every possible sphere. For their way of thinking can be applied only to the forces of decline and decay. It can observe only the declining forces in human evolution. The forces of growth are such that they cannot be comprehended by the powers of our ordinary consciousness. And here I must come back to something that I indicated here several months ago in a lecture about how the unconscious comes to be revealed.

Looked at superficially, this human soul life, in fact human life as a whole, proceeds in alternating states of waking and sleeping. Because we are naturally all very industrious, we are awake two thirds of our lives and are asleep one third. These conditions alternate. But this is not absolutely correct, for what we call sleeping and dreaming also extends to a large extent into our waking life. Our waking life is completely awake only in part. Beneath the surface of our waking life is something that sleeps, even when we are awake. A very significant man, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, had a kind of instinctive feeling for this when he pointed out how closely our feeling life and our passions are related to our dream life. Those who are really able to investigate and observe such things discover that what we experience as our feelings are conscious in us in a quite different way from our perceptions and mental images. For, in fact, we are only really awake in the latter. Our feelings shine through out of the unconscious spheres of the soul just as dreams do. We are not more strongly conscious of our feelings than we are of our dreams; we do not know them as they really are, but only observe their reflection in the sphere of consciousness. We raise our feelings into the waking condition by having them before our minds. We dream the whole day by allowing our souls to be permeated by feelings, and we are asleep inasmuch as we have will impulses and go through the world with such impulses, the motive you know as coming from your will impulses. You know what it is that as perception stimulates the will. How what you want comes about, how your mental images lead to movement in your limbs and hands,—all this proceeds in a sleeping state. We sleep and dream beneath the surface of our normal consciousness.

Having learned to look at the human being in this way, if we then learn to see history as it really is, we become aware of all those actions and impulses at work in the historical evolution of humanity, which are not forces of decay. They come to be recognized as something which the whole of humanity in living together dreams and sleeps. However odd and paradoxical it may sound this will become a most important truth once more, without which there can be no satisfaction in historical research—that the forces carrying humanity forward in its historical evolution do not belong to the normal forces, we use in natural science, for these impulses in history in no way proceed from our ordinary waking consciousness, but proceed from our dreaming and sleeping. This is not a comparison or picture but something real in the deepest sense.

This is why in earlier times, when people were still connected with the life of the spirit in their soul life, even if only unconsciously, they sought their information about social life and historical evolution from a different source than what we call history today. They sought their knowledge in myths, sagas, pictures. And they knew more about the impulses to be found in their own people than can be discovered today purely by means of the understanding that is confined to our ordinary consciousness, and that has provided such magnificent results in science. That is where it belongs.

Now Karl Lamprecht quite rightly observed that a new age began in the middle of the 15th century. But he was not able to make use of this fact. He said that the individual human being then began to be significant, to become intellectual. History really only begins in this age. At first it is studied according to the pattern of science. Of course, we cannot return to the old ways, but the impulses which lie at the root of historical evolution are subconscious.

When a person is possessed by something in the subconscious working in his soul, then something bursts through from the subconscious, as with Wilson, resulting in a brilliant and appropriate observation. But this makes it all the more difficult for someone who is called to be an individuality, an individual soul, to struggle for the truth. It is therefore necessary, especially in this intellectual age, in order to understand social, historical and moral life that something else emerge that can see into the part of the human being that cannot be grasped by our ordinary consciousness, that can see into the part where our ordinary consciousness no longer operates, where we dream and sleep away our normal life.

I have previously described this as imaginative knowledge, inspired knowledge and intuitive knowledge.—This is what looks into the spiritual world, and what can look below the threshold of our consciousness, where the real, true spirit works. The real nature of history, that humanity normally only dreams and sleeps through, can only be called forth if history is studied with the help of imagination and inspiration. In other words, because the real course of history is something that proceeds in the subconscious and does not reveal itself to our ordinary consciousness, it is imperative to apply what I have called the spiritual scientific method,—imagination, inspiration and intuition—to history, to the social, moral and legal life of humanity if we wish to come to know them as they are fundamentally. These facets of reality which first appear before the soul in pictures, in imaginations, must be called forth from the depths of historical evolution. These imaginations must then inspire. Then we shall come upon what is really at work in historical evolution. Attempts in the past such as those of Karl Lamprecht can occasionally come about through instinct, but it can only become truly spiritually enlightened knowledge when history is deepened by the science of spirit.

Now I do not wish to omit contrasting what today is called history with a few historical findings of the science of spirit. I would like to take as my starting point the fact that Karl Lamprecht instinctively divined something I have already mentioned—that a new age arose out of the old around the middle of the 15th century.

If we look with the eye of the seer—if we look with our perceptive consciousness into history, we do in fact find that there is an important turning point that begins roughly about the beginning of the 15th century. Everything that Karl Lamprecht says about subjectivism and the type is of lesser importance than this. Something begins at the turn of the 15th century that is not sufficiently recognized, that brings about a significant and tremendous change in the whole of human life, and which comes to expression most typically in the life of Central Europe. If we go back to the time before this age we find that the configuration, the structure of the human being and his actions are characterized by the fact that his understanding still operates in an instinctive way. In the science of spirit we therefore distinguish the more instinctive rational soul, where cleverness itself is still instinctive. This is superseded around the middle of the 15th century, and not according to the comfortable notion that nature makes no leaps, but is superseded by decided a leap, by a quite different configuration of the human soul. What in the science of spirit we call the consciousness soul which grasps everything through the consciousness, now becomes typical for humanity. And we can grasp what has happened since that time when we recognize that a whole age can be understood only by taking into consideration how this instinctive understanding, this rational soul, began to operate in more or less the same way in the 7th or 8th century B.C., how this understanding molded Greek history, Roman history, Roman law, Roman politics. Thus everything can be grasped only in the light of this instinctive kind of understanding. And we can comprehend what begins to happen around the middle of the 15th century, what is suddenly different in what takes place, only if we know that at that time the consciousness soul began to work.

The consciousness soul has a quite different relationship to reality, for it does not work instinctively from within, but makes the human being think and consider, drawing conclusions and proceeding purely intellectually. It is in this age that we live today. And what we have to study, and what can be observed in every detail, is what this consciousness soul brings to the very foundations of the soul. For the soul life comes to expression quite differently in such people as the Italian or Spanish who still have much that belongs to an older heritage, from such people as the British who have been particularly attracted to the material aspects of life by their geographical situation in evolving the consciousness soul. It is different again in Eastern Europe where there is no natural tendency for the consciousness soul to evolve, where today the evolution of the consciousness soul is slept through. And it is only in the age that will follow this present age of the consciousness soul that those who today are the Russian people will be ready to evolve their particular kind of soul which at the moment cannot be observed at all with the ordinary senses in the people who live in the east of Europe. Today it is imperative to acquire a deeper understanding for what is happening all over the earth. And also a deeper understanding is needed for what is taking place in the individual human being, inasmuch as he belongs to the great dream of history that can be understood only when we can call forth something from the dreaming human soul that cannot be approached with our normal observation: that from the 7th, 8th century until the 14th, 15th century instinctive willing and understanding evolved, and that a great change then comes about, under whose influence we now stand. This is one example.

I will cite another example. At a place such as this, where I have spoken for so many years, I will not shrink from describing the findings of the science of spirit quite concretely for the simple reason that we would not make any progress with the science of spirit if we did not gradually proceed to a description of concrete events.

Normally history draws only upon ordinary observation and ordinary documents for its study of earlier epochs. As I have said previously, the spiritual scientific method is based upon a particular development of powers slumbering in the human soul. It was explained how the soul is led to perceive spheres of life that never manifest themselves in the soul in normal life. Then was shown how the soul can free itself from the body, how it can then pursue knowledge independently of the body. Then the soul begins to utilize forces which, it is true, are present in normal life, but which remain in a slumbering state in the subconscious, the unconscious. Man's real life cannot be grasped by our ordinary powers of knowledge.

Let us take an ordinary phenomenon, but one which leads us deeply into the mysteries of human life, even of ordinary, everyday life. Let us take the fact that we can learn something by heart. In this way we can study how the human memory behaves. Now people usually believe that we master a mental image of what we take in, that we then have it in our consciousness and after a time it rises up again out of consciousness. This superstition is taught by countless psychologists. This is supposed to be science, this superstition that the ideas that we take in wander down into some indefinite sphere, wander about in the unconscious part of the soul, and that when need them they rise up again and appear as memory images. Such a view can only come about because no one has learned how to observe the real life of the soul. In fact, what happens is quite different. At the time we take in a mental image there is in our consciousness only the fact of this taking in. Parallel with this activity is another of quite a different nature that remains unconscious, that slips into the human organization and is responsible for something happening that is quite different from the formation of the mental image. This activity that takes place parallel with the formation of the image is unconscious. The memory is developed unconsciously. Now we have taken in new images. The parallel activity has functioned.

You can get a rough idea of what it is like—the time is too short to provide further proof—by remembering what it is like yourselves. Think of all the various other things you have had to do when learning a poem by heart or when trying to remember things for exams when you really have to cram,—think of all the things you have to do apart from taking in the image in order that the thing sticks! With our consciousness we try to support what happens unconsciously. There is really a parallel activity, and when people strike their foreheads when cramming themselves with what they have to remember, it is all a support for this unconscious activity. The mental image that we take in does not remain; it is temporary. What exists down below and is shaped and prepared there is something that we can perceive inwardly just as we can perceive things outwardly—the mental image is formed anew, it is something different from the original one.

Every time we use our memory the mental image has to be formed anew according to the inner copy. This is the true state of affairs. But the activity on which the memory rests, remains unconscious. Supposing it is drawn up into the consciousness so that we work in it and do consciously what otherwise takes place subconsciously in the parallel activity of forming images,—what have we then? It is the same power that is used when we apply imaginative knowledge. It forms the organism. We penetrate below the thresh-hold of consciousness, we penetrate to a sphere that we constantly exercise in life, but which remains unconscious. And we can always penetrate even deeper. The money then expands. We then acquire the possibility—and here I have to make a rather big leap because I have still to describe further findings—of following historical evolution from a purely spiritual viewpoint and of acquiring insight into the meaning and into the forces existing over the whole earth that carry the evolution of humanity. A number of laws are then revealed that go far beyond that ordinary observation can provide, but which for the first time raise what the human being sleeps and dreams through in his normal historical evolution, into consciousness.

The science of spirit, working with imagination, inspiration and intuition, can reach further back through the expansion of our memory into the memory of humanity so that we are really able to perceive what humanity has experienced. This can come about through the continuation of our own memory. It is true that it is much more difficult to do this than any other kind of scientific work—because we are ourselves deeply involved in it. Then we are able to reach back into earlier epochs of human evolution than the one I have just mentioned, which began in the 7th, 8th century B.C. and continued until the 15th century. We reach back into earlier times than this, into the time which followed what geology calls the ice age and by many geologists is called the flood. We must think of this as having taken place earlier than is normally believed—we go back thousands of years. What we come to then is not an ape-like humanity—this is a scientific superstition—but to a humanity whose soul constitution is quite different to today's. Allow me for once to risk describing in public a finding of the science of spirit. One must approach the science of the spirit without bias if one is not to regard its findings as merely fantastic. We reach back into an ancient epoch of earth evolution, about which we may say the following:

If we look at a human being and observe how he evolves, we see that what has to do with his bodily development takes place in the first years of childhood and in the later years of childhood up to puberty. And if we look still further we note that what develops in our souls goes hand in hand with our bodily development, right into the twenties. But then it stops. Our soul development no longer participates in this bodily development as it does with a child at the change of teeth, in growing and at puberty. The body and the soul then go their own separate ways. This is typical of our development from between the 25th and 30th years until old age—our souls no longer participate in what is developing in the body.

This was quite different in the first age that I will now describe, and which reaches back thousands of years. At that time the soul remained connected with the development taking place in the body until old age. The soul participated in this development right into the fifties and in the decline of the body in a way that today only happens in our childhood years. Because of this, the human being was able to experience something that he can no longer experience. As a matter of course we no longer experience in our souls the decline of our bodily organism. We are already withdrawn from our bodies. What happens in the soul comes to expression in our cultural life, where the soul is no longer dependent upon the bodily organism. At that time in Asia and India the soul-spirit life remained dependent on the life of the physical body until the fifties. This was quite a different kind of experience.

Then came the next epoch of historical evolution, when the dependence did not last so long, for at that time the soul's participation in the life of the body lasted until the forties. Then there was a further epoch when this participation lasted until the middle of the thirties. Here something quite special happened, which was still experienced by the old Egyptians and Chaldeans. And this was, that because the human being begins to decline in the life of the body after the age of 35, they were still able to experience this decline in their souls. Then this age came to an end, which was followed by the age I have already mentioned: the age of Greece and Rome, the effects of which lasted into the 15th century. In their soul life at that time people still remained more or less participants in the life of the body at least into their thirties. No one believes this today because no one really studies with inner personal interest what has come into being through the evolution of humanity. Since the 14th, 15th centuries the age has begun when the human being participates with his bodily life in the spirit-soul life until the end of the twenties. We no longer experience what the decline of human life is. In Greek and Latin times the beginning of the thirties was experienced within the instinctive understanding. At the present time this participation of the bodily life is concluded at the end of the twenties.

You can see that this is a remarkable law of history! As far as soul experience is concerned the age is progressively reduced, its final experience of the body is connected with an ever younger age. This is one of the most comprehensive and important laws of human evolution. Whereas the individual human being always grows older, humanity—if you now carry what I have just said to its logical conclusion—in its experience of the body, becomes younger. This means that it does not experience growing old as a reflex feeling in the soul; it only experiences its effect. But what the soul actually experienced in earlier times was quite different. It had something which enabled a person to look directly into the spiritual world by means of his instinctive knowledge. This must now be achieved again by humanity, only consciously. We have to learn to look into a sphere that cannot be perceived because today humanity can only experience what the body produces up to the age of 27.

I realize it is probably a bit much to speak about this growing younger of humanity, about the non-participation of the soul-spirit in the life of the body. But it does form the beginning of a true knowledge of history. For this true knowledge of history will be concerned with what is otherwise slept through, and we shall be able to understand properly what happens in history when we are able to appreciate such great, all-embracing laws.

I may be permitted to mention a personal experience. Those who have often heard me speak know that I mention personal experiences only if there is a particular reason to do so. It was because I directed my spiritual investigation to such matters that I came to know about what I have just told you—the growing younger of humanity and the influence on humanity due to the fact that the soul-spirit nature only experiences the life of the body in our younger years. That is how I found out about it. And I am quite convinced that anyone else applying the method of the science of spirit will find a law of history, though not of the kind that I characterized at the beginning of the lecture. And so I asked: How old was humanity then in the Greek age in its participation in the life of the body? At that time it continued until the beginning of the thirties. This was a tremendous change. For it is at this age that the human being enters upon a declining development. And in earlier times when he noticed this decline of the body he was granted a special form of spirituality. We study this spirituality when we study ancient wisdom and learning.

I have said that thinking is connected with a declining development. When the soul shared to a very large extent in the declining development of the body, it evolved a particular wisdom. This wisdom became lost in the age which began in the 7th century B.C. and ended in the 15th century. This age—inasmuch as we are interested in it and are still in it—represents the middle of evolution. If a new impulse had not arisen at that time there would have been the threat of a total break in our spiritual connection to the universe. The impulse came. When studying this growing younger of humanity I certainly did not think about such an impulse. That came later, and it belongs to one of the most shattering findings of the science of spirit.

I could see that the general course of human evolution had brought humanity to a crisis where its connection with the spiritual was threatened. What happened in this crisis?—I first came upon it after having found out about its origin. This is important, and I must single it out as a personal experience. I was shown the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha that occurred just in this age: the new impulse that gave humanity a fresh impetus. The Mystery of Golgotha thus finds its place in the historical evolution of humanity in a wonderful way.

Only for special reasons would I ever break what is expressed in the law that one should not use the name of God in vain. The science of spirit certainly leads to the great religious impulses, but I regard it as a duty to allow religious impulses to be cultivated by those who are called to do so. However, I know that what is achieved by the science of spirit also deepens the religious impulses of the human soul. It is precisely the thoughts presented by the science of spirit that can provide a really Christian view of life. But you cannot get people to accept this. They would only reproach us if they found that we have constantly to speak about the great religious content of evolution in a way that does not please them. They also reproach us if we do not do this because we leave it to them, knowing full well that by occupying ourselves with the science of spirit the religious life will certainly be deepened. For they say that the science of spirit, of course, does not talk about Christianity. These are the misunderstandings which are readily thrust into the battle against the science of spirit. We are reproached for whatever we say. If we do not speak about something because we feel that others are called to do this, we are then misunderstood and told that the science of spirit has no Christianity, or whatever it may be.

As I have said, the fact that this event concerning the whole cosmic connections of the universe happens at one particular moment in the evolution of humanity, belongs to the most shattering things that we can experience, especially since in my case—if you will allow me this personal remark—it was an experience quite unsought for.

I only wanted to indicate to you the beginning of a view of world evolution as seen by the science of spirit.

The forces that seek to penetrate more deeply into history have been divined instinctively, especially in our central European evolution. We only have to ask: How does the individual soul participate in this historical evolution? I have mentioned previously how in looking at thinking on the one hand and at the will on the other, we bring to expression in the overdevelopment of the sexual organism something that leads our spiritual-scientific observation to the eternal in the soul, to that which exists in the spiritual world before birth or conception, and which enters through the gate of death. This also leads to something else. The part of us that unites with our physical organism and that comes down from the spiritual world when we are conceived, when we are born, is intimately related—I have already said this today—to the part of us that operates throughout the whole course of our lives and makes us into complete and living human beings, intimately related to what works out of our souls as memory. If we now grasp not only the fact that the thinking can be conceived as inspiration, but also grasp the element that unites with our bodily organism, that flows out of inspiration and accompanies our memory and our growth, then we find that we not only emerge from a spirit-soul existence before beginning this bodily life, and which is united to what we evolve in life, but that within the part of us that goes through death is contained the desire to enter a human life again after the soul has been through a purely spiritual life, and that within this part of us is to be found not only what inspires us, but forms us, which not only comes from a spirit-soul existence before birth, but comes from previous incarnations upon earth.

Imagination, inspiration and intuition provide us with a true idea of previous lives on earth and a justified prospect of future lives on earth. I can only touch upon this for there is insufficient time for a more detailed description. But when we look at individual human life as it proceeds through repeated existences upon earth, we find something in historical evolution that can be grasped concretely. The human being naturally takes part in the various epochs I have described. He lives through the various cultures of the earth and he bears himself as soul from one epoch to the next, taking with him what he has evolved.

In the present epoch, when the consciousness soul is evolved, the human being unconsciously brings with him what he possesses from the previous epoch in which he once lived, and in which the instinctive soul worked instinctively in the understanding, and he now works upon this. Now we can fully grasp what this dream of history consists of, how human souls that live in each epoch work together and return again and again. This idea arose instinctively in the cultural life of Central Europe. But it has never been developed. The science of spirit is called upon to do this.

The pedants or “very clever people”—and I mention this in inverted commas—say: Of course, Lessing managed some wonderful things, but then he grew old and wrote his Education of the Human Race. If one has the necessary mean attitude, it is easy to be so very clever, much easier than being able to penetrate the mysteries of human life as did Lessing. Lessing achieved something immense. He indicated, if only in somewhat amateur fashion, how inner forces guide the evolution of man and of humanity. He says: There was once a time when human beings were educated in a quite particular way. Then there was a time when people were educated differently. Now is the time when self-education begins.—He had a feeling for the successive epochs, just as Karl Lamprecht had. Lessing had a feeling for even more in that he pointed out that the forces of one epoch are taken over into the following epochs by the human souls constantly reincarnating.

Of course it is easy to object to this by saying that human souls do not remember their previous lives. This is the same as saying that a four year old child cannot do arithmetic, therefore the human being cannot do arithmetic. Memory of earlier lives has first to be gained through the kind of knowledge I have referred to previously. Without this knowledge it is not possible to penetrate the sphere that is dreamed as history. This is something that humanity must grasp, for it is intimately connected with the present evolution of humanity.

Tremendous questions are presented to our souls today. One question is: What is the constitution of the human soul like in the east, in our center and in the west? We possess a science of history which, as we saw at the beginning, has gone quite astray. We need a science of history that can penetrate to those deeper forces of the human soul which bring what otherwise only dreams and sleeps, into our consciousness. When imagination and inspiration reach down into our experience of history that otherwise sleeps, we shall realize what it is that works between man and man in our social existence. Then quite different social laws will come into being from the ones of the past few centuries. What then emerges will be quite equal to the demands of life, the demands of reality. People experience history today in an odd way, and in conclusion I would like to give a few examples of this.

A certain J. H. Lambert was born in a South German city in the 18th century. In the 19th century, roughly in the middle of the forties, a monument was erected to him in that city. On the monument is a celestial globe as a sign that this man penetrated the laws of the heavens, as these things were done in the 18th century. Not much is known about this. He penetrated further than is possible with the Kant-Laplace theory. In the 1840's his native city erected a monument to him. A hundred years earlier his father, after several people had pointed out to him that his fourteen year old son was very talented and should be supported, applied for support. The worthy city gave 40 franks, but on condition that the son take himself off and did not return. A hundred years later—such is the course of history—a monument was erected.

Such things happen again and again. You may remember at the beginning of the war, particularly here in this city, I often had occasion to refer to a most significant thinker who once lived here, Karl Christian Planck. I referred to him at that time and had also spoken of him much earlier in my books. Now we see that people begin to take note of him, but not in the way that I meant. If Planck were alive today in conditions that are quite changed, he would express what he said, even in the 1880's, quite differently. Humanity can make use only of what is ardently experienced of reality, and not of what comes from looking back. Because people believe we need a new impetus, they think that a highly gifted and thoughtful person would say the same things today as he said in the 1880's. We honor the memory of such people if we continue to work in their spirit, and if we ask: How would they speak today if they were to speak out of the great spirit out of which they spoke then?

Today the times demand that we grasp what underlies the evolution of humanity, particularly concerning history. Then we shall not hear judgments like those I quoted at the beginning of the lecture. Nor will vague prophecies be uttered. But history will be described in such a way that we confront reality with feeling, which otherwise is only dissipated in dreams; that we confront reality with deeper forces, that we are equal to the demands made upon us. And the demands of the present time are tremendous.

We must know what is stirring in humanity from east to west, what is coming out in the events of today. We must be equal to this reality that is hammering so dreadfully upon our doors. We must take up the laws of history that are not contained in the laws today, laws that penetrate deeper than the purely intellectual, than the kind of understanding that has produced such great results in science, but which cannot grasp the social, political, historical and moral life of man. Goethe felt this. He not only expressed his impressions of the historical knowledge of his time, but he also expressed something that should come to be. What made an impression upon him was the best thing about history is not its abstract laws but the impulses that penetrate into our feelings and our enthusiasm.

By means of imagination, inspiration and intuition it will be possible to unveil what men sleep through. This will sink down into our feelings and enthusiasm. When reality draws toward us and we can approach reality, inwardly permeated by these impulses, we shall not utter prophetic or vaguely mystical statements, but in future our study of history will result in the fashioning of spiritual laws, not such as it has already, but laws which penetrate the human soul to the point of arousing enthusiasm which is equal to and can tackle the situation as it really is.

Not only is what Goethe said at that time true—what can be said today is also true. For today the following holds good: History must generate enthusiasm for the true, real and complete understanding of reality, for it is the best that can be offered to the life of the soul.

The most valuable aspect of history in the future will be the enthusiasm that it generates in the human soul.

Notes by Alice Kinkel Second Degree

Our human race will miss something essential if it stays away from our message; the consequences of this will only become apparent later. Those souls who accept our message will face a very specific future. All souls that are on earth today have not had consciousness of self for very long. The dream that one dreams, one has a son and he is buried alive, is typical.

The first Christian belief was the connection with the dead. The altars of the Christians were made in the shape of a coffin. For all souls there will come a time when they will look back on past times and lives. But for those who know nothing of reincarnation, this looking back will be agonizing. All souls will have to rely on themselves, but for those who have not taken up theosophy, this will be associated with a feeling of loneliness. It is intellectualism that dominates our time.

In our time of the fifth epoch, the astral body is the shell of belief, which causes a reflex, a reflection on our I-soul.

In the sixth period, the love character of the ether body will have to express itself in the I.

In the seventh period, the character of hope connected with the physical body will be reflected in the I.

The power of belief of the astral body seems to be entering the soul in our time. Morality and intellectuality are facing each other; ethics and morals are to purify intellectuality.

My dear friends! Today an even greater number of friends of Anthroposophy have made their appearance here, who have never before attended, and so I am obliged, with a few introductory words, to speak about the principles of the school. It certainly must be considered with utter gravity, that with the Christmas Conference here at the Goetheanum a breath of fresh air has come into the Anthroposophical Movement. And the entrance of this fresh air must penetrate thoroughly into awareness, especially so for the members of our School of Spiritual Science. Yes, I have pointed it out time and again, but I know that there are many friends of Anthroposophy here today, who have not yet been informed of the matter, and so I must lay it out once again.

It is certainly so, and it has had to be declared again and again since the Christmas Conference, that the Anthroposophical Movement must be strictly distinguished from the Anthroposophical Society.

The Anthroposophical Movement represents the infusion into human civilization of spiritual intervention and spiritual life-impulses, that can and should come into being in our time directly out of the spiritual world. The Anthroposophical Movement is there, not because human beings desire that it be there, but rather because it appears appropriate to the spiritual powers controlling and guiding the world, working to ensure the proper course of human history, it appears appropriate to these spiritual powers, to allow spiritual light, light that can come appropriately through Anthroposophy, to flow today into human civilization.

To that end the Anthroposophical Society was established as a governing body, to govern anthroposophical wisdom and institutions. And it had to be emphasized, time and again, that Anthroposophy is something above and beyond the Society, and that the Anthroposophical Society is merely the exoteric governance.

This has changed since the Christmas Conference here at the Goetheanum. Since the Christmas Conference it is quite the opposite. And only because the case is quite different, am I ready to clarify, with the Executive Council¹ established at the Christmas Conference, am I able to carry out the work that is appropriate, the work moreover that needs to be taken up, and only so am I able to clarify, together with the Executive Council, the assumed functions of leadership of what was established at Christmas as the Anthroposophical Society. What has happened through all this, I can address in just one sentence. This sentence is, that since Anthroposophy will now govern throughout in the Anthroposophical Society, all that occurs now within the Anthroposophical Society must be Anthroposophy itself. Since Christmas, Anthroposophy must be what is done in the Anthroposophical Society. Every individual deed must henceforth have the immediacy of an esoteric character. The appointment of the Dornach Executive Council on Christmas Day was an actual esoteric implementation, an implementation that must be considered as having come directly out of the spiritual world. Only when this is kept in mind by our anthroposophical friends can the Anthroposophical Society, which was actually founded in this manner, only then can the Anthroposophical Society flourish.

And so the Executive Council in Dornach, as underscored since the Christmas Conference, is an initiative executive council. Understandably, governance must take place. But governance is not the first matter of business to be attended to, but rather the business of allowing, of doing everything to allow Anthroposophy to flow through the Anthroposophical Society. To accomplish this is the aim.

The installation of the Dornach Executive Council took place in just such a way within the Anthroposophical Society. And it must be quite clear that from now on relationships within the Anthroposophical Society cannot be built on just any sort of bureaucratization, but rather must be built throughout on humanization. The statutes containing various paragraphs were produced in this way at the Christmas Conference. One must be aware, when one is a member, and must give affirmation to this, or else as described in detail in the statutes, the Executive Council at the Goetheanum must do what it has to do. And the Anthroposophical Society is constituted this way today. It is grounded on human relationships.

It is a small matter, but I must again and again emphasize it, that a membership card has been handed out to each member, signed by myself, so that at least, since at first it is a somewhat abstract matter, it is nevertheless handled with some personal rapport. It would have been quite possible to have had a stamp used with my signature on it. I don't do this, even though it does not lead to equanimity, by and by appending my signature to twelve thousand member-cards, I don't do it, because in reality the most abstract personal relationships would be established, in not having paused for just once, for just a moment, for each individual member, to focus on the name borne on the member's card. And self-understandably, by doing this, all future relationships will be somewhat more humanistic, and will put a mark on the commencement of concrete effective work within our society.

In this regard it must also become clear, I must emphasize this also, it must lie within the awareness of the membership, I emphasize this as otherwise many transgressions will occur, it must lie within the awareness of the membership that when the name General Anthroposophical Society is used, that the affirmation of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum has been obtained first. Even so, if something or other of an esoteric nature is distributed from the Goetheanum in Dornach and broadcast, this should only happen on the basis of an agreement with the Executive Council at the Goetheanum. Therefore, so that nothing will be claimed as going out in the name of the General Anthroposophical Society, that for those of us here, nothing given here as formulation and instructions will be claimed as having been authorized by the Goetheanum, that is, unless an agreement with the Executive Council at the Goetheanum is in place. No abstract relationships will be possible in the future, only concrete relationships. Whatever goes out from the Goetheanum, must have the stamp of approval of the Goetheanum, made in concrete. This is why we need the title "General Anthroposophical Society", for someone may put out something about lectures that may have been held, or about formulations of various sorts given here, someone, as an active member of the Anthroposophical Society, might share a document prepared with the letterhead of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum, or from Frau Wegman, and this must give the impression that the Executive Council at the Goetheanum is in agreement. It is really important for the Executive Council at the Goetheanum to be regarded as being at the center of the Anthroposophical Movement in the future.

Now and always, the relationship of this School to the Anthroposophical Society must be held in the consciousness of the membership. Someone may be a member of the Anthroposophical Society, if he has the inner heartfelt drive to get to know, to learn to live with, what goes through the world as anthroposophical ideas of wisdom and impulses of life. One undertakes no other commitment as such, other than taking up with heart and mind what has been bestowed by Anthroposophy itself. Out of this general membership, one can, when the time is right, for now a minimum of two years has been stipulated, one can after a time of having lived within the flow of the membership of the General Anthroposophical Society, one can then seek membership in the School of Spiritual Science.

In coming into this School of Spiritual Science, a person undertakes a really serious commitment to the Society, to anthroposophical endeavors, specifically, in becoming a member, he commits to being in truth a representative of anthroposophical endeavors before the world. This is essential in this day and age. Under any other conditions, the leadership of the School of Spiritual Science cannot readily commit itself to working together with someone as a member.

Do not think that this constitutes a limitation on your freedom, my dear friends. Freedom itself requires that all who here concern themselves with this remain free. And as members of the school can and should be free in this endeavor, so also must the leadership of the school be free, that is, in being able to establish with whom they can and will work, and with whom not. Therefore, when the leadership of the school, for one reason or another, is led to conclude that a member cannot be a true representative of anthroposophical matters before the world, then it must be possible, for instance, if admission is sought, to disapprove the admission, or if admission has already occurred, the person under discussion having already become a member, to say that the membership must be forfeited. This must be adhered to in the future unconditionally in the strictest sense, for through this in actual fact a free working relationship of the leadership of the school with the membership will be ushered in.

As has already been stated in the Members’ Supplement to the Goetheanum News, we are endeavoring step by step to make it possible for those unable to participate at the Goetheanum to take part in some way in the continuing work of the school. In great measure all that was possible would have already been presented, but there has been much to do here since the Christmas Conference, and we can only take the fifth step after the fourth, and not the seventh step after the first. We may look through various newsletters, and in what is released to peripheral members partake of what goes on here in the school. We have already started, and those in the school involved in medical affairs may participate by partaking of the newsletter Frau Dr. Wegman is sending out concerning the work of the school. Gradually other possibilities will emerge and I beg you to be patient in this respect.

The most comprehensive thing yet to be mentioned would be this, that the school in particular must not become attached to a mode of operation stemming from human impulses, but rather to a mode of operation from the side of the spiritual world. A resolution of the spiritual world is to be taken up with whatever means are possible. This School ought to be an institution of the spiritual world for the present day, as has been the case at all times in the mysteries. It must be pronounced today that this school itself must develop, so as to become what it actually can be in our time, a real mystery school. Thereby you will come to be the soul of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Along with this, moreover, it has already been pointed out in what manner the membership of the school is to be attached in earnest to the school. It is self-evident that whatever esoteric work has been going on will be taken into the work of the school. For this School is the fundamental esoteric bedrock and wellspring of all esoteric work within the Anthroposophical Movement. And to this end, various personalities of whatever background, in founding something esoteric in the world, must have the agreement of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum. These personalities must either come into full agreement with the Executive Council at the Goetheanum, or else they cannot in the least allow what emerges from the Goetheanum to flow into their impulses or into their teachings. Whoever seeks to strive esoterically under conditions other than these just mentioned, simply cannot be a member of this School. In this case such a person must be outside of the school, striving esoterically but by this School unrecognized, and he must himself be clear, that such undertakings can incorporate nothing of what wells up within and emanates from this school. Association with the school must be as thoroughly and concretely joined as possible. In this way each member of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, each and every member, must make clear to himself, that the school must be able to be regarded in such a manner, that a member is actually a true representative of anthroposophical matters before the world, that every single member's exoteric involvement with Anthroposophy is just so, that it is dealt with as a member of the school.

The attempt has certainly been made at the Goetheanum, in the event of my no longer being in a leadership position, no longer being the President of the Anthroposophical Society, for the school to develop in a fashion similar to other schools. Solely by means of interpersonal relationships that will not be possible. Here one finds real esoteric substance, which just cannot be found in any other school. And of course, no attempt will be made to rush into some sort of concordance with schools of the world, but rather what should begin at once, is to bring up questions, whenever an honorably searching person of today, from some area of life or another, comes upon this substance, questions that just cannot be answered outside of the esoteric.

It must be so in the future, especially for members. It is simply the way it is, for with the Christmas Conference something actually occurred, and this occurrence must be taken seriously. It has occurred, and in the future, because initiatives ought to be disseminated from this site, from the Goetheanum, in fulfilling its mission, it must be taken most seriously, it must be maintained unconditionally as a standard in fulfilling its mission, it must be crystal clear, and in the future in all the falderal attended to by members of the School it must be hearkened to, and again and again attention must be drawn back to it, in order to have a firm yet free acquaintanceship with it, which is by name, that I am present as a representative of Anthroposophy that flows forth from the Goetheanum. Whoever does not do this with a will, whoever cannot take this up again and again in an unconstrained free and easy manner, mulling over Anthroposophy quietly until after quite some time being prepared, striving in some manner or another along the lines of this policy, whoever believes that he will progress by first disavowing us in order then to be led back to us, usually does not really return to us, and should rather just give up his school membership at once. Membership in the School in the future, I can assure you, will be taken most seriously. I believe that for the various members of the school who henceforth really take up Anthroposophy with a will, taking it up not just for any reason, but taking Anthroposophy up in their work, taking up Anthroposophy in their work in the manner of holding it dear in their hearts, that it will lead again and again to the following phrase coming to mind, that one should approach people with Anthroposophy not just as immediately present and obvious. It must be communicated, by mouth or in some other fashion, in such a way that people can choose merely to remain within their own point of view outside of the school.

All this is what I must once more set out before you. And it had to be mentioned here today, because there are many, many friends of Anthroposophy who until now have not taken part in the work of this School. And specifically, because so many friends are here today who are new to the Class, we have had to wait awhile to start the lesson, we also, before the lesson has even begun, have had to attend to this preamble, which is, in a certain sense, an introduction to today's lesson. I will be holding a second lesson, the date of which is still to be determined, but no other friends will be able to attend this second lesson, other than those who are here today. Also, I will ask any others, who may be coming later, to be patient. Essentially, we cannot accomplish anything, when each time, whenever a lesson is held here, if ever and again new members arrive. With today's lesson we must be considered ourselves fulfilled with those actually in possession of memberships at this time. Certainly, one can become a member, although at the next lesson only those can take part, who are also already in such a position today. Yes, only those will be in this day's continuation.

Well, I would like here and now to begin the declamation, but at first please take note of this, that initially you are merely witnessing the mantric formulation as a reference to what initially emerged throughout time in the mysteries, and then by way of the outgoing mysteries from there hence unto the stars, as the imprinted script unto the entire cosmos, and into human souls, resounding in human hearts, resounding as the great clarion call to human beings, to strive after a real insight, a real knowing of one's self. The clarion call is this, "O Man, know yourself!" It resounds out of the entire cosmos.

As we gaze out to the resting stars, to those stars that in especially significant script stand in the zodiac, to those resting stars which through their gathering together in certain forms bring to expression the great cosmic script, then for one who understands this writing, there will initially be inscribed the contents of the Word of Worlds "O Man, know yourself!"

As one gazes out upon those, that as wandering stars journey along their ways, initially the sun and the moon, although also the other wandering stars, among which are the sun and the moon, then may be revealed, wrapped into the journeying paths of these wandering stars, as also in the forms of the resting stars, the content of the world-strengthening, soul-daunting Word of Worlds, and just so in the movement of the heart’s-, the heart’s world-content, the contents of one’s innermost nature.

And we take part through what we experience in the elements around about us out in the circumference of the earth, as well as experiencing them through our skin, through our senses, through having them nearby us, moving in us, and acting in our own bodies as Earth, Water, Fire, Air, through all that will the impulse of willing be embossed in the following words.

In this way we may allow the Word of Worlds to be intoned to human beings, to work on our souls by means of these mantric words:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

My dear friends, my dear brothers and sisters, nothing is known but what flows forth from the spiritual world. Whatever passes as knowing by mankind, but is neither fathomed from what emerges from the spiritual world, nor is shared by those who are able to quest within the spiritual world, is not real knowing. The human being must be clear about this, when he gazes around about the world, gazing in the realms of nature at the things that present themselves in color upon color, at the things that are revealed radiant and resplendent, at the things living overhead in the beaming stars, at the things presenting themselves in the warmth of the sun, and at the things that sprout forth out of the earth. In all of these things there is sublimity, grandeur, beauty, and the fullness of wisdom. And a person would be greatly in error, if he were to blithely pass by this beauty, sublimity, enormity, and fullness of wisdom. The person must, when an esoteric wishes to press on with him into real knowing, he must also have a sense of whatever is around about himself in the world, an open, free sense. For during the time between birth and death, during his earthly existence, he is obliged to draw his forces out of the forces of the earth, to carry out his work within the forces of the earth.

But so true it is, that the person certainly must take part in all that is around him in color after color, tone after tone, warmth after warmth, star after star, cloud after cloud, creature after creature in the external realm, so true it is, that the person looks there around about at all of the abundance, grandeur, sublimity, fullness of wisdom, and beauty imparted to him through the senses, and can nowhere find anything, of what he himself is. Directly then, as he has a real sense of the sublimity, beauty, and grandeur in his surroundings in life on earth, then he will immediately take notice, that nowhere to be found in this light, bright realm of earth is the innermost source of his own existence. It is elsewhere. And having a full, inward appreciation of this, this brings the person to the point of seeking an opening into the state of awareness in which he can grapple with what we call the threshold to the spiritual world. This threshold, that lies immediately before an abyss, this must be approached, and when there it must be remembered, that in all that surrounds a person on the earth in earthly existence between birth and death, the fountainhead of what it is to be a human being is not to be found.

Then one must know that on this threshold stands a spirit-form that is called the Guardian of the Threshold. This Guardian of the Threshold is concerned in a way for the welfare of the person, that the person does not come unprepared, without having thoroughly lived with and taken deep into his soul the things that I have already spoken about, that the man does not approach this threshold unprepared.

However then, when the person in all seriousness is really prepared for spiritual knowing, and it may be that he acquires it in clairvoyant consciousness, or it may be that he acquires it through healthy common sense, for in keeping informed both are possible. Whichever is the case, whether knowing about or seeing the Guardian of the Threshold, just then is it possible, that the Guardian of the Threshold may really reach out with a guiding hand and allow the person to look out over the abyss. There, where the person seeks his inner being’s true condition, his actual origin, lying there initially, however, on that side of the threshold, is uttermost darkness.

My dear friends, my dear brothers and sisters, we seek light, in order to see the origins of our own human essence in the light. Darkness however spreads out at first. The light that we seek must stream out of the darkness. And it streams out of the darkness only when we become aware of how the three fundamental impulses of our individual soul-life, namely thinking, feeling, and willing, are held together here in life on earth through our physical body. In physical earth existence thinking, feeling, and willing are bound together.

If I were to draw it bundled together schematically, I would draw it first with thinking [yellow], then with feeling [green] extending over into thinking, and then with willing [red] extending over into feeling. In this way the three are bound together in earthly existence.

The person must learn at heart that the three may separate from one another. And he will learn this when he steadfastly, more and more, takes the meditations recommended by this School as the forceful content of his life of soul. He will notice that it starts to happen. [It was once again drawn on the board.] Thinking [yellow] will become free, cast loose from its union with feeling, as will his feeling [green], as will his willing [red]. For the person learns to perceive without his physical body.

The physical body had been holding thinking, feeling, and willing together, drawn together into one another. [Around the first drawing an oval was drawn.] Here [by the second drawing of thinking, feeling, and willing] the physical body is not at hand.

Gradually, through the meditations that he receives here from the school, the person begins to feel himself outside of his body, and he comes into that state of being in which whatever the world is, for him will be the self, and whatever self was, for him will be the world. As we stand here on the earth in our earthly existence, we feel ourselves as human beings, we say, in that we become inwardly aware, that this is my heart, these are my lungs, this is my liver, this is my mouth. The various things that we call our organs, called by us our human organization, we label as our own. And we identify around about, there is the sun, there is the moon, there are the stars, the clouds, a tree, a stream. We denote these various things as being external to us, as we are bound up in our organs. We are quite distinct from those things that we identify externally as the sun, the moon, the stars, and so forth.

When we have prepared our soul sufficiently, so that we are able to perceive without the body, that is, distinct from the body, in the spirit-all, then a directly opposite awareness commences. We speak then of the sun as we speak here in earth existence of our heart, namely, that is my heart. We speak of the moon as that which forms my character. We speak of the clouds in a manner similar to speaking of our hair on earth. We call our organism all of what was a part of the whole surrounding world for the earthly man. And we identify outwardly, look there, a human heart, a human lung, a human liver, they are objective, they are the world. And as we here as men and women look out toward the sun and moon, as we gaze about in a physical body, so do we gaze about from the perspective of the world-all, in which the sun and moon and stars and clouds and streams and mountains are in us, and we look out at the person, who is our external world. The difficulty is only in the relationship of space. And this difficulty will be overcome.

And we may be sure, that as soon as we step out with our thinking out of our physical body, this thinking is at one with all that reveals itself in the resting stars. As we call our brain here, that it serves as the workhorse of our thinking, so do we begin to appreciate the resting stars, namely the resting stars of the zodiac, as our brain, when we are out there in the world and then gaze down upon the man external to us.

And those things that revolve as wandering stars, we perceive as just what our force of feeling is. Our power of feeling moves then in the coursing of the sun, the moon, in the coursing of the other wandering stars. Yes, between what we experience as thinking in the resting stars, and feeling, is the sun within ourselves [Between yellow and green on the second drawing, the sign of the sun was placed.] And between feeling and willing lies the moon, which we feel as being within ourselves. [Between green and red the sign of the moon was placed.] And quite simply, in meditating on these figures, lying within these figures is the force, ever more and more, for us to approach a spiritual perspective. One may come to this only when the substance of what I speak, of what I articulate here with these words, can actually be inwardly experienced, namely going out and beyond the physical body, extending oneself out over the cosmos, feeling the members of the cosmos, sun and moon, stars, and so forth, as one's own organs, and looking back at the person as being in the external world.

Dear friends, dear brothers and sisters, the thinking that people practice here on the earth between birth and death is just a corpse. It is not living. What a person otherwise likes to dwell on endlessly in his head about beauty, sublimity, and grandeur about the physical world in his vicinity, these thoughts do not live. But in pre-earthly existence they were living. They were living, these thoughts, before we descended into the physical world, while we were still living as beings of soul and spirit in the soul-spiritual world. Thoughts such as we have here upon the earth were full of life there, and our physical body is the grave in which the dead world of thoughts is buried, when we descend down upon the earth. And here we carry the thought-corpses within us. And with the thought-corpses, not with fully living thoughts, we think about what is in our sensory surroundings here upon the earth. But before our descent down into this physical world, there was active in us fully alive thinking.

My dear friends, one only needs, ever again and forever, with all of one's inner power and force, to thoroughly absorb this truth within. One comes to the point of developing in one's awareness a certainty that it is so. One learns to know the person as such. One learns to know him, so that one can gaze upon him, and say, there is the human head. [An outline of a head was drawn.] This human head is the base and the bearer for earthly corpse-thinking. They sprout forth, [It was drawn as an elongated form down to the right.] these thoughts, but dead, overlaid upon what has been taken in through the eyes, taken in through the ears, through the sense of warmth, taken in through other senses. This is how we regard thinking, in reference to the earth.

But gradually we learn to penetrate through this thinking. Behind it in the spirit-cell of the human head, there still reverberates true, living thinking, the thinking in which we lived before we descended into the physical world. As one gazes at a person, then most certainly one gazes initially at his dead thinking [Drawn as a red part of the head.]. But behind this dead thinking, in the head's spirit-cell, is living thinking. [Drawn as a yellow part of the head.] And this living thinking has brought along the primal force to construct our brain. The brain is not the producer of thinking, but rather the product of pre-birth living thinking.

And so, if one were to gaze with the proper awareness behind what the person reveals in the superficiality of his head's earthly dead thinking, looking into what is behind the spirit-cell, then one might gaze upon the living thinking which certainly is there. This is similar to an act of will coming to one's attention, willing as such in the human musculoskeletal system, for it is certainly there in us, but sleeping. We simply don’t know how a thought goes down, when it has the intention, the will, to make this or that happen in our muscles and elsewhere. Looking at what lives in us as willing, we behold willing in the spirit-cell as the thinking that lies behind sensually aligned thinking. However, the willing we behold there, which we are becoming aware of as thinking, is the creative force for our thinking-organ. There this thinking is no longer just human-thinking, there this thinking is world-thinking.

Understanding a person in this way, somehow being able to look behind earthly thinking, to the thinking which first made the foundation for earthly thinking in the brain, this allows sensual thinking to be cast off into the worldly void, and what emerges as an act of will is eternal thinking.

All of this brings us into the state of mind, within which we can allow the mantric words to work in us.

Look² behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkened³ spirit cell
Willing ascends from bodily depths;
Through the strength of your soul
Let dead thinking flow into worldly void.
And the will, it shall arise
As world-thought-creating.

The imagination must gradually stand before you, my dear friends, the imagination that from the top of your head are streaming out the dead thoughts that are aligned with the sensory world. Behind this lies true thinking, at first merely as darkness, shining behind and through the sensory thinking, the true thinking that actually configured the brain, into which a person descends out of the spiritual world into the physical. It is however a sort of willing. And one sees, then, how willing ascends from a person [A few white lines were drawn from below upward.], spreading out then in the head, and then becoming world-thoughts, because what lives in willing as thinking, is even now world-thinking.

Toward this end one seeks ever more fully to understand, ever more inwardly to grasp, and ever more and more to bring to an inner anchorage the mantric thoughts which one places within the soul, with these words, in the following way. [The first stanza was written on the board.]

Look behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkened spirit cell

Please note that one must gaze behind the thinking. [Behind was underscored.]

Willing ascends from bodily depths;

Now one must be strong in soul, to allow the customary sensory thoughts to be cast off.

Through the strength of your soul
Let dead thinking flow into worldly void.
And the will, it shall arise
As world-thought-creating.

In these seven lines is contained most certainly the secret of human-thinking in its connection with the world-all.

One must not make a pretense of this, in just grappling with these things with the intellect. One must allow these things to live as meditations in the heart's depth. And these words have strength. They are constructed harmonically. Thinking, willing, worldly-void, willing, and world-thought creating [These words were underlined on the board.] are joined together here in an inner organization of thought, so that they can work effectively upon imaginative awareness.

Even as we can look behind the human head, the human head becoming a mediator in gazing into world-thought creating, so may we glance behind the human heart, as the representation, the physical representation, the imaginative representation of the human soul. Even as thinking is the abstract representation of the human spirit, so may we glance behind the human heart, as the representation of feeling. Even so we can gaze into feeling as it is related to the ways of earth in human earthly existence between birth and death. We can gaze into feeling, although here not behind feeling, but rather within feeling [drawing, a yellow oval]. Then, just as we may discern world-thought-creating behind spirit-cell-thinking, so we may grasp in feeling, the representation of the heart, we may truthfully grasp in feeling, streaming through feeling, something that goes in and out of a person from the entire cosmos. World-living is what we truly grasp, world-living that in men and women becomes human-soul-living.

As it must stand there [in the first verse], "behind thinking's sensory light," so must it now be called, "into feeling's" in the second mantra, which must become harmonically interwoven together with the first.

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams
Living streams from world afar;
Through calm of heart in sleep
Let human feeling waft away;
And world living shall come alive
As human-being’s-power.

[The second stanza was now written on the board.]

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams

Feeling is merely a waking dream. Feelings are not so well known to a person as are thoughts. They become known to him as the builder of dreams. In such manner are feelings dreams while awake. And just so are they called.

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams

Living

Here [in the first verse] "willing" streams out of body's depths, although here streaming out of world distance into soul-weaving is "living." [The word living was underlined, and the mantric line was continued.]

streams from world afar;

[In the drawing four horizontal arrows were made.]

Now similarly, as here [in the first verse], thinking should be cast out through strength of soul into the world-void, we now allow feeling’s dreams to waft away, in order, however, to discern in feeling's fabric of soul, what streams in as world living. When feeling's dreams fully fade away in sleep, when the individual human feeling ceases, then moving within a person is world-living.

Living streams from world afar;

[The writing was continued.]

Through calm of heart in sleep

Here [in the first verse] we need strength of soul; here [in the second verse] we need complete inner peace in sleep to allow feeling's dreams to fade away, and for heavenly world-living to stream into the human soul.

Through calm of heart in sleep

[The writing was continued, and the words "waft away", "world living", and human-being's-power" were underlined.]

Let human feeling waft away;
And world-living shall come alive
As human-being’s-power.

In these seven lines is the whole secret of human feeling, how out of the unity into the trinity, it can itself contain self-understanding.

Even so we can gaze out upon the human limbs, in which willing manifests. There, when we gaze out upon these human limbs, in which willing manifests, [On the drawing, a white arrow was drawn up in elongated form.], there we cannot say "look behind" or "look into", there we must say, "look over," for thinking streams down from the head in willing. In customary awareness a person is not able to observe it, but streaming from the head into the limbs are thoughts, in order that willing can work in the limbs.

Then, however, when we observe willing working in the limbs, when we see in every arm movement, when we see in every leg movement, how the stream of willing streams, then we will also be aware, how in this willing a secret thinking lives, a thinking that grasps earthly existence immediately. Yes, it has been laid in the foundation of our being from earlier lives on earth, that just there, through the limbs, earthly existence is grasped, apprehended, so that through this apprehension we have present existence. Thinking sinks down into the limbs. And when we see it in the willful movement of the limbs, how it sinks down of its own accord, this thinking, then we may catch a glimpse of thinking in willing. [On the drawing, red was drawn downwards in elongated form.]

As we gaze out with the soul, it otherwise would be concealed from us, how thinking lives in arms, in hands, in legs, in feet, and in toes, and then we must see that this thinking is actually light. It streams, thinking as light streams through arms and hands, through legs and toes. And by itself it transforms willing, which otherwise lives in the limbs as sleeping willing. It transforms willing, and thinking appears as willing’s magical essence, which is transferred into a person from an earlier life on earth, carried by the spirit, into the present life on earth.

Look over willing’s bodily working,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from forces of head;
Through soul-viewing brought to light
Let human willing be transformed;
And thinking, it shall appear
As willing’s-magical-essence.

It is a sort of conjuring, it is effective, magical, this unseen thinking in the limb's willing. A person begins to understand when he knows that thoughts, because we sleep in the will, that thoughts, even when not apparent in willing, are magically effective in the limbs as willing. And he begins to understand true magic, a magic that at first appears as thoughts, that lives through arms and hands, through legs and toes. [The third stanza was written on the board, during which the words "thinking", "transformed", "thinking", and "willing’s-magical-essence" were underlined.]

Look over willing’s bodily working,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from forces of head;
Through soul-viewing brought to light
Let human willing be transformed;
And thinking, it shall appear
As willing’s-magical-essence.

And in this is the secret of human willing, how such willing, formed out of the world-all, works magically, is contained in human beings.

And so, my dear friends, my dear brothers and sisters, we will observe this as a foundation, for the time still to be announced, when I will build further upon this foundation. We will observe this as a foundation, using it in meditation, as we allow the mantric words ever and ever again to be drawn through the soul.

Look behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkened spirit-cell
Willing ascends from bodily depths;
Through the strength of your soul
Let dead thinking flow into worldly void.
And the will, it shall arise
As world-thought-creating.

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams
Living streams from world afar;
Through calm of heart in sleep
Let human feeling waft away;
And world-living shall come alive
As human-being’s-power.

Look over willing’s bodily working,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from forces of head;
Through soul-viewing brought to light
Let human willing be transformed;
And thinking, it shall appear
As willing’s-magical-essence.

• 1. der Vorstand
• 2. One may say Sieh in German, but in English one does not say “See over there,” or “see into your heart,” but rather “look over there,” or “look into your heart.”
• 3. Finstren is one of two variants of the uninflected comparative form of the adjective “dark” (finster). As this adjective is also sometimes inflected in German, meaning the ending of the word changes to express a grammatical function or attribute, it is confusing to translate, but a new ominous word such as darkling should not be invented. Dark or darkened seem to capture the meaning.

In order to round off, so to speak, what we could only superficially outline during the last few days regarding education based on anthroposophical investigations, I would like to add something today, as an example of how these ideas can be put into practice, about how the Waldorf school is run. What has to emerge clearly from the spirit of this education is that equal consideration be given to everything pertaining to the human body, soul, and spirit. If the actual teaching is carried out as characterized, therefore, it will at the same time become a kind of hygiene in the life of the child and, if necessary, even a therapy.

To see this clearly, one has to be able to look at the child's being in the right way. And here it must be understood that everything we have said about the child's development, from birth to the change of teeth, is revealed most of all in the activities of the nerve-sense system. Every organic system naturally extends over the entire human body, but each system is at the same time localized in a definite part of the physical organism. Thus the nervous system is mainly organized in the head. But when speaking about the three main organic systems of the human being—the nerve-sense system, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic-motor system—we do not imply that they are confined only to the head, the chest, and the metabolic-limb systems, because this would be completely inaccurate. It is impossible to divide the human organization into three separate spatial regions. It can only be said that these three systems interpenetrate one another, that they work and weave into each other everywhere.

The nerve-sense system is, nevertheless, localized primarily in the region of the head. The rhythmic system, which includes everything of a rhythmic nature in the human being, is mainly organized in the chest organs, in the organs of breathing and blood circulation. Here one must not ignore the fact that everything that furthers the rhythms of digestion—and ultimately those of sleeping and waking—also belongs to the rhythmic system, insofar as digesting, and sleeping and waking are based physically within the human organism. The actual chemical-physiological process of digestion is closely connected with all that forms the human motor system. As for movement itself, a reciprocal activity occurs between the nutritional and digestive system on the one hand, and the actual physical movement on the other.

All of this means that, although the three systems work naturally into each other during the child's early years until the change of teeth, the formative and malleable shaping forces involved in the child's growth and nourishing processes work mainly downward from the head, the center of the senses and the nervous system. Consequently, if a young child becomes ill, that illness is due primarily to the influences of the nerve-sense system. That is why young children before their second dentition are especially likely to suffer from illnesses that originate from within—those called childhood illnesses.

The influences that emanate from the environment, those that reach children through their urge to imitate, have a very powerful effect on this vulnerability to childhood illnesses, more than is commonly realized by the medical profession within the current materialistic climate. Thus, a sudden outburst of anger by an adult, when witnessed by a young child, can be responsible in many cases for an attack of measles. I am not referring to the psychopathic outburst of a psychopath, but to a less violent form of temper that can very often be seen among people. The shock that follows, together with its moral and spiritual implications, must certainly be seen as a contributing factor for measles. Furthermore, all these influences that work on the child will remain as after-effects until almost the ninth year. If a teacher happens to become very angry in school (for example, if a child accidentally spills some ink, and the teacher reacts by shouting, “If you do that again, I'll pour the entire inkwell over your head!” or “I'll throw it at your head!”), then we shouldn't be surprised when this has a very damaging effect on the child's physical health. Of course, I have chosen a fairly drastic example, but this kind of thing can happen too easily in a classroom.

Inner dishonesty in teachers also has a very harmful effect on children, even after their second dentition. Falsehoods can take on many different guises, such as insincerity or hypocritical piety, or establishing a moral code for the children that the adults would not dream of applying to themselves. In such cases the element of untruth weaves and lives in the words spoken, and in what unfolds in front of the child. An adult may remain totally oblivious to it, but children will take it in through the teachers' gestures. Through the nerve-sense system, dishonesty and hypocrisy have an extremely powerful effect on the organic structure of the child's digestive tract, and especially on the development of the gall bladder, which can then play a very significant role for the rest of the child's life.

All pedagogical interactions have to be permeated by this intensive awareness of how spirit, soul, and body constantly interweave and affect each other, even though it is unnecessary for teachers to speak of it all the time. And since the human organism, from the head downward, is so active during these early years—that is, from the polarity of the nerve-sense system—and because abnormal conditions can easily override socalled normal conditions in the head region, the child is particularly vulnerable to childhood diseases at just this age.

The years between the change of teeth and puberty, strangely enough (and yet, true to the nature of the human organism) are the child's healthiest years, although this is not really surprising to anyone with insight into human development. This is because the child's entire organic structure at this age radiates from the rhythmic system. This is the very system that never becomes tired or overstimulated on its own. Symptoms of illness that occur during these years are due to outer circumstances, although this statement must not be taken too strictly, of course, and only within the context of actual life situations. The child who is subject to illness at this particular age, when the rhythmic system plays such a dominant part has been treated improperly, one way or another, in outer life.

When puberty is left behind, the occurrence of illness radiates outward from within—that is, from the metabolic-motor system. That is the time of life when the causes of illness, to which young people are exposed, arise from within. Because the method of teaching the actual lessons plays a large part in the physical well-being of the students, we must always allow a certain physical and soul hygiene to be carried, as if on wings, by our educational ideas and methods. This must always be part of whatever we do with our classes, particularly during the second period of childhood.

Here certain details can be indicated. Let us take, for example, a child with a melancholic disposition. If you give that child sugar—an appropriate amount, of course—you will find that the sugar has a totally different effect than it would have on a predominantly sanguine child. In a melancholic child the sugar will have a suppressive effect on liver activity. This gradual lessening of liver activity, in radiating out into the entire being of the child, effectively curbs the melancholic tendencies from the physical side. It is a useful expedient, but one has to understand it. Using it as an aid does not mean the denial of soul and spirit, because anyone who knows that spirit is working in all physical or material processes—as anthroposophy reveals—will not view the effect of an increased sugar-intake on the activity of the liver as something merely physical, but as the working of soul and spirit brought about by physical means. (Naturally, the result always depends on the correct dosage.) In the case of a sanguine child it can be beneficial to stimulate liver activity by withholding sugar.

This is an example of how knowledge of the interaction and mutual working of body, soul, and spirit can greatly benefit the three systems of the human being. It definitely allows one to say as well that, contrary to frequently held opinions, Waldorf pedagogy (which arises from spiritual foundations) certainly does not neglect the physical aspects of education. On the other hand, you will find that other forms of pedagogy, bent on developing the physical part of the child according to fixed, abstract rules indeed serve it least, because their adherents do not realize that every soul and spiritual stirring within a child has a direct effect on his or her physical nature.

Because of all this, I felt it necessary to give a seminar course before the opening of the Waldorf school, for the benefit of those who had been chosen to become its first teachers.¹ One of the primary aims of this course was to bring the fundamental and comprehensive thought of the working together of soul, body, and spirit into the new pedagogy before its actual launching; for knowledge of this has been lost gradually during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—more so than is generally realized.

During the years after the Waldorf school founding, shorter supplementary courses were also given.² It goes without saying that anyone who seriously considers taking an active role in Waldorf education must live in the spirit of these courses. This is what really matters. If one wants to treat a certain subject in a living way, the details are not as important, because they can always be worked out of the spiritual background. The details will then also appear in proper perspective. You may already have seen, through talks given by Waldorf teachers such as Dr. von Baravalle³ and Dr. von Heydebrand,⁴ how the attempt was made to let the spirit living in this education flow into the ways of teaching various subjects. Something like lifeblood will pulse through the lessons when the human structure is comprehended in terms of an all-comprising spiritual entity. In this respect, of course, much of what can be said today will have to remain brief and superficial.

I mentioned yesterday that a united faculty of teachers, functioning like the soul and spirit of the entire school organism, is absolutely fundamental to running a Waldorf school. According to one of its pedagogical impulses, it is not so much a statistical collection of the teachers' observations expressed during the meetings that is important, but that a living and individualizing psychology should be jointly developed from out of the actual experience of teaching lessons. I would like to give you an example.

In our school, boys and girls sit next to each other. When we started, there were just over one hundred students in the Waldorf school. But our numbers have grown so quickly that we had seven hundred pupils last year, which necessitated opening parallel classes, especially in the lower grades of the school. Now we find that there are more girls than boys in some classes, while in others there are more boys. The number of boys and girls more or less even in very few classes. To insist on equal numbers in each class would not only be pedantic, but would not work. First of all, new arrivals do not come neatly paired, and, second, such a scheme would not represent real life. The right way to proceed in such a situation is to make it possible to apply educational impulses whatever the outer circumstances may be.

All the same, we soon found that a class with a majority of girls presented a very different psychological picture than those with more boys, aside from outer circumstances—that is, aside from the most obvious. What gives such a class its psychological character is the imponderable element that easily escapes one's notice. Nevertheless, when working together in our meetings, the opportunity was presented to make fruitful investigations in this direction. And it soon became clear that sharing such questions of common interest greatly contributed to the school's becoming a living, ensouled organism.

Let's imagine someone who says, “I want to think only thoughts that will be useful to me later in life. I don't want to allow anything to enter my soul that does not have direct value for later life, because this would be uneconomical.” Such a person would become an appalling figure in life! First, because such a person would have nothing to dream about—indeed, could never dream. Of course, people who are inclined in this direction might simply reply, “Dreams are unimportant. One can very well do without them, because they really don't mean anything in life.” True, dreams have little consequence for those who accept only external reality. But what if there were more to dreams than just fantastic images? Naturally, those who believe they see something highly significant and deeply prophetic in every dream, even if it is only caused by the activities of their liver, bladder, or stomach—people who consider dreams more important than events in waking life—they will not draw any benefit from their dreaming. Yet, if one knows that in one's dream life forces are expressed—even if only indistinctly—that have either a health-giving or an illness-inducing effect on the breathing, circulatory, and nerve-sense systems, then one also knows that half of the human being is mirrored in these dreams, either in a hygienic or in a pathological sense. Further, one will recognize that not to dream at all would be similar to undermining the digestion or circulation through taking some form of poison. It is important to realize that much of what may appear unnecessary in a human being for outer life, nevertheless, plays an important part—similar to the way we see outer nature. Just compare the infinite number of herring eggs, distributed all over the seas, with the number of herrings actually born, and you could easily reproach nature for being tremendously wasteful. However, this could only be the opinion of those who do not know of the powerful spiritual effects the dead herring eggs have on the growing herrings. A certain number of eggs have to die so that a certain number of eggs may thrive. These things are all interconnected.

If we now relate this thought to the school as a living organism, we have the following situation: In the staff meetings of our teachers such matters as the proportion of boys to girls, and many other problems, are being worked through from a psychological and pneumatological aspect as part of a common study of soul and spirit. Efforts are made continually to effect a new understanding of the psychological and pathological problems facing the school. And, in order to cover every contingency, something else is essential in the life of a school, something we have in the Waldorf school, and that is a school doctor. He is a full-time staff member, who also teaches various classes in the school. This allows the teachers—insofar as they actively take part in all the meetings—to discuss and work through pathological and therapeutic questions, as well as those posed by the specially gifted child. Problems are studied not only for the benefit of individual cases—more or less statistically—but they are worked through in depth. In this way, much can be learned from each individual case, even if it does not always appear to be immediately useful.

One could compare this situation with someone who has taken in one thing or another, and declares it to be of no use in life. Nevertheless, life may prove otherwise. Similarly, whatever is worked through by the teachers in these meetings, creating a living psychology, a living physiology, and so on, continues to have an effect, often in very unexpected places. Imagine you had occupied yourself, let's say, with the spiritual functions of a child's gall—forgive this expression, but it is fully justified—and that through this study you had learned to find a way into this kind of thinking. If you were now suddenly called on to deal with a child's nose, you actually would relate very differently to the new situation. Even if you may think, “What is the good of learning all about the gall if now I have to deal with the nose?” Once you find a point of entry, you meet every problem and task differently.

In this sense, the teaching faculty must become the spirit and soul of the entire school organism. Only then will each teacher enter the classroom with the proper attitude and in the right soul condition. At the same time, we must also remember that, in just these matters, an intensely religious element can be found. It is unnecessary to have the name of the Lord constantly on one's lips or to call on the name of Christ all the time. It is better to adhere to the command: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord God in vain.” Nevertheless, it is possible to permeate one's entire life with a fundamental religious impulse, with an intensely Christian impulse. Certain experiences of old, no longer known to the modern mind, will then begin to stir in one's soul, experiences deeply rooted in human evolution, in the Christian development of humankind. For example, teachers who in the depths of their souls are seeking the proper stimulation for finding appropriate forms of pedagogy (especially in these pathological-physiological areas) would do well to allow themselves to be inspired, time and again, by what radiates from the Gospel of Saint Luke. (To modern ears such a statement must sound bizarre.) On the other hand, teachers who want to instill the necessary idealism for life in their students, would do well to find a source of inspiration by reading again and again the Gospel of Saint John. If teachers do not want their pupils to grow up into cowards, but into the kind of people who will tackle life's tasks with exuberant energy, they should look for inspiration in the Gospel of Saint Mark. And those who are enthusiastic to educate the young to grow into perceptive adults, rather than into people who go through life with unseeing eyes, may find the necessary stimulation in the Gospel of Saint Matthew. These are the qualities that, in ancient times, were felt to live in the different Gospels. If our contemporaries were to read that in past ages the Gospel of Saint Luke was felt to radiate a healing element in a medical sense, they could not make anything of it. On the other hand, if they entered life as real pedagogues, they would begin to understand such matters again.

This is one way one can speak about these things. It is just as possible to speak of them in an entirely different way, no less religious or Christian. For instance, the main theme during a seminar course could well be the four temperaments of the human being—that is, the psychic, physical, and spiritual natures of the choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic temperaments. First, one would give a description of these four temperaments and then one could discuss how they must be treated in class. For example, it has a salutary effect if one seats choleric children together in one corner of the classroom, giving a certain relief in this way to the rest of the class, because the teacher is freed from having to constantly discipline them. Choleric children can't help pushing and hitting each other. If they now find themselves suddenly at the receiving end, this in itself produces a thoroughly pedagogical effect, because the ones who do the pushing and shoving, goading others into retaliating, are being “shaped up” in a very direct way. And if, by seating the phlegmatics together, one lets them “phlegmatize” each other, this also has a wonderfully pedagogical effect. However, all this needs to be done with the appropriate tact. One really has to know how to handle the situation in each individual case. You will find a detailed treatment of the children's various temperaments in the published version of the first training course, given to the teachers of the Waldorf school.⁵

What I have said about the four Gospels, fundamentally speaking, is exactly the same when seen from a spiritual perspective, because it leads one into the same element of life. Today it is ordinarily felt that, if one wants to learn something, the relevant elements have to be put neatly side by side. But this is a procedure that will not lead to fundamental principles, as they have to be dealt with in actual life. For example, one cannot understand the human gall or liver system unless one also has an understanding of the human head, because every organ in the digestive tract has a complementary organ in the brain. One does not know anything about the liver unless one also knows its correlative function in the brain. Likewise, one does not have an inner understanding of the immense inspiration that can flow into the human soul from the Gospels, unless one can also transform these into the ways that character and temperament are imprinted into the human individuality here on Earth. To livingly comprehend the world is very different from comprehending it through dead concepts.

This will also help one to see that if children are raised in light of the education spoken of here, one allows something to grow in them that will outlast their childhood days, something that will continue to affect them throughout their lives; for what do you have to do when you grow old? People who do not understand human nature cannot assess how important certain impulses, which can be implanted only during childhood, are for life. At that tender age it is still possible for these impulses to be immersed into the soft and pliable organism of the child, still very open to the musical-formative forces. In later years the organism becomes harder, not necessarily physically, but in any case, tending toward psycho-bodily hardening. What one has absorbed through one's upbringing and education, however, does not grow old. No matter how old one has become, one is still inwardly endowed with the same youthful element that one had from, say, the tenth to the fifteenth year. One always carries this element of youthfulness within, but it has to remain supple and flexible to the degree that the now aged brain—perhaps already covered by a bald head—can use it in the same way that the previously soft brain did. If a person's education has not helped this process, however, the result is a generation gap, which appears so often these days, and is considered unbridgeable.

Sometimes people say something that is actually the opposite of what is really happening. For example, one often hears the comment, “The young today don't understand the elderly, because old people no longer know how to be young with the young.” But this is not the truth. Not at all. What really happens is that the young generation expects the old generation to be able to properly use the physical organization which has grown old. In this way, young people recognize something in the old that is different from their own condition, something they do not yet have. This is the quality that leads to the natural respect for old age. When young people meet an old person who can still use an already-bald head in the way children use their tousled heads, they feel that something can be received from the older generation, something that they cannot find in their contemporaries. This is how it should be.

We must educate young people so that they know how to grow old properly. It is the malaise of our time that as young people grow up, they do not recognize among the older generation those who have aged properly. They see merely childish individuals, instead, who have remained at the same level of development as the young generation. This is because of the inadequate education of old people who cannot properly use their physical organization, and they remain infantile. The expression “overgrown kids” is really chosen with great ingenuity, for it implies that such persons lost the ability to get hold of their entire organism during the course of their lives.⁶

They can work only with the head, which is precisely what children or young people are meant to do. So the young respond by saying, “Why should we learn from them? They are no further along than we are; they are just as childish as we are.” The point is not that old age lacks youthfulness, but that it has remained behind, is too infantile, and this causes difficulties today. You see how expressions, sometimes chosen with the most goodwill, mean the opposite of what they intend convey.⁷

These things must all be seen in the proper light before education can stand on its feet again. This has become more than necessary today. Forgive this somewhat drastic way of saying it, but in our intellectual age education really has been turned upside-down.

Thus, one of the characteristic features of Waldorf pedagogy is to learn that it is not the externals that are important. Whether a teacher draws substance to nourish the souls of students from the different qualities of the four Gospels, or whether this is done by using what was presented in the Stuttgart teachers' training course with regard to the four temperaments does not matter at all. What does matter is the spirit that reigns in everything developed there. Because of how superficially these things are often regarded today, it could easily happen that someone, when told that the treatment of the four temperaments could be studied in the fundamental course given in Stuttgart, could also consult a later course where one would find something about the teacher's attitude toward the four Gospels. The reaction of such a person might well be, “In this case, I should study the later course as well.” It certainly is a good thing to approach different subjects by using different sources. But there is also another way of looking at it—that is, one may find a common message running through both courses, given in two different places at different times, even though outwardly the subjects may appear very different. This inner correspondence found within different lecture courses can be uncomfortable because of the way their various points are interlinked, instead of fitting into the more conventional patterns of cause and effect.

Thus, the educational course given here at the Goetheanum just over a year ago (where some English friends were present, and which was rendered very competently and artistically by Mister Steffen)⁸ can be compared with what I presented to you again differently in this course.⁹ You will find that, basically, the substance of both courses is the same as, for example, the head and the stomach; each form a part of one organism. It may be uncomfortable that, because of how various themes mutually support each other, one cannot say: I have read and understood the first course; and because the later one is supposed to carry the same message, there is no need for me to study it as well. The fact is, however, that, if one has studied both courses, the earlier one will be understood in greater depth, because each sheds light on the other. It could even be said that, only when one has digested a later teachers' course, can one fully understand an earlier one because of these reciprocal effects. Mathematics is built on purely causal sequences, so it is possible to understand earlier stages without any knowledge of subsequent stages. But when it comes to teaching in a living way, its subject is affected by mutual interconnections, so that what was given at an earlier date may receive further elucidation by what was presented later.

I mention this because it is all part of the living spirit that has to permeate the Waldorf way of teaching. One has to have the good will that wants to know it from all sides, and one must never be satisfied with having comprehended one particular aspect of it. As a Waldorf teacher, one has to be conscious of the necessity for continually widening and deepening one's knowledge, rather than feeling satisfied with one's achievements and, indeed, considering oneself very clever. If one has lived into the Waldorf way of teaching, such delusions are soon overcome! For a real Waldorf teacher, everything that flows from this activity must be permeated with true heart and soul forces. It has to spring from the right kind of self-confidence, which rests on trust in God. When there is awareness of the divine forces working within, one will be fed by a constantly flowing fountain of life, flowing since time beyond memory, and very much apart from what one may or may not have learned externally. It is only the beginning of the way when self-confidence stems from outer achievements. One is in the proper place when self-confidence has led to confidence in the working of God, when it has led to an awareness of the power of the words: Not I, but the Christ in me. When this happens, self-confidence also becomes self-modesty, because one realizes that the divine forces of Christ are reflected in whatever is carried in one's soul. This spirit must reign throughout the school.

If it were not present, the school would be like a natural organism whose lifeblood was being drawn out, or that was slowly being asphyxiated.

This is the spirit that is most important, and if it is alive, it will engender enthusiasm, regardless of the staff or the leadership of the school. One can then be confident that a somewhat objective spirit will live throughout the school, which is not the same as the sum of the teachers' individual spirits. This, however, can be nurtured only gradually within the life of the teaching staff.

As a result of working in this way, something has emerged in the Waldorf school that we call “block periods” or “main lessons.” These main lessons—much longer than the ordinary lessons, which allow one subject to be studied in depth—do not distract children, as often happens because of too many subject changes. For example, students might typically be given a geography lesson from 8 to 8:45 A.M., followed by an entirely different subject, such as Latin, from 8:45 until 9:30 A.M. This might be followed again by math, or some other lesson. Block periods of main lessons, on the other hand, are structured so that the same subject is taught every day for about three or four weeks (depending on the type of subject) during the first half of the morning session. For example, in a main lesson period, geography would be studied for perhaps three or four weeks—not severely or in a heavy-handed way, but in a more relaxed, yet completely serious way. When the same subject is taken up again during one of the following terms, it will build on what was given during the previous block period. In this way, the subject matter covered during one year is taught in block periods instead of during regular weekly lessons. This method is, no doubt, more taxing for teachers than the conventional schedule arrangements would be, because such lengthy geography lessons could easily become boring for the children. This is solved by the teachers' much deeper immersion in the subjects, so that they are equal to their freely-chosen tasks.

After a mid-morning break, which is essential for the children, the main lesson is usually followed by language lessons, or by other subjects not taught in main lesson periods. Two foreign languages are introduced to our pupils as soon as they enter the first grade in a Waldorf school. Using our own methods, we teach them French and English—the aim not being so much a widening of their outer horizons, but an enrichment of their soul life.

You will ascertain from what was said yesterday that physical movement, practiced most of all in eurythmy and gymnastics, is by no means considered to be less important, but is dealt with so that it can play a proper role within the total curriculum. Similarly, right from the beginning in the first grade, all lessons are permeated by a musical element according to various ages and stages.

I have already indicated (with unavoidable briefness, unfortunately) how our pupils are being directed into artistic activities—into singing, music-making, modeling, and so on. It is absolutely necessary to nurture these activities. Simply through practicing them with the children, one will come to realize exactly what it means for their entire lives to be properly guided musically during these younger years, from the change of teeth through the ninth and twelfth years until puberty. Proper introduction to the musical element is fundamental for a human being to overcome any hindrance that impedes, later in life, a sound development of a will permeated with courage. Musical forces effect the human organism by allowing, as smoothly as possible, the nerve fluctuations to become active in the stream of breath. The breath-stream, in turn, works back upon the functions of the nervous system. The breathing rhythms then work over into the rhythms of the blood circulation, which in turn act on the rhythms of sleeping and waking. This insight, afforded by anthroposophical investigation, of how musical forces creatively work within the structure of the human being, is one of the most wonderful things in life.

One learns to recognize that we have an extremely sensitive and refined musical instrument in the raying out of the nerves from the spinal marrow, from the entire system of the spinal cord. One also learns to see how this delicate instrument dries up and hardens, whereby, inwardly, the human being can no longer properly develop qualities of courage, if musical instruction and the general musical education do not work harmoniously with this wonderfully fine musical instrument. What constitutes a truly delicate and unique musical instrument is coming into being through the mutual interplay between the organs of the nerves and senses with their functions on the one hand, and on the other hand, the human motor functions with their close affinities to the digestive rhythms and those of sleeping and waking.

The upper part of the human being wants to influence the lower part. By directing the child's entire organism toward the realm of music, we enhance the merging of external sounds (from a piano during music lessons, or from the children's singing voices) with the nervous and circulatory systems, in what can be recognized as a divine plan of creation. This is a sublime thing, because in every music lesson there is a meeting between the divine-spiritual and what comes from the earthly realm, rising, as it were, within the child's body. Heaven and Earth truly meet in every achievement of musical culture throughout human earthly evolution, and we should always be aware of this. This awareness, plus the teachers' knowledge that they are instrumental in bringing together the genius of Heaven with the genius of Earth, gives them the enthusiasm they need to face their classes. This same enthusiasm is also carried into the teachers' staff meetings where the music teacher may inspire the art teacher, and so on. Here you can see clearly how essential it is that spirit works through every aspect of Waldorf education.

To give another example: not long ago, during one of our teacher meetings, it truly became possible to work out to a large extent what happens to the students' spirit, soul, and body, when first given eurythmy exercises and then directed in doing gymnastics. Such insight into the relationship between gymnastics and eurythmy (which is very important to how these lessons are presented) was really accomplished in one of our teacher meetings the other day. Of course, we will continue our research. But, this is how teacher meetings become like the blood that must flow through the school as a living organism. Everything else will fall into place, as long as that is allowed to happen.

Teachers will know also when it is proper to take their classes for a walk or for an outing, and the role of gymnastics will find a natural and appropriate place within the life of the students, regardless of which school they attend. Doubts and anxieties will disappear with regard to the remark: What is done in a Waldorf school may all be very good, but they neglect sports there. Admittedly, it is not yet possible for us to do everything that may be desirable, because the Waldorf school has had to develop from small beginnings. Only by overcoming enormous obstacles and external difficulties was it possible to have gone as far as we have today. But when matters are taken care of with spiritual insight, the whole question of the relationship between physical and spiritual will be handled properly.

The following analogy could be used: Just as it is unnecessary to learn how the various larger and smaller muscles of the arm function (according to the laws of dynamics and statics, of vitalism, and so on) so that one can lift it, so it is also unnecessary to know every detail of the ins-and-outs of everything that must be done, as long as we can approach and present lessons out of the spirit that has become transformed into the proper attitude of the teacher—as long as we can penetrate properly to the very essence of all our tasks and duties.

I could only give you brief and superficial outlines of the fundamental principles and impulses, flowing from anthroposophical research, according to which the Waldorf school functions. And so we have come to the end of this course—primarily because of your other commitments.

At this point I would like to express once more what I already said during one of our discussions: If one lives with heart and soul, with the ideal of allowing education to grow into a blessing for all humankind in its evolution, one is filled with deep gratitude when meeting teachers from so many different places; for you have come to this course to obtain information about the way of teaching that arises from anthroposophical investigation, which I have attempted to place before you. Beyond whether this was received by one or another participant with more or less sympathy, I want to express my deep gratitude and inner satisfaction that it was again possible for a large group of souls to perceive what is intended to work on the most varied branches of life, and what is meant to fructify life in general through anthroposophy. Two thoughts will remain with you, especially with those who dealt with the organization and practical arrangements of this course: the happy memory of the gratitude, and the happy memory of the inner satisfaction as I expressed it just now. And the more intensely these thoughts can be inwardly formed—the thoughts of the work based on such gratitude and satisfaction—the more hope will grow that, in times to come, this way of teaching may yet succeed for the benefit of all of humanity.

Such hope will intensify the loving care for this way of teaching in those who already have the will to devote themselves to it with all their human qualities.

It should also be said that it was not only the Waldorf teachers who may have given you something of their practical experience, because those of you who have been present here as visitors have certainly given equally to them. By allowing us to witness what lives in us begin to live in other souls as well, you have fanned the glow of love that is both necessary and natural, and just that can engender genuine enthusiasm. And we may hope that out of feelings of gratitude and inner satisfaction, of hope and love that have flowed together during this course, good fruits may ripen, provided we can maintain the necessary interest in these matters, and that we are inwardly active enough to sustain them.

Ladies and gentlemen, my dear friends, this is what I want to pour into my farewell, which is not to be taken as formal or abstract, but as very concrete, in which gratitude becomes a firm foundation, and inner satisfaction a source of warmth, from which hope will radiate out, bringing both courage and strength. May the love of putting into practice what is willed to become a way of teaching for all human beings be turned into light that shines for those who feel it their duty to care for the education of all humankind!

In this sense, having to bring this course to its conclusion, I wish to give you all my warmest farewell greetings.

Question: Would it be possible to implement the Waldorf way of teaching in other countries, in Czechoslovakia, for example?

Rudolf Steiner: In principle it is possible to introduce Waldorf education anywhere, because it is based purely on pedagogy. This is the significant difference between Waldorf pedagogy and other educational movements. As you know, there are people today who maintain that if one wants to give pupils a proper education, one must send them to a country school, because they consider an urban environment unsuitable for children's education. Then there are those who hold the opinion that only a boarding school can offer the proper conditions for their children's education, while still others insist that only life at home can provide the proper background for children. All of these things cease to be of real importance in Waldorf education. I do not wish to quarrel about these different attitudes (each of which may have its justification from one or another point of view), but since Waldorf education focuses entirely on the pedagogical aspect, it can be adapted to any outer conditions, whether a city school, a country school or whatever. It is not designed to meet specific external conditions, but is based entirely on observation and insight into the growing human being. This means that Waldorf pedagogy could be implemented in every school.

Whether this would be allowed to happen, whether the authorities that oversee education, the establishing of curricula, and so on would ever agree to such a step being taken, is an entirely different question. There is nothing to stop Waldorf pedagogy from being applied anywhere in the world, even tomorrow, but the real question is whether permission for this to happen would be granted. This question can be answered only in terms of the various local government policies. That is really all one can say about it.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, The Foundations of Human Experience, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996, and Practical Advice to Teachers, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1976, and Discussions with Teachers, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1967.
• 2. See Balance in Teaching, Mercury Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1990; Education for Adolescents, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996; and Deeper Insights into Education (to be republished).
• 3. Dr. Herman von Baravalle (1898–1973) teacher of mathematics and physics at the Waldorf school in Stuttgart.
• 4. Caroline von Heydebrand (1866–1938) class teacher at the Waldorf school.
• 5. See footnote page 171. See also the 1909 lecture, “The Four Temperaments,” contained in Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy in Everyday Life, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1995.
• 6. The German expression is Kindskopf, literally “child's head.”—Trans.
• 7. See Rudolf Steiner's The Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science, March 9, 1924 (published in The Constitution of the School of Spiritual Science, Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, 1964), which states:
  
  But the youth today does not see in the older men and women any human quality different from its own, yet worthy of its emulation. For the older people of the present day are not really “old.” They have taken in the content of many things and can talk of these. But their knowledge has not ripened in them. They have grown older in years, but in the soul they have not kept pace with the advancing years. They speak out of an older brain in just the same way that they spoke when the brain was young. Young people feel this fact. They do not perceive maturity when they are with their elders; they see their own young condition of soul in older bodies, and they turn away, for this does not seem true to them.
• 8. Albert Steffen (1884–1963), Swiss poet, novelist, playwright, and a leading student of Rudolf Steiner beginning in 1907.
• 9. See Rudolf Steiner, Soul Economy and Waldorf Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1986.

It is always stressed that in order to progress in occult matters one should be as positive as possible and as little as possible negative; that one should speak less about what is not, than about what is. When this is practised in ordinary life it is a preparation for work in the sphere of the occult. The occultist must not ask: Has the stone life? but: Where is the life of the stone? Where is the consciousness of the mineral kingdom to be found? That is the highest form of non-criticism. Particularly in regard to the highest questions this is the attitude of mind that must be cultivated.

In ordinary life we differentiate three bodily conditions: the solid, the fluid and the gaseous or airy. The solid must be distinguished from the mineral. Air and water are also mineral. Theosophical writings add to these, four other finer conditions of matter. The first element which is finer than the air is the one which causes it to expand, which always increases its spatial content. What expands the air in this way is warmth; it is really a fine etheric substance, the first grade of ether, the Warmth Ether. Now follows the second kind of ether, the Light Ether. Bodies which shine send out a form of matter which is described in Theosophy as Light Ether. The third kind of ether is the bearer of everything which gives form to the finest matter, the formative ether, which is also called the Chemical Ether. It is this ether which brings about the union of oxygen and hydrogen. And the finest of all the ethers is that which constitutes life: Prana, or Life Ether.

Science throws together all four kinds of ether. Nevertheless it will gradually distinguish them in this way. Our description tallies with that of the Rosicrucians, while Indian literature speaks of four different grades of ether.

To begin with, let us take everything that is solid. What is solid has apparently no life. When one transposes oneself into the life of the solid, which becomes possible through living in waking consciousness in the condition described as the dream world, and when one then seeks to discover the solid, for instance by entering into a rocky mountain landscape, then one feels in oneself that one's own life is altered, one feels life rippling through one. One is not there with consciousness, but with one's own life, the etheric body; one is then at a place, in a condition which is called the Maha-para-nirvana plane. On this Maha-para-nirvana plane the life of the solid is to be found. This plane is the other pole of the solid. Through life on the Maha-para-nirvana plane one acquired another means of perception. When one returns one has experienced the activity of beings in the Maha-para-nirvana plane. It is there that the solid stone has its life.

Secondly there follows what is fluid, water. When in the dream condition one transposes oneself into the sea, then one becomes imbued with the life of the fluid, on the Para-nirvana plane. Through this procedure one learns to know something of the different planes.

Thirdly, when one transposes oneself in dream into the air-forming element, one finds oneself on the Nirvana plane. Nirvana means literally, ‘to be extinguished’, as one extinguishes a fire. When one seeks for life in it, one is with one's own life on the Nirvana plane. Man breathes in the air. When he experiences in himself the life of the air, then that is the way to reach the Nirvana plane. This is the reason for the breathing exercises of the Yogis. No one can attain to the Nirvana plane if he does not actually practise breathing exercises. They are only Hatha-Yoga exercises when they are carried out on the wrong level. Otherwise they are Raja-Yoga exercises. One actually inhales life: the Nirvana plane.

Fourthly, below the Nirvana plane is the Buddhi or Shushupti plane. There warmth has its life. When Buddhi is developed in man, all Kama is transformed into selflessness, into love. Those animals which develop no warmth are also without passion. At higher levels man must again achieve this passionless condition, because he has his life on the Shushupti plane.

Fifthly comes the Devachan or Mental plane; hence the inner connection between wisdom and light. When in dream consciousness one experiences the light, one experiences wisdom within it. This was always the case when God revealed himself in the light. In the burning thorn bush, that is to say, in the light, Jehovah appeared to Moses in order to reveal wisdom.

The sixth is the astral plane. On this plane the chemical ether has its life. A somnambulist perceives on the astral plane the qualities of the chemicals, the chemical characteristics, because here the chemical ether actually has its life.

The seventh is the physical plane. There the life ether lives in its own element. With the life ether one perceives life. This ether is also called the atomic ether, because on this plane it has its own life, its own central point. What lives on a particular plane has on this same plane its central point.

As an actual fact everything we have around us contains the seven planes. We must only ask: Where has each element, the solid, the gaseous, etc., its life?

We have now heard that warmth has its own life on the Buddhi or the Shushupti plane. Thus between all things definite relationships exist. Very striking is the relationship between the ear and speech. In evolution the ear was present much earlier than speech. The ear is the receptive organ; speech is the organ which produces sound. These two, ear and speech, essentially belong together. Sound as it manifests is the result of vibrations in the air, and each single sound arises from a particular vibration. When you study what exists outside, outside yourself, as sound, then you are studying the arithmetic of the air.

Undifferentiated space would be soundless. Space which is arithmetically organised produces sound. Here we have an example of how one can look into the Akashic Record. If one can rise to the perception of the inner arithmetic which is preserved from sound in space, then at any time one can hear again a sound which someone has spoken. For instance one can hear what was spoken by Caesar at the crossing of the Rubicon. The inner arithmetic of sound is still present in the Akashic Record. Sound corresponds to something we call Manas. What the ear experiences as sound is the wisdom of the world. In the perception of sound one hears the wisdom of the world. In the act of speaking one brings forth the wisdom of the world. What is arithmetical in our speech remains in the Akashic Record. When he hears or speaks man expresses himself directly in wisdom. At the present time thinking is the form in which man can bring his will to expression in speech. Today it is only in thinking that we can unfold the will. Only later will it be possible for man, rising above the level of thought, to unfold the will in speech.

The next step is connected with warmth. Man's activity is to be sought in what streams out from him as inner warmth. Out of what proceeds from warmth: passions, impulses, instincts, desires, wishes and so on, Karma arises. Just as the parallel organ to the ear is the organ of speech, so the parallel organ to the warmth of the heart is the pituitary gland, the Hypophysis. The heart takes up the warmth from outside, as the ear does sound. Thereby it perceives world warmth. The corresponding organ which we must have, in order to be able to produce warmth consciously, is the pituitary gland in the head, which at the present time is only at the beginning of its development. Just as one perceives with the ear and produces with the larynx, so one takes up the warmth of the world in the heart and lets it stream forth again through the pituitary gland in the brain. Once this capacity has been achieved, the heart will have become the organ it was intended to be. There is a reference to this in words from ‘Light on the Path’:²² ‘Before the soul can stand in the presence of the Masters, its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart.’ Then our heart's blood streams out as today our words stream out into the world. In the future, warmth of soul will flood over mankind.

Somewhat deeper in evolution than the warmth organ stands the organ of sight. In the course of evolution the organs of hearing, warmth and sight, follow in sequence; the organ of sight is only at the stage of receiving, but the ear already perceives, for instance in the sound of a bell, its innermost being. Warmth must flow from the being itself. The eye has only an image, the ear has the perception of innermost reality. The perception of warmth is the receiving of something that rays outwards. There is an organ which will also become the active organ of vision. This is today germinally present in the pineal gland, the Epiphysis, the organ which will give reality to the images which today are produced by the eye. These two organs, the pineal gland and the pituitary gland as active organs, must develop into the organ of vision (eye) and the organ of warmth (heart). Today fantasy is the preliminary stage leading to a later power of creation. Now man has at most imagination. Later he will have magical power. This is the Kriya-shakti power. It develops in proportion to the physical development of the pineal gland.

In the reciprocal relationship between ear and larynx we have a prophetic model (Vorbild). Thinking will later be interpenetrated with warmth, and still later man himself will learn to create. First he learns to create a picture; then to create and send forth radiations; then to create beings. Freemasonry calls these three forces wisdom, semblance (beauty) and power. (See Goethe's Fairy Tale.)²³

Warmth has its life on the Shushupti plane. To make conscious use of this is possible for one who understands and controls the life of warmth, as in a certain sense man today controls the life of the air. In his development man must now approach the forces of the Shushupti plane (Buddhi-Manas). The Fifth Sub-Race has mainly the task of developing Kama-Manas. One finds Manas in everything which is placed in the service of the human spirit. Our age has placed its highest powers at the service of these needs, whereas the animal is satisfied without such achievements.

Now however Buddhi-Manas must also begin its development. Man must learn something beyond speech. Another force must be united with speech, such as we find in the writings of Tolstoi. It is not so much a matter of what he says, but that behind what he says stands an elemental force that has in it something of Buddhi-Manas, which must now enter into our civilisation. Tolstoi's writings work so powerfully because they are consciously opposed to West[ern] European culture and contain something new and elemental. A certain barbarism which is still contained in them will later be brought into balance. Tolstoi is just a small instrument of a higher spiritual power which also stood behind the Gothic initiate Ulfilas. This spiritual power uses Tolstoi as its instrument.

• 22. Light on the Path by Mabel Collins.
• 23. was first published in 1795. See: Rudolf Steiner's ‘Goethe's Standard of the Soul’.