The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Last time I tried to give an overview of the processes in the earthly system that are closest to us. I tried this insertion about cosmic processes because we need it to better understand the Apocalypse. Last time, I pointed out that before the beings that populate our Earth today were formed – above all, humans and the other three natural kingdoms that belong to them: the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the mineral kingdom – before these beings were on Earth, they were on other planets.

Now I ask you to understand what I am going to say today in the sense in which I already indicated it for the last lesson, and to take it even more so today. We are entering particularly high realms of supersensible vision, realms about which we are only able to make suggestions. They are not only difficult to understand, but the observation itself and what we can know about it is so subtle that it is quite difficult for those whose thoughts and especially their feelings are still rooted in the materialistic views of our time to get beyond the word “fantastic” when they hear about the things that are to be discussed today. It is not so easy for people in a materialistic age to get away from materialistic ideas. Thoughts can be freed more easily, but feelings still say too much: this is something that I cannot grasp, that is something that lies so far beyond what we call reality. Precisely because our feelings lag slightly behind what our thoughts rise to, I would like to point out that we are dealing with times that lie far behind us and that are very different from what we are accustomed to calling reality today.

To give you an idea of what I want to say, I have to start at the beginning. I have to start from a planet from which, so to speak, man first developed, from a planet from which he actually originated. Before man came into existence on this earth, he passed through three such planets. The last planet we passed through as human beings is called the Moon in the esoteric language. This is not the present Moon; the present Moon is only a cinder. The Moon we are talking about here is the predecessor of our earth, on which, in primitive conditions, what man has today developed. This was preceded by another planet, which we call the “sun” in esoteric language. This old sun is therefore also to be counted among the planets. Today and next time, I will be able to say more about this. We will return to the times when man left the moon again to undergo stages of development on Earth, which we will still get to know.

But now we have to go back to the third or the last - or even the first - planet where man first appeared, so that we have three planets that come into question for us humans, that were really our residences before we came to this earth. I will give you, as far as possible, a description of this first planet. This first planet differs fundamentally not only in terms of its physical nature but in terms of all its nature from everything that today's man is accustomed to imagine. What we are accustomed to seeing today, even what we are accustomed to thinking, did not yet exist at that time. All of this has only developed from that. Therefore, I will only be able to give a figurative and approximate description of this first planetary state in which man was.

Let us take a look at man himself during this first state. During the first state, man had a consciousness that was very different from the consciousness that man has on earth. The consciousness that man had at that time was dull. It was the same consciousness that a stone has today. But you must not compare it with what lives consciously in a stone today. Although it was dull, what lived in consciousness as in the stone at that time, it was all-encompassing at the same time. The whole sphere of development that man recognized as his dwelling place, and also everything around it in the stars that was in contact with this sphere of development, all this could be surveyed by this consciousness. This consciousness can still be produced in certain circumstances in humans today, albeit in very abnormal conditions, when the other states of consciousness of dream consciousness and deep trance are no longer present, but when very abnormal conditions occur. Medicine is also familiar with these conditions. Then a very deep trance occurs, and this deep trance is linked to the fact that these people begin to draw entire planetary systems in a chaotic and disorderly fashion. You can experience, for example, that in sanatoriums where people with such pathological conditions are housed, these patients record entire planetary systems. However, they only vaguely resemble what we speak of in theosophy. But one thing emerges from the state: people have a dull consciousness, and this consciousness not only spreads around the planet on which they live, but also over the neighboring world areas. It can be called all-consciousness. And such an all-consciousness was present in the people who were on the first planet.

All life on this first planet was such that it can only be compared to what you would experience if you were able to imagine the inanimate earth as it is today not only as permeated with stone and rock, but if you could imagine the earth itself as animated , as an animated ball – and, in addition, this entire animated ball is imbued with feeling; so that you would have had a feeling from an impression that someone had made on the planet at that time – for example, if someone had kicked the earth with their foot.

The planet at that time also had the most diverse conditions of growth and life. A mountain arose there, a valley there, and everything was surging with life and was all sensation. The shapes on it can only be compared to successive waves of the sea, with elements that spurt out and then splash back in the most diverse shapes. The whole is a wonderful surge and life. The whole grows and passes away in itself. The planet was in this state in its middle stages. It is difficult to characterize it with expressions taken from present-day things. But the planet was not the same in its first stages either. If you had transferred yourself with eyes, with physical sense organs into space, you would not have been able to see the first state of this planet. In its first state, this planet was in the Arupa state. It is there in a material condition that could not be perceived by the senses, even if such senses had been present. So it was in a highly refined state. In this state, only the highly developed clairaudient could perceive it. The highly developed clairvoyant would see nothing; even the psychic eyes, the clairvoyant eyes, cannot see anything in these first stages. You can only hear the planet. Only a fine clairaudience can perceive it. And all that you hear is a single fundamental tone, which is, however, developed in the most diverse ways. But a single fundamental tone is present; this varies and becomes manifold in itself.

When the planet then enters its second state, you cannot see it yet either, not even with clairvoyant eyes. But then it enters the third state, the astral state, and you can see it. But it is not the astral matter of the earth, it is a higher state, but I can call it that comparatively. In any case, you can already see an interweaving here. Everything that I described earlier as a swirling and surging can be seen here with the mind's eye. You can see billowing and swirling formations, but you cannot see them in a matter that you could grasp, but only in a matter that you see with the psychic eye in masses of colors and plays of colors of extraordinary subtlety - and in a formation that is distinguished by colors that cannot be compared to any of these earthly colors. That is a color picture.

Then we come to the fourth state. There we have a state that we can approximately call the physical state, the physical state. If there were an eye present, it could already see this physical state.

This is the state that I have described as sentient and living – but at the same time also in mineral formation, but not yet even, not yet flat. You have shell-like formations there, and everything is in a perpetual state of formation, as I have described. That is the fourth state. This is actually the first time that what we can call the very first ancestors of man are present. Such is man. He is an indeterminate being, taking on a different form at every moment, metamorphosing at every moment. Then the whole thing regresses again or, through the same states, also ascends again, similar to what I described last time: through the astral, the rupic, to the arupic. We have seen the development go from the arupic through the physical and back to the arupic. Down there in the fourth state, man has become physical for the first time.

We call this process the very first round of our human development. It is this first round that is the most important one that comes into consideration. This brings man on the planet as far as man can go on this first planet at all. The following rounds have no further significance for the further development of man to his perfection. Now, after going through a kind of sleep state, the whole thing starts all over again. The conditions are experienced two, three, four, five, six times. But during these six subsequent rounds or cycles, the actual human being, that which we now call a human being, does not make much further progress. Because what he achieves further is later lost and has no significance for further development. In contrast, higher beings, more exalted beings, who have come from earlier stages of development, develop and reach their perfection. In these following six rounds they reach their significance.

When the person is here, he is in the so-called elementary realm. And by being there, he becomes physical for the first time as a human being. The first elementary realm becomes physical there. It is important to note that we call this the 'first elemental realm'. And the state of consciousness in which he had a kind of omniscience, but in a dull way, is called 'tamas'. This is one of the so-called gunas. There the human being is at the first stage of evolution.

The whole thing is repeated seven times. So that these whole planets have taken on seven different forms seven times. So you could say that we are dealing with 7x7 states, equal to 49 states. These 49 states are referred to as the system of the first planet. These seven states are usually referred to as a planetary chain - but that is a poor description. The planet that I have described in this way is called Saturn in esoteric language - and for a very specific reason.

Anyone who wants to reach this planet at all must be capable of the following. The ordinary person at today's stage of his development has his bright day consciousness. He is with his consciousness on the physical plane, he is in sense consciousness. He ceases to have his consciousness when he sleeps. He either dreams or sleeps dreamlessly.

The dreamer may remember his dreams. During his dream, however, he usually has no consciousness. Now there is a possibility by which man is just as conscious during the dream as he is during his daily physical life. This is another state of consciousness. He is not just dreaming, he is consciously in a world in which he would otherwise only have dreamed, and that is the so-called astral world.

This world makes it possible for him to go back to what we call the development on the moon. There, the person can relive what happened during the lunar epoch.

An even deeper state is when the human being is conscious in dreamless sleep. Then a so-called continuity of consciousness occurs. The person is conscious while sleeping. Consciousness never stops; only the body sleeps, the spirit is awake.

This state of consciousness, when it is attained – that is to say, when a person, even when he falls asleep, nevertheless continues to be conscious, and when he wakes up, likewise consciously enters again into the bright day consciousness – makes it possible for him to transport himself back into the still preceding period. Then the person is able to carry out a real unification with that which is today the sun. He lives on the present sun. For those who have no real conception of the nature of clairvoyance, it is difficult to understand what I am saying. But I must share some experiences here.

Now there is an even higher state that elevates consciousness to yet another level. This is the state that extends beyond what is called the continuity of consciousness. It is a state of special enlightenment of consciousness itself, of this deep dreamless sleep consciousness. This makes it possible to have the experiences of the first planet during this life, and at the same time, when the clairvoyant focuses on the first planet, the fact occurs that he is united with what is currently the physical planet Saturn. But this has nothing to do with the Saturn of that time. So we have transported ourselves back to the 49 states through which man has developed.

Now I would like to continue by showing you how the development continues. I can continue to use the same drawing and can now simply say that a somewhat longer intermediate period, a kind of unconscious state, a state of sleep, now occurs for all beings that were in this planetary state, and then the whole game starts all over again.

Again we have these seven successive states, which means we have another round. This round now has a very specific task, it has the task of repeating everything that happened during the previous 49 states, so that during the first state of the seven states, in short, with sevenfold speed, what happened during the first 49 states is repeated, so that the person changes insignificantly, but now reappears here physically. Only in the second cycle is there a reorganization. And this second round is what matters now.

In this second round, after the Rupa and Arupa spheres have been experienced and we have entered the physical state, we no longer have a living, growing earth, but we have split off one realm and built a second one above it, and in this realm man is embodied. We now have a realm that is not so very unlike our mineral realm; we have a realm that is mineral, but we have growing minerals in it, just like our plants. These are living minerals. But this also gives rise to something dead. Man cannot use this. He would not be able to develop further if he did not excrete this. And he leaves behind the excreted matter as a special mineral kingdom. Man has then developed upwards into a kingdom that rises above the mineral kingdom, the nature of which could be described as plant animals. There are no such beings today. But we can compare them to animals that resemble today's jellyfish. These are very low-level animals, and even they are quite different. The beings that lived here had a much greater density and a completely different kind of substance that cannot even be compared to

what human substance is. You have to imagine these as refined, etherized, not less noble, but more noble than human substance. All the entities have the most diverse forms of stars. They were polyform stars, multifaceted and polygonal figures. All this is connected in a mobile way, structured according to numbers.

It is very important – you must remember this – that human consciousness has developed to a higher degree, to a consciousness that is no longer all-seeing, but has become brighter instead. The whole of the second planet, which we call the Sun, no longer knows everything, but has become brighter instead. This state of consciousness is called rajas. It is a consciousness that permeates all the higher realms. This consciousness is not limited to individuals, for the beings are not yet so strictly separated from each other, they still continually merge into each other. But beings are continually arising and continually passing away. They dissolve and form themselves again. In the first state, we only had to deal with the arising and passing away of dull forms; here we only had to deal with beings in this dull consciousness.

Man does develop further in the next cycles, but this is not particularly relevant for the upward development. What has lasting value for his development is the state he had reached during the second round.

The whole thing now begins again, after going through the same thing seven times – that is, a second time after a kind of sleep state.

Now, in the first cycle, we are dealing with a brief repetition of what happened on Saturn. Man appears once again as a kind of mineral sentient being, except that the sentience is no longer expressed in the same way. The sentience is gone; only growth and life remain. In the second round, man then repeats what happened on the sun. And in the third round, a further development of the human being takes place. There the human being first goes through the old conditions again and then appears in this third round in a physical state. This is the moon state, which we know as the predecessor of our present earth state. As a result, three realms have now formed, which differ from each other to a certain extent.

These three kingdoms are not similar to our three kingdoms, the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, but they are something else. The mineral kingdom is one that still has traces of growth and life, of mobile and growing minerals. The plants are those that still have traces of animality in them. And above that is a third kingdom, one that is higher than even our highest present animal kingdom, but not yet as high as the present human kingdom. But that was all at the same time.

When I say that this third realm was not as highly developed, I am referring to the consciousness and spiritual qualities. Matter is much finer than the matter of the present-day human being. The human being is in an ether-like state, which bears a certain resemblance to that of a jellyfish. The shape of the human being is not very similar to the present-day human shape, especially in these conditions. If you wanted to describe it, you could say that it was a kind of quadruped, but of a special kind. There are four feet and they are all used for some kind of locomotion. They are not used like the feet of today's monkeys, but all four are used for locomotion. The use of the hands was not yet necessary.

These are the three realms that exist here. The consciousness that man has attained is the dream consciousness. Man has lost the ability to see the whole earth, but he still has the ability to perceive astral states. He has a psychic consciousness in the lunar epoch. He sees the people who live with him at the same time, not only in their physical form, but also in their passions and in their emotional life. Man can put himself in their place and perceive it. That is during the third cycle. But now man develops further in the states he goes through in the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh cycles. These are not of such particular importance for his further progress. He does change, but these changes are not so important for man's progress.

So we have added another 49 states to the previous ones and have arrived at the last state that man enters when he has gone through the moon epoch. Now there is another kind of sleepover, and then we come to the development of the earth. There the beginning is made in the same way again. We have another round in which seven states are passed through. In this first round, the human being repeats what was experienced on the first planet. The human being is now in the state of the mineral. The mineral kingdom has now become lifeless, and in this state the earth appears in the first round. In the second round we are dealing with the repetition of the sun existence, in the third round with the repetition of the moon existence, and only in the fourth round does the actual new formation occur, to which our earth development belongs.

This new formation is characterized by the fact that when physical development occurs, a fourth realm is added to the three previous ones. The physical human being appears. Now man on earth becomes physical, and we have the present mineral kingdom, the present plant kingdom, the present animal kingdom and the human kingdom. This is the middle of physical development.

And now the following cycles begin to have a meaning for the further development of the human being. They are no longer shells that are shed, but they begin to have a meaning for the following cycles of the human being. In the middle of this round, where we speak of the Lemurian time, something very special occurs with the human being. A new beginning occurs. Until then, we have observed man, so to speak, developing from an imperfect state to his present human form. Here in the middle of the Lemurian period, he is endowed with what we call spirit, thinking, and later with even higher abilities that we will develop. The spirit begins to move man. This spirit is now undergoing its development, so that the next rounds, the fourth and fifth, are intended to lead this spirit to higher levels. The sixth round then leads even higher, and the seventh even higher.

You can see that from now on we are dealing with something completely new in humanity. Something is entering into man that was not present in him before. Next time we will talk about where this comes from. Today we want to be clear about the fact that man has become physical during this fourth round. I have spoken about how man has developed up to this physical state. Man would have been unable to progress if he had not been endowed with the spark of the spirit in the middle of the development of the earth. This forms a new influence, a seed, a leaven, through which man has been inspired to a new development. Otherwise man would have become only an external form. If the spirit had not reached him, there would have been no upward development of the physical man. Only through the spiritual impact on man has further development become possible. We shall see how this is connected with the whole development. Man would have become more and more external, the soul would have been lost in the external, and man would gradually have become his own petrification. He would have been only a mere outer form, he would have completely passed over into the eighth sphere. He would have ceased to be a being that can develop further. When something ceases to be able to develop further, we say that it has passed over into the eighth sphere. In order to prevent this, the impact with the spirit was intended.

So today we have learned about the fourfold planetary development. We have learned about the development that took place on what we call Saturn - a state that bears a certain similarity to what is happening on Saturn today. But it is not the same as what happened back then.

Seven times seven metamorphoses have taken place. The most important of these is the first round or cycle. During this, the human being developed into a dull consciousness and a kind of living, growing mineral existence. The following states belong to higher beings, which concern us less now. The second planetary state of development begins on the sun. This again goes through seven times seven states of development. We have seven rounds and seven planets or globes – the term 'globe' is rather inappropriate. The second round is the most important one to be considered here. Man develops into a kind of plant animal.

On the third planet, or during the lunar epoch, the first two rounds are repetitions. The third round brings new conditions. It develops and is permeated by a kind of dream consciousness. This is called the Sattva state. This is what the human being goes through. The following four rounds bring further development, but it is not significant. Then, after an intermediate state, the earth epoch begins. In the fourth round of the earth epoch, what is around us develops in the four kingdoms known to us: the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom.

That is what I have to say about the development so far. We must be aware that such things, which are so very different from what man sees around him today, can only be described approximately. It is not possible to describe these things exactly; one has to use auxiliary concepts. Nevertheless, I would prefer to describe them vividly rather than schematically. If you only have the names and a diagram, you will have a certain satisfaction for the mind, but it seems to me that it is more appropriate to describe the things vividly as they really happened in the various metamorphoses. I know that this is difficult, but I hope I have given you an idea of it.

Spiritual consciousness enables perception of the highest tone. Hyperpsychic consciousness enables perception of the lowest tone, and psychic consciousness enables perception of the world of colors. The physical part of the earth does not completely merge into the astral part.

Next time I will talk about Mars and Mercury. What I have told you is written in ordinary documents. You have described the seven conditions in the days of the week: Saturn-Day, Sunday, Monday, Mardi, Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi. These things have been given by the old sages. Our weekdays are modeled on the planetary system. You have written down in the weekdays what the ancient sages knew. What is written in the sky, they have written in the weekdays.

Answering questions

Do you think that the present moon preceded the physical earth?

The present moon is matter from the earlier earth. The moon [of the lunar epoch] goes into the eighth sphere. Those who look at the moon with the “eye of Dangma” can see that the moon mountains have crystallized and solidified the state of that time.

Was the sun already there then?

It was not present as it is today. It was already luminous itself, but at the same time the light was sounding. Goethe describes the state of the heavens at that time in the 'Prologue in Heaven, Faust, Part One', where he describes the state of the sun, which corresponds to the lower mental plane, as sounding: 'The sun sounds in the brother spheres in the old manner of song-contests...' and so on. Our present sun belonged to the solar body of that time.

What is the difference between astral vision and mental vision?

The astral seer can spread his consciousness to the whole race, to the root race. But the mental seer can spread his consciousness over seven races, thus to the beginning of the first, the polar race. All secret schools initially have 49 degrees.

How do these theosophical findings relate to modern geology?

The periods that are relevant to us here would be the Alluvium, then the Diluvium, and then we come to the Tertiary State, which roughly corresponds to the age of the Atlantic period, so that in essence the surface of the earth in this Tertiary state forms the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. If you were to look for people from that time, you would have to look for them on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This Tertiary period is preceded by the Secondary period; this roughly corresponds to the Lemurian period. In the middle of this period, today's form of man emerged. Even earlier, we are dealing with beings of such “thin” matter that it is impossible to obtain imprints of them. The animals that developed at the same time in the Lemurian period were reptiles, saurian-like creatures and the like. Then, in parallel with the Atlanteans, mammals developed. This would be more or less parallel to the geological periods. Then you also have to parallelize with the remains in question. You will then be able to see that palaeontology is also correct in certain respects. Many of the areas that we are considering are now covered by the sea. That is one reason why we cannot have accurate pictures of them. The Sons of Fire Nebula – the oldest entities – lived in the fiery state. If we go back to the Tertiary Period, we still have reptiles, and in the Primary Period we still have fish. These beings were already present as such at that time, only they were in a different material state. They were such that they have the same imprints. The essential was present. The state of fire gave them plasticity. Through further synthesis, folding was created – that is the state of accumulation.

Anyone who deals with these things occultly should be careful not to start from external things. In a second volume of my book 'Theosophy', I will give hints and references to the relevant parallelization of science. There must be no contradiction between modern science and theosophy. Science has arisen through a necessary evolution and must be brought into absolute agreement with all things that are facts, in all things, with what theosophy is.

How should we visualize the condensation, the solidification of matter?

A good image for this is pieces of ice floating in water. However, it is better not to say that water has the ability to become ice, but to content ourselves with the expression of ice floating in water. It is similar with the matter in space. They are solidified finer matters. The interesting formation of the world nebulae we have to understand as the descent of the lowest astral states. A human astral body looks similar to the Orion Nebula, to a world nebula, to a vortex. An elementary astral body can only be found in the vicinity of the human being, but the developed ones can move further away from him.

Would you like to tell us something else about the chakrams?

The chakrams are also called lotus flowers for comparison. There are sixteen-, twelve-, ten-, six-, four- and two-leaved chakrams or lotus flowers. The two-leaved lotus flower cannot perceive itself, but the sixteen-, twelve-, ten- and six-leaved lotus flowers can perceive themselves, just as the eye can perceive the tip of the nose.

The astral body is only human-like in highly developed people; otherwise it is quite different.

[The two-petalled lotus flower in less developed people:

The inner lotus flower is the twelve-petalled lotus flower in the more highly developed human being. This inner tube is as if the fingers of both hands were intertwined.

“Lotus flower is an expression similar to how we speak of lungs in the physical body.”

If I speak about death and immortality today, it may seem, as if at first such a consideration is caused in the personal needs of the human soul, which have little do with knowledge, with science. If you survey the series of spiritual-scientific talks that I have held, you yet realise that I applied a scientific standard to the considered objects already, even if a spiritual-scientific standard. Hence, the today's consideration does also not start from that what we find within our emotional life, within our longings and wishes towards a life that exceeds the life of the physical body. It will rather concern this: how has human knowledge to position itself to the questions of death and immortality completely in the sense, as this knowledge positions itself to other objects of our knowledge? Since if we abstain from the longing for a life which exceeds the bodily if we abstain from that what is to be understood possibly in the sense of concepts like fear of death and the like, we have the question of the nature of our whole human individuality in it as something that remains for the human knowledge regarding death and immortality.

But it may seem today, as if in case of all considerations of spiritual life these important questions of death and immortality are disregarded. Since if one takes one of the official psychologies, you find, indeed, the phenomena of the soul life discussed in detail. However, as far as they face us in the everyday life, for example, the question of the development of concepts, the question of memory, of perception, of attention and the like, but you will look in vain for a discussion about the real being of our soul life. Yes, you can find the prejudice just in most scientific circles this soul life that someone must be a dilettante who wants to put these questions as scientific ones.

But this scientific thinking has now to turn to roads different from the usual ones if it wants to consider issues like death and immortality. There that psychology is no longer enough which one calls “psychology without soul,” a psychology with which only the phenomena of the soul life should be considered, without looking at the real being of that what rests in our own individuality and whose expression the phenomena of the soul experiences are. Now spiritual science or anthroposophy is an unusual point of view regarding these as well as other questions.

Indeed, the questions of death and immortality have emerged like from dark depths of spirit already since more than one century from the Western cultural life. One has interpreted it always as a dream of single persons if it appeared with a great spirit, as for example with Lessing. One regarded it as a meaningless dream if it appeared with such men whose names are called less within the cultural life of the last decades. Concerning the questions of death and immortality spiritual science is also not in any opposition to natural sciences. Only the opinion is often spread, as if natural sciences must reject what spiritual science has to say for its part. Thus, we can experience that whenever something new appears, as it happened, for example, in the last decade with the problems of life, one points to the fact that the assumption of a real spiritual life that exceeds the only bodily, material life must be overcome gradually and completely. Spiritual science is not forced at all to deny something that appears, for example, in such discussions like in that by Jacques Loeb (1859–1924, German-American biologist) at the First Monists' Congress (Hamburg, 1911) about the problem of life. However, spiritual science has to hear repeatedly, as well as at that time, that it is over now with a spiritual-scientific consideration. For one can hope that one will succeed, finally, in the laboratory in producing life under outer material conditions.

Compared to all such matters I would like to remind you of one thing. There were times when one did not doubt really that one could once create life in the laboratory. People who have thought something to themselves with the representation of the Homunculus in the second part of Goethe's Faust and have remembered that this representation of Homunculus was really a kind of dream of the physical research of the Middle Ages and earlier times. That means that the creation not only of subordinated living beings, but also of the highest, the human being in the laboratory was a dream of the naturalists once. People who cherished this dream intended by no means that then the spirit had to be abolished from any consideration of humanity and the world.

No spiritual consideration of life contradicts the hope of producing life from the composition of outer substances. No, only the direction of the habitual ways of thinking matters. The habitual ways of thinking that develop with someone who immerses himself more and more in spiritual science show a view of a certain factor exceeding the material in the development of the human being and humanity.

The purely materialistic view of the human life says: there we see a human being entering the earthly existence, and we observe how the material processes happen this and that way, and we see the human being gradually growing up from a clumsy being to a human being who familiarises himself with life, can accomplish tasks of life. Moreover, we see descending processes after ascending ones as it were which lead gradually to the dissolution of the physical body or to death.

This materialistic consideration of life turns its attention solely to what one can reach with the senses and with methods of thinking and researching which are based on sensory views. There one is probably forced to exceed that what is given with the moment of birth or conception, because one cannot explain everything that appears in the human being if one pays attention only to those factors that prevail between birth or conception and death. Then one speaks of hereditary factors. However, as far as one remains within the purely material approach, one believes that all factors, all elements that should explain the human life consist only of that what one can observe between birth and death, or what comes into the human life by the inherited qualities of the parents or other ancestors.

However, as soon as people investigate this heredity, they realise that it is rather superstitious to lead back everything that the human being can realise in his life possibly to hereditary factors. Just in the last decade a brilliant historian, Ottokar Lorenz (1832–1904), tried once to examine families whose descent relations were known to what extent the qualities of the parents, grandparents and so on can be recognised in the lives of the descendants. However, he could get on this way of the purely experiential observation to nothing but to say, if one looks up in the line of ancestors, one finds that among the twenty to thirty ancestors whom everybody can count upwards human beings are who were either genii or idiots, wise men or fools, musicians or other artists, so that one can find all qualities, which are found with any human being, and that one does not come far in the reality if one clings to the prejudices of scientific theories if one wants to explain these or those hereditary factors, this or that expression of the human character, this or that quality.

Spiritual science adds a spiritual core to that what one can find in the line of heredity as conditions of the human life, which we cannot find in that which we search with the parents, grandparents and so on, but which we have to search within a supersensible spiritual world. So that in the course of the incarnation process something combines with the physical factors that is not physical that is of spiritual kind. This spiritual that one cannot see with physical eyes is that being that we carry in us as the result of our former lives on earth as one says. As it is true that we lead back our physical origin to our ancestors, we have to lead back a spiritual origin to a spiritual lineage, that means, to ourselves. Spiritual science is just forced to speak not only of one life on earth of the human being, but of repeated lives on earth. Indeed, one has to go far back for reasons that may become obvious in the course of these talks if we want to search our being in our previous life. So we say in the spiritual-scientific sense: we bring our essence with us from a former life, we have experienced this former life, and we have gone through death and then through a life between death and our appearance in this life.

Spiritual science is also forced to imagine this essence going through death and a supersensible life between death and a new life on earth. This essence is not a product of the material existence, but collects and forms the matter as it were, so that we receive this physical corporeality. Hence, we speak in spiritual science of repeated lives on earth. This idea of the repeated lives on earth faces us necessarily from the Western thinking first with Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729–1781) in the work which he left as his testament, in the Education of the Human Race. There he says about this teaching: “even if it is the oldest one what the human beings have confessed to, must it not appear again at the summit of the human development?” In his Education of the Human Race Lessing also answers to some questions that can be objected the repeated lives on earth. Indeed, if such things appear with an excellent person, then people who judge this excellent spirit normally say: he performed great achievements, but later he became addicted to this strange dream of the repeated lives on earth, and one has to grant the great Lessing that he could also commit this strange mistake.—Thus, every little spirit feels called to condemn the great spirits with their “terrible mistakes.” Nevertheless, this idea did not let single persons of the nineteenth century rest, and even before the recent Darwinist natural sciences approached, the idea of the repeated lives on earth appears as a necessity of the human thinking again. Thus, it faces us in a book by Drossbach (Maximilian D., 1810–1884) about human rebirth, a somewhat confused book from our standpoint, but an attempt that allows itself just compared with scientific thinking to represent this idea. Soon afterwards, a little community was to be found which put a prize on the best writing about the immortality of the soul, and the prize winning writing by Widemann (Gustav W., 1812–1876) which was published in 1851 dealt with the problem of immortality from the standpoint of reincarnation. Thus, I could still state many a thing how the thinking has gradually induced many persons to consider this idea of reincarnation.

Then the scientific view of the human being came that was based on Darwin. At first, it considered the human being materialistically, and it will consider it still this way for a long. But if you take my book Theosophy or other books which are written in the spirit of spiritual science and natural sciences at the same time, you will realise that the scientific thinking—thought through to the end—imposes the necessity to the human being to think of the idea of incarnation. Nevertheless, it is not only this. I would like to show not only a logical consequence, but also that, indeed, the human being must come to the idea of reincarnation on basis of the same principle which prevails in natural sciences, namely of the principle of experience. However, another question arises there, is anybody able to collect experiences of that what should come in from supersensible worlds what should produce the human body and leave this body at death again?

One can realise cursorily still without spiritual-scientific foundations that something mental works on the outer body of the human being; but one does not like such considerations particularly today. If the human beings looked more exactly at the physiognomy of the human being in its different sculptural forms if one also looked at the facial play, at the gestures, which are individual with every human being, at the creative spirit, one would soon get a sensation how the spirit is internally working on the body.

Observe a human being who has been working on the big questions of life for about ten years, namely in such a way, as one does it in the outer science or philosophy where one reflects on these matters without having to say a lot. On the other side, observe a human being who has dealt with these issues so that they have become inner problems to him, so that they have taken him in states of the highest bliss, but also to the highest pains and the deepest tragedy. Consider a human being who deals with the questions of knowledge, and look at him, after he has led such a soul life for ten years, and you will realise how this work expresses itself in his physiognomy, how, indeed, the humanely mental works into the forms of the body. May one pursue now by certain methods such working on the outer physical body further to that point where not only certain forms of our face are changed in such a way that into them the character of the soul life is pressed, but where the indefinite form which the human being has at first becomes his completely elaborated figure?

It is necessary that the human being leads his soul life beyond the point where it is in the everyday life today. He has to learn to seize the supersensible in himself, that which is accessible to no outer observation. Then every human being can find both points by mere reflection, so to speak, where our life directly finds the supersensible.

These two points are the transitions from the wake state to sleep and again from sleep to the wake state. Since nobody should think so illogically that the human soul life stops with falling asleep and comes again into being with awakening. Our soul life must be in any state of existence in sleep, it must be somewhere to put it another way. The big question emerges which maybe the child puts that is justified for someone who gets involved with the questions of knowledge, namely the question: where does the soul go when the human being falls asleep? We see also other processes stopping, we see, for example, a burning candle going out. May one also ask there, where to does the fire go? Then we say, the fire is a process that stops if the candle goes out, and which begins again if it is kindled again.—May we compare the bodily process of the human being to the candle and say: the soul life is a process that goes out if the human being falls asleep in the evening, and is kindled in the morning when he awakes again? It seems perhaps to be in such a way, as if one could use this comparison. However, this comparison becomes impossible if, indeed, one could prove that not for the usual perception or sensation, but for a sensation to be attained by careful soul preparation that can face us which leaves our body with falling asleep and visits us with awakening again. If this is in such a way that while falling asleep not only a process takes place like a going out flame, but if we can pursue what leaves the body in the evening while falling asleep and visits it in the morning again if we can prove this process in its reality, then a supersensible inside the human being exists. Then one asks us this supersensible: how does it work within the body?

Even the famous naturalist Du Bois-Reymond (Emil Du B.-R., 1818–1896) pronounced the thought that one can understand the sleeping human being from the standpoint of natural sciences, but not the waking one in whom impulses, instincts, passions and so on surge up and down. You can read that what I have outlined today only briefly, more in detail in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds

I have described the methods there which we want to touch now briefly by which the human being gets around to getting to know the reality of that what leaves the body in sleep, and what with the awakening goes into him again. At first, we want to ask attentive soul viewers who have got a certain ability to listen to these important moments like falling asleep and awakening.

There we hear them saying what spiritual science can confirm absolutely that at first that changes what exists with sharp contours in the surroundings into something nebulous, into blurred forms. Then the falling asleep feels, as if his whole inner being is extended and does no longer depend on the forms of his skin; this is connected with a certain feeling of bliss. Then a strange moment occurs in which the human being can feel everything like in a brief vision that he has accomplished as satisfying moral things; this faces him vividly, and he knows that these are contents of his soul, he feels being in them. Then a jerk happens as it were, and the human being still feels: oh, this moment could last forever!—Some people just have this sensation who pay attention to the moment of falling asleep. The consciousness has disappeared.

The human being goes over to an inner essentiality at such a moment where the outer body plays no role, because the daily strain tires him. One feels as if the reality of the mental is scurrying. All methods of spiritual science which we can call experimental ones spiritual-scientifically consist in nothing but that the human being receives the inner power to keep that which is disappearing so that he can experience the moment of falling asleep completely consciously. The consciousness is kept. Since why does the consciousness dwindle while falling asleep? Because the human being cannot unfold that inner strength and willpower in the usual life to experience something else when the outer senses leave him. Let us ask ourselves, how much we experience in the usual life within the soul what is not stimulated by the outer impressions? There is a little left with most human beings surely. No wonder that the inner strength does not exist which can penetrate the soul-life and that is left by any outer experience at the moment, when it steps out while falling asleep. Any spiritual development is based on the penetration of our soul with the strength that the soul needs to receive the consciousness unless it receives it from the body. Meditation, concentration, and contemplation are experimental means to advance farther with the soul life than one can come in the usual life. I would like to bring in one example only.

Assuming that a human being can put a thought of benevolence or of something else in the centre of his experience and can exclude all the other thoughts, also those which one can get with the senses, to hold on this one thought only. Since the thoughts fly to the human being at such a moment as the bees fly to the flowers if one stands within the usual life. However, if one can have the strength to exercise concentration of thinking repeatedly, to practice meditative immersion, as soon as one can become free of the mere outer impressions, and delves repeatedly into pictorial thoughts which express something allegorically, then such a thought can startle the human soul-life, so that it becomes a stronger force than the human being normally has. Then such a human being falls asleep consciously, that means he experiences consciously that he grows with his soul life into a spiritual world. This is no dream, also no self-deception or self-suggestion, but something that is accessible, indeed, to every human being, but is to be reached only with care and energy. The human being can free himself completely from his physical corporeality. As he frees himself, otherwise, in sleep unconsciously from it, and as every human being is in sleep beyond the physical body, he will consciously live by such exercises in that what exists usually unconsciously beyond the human being. Briefly, the human being can experience a relief of his soul from the physical corporeality with soul exercises.

Indeed, one can always hold against such a representation that is based on inner experience: this is based on deceit! Nevertheless, whether it is based on deceit or on reality, this can be decided only by experience. Hence, I have to say repeatedly: what the human being believes to experience this way can absolutely be self-suggestion, for how far does the human being go self-deception! He can go so far that if he thinks, for example, only of a soda he already has its taste on the tongue. Something may well give the impression, as if it were perception of a spiritual world, but still it can be self-deceit. Hence, someone who does such exercises and makes his soul the experimenter must take all means to eliminate illusions. Nevertheless, in the end only the experience decides. Certainly, somebody can suggest the taste of a soft drink to himself, but it is another question whether he can quench his thirst with it.

There is the possibility to experience as reality what is in sleep beyond the physical body. How does one experience it? So that the human being makes his soul more and more independent and gets to know a quite new supersensible world. Indeed, he starts getting to know a world of spiritual light. Then something particular turns out there. The human being who otherwise does not consider his thoughts and mental pictures as realities takes them along when he leaves his body with his soul really. He loosens his conceptual life from all materiality, and this conceptual life experiences a transformation when the human being becomes free of his physical body. What I say now appears to materialistic minded people like daydreaming, even so it is reality. Our mere thoughts change into a world which we can compare—but only compare, it is different—with a propagating light with which we find the underlying cause of the things. So you get to the world in which you detach the thinking that is bound, otherwise, to the tool of the brain and submerge with your thinking in a newly appearing world. This expresses itself in the way that you feel more and more enlarged. You get to know a world of which the outer physical-sensory world is only a revelation. Spiritual beings, not atoms, form the basis of the outer sensory world, and we can penetrate as human beings into this spiritual world. So we are accepted by such a spiritual world as it were if we carry out this self-experiment in our soul.

We only attain a complete knowledge of the relation of this spiritual world to us human beings if we can also spiritually experience the moment of awakening. This is possible when the human being contemplates a lot about his inner life in meditation and concentration. For example, he can review that pictorially every morning or evening what he has experienced during the day or the day before to consider it contemplating or he contemplates his moral impulses and takes stock of himself. Then the human being gets around to experiencing the reverse moment consciously by such exercises where we submerge in our bodies that we experience, otherwise, unconsciously while awakening.

Then he experiences something that I can characterise only in the following way. You all may know that a healthy quiet sleep depends on our emotions. If the human being has thought ever so much, has exerted itself ever so much in his thinking, he falls easily asleep. But if anger, shame, remorse, and in particular a troubled conscience gnaw at him, he tosses and turns sleepless in bed. Not our thinking which we can carry over to the big spiritual world but our emotions can drive away the sleep.

Our emotions are associated with our soul life in the narrower sense. We share our thoughts with the world. The way in which our emotions just affect us is something intimately connected with what we ourselves are. Somebody who has learnt now in such a way to free his soul consciously from his body, also gets clear from immediate observation how he carries his emotions into the world into which he enters if he has become free of body. As blissful it makes us on one side to submerge in a world of spiritual light, free of the body, as much we feel chained in this world to our emotions gnawing at us. With it then we go into the spiritual world and have to carry it again into our body. However, by the mentioned exercises we find our emotional world again while submerging in our bodies. It faces us as something strange. We get to know ourselves submerging in our emotional world, and thereby we get to know, while we pursue it now consciously, what works in truth killing on our organism. I note here that I speak about death in a later talk that has a quite different meaning considering it with plants or animals than with the human being. Spiritual science does not take the easy way out to find these phenomena identical in the three realms if we pursue that consciously what has become the possession of our soul that it settles in our physical body and can work destroying in it. Then we get to know how our innermost being really forms the body while it combines with that what comes from father and mother and from the other ancestors as hereditary factors. There we see the human being entering in the physical life, we see him entering clumsily at first. He cannot yet speak; then we see the forms becoming more and more certain and see him becoming an active human being gradually.

Considering the whole development of the human being spiritual-scientifically, we realise how an inner essence develops and this forms the human being working on the body from the spiritual from birth or conception on. We find the same essence that works creatively on the body if we can pursue how it leaves the body and penetrates into a spiritual world. There we find two things: an element that enables us to pour out our own being like in a spiritual world of light; but we also find something in this essence that we must bring into this spiritual world, namely our emotional world, that is everything that we have got to know in life. In these two things we have on one side what is creative in the human being what leaves the body as our spiritual essence, goes through death and appears again in a new body after an interim and on the other side we have our emotions which we get to know by the spiritual-scientific view as a real being as that what destroys our body and leads to death.

Therefore, we realise how our spiritual essence enters in existence, builds up the body gradually, and we see this essence working the strongest in the first months where we do not yet have an inner soul life where we do not yet think. There we see the human being entering existence sleeping as it were. If we try to remember, we can come back to a certain point, not farther. We have slept into existence as it were. Only from the third, fourth years on the human being can feel as an ego. The reason is that the spiritual essence of the human being is busy forming the body at first. Then he comes to a point where the body has to grow only, and from then on the human being can use what flowed once in his body for his soul life which works within the physical body constantly in such a way that we take up the necessity of death at that time, where we start saying “I” to ourselves, up to which we can remember later where we begin an inner life.

What do we receive with this necessity of death? We receive the possibility to take up the outer world, to enrich our inside being perpetually, so that we become richer in life every day. In that part of our being that we carry in sleep into the spiritual world that forms our soul being everything is contained that we get as joys and sorrows, as pleasure and pain. While we live and develop a consciousness, we have the possibility for our inner essence to enrich it perpetually. We take this enrichment along if we go through death, but we can have it only because we had to destroy our bodies throughout life. Our body is built as it has developed from the preceding life. However, we absorb something new perpetually that enriches our soul life. Nevertheless, this new can no longer penetrate completely into our physical body, but only up to a certain degree. That expresses itself by the fact that we feel the fatigue of yesterday removed; but it cannot completely penetrate into our body. What penetrates into our body cannot develop completely in the bodily.

We take the former example once again. A human being works on questions of knowledge for ten years. Thus, his physiognomy has changed after ten years if this activity has been a matter of his heart. However, his body limits this change. The desire to develop internally further may still exist; but, the later absorbed can no longer work into the body. Hence, we see, because the body puts a border, the richer inner life beginning when the soul has poured forth into the body. First, we see the physiognomy of such a human being changing—of a thinker, poet or artist; then only we see the rich spiritual life developing. Not before our outside world limits us, we develop so surely, but we can no longer carry into our physical bodies what we develop in ourselves because our body is built up according to that what we have got in a former life on earth. Therefore, we have to carry through death what we still get internally. This helps us to build up the next body, so that we have built only in a body of the next life what must destroy our present body.

A view presents itself there that fits into the scientific thinking, a view of what death and immortality means what the repeated lives on earth mean. There we realise if we change our physiognomy how the human being has built that into his body what he has got in former lives on earth. We see the results of our former lives in the developing body, and we see in that what we get now what stands in the way of our bodily, so to speak, as a spiritual, the developing elements of our future life.

Spiritual science regards the earthly life as something that is between something former and something following. The later considerations will show how our perspective increases to the times of our existence which the human being spends free of body in the supersensible worlds. In order that such matters would not remain pipe dreams, it is necessary that we look at the methods that enable the soul to perceive even if it lacks the physical brain. Only because the human being enables the soul to perceive that in the supersensible what must remain, otherwise, a mere assertion it becomes a proven reality.

Today we stand strictly speaking only at the beginning of a science that deals with such matters. Just many people consider themselves as the best experts of the matters, as the most enlightened ones and regard these matters as fantasies. I would not be surprised if anybody said, this is daydreaming that completely contradicts any scientific truth!—Nobody will find it more comprehensible than I do if anybody says this. But while the human beings become engrossed more and more in spiritual science, they realise that we can prepare our souls by meditation so that it can know about itself, can develop inner forces by which it can still know, can still perceive if it leaves the body and can no longer perceive with the organs of the body. This has to be found experimentally—one may say, it is to be found spiritual-experimentally—that the soul is something that one can experience if it can no longer use the bodily organs. It goes through births and deaths and works in such a way that it builds up the body that goes through death and collects new forces to build the body during the earthly existence. With the questions of the nature of the human being, you attain answers to the questions of death and immortality at the same time.

Goethe said once in an essay that nature invented death to have much life. Spiritual-scientific research proves such a notion to be true saying, in any life, the human being enriches his soul life; he must die because his respective body is built as an effect of his former lives on earth. While killing his body, he creates the possibility to work into in a new body what now he cannot work into his body and into the world.

Such a worldview influences our lives deeply. If it penetrates our whole being if it remains not only a theory, we feel such a truth only as a truth of life. Since we say to ourselves when we have crossed the middle of our lives when our hairs begin becoming grey and our faces get wrinkles: life is going downhill!—Why is it going downhill? Because that what the soul has got cannot be brought into the body. However, what we have gained internally, and what must destroy our present bodies is worked into a new body. Someone can argue easily: you spiritual researchers state that the human being becomes weak in old age, so you say that just with the body the mind dwindles away!—As this objection is a given, it is a given that one only admits that such a man does not think about that: from what is our present brain built?—It is built from our former lives! We must destroy our bodies and our brains with our thoughts. But the thoughts, which kill the bodies, are those, which use the brain. It is obvious that something must stop that is bound to a tool like the brain. However, our spiritual being does not stop with it. That is why it occurs that we do no longer find the tools in ourselves to realise what we have appropriated in the present life if the human being moves in downward direction. Then this yet works in a soul life which is not bound to the brain, and which cannot be expressed by cerebral thoughts. This prepares itself to act creatively in the next life. One says it not only in Goethe's sense that nature invented death to have much life—but we have also to say, death is there to work out that in new forms what we acquire internally in life. In this sense, we can say if we see the age approaching: thank God, that life can go downward, that death can be! Since if it did not exist, we could not take up what flows towards us from the world in such a way that it forms us. We need death, so that we can make that what we experience the contents of our own being. Hence, we regard death as that by which just life can advance. Hence, there is no better adviser than spiritual science; it is not only a comforter towards the fear of death, but it gives us strength, while we are walking towards death and see the outside dying. Since we know that then the inside grows. Spiritual science will raise the whole life to a higher level at which life seems meaningful and reasonable.

From the following talks will arise that life does not proceed endlessly forward and backward, but that also reincarnation has a beginning and an end. Now I would only like to point to it. From that which spiritual science has to say about death and immortality arises that we have the effects of our present life in a following life.

The complete human existence disintegrates into the existence between birth and death and into that between death and a new birth. There we see what Goethe felt in terms of the simple life extended to the whole life while we look back not only at the little yesterday, but also at the big yesterday where we made our present life. We look there at the joys or pains of life and feel: joy strengthens us for the future; we must experience grief for overcoming obstacles to strengthen ourselves also for the future. There we see a big contrast expanding in the future life and think of the Goethe's verses:

If yesterday is clear and accessible,
If today you work freely and strongly,
Then you can hope for a tomorrow
That is also fortunate.

Happiness and optimism flow to us from the internally conceived spiritual science showing us: indeed, the spirit forms the material and survives while the material life is destroyed to reveal itself always anew, and which applies the newly acquired. I would like to summarise this for the purposes of the today's evening with the words:

While living the spirit shows
Always its power only,
Dying, however, the spirit shows,
How through all deaths
It always survives to higher life.

The challenges presented by our age really have to be faced by every individual human being today. I have made it quite clear on a number of occasions that to understand the way individuals need to face those challenges we must be aware of how human evolution progresses all over the globe. The whole course of human evolution can only be clearly understood if we gain more profound insight into the powers that intervene in the course of earth evolution as a whole and also in human lives.

I have used a number of different approaches to show that as human beings we are part of an ongoing evolution that may be said to be taking its normal course. Spiritual science enables us to follow its progress over extended periods of time. I have also pointed out that there are certain powers that have different goals for mankind than the powers who desire to guide humankind in the normal course of evolution, a course during which the earth repeatedly comes to physical manifestation. Some of those powers we would call luciferic, others ahrimanic. I have spoken of this a number of times. It is necessary to take a very serious view of these things today, but our hearts and minds cannot really achieve this serious mood unless we pay proper attention to the way these luciferic and ahrimanic powers intervene directly in human lives.

As you know, a new era in human evolution started during the 15th century, very different from anything that went before. Thinking of this you will want to be aware of the many ways in which life is different in the present age, which had its beginning in the 15th century, if we compare it to the preceding age. We may say that one particular feature of the present age is that intellectual thinking has developed since the middle of the 15th century. Humankind has to undergo a major process of education in the course of Earth evolution. Part of it is this training of the intellect. Human beings had to find out, as it were, how human life can be lived when the emphasis is on intellectual thinking. They could never have been raised to be truly free individuals if the intellectual principle had not become part of them. We have no clear idea today of the extent to which people differed from us before the middle of the 15th century, particularly in this respect. We tend to take the things we are given for granted, without giving them much thought. We are now generally dealing with the peoples of civilized countries who are inclined to think with the intellect, and we have come to believe that people have always been thinking like this. That is not the case, however, Before the middle of the 15th century people were thinking in a different way. They simply did not think in the abstract terms in which we think today. Their thinking was very much more vivid and concrete, immediately bound up with the objects of the world around them. They were much more bound up with the feelings and will impulses that can be experienced in the human soul. We are living very much in our thoughts, though we are not sufficiently aware of this. We are not even aware of the source from which this way of thinking, the intellectual approach which we take so much for granted, has evolved. We shall have to go a long way back in human evolution to get a real understanding of the origins of this way of thinking, this intellectualism. Another question we must ask ourselves is whether anything still remains of the human activity out of which our thinking has evolved.

You know that older evolutionary forces persist into later ages and continue to be present side by side with those that are normal to the age in question. This also applies to our thinking. Reminders, echoes of thinking, of an activity similar to our thinking are experienced in our dreams, when a whole world of images emerges from our night time sleep. Experience teaches us to distinguish between the world of thoughts we evolve between waking up and going to sleep and the world of dream images which we experience in an entirely passive way. If we go back to earlier times in human evolution we find that the further back we go the more does the life of the soul during waking hours come to resemble the mental activity we know in our dreams today. Present-day thinking is the fruit of later stages of evolution. During earlier stages along this path the human soul developed activities more akin to dreaming. If we follow this dreamlike activity of the human soul a long way back we find ourselves going beyond Earth evolution as we know it. We come to a time when the earth had taken a physical form in the cosmos that preceded the present one. We have got used to calling it the Old Moon evolution. Human beings were part of this as well, but in an entirely different form. During that Moon evolution, i.e. the time when the earth materialized in a form that preceded the present one, the human being, the true ancestor of modern man, was still completely etheric. His soul became active in a way that was definitely dreamlike, consisting of dream images. The peculiar thing about this was that it related to the outer world in a way that is quite different from the soul activity we know as thinking. I would say that when our soul is active in thought we find ourselves rather isolated within the world. The world is outside us, it has its own processes. We reflect on those processes in our minds, but just when we think we are reflecting most profoundly on those external processes we actually feel ourselves entirely outside them. Indeed we often feel that we are best able to think about those external processes if we keep ourselves well isolated from them, withdrawing into ourselves. The human ancestor who was dreamy in his thinking, if I may put it like this, did not have that feeling. Developing in his way in his dreams what we develop in our way when we are thinking, he knew himself to be intimately bound up in everything he experienced with what went on in the world. We see the clouds, we think about them, but we do not feel that the powers alive in the clouds are also alive in our thinking. Our human ancestor did have the feeling that the powers alive in a cloud were also alive in his thinking. This ancestor said—and I must translate what he said into our language, for his language was a silent one compared to ours: The powers that are alive and active in the cloud out there produce images in my mind. He saw himself no more isolated from the great universe in which the cloud revealed its essential nature than my little finger is able to think itself isolated from the rest of me. If I were to cut it off it would wither; it would no longer be my finger. The human ancestor felt that he could not exist apart from the universe that belonged to him. My little finger might well say: The blood which pulses through the whole of the body also pulses within me; the whole of my organic life is governed by the same laws as the organic life of the rest of the body. The human ancestor said: I am part of the universe; the power that pulses within me as I evolve images is the same as the power that is alive and active in the forming of clouds. That is how the human ancestor felt himself to be closely related, intimately bound up, with the whole world.

We need to feel isolated from everything that goes on outside us in our thinking, as though the umbilical cord has been cut and we are separate from the essential origins and causes of the existing world. In ordinary life we are not aware of the pulses beating throughout the universe. Our thinking has grown abstract. Our thinking tells us nothing, as it were, of what is alive and active within it. This provides the actual potential for the freedom of human beings, a freedom where we do not feel that something is thinking in us but that we ourselves do the thinking.

The human ancestor was unable to form ideas independently of the universe as a whole. The human ancestor felt himself to be bound up with the existing world; he knew that this existing world contained more than just abstract forces of nature. He knew that power was also wielded by entities that differed from human beings, entities that did not have a physical body such as the human body, though human beings might feel that they had citizenry of the universe in common with them. The ancestor was not aware of ‘forces of nature’; he felt himself to be in communion with nature spirits. Today we may say that everything that happens in nature follows the laws of nature, and we are part of that nature. For the human ancestor who lived in a far distant past it was natural to say that everything that happened in nature outside himself happened out of will impulses of the spirits of nature. We say the earth attracts the bodies that are on it due to gravity, and according to the law of gravity the gravitational pull decreases at a rate that is proportional to the square of the distance between the two objects. We call this a special case of a law of nature. When we speak of nature we base ourselves on such abstract notions. The human ancestor knew that an essential spiritual element was present in the phenomenon we have made into an abstract gravitational force.

Certain spiritual powers who may be said to be involved in human evolution thus developed a relationship to human beings. This would normally cease the moment Earth evolution proper began for the human being. At that point human beings would be released from the tutelage of those spiritual powers, powers they had felt to be flowing and floating into them during the Old Moon stage. So we must ask ourselves what it was that made human beings grow independent of the guidance of spirits with whom they had felt at one, however dimly. It happened when the mineral kingdom became part of human nature. In those far distant times of which I have just spoken, human beings did not yet have the mineral kingdom within them. Their organization would not have been perceptible to our present-day sense organs, for it did not yet include mineral elements.

To grasp this without getting caught up in preconceived notions we need to consider what it truly means when an organism includes the mineral kingdom. People tend to be superficial in their thinking about such things. We look at a mineral, a stone, and quite rightly consider it to be the way it presents itself to our observation. Then, however, we look at a plant in exactly the same way we look at a stone. In reality it is not the actual plant we see. A plant is really something entirely beyond sensory perception. Consider a system of forces that in a sense has the qualities of an image. Its relationship to the mineral kingdom is that this otherwise invisible organization soaks up the mineral kingdom and the forces that are active between individual component elements in the kingdom. I have a plant before me. It is an invisible system of forces that absorbs mineral principles from the mineral kingdom. The result is that the mineral aspect occupies the space also occupied by the invisible system of forces. I see this mineral aspect, though it is merely something the plant, which is not perceptible to the senses, has absorbed. That is how it is even with a plant. When we talk about plants today we are really talking only of the minerals contained within them and not about the plants themselves. It is important that we clearly understand this in the case of a plant, for it also applies to animals and humans, only more so.

During the Old Moon stage, then, human beings did not have this mineral inclusion. Human beings living on the present earth have been made in such a way that they need the mineral kingdom, having absorbed the mineral kingdom and its forces into them, as it were. What significance does this have for human nature? In the first place human beings acquired a mineral body for thinking in images the way they did at the earlier stage. As evolution progressed the mineral human body provided the basis for intellectual thinking. This happened at a relatively late state, from the middle of the 15th century onwards, having been a long time in preparation.

Modern intellectual thinking is based on the fact that human beings have received a mineral body into them. As human beings we need a mineral body first and foremost to be able to think. The older form of thinking in images had been based on what we call the third elemental kingdom. The mineral kingdom had the function to transform this pre-earthly form of thinking into our earthly way of forming ideas on the basis of thought. Within the great scheme of things the spirits with whom human beings had to feel themselves connected, in forming those ideas that were images in the distant past, were then relieved of their function. We will have to picture those spirits rather differently from the way we are accustomed to picture non-human entities. People, even people of good will who may admit that there is more to life than is apparent to the senses, tend to stick too close to the human form. This anthropomorphism takes over whenever people try and create an image in their minds of anything that is above the human sphere. It is easy to accuse Feuerbach and Buechner¹ of being anthropomorphists. We have seen more than enough of this kind of thing. We have seen the legal way of thinking evolve in the Western world, with earthly misdeeds and crimes judged by earthly judges who impose penalties, and so on. The rewards and punishment meted out for sins, i.e. for something belonging to a sphere beyond this earth and seen more as imperfections in the Christian faith, have gradually come to look more like the proceedings in an earthly court of law. The religious ideas of the West have a great deal of human jurisprudence in them. We let the gods mete out punishments of the kind we know earthly courts of law impose. If we truly wish to get beyond the merely human we must firmly decide not to think in entirely human terms. We must think beyond anything anthropomorphic, and that indeed is what really matters in human life. That is the approach we must use if we want to see clearly that the spirits who influenced the thinking in images which human beings had at the time of the Old Moon lost that function in the normal progress of human evolution but are not prepared to accept this with good grace. We might ask why they do not submit to the will of the gods who guide normal progress. They simply do not. We have to accept that as a fact. The original intention was that they should only influence dreams within the human sphere and everything related to dreaming. In the context of today's lecture we refer to them as luciferic spirits. Their proper sphere would be everything that has to do with dreaming and anything related to this. They are not satisfied with this, however. They haunt the human way of thinking that has evolved out of their own sphere, human thinking now bound to the mineral sphere. When we allow anything that normally rules our dreams, the life of the imagination, to enter into our thinking we fall prey in our thinking to luciferic nature, to the influence of spirits that should only have influenced the old form of thinking in images that belonged to the human ancestors. They have retained their power and instead of limiting themselves to our dreaming, our life of the imagination, our creative artistic work, they are constantly trying to influence our thoughts and make them dependent on impulses similar to those that existed in pre-earthly times. Our thinking is still greatly influenced by elements coming from this source, by the luciferic principle.

It is justifiable to ask in all seriousness what powers are these that have such an influence on our thinking. These influences arise from the sphere where we human beings are still rightfully dreaming and rightfully asleep above all else. They come from the sphere of our feelings and emotions. We experience our feelings the way we normally experience dreams and we experience our will the way we experience sleep. There we are still rightly cocooned in a world which becomes a luciferic world as soon as it evolves in our thinking. We therefore will not manage our evolution as human beings properly unless we make the effort to evolve other thoughts as well, thoughts increasingly independent of mere feelings and emotions, of anything arising in us out of dreamlike inner experience even when we are fully awake. Theoretical principles will not help us achieve this, only life itself can do so. We find, however, that the mental habits humankind has acquired put up great resistance to the cultivation of mind and soul that is needed. We must be on the lookout for this resistance. We find that in the present time in particular people are not prepared to listen to anything that does not arise from their own inner prejudices, their feeling of how things should go, their personal preferences. They are not in the habit of listening to anything which in a way has been decided independently of human beings, requiring merely their consent. I should like to give you a brief example which I used on one occasion to explain to someone that there is an important difference with regard to what human beings are thinking.

Many years ago I gave a lecture in a town in southern Germany—today it is no longer in southern Germany—on the wisdom taught in the Christian faith.² —As you know, it is always necessary to limit the subject matter presented in a particular lecture and one can only speak within that context. When people hear just a single lecture, such a single lecture will impress one person in one way and another in a different way, particularly if one has been objective and dispassionate in presenting the subject. It certainly would not be possible for anyone to get an idea concerning the total philosophy that lies behind a single lecture if they just listened to that one lecture. If the wisdom taught within the Christian faith is the subject for example, it will of course be impossible to conclude from the contents of the lecture what the speaker thinks about the connection between light and electricity, say. It is therefore possible for something to happen the way it did on that occasion. I spoke about the wisdom taught within the Christian faith and two Roman Catholic priests were in the audience. They came up to me afterwards and said: ‘No objection can be raised to what you have been saying’—this by the way was many years ago now—‘but we have to say that whilst it is true that we say the same thing we do say it in such a way the everybody can understand it’. My reply was: ‘Reverend fathers, surely it is like this: You or I may have some kind of inner feeling that we are speaking for everybody, but that is not the point, for that is a subjective feeling. After all it is perfectly natural—if we go entirely by our feeling I, too, must believe that I am speaking for everybody, just as you think you do; that is self-evident; otherwise we would do it differently. But we are now living in an age when our belief that something is justifiable does not count. We need to let the facts speak for themselves. We must learn to look to the facts. Subjectively you believe you are speaking for everybody. But now let me ask you about the facts. Does everybody still come to your church? That would show that you are speaking for everybody. You see, I speak to those who do not come to your church to hear you speak. My words are for those who also have the right to hear of the wisdom taught in Christianity.’ That is how we must take our orientation from what the facts have to tell.

It is necessary for us to tear ourselves away from our subjective feelings. If we do not do so the luciferic element will enter into our thinking. We would not have gone through the truly dreadful campaign of untruthfulness that has gone around the world in the last five years, the final consequence of something that has long been in preparation, if people had learned to pay rightful attention to what the facts have to tell and not to their emotions, with nationalists the worst in stirring up such emotions.

On the one hand there is the absolute necessity today to do something about our thinking and to comply even if something goes against the grain. On the other hand people dislike having to be so true to reality that one looks to the facts for guidance.

We shall not be able to attain to the higher worlds and the knowledge to be gained there if we do no train ourselves in rigid adherence to the facts of the external world. Once you have got at least to some extent into the habit of liking to hear the facts you will often suffer tortures when people of the present age want to tell you something. Very often the kind of thing you hear people say is: ‘Oh, someone said something and that was frightful, quite terrible!’ Terrible in what way? You say is was terrible but that only tells me how you felt about it. I really want to hear exactly what it was. ‘Well, it really was terrible what was said there…’ And these people simply do not understand. All the time they want to describe their subjective feelings concerning the matter, whilst you want to hear an objective report of what they actually saw. It is especially when people tell you something someone else has told them, that it is quite impossible to tell if they are simply passing on what they have heard or if they have actually looked into the matter they are talking about. This is an area where one has to remind people again and again that truthfulness concerning the knowledge to be found in supersensible spheres can only be achieved if we train ourselves as far as possible to adhere closely to the facts in the sense-perceptible world. That is the only way in which human beings can overcome the luciferic elements that stream into their thoughts—by learning to base ourselves on the facts.

On the one hand mankind is open to luciferic influences, on the other to ahrimanic influences. It had to be said that thinking here on earth evolved from earlier stages of human soul life when human beings absorbed a mineral body, as it were. This mineral body is indeed the organ for the earthly way of thinking. It does however bring it predominantly into the sphere of the powers we call ahrimanic.

We can of course become aware of the need to base ourselves on the facts, on a real world that will get us out of the habit of being swayed by our subjective emotions. We must not, however, fall prey to the kind of thinking that is nothing but an inner activity arising from the mineral body. Here we come upon a truth that many people find highly unpalatable.

You know how some are idealists or spiritualists and others are materialists. There is plenty of discussion in the world as to which is the right approach, spiritualism or materialism. All these debates are of no value whatsoever for certain regions of the human organization. Human beings can develop in two ways. We can use the mineral body we have absorbed into ourselves as the instrument for our thinking, and indeed we have to use it, otherwise we would merely be dreaming. But we can also rise beyond this instrument in our thoughts; we can develop a spiritual point of view, spiritual vision. If we do this we will of course have been thinking with the aid of our material organization, but we will have used this to reach a further stage of human development, ascending to the world of the spirit as a result. On the other hand we can stop at the point where as earth beings we let our mineral body do the thinking. It is perfectly able to do so. That in fact is the danger, and materialism cannot be said to be wrong in its views, particularly where thinking is concerned. This mineral body is no mere photographic print. It is able to think for itself, though its thinking is subject to the limits of life on earth. We need to raise the experience our mineral body is able to give us into the spheres that lie beyond sensory perception.

It is therefore possible to say that it may indeed be true that human thoughts are merely something exuded by the human mineral organization. That may indeed be right, but human beings must first do it right.

Human beings have the freedom to develop on earth in such a way that they are merely the product of matter. Animals cannot do this; they do not get to the point where mineral inclusion leads to the development of thinking activity. Animals cannot choose to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view. Human beings are at liberty to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view; all it needs is the will to do so out of a materialistic attitude to life.

Human freedom is such that people are indeed free to make materialism come true for the human kingdom, that is, they can take a course that will lead to human beings on earth concerning themselves only with material things. Fundamentally speaking, therefore, it is a matter of choice if we become materialists. If we are strong enough to bring to realization what people are told is a materialistic attitude then this attitude will be made to come true by human beings.

This influence on human beings comes from ahrimanic powers. They want to keep everything connected with Earth evolution at the point which has been reached for human beings by that very Earth evolution—that is the point of having a mineral organization. They want to make human beings perfect, but only as far as their mineral organization is concerned. The luciferic powers want to keep human beings, who now have acquired a mineral organization, at the earlier stage that was right for them before they acquired a mineral organization. So we have two powers pulling at the traces, luciferic and ahrimanic powers. The luciferic spirits want to get human beings to a point where they finally cast off their mineralized bodies and go through an evolution that has no relevance in earth life and has merely been an episode in earth life. The luciferic spirits aim for the gradual elimination of everything relating to the earth from the whole evolution of mankind. The ahrimanic spirits aim to take firm hold of this earthly, mineral aspect of human beings, isolate it from progressive evolution and let it stand on its own. That is how luciferic and ahrimanic spirits are pulling in different directions.

It is absolutely vital that having presented the large outline we now come to apply this to ordinary everyday life. We do not consider a U-shaped bar of iron to be a horse-shoe when it is in fact a magnet. In the same way we really should not consider human life to be entirely the way it may appear on the outside. If you shoe a horse with magnets you fail to realize that a magnet has more to it than a horse-shoe. Yet it happens quite often nowadays that people speak of human life exactly like someone who shoes his horse with magnets rather than with horse-shoes. People have no hesitation in speaking of positive and negative electricity in the inorganic sphere, or of positive and negative magnetism, yet they hesitate to speak of luciferic and ahrimanic elements in human life. These are just as effective in human life as positive and negative magnetism are in the inorganic sphere. It is just that the idea of positive and negative magnetism is more easily understood. It does not take as much effort to grasp it as it does to grasp the idea that there are luciferic and ahrimanic elements. That is also the reason why we shall only learn to deal with the empty talk one hears today, empty talk that turns into lies, by knowing that it is luciferic by nature.

Similarly we shall only learn to deal with everything that shows itself here and there as the materialistic point of view by knowing that it is ahrimanic by nature. In future mere external characterization will not get us anywhere when we want to understand human life; all we would be doing is talk around the subject and commit the most stupid of errors when we try and apply such ideas to real life. One thing we would not be doing is to see human life in such a way that social impulses can be gained from our knowledge of human institutions. This has a very much to do with the utter seriousness required when looking at everything connected with evolutionary trends where humankind is concerned. We cannot gain understanding of the life we are now living unless we raise our vision from earthly concerns to spheres beyond this earth. There is a particular point to this.

Looking back into earlier stages of human evolution—though not as far back as those I have spoken of earlier—people generally base themselves on such historical documents as are available. There are historians—well-known names—who say that the history of humankind is made up of everything to be found in the written records. If you start from such a definition of history, like the historian Leopold von Ranke, you will obviously arrive at a particular kind of history. The art of writing is itself part of history, however, it has evolved from something else, and in real terms one cannot do anything with this kind of definition.

We need only go back as far as Chaldean-Babylonian times, to ancient Egyptian times, and we shall find that at that period of human evolution human beings still related to the cosmos in a very different way. People today have no real idea of what it meant to connect one's life to the course of the stars, the planets, and their position relative to the fixed stars of the zodiac. These things have become an empty abstraction nowadays. Do you think a modern astrologer delving into ancient astrological writings to compile his horoscopes—if at least he does search through the old writings, and does not produce new ones; the new ones are terrible!—has even the slightest idea of the living connection which the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans felt to exist between human beings and the movements and positions of the stars viewed from the earth? Everything is different today. It has to be said that an important part of human evolution since those times has been the narrowing down of human awareness to the physical world. What did those Egyptians know of the earth? It was the ground under their feet. They knew more about the heavens. They moved in the vertical in gaining their experience. The ancient Greeks did not yet go into the horizontal either; they, too, gained their experience by going vertically. The vertical came to be reduced as the horizontal started to spread. The maximum limitation human beings experienced in their knowledge of the heavens came with the great increase in knowledge of the earth that came when men sailed around the globe and found that having sailed away to the west they would return from the east. It was necessary for human understanding in the vertical direction to become obscured. Human beings had to be isolated from the universe so that they could find within themselves the only power that can lead to human freedom. Moral impulses will arise out of this human freedom in their turn.

Human beings therefore no longer relate to the spheres beyond the earth in the vertical fashion the ancient Greeks and Chaldeans did. We have had the training that only a horizontal surface can give and must now ascend again in moral, ethical terms. We must learn how human life is influenced by powers that do not show themselves in the course taken by the world that exists outside us. Those are the luciferic and ahrimanic powers.

People tend to put their minds to other things, however, and sometimes I also have to tell you something relating to our spiritual movement that takes its orientation in anthroposophy. This has accepted the task of working out of the full seriousness the time demands and listening to the language spoken from the cosmos beyond this earth, as it were, a language which tells us that we must once again come to see the way the human being is connected with the whole cosmos. Again and again, however, things make themselves heard in this work—please forgive the abrupt change of subject—which even today draw attention to some very peculiar points of view taken by people who oppose our aims of furthering the progress of mankind. Let me read you a passage from a letter that is really typical. As I said, please forgive the abrupt change of subject but we are obliged to inform you of all kinds of things that are going on at the present time with the purpose of undermining and destroying this movement which endeavours to take up the challenge of the present age.

There is someone in Norway³ who had made it his task to destroy our movement. To assure himself that he has a right to do so, this man is writing to leading figures—that is how one does these things nowadays. He wrote to a publication called Politisch-anthropologische Monatsschrift [Political Anthropological Monthly]. This journal sent him the following information: ‘Dr Steiner is a Jew of the purest water. He is connected with the Zionists, indeed associated with them, and works for the Entente.’ The editor added that they—i.e. people of this kind—'have had their eye on him for some time.’

I just wanted to tell you this in conclusion, as yet another case among the many one gets today, with a new one coming up almost daily. That is the attitude anthropologists are now taking to the efforts being made in the anthroposophical field.

• 1 . Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, German philosopher. Referring to Feuerbach's anthropomorphism, Rudolf Steiner repeatedly quoted from his book Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), e.g. in a lecture given in Dornach on 15 October 1921 (Anthroposophie als Kosmosophie, GA 207, English title Cosmosophy).
  
  Ludwig Buechner, German physician and materialist philosopher.
• 2 . ‘Die Weisheitslehren des Christentums in Lichte der Theosophie’ (The wisdom taught in the Christian faith in the light of Theosophy),Colmar, 21 November 1905 (no written record in existence).
• 3 . Details not known.

For the subject of these lectures, I have chosen an account of man's development during a particular period of the past, of his situation today, and of the outlook for his future evolution on this Earth-planet. No world-conception which has had any influence upon Western civilization, or its American off-shoot, has been content to deal only with present-day man and to show how the individual fits into the pattern of world-population. The world-conceptions acceptable to Western civilization have always emphasized the place of man in the whole course of human history on Earth. They have always shown the relationship between man of the present and of the past, no matter whether they go back only to a certain point—as the Old Testament does in describing the history of the Earth—or whether they trace man right through the stages of cosmic evolution.

The philosophies of the East, and even the early philosophies of Europe, if they did not belong to our modern civilization, were less concerned with this outlook. They were content to envisage man in terms of space only. The feeling we all have as a result of living within Western evolution makes it quite impossible for us to be satisfied with this spatial picture. There is a sort of psychological instinct in us to see ourselves in a brotherly association not only with men living today but also with men of the past; and unless we include both past and present we do not feel that we have a real notion of mankind.

But we can never have any satisfying idea of the historical development of man, whether in a wider or in a narrower sense, if we are limited to the results of ordinary anthropology. Man is a being whose evolution we cannot comprehend with the aid of nothing but external documents, however brilliantly they may be interpreted. Man is a being of body, soul and spirit; he is a being who has been penetrated, to a lesser or greater extent, by the spirit, in such a way that consciousness has been alive within him. The whole nature and being of man can be seen in the development of his consciousness, just as the being of a plant is finally revealed to the senses in the flower.

Let us therefore go a little more deeply into this most vital aspect of human evolution—the evolution of consciousness. When we consider man's consciousness as it is today we can make certain distinctions. In our ordinary waking condition, as we know it from waking in the morning to the time of falling asleep, we develop a more or less clear and luminous life of ideas which grow out of our life of feeling as the flower grows out of the plant. Over against this clear and luminous life of ideas there is a further condition which never really becomes quite clear, but is more or less unconscious, dark, inwardly surging and weaving. Even deeper than the feelings, which do, after all, quite directly stimulate our life of thought and ideas—much deeper within our being there is our surging will. And I have often described to anthroposophists how in his willing man is strictly speaking, asleep, even during his waking state. We never experience, in the waking conditions of our present-day consciousness, what lives within our willing. We have an idea that we are going to do this or that, but in this there is as yet no willing—only the intention to will clothed in the idea. Then the intention plunges into the depths of the human being, of which his consciousness has no clearer idea than it has of dreamless sleep. It then emerges as the will seen in the action of our arms and hands, legs and feet; in the activity we exercise on objects in the external world.

Whenever we act thus through the will on our own body, or in order to effect some change in the external world, we become aware of it through our ideas—ideas which also have some quality of feeling. Our ordinary consciousness perceives only the beginning and the end of willing, the intention in the form of an idea, and then again, also in the form of an idea, the consciousness observes our own movements or those in the external world which arise out of these intentions. All that lies between—how our intentions transfer themselves, via the soul, into our organism, how the soul arouses the physical warmth, the movement of the blood and muscles which then produce an act of will—of all this we are as unaware as we are of the events in dreamless sleep.

If we really manage to observe what happens, we must say that we are actually awake only in our ideas (our conceptual life); we dream in our feelings and sleep in our willing. Our knowledge of this willing is just like the experience of waking in the morning and noticing that our organism has somehow recuperated and refreshed itself. We perceive the effects of sleep when we wake. Similarly, we have the intention to perform some act of will; we transmit it unconsciously into our organism where, as though in sleep, it passes over into activity and deed; and we wake up again only with our action and see the result of what has been going on within us, of which we have been quite unconscious.

Such in broad outline is man's experience of his own being in waking, dreaming and sleeping. After all, the dreams we have when we are sleeping have very little relation to our ideas. They obey quite other laws than the logical laws of our conceptual life. But if we observe things closely we shall see that the course of our dreaming, with its marvelous dramatic quality that is so often typical of dreams, bears an extra-ordinarily close resemblance to our life of feeling. If in our waking life, we were capable only of feeling, those feelings would not, it is true, be very like the pictures of our dreams. But the dramatic quality, tensions, impulsive wishes and crises of the inner life, with their turmoil of emotion, are displayed in our feelings just as vaguely—or if you like, just as indefinitely—as they are in our dreams.; with this difference, that the basis of a dream lies in its pictures, whereas our feelings live in those peculiar experiences which we describe in terms of our inner life. Thus in the present state of human consciousness we may include our feelings and actual dreaming as part of the dream-state, and in the same way include our willing and actual dreamless sleep as part of the sleeping state.

We must, however, realize that what we are now describing as the basic quality of our present-day consciousness has passed through a process of evolution in a comparatively recent period, though we do not like taking much notice of this in our materialistic age. But you will not understand the surviving documents of human thought, even of the early Christian centuries, unless you realize that the inner activity of men in those days was quite different from what lives within our souls today as the activity of thought. In particular it would be a complete psychological error to seek to understand Scotus Erigena's work, “On the Parts of Nature” (De Divisione Naturae) written in the ninth century, for example, or the older writings on alchemy, with the conceptual intellect which has become normal today. We simply cannot understand what they were driving at if our modern type of thinking is employed. We can read the words, but we shall not grasp the meaning.

Human thinking since the fifteenth century has acquired a particular character which may have developed only slowly but has more or less already reached is culminating point. Yet this way of thinking, which represents the actual waking condition for modern man, is not really capable of giving him any satisfaction. A man can think, and that is the only luminous experience of his waking life. He can think, and that is the only means by which he can draw on his inner powers and establish the marvelous results of the sciences. Yet basically this modern thinking can give man no satisfaction for his inner yearnings. The fact is that he loses his own self in this modern thought. He does of course experience this thinking as the one clear element in his consciousness—much clearer, for instance, than his breathing or blood circulation, which remain obscure in the deeper regions of his consciousness. He feels that these also may contain some reality, but he sleeps through this reality, and it is only in his ideas and thinking that he is awake. But then, especially if he is disposed to a certain amount of self-observation, he comes to feel that although it is only in his thinking that he fulfils his inner being, yet his true self is lost. And I can give you two examples which will enable you—spiritually of course—to lay hands on this loss of self in thought.

There is a famous philosopher of modern times, Descartes, who is the originator of the famous saying, cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. So this philosopher says. But today men do not and cannot say it. For when we merely think something or experience it in thinking, it does not follow that it “is,” nor that I “am” merely because I myself am thinking. For us these thoughts are at most pictures; they may be the most certain thing in us, but we do not grasp any “being” through our thinking. Again, we often say that if we think something, that is “nothing but thinking.” So also in Descartes' case: he wants to “be” and cannot find any other point at which to grasp this “being” of man, and so he seeks it where the common man certainly does not feel it to be—in thought. We do not think in sleep, but does it follow then that we are not? Do we die in the evening and are we reborn each morning? Or do we exist between falling asleep and waking? The simplest truths are in fact not taken into account by present-day views of the world. Descartes' “I think, therefore I am” is not based on something inwardly experienced, but is only a convulsive effort to attach oneself to reality. That is the first point.

The second point I want to make is this. Besides his thinking, of which modern man is very proud, we have the results of natural science, results of observation or experiment. In point of fact these do not help us to see the real being of things, but only the changes that occur in them—that which is transitory. And nowadays people consider a thought to be justified only if it derives from this external actuality, which after all reveals only a manifestation of itself. So we have ceased completely to grasp our real “being” in ourselves; our thought is too much in the air. We have no way of finding anything else in us except by methods that science applies to Nature; and then we seek our real being in that. In consequence, man today believes only in that part of himself which is part of Nature. Nature and the form of existence associated with it thus becomes a sort of Moloch which robs modern man of any real feeling of his own being.

Many people will perhaps retort that they don't notice anything of the sort, and will contradict what I have said. But that is only their opinion. The feelings which modern men have, at least if they have even the elements of self-awareness, are the outcome of the mood I have just described. They are encased, as it were, within this experience of their own being and their relation to the external world, and they then transfer the consequence of this condition to their consciousness of the world. For instance, they may observe the stars with their telescopes, spectroscopes and other instruments. They record what these instruments show and then build up a purely spatial astronomy and astrophysics. They do not notice that they are merely transferring to the heavens what they have observed and calculated about things on the Earth.

Thus, suppose that I have here some source of light. We all admit that if I move thousands of miles away from it, the light will become weaker and perhaps no longer visible. We all know that the strength of the light decreases with distance. Ordinary physics states the law that gravitation, too, decreases with the square of the distance. But people don't pursue this thought further. They can demonstrate that here on Earth, gravity has a particular magnitude and diminishes with the square of the distance, for they live on the Earth and establish laws of Nature and truths valid for the Earth, and build them into a system. Where gravity has a definite magnitude, these laws are true. The force of gravity decreases, but so does truth. What was true for the Earth ceases to be true if we pursue it further outwards into the Universe. We have no more right to regard the findings of physics and chemistry as applicable to the whole Universe than we have to assume that earthly gravity holds good throughout the Cosmos. The truths that rule in the heavenly spheres cannot be dealt with in the same way as those that hold on Earth. Of course to say this sort of thing nowadays is considered highly paradoxical—even crazy. But our general consciousness is so solidly encased nowadays that even the slightest remark which might pierce through the case immediately appears strange. Modern men are so wholly tied to the Earth that their knowledge, even sometimes their reflections, never pass beyond what they experience on Earth. And they deal with cosmic time exactly as they deal with cosmic space.

I was particularly impressed with all this recently. (I have often discussed this sort of truth among anthroposophists and what I am saying now is only a repetition based on a particular example.) This struck me with particular force when I was invited by our English anthroposophical friends to give a course of lectures at Penmaenmawr in the second half of August.¹ – 31^st August, 1923. (Revised edition in preparation, 1966.) The title of the German text in the Complete Centenary Edition is: Initiations-Erkenntnis. Die geistig und physische Welt- und Menschheitsentwicklung in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft vom Gesichtspunkte der Anthroposophie Penmaenmawr is in Wales, where the island of Anglesey lies over against the West coast of Britain. It is really an extraordinary region which shows that there are quite different geographies over the Earth's surface from those you will find discussed in textbooks, even for the most advanced students. Ordinarily we think it more than enough if a geographical description includes the character of the vegetation, flora and fauna, and I in addition we base it on the geological and palaeontological nature of the region. But the Earth displays differentiations of a much more inward nature than any you will ordinarily find in geographical works. Thus in Penmaenmawr, where these lectures were held, you have only to go a short distance, a mile or so into the mountains, and all over the place you can find the remains of the old Druid cults, fallen stone circles of a simple sort. For instance, stones are put together to enclose a small space and covered with another stone so as to form a little chamber, where the light of the sun could be cut off, leaving the chamber in darkness. I do not dispute that such cromlechs had also to serve as burial places, for at all times the most important centers of worship have been set up over the graves of fellow-men. But here, even with these simple cromlechs, we have something further, as indeed indicated by the so-called Druid circles.

It was a wonderful experience when I went with a friend one day to one of these mountains at Penmaenmawr, on which the scanty remains of two such circles are still to be seen lying very close to each other. Even today it can be seen from the position of the stones that there were once twelve of them, and if one wants to discover their purpose they must be observed closely. Now while the sun follows his course through the Cosmos, whether during a day or during a year, a quite specific shadow is cast beneath each stone; and the path of the sun could be traced by following the shadow as it changed in the course of a day or year. We are still sensitive to light today, especially if light is associated with warmth or warmth with light. Present-day consciousness can naturally also notice the difference between the light of the summer and winter sun, since we are warm in summer and cold in winter; and we may note finer differences too. But, you see the same differences we can notice in so obvious a fashion in the light, when we are either warm or freezing, can be perceived in the shadow as well. There is a difference between the October sun and the July or August sun, not only in the direction but in the quality of the shadow. One of the duties of the Druids was to develop a special faculty for perceiving the quality of the shadow—for perceiving, let us say, the peculiar intermingling of a red tone in the August shadow or a blue one in that of November or December. Thus the Druids were able, by the training they received, to read off the daily and yearly course of the sun in the shadows. We can still see from these remains that one of the tasks they undertook was something of this sort. There were many other things that belonged to this cult: a Sun ritual, which, however, was not a mere abstraction, not even the abstraction we see in devotion and reverence. Without undervaluing devotion and reverence, it would be a complete error to believe that. But devotion and reverence were not in this case the essentials, for the cult included something quite different.

Take the grain of wheat or rye. It must be planted within the Earth at a particular moment of the year, and it is a bad thing for it to be planted at an inappropriate moment. Anyone who has exact knowledge of these things is well aware that it makes a difference whether a seed is planted a few days earlier or later. There are other things of this sort in human life. The people who lived about three thousand years ago in the region where the Druid cult flourished led an extremely simple life. Agriculture and cattle-raising were the chief occupations. But we may ask how they were to know when to sow and harvest in the best way, or when they were to attend to the many other jobs which Nature requires in the course of a year. Nowadays of course we have farmers' calendars which tell the farmer that on such and such a day such and such a job needs to be done, and tell him very intelligently. In our day, with our type of consciousness, this information can be catalogued and read off from the printed page. We think nothing of it, but the fact remains that there was none of that, not even the most primitive form of reading and writing, in the days when the Druid religion was in its prime. On the other hand, the Druids could stand in one of these stone circles and by observing the shadow they could proclaim, for instance, that during the next week farmers must undertake this or that work, or the bulls be introduced to the herd since the moment was right for the mating of the cows. The druids were equipped to read in the Cosmos; they used the signs produced by those monuments of which we have today only such scanty remains, and could read from them the information the sun gave them of what was to be done on Earth.

The constitution of the soul was in fact quite different, and it would be a serious conceit on our part if, just because we are capable of this little bit of reading and writing, we were to undervalue the art which made it possible to lay down the work and activities required on Earth through these revelations of the heavens. In places like Penmaenmawr we are impelled to recollect many other things, too, which Spiritual Science is peculiarly qualified to investigate.

I have often pointed out in anthroposophical circles how ordinary thoughts are inadequate to grasp what Spiritual Science can investigate and how we have to conceive it in Imaginations. I assume you all know what I have said about Imaginations in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. It is these Imaginations and not our ordinary ideas which we must have in our souls when we are describing things on the basis of some immediate spiritual observation and not of external sense-perception. The genuinely spiritual-scientific accounts which are given you in our anthroposophical lectures have their origin in Imaginations of that kind.

Now these Imaginations are much more alive than ordinary abstract thoughts, which can give us no inkling of what reality is, but only pictures of it. Imaginations on the other hand, can be laid hold of by active thinking, in the same way that we can grasp tables and chairs. We are much more vigorously permeated by reality when our knowledge comes from Imaginations and not from abstract concepts. Anyone who speaks on the basis of Imaginations always has them before him as though he were writing something down—writing, however, not with those terribly abstract signs which constitute our writing, but with cosmic pictures.

Now what is the position with regard to these Imaginations in our district here? Anyone who knows them knows also that it is pretty easy to attain them, pretty easy to form them. If he has a sense of responsibility when describing anything through Spiritual Science, he will allow these Imaginations to take effect—that is, to inscribe them in the spirit—only when he has pondered them a good deal and tested them thoroughly. Nobody who speaks out of the spiritual world with a full sense of responsibility has a facile tongue. Nevertheless we can say that in districts like ours here it is relatively easy to inscribe these Imaginations, but they are obliterated equally easy. If in districts like this we create a spiritual content in Imaginations—I cannot put it any other way—we find it is like writing something down and immediately afterwards rubbing it out. But there in Wales, where land and sea meet and the tides ebb and flow each day, where the wind blows through and through you—for instance in the hotel where we were staying you could not only feel the wind blowing in the windows, but when one walked on the carpet it was like walking on a rough sea because of the wind blowing under the carpet—where moreover Nature is so full of life and so joyful in its life that you may get almost hourly alternations of rain and sunshine, then you do really come to see how Nature revealed herself to the Druid priests—or I might say the learned Druids, for it would be the same thing—when they gazed upon her from their mountain height. How then did the Earth appear to the Druid's spiritual eye when the heavens had the character I have just described?

This is very interesting to observe, though you will only realize it fully if you can grasp the particular geographical quality of the place. There you have to exert yourself much more vigorously if you want to construct Imaginations than you do, for instance, here. There, they are much more difficult to inscribe in the astral atmosphere. On the other hand they are more permanent and are not so easily extinguished. You come to realize how these old Druids chose for their most important cult-centers, just such places in which the spiritual as it approaches mankind, expresses itself to some extent in the quality of the place. Those Druid circles we visited—well, if we had gone up on a balloon and looked down from above on the larger and the smaller circles, for though they are some distance apart you would not notice that when you are a certain height above them—the circles would have appeared like the ground-plan of the Goetheanum which has been destroyed by fire. It is a wonderfully situated spot! As you climb the heights, you have wide views over land and sea. Then you reach the top and the Druid circles lie before you—there where the hill is hollowed out, so that you find yourself in a ring of hills, and within this ring of hills are the Druid circles. It was there that the Druid sought his science, his knowledge, his wisdom; there that he sought his Sun-wisdom but also his Nature-wisdom.

As the Druid penetrated into the relationship between what he saw on Earth and what streamed down from the heavens, he saw the whole processes of plant-growth and vegetation quite differently from the way in which they appear to our abstract thought of later days. If we can properly grasp the true quality of the sun, on the one hand the physical rays which enter our eyes, on the other the shadow with its various gradations, we come to realize that the spiritual essence of the sun lives on in the various grades of shadow. The shadow prevents only the physical rays of the sun from reaching other bodies, whereas the spiritual penetrates further. In the cromlechs which I have described to you, a small dark place is separated off. But it is only the physical sunlight which cannot penetrate there; its activity penetrates, and the Druid, as gradually through this activity he came to be permeated by the secret forces of cosmic existence, entered into the secrets of the world. Thus, for instance, the actions of the sun on plants was revealed to him; he could see that a particular kind of plant-life flourishes at a particular time when the sun is active in a particular way. He could trace the spiritual activity of the sun and see how it pours and streams into flower, leaf and root; and it was the same with animals. And while he was thus able inwardly to recognize the activity of the sun he also began to see how other activities from the Cosmos, for example, those of the moon, pour into it. He could see that the effect of the sun was to promote sprouting growth, with an upward tendency, and so he knew that if a plant as it grows out from the soil were exposed only to the sun, it would grow unendingly. The sun brings forth burgeoning, luxuriant life. If this life is checked and reduced to form, if leaves, blossom, seed and fruit assume a specific shape, if what strives towards the infinite is variously limited—all this has its origin in the activities of the moon. And these are to be found not only in the reflected light of the sun, for the moon reflects all influences, and these in their turn can be seen in the growth of the plant out of its root and also in what lives in the propagation of animals, and so on.

Let us take a particular instance. The Druid observed the growing plant; he observed in a more living way what, later on, Goethe observed more abstractly in his idea of metamorphosis. The Druid saw the downward streaming sun-forces, but he saw also the reflected sun-forces in everything that gives the plant its form. In his natural science he saw the combined activity of sun and moon on the root, which is wholly within the Earth and has the function of absorbing the salts of the Earth in a particular way. He could see that the action of sun and moon was quite different on the leaf, which, wrests itself out of the Earth and presses forward into the air. Again, he saw a different action on the flower, which pushes onwards to the light of the sun. He could see as a unity the activity of the Earth; to him, plant-growth and the being of the animal were also a unity.

Of course his life there was just what we experienced, with the winds raging around, which can reveal so much about the structure of the region, with the peculiar weather conditions which manifest themselves so vividly in that district. Thus, for example, at the beginning of one of our Eurythmy performances, which took place in a wooden hall, the audience sat with their umbrellas up, because just before the performance there had been a heavy downpour which was still going on when the performance began. The curtains were quite wet! This intimate association with Nature which can still be experienced today was of course also experienced by the Druids. Nature there is not so hard; she almost embraces one. It really is a delightful experience. I might almost say that one is drawn on and accompanied by the activity of Nature; one seems to be part of it. I even met people who maintained that one need not really eat there, that one can be fed by this very activity of Nature.

The Druid, then, lived with his Sun-Initiation within this activity of Nature, and he saw as the unity I have described the sun and moon mediated through the activity of the Earth, the growth of the plant, the growth of root, leaf and flower; and all this not in the form of abstract laws as today, but of living elemental beings. Different elemental beings of sun and moon were active in the root, in the leaf and in the flower. He could also pursue in the wider realms of Nature what is so beneficially differentiated in root, leaf and flower. Through his imaginative gifts he could see the small elemental beings restricted to narrow limits in the root, and he knew that what lives in beneficial form in the root can free itself and expand to the gigantic. Thus he saw the large-scale activities of Nature as the small activities of the plant raise dot a gigantic power. Just as he had spoken of the elemental beings in the root of the plant, he could also speak of these root-beings as having expanded in a cosmically irregular way and manifesting in the formation of frost, dew and hail. On the one hand he spoke of the root-beings who were beneficially active, and of the giants of frost and ice which are these root-beings grown to gigantic size.

Again, he spoke of the elemental activities in the leaf of the plant, which permeate themselves with the forces of the air; he traced them into the distant spaces of Nature, and he then saw that, if what lives in the leaf frees itself and strives beyond its proper limits into the distances of Nature, it manifests in the surging of winds. The giants of wind and storm are the elemental beings of the plant grown beyond their size. And the element which is distilled in the flower the etheric oils with their phosphoric quality—if that is freed, it manifests itself as the giants of fire, among whom, for instance, Loki belongs. In this science of sun and moon, therefore, the Druid saw as a unity both that which lives in the narrowly restricted space of the plant and that which frees itself and lives in wind and weather.

But he went further. He said to himself: When that which lives in root, leaf and flower is contained within the desirable limits set by the good gods, normal plant-growth results. If it appears in hoar frost, that is the work of opposing beings: for the elemental beings growing into powers of opposition, create the harmful, devastating aspects of Nature. Now as a human being I can make use of the devastating activities of the beings who are the opponents of the gods; I can gather the hoar frost in appropriate ways, and the products of the storm and whatever is caught up in the surging of wind and rain. I can make use of the giant forces for my own purposes by burning the plant, for instance, and reducing it to ashes, to charcoal and so on. I can take these forces, and by using frost, hail and rain and other such things, or what the giants of fire control—things which are the expression of forces that have grown to harmful vastness—I can protect the normal growth of the plant. I can rob these giants of all this and can treat normal plants with it, and by applying these forces of the opposing powers I can make healing medicines out of the good elemental forces which have remained within their proper limits. And this was in fact one of the ways of making medicines out of plants, by employing frost and snow and ice and by the use of burning and calcinations. The Druid felt it to be his work to take whatever was harmful from the opposing giant powers and restore it to the service of the good gods. We can trace these things in many different ways.

Now why am I spending time on this? I want to use it as an example—and I quote this particular one because I do indeed think that the Penmaenmawr lecture-course was a very important event in the history for the Anthroposophical Movement—to show how man's consciousness and his whole constitution of soul were quite different at a time not so very far removed from the present. With his present-day consciousness man cannot realize what lived in the consciousness of this ancient humanity. And what I have said of that ancient humanity could also be said of other peoples. There we catch glimpses of a quite different constitution of soul. Men in those days had no idea of what we experience as abstract thoughts. All their thinking was more dreamlike, and they did not live within such sharply outlined ideas and concepts as we do today. They lived in dreams which were much more vivid and alive, more full of substance; and indeed their waking life was really a sort of continuation of their dreaming. Just as nowadays we live in an alternation of dreaming or dreamless sleep and the abstract ideas of our waking life, so they alternated between this dreamlike everyday life and a dreamless sleep which was not wholly like ours. When they woke they felt that there was still something remaining over from sleep—something which afforded a sort of nourishment for the soul, which they had absorbed during sleep and which could still be felt the after-taste of sleep in their whole organism. There was a third condition which no longer occurs in human consciousness, a feeling of being surrounded by the Earth, and when a man woke up he felt not only that he had been asleep—of which he retained an aftertaste—but that he had been received into a kind of grave by the forces of gravity, that gravity had closed him in, and he was, as it were, within the embrace of the Earth.

Now just as we can describe our present-day states of consciousness as waking, dreaming, and sleeping so we should have to say that at a certain stage of the past there were the three states of dreaming, sleeping and being surrounded by the Earth. Since everything which evolves in the course of history has some sort of relation to the present, we find human souls in whom, during a later earth-life something peculiar appears like a genuine memory of earlier times, something connected with their earlier earth-life. Men like this display what for their own age is abnormal, but which is a living memory of their souls. Examples of this were Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg, and in such spirits something connected with human evolution lights up into contemporary humanity from a very distant past.

Tomorrow I will say more about the special qualities of vision of Boehme and Swedenborg; this will help us to understand the past of humanity and also the three future states of consciousness.

• 1. The Evolution of the World and of Humanity. 13 lectures, 19^th 1

This lecture, the 9th of 12 lectures published under is: A Living Knowledge of Nature, the Fall of the Intellect into Sin, the Spiritual Resurrection.

You have seen from these lectures that I feel duty bound to speak at this time about a consciousness that must be attained if we are to accomplish one of the tasks of the Anthroposophical Society. And to begin with today, let me point to the fact that this consciousness can only be acquired if the whole task of culture and civilization is really understood today from the spiritual-scientific point of view. I have taken the most varied opportunities to try, from this point of view, to characterize what is meant by the fall of man, to which all religions refer. The religions speak of this fall of man as lying at the starting point of the historical development of mankind; and in various ways through the years we have seen how this fall of man—which I do not need to characterize in more detail today—is an expression of something that once occurred in the course of human evolution: man's becoming independent of the divine spiritual powers that guided him.

We know in fact that the consciousness of this independence first arose as the consciousness soul appeared in human evolution in the first half of the fifteenth century. We have spoken again and again in recent lectures about this point in time. But basically the whole human evolution depicted in myths and history is a kind of preparation for this significant moment of growing awareness of our freedom and independence.

This moment is a preparation for the fact that earthly humanity is meant to acquire a decision-making ability that is independent of the divine spiritual powers. And so the religions point to a cosmic-earthly event that replaces the soul-spiritual instincts—which alone were determinative in what humanity did in very early times—with just this kind of human decision making. As I said, we do not want to speak in more detail about this now, but the religions did see the matter in this way: With respect to his moral impulses the human being has placed himself in a certain opposition to his guiding spiritual powers, to the Yahweh or Jehovah powers, let us say, speaking in Old Testament terms. If we look at this interpretation, therefore, we can present the matter as though, from a definite point in his evolution, man no longer felt that divine spiritual powers were active in him and that now he himself was active.

Consequently, with respect to his overall moral view of himself, man felt that he was sinful and that he would have been incapable of falling into sin if he had remained in his old state, in a state of instinctive guidance by divine spiritual powers. Whereas he would then have remained sinless, incapable of sinning, like a mere creature of nature, he now became capable of sinning through this independence from the divine spiritual powers. And then there arose in humanity this consciousness of sin: As a human being I am sinless only when I find my way back again to the divine spiritual powers. What I myself decide for myself is sinful per se, and I can attain a sinless state only by finding my way back again: to the divine spiritual powers.

This consciousness of sin then arose most strongly in the Middle Ages. And then human intellectuality, which previously had not yet been a separate faculty, began to develop. And so, in a certain way, what man developed as his intellect, as an intellectual content, also became infected—in a certain sense rightly—with this consciousness of sin. It is only that one did not say to oneself that the intellect, arising in human evolution since the third or fourth century A.D., was also now infected by the consciousness of sin. In the Scholastic wisdom of the Middle Ages, there evolved, to begin with, an ‘unobserved’ consciousness of sin in the intellect.

This Scholastic wisdom of the Middle Ages said to itself: No matter how effectively one may develop the intellect as a human being, one can still only grasp outer physical nature with it. Through mere intellect one can at best prove that divine spiritual powers exist; but one can know nothing of these divine spiritual powers; one can only have faith in these divine spiritual powers. One can have faith in what they themselves have revealed either through the Old or the New Testament.

So the human being, who earlier had felt himself to be sinful in his moral life—‘sinful’ meaning separated from the divine spiritual powers—this human being, who had always felt morally sinful, now in his Scholastic wisdom felt himself to be intellectually sinful, as it were. He attributed to himself an intellectual ability that was effective only in the physical, sense-perceptible world. He said to himself: As a human being I am too base to be able to ascent through my own power into those regions of knowledge where I can also grasp the spirit.

We do not notice how connected this intellectual fall of man is to his general moral fall. But what plays into our view of human intellectuality is the direct continuation of his moral fall.

When the Scholastic wisdom passes over then into the modern scientific view of the world, the connection with the old moral fall of man is completely forgotten. And, as I have often emphasized, the strong connection actually present between modern natural-scientific concepts and the old Scholasticism is in fact denied altogether. In modern natural science one states that man has limits to his knowledge, that he must be content to extend his view of things only out upon the sense-perceptible physical world. A Dubois-Reymond, for example, and others state that the human being has limits to what he can investigate, has limits to his whole thinking, in fact.

But that is a direct continuation of Scholasticism. The only difference is that Scholasticism believed that because the human intellect is limited, one must raise oneself to something different from the intellect—to revelation, in fact—when one wants to know something about the spiritual world.

The modern natural-scientific view takes half, not the whole; it lets revelation stay where it is, but then places itself completely upon a standpoint that is possible only if one presupposes revelation. This standpoint is that the human ability to know is too base to ascend into the divine spiritual worlds.

But at the time of Scholasticism, especially at the high point of Scholasticism in the middle of the Middle Ages, the same attitude of soul was not present as that of today. One assumed then that when the human being used his intellect he could gain knowledge of the sense-perceptible world; and he sensed that he still experienced something of a flowing together of himself with the sense-perceptible world when he employed his intellect. And one believed then that if one wanted to know something about the spiritual one must ascend to revelation, which in fact could no longer be understood, i.e., could no longer be grasped intellectually. But the fact remained unnoticed—and this is where we must direct our attention!—that spirituality flowed into the concepts that the Schoolmen, set up about the sense world. The concepts of the Schoolmen were not as unspiritual as ours are today. The Schoolmen still approached the human being with the concepts that they formed for themselves about nature, so that the human being was not yet completely excluded from knowledge. For, at least in the Realist stream, the Schoolmen totally believed that thoughts are given us from outside, that they are not fabricated from within. Today we believe that thoughts are not given from outside but are fabricated from within. Through this fact we have gradually arrived at a point in our evolution where we have dropped everything that does not relate to the outer sense world.

And, you see, the Darwinian theory of evolution is the final consequence of this dropping of everything unrelated to the outer sense world. Goethe made a beginning for a real evolutionary teaching that extended as far as man. When you take up his writing in this direction, you will see that he only stumbled when he tried to take up the human being. He wrote excellent botanical studies. He wrote many correct things about animals. But something always went wrong when he tried to take up the human being. The intellect that is trained only upon the sense world is not adequate to the study of man. Precisely Goethe shows this to a high degree. Even Goethe can say nothing about the human being. His teaching on metamorphosis does not extend as far as the human being. You know how, within the anthroposophical world view, we have had to broaden this teaching on metamorphosis, entirely in a Goethean sense, but going much further.

What has modern intellectualism actually achieved in natural science? It has only come as far as grasping the evolution of animals up to the apes, and then added on the human being without being able inwardly to encompass him. The closer people came to the higher animals, so to speak, the less able their concepts became to grasp anything. And it is absolutely untrue to say, for example, that they even understand the higher animals. They only believe that they understand them.

And so our understanding of the human being gradually dropped completely out of our understanding of the world, because understanding dropped out of our concepts. Our concepts became less and less spiritual, and the unspiritual concepts that regard the human being as the mere endpoint of the animal kingdom represent the content of all our thinking today. These concepts are already instilled into our children in the early grades, and our inability to look at the essential being of man thus becomes part of the general culture.

Now you know that I once attempted to grasp the whole matter of knowledge at another point. This was when I wrote The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and its prelude Truth and Science although the first references are present already in my The Science of Knowing: Outline of an Epistemology Implicit in the Goethean World View written in the 1880's. I tried to turn the matter in a completely different direction. I tried to show what the modern person can raise himself to, when—not in a traditional sense, but out of free inner activity—he attains pure thinking, when he, attains this pure, willed thinking which is something positive and real, when this thinking works in him. And in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I sought, in fact, to find our moral impulses in this purified thinking.

So that our evolution proceeded formerly in such a way that we more and more viewed man as being too base to act morally, and we extended this baseness also into our intellectuality.

Expressing this graphically, one could say: The human being developed in such a way that what he knew about himself became less and less substantial. It grew thinner and thinner (light color). But below the surface, something continued to develop (red) that lives, not in abstract thinking, but in real thinking.

Now, at the end of the 19th century, we had arrived at the point of no longer noticing at all what I have drawn here in red; and through what I have drawn here in a light color, we no longer believed ourselves connected with anything of a divine spiritual nature. Man's consciousness of sin had torn him out of the divine spiritual element; the historical forces that were emerging could not take him back. But with The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I wanted to say: Just look for once into the depths of the human soul and you will find that something has remained with us: pure thinking, namely, the real, energetic thinking that originates from man himself, that is no longer mere thinking, that is filled with experience, filled with feeling, and that ultimately expresses itself in the will. I wanted to say that this thinking can become the impulse for moral action. And for this reason I spoke of the moral intuition which is the ultimate outcome of what otherwise is only moral imagination. But what is actually intended by The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity can become really alive only if we can reverse the path that we took as we split ourselves off more and more from the divine spiritual content of the world, split ourselves off all the way down to intellectuality. When we again find the spirituality in nature, then we will also find the human being again.

I therefore once expressed in a lecture that I held many years ago in Mannheim that mankind, in fact, in its present development, is on the point of reversing the fall of man. What I said was hardly noticed, but consisted in the following: The fall of man was understood to be a moral fall, which ultimately influenced the intellect also. The intellect felt itself to be at the limits of its knowledge. And it is basically one and the same thing—only in a somewhat different form—if the old theology speaks of sin or if Dubois-Reymond speaks of the limits of our ability to know nature. I indicated how one must grasp the spiritual—which, to be sure, has been filtered down into pure thinking—and how, from there, one can reverse the fall of man. I showed how, through spiritualizing the intellect, one can work one's way back up to the divine spiritual.

Whereas in earlier ages one pointed to the moral fall of man and thought about the development of mankind in terms of this moral fall of man, we today must think about an ideal of mankind: about the rectifying of the fall of man along a path of the spiritualization of our knowing activity, along a path of knowing the spiritual content of the world again. Through the moral fall of man, the human being distanced himself from the gods. Through the path of knowledge he must find again the pathway of the gods. Man must turn his descent into an ascent. Out of the purely grasped spirit of his own being, man must understand, with inner energy and power, the goal, the ideal, of again taking the fall of man seriously. For, the fall of man should be taken seriously. It extends right into what natural science says today. We must find the courage to add to the fall of man, through the power of our knowing activity, a raising of man out of sin. We must find the courage to work out a way to raise ourselves out of sin, using what can come to us through a real and genuine spiritual-scientific knowledge of modern times.

One could say, therefore: If we look back into the development of mankind, we see that human consciousness posits a fall of man at the beginning of the historical development of mankind on earth. But the fall must be made right again at some point: It must be opposed by a raising of man. And this raising of man can only go forth out of the age of the consciousness soul. In our day, therefore, the historic moment has arrived when the highest ideal of mankind must be the spiritual raising of ourselves out of sin. Without this, the development of mankind can proceed no further.

That is what I once discussed in that lecture in Mannheim. I said that, in modern times, especially in natural-scientific views, an intellectual fall of man has occurred, in addition to the moral fall of man. And this intellectual fall is the great historical sign that a spiritual raising of man must begin.

But what does this spiritual raising of man mean? It means nothing other, in fact, than really understanding Christ. Those who still understood something about him, who had not—like modern theology—lost Christ completely, said of Christ that he came to earth, that he incarnated into an earthly body as a being of a higher kind. They took up what was proclaimed about Christ in written traditions. They spoke, in fact, about the mystery of Golgotha.

Today the time has come when Christ must be understood. But we resist this understanding of Christ, and the form this resistance takes is extraordinarily characteristic. You see, if even a spark of what Christ really is still lived in those who say that they understand Christ, what would happen? They would have to be clear about the fact that Christ, as a heavenly being, descended to earth; he therefore did not speak to man in an earthly language, but in a heavenly one. We must therefore make an effort to understand him. We must make an effort to speak a cosmic, extraterrestrial language. That means that we must not limit our knowledge merely to the earth, for, the earth was in fact a new land for Christ. We must extend our knowledge out into the cosmos. We must learn to understand the elements. We must learn to understand the movements of the planets. We must learn to understand the star constellations, and their influence on what happens on earth. Then we draw near to the language that Christ spoke.

That is something, however, that coincides with our spiritual raising of man. For why was man reduced to understanding only what lives on earth? Because he was conscious of sin, in fact, because he considered himself too base to be able to grasp the world in its extraterrestrial spirituality. And that is actually why people speak as though man can know nothing except the earthly. I characterized this yesterday by saying: We understand a fish only in a bowl, and a bird only in a cage. Certainly there is no consciousness present in our civilized natural science that the human being can raise himself above this purely earthly knowledge; for, this science mocks any effort to go beyond the earthly. If one even begins to speak about the stars, the terrible mockery sets in right away, as a matter of course, from the natural-scientific side.

If we want to hear correct statements about the relation of man to the animals, we must already turn our eye to the extraterrestrial world, for only the plants are still explainable in earthly terms; the animals are not. Therefore I had to say earlier that we do not even understand the apes correctly, that we can no longer explain the animals. If one wants to understand the animals, one must take recourse to the extraterrestrial, for the animals are ruled by forces that are extraterrestrial. I showed you this yesterday with respect to the fish. I told you how moon and sun forces work into the water and shape him out of the water, if I may put it so. And in the same way, the bird out of the air. As soon as one turns to the elements, one also meets the extraterrestrial. The whole animal world is explainable in terms of the extraterrestrial. And even more so the human being. But when one begins to speak of the extraterrestrial, then the mockery sets in at once.

The courage to speak again about the extraterrestrial must grow within a truly spiritual-scientific view; for, to be a spiritual scientist today is actually more a matter of courage than of intellectuality. Basically it is a moral issue, because what must be opposed is something moral: the moral fall of man, in fact.

And so we must say that we must in fact first learn the language of Christ, the language ton ouranon, the language of the heavens, in Greek terms. We must relearn this language in order to make sense out of what Christ wanted to do on earth.

Whereas up till now one has spoken about Christianity and described the history of Christianity, the point now is to understand Christ, to understand him as an extraterrestrial being. And that is identical with what we can call the ideal of raising ourselves from sin.

Now, to be sure, there is something very problematical about formulating this ideal, for you know in fact that the consciousness of sin once made people humble. But in modern times they are hardly ever humble. Often those who think themselves the most humble are the most proud of all. The greatest pride today is evident in those who strive for a so-called ‘simplicity’ in life. They set themselves above everything that is sought by the humble soul that lifts itself inwardly to real, spiritual truths, and they say: Everything must be sought in utter simplicity. Such naive natures—and they also regard themselves as naive natures—are often the most proud of all today. But nevertheless, during the time of real consciousness of sin there once were humble people; humility was still regarded as something that mattered in human affairs. And so, without justification, pride has arisen. Why? Yes, I can answer that in the same words I used here recently. Why has pride arisen? It has arisen because one has not heard the words “Huckle, get up!” [From the Oberufer Christmas plays.] One simply fell asleep. Whereas earlier one felt oneself, with full intensity and wakefulness, to be a sinner, one now fell into a gentle sleep and only dreamed still of a consciousness of sin. Formerly one was awake in one's consciousness of sin; one said to oneself: Man is sinful if he does not undertake actions that will again bring him onto the path to the divine spiritual powers. One was awake then. One may have different views about this today, but the fact is that one was awake in one's acknowledgment of sinfulness. But then one dozed off, and the dreams arrived, and. the dreams murmured: Causality rules in the world; one event always causes the following one. And so finally we pursue what we see in the starry heavens as attraction and repulsion of the heavenly bodies; we take this all the way down into the molecule; and then we imagine a kind of little cosmos of molecules and atoms.

And the dreaming went further. And then the dream concluded by saying: We can know nothing except what outer sense experience gives us. And it was labeled ‘supernaturalism’ if anyone went beyond sense experiences. But where supernaturalism begins, science ends.

And then, at gatherings of natural scientists, these dreams were delivered in croaking tirades like Dubois-Reymond's Limits of Knowledge. And then, when the dream's last notes were sounded—a dream does not always resound so agreeably; sometimes it is a real nightmare—when the dream concluded with “Where supernaturalism begins, science ends,” then not only the speaker but the whole natural-scientific public sank down from the dream into blessed sleep. One no longer needed any inner impulse for active inner knowledge. One could console oneself by accepting that there are limits, in fact, to what we can know about nature, and that we cannot transcend these limits. The time had arrived when one could now say: “Huckle, get up! The sky is cracking!” But our modern civilization replies: “Let it crack! It's old enough to have cracked before!” Yes, this is how things really are. We have arrived at a total sleepiness, in our knowing activity.

But into this sleepiness there must sound what is now being declared by spiritual-scientific anthroposophical knowledge. To begin with, there must arise in knowledge the realization that man is in a position to set up the ideal within himself that we can raise ourselves from sin. And that in turn is connected with the fact that along with a possible waking up, pride—which up till now has only been present, to be sure, in a dreamlike way—will grow more than ever. And (I say this of course without making any insinuations) it has sometimes been the case that in anthroposophical circles the raising of man has not yet come to full fruition. Sometimes, in fact, this pride has reached—I will not say a respectable—a quite unrespectable size. For, it simply lies in human nature for pride to flourish rather than the positive side.

And so, along with the recognition that the raising of man is a necessity, we must also see that we now need to take up into ourselves in full consciousness the training in humility which we once exercised. And we can do that. For, when pride arises out of knowledge, that is always a sign that something in one's knowledge is indeed terribly wrong. For when knowledge is truly present, it makes one humble in a completely natural way. It is out of pride that one sets up a program of reform today, when in some social movement, let's say, or in the woman's movement one knows ahead of time what is possible, right, necessary, and best, and then sets up a program, point by point. One knows everything about the matter. One does not think of oneself at all as proud when each person declares himself to know it all. But in true knowledge, one remains pretty humble, for one knows that true knowledge is acquired only in the course of time, to use a trivial expression.

If one lives in knowledge, one knows, with what difficulty—sometimes over decades—one has attained the simplest truths. There, quite inwardly through the matter itself, one does not become proud. But nevertheless, because a full consciousness is being demanded precisely of the Anthroposophical Society for humanity's great ideal today of raising ourselves from sin, watchfulness—not Hucklism, but watchfulness—must also be awakened against any pride that might arise.

We need today a strong inclination to truly grasp the essential being of knowledge so that, by virtue of a few anthroposophical catchwords like ‘physical body,’ ‘etheric body,’ ‘reincarnation,’ et cetera, we do not immediately become paragons of pride. This watchfulness with respect to ordinary pride must really be cultivated as a new moral content. This must be taken up into our meditation. For if the raising of man is actually to occur, then the experiences we have with the physical world must lead us over into the spiritual world. For, these experiences must lead us to offer ourselves devotedly, with the innermost powers of our soul. They must not lead us, however, to dictate program truths. Above all, they must penetrate into a feeling of responsibility for every single word that one utters about the spiritual world. Then the striving must reign to truly carry up into the realm of spiritual knowledge the truthfulness that, to begin with, one acquired for oneself in dealing with external, sense-perceptible facts. Whoever has not accustomed himself to remaining with the facts in the physical sense world and to basing himself upon them also does not accustom himself to truthfulness when speaking about the spirit. For in the spiritual world, one can no longer accustom oneself to truthfulness; one must bring it with one.

But you see, on the one hand today, due to the state of consciousness in our civilization, facts are hardly taken into account, and, on the other hand, science simply suppresses those facts that lead onto the right path. Let us take just one out of many such facts: There are insects that are themselves vegetarian when fully grown. They eat no meat, not even other insects. When the mother insect is ready to lay her fertilized eggs, she lays them into the body of another insect, that is then filled with the eggs that the insect mother has inserted into it. The eggs are now in a separate insect. Now the eggs do not hatch out into mature adults, but as little worms. But at first they are in the other insect. These little worms, that will only later metamorphose into adult insects, are not vegetarian. They could not be vegetarian. They must devour the flesh of the other insect. Only when they emerge and transform themselves are they able to do without the flesh of other insects. Picture that: the insect mother is herself a vegetarian. She knows nothing in her consciousness about eating meat, but she lays her eggs for the next generation into another insect. And furthermore; if these insects were now, for example, to eat away the stomach of the host insect, they would soon have nothing more to eat, because the host insect would die. If they ate away any vital organ, the insect could not live. So what do these insects do when they hatch out? They avoid all the vital organs and eat only what the host insect can do without and still live. Then, when these little insects mature, they crawl out, become vegetarian, and proceed to do what their mother did.

Yes, one must acknowledge that intelligence holds sway in nature. And if you really study nature, you can find this intelligence holding sway everywhere. And you will then think more humbly about your own intelligence, for first of all, it is not as great as the intelligence ruling in nature, and secondly, it is only like a little bit of water that one has drawn from a lake and put into a water jug. The human being, in fact, is just such a water jug, that has drawn intelligence from nature. Intelligence is everywhere in nature; everything, everywhere is wisdom. A person who ascribes intelligence exclusively to himself is about as clever as someone who declares: You're saying that there is water out there in the lake or in the brook? Nonsense! There is no water in them. Only in my jug is there any water. The jug created the water.

So, the human being thinks that he creates intelligence, whereas he only draws intelligence from the universal sea of intelligence.

It is necessary, therefore, to truly keep our eye on the facts of nature. But facts are left out when the Darwinian theory is promoted, when today's materialistic views are being formulated; for, the facts contradict the modern materialistic view at every point. Therefore one suppresses these facts. One recounts them, to be sure, but actually aside from science, anecdotally. Therefore they do not gain the validity in our general education that they must have. And so one not only does not truly present the facts that one has, but adds a further dishonesty by leaving out the decisive facts, i.e., by suppressing them.

But if the raising of man is to be accomplished, then we must educate ourselves in truthfulness in the sense world first of all and then carry this education, this habitude, with us into the spiritual world. Then we will also be able to be truthful in the spiritual world. Otherwise we will tell people the most unbelievable stories about the spiritual world. If we are accustomed in the physical world to being imprecise, untrue, and inexact, then we will recount nothing but untruths about the spiritual world.

. You see, if one grasps in this way the ideal whose reality can become conscious to the Anthroposophical Society, and if what arises from this consciousness becomes a force in our Society, then, even in people who wish us the worst, the opinion that the Anthroposophical Society could be a sect will disappear. Now of course our opponents will say all kinds of things that are untrue. But as long as we are giving cause for what they say, it cannot be a matter of indifference to us whether their statements are true or not.

Now, through its very nature, the Anthroposophical Society has thoroughly worked its way out of the sectarianism in which it certainly was caught up at first, especially while it was still connected to the Theosophical Society. It is only that many members to this day have not noticed this fact and love sectarianism. And so it has come about that even older anthroposophical members who were beside themselves when the Anthroposophical Society was transformed from a sectarian one into one that was conscious of its world task, even those who were beside themselves have quite recently gone aside again. The Movement for Religious Renewal, when it follows its essential nature, may be ever so far removed from sectarianism. But this Movement for Religious Renewal has given even a number of older anthroposophists cause to say to themselves: Yes, the sectarian element is being eradicated more and more from the Anthroposophical Society. But we can cultivate it again here! And so precisely through anthroposophists, the Movement for Religious Renewal is being turned into the crassest sectarianism, which truly does not need to be the case.

One can see how, therefore, if the Anthroposophical Society wants to become a reality, we must positively develop the courage to raise ourselves again into the spiritual world. Then art and religion will flourish in the Anthroposophical Society. Although for now even our artistic forms have been taken from us [through the burning of the Goetheanum building on the night of December 31, 1922], these forms live on, in fact, in the being of the anthroposophical movement itself and must continually be found again, and ever again.

In the same way, a true religious deepening lives in those who find their way back into the spiritual world, who take seriously the raising of man. But what we must eradicate in ourselves is the inclination to sectarianism, for this inclination is always egotistical. It always wants to avoid the trouble of penetrating into the reality of the spirit and wants to settle for a mystical reveling that basically is an egotistical voluptuousness. And all the talk about the Anthroposophical Society becoming much too intellectual is actually based on the fact that those who say this want, indeed, to avoid the thoroughgoing experience of a spiritual content, and would much rather enjoy the egotistical voluptuousness of soulful reveling in a mystical, nebulous indefiniteness. Selflessness is necessary for true anthroposophy. It is mere egotism of soul when this true anthroposophy is opposed by anthroposophical members themselves who then all the more drive anthroposophy into something sectarian that is only meant, in fact, to satisfy a voluptuousness of soul that is egotistical through and through.

You see those are the things, with respect to our tasks, to which we should turn our attention. By doing so, we lose nothing of the warmth, the artistic sense, or the religious inwardness of our anthroposophical striving. But that will be avoided which must be avoided: the inclination to sectarianism. And this inclination to sectarianism, even though it often arrived in a roundabout way through pure cliquishness, has brought so much into the Society that splits it apart. But cliquishness also arose in the anthroposophical movement only because of its kinship—a distant one to be sure—with the sectarian inclination. We must return to the cultivation of a certain world consciousness so that only our opponents, who mean to tell untruths, can still call the Anthroposophical Society a sect. We must arrive at the point of being able to strictly banish the sectarian character trait from the anthroposophical movement. But we should banish it in such a way that when something arises like the Movement for Religious Renewal, which is not meant to be sectarian, it is not gripped right away by sectarianism just because one can more easily give it a sectarian direction than one can the Anthroposophical Society itself.

Those are the things that we must think about keenly today. From the innermost being of anthroposophy, we must understand the extent to which anthroposophy can give us, not a sectarian consciousness, but rather a world consciousness. Therefore I had to speak these days precisely about the more intimate tasks of the Anthroposophical Society.

Good morning, gentlemen! Now let us try to finish, at least for the time being, what we have begun to consider. You see, an understanding of life comes only from the fact that one begins to observe the sleep of man, as I have already mentioned to you several times. When one is immersed in life from morning to evening, one usually has the opinion that sleep gives one strength, removes fatigue and so on. But sleep actually does much more. You just need to think about it. Think back to your life, the dreams you have had in your sleep, you don't always remember them. Dreams are something you soon forget, as you all know. Only at most you may remember that you had a dream here or there that you often told. Then you remember it by telling it. But the dreams that you don't tell are quickly forgotten. If you remember your life back to your childhood, you will remember some memories from your childhood up to later in life. But these memories are always interrupted. When you think back today, there is the time during which you slept. That is a break, and you do not remember it. The memory starts again only yesterday evening and goes until yesterday morning. Then there is another break. So that actually, when you remember back, you do not have your whole life, but in this remembering back, what is in the night is actually always left out. If you draw a line of retrospection, a period of time flows from evening to morning without retrospection, then again from morning to evening, then again a pause from evening to morning, and so on. We actually only remember our lives in such a way that we do not remember a whole part of our lives at all. That is quite clear. That is the time that we have slept through.

Now let us consider a person who cannot sleep. You know, some people complain that they cannot sleep. But many of these complaints should not be taken so seriously, because some people tell you that they never sleep at all during the night. And when you ask them how long they have not slept at night, they say: Yes, not for ten years already. Well, anyone who couldn't sleep for so long would have been dead long ago. People do sleep, but because they have such vivid dreams while sleeping, it seems to them as if they had been awake. You should tell such a person: just lie down for once, you don't need to sleep; just lie down. He is already asleep, and even if he is not aware of it, he is asleep. I just wanted to tell you this so that you can see that a person really does need sleep for life. Sleep is more necessary for life than food. And those who cannot sleep cannot live.

Now, how much of our lives between birth and death do we oversleep? Yes, gentlemen, you see, this oversleeping lasts longest in very young children. When a child is born, it is almost always asleep. Then gradually the time spent awake decreases, and sleeping becomes less and less. And when you get a little older, if you count back, you have to say that you have actually slept a third of your life. That is also healthy. You have actually slept a third of your life.

This has been known for quite a long time. But today people don't like to remember such things that have been known for a long time. Even in the 19th century, at the very beginning, people who wrote about this said: Man should work for 8 hours, be alone for 8 hours and sleep for 8 hours. That leaves 16 hours of wakefulness and 8 hours of sleep, so 3 times 8 = 24 hours.

So that gives us a third of 24 hours for the time of sleeping. That was also a very correct observation. A person needs a third of his entire life to sleep. Now, people don't care about how important sleep is for life because today they don't care at all about what soul and spirit are. They only care about what the person experiences with his body when he is awake, but not what soul and spirit are. That is just how people often say in their daily lives today: God, yes, sleeping, that's all very well, but you don't need more than the necessary heaviness in bed. And so they drink so and so much beer in the evening so that they can sleep. But what matters is not having the necessary heaviness in bed, but realizing the great importance of sleep.

And now let us try to understand what sleep actually means. You see, gentlemen, basically people like themselves very much. This is particularly evident in the case of sick people. Sick people show how much they like themselves, because when something hurts them, they take terrible care of themselves and so on. That is all very well, but it shows that people like themselves very much. What does a person actually like when he likes himself? Yes, he likes his body. And that is the great secret of life, I would say, that a person likes his body. And the love that a person has for his body shows when that body is not quite right.

But there are also snags with this love of the body. The body moves all day long. The body works hard all day long. And the soul and spirit within it, without the person knowing it, grows less and less fond of the body as the day progresses. That is the strange thing, and one must know that. While the human being lives in the day and must constantly be active, the soul-spiritual aspect grows less and less fond of the body. That is why a child sleeps so much. It loves its body very much and always wants to enjoy its body. When you see a child, you can always see how it enjoys its body. Just think about what it is like when the child has drunk its milk and falls asleep. In this sleep, the child has the pleasant feeling of digestion. It enjoys what is going on in its body. And only when it gets hungry does it wake up. Because what happens when it is hungry, it likes less. Then it wakes up again. So you see, the child still wants to enjoy its body even during sleep. You can make the most beautiful observations. Only the scholars do not do that because they do not have the ability to do so.

Observe a herd of cows in a meadow, eating and then lying down comfortably, enjoying their digestion. They enjoy what is happening in their body.

That is what you need to know: that a person actually wants to enjoy his body. But in humans it is somewhat different than in cows, and in the adult human it is somewhat different than in the child. The little child does not work yet, so he enjoys his body while sleeping. The cows do everything out of instinct, so they also enjoy their digestion while sleeping. The human being does not even get to enjoy his digestion. A person actually becomes so that when he uses his body all day, by evening he is no longer sympathetic to his body. He no longer loves it. And you see, that's why he sleeps. He sleeps because he no longer likes his body. The antipathy that a person develops towards his body throughout the day makes him fall asleep at night, and he sleeps until he has overcome this antipathy in his soul, and he wakes up again when he feels sympathy for his body again. This must be understood first of all, that waking up depends on the person developing sympathy for his body again. And this sympathy exists for all the individual organs of the body. Therefore, when a person wakes up, he slips into his organs, so to speak.

Just think of how dreams are when you wake up. When you wake up, you dream of snakes, for example. You slip into your intestines and dream of snakes. The snakes represent the intestines.

So when a person wakes up, they slip into their body out of sympathy with their body and their soul and spirit. People have to have this sympathy, otherwise they would always want to leave their body.

And now imagine: the person has died, he has laid down his body; the body is no longer with the person. The first thing that happens, I have told you, is that the person has his thoughts as a memory of his whole life. And these are then lost after a few days already. They are scattered all over the world. But then he is left with the sympathy for what his body has experienced. And this sympathy with what his body has experienced, he must now gradually lose. This is what we first go through after death, that we must lose our sympathy with our body.

How long does it take to restore this sympathy with the body if we live one day? It takes a third of the day. Therefore, the loss of sympathy after death also takes a third of a lifetime. If a person has, let's say, reached the age of thirty, it takes about ten years for him to get rid of the whole body, to have no more sympathies with the world and life at all - this is, of course, an approximation. So that after death a person first has a few days when he has a memory back, and then he has this breaking off, I would say, of memory back, which takes a third of the whole life he has spent on earth. Now, that is true on average for the individual person, but it is longer for one person and shorter for another because one person has more sympathy for his body, likes himself more, the other likes himself less and so on. So after death we go through something that could be called: the human being gets used to all the things that hold him together with his body.

But now you may say: What you are telling us is still somewhat theoretical. How can you know that a person still has something to him when he has discarded his physical body? How can you know that? — Yes, for that, gentlemen, you have to study how a person develops in life.

There is the first period of life in which the human being develops, the first period of life; this is until the human being gets the second teeth. First he has the milk teeth, then he gets the second teeth. Yes, you see, you can say that the human being has the milk teeth from heredity. But the second teeth, he no longer has them from heredity. The second teeth come from his ether body. The ether body is active in him and gives him the second teeth. So we have the physical body, as I already wrote to you the other day; it gives the first teeth. Then there is the ether body; it gives the human being the second teeth, the teeth that then remain.

Now one must just acquire the ability to see — today people only acquire the ability to think abstractly, to develop theories, but not to see what I have just described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. If you really look at the child as it gradually gets its second teeth, you can see this supersensible work of the etheric body. And this is the same body that a person retains when they die, retains for a few days, and then disperses throughout the world. So if you study what gives a person their second teeth, you find out that after death, a person still has their etheric body for a few days and then throws it away a few days later, that is, it disperses throughout the world.

Now he still has his astral body and his ego. This astral body is what always craves the physical body. With the ego inside, it always craves the physical body. So we can say: the human being develops - I have already told you this recently - the need in his astral body. The astral body develops all needs. The needs are not in the physical body. When the physical body is a corpse, it no longer has any needs.

So we can say: What gives the human being false teeth is also gone a few days after death. What remains now? Here one must again study what now begins to be particularly active in man from the moment he has his second teeth until the moment he becomes sexually mature. That is again an important period of human life. Our present-day science cannot study such things because it does not pay any attention to them at all.

You see, from the moment the child gets its second teeth until the moment it reaches sexual maturity, something supersensory is at work in the child. And what does this supersensory element want? This supersensory element wants to gradually take hold of the whole body. It is not yet inside when the child has its second teeth and begins to get this astral body into its whole body so that it permeates it. Then the child becomes more and more mature. And when the astral body is completely inside the body, then the child is sexually mature. That is the important thing to know: the astral body is the one that brings sexual maturity to the child.

Of course, these things cannot be studied in the way that today's scholars would like to study them. Today's scholars only want to study what is tangible. They do not observe human life. But anyone who has really learned to observe what it is that works its way into the body from the second teeth to sexual maturity knows that this is the astral body. It is the source of all needs. Of course, a child already has needs before the second teeth come in, because the astral body is present in the head; but later it spreads throughout the entire body. You can see this very clearly in boys, how the astral body spreads. The boy changes his voice, and with that he also becomes sexually mature. This is the penetration of the astral body into the whole physical body. In the case of a woman, you can observe it by the development of the secondary organs of sexual life, the breasts and so on. This is the penetration of the astral body. And this astral body the person retains after death if he has already discarded the etheric body.

You see, it is this astral body that wants to enter the physical body again every morning. Because while a person sleeps, he has no needs, neither sexual nor other needs. These arise when he is awake. They arise when the astral body wants to enter the physical body in the morning. And so, in life, this astral body is always striving to enter the physical body every morning. Of course, it wants to do the same after death, and it must first unlearn this habit.

If someone is thirty years old, how long has he been in his physical body? He has been in it for twenty years, he has not been in it for ten years. The ten years that he was not in his physical body, he slept through, and after death he wants to be in it again. And that is why he works in his astral body for a third of his life after his death, which he has gone through here on earth. After this time the astral body is satisfied. Then the human being only lives in his ego. So that after spending about a third of his lifetime after death, the human being only continues to live in his ego.

But this ego, this actual spiritual part of man, needs an enormous amount if it is to continue to live. You see, it is not without reason that I have been telling you that reason, the intellect, thoughts about the world are actually spread out. I have told you how everything in the world, when properly studied, is actually intelligently arranged. I have made it clear to you in the animal world. This whole world is such that we should not believe that our mind is the only one, but the mind that we have is only as if scooped out of the mind spread throughout the world. Mind is everywhere. And the one who believes that his mind is the only one is as foolish as the one who believes: “I have a glass of water here, this glass of water was empty at first, then it became full, that is, the water grew out of the glass.” - One must first draw the water from the well, from the whole body of water. And so one must also first bring the mind that one has out of the whole world mind.

We just don't realize any of this during our lifetime. Why not? Because our body does it. Gentlemen, if you should ever know – I have made this clear to you – what your body does with a very small piece of sugar that you have swallowed, how this small piece of sugar is not only dissolved in the body but also transformed into all kinds of other substances, if you knew what is going on there, then you would be amazed. You are amazed after I have told you only the very basics of what goes on in the human body. But no matter how much of what goes on in the human body is observed, it is always only a small part. You breathe in. The breath you inhale must be used throughout your entire body. Just think, you breathe in about eighteen times a minute. What you breathe in must be used throughout your whole body. This requires a tremendous amount of reason, a truly tremendous amount of reason.

Well, our body does all that. Our body, it really works for us with tremendous cleverness. It is quite admirable what one must feel when one realizes what the human body actually accomplishes in terms of cleverness. It is quite enormous. So it takes a lot out of us during our lifetime.

But now, after death, we no longer have it. Now we no longer even have the etheric body. We do not have the astral body, not even a longing for the physical body. So we only have the ego at all, and the ego now realizes that it does not have the body and now begins to familiarize itself with everything that is necessary for the body.

And that is where the mighty thing that must be understood begins. Today's science makes it particularly easy for itself. Today's science says: Where does man come from? Well, man comes from what has arisen as fertilization, as a fertilized germ in the mother. So science says: There is the fertilized germ, and in there, well, somehow man is already predisposed. If you don't know anything, you say: there is a predisposition; that's where the whole person comes from. Yes, you see, people have been aware of this for a long time, but in their own way, that is, they have been unclear about it.

Just imagine that this is the mother egg (it is drawn) from which you yourself emerged. So you would have been inside it, would have been inside it, so to speak, as a small human being. But this mother egg was in turn born of a mother egg. So the little human being must have been in the womb again, and the mother egg, that is, the mother, must have been in the grandmother again, and further up to the great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, to Eve. And you come to the strangeness that in the great-mother Eve, the whole of humanity was inside, but so nested. Mr. Miller, he was inside the egg, which in turn was inside the egg with all the other human eggs, it was just nested that way. The whole human race was in the original mother Eve. This theory, which was also called the theory of evolution back then, later became known as the nesting theory.

So at the beginning of the 19th century, people came to the conclusion that the story of the egg containing the whole human race, with each individual contained within the next, and then so many of them, was not acceptable. And so they adopted another theory. They then said: No, in the egg there is actually nothing yet; but when this egg is fertilized, all the external conditions, wind and weather and sun and light and everything possible, can get to it. And from the influence of all of nature on this egg, man comes into being.

Yes, gentlemen, that is something that does materialism a great deal of good, if it can imagine something like that. But it does not stand up to closer scrutiny. Because just think what we become when the whole of nature is constantly working on us. We become what people today call nervous. Those who are sensitive to every breath of air and every ray of light do not become real people, but rather a bundle of nerves. We become just that from the surrounding nature. So that can't be it either.

A proper study shows us something completely different. A proper study shows that there is absolutely nothing inside this egg. Before it is fertilized, it is still, I would say, halfway so that you can see all kinds of things inside. It has a shape. So in the unfertilized egg, you can still see all kinds of threads and so on. But when the egg is fertilized, those threads are destroyed and the whole egg is nothing but a real 'mess', if I may express myself so. In more scientific terms, it is a chaos. It is a completely disordered substance.

You see, such a substance, which is completely disordered, is not found anywhere else in the world. All substances are in some way internally ordered, arranged. If you take the most arbitrary substance, if you just take a grain of dust and look at it through the microscope, you will see how finely and artfully it is constructed inside. The only thing that is completely chaotic inside is the fertilized egg. And the substance must first become completely chaotic; it must no longer be anything in itself if a human being is to develop from it. People are always thinking about the egg white, for example. They always want to study how the egg white is formed internally. Yes, the egg white is internally configured as long as it is not fertilized. When it is fertilized, it is just what I have called a “mess”, that is, a chaos, an absolutely disordered substance. And out of this comes the human being. Even in the Primordial Mother Eve, if she existed at all, the whole human race was not present, nor somehow in an egg germ that was later fertilized, but the egg germ is completely chaotic, disorderly, and was also disorderly in the Primordial Mother Eve. And if a human being is to arise out of this egg germ, then this must be brought about from outside, that is, the human being must enter into this egg germ. A proper scientific study shows, in turn, that the human being must enter this egg germ from the outside. That is to say, the human being comes from the spiritual world. He does not come from the material. The material must first be destroyed.

This is already the case with plants. In plants, you have the earth and in the earth the plant germ. Now, people are not properly studying what happens to the plant germ in the earth. It must first be destroyed, and then the new spring causes the new plant to arise from the destroyed material from outside in a spiritual way. This is how it is with animals, and especially with humans. It is only that it is easier for the plant. The whole universe forms its shape. In the case of the human being, the whole universe does not initially form his shape. He must actually form it himself. The human being must actually enter into this destroyed matter, otherwise no human being could arise from this destroyed matter. The human being must therefore first come from the spiritual world and enter into this destroyed matter. The whole process of fertilization is only there to ensure that the human being, who wants to enter the world, is confronted with a destroyed substance, that he has a destroyed substance. He could not do anything with an undestroyed substance. He cannot enter the world like a plant, because then he could only become a plant. He must really form the whole universe within himself. And he does form it. It is truly wonderful how man forms the universe within this destroyed substance.

I will show you an example of how the human being now forms the universe into this destroyed substance. If you have the earth's surface here (it is drawn), then we can just show it, because if you just look at a piece of earth, it looks even. The sun comes up in the morning, goes up to a certain height, then goes down again. That is a certain angle up to which the sun rises. It is very interesting that the sun always rises up to a certain angle and then goes down again. The angle is of course a little higher in summer than in winter, but up to a certain angle the sun rises. This angle is therefore an inclination of the sun to the earth.

We find this angle elsewhere, too. You see, when light enters our eye, where the optic nerve enters from the brain into the eye – I have drawn the eye for you – there is what is known as the blind spot. You cannot see there. You see most clearly only at points that are somewhat away from this blind spot, where the optic nerve enters. And that is where the interesting thing is: the same inclination that the sun has to the earth in its orbit, this point, where we perceive most brightly in our inner being, has the same inclination to the blind spot.

And something else. If you take the heart, it is also slightly tilted. It has the same inclination as the sun to the earth. I could show you countless such things, from which you would see: Everything that is out there in the universe, we somehow carry it within us. We carry the inclination of the sun in the inclination of our eye and in the inclination of our heart. We are formed entirely out of the reason of the universe.

Oh, gentlemen, that is where you start, when you gradually get some knowledge, to really tell yourself how actually man is a whole small world. Everything in the world outside is recreated in man. Center Just imagine if you were given this “mess”, this destroyed matter, and you were supposed to recreate it inside! You would not be able to do that. You see, when the ego is alone after death, it has to learn from the whole world how to recreate the whole world. So that after the person has shed the sympathy with the body during this third of the previous life, he now begins to learn from the whole universe how to become a human being again. And that takes longer than life on earth lasts, because on earth, things are such that one can learn a lot or a little. Actually, most people today learn very little. And however strange it may seem, scholars learn the least of all, because what they learn is all useless. It is only good for understanding what a corpse looks like, but not how a living body is affected. But the ego must learn this after death. It must learn the secrets of how a body is built from the whole world. And one can point to this time, which the ego now spends learning from the whole world how a person works and lives internally.

You see, when a person, through the exercises I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, brings themselves to remember the time when one would otherwise not remember, when one was a very small child, then one comes to understand what this actually consists of, this life of the infant, who as yet knows nothing of the world, who only uses his body, only wriggles, only lives in his eyes, lives in his ears, but does not yet understand anything of all this. In ordinary life, a person does not think of looking back. They say: Oh, what do I care about my childhood; I'm here now. But if you look back into this short time, which you otherwise do not remember, in terms of knowledge, you realize what you actually did there. Yes, you actually get a terribly uncomfortable feeling when you think about it. Because this fidgeting of the very young child consists of trying to forget all this knowledge of the universe. You give it to the body, and it knows it afterwards. Therefore, it can take it over during life.

The small child gives the body the whole wisdom of the world. It is so terribly painful, so terribly sad that today's science has no idea of what is going on in life, how the small child gives the body the wisdom of the world that it has acquired, how it gradually grows into the eyes, into the hands. Gradually it grows into it, giving all the wisdom of the ego to the body, while the ego actually used to possess all the wisdom of the world.

It may seem strange to you, but it is actually true: if you really have mastered anthroposophy, how can you tell people something about the universe? You can tell something about the universe simply because you remember back to the first days of childhood, when you still knew everything from the experiences you had before you entered the body. And anthroposophy actually consists of the fact that you gradually get all this world wisdom out of the body that you gave up to the body.

Yes, gentlemen, for that, ordinary science today gives no guidance. It gives no instruction at all on how to find the knowledge that one has put into the body oneself. It leads people to experiment, and they should only learn what they experience externally; whereas the right thing would be to guide people into the living body. Our students are guided to the dead body, which is already a corpse, and learn nothing about the living human being. That would admittedly be a more difficult study, because there the human being must practice self-knowledge, must look into himself, because there the human being is to become more perfect. But that is precisely what the modern person does not want: he does not want to become more perfect, he wants the school to train him a little, and then he wants to stop there, does not want to become more perfect. Man does not want this because, in the education he enjoys today, I would say he is already far too proud to somehow admit that he should perfect himself.

Well, with that I have, I would say, told you a little bit about the self. But we will talk about these things more in the coming hours, so you will hear much more and gradually find everything more understandable.

You see, I have told you a little about what the self has to do during the time until the human being comes down to earth again. But there are people who say: Oh, I'm not interested in what the self has to do afterwards! You can wait until after you die and then you'll see.

Yes, gentlemen, that would be just as if the germ, after it has emerged and been fertilized, and the human being has hatched, would say in the mother's body: Oh, I don't like living in the mother's body, I'll leave sooner. — Yes, but if he doesn't want to live his proper nine months in the mother's body, he cannot become a human being. He must go through with it first. Nor can the ego experience anything after death if it does not live here in such a way that it is stimulated to do so. Therefore it is quite wrong when someone says: I'll wait until death has occurred, then I'll see if I am something or nothing, and so on. People are not very logical. People today are actually as logical as the one who swore that he did not recognize any God, and he swore: “As surely as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist!” That's more or less how people are today. They repeat the old sayings. Quite unconsciously they repeat the sayings, even when they contradict them. And so people believe: You can wait, then you will see whether I am still something or nothing. Isn't it true that people say to themselves: Do I believe in immortality, or do I not believe in immortality? Yes, if I don't believe in immortality and there is one after all, then I could be in a bad way. But if I believe in immortality and there is none, then it doesn't do any harm. So in any case it is better if I believe in immortality.

But, you are not supposed to play with the idea, instead it is important to really become clear about the facts. And so one must say: Here on earth, man must receive the stimulus that his ego can truly penetrate into the world after death. And today's science thoroughly dispels this stimulus, if at all, when people are no longer made aware of the facts. It is not admitted, but actually today it is in the interest of keeping people as stupid as possible, so that after death they sleep and have no idea how to penetrate the secrets of the whole universe in order to become truly human again.

You see, gentlemen, if humanity continues to live as it does today, merely concerning itself with outward things, then in the future people will be born who will no longer be able to lift a finger because they have not learned anything until the next life.

We will come back to how lives repeat themselves. Today I just wanted to give you some ideas so that you can see that it is not just a careless assertion about what the ego is like after death, but that one can point out from knowledge itself that the human being in turn descends and has to form his life from the confused material. This is really recognized on the basis of objective facts.

That is what this is about. It is just not going so fast, but I will answer the question in full when one takes together what is known about the end of human life, how man gradually loses his etheric body and his astral body, and how then the ego must descend to form its astral body and so on. Then one comes to understand how man repeatedly descends. And then, in the course of time, one also comes to understand when man will be liberated from his entire earthly life, when he will no longer have to descend. The question of when he once began will also be answered then. He must once have begun as a kind of plant. For that he does not need to be human. I have also described to you how the earth was once a large plant, and we will see how the earth will once again become a plant, and man will then be freed from his humanity.

I will then deal with the whole question again from a different angle. You will, of course, have to have the patience not to say after the first few lessons: I can't go along with this. You will see that the more detailed it becomes, the more it will seem plausible to you.

"Honor your German masters, then you will banish good spirits", Richard Wagner aptly calls out to us. Unfortunately, we still follow this call in a rather one-sided way. However, while we strive to create ever clearer and more complete images of the deceased greats of German intellectual development, we are often unfair to the living.

Without wishing to object in the slightest to the just appreciation of past cultural periods and to the ever-increasing immersion in the study of Schiller, Goethe, Herder and so on - on the contrary, we fully recognize the necessity of this - we cannot deny ourselves the insight that we usually lack the good will to come to a judgment about the greats of the present. Admittedly, it takes less courage to express one's admiration for Goethe and Schiller over and over again, whereby one can meet with no contradiction anywhere in the educated world, than to stand up for a living person and to speak a ruthless word here for once.

Since we believe that a newspaper is preferably called to serve the present, we would like to record our judgment on one of the most sympathetic German thinkers, Johannes Volkelt.

We want to start from a fact that will still be vividly remembered by many who studied in Vienna in the seventies. On March 10, 1875, Johannes Volkelt, a 27-year-old scholar at the time, gave a lecture at the "Reading Association of German Students in Vienna" which must be regarded as the most significant contribution to the cultural history of the present day.

In every sentence, Volkelt shows how deeply he has delved into the history of his time. There is an astonishing wealth of spirit in this lecture, and indeed of genuine German spirit.

Of course, this is not the light, French-style wit of Ludwig Speidel, Eduard Hanslick, Hugo Wittmann or even Oppenheim and Spitzer, who supposedly speak about some important subject, but in reality entertain their audience with stale quips and thoughtless phrases. No, Volkelt's speech was witty in the sense that it found the right word at the right moment, the genuine, pithy German word that always entertains us because it lifts us spiritually.

In this lecture, Volkelt measures our time against Kant's high concept of morality, which is deeply rooted in the essence of the German people. Kant makes the morality of an action solely dependent on the attitude from which it emerged. An action that complies with all existing laws, that is of incalculable benefit to others and posterity, is not moral if it does not flow from the good mindset of its author. If two do the same thing, one out of selfishness, the other out of duty, the first acts immorally, the second morally. Volkelt now asks: What is the attitude of our time to these views of the Königsberg sage? He comes to a sad answer. The view seems to have become almost universal: you don't get anywhere with a moral attitude, you don't build railroads with it, you don't found industrial enterprises with it. People believe they have done enough for morality if they do not come into conflict with the criminal law. Being good at heart is seen as a prejudice that children have to be taught at school, but which is of no use in life. There are circles today that have adopted ways of life that are immoral at their root. "It seems to me," says Volkelt, "that hardly any expression characterizes the moral life of our time as aptly as the word 'beguem'. Cool laxity, genteel comfort is part of the good tone."

There was a time when man had to wring the least he needed for his sustenance from nature. Hard work, a struggle in the truest sense of the word, was required to eke out an existence. Today things have changed. Conquering nature is easy for us. We have machines and tools that do what our ancestors had to do with their own hands. Like any sensible person, we naturally recognize this as progress. But we also do not fail to recognize that this very progress goes hand in hand with a decline in character and morals. The toil and labor that man once had to perform in order to wring a living from nature were for him a high school of morality. Today, all we have to do is lift a hand and the whole social apparatus works to satisfy our needs. As a result, the latter increase to the point of exaggeration, people lose the desire to walk the straight and hard path of duty, preferring instead the easy path of comfort. This results in a paralysis of personal strength of character, of the ability to work.

A large part of our society suffers from marrowlessness and softening of the bones in spiritual terms.

"We live in a time of general upholstery," says Volkelt aptly, and adds: "You will find out how right I am when you look around your comfortably furnished room, when you take a walk through the streets, when you go on a journey. Even the most remote mountain valleys are no longer safe from railroads and modern hotels. You experience it as often as you allow yourself to be served in a pub by the slickly combed waiters, those poetry-less machines; as often as you have to move about on a mirror-like saloon floor in tails and gloves. You experience it with every legal transaction you get into, with the simplest business you are supposed to handle. Even war today has an impersonal, prompt machine character." This is the age in which there are few who have an ideal goal in mind and, without a sideways glance to the right or left, head ruthlessly towards it; no, where everyone just abandons themselves to the blind hustle and bustle of the world and, playing a frivolous game with happiness and life, tries to get as much out of the social machine as they can. Everywhere the comfortable is preferred to that which requires the use of the whole personality. Who reads a systematic book today that has been produced by years of hard work? No, people prefer to take note of the issues of the day from "elegantly" written feuilletons or "popular", i.e. shallow lectures. The former is tedious and requires rigorous thinking, the latter is comfortable. In the theater, the audience is offered the lightest, meanest, even the most stupid stuff. They sip it with pleasure, because the enjoyment of something higher also requires mental effort. Political party life everywhere reveals only half-measures and opportunism. Almost no one can be found who utters a sincere, ruthless "That's what I want!"

The firmness of character has perished in the staggering life of pleasure. Volkelt recommends reading Kant's writings to all those who are corroded by the evil spirit of our time. For they are a school for the weak in character. In particular, Volkelt addresses his admonition to journalists. It is precisely this profession that most degrades the dignity of man in his own person, when he surrenders himself to the will-less tool of his financial backers. The journalist turns his person into a thing by selling himself.

It is curious that Volkelt, in view of the outcome of the Ofenheim trial in 1875, had already bluntly exposed the damage done to the Viennese press. He chose an example from the series of papers that do not want to know anything about morals and sentiment when it comes to large-scale undertakings, for which the only decisive factor is whether more or less can be gained from something. Irrespective of the fact that you risk a lot when you make enemies of the powerful, our thinker chose the "most respected" newspaper in Vienna, the "Neue Freie Presse", as the object of his attack. He was right, because although this newspaper lives only from the phrase, it still impresses many. One must first remove its mask. The other leaves of this character are not even worth this effort. Volkelt says: "After the acquitting verdict of the jury - in the Ofenheim trial - one should have confessed with moral sorrow: Our penal law is unfortunately so imperfect that it cannot catch the immorality of those people in its snares. But what happened instead? The next morning, an editorial appeared in the "Neue Freie Presse" that must make every simple and healthy-minded person nauseous. If the Ofenheim spirit was not adhered to in industrial undertakings, we would fall into an "era of dull, despondent resignation". This paper goes so far in its forced, artificially incited enthusiasm that it regards acquittal as the highest achievement for the 'conscience', for 'ethics'. The same conflation of legal right and morality can be found in the next editorial. In order to present its lapchild Ofenheim as completely morally rehabilitated, the 'Neue Freie Presse' seeks to scandalize morality in general. It has the temerity to declare that there is 'no earthly tribunal' for morality at all.

I ask: does not a voice of judgment live in the people, does not a voice of judgment live in every man's breast, urgently proclaiming his moral guilt and innocence? The 'Neue Freie Presse', which describes morality, which is different from law and justice, as an 'insubstantial abstract' and wants us to believe that every person's breast is as arid and paragraph-like as that of its followers, should take a lesson from the old Kant that acting in accordance with the law is legal, but not yet 'moral'. But the "Neue Freie Presse" probably knows this itself. Only the oppressive feeling of having once stood up for something morally hollow could give it the sentence: "If justice and the law have spoken, then morality has also been satisfied." While she usually loved to dress herself with a certain idealistic verve, she now displays a moral dullness and moral nakedness. In her eyes, all those who are morally indignant are hypocrites, sycophants, people with a crude attitude."

These were strong words. Volkelt had said what moved hundreds of people. Anyone who heard his words had to recognize the German man in Volkelt and agree with him wholeheartedly. And he has so far proved himself to be an energetic, fully German man. He leads a life of thought in the German sense and strives to solve the highest world problems. His works definitely bear the trait that is imprinted on them by his harmonious, indomitable personality.

Mind and thought are equally present in this man. If you want to see this for yourself, read his book: "Dream Fantasy."

Just as astronomy developed from astrology and chemistry from alchemy, a science of the dream world will develop from dream interpretation. Man always wants to exploit the realms of reality for his personal desires first and will only penetrate them later with the selfless research of science. In his book, Volkelt has eloquently compiled all the elements we have today for a future 'dream science'. Anyone who goes through the book will soon realize that this intimate field, this world of fairy tales, could only have been treated so favorably by a German.

Volkelt's writings: "The Unconscious and Pessimism", "Individualism and Pantheism", "The Concept of Symbol in the Latest Aesthetics", show us everywhere the highly gifted, thorough thinker who finally appears at his full height in his last writings: "Kant's Epistemology" and "Experience and Thought".

Volkelt is an original researcher who builds on Kant in his own way. Kant argued against the scientific "groping around in the dark" that we must first test our own cognitive faculty to see whether this instrument is also suitable for understanding extraordinary things such as God, the soul and the like. And he believed he had proved that we can understand nothing but the experience that is spread out before our senses. Everything supernatural remains uncertain. Volkelt is also of the opinion that we only have certain knowledge of that which is given to our eyes and ears and so on. However, he believed that by logical reasoning we could also gain knowledge of the active causes lying behind this sensory world, but that this knowledge had no character other than that of probability. He wanted to unite the "cautious criticism", which he had adopted from Kant, with a "highly aspiring idealism". It is true that the latest phase of his thought is not entirely free of the lack of courage and energy that generally prevails in thought today, but his healthy nature and his German sense will hopefully not allow him to fall into the error of thinking that our research is a futile struggle. We hope to see the disappearance from his philosophy of that which he regards as necessary today: "A going forward, which again partially recedes, a yielding, which again to a certain extent takes hold." We demand that the philosopher also be inspired by Hutten's spirit and speak a strong and resolute "Through!"

We would have liked this German thinker, who was born in Austria, to have found an appropriate place for his work here too. His bold, free spirit made him impossible in his homeland. Truly, he would have become a role model for the academic citizenry here in the upholding of our ideal goods and in the hatred of all that is bad and half-baked. Not everywhere, however, people love a free, unrestrained demeanor, and so Volkelt had to wander. He first found a place to work at the University of Jena, then in Basel, where he lives today.

Neither the future historian of philosophy nor the cultural historian will be able to deny Volkelt's name a place of honor.

For those who think of music from the aesthetic point of view, there is something puzzling about it; for simple human feeling it is a direct experience which penetrates the soul; and for those who want to understand how it produces its effects, it is a rather difficult problem.

Compared with other arts—sculpture, painting, poetry—music has a special character. All the other arts have some kind of model in the external world. The sculptor works from a model, and if he creates a statue of Zeus or Apollo, it takes an idealised human form. It is the same with painting—and today the tendency is to give an exact impression of what the senses perceive. Poetry, similarly, tries to deal with some aspect of the real world. But if one tried to apply this theory to music, one would get nowhere—for how could one copy, for example, the song of birds!

What is the origin of musically-shaped sounds? How are they related to anything in the objective world?

It is precisely in connection with this art of music that Schopenhauer has advanced some interesting views; in a certain respect they are indeed clear and striking. He assigns to music a quite special place among the arts, and to art itself a quite special value in human life. His philosophy has a fundamental ground-note which may be expressed as follows:

Life is a sorry business, and through thinking I try to make it bearable. Pervading everything in the world is a blind, unconscious Will. It shapes the stone and then the plant—but always, in all its manifestations, with a restless yearning for something higher. The savage feels this less than does the genius, who experiences the painful cravings of the Will in the highest, most intense, degree.

Besides the activity of the Will—Schopenhauer continues—man has the faculty of forming mental images. These are like a fata morgana, like pictures in the mist, like the spray thrown up by the waves of the Will. The Will surges up to shape these illusory pictures. When in this way man perceives the working of the Will, he is less than ever satisfied; but a release from the blind driving-force of the Will comes to us through art. Art is something through which man can escape from the restless craving of the Will. How does this happen?

When man creates a work of art, it springs from his image-forming faculty; but genuine art, Schopenhauer insists, is not merely a copy of external reality. A statue of Zeus, for example, is not produced by copying; the sculptor draws for his model on the characteristics of many men, and so he creates the archetypal image, which in nature is distributed among numerous separate individuals.

So the artist surpasses nature. He extracts her archetypal essence, and this is what the true artist renders. By penetrating into the creative depths of nature, he creates something real and achieves a certain release for himself.

So it is with all the arts except music. All the other arts have to work through images and produce only pictures of the Will. But musical sound is a direct expression of the Will itself. The composer listens to the pulse-beat of the Will, and renders it in the sequence of musical sounds. Music is thus intimately related to the working of the Will in nature, to “things in themselves”; it penetrates into the elemental archetypal being of the cosmos and reflects the feeling of it; that is why music is so deeply satisfying.

Schopenhauer was no occultist, but in these matters he had an instinctive apprehension of the truth.

Why does music speak so intimately to the heart, and so widely, and why is its influence so powerful, even in early childhood? For answers to these questions we must turn to the realm where the true models for music are to be found.

When a composer is at work, he has nothing to copy from; he has to draw his music from out of his own soul. Whence he derives it we shall find out if we turn our attention to the worlds which are not perceptible to the ordinary senses.

Human beings are so made that it is possible for them to release in themselves faculties which are normally asleep; in the same way that someone born blind may be given sight by an operation, so can a man's inner eyes be opened, enabling him to gain knowledge of higher worlds. When a man develops these slumbering faculties through concentration, meditation and so on, he advances step by step. First of all he experiences a special configuration of his dream life. His dreams take on a much more orderly character; on waking, he feels as though he were rising from out of the waves of an ocean in which he had been submerged, a world of flowing light and colour. He knows that he has experienced something; that he has seen an ocean of which he had no previous knowledge. Increasingly his dream-experiences gain in clarity. He remembers that in this world of light and colour there were things and beings which differed from anything physical in being permeable, so that one can pass right through them without meeting any resistance. He comes to know beings whose element, whose bodies, the colours are. Gradually he extends his consciousness over this world, and on waking he remembers that he has been active within it.

The next step occurs when he—as it were—carries this world back with him into waking life. Then he sees the astral bodies of other men and of much else, and he experiences a world which is much more real than the physical one—a world which in relation to the physical world appears as a densification, a crystallisation, from out of the astral world.

Now it is also possible to transform into a conscious condition the unconscious state of dreamless sleep. The disciple who attains to this stage learns to extend his consciousness over those parts of the night which are not filled with dreams, but are normally spent in complete unconsciousness. He then finds himself conscious in a world of which previously he knew nothing, a world which is not intrinsically one of light and colour; it first announces itself as a world of musical sound. The disciple acquires the capacity to hear spiritually; he hears sequences and combinations of sounds which are not audible to the physical ear.

This world is called the devachanic world (Deva=spirit, chan=home). One must not think that when a man enters this world and hears its tones resounding, he loses the world of light and colours. The world of tones is shot through with light and colours, but they belong to the astral world. The essential element of the devachanic world is the endlessly flowing and changing ocean of musical tones. When continuous consciousness extends to this world, its tones can be brought over, and it is then possible to hear also the ground-tones of the physical world. For every physical thing has its ground-note in the devachanic world, and in every countenance devachanic ground-notes are figured forth. It was on this account that Paracelsus said: “The kingdoms of nature are the letters of the alphabet, and Man is the word formed from them.”

Whenever anyone falls asleep, his astral body goes out from his physical body; his soul then lives in the devachanic world. Its harmonies make an impression on his soul; they vibrate through it in waves of living sound, so that every morning he wakes from the music of the spheres, and out of this realm of harmony he passes into the everyday world. Just as the human soul has a sojourn in Devachan between incarnations, so we can say that during the night the soul rejoices in flowing tones of music: they are the very element out of which it is itself woven and they are its true home.

The composer translates into physical sounds the rhythms and harmonies which at night imprint themselves on his astral body. Unconsciously he takes his model from the spiritual world. He has in himself the harmonies which he translates into physical terms. That is the secret connection between the music which resounds in the physical world and the hearing of spiritual music during the night. But the relation of physical music to this spiritual music is like that of a shadow to the object which casts it. So the music of instruments and voices in the physical world is like a shadow, a true shadow, of the far higher music of Devachan. The primal image, the archetype, of music is in Devachan; and having understood this, we can now examine the effect of music on human beings.

Man has his physical body, and an etheric model for it, the ether-body. Connected with his ether-body is the sentient body, which is a step towards the astral. Inwardly bound up with him, as though membered into him, is the Sentient Soul. Just as a sword and its scabbard form a single whole, so do the Sentient Soul and the sentient body. Man has also the Intellectual Soul, and as a still higher member the Spiritual Soul, which is linked with the Spirit-self, or Manas. In completely dreamless sleep the higher members, and so also the Sentient Soul, are in the devachanic world. This is not like living in the physical realm, where everything we see and hear is outside ourselves. The beings of Devachan interpenetrate us, and we are within everything that exists there. In occult schools, accordingly, this devachanic-astral realm is called the world of interpenetrability. Man is played through by its music.

When he returns from this devachanic world, his Sentient Soul, his Intellectual Soul and his Spiritual Soul are permeated with its rhythms; he carries them down into his denser bodies. He is thus able to work from out of his Intellectual Soul and his Sentient Soul on to his ether-body, and to carry the rhythms into it. As a seal stamps itself on the wax, so the astral body imprints the devachanic rhythms on the ether-body, until the ether-body vibrates in harmony with them. Ether-body and astral body bear witness in their own being to the spiritual tones and rhythms. The ether-body is lower than the astral body, but in activity it is superior.

From out of his Ego man works on his bodies in so far as he transmutes the astral body into Manas, the ether-body into Buddhi, the physical body into Atma. Since the astral body is the most tenuous, the transmutation of it calls for the least strength. Man can work on his astral body with forces drawn from the astral world. But to work on his etheric body he has to call on forces from the devachanic world, and for working on his physical body he needs forces from the higher devachanic world. During the night he draws from the world of flowing tones the strength to carry them over into his sentient body and his etheric body. Although on waking in the morning he is not conscious of having absorbed this music of the night, yet on listening to music he has an inkling that these impressions of the spiritual world are within him.

When a man listens to music, the seer can observe how the rhythms and colours flow into and lay hold of the firmer substance of the ether-body, causing it to vibrate in tune with them, and from the harmonious response of the ether-body comes the pleasure that is felt. The more strongly the astral body resounds, the more strongly do its tones echo in the ether-body, overcoming the ether-body's own natural rhythms, and this gives feelings of pleasure both to a listener and to a composer. In certain cases the harmonies of the astral body penetrate to some extent into the sentient body, and a conflict then arises between the sentient body and the ether-body. If the tones set up in the sentient body are so strong that they master the tones of the ether-body, the result is cheerful music in a major key. A minor key indicates that the ether-body has prevailed over the sentient body; and the painful feeling that ensues gives rise to the most serious melodies.

So, when someone lives in the experience of music, he is living in the image of his spiritual home. It naturally elevates the soul to feel this intimate relationship to its primal ground, and that is why the simplest souls are so receptive to music. A man then feels himself truly at home, and whenever he is lifted up through music he says to himself: “Yes, you come from other worlds, and in music you can experience your native place.” It was an intuitive knowledge of this that led Schopenhauer to assign to music a central place among the arts, and to say that the composer discerns with his spiritual ear the pulse-beat of the Will.

In music, man feels the echo of the inmost life of things, a life related to his own. Because feelings are the most inward part of the soul, and because they are related to the spiritual world and are indwelt by musical sound—that is why man, when he listens to music, lives in the pleasure of feeling himself in harmony with its tones, and in touch with the true home of his spirit.

Among the ideas advanced by Spiritual Science, that of Reincarnation occupies a foremost place. The idea that the human individuality has to manifest over and over again in a single personality in the course of the development of mankind on the Earth is at present but little understood, and, moreover, it is generally unpopular. As we have seen and shall still see, many questions arise in Spiritual Science, among them that of the meaning of repeated earthly lives.

When we study the evolution of human life on Earth in the light of Spiritual Science, we find that there is a very deep meaning behind the fact that the human individuality passes, not only once, but many times through earthly life. Every epoch and every age has its special content, its special characteristics, and all the varied possibilities which it offers have to be assimilated over and over again by the individual life-germs of man. This is possible because man, with all that composes his being, is connected not once and for all, but over and over again with the living stream of evolution. Looking upon this evolution as a rational progress into which new contents, new qualities are poured, we begin to realise the true significance of those Great Ones who have been the leading and guiding spirits of the different epochs. From each of these Great Ones, new qualities, new impulses for the progressive evolution of humanity have emanated and in the course of these lectures we shall be considering important questions connected with such leaders of mankind.

To-day our attention is turned to an individuality who, so far as historical investigation goes, is shrouded in mystery—an individuality lost in dim prehistoric ages, of whom no documentary records exist. I refer to the personality of Zarathustra.

A personality such as that of Zarathustra, whose gifts to humanity, in so far as they are preserved for us, seem so strange to the present age, makes us realise what great differences arise in the sum total of human nature during the various epochs. Superficial opinion may state that ever since man has been man, he has thought, felt and conceived ideas of morality exactly as he does to-day. But Spiritual Science shows us that the life of the human soul and the nature of man's thought, feeling and will, have undergone great changes in the course of human evolution. Human consciousness in olden times was of quite a different nature and we have reason to believe that, in the future, other stages of consciousness will be reached, again very different from the normal consciousness of to-day.

When we turn our attention to Zarathustra, we must look back over an infinitely long period of time. It is true that certain modern investigators have fixed the date of Zarathustra as contemporary with that of Buddha, which would mean that he lived some five or six centuries before the Christian era. It is however significant that our modern historians, after careful investigation of the traditions referring to Zarathustra, have been obliged to indicate that the personality hidden beneath the name of “Zarathustra,” the original founder of the Persian religion, must be placed a great many centuries before Buddha. Greek historians have repeatedly pointed out that Zarathustra must have lived about five or six thousand years before the Trojan War. We are prepared to state that historical research will, however unwillingly, eventually be forced to admit that the Greek tradition is correct in regard to the epoch in which Zarathustra lived. Spiritual Science, which is based on inner knowledge, agrees with the Greek tradition and it is therefore reasonable to indicate that Zarathustra, living as he did thousands of years before the birth of Christianity, was confronted by a consciousness entirely different from that of the present day.

I have often pointed out, and I shall explain it further, that human consciousness in ancient times was bound up with certain dream states, or rather clairvoyant states, in normal human life. Primeval man did not contemplate the world with the strong, clearly-defined sense perceptions of to-day. We shall best understand the way in which man of those primeval times took his environment into his consciousness, if we think of a last remnant of the ancient consciousness, still left to us in dreams. Everybody knows how dream images appear and disappear, how they emerge and fade away. To our present consciousness they are for the most part dream pictures, meaningless reminiscences of the outer world. Interwoven though they are with higher states of consciousness, they are incomprehensible to people of our time. Images, ever-changing pictures, symbols—of these our dream consciousness consists. Everyone has experienced how a fire, for instance, is symbolised in a dream. Think of the difference between a dream and ordinary waking consciousness. Such as it is, this dream state represents the remnant of a primeval consciousness of man. Man then lived in a world of images—images not vague or empty but proceeding from a real external world. In this ancient consciousness there were intermediate states between waking and sleep and in these states man was face to face with the spiritual world. The spiritual world actually entered into his consciousness. Nowadays the door into the spiritual world is locked against the normal consciousness of man, but this was not the case in olden times; for he then entered into those intermediate states between waking and sleep when the spiritual world appeared before him in dreamlike images. In these dreamlike images he saw the working and the weaving of the spirit behind the physical world of sense. He had direct experience of the spiritual world, although by the time of Zarathustra this was already indistinct and dim. A man of antiquity could say to himself: “I behold the outer physical world and the life of sense, but I also have experiences and perceptions in a different state of consciousness; I know that there is another world behind the world of sense—a spiritual world.”

Evolution consists in one faculty being acquired at the expense of another, and thus as the epochs took their course, the faculty which man once possessed of understanding the spiritual world became less and less. Our clear reasoning and cognitional faculties, our present logical thinking which we regard as the most important feature of modern culture—these did not exist in those early times. They had to be developed by man in the epoch to which we now belong, at the expense of the old clairvoyant consciousness. Clairvoyant consciousness will have to be cultivated again in the future evolution of mankind, but in a different way. It has to be added to the purely physical consciousness that is bound up with the faculty of intellectual logic. A rising and a falling can be traced in the evolution of human consciousness and we see therein a deep purpose in man's development.

The old consciousness described above dates back to a prehistoric age of which there is no documentary evidence. Zarathustra himself belongs to this age of which, as yet, no historical traditions have reached us. He was one of those leading personalities who gave a stimulus for great steps forward in the civilisation of mankind. Whatever the level of human consciousness at the time, these leading personalities must always draw from the source which we may call Illumination, Initiation into the higher mysteries of the universe. Among such personalities were Hermes, Buddha and Moses, as well as Zarathustra, whom we are to study in the course of these lectures.

Zarathustra lived at least eight thousand years before our present era, and the gifts to civilisation which poured from his enlightened spirit shine forth clearly across the centuries. Those who penetrate into the inner currents of human evolution can detect them even after this lapse of time. Zarathustra was one of those whose soul had experienced Truth, Wisdom and Intuition to an extent far transcending the normal consciousness of the age. In that part of the Earth which later on was known as the Persian Empire, Zarathustra proclaimed mighty truths from the super-sensible worlds—regions lying far above the normal consciousness of the men of that time.

If we would understand the significance of Zarathustra's teaching, we must realise that his mission was to communicate a certain conception of the universe to one particular section of humanity, while other streams had, as it were, a different mission in human culture. The personality of Zarathustra is all the more interesting to us in that he lived in a part of the world directly adjoining on its South side another land whose people transmitted an entirely different order of spirituality to mankind. I refer to the peoples of India, from whom arose the Vedic poets. The region permeated with the mighty impulse of Zarathustra lies to the North of the land from which the great teaching of Brahma went forth. Zarathustra's message to the world was fundamentally different from the Brahministic teachings of the great leaders of ancient Indian thought. These Indian teachings have come down to us in the Vedas, and in the profound philosophy of the Vedanta, of which the revelations of Buddha represent, as it were, the final splendour.

We shall understand the difference between the two thought currents—the one proceeding from Zarathustra and the other from the ancient Indian teachings—when we consider that man can reach the spiritual world along two paths of approach. There are two ways by which we may raise the inner powers of the soul above their normal level so that we may pass from the world of the senses into the super-sensible world. One way is to penetrate deeply into our own souls, to immerse ourselves, as it were, in our inner being. The other way leads behind the veils spread around us by the physical world. Both ways lead into the super-sensible world. If in the intimate experiences of soul life we so deepen our feelings, ideas, and impulses that the powers of soul grow stronger and stronger, we can descend mystically into the “Self.” Passing through that part of our being which belongs to the physical world, we may indeed find our real spiritual essence—the imperishable essence that passes from incarnation to incarnation. When we pierce through the veil of the inner being with all the desires, passions and inner experiences of soul (which are only one part of us in so far as we live in a physical body) we then reach our eternal essence and enter a world of spirit. On the other hand, if we develop powers which not only perceive the physical world with its sounds, colours, sensations of warmth and cold—if we so strengthen our spiritual powers that they can penetrate behind the encircling veil of colour, sound, warmth, cold and other physical phenomena—then our strengthened spiritual forces will reach the super-sensible worlds, stretching before us into boundless distances, into infinity. The first way is that of the Mystic; the second the way of Spiritual Science. It was along one of these two ways that the great teachers attained to the revelations of truth which they had to inculcate into mankind as the basis of culture.

In primeval times the evolution of humanity was such that only one of the two ways was open to a particular people. Only later, in the Greek epoch (coinciding with the beginning of the Christian era) did these two currents mingle and gradually become a single current of culture. When we speak to-day of the ascent into higher worlds, it is right to state that the man who would make the ascent must to a certain extent develop both kinds of spiritual powers within his soul—the mystical powers on the path into the inner self and the powers developed by Spiritual Science as it penetrates the outer world. To-day these two paths are no longer strictly separate from one another, for it is part of the purpose of human evolution that the two currents should meet. Before the Greek and Christian eras these two methods of development were practised by different peoples living in regions not very far apart in space. We find traces of them in ancient Indian culture, in the Vedic songs and in the Zarathustrian civilisation to the North. All that we so greatly admire in the old Indian culture—which later on found expression in Buddhism—all this was attained through inner contemplation, by turning away from the outer world. The eye had to become insensitive to physical colour, the ear to physical sound, the senses to turn away from outer impressions, and finally, with his inner powers of soul made strong, man attained to Brahma. In Brahma, he felt himself united with the inner being of the Cosmos, moving and creative. And so there arose the teaching of the Holy Rishis which flowed into the Vedas and lived on in the Vedantic philosophy and in Buddhism.

The other path springs from the teachings of Zarathustra. Zarathustra handed down to his disciples the secret of how to strengthen the powers of understanding in order to penetrate the veil of the outer world of sense. Zarathustra did not teach as did the Indian mystics: “Turn away from colours, sounds and all the outer impressions of the senses, and seek the way into the spiritual worlds entirely by means of inner contemplation, in your own soul life.” On the contrary, Zarathustra taught: “Strengthen the powers of knowledge and understanding for everything that lives, be it plant or animal; understand all living things in air and water, on the mountain heights or in the valleys. Look upon this world!” We know that for the Indian mystic, this world was Maya—illusion; he turned from it in order to find Brahman; but Zarathustra taught his disciples rather to penetrate the world with understanding and to feel, behind the outer realm of physical phenomena, the reality of a spiritual power, active and creative. This is the other path.

It is remarkable how these two paths converge in the Greek age, where the understanding of things spiritual was far deeper than it is in our time. This understanding was expressed in symbolical imagery, in mythology. The two thought currents, the mystic path into the inner self and the other leading into the outer Cosmos, blended in Greek culture. One current derived its name from the mystical God Dionysus, the mysterious being who was to be found when a man descended more and more deeply into his inner being and there discovered the sub-human element which formerly he did not know, and from which he evolved into full manhood. This element, still unpurified, still partly animal, was known by the name of Dionysus. The other element, in which the eyes of spirit beheld the phenomena of the physical world, was expressed by the name of Apollo.¹ Thus we find the teachings of Zarathustra expressed in the cult of Apollo and the mystic doctrine of contemplation in the cult of Dionysus in Greece. In ancient times, these two currents arose separately, but in the Apollonian and Dionysian cults they were united and blended. If we, in our modern culture, undergo a true spiritual training, we can re-experience them both in one.

Nietzsche had an inkling of the significant difference between the cults of Apollo and Dionysus. True, he did not enter very deeply into the matter, but in his first Essay, “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,” he shows that the Apollonian and Dionysian cults of ancient Greece are represented on the one hand in the mystic current, and on the other in the current which is now expressed by Spiritual Science.

Zarathustra taught his disciples to see the Spirit behind every physical phenomenon. The whole civilisation inspired by him was based on this principle. Now it is not enough to say that behind the world of the senses there is the Divine-Spiritual. Man may think he has discovered a great truth here, but it leads to nothing but a vague Pantheism. We may think we express a truth when we say: “God is at work behind every physical phenomenon”—but this is merely a conception of a nebulous spiritual power behind all things physical. A teacher like Zarathustra, who had actually ascended to the spiritual world, did not speak in this abstract and vague terminology to his disciples and his people. He showed that just as individual physical phenomena are different, so the spiritual essence behind them is at one time more evident, at another less. He taught how behind the physical Sun—the origin of all life and activity—there is the centre of spiritual life.

Let us try to condense into simple language the doctrines which Zarathustra tried to inculcate into his disciples. He spoke thus: “Man, as we perceive him, is not merely composed of a physical body, for this physical body is but the outer manifestation of the Spirit. Just as the physical body is nothing but the manifested crystallisation of the Spiritual in man, so the Sun, in so far as it is a body of luminous matter, is nothing but the external body of a spiritual Sun.” The spiritual part of man is spoken of as the “Aura”—or “Ahura,” to use the old expression—in distinction to his physical body and in the same sense the spiritual part of the physical Sun may be called the “Great Aura,” for it is all-embracing. Zarathustra called that which lies behind the physical Sun, Aura Mazda or Ahura Mazdao—the Great Aura. With this spiritual essence behind the Sun, all spiritual experiences and conditions are bound up, just as the existence and well-being of plants, animals and all that lives on Earth are bound up with the physical Sun. Behind the physical Sun lives the spiritual Lord and Creator, Ahura Mazdao. This is the derivation of the name “Ormuzd,” Spirit of Light. While the Indians searched mystically in the inner self to find Brahma, the Eternal, shining like a luminous centre in man, Zarathustra pointed his disciples to the great periphery, showing them that the mighty Spirit of the Sun, Ahura Mazdao, the Spirit of Light, dwelt in the physical body of the Sun. Ahura Mazdao has to face his enemy—Ahriman, the Spirit of Darkness—just as man, who bears within himself the enemies of his good impulses, strives to raise his real spiritual being to perfection and has to battle against his lower passions, desires, and the delusive images of lying and falsehood.

Zarathustra was able to transmute his conception of the universe from mere doctrine into real feeling, real vision. And so he was able to teach his disciples that within them was an active principle of perfection. Whatever their development might be at the time, they were taught to realise that this principle of perfection could raise them to higher and higher stages of existence. They were taught that passions and desires, lying and deceit within the soul lead to imperfection. Zarathustra taught of the attacks made upon Ahura Mazdao in the outer world by the principle of imperfection, by the evil which casts shadow into the light, by Angra Mainyus—Ahriman.

Zarathustra's disciples were thus enabled to realise that the great universe is reflected in each individual. The real significance of this doctrine lay, not in its theoretical concepts and ideas but in the feeling it called forth in man—a feeling which taught him of his relationship to the universe and made him able to say: “Here I stand—a little world, but a little world which is a replica of the great world. In human beings, the principle of perfection is opposed by evil; in the great universe, Ormuzd and Ahriman face one another. The whole universe is, as it were, a man grown immeasurably great and the highest human forces are Ahura Mazdao—their enemy, Ahriman.”

If man directs his attention truly to the physical world he must finally discover that all phenomena are part of the great cosmic process; he is filled with awe when spectro-analysis reveals the fact that the same substances which exist on Earth exist also on the farthest stars. In the light of Zarathustra's teaching, man felt himself in his spiritual being, part of the Spirit of the whole Cosmos; he felt himself emanating from this Spirit. Herein lies the great significance of the doctrine.

The teaching was not abstract but very concrete. Even when people of our time have a certain feeling for the Spiritual behind the physical world it is very difficult to make them realise that there must necessarily be more than one central spiritual power. But just as there are different natural phenomena—heat, light, chemical forces and the like—so there are different orders of lower spiritual Powers, subordinate forces whose realm of activity is more limited than that of the One All-Embracing Power. Zarathustra made a distinction between Ormuzd and other lower spiritual beings, who were his servants. Before we turn to consider these lower spiritual beings, let us realise that the doctrine of Zarathustra is not mere dualism, a teaching of the two worlds of Ormuzd and of Ahriman. He taught that underlying these two currents in the universe there is one power whence both the realm of light (Ormuzd) and the realm of darkness (Ahriman) proceed. Old Greek writers tell us that the unity behind Ormuzd and Ahriman was worshipped by the ancient Persians as the LIVING UNITY, but it is difficult to re-create this idea nowadays. Zarathustra calls this Zervane Akarene—that which lies behind the light. To get at some conception of the meaning of this, let us think of the course of evolution. We must conceive of all creation as travelling towards greater and greater perfection, so that if we look towards the future, the Ahura of Ormuzd grows clearer and clearer. Looking into the past, we see the Ahrimanic powers in opposition to Ormuzd; in course of time, however, their existence must cease. In all these things we must understand that a survey of the future and of the past leads to the same point. It is very difficult for the man of to-day to realise this. Let us think of a circle, by way of illustration. If we start at the lowest point and pass along one side, we arrive at the opposite, the highest point. If we pass along the other side, we also arrive at the same point. If we enlarge the circle, we have further to go, and the curve of the arc becomes flatter and flatter. Draw the circle larger and larger, and the arc eventually becomes a straight line; thereafter both lines lead to infinity. But before this, with a smaller circle, we arrive at the same point along both sides. Why should we not assume that the same result obtains when the sides of the circle are flat and its fines straight? In infinity, the point must then remain the same on the one side as on the other. Therefore to conceive of infinity, we may imagine a line continuing indefinitely on both sides—in effect, a circle.

This is an abstract conception of what underlies the Zarathustrian doctrine of Zervane Akarene—Zaruana Akarana. Taking the concept of Time, we look into the future on the one side and into the past on the other. Time, however, is welded into a circle; the completion takes place in infinity. This is symbolically represented as the serpent biting its own tail; into the serpent the Power of Light which grows brighter and brighter, is woven on the one side, and on the other the Power of Darkness, which appears to grow deeper and deeper. While we ourselves remain in the centre, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Light and Shadow, are intermingled, and into all this is woven the self-contained, mysterious “Zaruana Akarana”—Time.

This ancient conception of the universe did not merely state vaguely: Outside and behind the world of the senses which works upon eyes and ears, there is “Spirit.” A kind of alphabet, records of the spiritual world were revealed. Suppose we to-day take a page of a book. We see letters on it and we build up words from these letters, but we must first have learnt to read. Those who have not learnt to read in the spiritual sense, cannot understand Zarathustra; they cannot read the sense of his teaching but merely see signs and symbols. Only those who know how to build up these signs into a doctrine to which their souls respond can understand Zarathustra.

Now behind the world of the senses, in the ordered grouping of the stars, Zarathustra perceived a symbolic writing in cosmic space. Just as we have a written alphabet, so Zarathustra saw in the starry worlds of space, a kind of Alphabet of the spiritual worlds, a language through which they became articulate. Thus arose the science of penetrating into the spiritual world and of reading and interpreting the constellations. He knew too, how to decipher the signs in which the Cosmic Spirits inscribe their activities into space. Their language is the grouping and movement of the stars. Zarathustra and his disciples saw that Ahura Mazdao creates and manifests by describing an apparent circle in the heavens, in the sense of our Astronomy, and this circle was for them the outward sign of the way in which Ormuzd manifested his activity to man. Zarathustra showed—and this is a most important point—that the Zodiac is a line which returns on itself, forming a circle as the expression of the rotation of Time. In the highest sense, he taught that while one branch of Time goes forward into the future, the other turns backwards into the past. Zaruana Akarana, the self-contained line of Time, the circle described by Ormuzd, the Spirit of Light, is what was later called the Zodiac. This is the expression of the spiritual activity of Ormuzd. The course of the Sun through the Zodiac is the expression of the activity of Ormuzd. The Zodiac is the expression of Zaruana Akarana. Zaruana Akarana and Zodiac are one and the same word, like Ormuzd and Ahura Mazdao. Two things must here be remembered.

When the Sun passes in summer through the light, his full powers fall upon the Earth; they are the forces of spiritual light sent forth by Ormuzd from his realm of light. The signs of the Zodiac through which Ormuzd passes in the summer or in the daytime reveal his activity unhampered by Ahriman. The signs of the Zodiac below the horizon are symbolical of the realm of shadow through which Ahriman passes. What, then, are the expressions of Ormuzd (who represents the light part of the Zodiac) and of Ahriman (the dark part), in their activity on Earth? Now there is a difference between the influence of the Sun in the morning and at noon time. When Ormuzd ascends from Aries to Taurus, the effect of his rays is not the same as when he is descending. His rays differ in summer and in winter and they differ with every sign through which the Sun passes. The course of the Sun through the signs of the Zodiac revealed to Zarathustra the many sides of the activity of Ormuzd, and he beheld here the expressions of spiritual beings who are, as it were, the servants, the “sons” of Ormuzd, who execute his commands. These subservient powers, each having their own special activity, are the “Amschaspands” or “Ameschas Pentas.” While Ormuzd represents the collective activity of the Zodiac, the Amschaspands have to perform the specialised activities expressed in the raying forth of the Sun from Aries, Taurus, Cancer, and so forth. The activity of Ormuzd is expressed in the raying of the Sun through all the light signs of the Zodiac—from Aries to Libra or Scorpio. According to Zarathustra, Ahriman works from the centre of the Earth, from the darkness where his servants, the Amschaspands, dwell; they are the opponents of the good genii surrounding Ormuzd. Zarathustra distinguished twelve orders of spiritual beings, six or rather seven, on the side of Ormuzd; six, or rather five, on the side of Ahriman. They are symbolised as good and evil genii, or subservient spirits, according to whether the Sun's course runs through the light or the dark signs of the Zodiac. Goethe was thinking of these helpers of Ormuzd when he wrote at the beginning of Faust, in the Prologue in Heaven:—

“But ye, pure
Children of God, enjoy eternal beauty:—
Let that which ever operates and lives
Clasp you within the limits of its love;
And seize with sweet and melancholy thoughts
The fronting phantoms of its loveliness.” (Shelley's translation).

The Amschaspands of Zarathustra are the same beings to whom Goethe refers as the “pure children of God,” who serve the highest Divine Power.

There are twelve Amschaspands or genii; below, there are other spiritual powers of which the teaching of Zarathustra distinguished twenty-eight grades. The number is approximate, for it varies between twenty- four, twenty-eight, and thirty-one. These subordinate powers are called Izerads or Izods. What class of beings are these? If we think of the Amschaspands as the twelve great powers in Space, then the Izods are the subordinate forces behind the lower activities of Nature, and of these, there are from twenty-four to thirty-one. There is yet a third group of spiritual powers—powers which, in our sense, are not really active in the physical world as such. They are called by Zarathustra, Ferruhars or Frawashars. The twelve forces behind which the Amschaspands live are active in all the physical activities of light upon the Earth: behind the Izods we must imagine the forces affecting the animal kingdom. The Frawashars are to be thought of as the spiritual beings guiding the group-souls of the animals.

Thus Zarathustra saw a real super-sensible world behind the world of sense: Ormuzd and Ahriman, behind them Zaruana Akarana, below them the Amschaspands, good and bad. Now what are the Izods and Frawashars? According to Zarathustra they are the spiritual essence pervading the macrocosm, the living essence² of the external physical phenomena we perceive with our senses. Man, as he stands in the world, is a replica of this greater world; therefore he contains within himself all the powers which ensoul the greater world. Just as we have recognised Ormuzd in the struggle of man towards perfection, and Ahriman in man's impure instincts and impulses, so we can also find in man the imprint of the other spiritual beings, the lesser genii.

And now I have to speak of something which may appear extraordinary to-day to the usual conceptions of the Cosmos held by man. The time, however, is not far distant when even external science will discover that there is super-sensible element behind all physical phenomena, a spiritual world behind the world of the senses. It will then be realised that the physical body of man in all its parts, is an image of the whole Cosmos The Cosmos pours itself into, and densifies within the physical body of man. Thus, according to the conception of Zarathustra—which much resembles that of Spiritual Science—we can say that both Ormuzd and Ahriman work upon man: Ormuzd as the impulse towards perfection, and Ahriman as the impulse in opposition to this. But the spiritual activities of the Amschaspands are also at work in man. We must think of these beings as so far densified in man that they are physically manifest.

In the time of Zarathustra there was, of course, no science of anatomy in our sense of the word, but he and his disciples, with their spiritual conception of the world, saw the twelve currents of the Amschaspands as a reality. They saw these currents flowing towards man and working in him. The human head was to them the visible expression of the activities of the seven good and five evil currents of the Amschaspands. How is this truth expressed at the present time? To-day, the anatomist has discovered the existence of twelve pairs of cerebral nerves which are repeated in the body. These are the physical counterparts, the frozen currents, as it were, of the Amschaspands. There are twelve pairs of nerves and by their means man can either attain the highest perfection or sink to the greatest evil. Thus the spiritual teaching given by Zarathustra to his disciples appears again, materialised, in our own age. People may regard it as so much fancy on the part of Spiritual Science to say that Zarathustra was referring to the twelve pairs of cerebral nerves when he taught of the Amschaspands, but the world will have much to learn besides this, for it will be found that all the moving and weaving Cosmos works on further in man. The ancient teachings of Zarathustra are indeed revived in modern physiology. The twenty-eight to thirty-one Izods occupy the same subordinate position to the Amschaspands as do the twenty-eight nerves of the spine to the nerves of the brain. The spinal nerves which stimulate the soul life of man are created by the spiritual currents of the Izods outside; they work into us and crystallise, as it were, into the spinal nerves. And in that which is not of the nature of the nerves but which makes us individuals, which does not now pour in from outside, but lives within—there dwell the Frawashars or Ferruhars. They live in those thoughts which transcend the merely physical activity of the brain and nerves.

There is a remarkable connection between the tendencies of our own time and the doctrines which Zarathustra gave in spiritual pictures flowing behind the veil of the world of sense. There is, however, one significant thing to be remembered. The teachings of Zarathustra influenced the thought of the people for a very long time and then for a while they receded into the background. Sometimes it was the mystical way of thought which predominated, sometimes the occult, after Greek thought had in a measure united the two currents. Nowadays there seems to be a tendency to the mystical way. Many feel drawn towards Indian occultism with its tendency towards introspection and this explains the fact that little heed is paid to the essential features of the doctrines of Zarathustra in the spiritual life of to-day. There is a great deal of ancient Persian thought in our own spiritual life, yet in a sense, its most essential features, the very core of the doctrine of Zarathustra, is lost to our age. When we realise once more that the teachings of Zarathustra are the spiritual prototypes of countless examples of physical research, then the key-note of our present day culture will be replaced by another. Now one important feature in almost all other mystical currents of culture is missing in the religion of Zarathustra. The reason for this is its entire preoccupation with macrocosmic phenomena. Other religious systems have accentuated the contrasts presented by the division of the sexes. In most old religious systems, Goddesses and Gods are contrasting symbols of the two streams active in the world. The religion of Zarathustra rises above this conception in the symbols of Goodness as Light and Evil as Darkness. Hence the sublime purity of this religion and the nobility which lifts it above ideas which play an ugly part in any endeavour to deepen the thought life of our time. Even the Greek writers stated that the highest Godhead had perforce to create Ahriman as well as Ormuzd in order that there might be the necessary contrast. This implies that one Primal Power was set over against another. In the Hebrew religion, woman, Eve, is the symbol for the evil which came into this world. In the religion of Zarathustra there is no element of sex antagonism. The ugly things which nowadays enter so largely into our daily literature, pour into our thoughts and feelings and so unpleasantly accentuate the chief causes of health and disease without touching upon the essentials of life—all these will disappear when the “heroic” conception of Ormuzd and Ahriman is understood, when the true Zarathustrian influence spreads in present-day culture, clothed in the words of its great founder. These things pursue their own course in the world and nothing can arrest the progress of the truth inherent in the culture of Zarathustra. If we follow the progress of culture in Asia Minor, down to later times among the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and even up to the Christian era, we find traces of concepts derived from the illumination of the great Zarathustra. And we shall not wonder at the view expressed by a Greek writer, that the great spiritual leaders of the races imparted to the people part of a future culture of which they stood in need. This Greek writer pointed to Pythagoras, showing what he had learned from his great predecessors—Geometry from the Egyptians, Arithmetic from the Phoenicians, Astronomy from the Chaldeans—and how he had turned to Zarathustra's doctrines to learn from them the sacred teaching of the relations of man to the spiritual world and the true conduct of life. The same writer asserts that the conduct of life laid down by Zarathustra leads man above all minor conflicts, that they all culminate in the one great conflict between Good and Evil, where victory can only be gained by purification from evil, lying and falsehood. The worst enemy of Ormuzd bears the name of “Calumny”—one of the chief qualities of Ahriman. The Greek writer tells us that Pythagoras could not find the highest moral idea (the moral purification of man) among the Egyptians from whom he learnt Geometry, nor among the Phoenicians from whom he learnt Arithmetic, nor among the Chaldeans from whom he learnt Astronomy; but that he had to turn to the followers of Zarathustra to understand the heroic conception of the universe, since purification alone can vanquish evil. This shows the high value placed upon the noble teachings of Zarathustra in olden times.

What I have said may be illustrated by quotations from historical documents. Plutarch, for instance, says that Zarathustra teaches the worship of Light because Light is the greatest factor for the well-being of the Earth and the highest spiritual factor is Truth. This is in complete agreement with what has been said.

Let us now return again to the ancient Vedic conceptions. They were the result of a mystic descent into the inner being. Before man can penetrate to the inner light of Brahma, he meets with his own passions, his wild and semi-human impulses. These oppose his entry into the true life of spirit and soul. The Indian mystics realised that the mystic union with Brahma could only be attained by the elimination of all the impressions of the physical world, that the sensuous appeals of colours and sounds must cease. So long as these elements enter into meditation, the opponents of the attainment of perfection are there. The Indian mystic would have said: “Cast away all that may enter the soul from the outer powers; deepen yourself in the innermost core of your own soul; descend into the realm of the Devas, and when you have vanquished the lower Devas you will find the kingdom of Brahman. But shun the world of the Asuras, those beings who would fain penetrate into you from the world of Maya, the outer world. These must on no account be allowed to enter.”

And now listen to what Zarathustra taught his disciples: “The peoples of the South are differently constituted and they seek the spiritual world in another way. Their way would not help a nation whose mission is not only to dream and meditate in this wonderful world, but to teach mankind the art of Agriculture and the conquest of savagery. Do not look upon external things merely as Maya; you must penetrate behind this veil of colour and sound around you. Shun all that threatens to keep your soul within the bonds of egoism, shun all that bears the stamp of the Deva qualities! Make your way through the realm of the lower Asuras and ascend to the higher. Your nature is such that you can do this if you will!” In India the Rishis had taught that man was not so organised as to enable him to seek what lies in the realm of the Asuras, and that he should therefore shun their world and enter that of the Devas.

This is the difference between the Indian and Persian cultures. The Indian peoples were taught that the Asuras are evil spirits and must be avoided, for the organisation of the Indians was such that they only could know the lower Asuras. The Persian peoples, on the other hand, knew only the lower Devas and were therefore taught: ‘Penetrate to the realm of the Asuras and you will be able to rise from there to the realm of the higher Asuras.’

The impulse which Zarathustra gave to the men of his epoch lay in the fact that he had a gift for mankind which could work on through all the ages—a gift which would make clear the upward path and conquer all the false doctrines deceiving man on his path to perfection. Zarathustra therefore looked upon himself as the servant of Ahura Mazdao, and as such, he personally knew the opposition of Ahriman. His teaching was intended to aid mankind to a heroic conquest of the Ahriman principle. We find his words recorded in the documents of a later era. Inspired by the inner impulse of his mission, and fired by the passion with which he felt himself the antagonist of Ahriman, he said: “I will speak! Harken, ye who journey from afar, and ye that come from near at hand, with longing to hear. Mark well my words! No longer shall the Evil One, the false leader, conquer the Spirit of Good. Too long has his evil breath permeated human speech. I will refute him with the speech which the Highest, the Primal One has put into my mouth. I will speak what Ahura Mazdao says to me. And he who hears not my words nor understands their meaning as I speak them will experience much evil ere the end of the world-cycles!” Thus spake Zarathustra.

May we realise from these words that Zarathustra's message to mankind can be felt and experienced through all later epochs of culture. Those of us who have ears to hear the dim echoes still living in our time, will, if they listen with spiritual ears, hear the faint tones of Zarathustra's words to mankind thousands of years ago. For those who have ears to hear, the message of Zarathustra and other great Leaders of whom we shall speak in these lectures, may be summed up in the following words: “These God-sent Spirits shine as stars in the heavens of Life Eternal. May it be vouchsafed to every soul to behold their radiance in the realms of earthly life.”

• 1. See Chapter VI. of “The East in the Light of the West” by Rudolf Steiner. Anthroposophical Publishing Company
• 2. das Wesenhafte

I should like, my dear friends, to make a few remarks about the Walpurgis-night performed yesterday, which we shall be playing again tomorrow, because it seems to me important to have a correct idea of how this Walpurgis-night fits in with the whole development of the Faust poem. It is indeed remarkable that, having brought such calamity upon Gretchen—her mother killing herself with a sleeping-draught, her brother coming into his end through the fault of Faust and Gretchen—Faust should then flee, leaving Gretchen completely in the lurch, and knowing nothing himself of what is happening.

An incident of this kind has naturally made no small impression on those who have studied the Faust poem with most sympathy. I will read you what was said on the subject by Schröer who certainly studied Faust with great warmth of heart. (You will find a note on Schröer in my recent publication Riddles of Man.) He says concerning the “Walpurgis-Night”:

“We are to suppose of Faust urged on by Mephistopheles, has fled, leaving Gretchen behind in misery. Her mother was dead, her brother killed. Close upon all this followed her confinement. She lost her reason, drowned her child, and wandered around until she was arrested and thrown into prison. Although Faust could not have known what befell Gretchen after Valentine's death, yet he had parted from her in circumstances that make it appear very unnatural to see him now, two days after, strolling—as it appears in the text—at his ease on the Brocken. It is obvious, however that the Walpurgis-night was not written in close coordination with the poem as a whole. The poet is clearly no longer in a pathetic vein, but attacks his subject with a touch of irony. The underlying idea of linking this scene with the whole is quite clear. Mephistopheles takes Faust away to the Brocken to bewilder him and make him forget Gretchen. But the love in Faust is stronger than Mephistopheles can understand. The witch-apparitions did not attract him; in the midst of the frenzied confusion the image of Gretchen rises before him—this thought certainly does not arise with sufficient insistence in the whole Walpurgis-night take too great a place in relation to the dramatic action. It grew to an independent whole becoming all the more excessive by reason of the addition of the “Walpurgis-night Dream”. This of course applies only to the Walpurgis-night as part of the tragedy.”

Thus, even a man having a real love for Faust cannot explain to his own satisfaction how it comes about that, two days after the calamity, Faust is to be seen full of vigour walking with Mephistopheles on the Brocken.

Now I should like your here to set against against this, something purely external—that the Walpurgis-night belongs to the most mature part of Goethe's Faust. It was written in 1800–1. As a quite young man Goethe began to write his Faust, so for that we may go back to the beginning of the seventies of the eighteenth century—1772, 1773, 1774; it was then he began to write the first scenes. In 1800 or so he was all that older and had passed the great experiences, recorded, for instance, in the story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily written before the Walpurgis-night that he now adds to his Faust. The Walpurgis-night Dream was actually written a year earlier than the Walpurgis-night itself. We may therefore suppose that Goethe took it very seriously the fitting of the Walpurgis-night mysteries into Faust. But the difficulty of understanding it can never be overcome unless we bear in mind that Goethe's meaning was really of a spiritual nature.

I have a pretty considerable knowledge of the commentaries on Faust written up to the year 1900, but not so much of those that were later; but up to 1900 I know them almost all, though since that I have not gone so deeply into what has been written on the subject. This I do know, however, that no one has taken it from a spiritual point of view. It may be objected, no doubt, that is asking too much of us to suppose that, two days after such a great misfortune, Faust should have gone off on a ramble in this carefree way. But Goethe was really not the commonplace, imperturbable Monist he is often pictured; he was a man, as the details of this Walpurgis-night themselves show, deeply initiated into certain spiritual connections. Anyone familiar with these connections, can see that there is nothing dilettante about the Walpurgis-night; everything in it shows deep knowledge. To speak rather trivially, you can see that there is something behind it, that it is not an ordinary poem but written out of understanding for what is spiritual. Anyone with the certain knowledge, can easily judge by details whether realities are spoken of, whether a poet's description is the result of spiritual understanding, or whether he is just thinking out something about spiritual worlds and their connections—for instance, the world of witches. O ne must cultivate a little observation in such matters.

I will tell you a simple story—I could tell you hundred of the same time—to illustrate how it can be seen from details whether, in what one is dealing with, there is anything behind. It goes without saying that sometimes one may be mistaken; it depends on the way the matter is presented.

I was once in a gathering of theologians, historians, poets, and so on. In this assembly the following story was told. (This was all long ago, nearly thirty years, in the eighties of the nineteenth century). Once in a church in Paris a Canon was preaching in a very fanatical way against superstition. He would only concede what the Church conceded. Above all he wished to prevent people from believing things that were objectionable to him in particular. Now this Canon in his fanatical sermon tried to convince his hearers that Freemasonry was a very evil thing. (Catholic clergy, you know, very often preach about Freemasonry and its potential dangers). He now only wished to maintain that it is a very reprehensible doctrine, and that those connected with that are thoroughly bad men. He would not allow that there was anything spiritual in many of such brotherhoods. Now, a man is listening to this who had been taken there by a friend, and it seemed to him very strange that the Canon of a great community should be speaking thus to a large congregation, for he himself believed that spiritual forces do work through such societies. The two friends waited for the preacher after the sermon and discussed the matter with him. He, however, fanatically persisted in his opinion that all this had nothing to do with what is spiritual, that Freemasons were just evil men with a very evil doctrine. Then one of the two, who knew something about the matter said: I suggest, Your Reverence, that you should come with me at a fixed time next Sunday. I will put you in the private seat in a certain lodge, from which you can watch what is going on unseen. The preacher said: very well. But may I take sacred relics with me?—he was beginning, you see, to be frightened! So he took the relics with him and was led to the place where he could sit in concealment. At a given signal he beheld a very strange-looking individual with a pale face moving towards the presidential chair, and he moved without putting one foot before the other, but making himself glide forward.—this was all described very exactly and the man continued: now he set his relics to work, pronounced the blessing, and so on, so that there immediately arose a great disturbance in the assembly, and the whole meeting was broken up.

Afterwards, a very progressive priest, a theologian, who was present, declared that he simply did not believe in the thing, and another priest alleged that he had heard in Rome that ten priests there had taken an oath vouching for the Canon's veracity. But the first priest replied: I would rather believe that ten priests had taken a false oath than that the impossible is possible. Then I said: the way in which it was told is enough for me. For the way was the important thing with regard to the gliding.

You meet with this gliding in the Walpurgis-night also; Gretchen, when she again appears, also glides along. Thus with Goethe even such a detail is relevant. And every detail is presented in this way, nothing is irrelevant from a spiritual point of view.

What is it then we are dealing with? We are dealing with something which shows that, for Goethe, the question was not whether it would be natural for Faust, two days after the catastrophe, to be going for a pleasant country ramble on the Brocken. No, what we are dealing with is a spiritual experience coming to Faust during Walpurgis-night, an experience he could not avoid which came to him as the definite result of the shattering events through which he had passed. We must realize, therefore, that his soul has been snatched out of his body, and has found Mephistopheles in the spiritual world. And it is in the spiritual world that they wandered together to the Brocken, that is to say, they meet with those who are also out of their bodies when they go to the Brocken; for naturally the physical body of those who make this journey remains in bed.

In the days when such things were intensively practiced, those who wished to make this journey to the Brocken (the time for it is the night of April 30) rub themselves with a certain ointment whereby—as otherwise in sleep—the complete separation of the astral body and ego is brought about. In this way the Brocken journey is carried out in spirit. It is an experience of a very low type, but still experience that can be carried out. No one need think, however, that he can obtain information about the mixing of the magic ointment any more easily than he can obtain it about the way in which van Helmont, by rubbing certain chemicals into parts of the body, has contrived consciously to leave it. This leaving of the body has happened to van Helmont. But this kind of thing is not recommended to those who, like Franz in Hermann Barr's Ascension,¹ find it too tedious to do the exercises and to carry out the affair in the correct way. But I know well that many would consider themselves lucky were methods of this kind to be divulged to them!

Well then, my dear friends, Faust, that is, Faust's soul, and Mephistopheles, on the night of April 30, actually find themselves together with a company witches also outside their bodies. This is a genuine spiritual occurrence, represented by Goethe out of his deep knowledge. Goethe is not merely showing how one may have a subjective vision; to him it is clear that when a man leaves his body he will meet with other souls who have left theirs. Mephistopheles indicates this conclusively when he says:

In the realm of dreams and glamour
as it seems we now have entered.

They have actually entered another realm, they have entered the soul-world and there meet with other souls. And we naturally find them within this world as they have to be in accordance with the after effects of their physical life. Faust has to go back into his physical body. So long as the conditions are there are for man to go back into his physical body, that is, while he is not physically dead, so long does he bear about with him, on going out with his astral body, certain inclinations and affinities belonging to his physical existence. Hence, what Faust says is quite comprehensible, that is, how he is enjoying the Spring air of the April night just passing into May; naturally he is perfectly conscious of it since he is not entirely separated from his body, but only temporarily outside it. When a man is outside his physical body, as Faust was here, he can perceive all that is fluid and all that is of an airy nature in the world, though not what is solid. Of solid things he can only perceive the fluid in them. Man is more than 90% fluid, a column of fluid, and has in him quite a small percentage of what is solid. Thus you need not imagine that when outside he is unable to see another man; he can only see, however, what is fluid in him. He can perceive nature too, for nature is saturated with fluid. All that is here pictured that shows deep knowledge. Faust can perceive in this way. But Mephistopheles, that is Ahriman, as an Ahrimanic being has no understanding of the present earth; he belongs relate to what has lagged behind, and hence he feels no particular pleasure in the Spring. You remember how I explained to you in one of my last lectures that in winter a man can remember what is connected with the Moon. But what is connected with the present moon, now that it is Earth-Moon, does not particularly appeal to him. What has to do with the Moon, that unites itself with the former Moon-element, when fiery, illuminating forces issued from the Earth—that is man's element; the Will-o'-the-wisps not the moonlight. This reference to the Will-o'-the-wisps, issuing from the moon element still in the Earth, it is in accordance with the exact truth.

I draw your attention in passing to the fact that the first part of the manuscript of the Walpurgis-night is not clear owing to some negligence; in these editions there is everywhere something almost impossible. It did not occur to me until we were rehearsing that corrections would be needed even in the Walpurgis-night. In the first place, in these copies, the alternated song between Faust, Mephistopheles and the Will-o'-the-wisps, the alternate singing and the alternate dancing, are not assigned to the several characters. Now the learned people have made various distributions that, however, do not fit the case. I have allotted it all in such a way that what we so often find given to Faust belongs to Mephistopheles:

“In the realm of dreams and glamour,
As it seems, we now are entered.
Lead us truly through the clamor (this is said to the will-o'-the-wisps)
Thither where our aims are centered
Through the wide and desert spaces.”

Even in Schröer's version I find this given to Faust, but it really belongs to Mephistopheles—as it was spoken, you will remember yesterday. What comes next belongs to the Will-o'-the-wisps:

“Lo now! Lo! how swiftly races
Tree past tree! How the gigantic
Crags lean over, and the antic
Rocky snouts that stand in cluster
How they snort and how they bluster!”

Then it is Faust's turn where reference is made to these things reminding him of the shattering experience he has passed through:

“Through the stones and turf what lustre,
Stream and streamlet downward springing.
Hark! ’tis murmurs! Hark! ’tis singing.
Hark! ’tis love-plaints sweet and olden,
Voices from yon-days all golden!
All our hope, and love and longing
Echo, too, like tales once told in
Far-off times, comes faintly ringing.”

Then, strangely enough even Schröer assigns what comes next Mephistopheles: it belongs, of course, to the Will-o'-the-wisp:

Woo hoo! shoo-hoo! nearer hover
Cry of screech-owl, jay and plover.” and so on.

Schröer gives these lines to Mephistopheles, that is obviously wrong. That last lines should go to Faust:

“Nay, but tell me, are we biding
Still, or are we onward riding?
Cliffs and green trees are sliding,
Will-o'-the-wisps their number doubles,
Blown up like transparent bubbles.
All in giddy whirls are gliding.”

I will here point out that there are still mistakes in what follows. Thus after Faust has spoken the words:

“Now through the air the wind doth howl and hiss,
And with what buffets beats upon my shoulder!”

You will find a long speech given to Mephistopheles. But it does not belong to him (though assigned to him in all editions). Only the first three lines are his:

“Clasp thou the cliffs old ribs! Cling to the boulders!
Else will it hurl thee headlong into the deep abyss!
The night is thick with rack.”

The lines following are Faust's:

“Hark how the groaning woods do crack.
Startled fly the solemn owls ...” and so on.

Not until the final line does Mephistopheles speak again:

“... Hear'st thou voices o'er us?
Far and dear that sing in chorus?
All the magic mount along
Wildly streams the wizard song.”

This had to be corrected, for things must stand in their right form. Then I have taken upon myself to insert just one line. For there are some things, especially where witches are concerned, that really cannot be put on the stage, and so have thought fit to introduce a line that does not actually belong.

Now I must admit that it has distressed me a good deal to see how corrupt the rendering is in all the editions and how it has occurred to no one to apportion the passages correctly. It must be kept clearly in mind that Goethe wrote Faust bit by bit, and that much in it naturally needs correction, (he himself called it the confused manuscript). But the correction must be done with knowledge. It is not Goethe, of course, who is to be corrected, but the mistakes made publication.

From what has been said it will be clear that Mephistopheles makes use of the Will-o'-the-wisp's as a guide, and that they go into a world that is seen to be fluctuating, in movement, as it would be perceived were everything solid away. Now enter into all that that is said there. How much real knowledge is shown in the way all that is solid is made to disappear! How all this is in tune with what is said by the Will-o'-the-wisps, Mephistopheles and Faust, as being represented by Goethe as out of the body. Mephistopheles indeed has no physical body, he only assumes one; Faust for the moment is not in his physical body; Will-o'-the-wisps are elemental beings who naturally, since it is solid, cannot take on the physical body. All this that proceeds in the alternated song shows that he wishes to lead us into the essential being of the supersensible, not into something merely visionary but into the very essence of the spiritual world.

But mow our attention is drawn to how, when we are thus in the spiritual, everything looks different; for in all probability any ordinary onlooker would not see Mammon all aglow in the mountain, nor the glow within it. It is hardly necessary to explain that all here described shows that the soul pictured is outside the body. It is a real relation then between spiritual beings that we are shown, and Goethe lets us see what unites him with knowledge of the spiritual world. That Goethe could placed Mephistopheles so relevantly into his poem at all, proves that he has knowledge of these matters and that he knew perfectly well that Mephistopheles is a being who has lagged behind. Hence he actually introduces other retarded beings of that ilk. Notice this—a voice comes:

“Which way, comest thou here?”

A voice from below answers (and this means a voice proceeding from a being with sub-human instincts):

Over the Ilsensteep.
In the owlet's nest I took a peep
She had eyes like moons!”

Voice: to hell with a wanion!
Why so hot-foot thou ronyon?

Voice: She hath well-nigh flayed me!
See the wounds she hath made me!

Now notice that later the answers given by a voice above.

“Come with us, come, from the Felsenmere.”

Voices from below: “We would climb with you the mountain sheer.”

Voice from above: “Who calls from out the rocky cranny?”

And then we hear the voice of one who has clambered for three hundred years. That means that Goethe calls up spirits who are three hundred years behind. The origin of Faust lies three hundred years back; the Faust legend arose in the sixteenth century. The spirits left behind from that time appear, mingling now with those who come to the Brocken as witches in the present—for these things must be taken literally. Thus Goethe says: Oh, there are many such souls with us still, souls akin to the witch souls, for they are three hundred years behind. Since everything in the Walpurgis-night is under the guidance of Mephistopheles, it would be possible for young Mephistopheles beings to appear among the witch-souls. And then comes a present-day half witch, for the voice that earlier cried:

“Take me with you, take me up!
Three hundred years I've clambered zealous.”

is not that of a half-witch but of a being who is really three hundred years old. The witches are not as old as that although they go to the Brocken.—The half-witch comes slowly trotting up the mountain. Here then we meet something genuinely spiritual, something that has overcome time, that has remained behind in time. Many of the words are positively wonderful. Thus, one voice, the voice of the one who has been clambering for three hundred years, says:

“Yet I cannot reach the top.
Fain would I be beside my fellows!”

In these words Goethe very beautifully expresses how the witch-souls and the souls belonging to the dead who, in like manner, have remained so very much behind, are akin. These souls remaining behind would fain be with their fellows—very interesting!

Then we see how all the time Mephistopheles tries to keep Faust to the commonplace, the trivial; he tries to keep him among the witches' souls. But Faust wants to learn the deeper secrets of existence, and therefore wants more, wants to go farther; he wishes to get to what is really evil, to the sources of evil:

“Up yonder, though, I'd rather be!
The smoke with lurid splendour lit
Rolls on. The crowd streams to the devil,
What riddles there one might unravel!

For this deeper element Faust is seeking in Evil, Mephistopheles has no understanding; he does not want to take even Faust there because there things will naturally become rather—painful. It is all very well to be taken to the witches as a soul; but when a man like Faust, having been received into this company, goes still farther towards evil, he may discover things highly dangerous to many. For, in Evil, is revealed the source of much that exists on earth. That is why it was better for many people that the witches should be burnt. For although no one need practise witchcraft, yet by reason of the existence of witches and their being used to a certain extent for their mediumistic qualities, by certain people wishing to fathom various secrets, if their mediumistic powers went far enough the source of much that is in the world could be brought to light. Things were not allowed to go to these lengths, hence the witches were burnt. It was definitely to the interest of those who burned witches, that nothing could be divulged of what comes to light when those experienced in such matters probe deeper into witch secrets. Such things can only be hinted at. The origin of all sorts of things would have been discovered—no one who had not this to fear has been in favour of burning witches.

But, as we have said, Mephistopheles wishes to keep Faust more to trivialities. And then Faust becomes impatient, for he had thought of Mephistopheles as a genuine devil, who would not practice trifling magic arts upon him but, once he was out of his body, would take him right into Evil. Faust wants Mephistopheles to show himself as the Devil, not as a commonplace magician able to lead him only to what is trifling in the spiritual world. But Mephistopheles shirks this and is only willing to lead him to the trivial. It is exceedingly interesting to notice how Mephistopheles turns aside from actual Evil; that is not to be disclosed to Faust at this stage, and he directs his attention once more to the elemental. The following is a wonderful passage:

“See where yon snail comes creeping
She with her groping face hath nosed
Some inkling of my secret out.”

Wonderfully to the point is this jolt down into the sphere of smelling! It is actually the case that in the world into which Mephistopheles has led Faust, smelling plays a bigger part than seeing. Her ‘groping face’—a wonderfully vivid expression, for it is not the same sense of smell as men have, neither is it a face; it is as if one could send out something from the eyes to touch things with delicate rays. It is true, the lower animals have something of the kind, for the snail not only has feelers, but these feelers lengthen themselves into extraordinarily long etheric stalks with which an animal of this kind can really touch anything soft, but only touch it etherically. Think what deep knowledge this all is—in no way dilettante.

And now they come to a lively Club. We are still in the spiritual world, of course, and they come to this lively club. Goethe understood how to be one of those who can talk of the spiritual world without a long and tragic face, and how to speak with humour and irony when these are necessary and in place. Why should not an old General, a Minister (His Excellency), a Parvenu and an Author, discussing their affairs together while sipping their wine, find themselves by degrees so little interested in what is being said that gradually they fall asleep? Or, when they are still under the particular influence of what is going on at the Club—a little dicing perhaps, a little gambling—why then should not these souls so come out of their bodies that they might be found in a lively Club among others who have left their bodies? At a Club—the General, His Excellency the Minister, the Parvenu, and now the Poet as well; why not? One can meet with them for they are outside their bodies. And if one is lucky, one can really find such a party, for it is something like that in this sort of assembly, that they fall asleep in the midst of amusing themselves. Goethe is not ignorant of all this, you see. But Mephistopheles is surprised that here, through nature herself, through nothing more than a rather abnormal occurrence of ordinary life, these souls have come to be in this position. He is so surprised to come across it in this way, that he has to recall a bit of his own past. For this reason he becomes suddenly old on the spot, or in his present form he is not able to have this experience. The human world is meddling with him and this he does not want. He tells the will-o'-the-wisp it should go straight not zigzag, lest its flickering light should be blown out. The will-o'-the-wisp is trying to ape man kind by going zigzag. Mephistopheles wants to go straight—men go zigzag. So it disturbs him that, merely through an abnormal way of proceeding in life and not through any hellish machination, four respectable members of human society have appeared on the Brocken scene.

But then things begin to go better. First there enters the Huckster-witch, naturally also outside her body. She arrives with all her arts—so beautifully referred to here:

“No chalice but into the healthy frame
Hath poured the poison's slow-consuming flame;
No jewel but to shame beguiled some winsome woman,
No sword that hath not stabbed i’ the back the foeman.”

So now he feels himself again. This witch has certainly been properly anointed; he wants more feels quite in his element, addresses her as ‘Cousin’, but tells her:

“Nay, thou dost read the times but badly, Cousin,
For done is past, and past is done!
Only for novelties we clamour,
Should'st lay in novelties alone.”

He want something of more interest to Faust. But Faust is not at all attracted. He feels that he is in a very inferior spiritual elements and now says—what I asked you to notice, for it is wonderful:

“If only I don't take leave of my senses!”

(If only I don't loose consciousness!) That means he does not wish to go through the experience with a suppressed consciousness, in an atavistic way; he prefers to have the experience in full consciousness. In such a Witches' Sabbath the consciousness might easily be blunted, and that should not be. Think how deep Goethe goes!

And now references made to how the soul element has to leave the body, and how a part of the etheric body too must be lifted out, and what I might call a kind of Nature-initiation, that during the whole earth-evolution only happens in exceptional circumstances. Part of Faust's etheric body has gone out; and because a man's etheric body, as I have often told you already, is feminine, this is seen as Lilith. This takes us back to times when man was not constituted at all as he is now. According to legend Lilith was Adam's first wife and the mother of Lucifer. Thus we see here how Mephistopheles is making use of the luciferic arts at his disposal, but how something lower also enters in that, in the following speech amounts almost to a temptation. Faust moreover is afraid he may lose consciousness and losing consciousness he would fall very low—so that Mephistopheles would like to promote this. He has already brought Faust to the point of having part of his etheric body drawn out, which makes him able to see Lilith appear. But Mephistopheles would like to go still farther, and thus tempts Faust to the witch-dance, when he himself dances with the old witch, Faust with the young. But it all results in Faust not being able to lose consciousness—he is unable to lose it!

Thus we are given an accurate picture by Goethe of a scene taking place among spirits. When souls have left their bodies they can experience this, and Goethe knew how to represent it. But there are other souls who can enter such an assembly, and they to bring their earthly qualities with them. Goethe knew that in Berlin lived Nikolai, a friend of Lessing's. Now this Nikolai was one of the most fanatical, so-called enlightened men of his time; he was one of those who, had a Monist society then existed, would have joined it, would indeed have directed it, for men were like that in the eighteenth century, they made war upon everything spiritual. A man of that kind is like the ‘Proktophantasmist’. (You can look this word up in the dictionary). Thus Nikolai not only wrote The Joys of Young Werther in order from a free-thinkers point of view to make fun of Goethes's sentimentality in The Sorrows of Werther, but also wrote for the Berlin Academy of Science—to prove himself, one might say, a genuine monist—Concerning the Objectionable Nature of the Superstitious Belief in a Spiritual World. And he was in a position to do that, for he suffered from visions—he was able to see into the spiritual world! But he tried the medical antidote of the time; he had leeches applied to a certain part of his body, and low and behold the visions disappeared. Hence he was able to give a materialistic interpretation of the visionary in his discourse to the Academy of Science, for he could prove by his own case that visions can be driven away by the application of leeches; therefore everything is entirely under the influence of the material.

Now Goethe knew Nikolai, Friedrich Nikolai, bookseller and writer, who was born in 1733 and died in 1811, he knew him very well. So perhaps he was not blindly inventing. And that there should be no doubt that Nikolai is meant, he makes the Proktophantasmist say, after he has been drawn in as a spirit among the spirits, and has tried to talk them down:

“Are you still there? Well, well! Was ever such a thing?” They ought to have gone by now for he hoped to drive them away by argument.

“Pack off now! Don't you know we've been enlightening!” Today he would have said: we have been preaching Monism.

“This crew of devils by no rule is daunted.” Now he must see, for he really can see, since he suffers from visions. Such men are quite fit to join in the Walpurgis-night.

Again it is not as an amateur that Goethe has pictured this; he has chosen a man who, if things go favourably, can enter even consciously into the spiritual world on this last night of April, and can meet the witches there. And he must be such a one. Goethe pictures nothing in a dilettante way; he makes use of thoroughly suitable people. But they retain the bent, the affinities, they have in the world. Therefore even as a spirit the Proktophantasmist wants to get rid of the spirits, and Goethe makes this very clear. For as a sequel to the treatise about leeches and spirits, Friedrich Nikolai had also conjured away ghosts on Wilhelm von Humboldt's estate in Tegel. Wilhelm von Humboldt lived in Tegel, in the neighborhood of Berlin and the Friedrich Nikolai had fallen foul of him also, as one of the enlightened. Hence Goethe makes him say:

“We're mighty wise, but Tegel is still haunted.” Tegel is a suburb of Berlin; the Humboldt's any property there and it was there that the ghosts appeared in which Goethe was interested. Goethe also knew that Nikolai had described it, but as an enlightened opponent.

“I've swept and swept at this vain fancying,
Yet cannot sweep clean! Was ever such a thing?”

So even in the house of the enlightened Wilhelm von Humboldt in Tegel there are apparitions. Nikolai cannot endure this spirit despotism; it refuses to follow him and will not obey him:

“My spirit cannot discipline it.”

And to make it perfectly clear that with full knowledge he is describing just such a personality as Nikolai, Goethe adds:

“Alas, today 'tis useless. Now I know it.
At least I'll take a journey with them though.
And still I hope, ere my last step, to show
My mastery alike o'er devils and poet.”

For at that time Nikolai had taken a journey through Germany and Switzerland, of which he had written a description where was recorded everything noteworthy he came across. And there one can find many shrewd and enlightened remarks. Everywhere he contended particularly against what he called superstition. Thus even this Swiss tour is alluded to:

“And still I hope, ere my last step, to show
My mastery alike o'er devils and poet.”

‘Devils’ because he attacked the spirits; ‘poet’ because he attacked Goethe—in the “Joys of Young Werther”.

Mephistopheles is quite clear about such people, and says:

“To seek relief, as usual in a puddle
He'll seat himself, and when the leeches feast
Upon his rump, from all his brains that muddle
From phantoms and from fancy he's released.”

Also a reference to Friedrich Nikolai's leech theory. (You may read about it in the Transactions of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Nikolai delivered the lecture in 1799).

But now, when this affair is over, Faust sees a very ordinary phenomenon—a red mouse jumping from the beautiful witch's mouth. That is a very common phenomenon and a proof that Faust has remained completely conscious; for had he not been conscious but only dreaming, it would have remained a red mouse, whereas now he is able to change this vision called up by sense-instinct into what it should really be for him. Everything is transformed—I think this is most impressive—and the red mouse becomes Gretchen. The blood-red cord is still about her neck. The Imagination has grown clear, and Faust is able to pass from a lower imagination to the vision of the soul of Gretchen who, by reason of her misfortune, now becomes visible to him in her true form.

You may think as you like, my dear friends, the connections of the spiritual world are manifold and perhaps bewildering—but what I have just shown you in this changing of a lower vision of a red mouse into something lofty, true and deep, is pre-eminently a spiritual fact. It is highly probable that Goethe originally planned the whole scene quite differently represented. A little sketch exists in which it is differently represented—in the way Mephistopheles might have conjured up the scene before Faust. But Faust has been sufficiently conscious to elude Mephistopheles here, and to see a soul to whom Mephistopheles would never have led him. To Mephistopheles himself she appears as Medusa, from which you see that Goethe is wishing to show how two different souls can quite differently interpret one and the same reality—the one way true, the other in some respect false. His own base instincts giving colour to the phenomenon, Mephistopheles flippantly utters:

“Like his own love she seems to every soul.” And here again we find that this is a spiritual experience through which Faust had to pass. He is not just a vigorous man enjoying a walk, he is a man undergoing a spiritual experience; and what he now sees as Gretchen is actually what lives within him, while the other serves merely to bring this to the surface.

Now, Mephistopheles, wishing to lead Faust away from the whole, from what is now the deeper spiritual reality, takes him to something which he just introduces as an interlude, and which we must regard as the conclusion of the Walpurgis-night—a kind of theater and simply a stroke of Mephistopheles' magic art. This is “The Walpurgis-night's Dream”, that will be performed, but the whole of it is inserted into the Brocken scene to show how Mephisto wishes to get hold of Faust. This Walpurgis-night's Dream—about which I shall say no more today—was introduced by Mephisto in order to turn Faust's thoughts in a quite definite direction. But here we have a remarkable kind of poetical paraphrase. You remember how Mephistopheles says:

“Go to! slight Reason, now, and Science slight,
Wherein doth lie man's greatest might!
Let but the spirit of lies enamour
Thy soul of sorcery and glamour
And, pact or none, I hold thee tight—”

In the Walpurgis-night Dream everything is reasonable, but Faust has to be shown how to enjoy this reasonableness. Goethe has translated the Italian dilettare into the German dilettieren that is actually to divert; and Servilibus, a servant of Mephistopheles invented by Goethe, is to persuade Faust to find diversion in what is reasonable, that is, to treat it in a low and flippant way. Hence though the Walpurgis-night Dream is to be taken seriously it is said:

“We're just about to begin
A brand new piece. T'is the last of the seven;
To give so many is the custom here.
A dilettante wrote it. Even
The players are dilettante too.
Excuse my vanishing. As dilettante t'is my diversion
To pull the curtain up.”

This then is the way Mephistopheles tries to tempt Faust to despise the reasonableness of the Walpurgis-night Dream. That is why he places it before him in this kind of aura. For it suited Mephistopheles cunningly to introduce the rational into the Brocken; he finds that right for in his opinion it is where it belongs.

So you see in Goethe's poem we are dealing with something that really rises above the lower spiritual world and shows us how well Goethe was versed in spiritual knowledge. One the other hand, it may bring to our notice the necessity of acquiring a little spiritual science—for how else can we understand Goethe? Even eminent men who love Goethe can otherwise merely conclude that he is a bit of a monster—they don't say it, they are silent about it, and that is one of the lies of life—such a monster that he takes Faust, two days after causing the catastrophe with Gretchen's mother and brother, for a pleasant walk on the Brocken. But, we must constantly repeat, Goethe was not the commonplace, happy-go-lucky man he has hitherto appeared. On the contrary, we must accustom ourselves to recognise more in him than that, something quite different, and to realise that much concealed in Goethe's writings has yet to be brought into the light of day.

• 1. See lecture 10th December, 1916. Also Cycle XLIII, lecture 3