The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Ladies and gentlemen!

Eight days ago today I tried to present Heraclitus on the basis of the Greek Mysteries, because it seems to me beyond doubt that this personality and his world view can only be understood from this point of view. I mean that if one has before one such a personality from the [transition from the sixth to the] fifth century before our era and has only a series of fragmentary sayings from his life at one's disposal, and if one then tries to form a picture of the world view of this personality, and if one looks at this world view from the point of view that one gains when one starts from ordinary philosophy, and finds that one does not know what to do with this world-view, whereas with the contemporaneous, earlier and later Greek philosophers one is very well able to penetrate to a deeper understanding without further, deeper insights, this must make one suspicious, and one must look for the source elsewhere than in the source of reflection and pure science. I have said that the source that provides us with the conviction that Heraclitus has drawn from the immense depths of the Hellenic world view is nothing other than what Heraclitus implies when he says: 'If one looks around and sees the Mystery Being with the eyes of the layman, it might appear that the Mystery Being contains nothing special, contains nothing other than a cult of the lust for life, of the pleasure of the senses, a cult of the urge for the continual rejuvenation of existence. - There is no doubt that the god Dionysus was worshipped by the masses as nothing other than the god of the effervescent lust for life. If we look at Nietzsche, this Dionysus deity appears to us in a serene and profound way, but only in the form in which the researcher of Greek culture can see it. You can see what ideas you can gain [about the] god Dionysus if you don't delve deeper.

I would like to say a few words about Nietzsche's conception of the god Dionysus. For the first time, he and his friend Erwin Rohde, the [philologist], [fought] the view [prevailing] throughout the nineteenth century that it was the people of childhood who lived in eternal serenity, for whom the whole life of the day ran like a game. They fought this view of the Greeks because they saw that this absorption in beauty, this search for playful activity, rested on a deeper foundation. This is how Nietzsche came to understand Greek tragedy, the Greek work of art, not as it had been understood until Rohde, but in a completely different way. Until Nietzsche, the saying was not understood in the right way: The worst thing that could happen to man is that he lives at all; and the best thing would be that he is not born at all. But since he is born, it is best to die. - It is to the credit of Rohde and Nietzsche that they have correctly understood this saying and understood Greekism in this way. It is not pessimism. Nietzsche called his first work "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music" because music is only a symbol for beauty, for the conception of the world as a work of art. Together with Rohde, Nietzsche understood that even the Greek could not find satisfaction in everyday life, but that he also had to rise above his unsatisfactory existence. This is why Nietzsche says that he wanted to see it as an urge not to perceive the world as it appears to us, but as a work of art. And the world as we see it with the Greeks is to be endured as such. He perceived life, the everyday, as a tragedy. And then you can only bear it if you see it in the mirror image [of art]. What the world is as a work of art is that which is intended to console us about the world of everyday life. Nietzsche understands this service as the cult of Dionysus. For Nietzsche, the urge for the life of appearance, of reflection, was the Dionysian urge. Nietzsche's entire urge to live emanates from here, and it continues to develop in him later. The idea of the eternal return [of the same] is not to be confused with the idea of reincarnation. If you put Nietzsche's idea together with that one, it looks very dull. Nietzsche says that everything that is taking place here before our eyes has already happened an infinite number of times and will happen an infinite number of times. Nietzsche developed the idea of the eternal return of the same from his own life. This is a specifically Nietzschean form of the urge to live. This Nietzschean idea is a subsequent construction, which he gained from the observation of externalities.

But if we start from the point we emphasized last time, that the cult of Dionysus can only be understood if we know that the Greeks also worshipped [Hades], the god of death, the underworld, in him, then we also get an idea of what to think of Heraclitus, who was deeply initiated into the meaning of the mystery cults and had the concept of the mystery cults themselves, which enabled him to give an image of those great truths that later reappear in our German mystics, in all those who were at all capable of living within the mystical world of imagination. Thus death is also the root of all life, which is also expressed in the saying of Jakob Böhme: "He who does not die before he dies, perishes when he dies." What I am about to say should lead us into what the Greek cults wanted. This is not easy to say in a nutshell.

What we can say in words about what lies at the heart of this is what we find in Aristotle. It is not a question of knowledge that can be expressed, but of having stood in the cults in order to have experienced these truths for oneself. We also know that the people who taught the mysteries said that those who were initiated into the mysteries were freed from all destruction, that they were partakers of an eternal life, that they praised initiation as the highest happiness of their lives. Plato does the same. And this would be recognized by anyone who was able to grasp his doctrine of ideas - which, however, is something quite different from what it is usually taken to be. So what are those who were initiated? Aeschylus was the predecessor of the Greek tragedians. Aeschylus was accused of betraying the Greek mysteries. The betrayal of the mysteries was punishable by death. He was also condemned. He could only save himself by proving that he had not been initiated into the mysteries at all. What does this mean now? Is this [story] to be taken as it is told to us? Was he really not initiated into the mysteries? Anyone who knows how to interpret such a tradition will see that this [story] is not a [story], but has an allegorical meaning. The whole [story] that he was accused of having betrayed the mysteries and then provided proof that he was not initiated at all is to be taken as an allegory. What does it mean that Aeschylus was actually highly versed in the Mysteries and, as far as we can know about this wisdom, was initiated? And what does it mean that he proved that he was not initiated? He has shown that what he said was not mystery wisdom at all, that it did not refer to mystery wisdom. The Aeschylus who was initiated could not reveal anything. The wisdom of the Mysteries could not be betrayed. One could say something about the wisdom of the Mysteries to this or that person. But anyone who doesn't start to really get into it hears words but doesn't understand their meaning.

Aristotle is not talking about this or that truth, but that those who participate in the mystery cults live these mysteries and absorb them as wisdom. Then it reveals itself as the greatest secret that could be transmitted to them, that what can be sought is nothing other than man himself. He is the highest and at the same time the deepest; he is that which reveals itself to the participant in the secret teaching. It is now a matter of presenting what it means: ["Man, know thyself!"].

We will stick to the external tradition. There is also a tremendous amount to learn from it. We cannot participate directly in the mysterious, at least not in the way it was understood when the Greeks spoke of the mystery being man. This teaching, it was said, was a corrupting truth. It was seen as destroying everything that existed in the Greek truths of faith. That is what is being emphasized. It should not be brought to the people because it was likely to overthrow all the old deities. We hear that something is being done which was capable of destroying the whole world of gods.

Now, let us stick to the mystery truths. If these are supposed to have been capable of destroying this religious world of the people, this world of the gods, then they had to have some relation to it. They could have appeared and had to have some relationship, and they did have a relationship. If we are clear about the relationship between mysteries and religious ideas, we can start from our most trivial concepts within our own worldview.

We always hear that humans anthropomorphize, humanize the processes in their environment. There is no other way. It is said that pagans humanize thunder and lightning, that they see the alternation of day and night as a battle between the gods, that they imagine that the gods are only related to each other in the same way as humans. This humanizes nature. Man humanizes it. When we progress to scientific ideas, we can't help it. We often don't even know that we are doing this.

The natural scientist will not present the sun as a light [deity]. He has sifted ideas. But they have become so refined that he no longer realizes that he is on the level of pagan mythology. Let us take the idea of impact as an example. Atoms collide in space. This looks very scientific, very advanced. But if we go back to the impact of two bodies, it is nothing other than a humanization. We transfer our subjective power to the being outside us, [even] if we are [often] not clear [about it] and no longer keep present how we have taken the ideas from nature. All this is not merely a crude description, a crude enumeration of what the eye sees: A ball rolls this far and hits another one there, then this one stops and the other one rolls. If you go just one step further, then you have humanized nature, then you have done the same as the pagan "researchers". We have such humanizations before us in natural science. Man puts his own nature out into the world as pure fact. We must hold fast to the fact that in pagan religion and in scientific ideas, when we speak of the outer world, we speak of nothing other than digging our own inner life into the outer world and this into our inner world and then seeing the whole inner and outer world come towards us as harmony. So if we want to make the outer world understandable and worthy of worship, that is our inner world.

All that I have said about the humanization of the outer world lies in religion, is what I have called the "conception of the great mass and what man wanted to get beyond. Is what Heraclitus wanted something else? It is something that stands in a certain contrast to the point of view of the world view [of the great masses]. The Mysteries are something quite different, something exactly opposite to the exoteric religions, which view the world in the way I have just described. The Mysteries begin with simple truths, with simple insights, so that what I have just said also applies to them. I mean that the simple truth, whether it be primitive religion or science, arises from the confluence of the spiritual and the material, from what lies subjectively within us and from what lies outside. Man must

realize this first truth. If he feels this truth, then he must ask: How do I see that which I seek as truth from the ideas in its pure form? At this preliminary stage I have humanized the world for myself. Now I must see in its purity that which I have contaminated in myself with real existence, with that which exists in the outer world.

Now the great cliff begins, that it is now possible that you try to get out of the world view filled with the content of the world of legends, but that you see nothing at all. This is because people tell themselves that they see nothing other than the gray, the abstract, the general. Just as someone whose eyes are not suitable for seeing colors sees the world grey in grey, i.e. not in colors, so it is with someone who has passed the first stage and still wants to retain a content, even if he no longer uses his senses, his eyes and ears to help him.

So the really big question is this - and a personality like Heraclitus has to ask it: If I renounce everything I have through the senses, do I still have any content at all? And if so, then it cannot be sensory content, but only spiritual content. This gift is called intuition, genius, grace and so on. But the basic level is this, the ability to experience something when the entire external world, which is perceived with the eyes and ears, is no longer there.

This is a correct understanding of the word: experiencing knowledge. - To experience means not to have gained knowledge through external sensory impressions, not even through religious ones, but to allow spiritual knowledge to light up within oneself, to be reborn from within into a state of consciousness which is higher than the everyday one and which at the same time has the effect that it has swallowed up the ordinary state of consciousness, that it is no longer there, but is reborn on a higher level. He is spiritually reborn, and that is a purely inner state of consciousness. But if he then [has gained such a] state of consciousness, then he must go through the same process again, he must

go through the process from the outer worldview to the inner worldview again, he must be born again. And when this has taken place, then he is no longer born as a human being, but at the higher level, where the human being is no longer an individual being, but is aware of what shines above every single thing, shines above everything - and that this light is a light, of which Heraclitus says: Now I know everything. - He did not mean to say that he knows all the details, but only that he has reached a state of consciousness where not the personal human being but the eye of the primordial human being sees.

We therefore have to distinguish three stages: 1. the ordinary world consciousness, interspersed with sensory perceptions, 2. the consciousness that is also still sensual, but which has fought down the sensual, 3. the purely spiritual consciousness, in which man still sees what is extinguished and intertwined; all perception has become one with the all-perception. - Heraclitus and his comrades had these three states in mind, had them in mind as lived states that they had actually experienced.

How do we imagine these purely internally experienced states? We have to think of them in a completely different way than in space and time. We can no longer say: this is this person and this is that person. In this third state of consciousness, there is no talk of multiplicity, but only of the all-consciousness that lives - and sees - in each individual.

Heraclitus and his comrades also have this experience in the ordinary ideas of the people, in the ordinary world view. But the ordinary world view now relates to these inner experiences in the opposite way to how these inner experiences used to relate to the outer processes in the world. When Heraclitus and his comrades (those who had these experiences) came to the people, they were confronted with the doctrine of the gods as we find it in Hesiod and Homer. They spoke of the existence of gods. They spoke of Uranos and that he had a wife, Gaea, and that this pair of gods was then replaced by Kronos and Rhea - not without them

defeating them. The third pair of gods is Zeus and Hera, because Zeus was saved and defeated his father Cronus. So we see a series of Greek gods and goddesses. They form the content of the Greek consciousness of the gods. This consciousness of the gods relates to the inner experience of the myths in the same way as the outer facts relate to the inner facts. While the external facts are lifted up so that they merge with the spiritual ones, [the myths] are created by the fact that all this gradually comes up and is only projected out into the world and that then nothing else is reflected in the experiences of the gods than the inner experiences.

Uranos and Gäa are the first consciousness. It was swallowed up by the second consciousness, by Kronos and Rhea. And the third is the general world light that shines in man, which has its outer projection in Zeus and Hera, who let all the earlier generations of gods sink into night. Just as the individual consciousness sinks into the night, so do they. Just as the individual consciousness is immersed in the outer world, so they are immersed in the inner world. Exactly the opposite process occurs. Therefore the doctrines of the gods first appear as something that is not known to those who have them before them only as doctrines of the gods, just as those who dream do not know the origin of the dream, but only know the dream. He who only sees the dream images would rightly consider them to be reality. He who lives only in the outer projection can take them for reality. And rightly so. But anyone who has seen through them and sees that they are nothing more than projections will no longer regard them as realities.

This is why the Mystery Being is a meaningful allegory. The world of the gods is dead to the mystic. The mystery cult represents the twilight of the gods. The outer concept of the gods is an inner state of consciousness. What burns away the outer conception of the gods and allows it to reappear as a purely spiritual state of consciousness, this primal element of the world is what Heraclitus also knew, it is what he and his contemporaries called the "fire" that causes the great world conflagration. The twilight of the gods consists of everything being burnt in order to dissolve it and allow it to reappear on a higher level.

When we look at our inner state of consciousness, we always have two things in front of us. First, we have to consider the content of what lives within us; and then we have to focus our attention on that which absorbs the content. In other words: We have to distinguish between the spiritual that is absorbed by us and is always reborn at a higher level, and the power that stands behind this activity of giving birth and rebirth. We have spirituality on the one hand and consciousness on the other. We have to distinguish between the world and the senses that grasp this world, and then the senses reborn in the spirit and the consciousness itself. Consciousness itself and that which is at the highest level of consciousness are the same thing that is seen. At the highest level they are one and the same. We always have to distinguish between these two powers, these two potencies. That which forms the content, which fills the consciousness, and that into which this content must submerge and through which it is reborn.

The Greek world of the gods also has a personification, a clear expression, for this inner process, for this division of spiritual life into two potencies. Otherwise we would have to wonder why this world of Greek gods always places the goddess next to the god, for example Gäa next to Uranos. If we stick to external mythology alone, we cannot find a real reason for this. But we must not imagine the matter so superficially. We must be clear about the fact that when we project the inner consciousness into the outer world, the fact that we are dealing with two different forces, with two potencies, enters our consciousness as that which is [devoured] and that which is reborn. This fact is expressed in the two sexes, in Uranos and Gäa, Kronos and Rhea, Jupiter or Zeus and Hera. The feminine in mythology means nothing other than consciousness. A woman, when she appears in mythology, signifies consciousness.

The masculine signifies that which is absorbed by consciousness. The feminine is always the driving force. The female is what saves Zeus. Likewise, consciousness is the actual driving force, it is what brings about the various successive states. Now we will also understand why the deepest mystery, the symbol of the deepest mystery, which was offered to those initiated into the Mysteries, presents itself as the human being. This is nothing other than the highest level of development of consciousness. Then he has answered this "Know thyself" for himself. Therefore, the human being must also be regarded as the symbolic solution to the riddle of the world. And this person who confronts him is no longer bisexual, but unisexual. It is exactly the same as with the content of consciousness and the consciousness that has always confronted him as bisexual. Just as the latter then presents itself as unisexual, so there is no longer any separation in consciousness, but rather, to put it in the words of Meister Eckhart, that what sees and is seen is one and the same. The primal being sees itself. It only has to do with itself. In this, the highest solution to the riddle of the world presents itself as a being that is male and female at the same time.

These are the various clues that clearly show us that [in the Greek doctrine of the gods] we are dealing with a projection of inner states of consciousness. In addition, there is the myth of Dionysus, which has made its way along various paths. In Egypt in particular, we are dealing with the Osiris and Isis myths. However, we cannot go into details here. Dionysus is the son of Persephone. Persephone is the daughter of Demeter - these are nothing other than states of consciousness; [Dionysus] is overcome and dismembered by the Titans. Only the heart is saved. Zeus revives the heart. The limbs of Dionysus, Persephone's brother, are buried, and from them humans are born. So we see that this myth unites man with the supreme deity, i.e. with nothing other than his consciousness. Persephone is a daughter of Demeter and she is a daughter of Kronos. A higher state of consciousness emerges from the lower state of consciousness. This presents itself to us in Demeter. In Persephone an even higher level of cognition presents itself to us. From this highly developed stage emerges the consciousness of man, the answer to the question "Know thyself". But this answer is such an immense gulf, presents itself as so incomprehensible that man cannot bear it, that man first fragments the man he comprehends, that is, that he seeks to comprehend man in the general world consciousness.

From the general world consciousness, from the phenomena of nature, he first builds the human being again. He must first bury this first man, who handed him the questions, in the world and must then build the younger Dionysus from the entire world consciousness. In this way, Zeus rescues him from the old man's substance. This expresses nothing other than the various experiences, the various transformations that are expressed in individual Greek myths. Thus we now understand why the knowledge of the Greek mystery world would have meant the death of external popular ideas.

We must also realize that only those who could go through this inner state of consciousness were mature enough to overcome the gods. You had to experience Dionysus yourself, be dismembered yourself and collect the pieces in order to put the younger Dionysus back together again. To hand this over to the one who stands on the outer standpoint would have been poison for him and thus for the great crowd. It would only have taken something from her that could not have been replaced. If the gods had been taken from her, she would have been left with absolutely nothing. Nothing else would have given her other ideas of gods, other commandments. Aeschylus' statement shows us this: "It is impossible to speak of the [mysteries] and to guess or reveal anything about things. - The mysteries, he says, are only a communication of things that can only be experienced, not expressed in words. What one expresses in the mysteries is a projection of the inside outwards. That was the urge to recognize man, the illumination of the great question "Know thyself", since man's greatest enigma was man.

At the same time, this was connected with the great destruction of this basic conception of man, this dissection and dismemberment of Dionysus in the world, the gathering of him and his rebirth on a higher level of existence. If one has such an understanding, then many things become comprehensible that otherwise sound like empty words and cannot be understood. Everything must be understood as a fact. One of the most difficult tasks in life is to bring the details back together. This is nothing other than what the Greek mystics expressed with the words: [gap in transcript]

[Answer to question:]

And what Goethe expresses in his "Faust" is almost the same: "Everything transient is only a parable." [Goethe] means nothing other than that the world of sensory existence is only a parable for those who embark on the path to a higher consciousness. This world is perishing. "The inadequate, here it becomes [event], the indescribable, here it is done", that is, that which cannot be described but must be experienced, here it is done. A special light then falls on the final words of the Chorus mysticus: "The eternal feminine draws us in." The eternal feminine means nothing other than the upper state of consciousness, consciousness itself. And in the whole of Greek mythology, this drawing from one consciousness to another was represented under the image of the goddess, under the image of the woman. Goethe expresses this drawing towards with these words. Thus, the stage of Heraclitus leads him to the Mystery Being, and to have gained the stage of Heraclitus means for him to have gained the first stage to the Mystery Being itself.

He believes he has shown that when Heraclitus says: The world came into being from fire - this means nothing other than: The world originated from the Mystery.

Through Paracelsus we have a transition.

Nicolaus Cusanus is the forerunner of modern world views. At the same time, he had a deep understanding of the world.

The opposites always dissolve at the next higher level. All knowledge is: annihilation in order to be reborn at a higher level. The whole process is illuminated again from behind, as it were. Those who lose themselves in the sciences flutter away too easily.

Heraclitus did not have as much to overcome as Paracelsus.

Fichte overcame pantheism and thus arrived at an inner view.

Schelling also had this. His "Mythology" is the most important work we can read today.

In the "Theologia Deutsch", the language has become old.

It is necessary to let certain fundamental truths of spiritual development come to mind whenever you have gained some material, as we may call it, by way of knowledge and the like, for this will allow you to penetrate those fundamental truths more deeply. In the last days we have considered all kinds of ideas which may explain the events of our time, at least to some extent. We have therefore acquired a number of ideas concerning present developments. We can put these together with fundamental truths which we already know from certain points of view, but which can be penetrated more deeply if we approach them again following further preparation.

I have frequently spoken of the significant break which occurred in the spiritual development of the peoples of Europe and America in the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially in the 1840s. I have pointed out that this was the time when the materialistic point of view came to its peak, with a peak was reached in what we may call a way of grasping dead, outer facts with the intellect, refusing to enter into living reality.

The deeper sources of such events—and today we are very much involved in their after-effects, which will continue to have an influence for a long time to come—must be sought in the world of the spirit. And if we investigate the processes in that world which have come to outer expression in the event of which I have just spoken, we have to point to a struggle, a real war in that world, which began then and came to a certain conclusion for the world of the spirit by the autumn of 1879. To have the right idea about these things, you must visualize a battle which continued for decades in the spiritual worlds, from the 1840s until the autumn of 1879.

This may be called a battle which the spirits who are followers of the spirit belonging to the hierarchy of Archangels whom we may call Michael fought with certain ahrimanic powers. Please consider this battle to have been in the first place a battle in the spiritual world. Everything I am referring to at the moment relates to this battle fought by Michael and his followers against certain ahrimanic powers. A good way of strengthening this idea, especially if you want to make it fruitful for your life in the present time, is to have it in your mind's eye that the human souls who were born exactly in the fifth decade of the nineteenth century actually took part in this battle between Michael's followers and the ahrimanic powers when they were in the spiritual world. If you think on this, it will give you a great deal of understanding of the outer and inner destiny experienced by these individuals, and above all of their inner constitution. The battle thus took place in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s and came to a conclusion in the autumn of 1879, when Michael and his followers won a victory over certain ahrimanic powers.

What does this signify? To see something like this in the right way, we can always call on an image which humanity has known throughout its evolution—the fight between Michael and the dragon. This image has come up again and again in the course of evolution. We may characterize it by saying that every battle between Michael and the dragon is similar to the one in the 1840s, but it is about different things—harmful and damaging things. We may say that a particular crowd of ahrimanic spirits seek over and over again to bring something into world evolution, but they are always overcome. And so they also lost the battle in the autumn of 1879, and, as I said, this was in the spiritual world.

But what does it signify that the powers of the dragon, this crowd of ahrimanic spirits, are driven down into the human realms, banished from heaven to earth, as it were? Losing the battle means they are no longer to be found in the heavens, to use the biblical term. Instead they are to be found in the human realms, which means that the late 1870s were a particular time when human souls became subject to ahrimanic powers with regard to certain powers of perception. Before this, these powers were active in the spiritual realms and therefore left human beings more in peace; when they were driven out of the spiritual realms they came upon human beings. And if we enquire into the nature of the ahrimanic powers which entered into human beings when they had to leave the realms of the spirit, the answer is, the ahrimanic materialistic view with its personal—mark this well—its personal bias.

Materialism had, of course, reached its peak in the 1840s, but in those days its impulses were more instinctive in humans, for the crowd of ahrimanic spirits still sent their impulses from the spiritual world into human instincts. From the autumn of 1879 onwards, these ahrimanic impulses—powers of perception and of will—became the personal property of human beings. Before this they were more of a general property, now they were transplanted to become personal property. We are thus able to say that due to the presence of these ahrimanic powers from 1879 onwards, personal ambitions and inclinations to interpret the world in materialistic terms came to exist in the human realm. You only have to trace some of the events which have arisen because of personal inclinations since then, to understand that they resulted when the Archangel Michael drove the dragon, that is the crowd of ahrimanic spirits, from the realms of the spirit, from the heavens, down to earth.

This occurrence has profound significance. The people of the nineteenth century and of our own time are not inclined to pay attention to such occurrences in the spiritual world and to the way in which they relate to the physical world. Yet the ultimate reasons and final impulses for events on earth can only be found if one knows the spiritual background. It has to be said that it takes a fair amount of materialism, even if dressed up as idealism, to say: ‘In terms of eternity, what does it matter if so and so many more tons of organic matter will perish as the war is allowed to continue?’ One has to feel the extent to which such a view has its roots in ahrimanism, for its roots truly are in the realms of inner response. The philosopher Henri Lichtenberger's¹ philosophy of ‘tons of organic matter’ is one of many examples which may be quoted to Show the specific forms taken by the ahrimanic way of thinking.

The deepest impulse which has been living in many human souls since 1879 is therefore one which was cast down into the human realms; before that, it lived as ahrimanic power in the world of the spirit. It is helpful to look for other ways of strengthening the idea in our minds by using concepts from the material world, using them essentially as symbolic images. What happens today more at the level of soul and spirit had more of a material bias in very early times. The world of matter is also spiritual; it is merely a different form of spirituality.

If you were to go back to very early times in evolution, you would find a battle similar to the one I have just described. As already mentioned, these battles have recurred over and over again, but always on different issues. In the distant past, the crowd of ahrimanic spirits were also cast down from the spiritual worlds into the earthly realm when they had lost such a battle. You see, they would return to the attack again and again. After one of these battles, for example, the crowd of ahrimanic spirits populated the earth with the earthly life-forms which the medical profession now calls bacilli. Everything which has the power to act as a bacillus, everything in which bacilli are involved, is the result of crowds of ahrimanic spirits being cast down from heaven to earth at a time when the dragon had been overcome. In the same way the ahrimanic, mephistophelean way of thinking has spread since the late 1870s as the result of such a victory. Thus we are able to say that tubercular and bacillary diseases come from a similar source as the materialism which has taken hold of human minds.

We can also compare the occurrences of the last century with something else. We can point to something which you know already from Occult Science² the withdrawal of the Moon from the sphere of Earth evolution. The Moon was once part of the Earth; it was cast out from the Earth. As a result, certain Moon influences took effect on Earth, and this, too, followed a victory won by Michael over the dragon. We are therefore also able to say that everything connected with certain effects relating to the phases of the Moon, and all impulses which reach the Earth from the Moon, have their origin in a similar battle between Michael and the dragon.

These things really do belong together, in a way, and it is extremely useful to consider this, for it has profound significance. Some individuals develop an irresistible hankering for intellectual materialism which arises from being in league with the fallen Ahriman. They gradually come to love the impulses which Ahriman raises in their souls and, indeed, consider them to be a particularly noble and sublime way of thinking. Once again, it is necessary to be fully and clearly aware of these things. Unless they are in our conscious awareness and we have clear insight, we cannot make head or tail of events. The danger inherent in all this must be looked at with a cool eye, as it were, and a calm heart. We have to face them calmly. We shall only do so, however, if we are quite clear about the fact that a certain danger threatens human beings from this direction. This is the danger of preserving what should not be preserved. Everything which happens within the great scheme of things does also have its good side. It is because the ahrimanic powers entered into us when Michael won his victory that we are gaining in human freedom. Everything is connected with this, for the crowd of ahrimanic spirits has entered into all of us. We gain in human freedom, but we must be aware of this. We should not allow the ahrimanic powers to gain the upper hand, as it were, and we should not fall in love with them.

This is tremendously important. There always is the danger of people continuing in materialism, in the materialistic, ahrimanic way of thinking, and carrying this on into ages when, according to the plan of things, it should have been overcome. The people who do not turn away from the ahrimanic, materialistic way of thinking and want to keep it, would then be in league with everything which has come about through similar victories won over the dragon by Michael. They therefore would not unite with spiritual progress in human evolution but with material progress. And a time would come in the sixth post-Atlantean age when the only thing to please them would be to live in something which will have been brought about by bacilli, those microscopically small enemies of humanity.

Something else also needs to be understood. Exactly because of its logical consistency, and indeed its greatness, the scientific way of thinking, too, is in great danger of sliding into the ahrimanic way of thinking. Consider how some scientists are thinking today in the field of geology, for instance. They study the surface formation of the earth and the residues and so on, to determine how certain animals live, or have lived, in the different strata. Empirical data are established for certain periods. Scientists use these as a basis for their views as to what the earth looked like thousands and millions of years ago, arriving, for instance, at the nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace.³ They also develop ideas as to the future evolution of the earth, and from the physical point of view these are quite correct. They are often utterly brilliant, but they are based on a method where the evolution of the earth is observed for a time and then conclusions are drawn: millions of years before, and millions of years afterwards.

What is really being done in this case? It is the same as if we were to observe a child when it is seven, eight or nine years old, taking note of how its organs gradually change, or partly change, and calculate how much these human organs change over a period of two or three years. We then multiply this to work out how much these organs change over a period of centuries. So we can work out what this child looked like a hundred years ago, and going in the other direction we can also work out what it will look like in a hundred and fifty years. It is a method which can be quite brilliant and is, in fact, the method used by geologists today to work out the primeval conditions of the earth; it was also used to produce the hypothesis of Laplace. Exactly the same method is used to visualize what the world is going to be like according to the physical laws which can now be observed. But I think you will admit that such laws do not signify much when applied to a human being, for example. A hundred years ago the child did not exist as a physical human being; neither will it exist as a physical human being in a hundred and fifty years' time.

The same applies to the earth with reference to the time-scale used by geologists. The earth came into existence later than Tyndall, Huxley, Haeckel⁴ and others reckon. Before the time comes when you can simply paint the walls of a room with protein and have enough light to read by, the earth will be nothing but a corpse. It is quite easy to work out that one day it will be possible to use physical means to put protein on a wall where it will shine like electric light, so that one can read the paper. This is bound to happen as part of the physical changes, no doubt. But in fact the time will never come, just as it will never happen that in a hundred and fifty years time a child will show the changes calculated from successive changes seen in its stomach and liver in the course of two or three years between the ages of seven and nine.

Here you gain insight into some very strange things we have today. You can see how they clash. Think of a conventional scientist listening to what I have just been saying. He will say this is sheer foolishness. And then think of a spiritual scientist; he will consider the things the conventional scientist says to be foolish. All the many hypotheses concerning the beginning and the end of the earth are indeed nothing but foolishness, even though people have been utterly brilliant in establishing them.

You see from this how unconsciously human beings are, in fact, being guided. But we are now in an age when such things must be perceived and understood. It is necessary to link such an idea with the other ideas we have characterized today. A time will come when we must have transformed our materialistic ideas to such an extent that we can progress to a more spiritual form of existence, but by then the earth will have been a corpse for a long time. It will no longer support us, and incarnations in the flesh such as we seek today will no longer be sought. But the individuals who have become so tied up with the materialistic way of thinking that they cannot let go of it will still sneak down to that earth and find ways of involving themselves in the activities of bacilli—the tubercle bacillus and others—bacillary entities which will be rummaging through every part of the earth's corpse. Today's bacilli are merely the prophets, let us say, of what will happen to the whole earth in future. Then a time will come when those who cling to the materialistic way of thinking will unite with the moon powers and surround the earth, which will be a burnt-out corpse, together with the moon. For all they want is to hold on to the life of the earth and remain united with it; they do not want to take the right course, which is to progress from the earth's corpse to what will be the future soul and spirit of the earth.

In our time particularly, all these things are having an effect on many much admired brilliant ideas and moral impulses—people christen everything ‘moral impulse’‘ nowadays—in which the ahrimanic and materialistic powers are alive. These have the capacity to develop into the impulses which act as numerous ties to hold human beings to the earth, of their own will. It is important, therefore, to turn our attention to these things. And it is really most necessary to pay real heed to some highly respected elements which are taken as a matter of course today, such as certain laws of nature. Anyone who does not accept them is called an amateur and a fool. Certain moral and political aspirations are taken as a matter of course. Great Wilsoniades are proclaimed with regard to them. All these things have the potential to develop into something that can be characterized in the way I have just done.

I had my reasons for saying that the people who had a part in the beginning of the battle in the 1840s were in a special position. They were placed on earth at that time. And we can understand a great deal of the inner life of these people, especially those who were active in mind and spirit, and of their doubts and their inner battles, if we consider the impulse they brought from the life of the spirit in the 1840s into the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

Something else also relates to this, something which should not be overlooked today, but very often is. It is the belief that spiritual entities and their activities have no part in human affairs. People do not like to speak of events in human affairs having spiritual causes. Anyone who knows the real situation, however, is well aware that psychic or spiritual influences from the spiritual world on human beings here in the physical world are, in fact, particularly powerful at the present time. It is not at all uncommon to find people today who will tell you that a dream, or something like a dream—they do not normally understand what is going on, but these are always non-physical elements—drove them to a particular course of events. Psychic influences of this kind play a much greater role today than materialists are prepared to believe. Anyone who has the opportunity to go into such things will find them at every turn. If you were to take the published works of today's better poets and do a statistical analysis of how many poems have come into existence in a way for which there is a rational explanation, and how many by an inspiration—a definite spiritual influence from the other world, with the poet experiencing it in a dream or something similar—you would be surprised how great is the percentage of direct influences from the spiritual world. People are influenced by the spiritual world to a much greater extent than they are prepared to admit. And the human actions performed under the influence of the spiritual world are indeed significant ones.

Now and then the question comes up: ‘Why was a particular newspaper started?’‘ The individual who started it had a particular impulse from the spiritual world. If he trusts you enough to speak openly about his impulses, he will speak of a dream when you ask about the real origin. This is why some time ago I had to say here that when historians come to discuss the outbreak of this war in time to come and use the documents of our civilization in the same way as did Ranke⁵ and other historians who went by the documents, they will never write about the most important event, which is something that happened under the influence of the spiritual world in 1914.

Things go in cycles or periods. Anything which happens in the physical world is really a kind of projection, or shadow, of what happens in the spiritual world, except that it would have happened earlier in the spiritual world. Let us assume this line here (Fig. 9a) was the line or plane separating the spiritual and the physical worlds. What I have just said could then be characterized as follows: Let us assume an event—for example the battle between Michael and the dragon—happens first of all in the spiritual world. It finally comes to an end when the dragon is cast down from heaven to earth. On earth, then, the cycle is brought to completion after a time interval which approximately equals the time between the beginning of the battle in the spiritual world and the time when the dragon was cast down. We might say: The dawn, the very beginning of this battle between Michael and the dragon, was in 1841. Things were particularly lively in 1845. It is thirty-four years from 1845 to 1879, and if we move on thirty-four years after 1879 we come to the mirroring event: You get 1913, the year preceding 1914. You see, the developments which started in the physical world in 1913 are the mirror-image of the prime reasons for the spiritual battle. And now consider 1841—1879—1917! 1841 was the crucial year in the nineteenth century. 1917 is its mirror-image. If one realizes that the exertions of the crowd of ahrimanic spirits in 1841, when the dragon started to fight Michael in the spiritual world, are mirrored right now in 1917, much of what is happening now will not really come as a surprise. Events in the physical world can really only be understood if one knows that they have been in preparation in the spiritual worlds.

These things are not being said to worry people or put strange notions in their heads; they are meant as a challenge to see things clearly, to resolve to make the effort to look into the spiritual world and not to sleep through events. This is why it has become necessary in the field of anthroposophical development to say over and over again that there is need to be watchful, to take note of what is happening and not let events go by unnoticed.

It is sometimes only possible to say what I mean by using an analogy. Yesterday I spoke of the way in which the people in Eastern Europe draw conclusions from such events. If we here in the West want to find out what actually lives in the East European soul, the best way is to study the works of the philosopher Soloviev, <⁶ though there are serious limits to what we can learn in this way. Real insight can only be gained from what has been said for many years in lectures and lecture courses given within the anthroposophical movement on the destiny and true nature of the Russian spirit. But by turning our attention to the philosopher Soloviev it is possible to express by means of an analogy what one really wants to say in this case. As you know, Soloviev died at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and has therefore been dead for a long time. Western people did not bother much with his philosophy. They had little opportunity to get to know it and little effort was made to study Soloviev as a representative of Eastern Europe. At best we have the situation of the professor who some years ago had an idea that it was not exactly right for a Professor of Philosophy to know nothing about Soloviev—you know the story. So he let someone write a doctoral dissertation, saying to himself: He can study the work of Soloviev and I can read his dissertation.

I merely want to use the point at issue as an analogy, therefore. I should like to put it like this. If we were to say that, hypothetically, Soloviev were alive today and had known this war and the events taking place in Russia—what would he, a Russian, have done? The answer can, of course, only be hypothetical, but it is a reasonable assumption that Soloviev would have found a way of removing everything he had written before the war and would have written new works. He would have realized that it was necessary to revise his views completely, for his views were based on the time when they were written. He would thus have drawn the same conclusion as the whole of Eastern Europe.

It seems paradoxical to say something like this. But if one reads Soloviev today it is best to be clear in one's mind that little would have Soloviev's absolute approval today. It would be a sign of being wide awake to make a fundamental revision of ideas which carried the greatest weight at the time but have since been reduced to absurdity. 2+2=4 would still be 2+2=4, but other things must certainly be revised. And we are only awake in our time if we are aware of this need for revision.

In this year of 1917—thirty-eight years after 1879, with 1879 thirty-eight years after 1841—something important is being asked of humanity. What matters today is not what people did in 1914, but that they get themselves out of this situation. The problem we have to face now is how to get out of it again. And unless people realize that the old ideas will not get us out of it and that new ideas are needed, the result will be failure. Anyone who thinks we shall get out of this with the old ideas is barking up the wrong tree. The effort must be made to gain new ideas, and this is only possible with insight into the spiritual world.

It has been my intention today to give you something of a background to much of I have been saying in there last days. You see, if one deals with spiritual life in concrete terms, it is not enough to have the general twaddle which is so popular with the people who believe in pantheism and similar philosophies—that there is a spiritual world, that the spirit is behind all physical things. Talking about the spirit in vague general terms will get you nowhere. We must consider specific spiritual events and spiritual entities which are beyond the threshold. Events in this world are not merely general but quite specific, and they are concrete and specific in the other world. I do not think that there are many who, as they get up in the morning, would think: ‘If I step outside the front door, I shall be out in the world.’‘ They would not say this, but they will have ideas about something specific they are going to encounter. In the same way we shall only manage to deal with the deeper sources of human and world evolution if we are able to visualize the things which are beyond the threshold in a specific and concrete way and not just refer to them in general terms such as ‘universal’, ‘providence’, and the like.

Much, much can be felt when we look at the figures 1841 and 1917 in the diagram (see Fig. 9a). But our inner response to this has to be alive in us if we are to understand what is really happening.

• 1. See Note 1 of lecture 8.
• 2. See Note 2 of lecture 4.
• 3. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), German philosopher, wrote an essay on Newtonian cosmology in 1755 in which he anticipated the nebular hypothesis of Simon Pierre Laplace (1749–1827). The hypothesis is that the planets condensed from a nebula which finally contracted into the primitive Sun.
• 4. John Tyndall (1820–1893), Irish physicist. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), English biologist, friend of Darwin and one of the major protagonists of Darwinism. Ernst Haeckel, see Note 1 of lecture 2.
• 5. Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), German historian. His best known work in English is his History of the Popes in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1834–37; translated into English by Sarah Austin, 1846). He wrote many historical works right until the end of his life.
• 6. See Note 6 of lecture 8.

In the lectures to-day and tomorrow I wish to give certain indications which will throw light, not only on the working of karma, but on the wider importance of karmic knowledge for our general knowledge of the history of evolution, especially in the domain of the spiritual life. We cannot understand the real working of karma if we merely consider the successive earthly lives of any one individuality. Certain it is that within this earthly life, being strongly impressed by the earthly career and history of one man or another, or maybe even of ourselves, we are most keen to know: How do the results of former earthly lives reach over into a later one? But the ways of the working of karma would never become clear to us if we stopped short at the earthly lives themselves. For between one earthly life and another man spends the life between death and a new birth, and it is there that karma is elaborated from what has happened in a former earthly life. There it is elaborated in co-operation with other karmically connected human souls who are also in their life between death and a new birth, and with the Spirits of higher and lower Hierarchies. And this elaboration of karma can only be understood if we can look to the world of stars beyond the earth. For we know that the realm of the stars as it appears to physical sight, reveals only its external aspect.

Again and again we must repeat that the physicist would be in the highest degree astonished if he arrived at the places of the stars which he observes through his telescope, whose constitution and substances he analyses with his spectroscope. The physicist, if he were to go to the places where the stars are, would be astonished to see something totally different from what he would expect. For what the star shows to earthly observation is in reality only an outward semblance, comparatively unessential to its own true being. What the star really contains is of a spiritual nature, or, if physical it appears as the remnant, so to say, of something spiritual.

We can best explain this in the following way. Imagine that an inhabitant of some other star were to observe the Earth in the way our astronomers and astro-physicists observe other stars. He would describe a luminous disc shining far out into the cosmos. On it he would find perhaps darker and lighter spots which he would somehow interpret. Probably the interpretation would altogether disagree with what we who inhabit the globe know amongst ourselves. Or perhaps, if Vesuvius were erupting and such a being could observe it, he would theorise that a comet was colliding with the Earth, and so forth. At any rate, what such a being described would have very little to do with the real essence of our Earth.

For what is the essence of our Earth? You must remember that this Earth has proceeded from the Saturn-existence as I described it in my Occult Science. In Saturn there was as yet no air, no gas, no liquid, no solid earth-constituent. There were only varied differentiations of warmth. But in those warmth-conditions, everything that afterwards became the mineral, plant and animal, and human kingdoms was contained germinally. We human beings, too, were in the warmth of ancient Saturn.

Then evolution went forward. Out of the warmth, air was precipitated, water was precipitated, and at length the solid element. All these are remnants, precipitated, cast out by humanity in order that it might attain its further evolution. The whole solid mineral world belongs to us. It is but a relic that has remained behind. So, too, the watery and airy elements. Thus the real essence of our Earth is not what we have in the kingdoms of Nature, and not even what we carry in our bones and muscles (for these too are composed of what we have thus cast out and afterwards absorbed again). Our own souls are the real essence, and everything else is in reality more or less a semblance, a remnant, a waste product, or the like.

The only true description of the Earth would be to describe it as the colony of the souls of man in cosmic space.

Thus are all the stars colonies of spiritual Beings in cosmic space, colonies which we can learn to know as such. And having passed through the gate of death, our own soul lives and moves among these starry colonies. It goes on its further journey, evolving towards a new birth in community with other human souls that are there, and with the Beings of higher or even of lower Hierarchies. And when a man's karma is elaborated and he is ripe to take on an earthly body once again, his soul starts on the returning journey.

To understand karma, therefore, we must return once more to a wisdom of the stars. We must discover spiritually the paths of man between death and a new birth in connection with the Beings of the stars.

Now until the beginning of the age of Michael there have been the greatest difficulties for the men of modern time to approach a real wisdom of the stars. And Anthroposophy, having nevertheless found its way to such a wisdom, must be deeply thankful for the fact that the dominion of Michael really did enter the life of Earth-humanity with the last third of the 19th century. For among many things that we owe to the dominion of Michael there is this too: we have gained once more unhindered access to discover what must be investigated in the worlds of the stars if we would understand karma and the forming of karma in the sphere of humanity.

To introduce you gradually into the extremely difficult questions that arise in the investigation of karma, I will give you an example to-day. It will show you by an illustration how much must be achieved before we can speak of the working of karma as we are doing in these lectures.

It is true enough, is it not, that if we were to speak popularly or in public of the content of these lectures nowadays, these things which are truly an outcome of exact research would be treated as an absurdity. Nevertheless it is a most exact research and you must make yourselves acquainted with all the responsibilities of which one becomes aware in the course of it. You must learn to know all the obstacles and difficulties one meets in such research—the thorny hedges, as it were, which one must pass. For all these things are necessary in order that at length a number of human beings, united karmically in the community of Michael, can learn to know the things of karma. You must know that these are questions of the most earnest spiritual research, far removed from what is imagined by the layman who stands outside this Anthroposophical Movement.

Most of you will remember a character who occurs again and again in my Mystery Plays—the character of Strader. I have already to some extent spoken of these things. The character of Strader is partly drawn from life, in so far as that is possible in a poetic work. I had a kind of pattern for the personality of Strader. It was a man who lived through the developments of the last third of the 19th century and came to a kind of rationalistic Christianity. After an extremely difficult period of youth (as is suggested in the description of Strader) this man became a Capuchin monk, but he could not bear it in the Church, and at length became a professor.

Having been driven from theology into philosophy, he wrote and spoke with great enthusiasm of Lessing's “free-thinking religion” if one may so describe it. Having come into an inner conflict with official Christianity, he then wanted to found a sort of rationalistic Christianity on a basis of reason and in a quite conscious way. The soul-conflicts of Strader as described in my Mystery Plays did indeed take place in the real life of this man, though of course with certain variations.

Now you know that in the last Mystery Play, Strader dies. I myself, if I now look back and see how I wove the character of Strader into the plot of the four Mystery Plays, must see that though there was no external difficulty in letting him live on just like the other characters, he dies out of an inner necessity at a certain moment. One may well feel his death as a surprise when reading through the plays. But I had the strong inner feeling that I could no longer continue the character of Strader in the plays.

Why was it so? You see, in the meantime the original, the model, if I may call him so, had died. Now having based the character of Strader on him, you may well imagine how deeply interested I was in the original, in his further course of evolution. He continued to interest me when he had passed through the gate of death.

Now it is a peculiar thing when we wish to follow the life of a human being clairvoyantly through the time directly after death, through the period that lasts about a third of the physical life on earth. The earthly life, as we know, is in a certain way gone through again backward, at a threefold speed. Now what is the human being really experiencing in these decades that immediately follow his earthly life?

Imagine a human life here upon earth. We know how it falls into day and night—alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. Already in the periods of sleep man experiences reminiscences of the day-waking life pictorially, but he is not conscious. Ordinarily when we look back upon our life we remember only the day-waking states. Nor do we bear in mind what the chain of memories is really like, for in reality we should say: I remember that day from morning till evening, then there is a break, then again from morning till evening, then again a break and so on. But, as the nights are an empty void in our memory, we draw the line continuously through and thus falsify the chain of memory by placing one day directly after another. After death it is different, for then we must live with intense reality through all the experiences that were present in the nights of our life, comprising about a third of the length of our life. We live through it backwards. Now this is the peculiar thing—we have, as you know, a certain sense of reality, a certain feeling of real existence with regard to the things we meet with here in the physical world. If we had not this sense of reality we could consider as a dream all the things we meet with, even in the daytime. Thus we undoubtedly have a sense of the reality of things. We know that they are real; they hit us if we knock against them; they send us light and sound. In short, there are many things that give us our sense of reality here in this earthly life between birth and death.

Now all that we have here on earth as feeling of reality, all that we should describe as the reality—the real existence—of human beings whom we meet here, is in its intensity like the reality of a dream compared to the immensely strong reality which we experience in the decades immediately after death and which the clairvoyant observer can experience with us. For there, everything seems to us more real. The earthly life seems like a dream. It is as though the soul were only then awakening into the real intensity of life.—That is the peculiar thing.

Now as I followed the image of Strader (or of his counterpart) after his passage through the gate of death, the real individuality living after death naturally interested me far more than the reminiscence of his earthly life. For the earthly seems like a dream compared to what emerges after death. Faced with the strong impressions of the dead I could no longer have evolved sufficient interest in the living man to describe his life. In this case I speak out of my own experience. How weak is the reality of earthly life compared with that intensest life which meets us when we follow a man after his death!

When our interest has been kindled on the earth and we try to follow the life of a man in his further course after death, we begin to realise the tremendous difficulties and hindrances. For if we observe rightly and penetratingly, we see, already in that backward course which takes about a third of the time of the past earthly life, how the dead man begins to approach and prepare for the forming of his karma. In a reverse and backward life, he sees all that he underwent during his life on earth. If he offended another man he experiences the event again. If I die at the age of seventy-three, and at the age of sixty I offended someone, I experience it again on the backward journey. But this time I experience, not the feelings which I had in giving the offence, but the feelings of the other man. I live right over into him. Thus I with my own experience live in those who were touched in a good or in a bad sense by these my experiences in life. And thus the tendency is prepared and grows in me myself, to create the karmic balance.

Now my interest in the earthly archetype of Strader who now appeared before me as an individuality in higher worlds—my interest in him had been kindled especially by his desire to take hold of Christianity in a very penetrating, in a very brilliant, but rationalistic way. In his case we cannot but admire the thinker, and yet in the books he wrote, in his rationalistic description of Christianity, we see again and again how the thread of rationalism, the thread of abstract concepts breaks at the critical moment, and in the last resort appalling abstractions are the outcome. He cannot really enter a spiritual conception of Christianity. He builds up a religion of abstract philosophical concepts for himself. In short, the whole workings of modern intellectualism find expression in him.

This again appeared in a peculiar way as one followed his path of life after his death. Ordinarily, when there are no special difficulties, we find the human being living gradually into the sphere of the Moon, for that is the first station of the life after death. When we arrive after death in the Moon-region, we find all those whom we might call the “Registrars” of our destiny, who in primeval time were the wise Teachers of humanity. How often we have spoken of them here! As the Moon separated physically from the Earth, and, having been a part of earthly substance, became a heavenly body by itself, so the primeval Teachers of mankind afterwards followed the Moon, and we to-day, when as dead men we pass the region of the Moon, find the great primeval Teachers of mankind. They were not here in physical bodies, but they founded the primeval wisdom of which the traditions of sacred literature are but an echo.

Unhindered, if there are no special hindrances, we find our way after death into that region of the Moon. Now with the human being who was the archetype of Strader, something peculiar occurred. It was as though he was simply unable to approach the Moon-region unhindered and undergo that life of soul which follows directly after death. There were perpetual hindrances, as though the Moon-region simply would not let this individuality approach it.

Then if one followed the real events and causes in pictorial Imagination, the following appeared.—It was as though the Spirits, the primeval Teachers of mankind who had once brought to humanity the original and spiritual wisdom, called out again and again to this human being, the archetype of Strader: “Thou canst not come to us, for owing to thy special qualities as man thou mayst not know anything as yet about the stars. Thou must wait, and first repeat and recapitulate many things that thou didst undergo not only in thy last, but in thy former incarnations. Thou mayst not know anything at all of the stars and their real being, till thou hast thus prepared thyself.”—It was a strange scene. One had before one an individuality who simply could not grow out towards the spiritual of the world of stars—or could only do so with the greatest difficulty. And in this case I made the strange discovery that these modern individualities of the rationalistic, intellectualistic mind, find the great hindrance in the shaping of their karma, inasmuch as they cannot approach unhindered the spiritual being of the stars.

On further investigation it appeared that this personality had drawn all the forces of his rationalism from the time that still preceded the dawn of the Age of Michael. He was not yet really touched by the dominion of Michael.

In this case I felt strongly called upon to follow the individual karma farther into the past. It was a real challenge. For I said to myself: something is here, which, working from the results of former lives on earth, has prepared this human being karmically, so that the karma works itself out not only in this earthly life, but extends even into the life after his death. It is indeed a strange phenomenon.

Then the following appeared. The earthly life which I have indicated in bare outline, which is reflected in the character of Strader, this earthly life of the individuality was preceded by a life in spiritual worlds which I can only describe as a sore and grievous trial. It was a trial in the spiritual worlds: “What shall I do with Christianity?” It was like a slow preparation of the influences which then made him insecure in earthly life in his conception of Christianity. This too shines through in the figure of Strader. He is in no way certain. He rejects the super-sensible in a way; he tries only to take hold of it with intellect, and yet after all he wants to see. Call to mind the character of Strader, and you will find it so. Thus the real life of the archetype of Strader grew out of his former karma. In effect, in his passage through the life between death and a new birth, before his earthly life at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, he had passed through the world of the stars in a very dim and darkened consciousness. His consciousness was darkened as he went through that life between death and a new birth. And as a reaction, in his life on earth he conceived concepts the more clear and sharply outlined for the bluntness of the conceptual pictures he had experienced between death and a new birth.

We go backward still—beyond these phenomena which seemed to show the starry worlds as though in a perpetual fog—backward to his former life on earth, and there we find the most remarkable thing of all. We are led to begin with, or at least I was led, to the Battle of the Minstrels in the Wartburg, A.D. 1206. It was the very time of which I told you how the old Platonists from the School of Chartres, for instance, had gone up into the spiritual worlds and the others had not yet descended. It was the time when a kind of heavenly conference took place between the two groups of souls as to the further progress of the activities of Michael. In that time there took place the Battle of the Minstrels in the Wartburg.

It is ever interesting to observe: What is happening here on earth and what is happening yonder? Thus we have an event on earth in the Battle of the Minstrels on the Wartburg, not directly connected with the continued stream of Michael.

Now who was there in the Battle of the Minstrels? The greatest German poets were there together, vying one with another in their song. The story is well known—how the Minstrels fought for the fame of princes and for their own repute: Walther von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Reinmar von Zweter, and how there was one who stood against all the others—Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

In this Heinrich von Ofterdingen I found the individuality that underlay the archetype of Strader.

Thus it was Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Now we must concentrate on this: Why did Heinrich von Ofterdingen meet with such difficulties when he had passed through the gate of death? Why did he have to go through the world of stars, as it were, darkened and befogged?

To answer this we must return to the story of the Battle of the Minstrels. Heinrich von Ofterdingen takes up the fight against the others. They have already called the hangman. He is to be hanged if he loses. He manages to withdraw; but, hoping to bring about a renewed contest, he summons the magician Klingsor from the land of Hungary. He did, in effect, bring the magician Klingsor from Hungary to Eisenach. A new Battle of the Wartburg ensues and Klingsor enters the lists for Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Klingsor himself sings against the others, but it is quite evident that he is not battling alone. He causes spiritual beings to battle with him. For instance, in order to do so, he makes a youth become possessed by a spiritual being—and then compels the youth to sing in his place. He calls still stronger spiritual forces into play in the Wartburg.

Over against all that comes from Klingsor's side stands Wolfram von Eschenbach. One of Klingsor's practices is to make one of his spiritual beings put Wolfram to the test, as to whether he is really a learned man. For Klingsor finds himself driven into a corner by Wolfram. In effect, Wolfram von Eschenbach, observing that some spiritual influence is at work, sings of the Holy Communion, the Transubstantiation, the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the spirit is obliged to depart, for he cannot bear it. There are indeed “real realities” underlying these things, if I may use the tautology.

Klingsor puts Wolfram to the test, and succeeds indeed, with the help of the spiritual being, in proving that Wolfram (though indeed he has a star-less Christianity, a Christianity that no longer reckons with the cosmos) is quite unlearned in all cosmic wisdom. This now is the point. Klingsor has proved that the Minstrel of the Holy Grail, even in his time, knows only that Christianity which has eliminated the Cosmic Christianity. Klingsor himself, on the other hand, is only able to appear with the support of spiritual beings, inasmuch as he possesses a wisdom of the stars. But we recognise, from the way he uses his wisdom, that what is called “Black Magic” is indeed mingled in his arts.

In a word, we see Wolfram von Eschenbach, who is a stranger to the stars, encountered by a wisdom of the stars unrighteously applied.

This was in the 13th century, immediately preceding the appearance of those Dominicans of whom I told you. It was at the very time when Christianity, just where it was greatest, had divested itself of all insight into the world of stars. Indeed at that time the wisdom of the stars only existed in quarters that were inwardly estranged from Christianity, as was the case with Klingsor of Hungary.

Now it was Heinrich von Ofterdingen who had summoned Klingsor. Heinrich von Ofterdingen, therefore, had allied himself with an unchristian wisdom of the stars. And thus Heinrich remained united in a certain way, not merely with the personality of Klingsor (who in fact afterwards vanished from Heinrich's life in the super-sensible) but with the unchristian cosmology of the Middle Ages. In this way he lived on between death and a new birth, and was reborn as I described it to you. He came into an uncertainty of Christianity.

But the most important thing is this.—He dies again and enters on the returning journey of his life. And in the world of souls, at every step he stands face to face with the necessity, if ever he is to approach the world of stars again, to pass through the grievous battle which Michael had to wage in the last third of the 19th century when he claimed his dominion especially against those demonic powers which were connected with the unchristian cosmology of the Middle Ages.

To complete the picture, I will add that it is clearly possible to see among those who fought hard against the dominion of Michael, and against whom the spirits of Michael had to proceed—it is clearly possible to see among them to this day, the very spirit-beings whom Klingsor conjured up in the Wartburg long ago against Wolfram von Eschenbach.

Thus we see a man whose other results of past karma even led him for a time into the services of the Capuchin Order, unable to come near to real Christianity. He could not come to it because he bore within him the antagonism to Christianity which he had raised in his past life,when he summoned Klingsor to his aid from the land of Hungary, against Wolfram von Eschenbach, the singer of Parsifal. Darkly in the unconscious life of this man the unchristian cosmology still showed itself, but in his ordinary consciousness he evolved a rationalistic Christianity which is not even very interesting. For the interest attaches more to the great conflict of his life, when with a Christian rationalism he tried to found a kind of rationalistic religion.

But it is most significant of all to recognise this connection of abstract rationalism, abstractly clever thinking, with that which lives in the subconscious as darkened, veiled conceptions about the stars and relationships to the stars. Such things, living in the subconscious, rise into consciousness as abstract thoughts. We can study the karma of the cleverest men of the present day—cleverest in the materialist sense—and we find that as a rule in former earthly lives they had something to do with cosmological aberrations into the realms of black magic. This is a very significant connection. An instinctive feeling of it is preserved in the peasants and country folk, who feel a certain aversion from the outset when they find among them someone who is all too clever in a rationalistic sense. They do not like him. In their instinctive conception of him there is something which, if we follow it up, leads eventually to such connections.

Now I want you to consider all these things in relation to our main subject. Such human spirits one could meet with in the last third of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th. They are among the most interesting. A reborn Heinrich von Ofterdingen, who had to do with the blackest magician of his time, with Klingsor, proves indeed most interesting in his present-day rationalistic intellect.

We see here how great the difficulties are when one wishes to approach the wisdom of the stars rightly and righteously. Indeed the true approach to the wisdom of the stars, which we need to penetrate the facts of karma, is only possible in the light of a true insight into Michael's dominion. It is only possible at Michael's side.

I have shown you a single example to-day—the example of him who was the archetype of Strader. It will show you once more, how through the whole reality of modern time there has come forth a certain stream of spiritual life which makes it very difficult to approach with an open mind the science of the stars, and the science, too, of karma. But difficult as it is, it can be done. Despite the attacks that are possible from those quarters which I have described to-day, we can nevertheless go forward with assurance, and approach the wisdom of the stars and the real shaping of karma. As to how these things are possible, I will tell you more tomorrow.

The essential purpose of the lectures I have been giving here for some weeks past was to show how through his spiritual life man partakes in what we may call the world of the Stars, just as through his physical life on Earth he partakes in earthly existence, earthly happenings. In the light of the outlook acquired through Anthroposophy we distinguish in man the forces that lie in his physical body and in his etheric or formative-forces body, and those that lie in his Ego and his astral body. You know, of course, that these two sides of his being are separated whenever he sleeps. And now we will think for a short time of a man while he is asleep. On the one side the physical body and the etheric body lie there in a state of unconsciousness; but the Ego and the astral body are also without consciousness.

We may now ask: Are these two unconscious sides of human nature also related during sleep?—We know indeed that in the waking state, where the ordinary consciousness of modern man functions, the two sides are related through thinking, through feeling and through willing. We must therefore picture to ourselves that when the Ego and astral body plunge down, as it were, into the etheric body and the physical body, thinking, feeling, and willing arise from this union.

Now when man is asleep, thinking, feeling, and willing cease. But when we consider his physical body we shall have to say: All the forces which, according to our human observation belong to Earth-existence are active in this physical body. This physical body can be weighed; put it on scales and it will prove to have a certain weight. We can investigate how material processes take their course within it—or at least we can imagine hypothetically that this is possible. We should find in it material processes that are a continuation of those processes to be found outside in Earth-existence; these continue within man's physical body in the process of nutrition. In his physical body we should also find what is achieved through the breathing process. It is only what proceeds from the head-organization of man, all that belongs to the system of senses and nerves, that is either dimmed or plunged in complete darkness during sleep.

If we then pass on to consider the etheric body which permeates the physical, it is by no means so easy to understand how this etheric body works during sleep. Anyone, however, who is already versed to a certain extent in what Spiritual Science has to say about man will realize without difficulty how through his etheric body the human being lives, even while asleep, amid all the conditions of the ether-world and all the etheric forces surrounding existence on Earth. So that we can say: Within the physical body of man while he is asleep, everything that belongs to Earth-existence is active. So too in the etheric body all that belongs to the ether-world enveloping and permeating the Earth is active.

But matters become more difficult when we turn our attention—naturally our soul's attention—to what is now (during sleep) outside the physical and etheric bodies, namely, to the Ego and astral body of man. We cannot possibly accept the idea that this has anything to do with the physical Earth, or with what surrounds and permeates the Earth as ether. As to what takes place during sleep, I indicated it to you in a more descriptive way in the lectures given here a short time ago, and I will outline it today from a different point of view. We can in reality only understand what goes on in the Ego and astral body of man when with the help of Spiritual Science we penetrate into what takes place on and around the Earth over and above the physical and etheric forces and activities.

To begin with, we turn our gaze upon the plant-world. Speaking in the general sense and leaving out of account evergreen trees and the like—we see the plant-world sprouting out of the Earth in spring. We see the plants becoming richer and richer in color, more luxuriant, and then in autumn fading away again. In a certain sense we see them disappear from the Earth when the Earth is covered with snow.

But that is only one aspect of the unfolding of the plant-world. Physical knowledge tells us that this unfolding of the plant-world in spring and its fading towards autumn is connected with the Sun, also that, for example, the green coloring of the plants can be produced only under the influence of sunlight. Physical knowledge, therefore, shows us what comes about in the realm of physical effects; but it does not show us that while all the budding, the blossoming and withering of the plants is going on, spiritual events are also taking place. In reality, just as in the physical human organism there is for example the circulation of the blood, just as etheric processes express themselves in the physical organism as vascular action and so forth, and just as this physical organism is permeated by the soul and spirit, so also the processes of sprouting, greening, blossoming and fading of the plants which we regard as physical processes, are everywhere permeated by workings of the cosmic world of soul and spirit.

Now when we look into the countenance of a man and his glance falls on us, when we see his expression, maybe the flushing of the face, then indeed the eyes of our soul are looking right through the physical to the soul and spirit. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise in our life among our fellow-men. In like manner we must accustom ourselves also to see spirit-and-soul in the physiognomy—if I may call it so—and changing coloring of the plant-world on our Earth.

If we are only willing to recognize the physical, we say that the Sun's warmth and light work upon the plants, forming in them the saps, the chlorophyll and so forth. But if we contemplate all this with spiritual insight, if we take the same attitude to this plant-physiognomy of the Earth as we are accustomed to take to the human physiognomy, then something unveils itself to us that I should like to express with a particular word, because this word actually conveys the reality.

The Sun, of which we say, outwardly speaking, that it sends its light to the Earth, is not merely a radiant globe of gas but infinitely more than that. It sends its rays down to the Earth but whenever we look at the Sun it is the outer side of the rays that we see. The rays have, however, an inner side. If someone were able to look through the Sun's light, to regard the light only as an outer husk and look through to the soul of it, he would behold the Soul-Power, the Soul-Being of the Sun. With ordinary human consciousness we see the Sun as we should see a man who was made of papier-maché. An effigy in which there is nothing but the form, the lifeless form, is of course something different from the human being we actually see before us. In the case of the living human being, we see through this outer form and perceive soul-and-spirit. For ordinary consciousness the Sun is changed as it were into a papier-maché cast. We do not see through its outer husk that is woven of Light.

But if we were able to see through this, we should see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun. We can be conscious of its activity just as we are conscious of the physical papier-maché husk of the Sun. From the standpoint of physical knowledge we say: ‘The Sun shines upon the Earth; it sparkles upon the stones, upon the soil. The light is thrown back and thereby we see everything that is mineral. The rays of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them green, making them bud.’—All that is external. If we see the soul-and-spirit essence of the Sun, we cannot merely say: ‘The sunlight sparkles on the minerals, is reflected, enabling us to see the minerals,’ or, ‘The light and heat of the Sun penetrate into the plants, making them verdant’—but we shall have to say, meaning now the countless spiritual Beings who people the Sun and who constitute its soul and spirit: ‘The Sun dreams and its dreams envelop the Earth and fashion the plants.’

If you picture the surface of the Earth with the physical plants growing from it, coming to blossom, you have there the working of the physical rays of the Sun. But above it is the weaving life of the dream-world of the Sun—a world of pure Imaginations. And one can say: When the mantle of snow melts in the spring, the Sun regains its power, then the Sun-Imaginations weave anew around the Earth. These Imaginations of the Sun are Imaginative forces, playing in upon the world of plants. Now although it is true that this Imaginative world—this Imaginative atmosphere surrounding the Earth—is very specially active from spring until autumn in any given region of the Earth, nevertheless this dreamlike character of the Sun's activity is also present in a certain way during the time of winter. Only during winter the dreams are, as it were, dull and brooding, whereas in summer they are mobile, creative, formative. Now it is in this element in which the Sun-Imaginations unfold that the Ego and astral body of man live and weave when they are outside the physical and etheric bodies.

You will realize from what I have said that sleep in summer is actually quite a different matter from sleep in winter, although in the present state of evolution, man's life and consciousness are so dull and lacking in vitality that these things go unperceived. In earlier times men distinguished very definitely through their feelings between winter-sleep and summer-sleep, and they knew too what meaning winter-sleep and summer-sleep had for them. In those ancient times men knew that of summer-sleep they could say: During the summer the Earth is enveloped by picture-thoughts. And they expressed this by saying: The Upper Gods come down during the summer and hover around the Earth; during the winter the Lower Gods ascend out of the Earth and hover around it.—This Imaginative world, differently constituted in winter and in summer, was conceived as the weaving of the Upper and the Lower Gods. But in those olden times it was also known that man himself, with his Ego and his astral body, lives in this world of weaving Imaginations.

Now the very truths of which I have here spoken, show us, if we ponder them in the light of Spiritual Science, in what connection man stands, even during his earthly existence, with the extra-earthly Universe. You see, in summer—when it is summer in any region of the Earth—the human being during his sleep is always woven around by a sharply contoured world of Cosmic Imaginations. The result is that during the time of summer he is, so to speak, pressed near to the Earth with his soul and spirit. During the time of winter it is different. During winter the contours, the meshes, of the Cosmic Imaginations widen out, as it were. During the summer we live with our Ego and astral body while we are asleep within very clearly defined Imaginations, within manifold figures and forms. During winter the figures around the Earth are wide-meshed and the consequence of this is that whenever autumn begins, that which lives in our Ego and astral body is borne far out into the Universe by night. During summer and its heat, that which lives in our Ego and astral body remains more, so to speak, in the psycho-spiritual atmosphere of the human world. During winter this same content is borne out into the far distances of the Universe. Indeed without speaking figuratively, since one is saying something that is quite real, one can say: that which man cultivates in himself, in his soul, and which through his Ego and astral body he can draw out from his physical and etheric bodies between the times of going to sleep and waking—that stores itself up during the summer and streams out during winter into the wide expanse of the Cosmos.

Now we cannot conceive that we men shut ourselves away, as it were, in earthly existence and that the wide Universe knows nothing of us. It is far from being so. True, at the time of Midsummer man can conceal himself from the Spirits of the Universe, and he may also succeed in harboring reprehensible feelings of evil. The dense net of Imaginations does not let these feelings through; they still remain. And at Christmastime the Gods look in upon the Earth and everything that lives in man's nature is revealed and goes forth with his Ego and astral being. Using a picture which truly represents the facts, we may say: In winter the windows of the Earth open and the Angels and Archangels behold what men actually are on the Earth.

We on Earth have gradually accustomed ourselves in modern civilization to express all that we allow to pass as knowledge in humdrum, dry, unpoetic phrases. The higher Beings are ever poets, therefore we never give a true impression of their nature if we describe it in barren physical words; we must resort to words such as I have just now used: at Christmastime the Earth's windows open and through these windows the Angels and Archangels behold what men's deeds have been the whole year through. The Beings of the higher Hierarchies are poets and artists even in their thinking. The logic we are generally at pains to apply is only an outcome of the Earth's gravity—by which I do not at all imply that it is not highly useful on Earth.

It is what lives in the minds and hearts of men as I have just pictured it, that is of essential interest to these higher Beings; the Angels who look in through the Christmas windows are not interested in the speculations of professors; they overlook them. Nor, to begin with, are they much concerned with a man's thoughts. It is what goes on in his feelings, in his heart, that in its cosmic aspect is connected with the Sun's yearly course. So it is not so much whether we are foolish or clever on Earth that comes before the gaze of the Divine-Spiritual Beings at the time of Christmas, but simply whether we are good or evil men, whether we feel for others or are egoists. That is what is communicated to the cosmic worlds through the course of the yearly seasons.

You may believe that our thoughts remain near the Earth, because I have said that the Angels and Archangels are not concerned with them when they look in through the Christmas windows. They are not concerned with our thoughts because, if I may use a rather prosaic figure of speech, they receive the richer coinage, the more valuable coinage that is minted by the soul-and-spirit of man. And this more valuable coinage is minted by the heart, the feelings, by what a man is worth because of what his heart and feeling contain. For the Cosmos, our thoughts are only the small change, the lesser coinage, and this lesser coinage is spied out by subordinate spiritual beings every night. Whether we are foolish or clever is spied out for the Cosmos every night—not indeed for the very far regions of the Cosmos but only for the regions around the Earth—spied out by beings who are closest to the Earth in its environment and therefore the most subordinate in rank. The daily revolution of the Sun takes place in order to impart to the Cosmos the worth of our thoughts. Thus far do our thoughts extend; they belong merely to the environment of the Earth. The yearly revolution of the Sun takes place in order to carry our heart-nature, our feeling-nature, farther out into the cosmic worlds.

Our will-nature cannot be carried in this way out into the Cosmos, for the cycle of the day is strictly regulated. It runs its course in twenty-four hours. The yearly course of the Sun is strictly regulated too. We perceive the regularity of the daily cycle in the strictly logical sequences of our thoughts. The regularity of the yearly cycle—we perceive the after-effect of this in our heart and soul, in that there are certain feelings which say to one thing that a man does: it is good, and to another: it is bad.

But there is a third faculty in man, namely, the will. True, the will is bound up with feeling, and feeling cannot but say that certain actions are morally good, and others morally not good. But the will can do what is morally good and also what is morally not good. Here, then, there is no strict regularity. The relation of our will to our nature as human beings is not strictly regulated in the sense that thinking and feeling are regulated. We cannot call a bad action good, or a good action bad, nor can we call a logical thought illogical, an illogical thought logical. This is due to the fact that our thoughts stand under the influence of the daily revolution of the Sun, our feelings under the influence of its yearly revolution. The will, however, is left in the hands of humanity itself on Earth. And now a man might say: ‘The most that happens to me is that if I think illogically, my illogical thoughts are carried out every night into the Cosmos and do mischief there—but what does that matter to me? I am not here to bring order into the Cosmos.’—Here on Earth, where his life is lived in illusion, a man might in certain circumstances speak like this, but between death and a new birth he would never do so. For between death and a new birth he himself is in the worlds in which he may have caused mischief through his foolish thoughts; and he must live through all the harm that he has done. So, too, between death and a new birth, he is in those worlds into which his feelings have flowed. But here again he might say on Earth: ‘What lives in my feelings evaporates into the Cosmos; but I leave it to the Gods to deal with any harm that may have been caused there through me. My will, however, is not bound on Earth by any regulation.’—

The materialist who considers that man's life is limited to the time between birth and death, can never conceive that his will has any cosmic significance; neither can he conceive that human thoughts or feelings have any meaning for the Cosmos. But even one who knows quite well that thoughts have a cosmic significance as the result of the daily revolution of the Sun, and feelings through the yearly revolution—even he, when he sees what is accomplished on the Earth by the good or evil will-impulses of man, must turn away from the Cosmos and to human nature itself in order to see how what works in man's will goes out into the Cosmos. For what works in man's will must be borne out into the Cosmos by man himself, and he bears it out when he passes through the gate of death. Therefore it is not through the daily or the yearly cycles but through the gate of death that man carries forth the good or the evil he has brought about here on Earth through his will.

It is a strange relationship that man has to the Cosmos in his life of soul. We say of our thoughts: ‘We have thoughts but they are not subject to our arbitrary will; we must conform to the laws of the Universe when we think, otherwise we shall come into conflict with everything that goes on in the world.’—If a little child is standing in front of me, and I think: That is an old man—I may flatter myself that I have determined the thought, but I am certainly out of touch with the world. Thus in respect of our thoughts we are by no means independent, so little independent that our thoughts are carried out into the Cosmos by the daily cycle of the Sun. Nor are we independent in our life of feelings, for they are carried out through the yearly cycle of the Sun. Thus even during earthly life, that which lives in our head through our thoughts and, through our feelings in our breast, does not live only within us but also partakes in a cosmic existence. That alone which lives in our will we keep with us until our death. Then, when we have laid aside the body, when we have no longer anything to do with earthly forces, we bear it forth with us through the gate of death.

Man passes through the gate of death laden with what has come out of his acts of will. Just as here on Earth he has around him all that lives in minerals, plants, animals and in physical humanity, all that lives in clouds, streams, mountains, stars, in so far as they are externally visible through the light—just as he has all this around him during his existence between birth and death, so he has a world around him when he has laid aside the physical and etheric bodies and has passed through the gate of death. In truth he has around him the very world into which his thoughts have entered every night, into which his feelings have entered with the fulfilment of every yearly cycle ... “That thou hast thought; that thou hast felt.” ... It now seems to him as though the Beings of the Hierarchies were bearing his thoughts and his feelings towards him. They have perceived it all, as I have indicated. His mental life and his feeling-life now stream towards him.

In earthly existence the Sun gives light from morning to evening; it goes down and night sets in. When we have passed through the gate of death, our wisdom rays out towards us as day; through our accumulated acts of folly, the spiritual lights grow dark and dim around us and it becomes night. Here on Earth we have day and night; when we have passed through the gate of death, we have as day and night the results of our wisdom and our foolishness. And what man experiences here on this Earth as spring, summer, autumn and winter in the yearly cycle, as changing temperatures and other sentient experiences, of all this he becomes aware—when he has passed through the gate of death—also as a kind of cycle, although of much longer duration. He experiences the warmth-giving, life-giving quality (life-giving, that is to say, for his spiritual Self) of his good feelings, of his sympathy with goodness; he experiences as icy cold his sympathy with evil, with the immoral. Just as here on Earth we live through the heat of summer and the cold of winter, so do we live after death warmed by our good feelings, chilled by our evil feelings; and we bear the effects of our will through these spiritual years and days. After death we are the product of our moral nature on Earth. And we have an environment that is permeated by our follies and our wisdom, by our sympathies and antipathies for the good.

So that we can say: Just as here on Earth we have the summer air around us giving warmth and life, and as we have the cold and frosty winter air around us, so, after death, we are surrounded by an atmosphere of soul-and-spirit that is warm and life-giving in so far as it is produced through our good feelings, and chilling in so far as it is produced through our evil feelings. Here on Earth, in certain regions at least, the summer and winter temperatures are the same for all of us. In the time after death, each human being has his own atmosphere, engendered by himself. And the most moving experiences after death are connected with the fact that one man lives in icy cold and the other, close beside him, in life-giving warmth.

Such are the experiences that may be undergone after death. And as I described in my book Theosophy, one of the main experiences passed through in the soul-world, is that those human beings who have harbored evil feelings here on Earth, must undergo their hard experiences in the sight of those who developed and harbored good feelings.

It can indeed be said: All that remains concealed to begin with in the inner being of man, discloses itself when he has passed through the gate of death. Sleep too acquires a cosmic significance, likewise our life during wintertime. We sleep every night in order that we may prepare for ourselves the light in which we must live after death. We go through our winter experiences in order to prepare the soul-spiritual warmth into which we enter after death. And into this atmosphere of the spiritual world which we have ourselves prepared we bear the effects of our deeds.

Here on Earth we live, through our physical body, as beings subject to earthly gravity. Through our breathing we live in the surrounding air, and far away we see the stars. When we have passed through the gate of death we are in the world of spirit-and-soul, far removed from the Earth; we are beyond the stars, we see the stars from the other side, look back to the world of stars. Our very being lives in the cosmic thoughts and cosmic forces. We look back upon the stars, no longer seeing them shine, but seeing instead the Hierarchies, the Spiritual Beings who have merely their reflection in the stars.

Thus man on Earth can gain more and more knowledge of what the nature of his life will be when he passes through the gate of death. There are people who say: ‘Why do I need to know all this? I shall surely see it all after death!’—That attitude is just as if a man were to doubt the value of eyesight. For as the Earth's evolution takes its course, man enters more and more into a life in which he must acquire the power to partake in these after-death experiences by grasping them, to begin with in thought, here on the Earth. To shut out knowledge of the spiritual worlds while we are on the Earth is to blind ourselves in soul and spirit after death. A man will enter the spiritual world as a cripple when he passes through the gate of death, if here, in this world, he disdains to learn about the world of spirit, for humanity is evolving towards freedom—towards free spiritual activity. This fact should become clearer and clearer to mankind and should make men realize the urgent necessity of gaining knowledge about the spiritual world.

One can express the facts of the spiritual world in different ways, illuminating them from the most diverse sides. This sometimes sounds different. But it is precisely through these various illuminations that the facts of the spiritual world are fully presented to the soul. And so this evening, in a slightly different language and in a different light, I will share some of the things I have discussed in the last two lectures in the Goetheanum building for the human being's experience between death and a new birth.

We have heard how the human being initially, when the physical body has fallen away from him, enters into a state of cosmic experience. After the physical body has fallen away, he still carries his etheric organism within him; but he no longer feels, as it were, within this etheric organism, but he feels himself spread out soulfully into the world. But in these cosmic expanses, over which his consciousness is now beginning to spread, he cannot yet clearly distinguish the entities and processes from one another. He has a cosmic consciousness, but this cosmic consciousness still has no inner clarity. And besides, in the first days after death, this consciousness is occupied by the still existing etheric body. What is lost first is that in man which is bound to the head organization. I do not want to say anything ironic, but something very serious: one loses one's head, also meant in a spiritual sense, first of all when one passes through the gate of death. The head organization ceases to function.

Now it is precisely the head organization that mediates thinking in earthly existence. It is through the head organization that man forms his thoughts during his earthly existence in a certain activity. One loses the head organization first when one has passed through the gate of death, but one does not lose one's thoughts; they remain. They only become interspersed with a certain liveliness. They become dull, dusky, spiritual entities that point one out into the world. It is as if the thoughts had detached themselves from the human head, as if they still shone back on the last human life, which one experiences as one's etheric organism, but as if at the same time they would point to the world. One does not yet know what they want to tell us, these human ideas, which were, as it were, harnessed and penned up in the head organization and are now freed and point out into the world wide.

When the etheric body has dissolved for the reasons and in the way I characterized yesterday over at the building site, when the cosmic consciousness is no longer banished in this way to the last course of earthly life - in the other way, which I also characterized , it remains transfixed for the time being. When this etheric body has also been released from the human being, then the ideas that have been wrested from the head organization become, as it were, brighter, and one now notices how these ideas point one out into the cosmos, into the universe.

It is the case that one comes out into the cosmos in such a way that, initially, the plant world of the earth is the mediator. Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying that the plants covering the ground at the place where one died are the ones that prepare the way out, but when we look at the plant world of the earth, it presents itself to the spiritual vision in such a way that what the physical eyes see is only a part of that plant world. I will draw what is taking place in a schematic way on the board (see drawing). Let us assume that this is the surface of the earth; plants grow out of the earth's surface (green). It is, of course, drawn out of all proportion, but you will understand what I mean. One follows these plants with the senses to the flowers (red). The spiritual view of these plants, however, shows that this is only part of the plant world, that from the flowers upwards an astral event and weaving begins. In a sense, an astral substance is poured out over the earth, and spiral formations (yellow) arise from this astral substance. Wherever the earth provides the opportunity for plants to arise, the flowing over of these astral world spirals gives rise to plant life.

These world spirals now surround the earth everywhere, so you must not believe that the downpouring, downshining and downglittering of these astral world spirals is only where plants grow. It is present everywhere in different ways, so that one could also die in the desert and yet have the opportunity to encounter these plant spirals as they pour out into space.

These spirals of vegetation are the path by which one moves from the earth to the planetary sphere. So, in a sense, one slips out of the earthly realm through the spiritual extensions of the plant world of the earth. This becomes wider and wider. These spirals expand more and more, becoming wider and wider circles. They are the highways out to the spiritual world. But one would not get out there, one would have to stand still, so to speak, if one did not gain the possibility of having a kind of negative weights, weights that do not weigh down, but weights that push one up. And these weights are the spiritual contents, the ideas of the mineral formations in the earth, especially of the metals; so that one moves out into the world on the plant paths and is supported by the power that carries one from the metals of the earth to the planet stars. All mineral formations have the peculiarity that the ideas inherent in them carry us to a particular planet. Thus, let us say, we are carried by tin-like minerals, that is, by their ideas, to a particular planet; we are carried to a particular planet by what is in the earth as iron, that is, by the idea of iron. What the physical human being takes in from the mineral and plant world during his earthly existence is taken over in his spiritual counter-images, guiding the human being after death into the world's vastness. And one is really carried into the planetary movements, into the whole rhythm of the planetary movements through the mineral and plant kingdoms of the earth.

By gradually expanding one's consciousness to include the entire planetary sphere, so that one is aware of the planetary life in one's own inner world of the soul, one passes through the entire planetary sphere in this way. If there were nothing in the planetary sphere except the outpourings of plant and mineral existence in its vastness, one would experience everything that can be experienced in the secrets of the mineral and plant kingdoms. And these secrets are extraordinarily manifold, magnificent, powerful, they are full of content, and no one need think that the life that begins there for the spiritual person when he has left his physical organism is somehow poorer than the earthly life we spend from day to day. It is manifold in itself, but it is also majestic in itself. You can experience more from the secrets of a single mineral than you experience in earthly life from all the kingdoms of nature combined.

But there is something else in this sphere, which one passes through as the planetary sphere. These are the lunar forces, the spiritual lunar forces, which were characterized in the last 'Days'. The lunar sphere is there. However, the further one enters into an extra-terrestrial existence, the weaker and weaker its effectiveness becomes. Its effectiveness announces itself strongly in the first times, which are counted in years after death; but it becomes weaker and weaker the more the cosmic consciousness expands. If this lunar sphere were not there, one would not be able to experience two things after death. The first is that entity which I mentioned in the last days and which one has developed oneself during the last earth life from the forces which represent the moral-spiritual evaluation of one's own earth life. One has developed a spiritual being, a kind of spiritual elemental presence, which has as its limbs, as its tentacle formations, what is actually an image of the human moral-spiritual value. If I may express myself in this way: a living photograph, formed out of the substance of the astral cosmos, lives with the soul, but it is a real, living photograph on which one can see what kind of person one actually was in one's last life on earth. This photograph is in front of one as long as one is in the sphere of the moon. But in addition, in this sphere of the moon, one experiences all kinds of diverse elemental beings, of whom one very soon notices that they have a kind of dream-like but very bright dream-like consciousness, which alternates with a brighter state of consciousness, which is even brighter than human consciousness on earth. These entities oscillate, as it were, between a dull, dream-like state of consciousness and a brighter state of consciousness than that of a person on earth. You get to know these entities. They are numerous and their forms are extremely different from one another. In the condition of life I am now describing, these entities are experienced in such a way that when they enter a duller, dream-like consciousness, they float down to the earth, as it were, through the moon's spirituality, and then float back again. A rich life presents itself from such figures, floating down to earth and back again, flowing up and down, as I have just described. One learns to recognize that the animal kingdom on earth is related to these formations. One learns to recognize that these figures are the so-called group souls of the animals. These group souls of the animals descend. This means that some animal form wakes up on the earth below. When this animal form is more in a state of sleeping below, then the group soul comes up. In short, it can be seen that the animal kingdom is related to the cosmos in such a way that within the lunar sphere is the living environment for the group souls of the animals. Animals do not have individual souls, but whole groups of animals, the lions, tigers, cats and so on have common group souls. These group souls just lead their existence in the lunar sphere, floating up and down. And in this up and down floating, the life of the animals from the lunar sphere is brought about.

It is a law of the world that in this sphere, where we find the group souls of the animals, that is, in the lunar sphere, our moral-astral counterpart also has its life. For when one then, with cosmic consciousness, lives one's way further out into the cosmic expanses, one leaves behind in the lunar sphere, as I have described it, this living photograph of what one has achieved as a moral-spiritual being during one's last life on earth and also in earlier ones. In this way, one enters the planetary sphere, experiencing the plant, mineral and animal worlds. One is still absorbed in the lunar sphere, but in this way one lives one's way into the planetary sphere. One experiences the movements of the planets. One has stepped out into the cosmos on the paths of the plant being. One has been carried by the ideas of the mineral, especially the metallic beings. One feels that a particular kind of plant on Earth is an earthly image of what leads one there as a spiral path that widens more and more, let us say to Jupiter. But the fact that one is led to Jupiter depends on experiencing the idea of a particular metal and certain minerals of the Earth in a living way.

Once the path of the plants has led one to a planet – one always has with one the idea of the mineral on the earth that carried one out – one has arrived at the planet in question, then this idea that carried one out of the mineral, this idea that has become ever more and more alive, begins to resound in the planet in question. So that after death one experiences a gradual development along the lines of the plant kingdom, the mineral inner beings experiencing themselves in ideas that are more and more alive. These ideas become spiritual beings. When the one living idea arrives at one planet and the other at another planet, the mineral ideas that have now become spiritual beings feel at home. One type of mineral feels at home in Jupiter, the other type in Mars, and so on. And that which was only regarded as inconspicuous on earth now begins to resound in the respective planet when it has arrived, and to resound in the most diverse ways. So that what has mineral images on earth, which can only be seen with the senses, can now be heard resounding from the interior of the planets and in this way one lives into the harmony of the spheres. For in the universe, in the cosmos, everything is connected internally. What grows out of the ground down here on earth as the plant world is a reflection of what connects the earth to the planetary system as if along plant pathways. What is in the ground as a mineral is actually only an inconspicuous image of what works as a force up along the plant paths, but what has its home outside in the planets and what introduces world tones into the planet, which combine to form a great world harmony.

Thus, when one understands what is here on earth, one speaks the truth when one says to gold: I see in gold, which shines with its own peculiar color, the image of that which, in the sun, resonates a central cosmic tone for my soul when I have carried it up into the sun along certain plant pathways.

When a person has gone through this, when what I have described as necessary in the last days occurs, then the possibility begins for him to rise above the planetary sphere and enter the sphere of the fixed stars. He can only do this by extricating himself from the lunar sphere. This must, as it were, remain behind him. But what he experiences in the way described in the planetary sphere, what he experiences as the sense of the mineral-metallic realm of the physical earth, what he experiences as the guiding directions of the plant world of the earth, all the magnificent things he goes through there, are disturbed in a certain way disturbed by the impacts of the lunar sphere, it is darkened for him in a certain way by the fact that he experiences the elemental beings that belong to the animal kingdom and that, in addition to those actually quite harmonious movements in which they ascend and descend, thus in addition to these vertical movements, also have horizontal movements. In these horizontal movements, which are carried out by the group souls of the animals within the sphere of the moon, terrible archetypes for disharmonious, discrepant forces in the animal kingdom take place. There are terrible, savage struggles between the group souls of the animal kingdom. Through this impact of the lunar sphere into the planetary sphere, what can otherwise be experienced in inner peace and with dignity and majesty through the archetypal nature of the plant and mineral kingdoms is disturbed to a certain extent.

When the human being escapes from the lunar sphere and enters the sphere of the fixed stars, then what remains for him is a cosmic memory – we can call it that – of these powerful, majestic experiences of the planetary sphere with the archetypal nature of the earthly mineral and plant kingdoms. This remains with him as a memory. And he enters into a world of spiritual beings, of which, as I have already said, the physical, sensory image is the constellations of the stars, those star constellations which, when understood in the right way, are the expression, so to speak, the written characters from which one can experience the peculiarity, the deeds and the volitional intentions of the spiritual beings in the sphere of the stars. In a sense, one now experiences by vision the spiritual beings that do not walk on earth in physical bodies, which can only be experienced in this sphere of the stars. And one enters this sphere in order to penetrate one's own being with the deeds of these divine spiritual beings, within the same, one's own being with the cosmic consciousness – which has now expanded, for which spatial vision has passed over into a qualitative vision, for which temporal vision has passed over into simultaneity.

While here on earth we are enclosed in our own skin and the other human beings outside in theirs, doing what they have to do, while we are all next to each other here on earth, in this sphere of stars we are not only in each other as human souls, but we are also such that our cosmic consciousness expands and we feel the entities of the divine spiritual world within us. Here on earth we say “we” to ourselves, or rather, each of us says “I”. Out there, he says “I” by which he means: Within this my I, I experience the world of the divine-spiritual hierarchies; I experience them as my own cosmic consciousness. This is, of course, an even more powerful, expansive, diverse, meaningful and majestic world of experience that one now enters. And when one becomes aware of the forces that play into the soul of man from the most diverse entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies, then one sees: they are forces that all interact, having cosmic intentions, which all, so to speak, aim at one point. One's own spiritual and soul activity is interwoven with the intentions of the divine spiritual hierarchies and their individual entities. And everything in which one is enveloped, into which one's own cosmic activity, felt within and encompassed by cosmic consciousness, passes, all this ultimately aims at constructing the spirit germ, as I have described it, of the human physical organism.

Indeed, the ancient mystery centers spoke of a profound truth when they said that man is a temple of the gods. What is built first in mighty, majestic grandeur out of the spiritual cosmos and then contracts into the human physical body, so as to be transformed that one no longer recognizes the original image, the mighty, majestic original image, is actually what the context of the divine-spiritual hierarchies builds in order to have its goal in this building.

This sphere of experience is such that, when we are in this sphere, we see the cosmos, which we see from the inside when we are in the earthly position, from a point from which we look out in all directions, from the outside. For when we enter the sphere of the stars, we feel even at the moment when we have snatched ourselves from the sphere of the moon that we are outside in the universe and actually looking at the cosmos from the outside.

I will try to sketch what is taking place (see drawing). Let us assume that the Earth is here. Of course, the proportions are not correct, but we will understand each other. We look out into the vastness of the cosmos. We see stars wandering outside, the planets, and the fixed stars are outside. Here on Earth, our consciousness is concentrated as if in a small point (red). We look out centrally into the universe. In the moment when we have escaped from the sphere of the moon, we arrive with our consciousness in the sphere of the stars. But we pass, as it were, only through the sphere of the stars, guided by the memory that remains to us from the experiences of the planetary sphere, and enter the sphere beyond the stars.

In this sphere beyond the stars, space no longer actually exists. Of course, when I draw here, I have to draw what is actually qualitative in spatial terms. I can then draw it like this: While our consciousness on earth is, as it were, concentrated at this point as our ego (red), it is peripheral when it has reached beyond the sphere of the stars (blue). We look inwards from each point (blue arrows). This looking is only represented in the image of space. We look inward. If we have the constellation of Aries here (red at the top left) and if we see the sun (yellow) standing in the constellation of Aries from the earth, so that the sun, as it were, covers the constellation of Aries for us, and if we then go out into space, we see Aries standing in front of the sun. But to understand from the cosmic consciousness means something else: to see Aries standing before the Sun — than to look with the earthly consciousness and see the Sun standing before Aries. We see everything spiritually in this way. We look at the universe from the outside.

And in the development of the spirit germ of the physical organism, we actually have the powers of the spiritual-divine beings within us, but in such a way that, basically, we feel outside the whole cosmos, which we experience from the earth. And now, in our cosmic consciousness, we experience being with the divine-spiritual beings.

When we then look back and see, as it were, the constellations — but all in a qualitative rather than a spatial sense — above the sun, one time this, the other time that, then we recognize in what we are experiencing, by connecting it with the memory we have of how the metals and minerals, after the plant paths had been completed, had sounded in the planets, then we experience that this sounding, which was initially a world music, is transformed into the cosmic language, into the Logos. We read the intentions of the divine-spiritual beings among whom we are by experiencing the individual signs of this cosmic writing: The standing of Aries before the Sun, the standing of Taurus before the Sun and so on — by experiencing how this takes place and how the sounds that the metals make in the planets resonate with this writing. This instructs us how to work on the spiritual germ of the physical organism on earth.

As long as we are in the lunar sphere, we have a vivid feeling for this photograph of our moral and spiritual life on earth. We have a vivid feeling for what is going on among the group souls of the animals. But these are a kind of demonic, elemental entities. Now that we find the zodiac on the other side of the sun, we are learning to recognize what we have actually seen. For the memory of these animal forms, of these group soul forms of the animals, remains with us into the beyond of the sphere of the stars, and we make the discovery that these group souls of the animals are, so to speak, lower — if one human language), are the caricatured after-images of the magnificent forms that now permeate our cosmic consciousness beyond the sphere of the stars as the entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies.

Thus, outside the sphere of the stars we have the entities of the divine-spiritual hierarchies, and within the sphere of the stars, insofar as it is interspersed with what spiritually belongs to the sphere of the moon, we have the caricatures of the divine-spiritual entities in the group souls of the animals. When I say caricatures, please do not take this in a pejorative sense. What a caricature is in the human-humorous-artistic view is, of course, something extraordinarily trivial compared to the grandiose caricature of the divine spiritual beings in the world of the moon sphere, which is at the same time the world of the group soul beings of the earthly animal kingdom. We owe an extraordinary debt to the experience we have in this sphere. I have already mentioned this in a more conceptual form in the last few days, now I would like to express it more in an imaginative way.

Imagine the human being is up there (see drawing on page 19, red). He looks back here. His actual area of perception of his spiritual and soul world is beyond the star sphere. This is where he has the field of his current activity. It is like standing on a high mountain, with sunshine above and fog below. In this cosmic experience, you have the entire surging, struggling, and discordant group soul of the animals below, but also their harmonious ascent and descent. Like a multiform mist, it propagates itself down below, lives itself out down there. And while gazing at the constellations, beholding the intentions of the divine-spiritual beings, while reading the intentions of the divine-spiritual beings, while learning in cosmic consciousness to understand how the temple the temple of the gods, this spirit germ of the physical body, has its secrets in itself, those secrets that correspond to the pure world of extra-terrestrial and extra-lunar existence, one looks down and sees what is going on in the sphere of spirituality of the animal kingdom. And by looking down as if from a sun-drenched mountain peak into a lower mass of fog clouds, one has the same experience as one has in cosmic thoughts: If you do not take with you all the strength with which you have now imbued yourself from this divine spiritual world as you descend back down, you will not emerge unscathed from this world of the foggy clouds of animal group souls. There you will find the image of your previous earthly life with a moral and spiritual evaluation. This will be floating in the fog down there. You have to take it up again. But there will be all the group souls of the animals, wildly rushing into each other; there will be all the wild hustle and bustle. You must take such strong powers with you from your beyond the sphere of the stars that you can take these powers of the group soul nature of the animals as far away from your destiny as possible. Otherwise, just as matter attaches itself to a crystal, what these group souls of the animals cosmetically exude towards your moral-spiritual core of being will attach itself to you. And you will have to take with you everything that you cannot then hold back through the powers you have accumulated, and you will have to integrate it as all kinds of urges and instincts for your next earthly existence.

However, one will only be able to draw from the hereafter the forces of the sphere of the stars that one has made oneself capable of drawing by developing in the inclination towards Christ, in the inclination towards the Mystery of Golgotha, in the truly religious, not in the egoistic religious, permeation of the soul in the sense of the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” This makes one strong to penetrate beyond the sphere of the stars, in the company of the divine spiritual beings, with those forces that one has to take with one as one's destiny core when going back down through the sphere of the moon from that which which is grouped in the disharmonious, discrepant play of the spiritual-animal environment and permeates this spiritual-soul core.

If one wants to describe what the human soul experiences between birth and death, what unites it with itself, what it incorporates into its perceptions, feelings and impulses of will, then one must describe the earthly world around the human being. But if one wants to describe what the human being experiences between death and a new birth, then one must describe what the archetypes of what is on earth are. If one wants to know what the minerals really are, then one must hear their essence resounding in the life between death and a new birth from the planets. If one wants to know what the plants really are, then one must study the essence of what grows out of the earth in a faint afterimage in the plant, on the paths that lead from the plant kingdom out into space and that are traced in the forms of plant formations. If one wishes to study the animal kingdom, one must become acquainted with the ebb and flow of the group souls of the animals in the sphere of the moon. And when one has extricated oneself from all this, when one has entered the sphere beyond the world of the stars, only then does one learn to recognize the actual secrets of the human being. And one learns to look back on all that one has experienced in the archetypal worlds of the mineral, the plant, and the animal.

One carries this out into those regions of the cosmos where one not only recognizes the actual secrets of the human being, but also experiences them vividly and is active in shaping them. One carries into these regions, like a cosmic memory, everything one has experienced with reference to minerals, plants and animals on the ascent. A rich and varied life takes place in the confluence of these memories and what one sees as the secrets of human existence, what one actively experiences and participates in, and in the confluence of this memory and this activity. And it is this varied life that a person goes through between death and a new birth.

Before beginning this lecture, Dr. Steiner spoke words of greeting to the audience which consisted of Members of the Anthroposophical Society only—and referred briefly to the importance and consequences of the Christmas Foundation Meeting held at Dornach in December, 1923.

In these three lectures I want to speak of how Anthroposophy can live as knowledge of the spiritual in the world and in man—knowledge that is able to kindle inner forces and impulses in the moral and religious life of soul. Because this will always be possible, Anthroposophy can bring to mankind something altogether different from anything produced by the civilisation of the last few centuries. This civilisation has actually suffered from the diffusion of brilliant forms of knowledge: natural science, economics, philosophy. But all this knowledge is a concern of the head alone, whereas moral religious impulses must spring from the heart. True, these impulses have existed as ideals; but whether these ideals and the feelings associated with them are also powerful enough to create worlds of the future when the present physical world has passed away, is a question unanswerable by modern science. What has sprung from modern science is the widespread doubt that is characteristic of the present age and the age just past.

To begin with I want to consider three aspects of man's life. We ourselves, our destiny, are inextricably connected with this life from birth to death. Birth, or rather conception, is the boundary in one direction; death is the boundary in the other. Birth and death are not life; they are merely the beginning and the end of physical life. And the question is this: Can birth and death in themselves be approached with the same mental attitude with which we contemplate our own life, or the life of others, between birth and death, or must our approach to the actual boundaries of birth and death be from a different vantage point? Therefore the aspect of death, which so significantly sets a boundary to human life, shall be the first object of our study to-day.

At the end of a man's earthly life he is divested by death of the physical body we see before us. The Earth takes possession of it, either through its own elements as in burial, or through fire as in cremation. What can the Earth do with the part of man we perceive with physical senses? The Earth can do no other than subject it to destruction. Think of the forces in nature around us. They build up nothing when the human corpse is given over to them; they simply destroy it. The nature forces around us are not there for the purpose of upbuilding, for the human body disintegrates when it passes into their grasp. Hence there must be something different which builds up the human body, something different from earthly forces, for they bring about its disintegration.

If, however, human death is studied with forces of cognition activated in the soul through the appropriate exercises, everything presents a different aspect. With ordinary faculties of cognition we see the corpse and nothing else. But when, by means of these exercises, we develop Imagination the first stage of higher knowledge described in my books then death is completely transformed. In death man tears himself from the grasp of the Earth; and if we cultivate Imagination, we see in direct vision, in living pictures, that in death man rises from his corpse; he does not die. At the stage of Imaginative Knowledge, physical death is transformed into spiritual birth. Before death, man stands there as earthly man. He can say: “I am here, at this place; the world is outside me.”—But the moment death occurs the man himself is not where his corpse lies. He is beginning his existence in the wide spaces of the Universe; he is becoming one with the world at which he has hitherto only gazed. The world outside his body now becomes his field of experience and therewith what hitherto was inner world becomes outer world, what hitherto was outer world becomes inner world. We pass out of our personal existence into world-existence. The Earth—so it appears to Imaginative cognition—makes it possible for us to undergo death. The Earth is revealed to Imaginative cognition as the bearer of death in the Universe. Nowhere except on Earth is death to be found in any sphere frequented by man, whether in physical or spiritual life. For the moment man passes through death and becomes one with the Universe, the second aspect presents itself—the aspect in which the widths of space appear to be everywhere filled with cosmic thoughts. For Imaginative vision and for the man himself who has passed through death, the whole Cosmos now teems with cosmic thoughts, living and weaving in the expanse of space. The space aspect becomes the great revealer. Having passed through death man enters a world of cosmic thoughts; everything works and weaves in cosmic thoughts. This is the second aspect.

When we confront a man in earthly life, he is there before us in the first place as a personality. He must speak if we are to know his thoughts. So we say: “The thoughts are within him; they are conveyed to us through his speech.” But nowhere within the perimeter of earthly life do we discover thoughts which stand alone. They are present only in men, and they come out of men. When we pass from the earthly sphere of death to the space sphere of thoughts, to begin with we encounter no beings in the widths of space—neither gods nor men—but everywhere we encounter cosmic thoughts. Having undergone death and passed into the expanse of universal space it is as though in the physical world we were to meet a man and perceive only his thoughts without seeing the man himself. We should see a cloud of thoughts. After death we do not at first encounter beings; we encounter thoughts, the universal World Intelligence.

In this sphere of cosmic Intelligence man lives for a few days after his death. And in the weaving cosmic thoughts there appears as it were a single cloud in which he sees the record of his last earthly life. This record is inscribed into the cosmic Intelligence. For a few days he beholds his whole life in one great, simultaneous tableau. During these few days what is inscribed into the cosmic Intelligence becomes steadily fainter and fainter. The record expands into cosmic space and vanishes. Whereas at the end of earthly life the aspect of death appears, a few days after the end of this experience there comes the vanishing into cosmic space. Thus, after the first aspect, which we may call the aspect of death, we have the second aspect, which may be called the aspect of the vanishing of earthly life. After death there is actually for every human being a moment of terrible fear that he may lose himself, together with all his earthly life, in cosmic space.

If we wish for more understanding of man's experiences after death, Imaginative Knowledge will be found to be inadequate; we must pass on to the second stage of higher knowledge, to Inspiration. Imaginative Knowledge has pictures before it—pictures that are in the main like dream pictures, except that we can never feel convinced of any reality behind the latter, whereas the pictures of Imagination, through their own inherent quality, always express reality. Through Imagination we live in a picture world that is nevertheless reality. This picture world must be transcended if we are to see what a man experiences after death when the few days during which he reviewed his life, have passed.

Inspiration, which must be acquired after or during the stage of Imagination, presents no pictures; instead of pictures there is spiritual hearing. Knowledge through Inspiration absorbs cosmic Intelligence, cosmic thoughts, in such a way that they seem to be spiritually heard. From all sides the cosmic word resounds, indicating distinctly that there is reality behind it. First comes the proclamation; then, when a man can give himself up to this Inspiration, he begins, in Intuition, to perceive behind the cosmic thoughts, the Beings of the Universe themselves. Pictures of the spiritual are perceived in Imagination; in Inspiration the spiritual speaks; Intuition perceives the Beings themselves. I said that the world is filled with cosmic thoughts. These in themselves do not at once point to beings; but we eventually become aware of words behind the thoughts and then of beholding through Intuition, the Beings of the Universe.

The first aspect of man's existence is the aspect of death it is the earthly aspect; the second aspect leads us out into cosmic space, into which, as earthly men, we otherwise gaze without any understanding; this is the aspect of the vanishing of man's life. The third aspect presents the boundary of visible space: this is the aspect of the stars. But the stars do not appear as they do to physical sight. For physical sight the stars are points of radiance at the boundaries of the space in the direction towards which we are looking. If we have acquired the faculty of Intuitive Knowledge, the stars are the revealers of cosmic Beings, spiritual Beings. And with Intuition we behold in the spiritual Universe, instead of the physical stars, colonies of spiritual Beings at the places where we conceive the physical stars to be situated. The third aspect is the aspect of the stars. After we have learnt to know death, after we have recognised cosmic Intelligence through the widths of space, this third aspect leads us into the spheres of cosmic spiritual Beings and thereby into the sphere of the stars. And just as the Earth has received man between birth and death, so, when he has crossed the abyss to cosmic Intelligence a few days after his death, he is received into the world of stars. On Earth he was a man of Earth among Earth beings; after death he becomes a being of Heaven among heavenly Beings.

The first sphere into which man enters is the Moon-sphere; later on he passes into the other cosmic spheres. At the moment of death he still belongs to the Earth-sphere. But at that moment, everything within the range of earthly knowledge loses its significance. On the Earth there are different substances, different metals, and so on. At the moment of death all this differentiation ceases. All external solid substances are earthy; at the moment of death man is living in earth, water, air and warmth. In the sphere of cosmic Intelligence he sees his own life; he is between the region of Earth and the region of Heaven. A few days after death he enters the region of Heaven: first, the Moon-sphere.

In this Moon-sphere we meet cosmic Beings for the first time. But these cosmic Beings are still rather like human beings for at one time they were together with us on the Earth. In my books you can read how the physical Moon was once united with the Earth and then separated from it to form an independent cosmic body. It was, however, not the physical Moon alone that separated from the Earth. At one time there were among men on Earth great, primeval Teachers; it was they who brought the primordial wisdom to mankind. These great Teachers were not present on Earth in physical human bodies, but only in etheric bodies. When a man received instruction from them, he absorbed it inwardly. After a time, when the Moon separated from the Earth, these ancient Teachers went with it and formed a colony of Moon Beings. These primeval Teachers of mankind, long since separated from the Earth, are the first cosmic Beings to be encountered a few days after death.

The life spent with the Moon Beings during this period after death is related in a remarkable way to earthly existence. It might be imagined that man's life after death is more fleeting, less concrete, than earthly life. In a certain respect, however, this is not the case. If we are able to follow a man's experiences after death with super-sensible vision we find that for a long time they have a much stronger effect upon him than anything in the earthly life which, in comparison, is like a dream. This period after death lasts for about a third of the time of life on Earth. What is now experienced differs with different individuals. When a man looks back over his earthly life he succumbs to illusion. He sees only the days and pays no heed to what he has experienced spiritually in sleep. Unless he is particularly addicted to sleep a man will, as a general rule, spend about a third part of his life in that state. After death he goes through it all in conscious connection with the Moon Beings. We live through these experiences because the great primeval Teachers of mankind pour the essence of their being into us, live in and with us; we live through the unconscious experiences of the nights on Earth as reality far greater than that of the earthly life.

Let me illustrate this by an example. Perhaps some of you know my Mystery Plays and will remember among the characters a certain Strader. Strader is a figure based upon a personality who is now dead but was alive when the first three Plays were written. It was not a matter of portraying his earthly life but the character was founded on the life of a man who was exceptionally interesting to me. Coming from comparatively simple circumstances, he first became a priest, then abandoned the Church and became a secular scholar with a certain rationalistic trend. The whole of this man's inner struggle interested me. I tried to understand it spiritually and wrote the Mystery Plays while watching his earthly life. After his death the interest I had taken in him enabled me to follow him during the period of existence he spent in the Moon-sphere. To-day (1924) he is still in that sphere. From the moment this individuality broke through to me with all the intense reality of the life after death, whatever interest I once had in his earthly life was completely extinguished. I was now living with this individuality after his death, and the effect upon me was that I could do no other than allow the character in the fourth Mystery Play to die, because he was no longer before me as an earthly man.—This is quoted merely in corroboration of the statement that experience of the life after death has far greater intensity, greater inner reality, than the earthly life; the latter is like a dream in comparison.

We must remember that after death man passes into the great Universe, into the Cosmos. He himself now becomes the Cosmos. He feels the Cosmos as his body, but he also feels that what was outside him during his earthly life is now within him. Take a simple example. Suppose you were once carried away by emotion during your earthly life and had struck someone a blow which caused him not only physical pain but also moral suffering. Under the influence of the Moon Beings after death you experience this incident differently. When you struck an angry blow, perhaps with a certain inner satisfaction, you did not feel the suffering of the man you struck. Now, in the Moon-sphere, you experience the physical pain and the suffering he had to endure. In the Moon-sphere you experience what you did or thought during your earthly life, not as you felt it, but as it affected the other person. After death, for a period corresponding to a third part of his lifetime, a man lives through, in backward order, everything that he thought and whatever wrong he did during his earthly life. It is revealed to him by the Moon Beings as intense reality. When I was inwardly accompanying Strader, for instance, in his life after death—he died in 1912 and is called Strader in the Mystery Plays although that was not his real name—he was experiencing first what he had experienced last in his earthly life, then the earlier happenings, and so on, in backward order. When he now comes before my soul he is living through in the Moon-sphere what he had experienced in the year 1875. Up to now he has been experiencing backwards the time between 1912 and 1875 and will continue in this way until the date of his birth.

This life after death in the sphere of the Moon Beings—who were once Earth Beings—is lived through for a third of the time of a man's life. The first seed of what is fulfilled as karma in the following earthly lives, arises here. In this life, which corresponds to a third part of his earthly lifetime, a man becomes inwardly aware, through his own feeling and perception, of how his deeds have affected others. And then a strong desire arises within him as spirit man that what he is now experiencing in the Moon-sphere as the result of his dealings with other men on Earth may again be laid upon him, in order that compensation may be made. The resolve to fulfil his destiny in accordance with his earthly deeds and earthly thoughts comes as a wish at the end of the Moon period. And if this wish—which arises from experience of the whole of the earthly life back to birth—is devoid of fear, the man is ready to be received into the next sphere, the Mercury-sphere, into which he then passes. In the Mercury-sphere he is instructed by the Beings whose realm he has entered—Beings who have never been on Earth, who were always super-sensible Beings; in their realm he learns how to shape his further destiny. Thus, to learn what a man goes through between death and a new birth, corresponding in his spiritual existence to what he experienced among earthly beings between birth and death, we must follow him through the Mercury-sphere, the Venus-sphere and the Sun-sphere. For the totality of man's life consists in the earthly existence between birth and death and the heavenly existence between death and a new birth. This constitutes his life in its totality, and of this we will speak in the next lectures.

My dear Theosophical friends!

In the course of yesterday's lecture, we saw how complicated the event in Palestine is for spiritual scientific research. We have seen that clairvoyant consciousness has shown us two infant Jesus, one belonging to the Solomonic line of the House of David, and the other to the Nathanic line of the House of David, and that in the pure physical body of the child of the Solomonic line, that individuality incarnated again which we know under the name Zoroaster or Zarathustra.

Today we will deal with the other of the two children, with the one from the Nathanic or priestly line. The etheric body of this child was of a peculiar purity. To understand this, we have to go back far in the evolution of mankind. Never before has a being been born with a similar etheric body. We have to go back to the beginning of human development on earth, to the so-called Lemurian age.

We know that humanity has developed only gradually and slowly into what it is now. Jesus lived in the fourth post-Atlantic age. It was only during this cultural period that the I came into full possession of its powers.

This time marked the descent of the personality to Earth. Before this period was the Chaldean-Egyptian age, the third post-Atlantean; before that the Ur-Persian, the second post-Atlantean; and before that the first post-Atlantean age, the ancient Indian, whose culture came directly from the Atlantean period. Before this period was the event that we call the great Atlantic catastrophe, since our ancestors, that is, our own souls, which were embodied on the Atlantic continent, Atlantis, were washed away from the earth.

The continent inhabited by our ancestors was located between present-day Europe, Africa and America. The Atlanteans saw spiritual entities as a misty aura surrounding all beings. They also saw all the soul and spiritual energies that flow in and out through the person. Just as our finger, if it were conscious, would see the blood pulsating in it and feel itself as a limb in the organism, so the Atlantean felt himself to be part of the environment; he knew that, cut off from the environment, he would wither away. On the other hand, he could not distinguish himself from the environment; he felt himself cast into the whole external world.

Enormous natural revolutions, which completely changed the world map, put an end to the Atlantic cultural period, during which people had lived together in sharply distinct groups and races. The same individualities that had been active in the Atlantides continued their development - although under completely different circumstances - in other parts of our earth, where their first steps were guided by the high Rishis.

But we have to go back even further if we want to get to know the conditions that [gap in the transcript].

Before the Atlantic catastrophe, humanity – that is, we, our souls – lived in very different bodies on the Lemurian continent, which was located roughly between present-day southern Asia, Africa and Australia. Going back even further, we see beings with forms that would seem quite fantastic to present-day humans. What does this mean? Yes, during this Lemurian period, large areas of this earth were abandoned by human souls. Before this time, human souls had inhabited the earth in completely different forms; but now they went in great flocks to completely different regions of the world [incarnated themselves on other planets]; only very few people remained behind to survive the most difficult and barren period of development on our earth. It was the time when the first germ appeared that we call self-awareness.

In this world, beings asserted themselves that we describe as Luciferic beings. At that time, people had clairvoyance. These Luciferic beings approached the astral bodies of people and penetrated the astral bodies of people who were on earth. Since that time, the Luciferic element has been in the soul of man. Man owes his freedom to this Luciferic element. What would have become of people if these Luciferic beings had not come? Through them, man developed into an ego, but slowly; and man would never have been able to develop this out of his own nature, what is called the inner impulse to freedom. Man had to pay for the possibility of evil, in other words, he had to be confronted with the possibility of choosing between good and evil.

But a counterweight also had to be created, otherwise man would not be able to maintain his connection with good. So that the luciferic element would not become too strong, a counterweight was created in that part of the etheric body of the few people remaining on the devastated earth was withdrawn from their bodies and sunk into the spiritual world. This part remained during the Lemurian and Atlantean ages. The descendants of the Lemurian people thus lacked a part of their etheric body, which remained in the spiritual world. That part of the human etheric body, which no human being had been part of until the Palestine event, and which had thus remained untouched by all Luciferic influence, became the etheric body of the Nathanic Child Jesus; and so there was a sum of forces present in this child that had never existed before in the etheric body of a human being. The religious documents that are really based on clairvoyant knowledge, and which are always right about human physical research, speak of this if we understand them correctly.

The effect of the luciferic forces on people is described in the story of the Fall of Man. The astral body had been corrupted by the luciferic influence. The snake of the Garden of Eden is a symbol of the Luciferic influence, through which human beings acquired the ability to distinguish between good and evil by their own judgment. Jehovah's words to man that they should not eat from the tree of life indicate that a part of the etheric body remained until it was taken up into the Nathanic boy Jesus. In this boy were united the purest heart feelings and the greatest powers of love as never before in a human being; the pure soul qualities that man had before the Fall, that is, before the Luciferic influence, were present in him in the richest measure.

There is something else to be said, namely about the astral body of the Nathanian Jesus Child. There was an important power in it, over which nothing less than the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha exercised its influence. After Buddha had completed his incarnation as Buddha, he no longer needed a physical incarnation, but could only embody himself in an etheric body. As such a being, Buddha descended - attracted by the pure etheric body to which Buddha had risen - and united with the astral body of the Nathanian child Jesus. Anyone who could have observed the process with clairvoyant eyes at that moment would have seen the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha floating in the aura of the child. This is hinted at in the Gospel of Luke in the account of the vision of the shepherds. Due to special circumstances, the shepherds had become clairvoyant. They saw a host of angels, that is, the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha, the etheric body of the Buddha. Thus, a wonderful etheric body was at work in this Nathanic Jesus child, which had never before been used by a human being. In the same way, Gautama Buddha worked through the Nathanic Jesus Child, and through him he let flow the contribution that he, as Buddha, had to give after six hundred years of development.

In a wonderful way, the Evangelist Luke describes a blending of oriental legend with religious document. This merging of the Buddha with the spiritual body of the Nathanian Jesus child, which Luke saw with clairvoyant eyes, is confirmed by legend. Legend tells us that when the son of King Suddhodana was born, the old seer Asita saw a host of angels descending from heaven. At this sight, he began to weep. When asked if something had happened to make him weep, he replied, “No, I weep because my eyes will no longer see my Bodhisattva.” In a clairvoyant way, he had recognized his master in the newborn prince and wept because he was too old to see him grow into a Buddha.

When the Nathanian Jesus child was born, Asita was also there. The Simeon of the Gospel of Luke is none other than the reincarnation of Asita from Indian legend. He was now standing before his Buddha again, and saw the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha floating in the aura of the child. Therefore he added to his testimony and said: “Now, God, thou lettest thy servant depart in peace, for now he has seen his Lord.” Thus the oriental legend winds itself into the religious document in the great images which have become real events of the physical world.

Now we must turn back for a few words to the other Child Jesus, in whose physical body was enclosed the ego of Zarathustra, the Zarathustra who was once a contemporary of Buddha and, as Zaratas-Nazaratos, taught Pythagoras during the Babylonian captivity.

So we know the ego of this Solomon-like baby Jesus, but now we have to look at that physical body. This body originated from the ancient Hebrew people, and this body had to be able to develop organs that Zarathustra could use at that particular time. That is to say, they had to be built up through inheritance from generation to generation within a specially selected people. This was the mission of the ancient Hebrew people.

[In order for the ego to emerge, ancient clairvoyance had to be abandoned. Instead of the old consciousness, which consisted of dark dream images, brain-bound thought power now had to be developed. In the year 3101 BC, the old clairvoyance began to fade... Kali yuga]

Here we come back to an area where we have to turn to spiritual science to gain reliable insights. This teaches us that the Hebrew people can be traced back to a patriarch who had been specially selected: Abraham. He was entrusted with a very special mission. We can best understand this if we realize that the further we go back in the development of the earth, the more varied the soul forces in man were. Before Abraham, people still had a vague dream-like consciousness. Those old clairvoyant abilities had to be sacrificed. Now, from the entire mass of ancient peoples, the individuality was selected that was best suited in its physical makeup, not to be a tool for the old clairvoyance, but for intellectual combination, suitable only to direct the eyes and ears to the outer world in order to develop reason or intellect. That individuality was Abraham.

All the old qualities of dreamy clairvoyance were closed to him. Mathematical calculation was his tool. That is why he could become the progenitor of a nation that was geared to deduction, to rational, intellectual thinking, but was alien to all forms of clairvoyance. While all other people tried to grasp the spiritual world by closing their outer eyes and letting inspiration flow into them, Abraham looked out, saw everything and tried to grasp the spiritual by combining the outer appearances. This required a particularly developed brain.

Abraham received everything from the outside, and because this ability, which became a physical property, was inherited from generation to generation. So the characteristic of the ancient Hebrew people is

to take nothing from within, but everything from without. The consciousness of the people should also be given from the outside. Everything [should be] received from the outside, even one's own nationality. The sacrifice of Isaac is a symbol of this, in that Abraham is induced to sacrifice Isaac and then gets him back as a gift from God. What was sacrificed with this? Yes, the whole nation, its own mission. Israel received its own nationality as a gift from outside.

What is significant is what is handed down to us in the promise of Jehovah to Abraham regarding the descendants of Abraham, namely that his descendants should be structured according to the number of stars in the sky: “Numerous as the stars in the sky” is an incorrect translation, it should be “corresponding to the numerical proportions of the stars in the sky”. The order of his descendants should correspond to the actual order of the stars in the sky. Twelve is a basic number in all things esoteric. They were to be organized according to the twelve constellations of the zodiac; hence the twelve tribes, which thus correspond to the number of stars in the sky and have a spiritual connection with them. Here that which is otherwise spiritual-soul should express itself in the physical descendants. We now see the mission of the ancient Hebrew people gradually developing physically in such a way that ultimately the body for Zarathustra could emerge.

But something that had happened to Abraham could not be completed immediately. Some of the old clairvoyance remained; Joseph's dreams point to this. Therefore, he had to be excluded from the ancient Hebrew people. At first, this people developed without Joseph, who was sent to Egypt; then it was limited entirely to external combinations. Now the ancient Hebrew people had to receive from Egypt, from the outside, what the other peoples received from within. Moses gave the Hebrews Egyptian wisdom as something external. Thus, this people had to receive clairvoyant wisdom from the outside. So it was to develop under constant external influences until, as its most mature fruit, it could produce the physical body for the re-embodied Zarathustra.

When an individual develops, the physical body is born first. Up to the seventh year, when the teeth change, the human being is enclosed in an etheric mother-shell; this is an etheric birth. At fourteen years of age, the astral shell is shed: astral birth. At twenty-one years of age, the human ego is fully born. We see, then:

1. From birth to the change of teeth, seven years.
2. From the change of teeth to the fourteenth year, the development of the etheric body follows.
3. From there, the astral body develops until the twenty-first year.

From the age of twenty-one, the ego develops after the veils have been discarded.

Likewise, there had to be three epochs in the development of the ancient Hebrew people:

1. From Abraham to the Davidic era.
2. From David to the Babylonian captivity.
3. From the Babylonian captivity to the birth of the Solomonic child Jesus. This is so that a lofty ego like the Zarathustra ego may receive a worthy shell. The people had to be developed from generation to generation so that the physical shell would become more and more suitable. Seven years correspond to seven generations in each epoch. But seven generations were not enough; one generation is always skipped in inheritance, because children do not inherit their predispositions from their parents, but from their grandparents. There had to be 3 x 14 = 42 generations before the physical body was developed in which the ego of Zarathustra had a worthy shell. The Gospel of Matthew, which describes the Palestine event from the physical aspect, gives the list of generations for the Solomon Jesus child and goes back to Abraham, that is, to the time when the physical body began to be developed. Luke, who describes the Palestine event from the astral point of view, gives the generation list of the Nathanian Jesus child and goes back to Abraham and to God. Luke goes even further back than Abraham, because the etheric body must be sensed even earlier. In the Nazarene of Nathan there was something present that did not come from people, but from the very beginning, before the Luciferic influence. It is therefore good that these records differ from each other. In the three wise men of the Orient we find three disciples of Zaratas-Nazaratos. These Chaldean disciples knew that the star they were following contained the ego of Zarathustra. The three disciples followed the star to Bethlehem, and when the star stopped over the manger in Bethlehem, they understood that Zarathustra descended there to incarnate.

Both boys grew up to the age of twelve. By then, the Solomon-like boy had developed the Zarathustra qualities; he had developed the qualities that belonged to his physical body. He had come so far that he was able to make a great sacrifice. The Nathanian boy had in particular those abilities that originated from the pure etheric body and on the other side from the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha. This Nathanian Jesus boy did not have an ordinary ego in the human sense. He had preferably the three higher covers.

The Zarathustra embodied in the Solomon Jesus Child made a great sacrifice in his twelfth year. A spirit as high as his can leave his body and take on another body. The ego of the Solomon Jesus Child, that is, that of Zarathustra, left the body of the Solomon Jesus Child and entered the body of the Nathan Jesus Child. This happened when the Nathanian Jesus child was allowed to accompany his parents to Jerusalem at the age of twelve. His parents lost sight of him, and when they found him again in the temple three days later, they did not recognize his speech: Zarathustra had inspired the Nathanian Jesus child.

The Solomon-like Jesus child died after he had lived an “automatic” life for a time. The mother of the Nathanian Jesus child also died. Soon after the birth of the Solomonic Jesus child, his parents had moved to Nazareth, where not long after, the Solomonic father died. In Nazareth, the boys grew up, side by side. After the Nathanian mother had died, the father of the Nathanian child took the Solomonic mother to live with him, and so she became the stepmother of the Nathanian Jesus child.

For the period from the age of twelve to thirty, the Gospels tell us nothing about the life of Jesus. At the age of thirty, he had matured for the great event.

We see how complicated the starting point of Christianity is, and how the most significant spiritual currents of the preceding time, through Zarathustra and Buddha, have flowed into the Nathanian Jesus child.

The rôle of Christianity in human history is unique. The coming of Christianity represents, in a sense, the central moment, the turning point between involution and evolution. That is why it radiates so brilliant a light—a light that is nowhere so pregnant with life as in the Gospel of St. John. Truth to tell it is only in this Gospel that the full power of the light is made manifest.

It cannot be said that modern theology has this conception of the Gospel. From the historical point of view it is considered inferior to the three synoptic Gospels, as being, in a sense, apocryphal. The very fact that its authorship is said by some to have taken place in the second century after Christ has made certain theologians of the school of Bible criticism regard it as a work of mystical poetry and Alexandrian philosophy.

Occultism has quite another conception of the Gospel of St. John.

During the Middle Ages a number of Brotherhoods saw in this Gospel the essential source of Christian truth. Such Brotherhoods were the Brothers of St. John, the Albigenses, the Catharists, the Templars and the Rosicrucians. All were engaged in practical occultism and looked to this Gospel as to their Bible. It may be said in a sense that the legend of the Grail, Parsifal and Lohengrin emanated from these Brotherhoods and that it was the popular expression of the secret doctrines.

All the members of these different parent Orders were considered to possess the secret. They were the precursors of a Christianity which should spread over the world in later times. In the Gospel of St. John they found the secret, for its words contained eternal truth—truth applicable to all times. Such truth as this regenerates the souls of all who become aware of it in the depths of their being. The Gospel was never regarded or read merely as a gem of literature. It was used as an instrument for developing the mystic life of the soul. Let us, to begin with, leave its purely historical value out of account.

The first fourteen verses of this Gospel were the subject of daily meditation among the Rosicrucians. These verses were held to possess a magical power—a fact well known to occultists. By repeating these verses at the same hour, day by day without intermission, the Rosicrucians began to see in dream-visions all the events recorded in the Gospel and lived through them in inner experience.

Thus in spiritual vision the Rosicrucians saw the life of Christ—nay indeed the Christ Himself being born in the depths of the soul. They believed, of course, in the actual and historic existence of the Christ, for to know the inner Christ is also to recognise the outer Christ.

A materialist of today might ask whether the fact that the Rosicrucians had these visions is any proof of the actual existence of Christ. To this the occultist will reply: ‘If there were no eye to perceive the sun, there would be no sun; but if there were no sun in the heavens, there would be no eye to perceive it. For it is the sun which in the course of ages has formed and built the eye in order that it may behold the light.’ In this sense the Rosicrucians said:—‘The Gospel of St. John awakens thine inner senses but if there were no living Christ, He could not live within thee.’

The mission accomplished by Christ Jesus cannot be understood in all its depths unless we realise the difference between the Ancient Mysteries and the Christian Mystery.

The Ancient Mysteries were held in the temple-sanctuaries. The Initiates were the awakened ones. They had learnt to work upon the etheric body and were the ‘twice-born’ because they could perceive truth in a two-fold sense: directly, through dream and astral vision, indirectly, through sense-perception and logic. The initiation through which they passed was accomplished, in three stages: life, death and resurrection. The disciple spent three days in a sarcophagus in a tomb of the temple. His Spirit was released from his body; but on the third day, at the call of the hierophant, the Spirit came down again into the body from the cosmic spaces of universal life. The man was a transformed, new-born being. The greatest Greek writers have spoken of these mysteries with great awe and inspiration. Plato goes so far as to say that the Initiate alone is worthy of the name of man. This ancient initiation has its crowning-point ‘in Christ.’ Christ represents the crystallised initiation of the life of sense. All that was supersensibly seen in the Ancient Mysteries becomes, in Christ, historic fact on the physical plane. The death undergone by the ancient Initiates was only a partial death in the etheric world. The death of Christ was a full and complete death in the physical world.

The Raising of Lazarus may be regarded as a moment of transition from the ancient initiation to the Christian initiation. In the fourth Gospel no mention is made of John himself until after the story of the death of Lazarus. “The disciple whom Jesus loved” is he who passed through the stages of death and resurrection in initiation and who was called to new life by the voice of Christ Himself. John is Lazarus who came forth from the tomb after his initiation; he lived through the death undergone by Christ. Such is the mystic path concealed in the depths of Christianity.

The marriage at Cana expresses one of the most profound mysteries of the spiritual history of mankind. It is related to the saying of Hermes: “The above is as the below.” In the marriage at Cana, water is changed into wine. The symbolic meaning of this miracle is that the sacrifice of water was to be replaced for a time by the sacrifice of wine.

There were ages in the history of man when wine was not known. In the days of the Vedas it was practically unknown. In the ages when there was no drinking of alcohol, the idea of previous existences and of many lives was universally held; nobody doubted its truth. As soon as man began to drink wine, however, the knowledge of re-incarnation rapidly faded away, ultimately to disappear entirely from the consciousness of man. It existed only among the Initiates who took no alcohol. Alcohol has a peculiarly potent effect on the human organism, especially on the etheric body which is the seat of memory. Alcohol obscures the intimate depths of memory. ‘Wine induces forgetfulness’—so the saying goes. The forgetfulness is not only superficial or momentary, but deep and permanent and there is a deadening of the power of memory in the etheric body. That is why, little by little, men lost their instinctive knowledge of reincarnation when they began to drink wine.

Belief in reincarnation and the law of Karma had a great influence not only upon the individual but upon his social sentiment. It helped him to bear with the inequalities of human life. When the unhappy Egyptian labourer was working at the Pyramids, or the lowest caste of Hindu building the gigantic Indian temples in the heart of the mountains, he said to himself that another existence would compensate him for labours patiently accomplished, that his master if he were good had already undergone similar tests or that he would have to undergo them in the future if he were unjust and cruel.

As the era of Christianity drew near, man was destined to enter upon an epoch of concentration upon earthly efforts; he was to work towards the amelioration of earthly existence, the development of intellect, of logical and scientific understanding of Nature. The knowledge of re-incarnation, therefore, was to be lost for two thousand years and wine was the means to this end.

Such is the profound background of the cult of Bacchus, the God of wine and intoxication. (Bacchus is the popular expression of the God Dionysos of the Ancient Mysteries to whom quite a different significance must be attached.) Such, too, is the symbolic meaning of the Marriage at Cana. Water served the purpose of the ancient sacrifice; wine was to serve the purpose of the new. The words of Christ, “Happy are they who have not seen and yet have believed,” refer to the new epoch when man—wholly given up to his earthly tasks—was to live without remembrance of his incarnations and without immediate vision of the divine world.

Christ has left us a testament in the scene on Mount Tabor, in the Transfiguration before Peter, James and John. The disciples see Him between Elias and Moses. Elias represents the Way of Truth; Moses, the Truth itself; Christ, the Life that epitomises them. That is why Christ can say of Himself: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

All life is thus concentrated, illumined, deepened and transfigured in Christ. He epitomises the past of the human soul back to its primal source and prefigures its future to the point of union with God. Christianity is not only a power of the past but of the future. In common with the Rosicrucians, the occultist of our day teaches of the Christ in the inner being of each individual and of the Christ, in the future, in all mankind.

We have often approached the question that must interest us all: Where does it actually come from that relatively few people today still find access to the spiritual knowledge of the world order? This question can be answered from a wide variety of points of view. Today we want to consider a point of view that can then bring us certain thoughts that may be very important to take in, especially in the present time. When we consider man's relationship to the spiritual world, we are naturally interested in various things in this field. One that interests us most is the relationship that a person can have with those human souls who, from his own circle, from the circle with which he is connected karmically, have passed through the gates of death and are now in the spiritual realm. The relationship with the so-called dead will always be of the greatest interest for the relationship of the human being to the spiritual world. This relationship shows particularly how fundamentally different the view of the spiritual world approached man than the view of the physical-sensual world. I have often mentioned that when man confronts the spiritual world, it very often happens that he has to radically break with the ideas he has formed about physical existence. He has to break radically because the things and processes of the spiritual world often have to be grasped by concepts that are the opposite of those of the physical world. But one must not believe that one can come to a knowledge of the spiritual world by imagining, for example, that one simply has to turn the physical world upside down and reverse everything. That is not the case. Each one must be specially experienced, specially investigated. But just when it concerns the relation of man to the so-called dead, there it is indeed the case, at least for the time being, that we must acquire the ordinary concepts opposed to the physical ones.

The spiritual researcher can initially only relate how things are. What he has to say about the relationship to the so-called dead is more or less present in every person in reality, but only remains in the subconscious if the person is not a spiritual researcher. So I will tell you things that are present for all of you. I will speak about relationships to the so-called dead in which you all find yourselves. Only that this relationship is unconscious at first. Spiritual science has to bring these things into consciousness.

Let us assume that someone to whom the spiritual world has revealed itself is confronted with a particular dead person. It turns out that when we address the dead person in speech, we naturally do so not with physical words but in thought. When we turn to the dead person in thinking and speaking, then, if the relationship with the dead person is a real one, the feeling arises: What we ask the dead person or what we tell them comes from them. We are accustomed to imagining things differently in our physical lives: when we ask someone something or tell them something, we hear ourselves speaking and address the words to them. It is the other way around when we enter into a relationship with the dead. If we want to communicate something to him and the relationship is to be a real one, we have the feeling that we ourselves are inwardly at peace. For when what we have to ask or communicate really reaches him, it seems to us, in contemplation, as if the words, and thus the thoughts, come from him to us. He speaks to us. And what he says to us rises from the depths of our own soul as an answer or a message. The relationship that I have just described, which is quite the opposite of the relationship we have with a person in the physical world, is something that people do not easily notice in ordinary life because it is quite different from what they are used to. If it were not so extraordinarily difficult for people to get used to the unusual, many more people would be able to tell of their relationship with the dead.

Take a particular case. You are always in a relationship with some karmically connected dead person. If you want to make this relationship particularly intimate and particularly real, then you would do well to bear in mind an important rule: abstract thoughts and abstract ideas have the least significance for the spiritual world. Anything that remains abstract does not reach across into the spiritual world. So if you only think in abstracto, let us say, of the dead, if you - one can also say it that way - abstractly love the dead, not much comes across. On the other hand, if you strongly link this relationship to something concrete, then it comes across. I mean it like this: you remember, for example, a certain situation in which you were with the dead person when he was still alive. You imagine it very precisely: how he stood or sat opposite you, how you went for a walk with him. You imagine him in very specific situations, you imagine what it was like, what he said, what you said to him, you imagine the tone of his voice and try – which is the most difficult thing – to let the feelings you had for him become present in your soul again. You tie in with specific experiences you had with him. And then, starting from there, you try to say something to the dead person, something you would say if he were still alive in some situation, something you want to ask him, something you want to tell him. And you do this as if he were still there, again very specifically. That is enough to make the connection. In the moment when you have the feeling: I am now telling the dead person something – or: I am now asking the dead person something – the connection will not be made immediately. You have to allow time for this. Time is really something that has a completely different meaning for the spiritual life than it does for physical existence.

Even if you are not a spiritual scientist yourself, you can still establish a connection with the dead through what I have just characterized, so that it is a reality. But time itself will be waiting, so to speak, so that what you want to send to the dead person really does get through to him. For someone who is not consciously initiated, who does not consciously have a relationship with the spiritual world, the situation will usually be such that one moment seems particularly important for establishing this relationship with the dead: that is the moment of falling asleep. The moment of transition from waking to sleeping is at the same time the moment that usually carries what you have directed to the dead during the day, as I have described it, over to the dead. The path that leads you into the spiritual world when you fall asleep also leads what you have directed to the dead into the realm of the dead. Therefore, you must be careful when interpreting dreams. Dreams are very often only reminiscences, memories of daily life, but they do not have to be; they can also be reflections of realities. And in particular, dreams in which the dead are dreamt do not always, but very often, actually originate in connection with real dead people. But people usually believe what appears to them in the dream, what the dead person communicates to them, as being as direct a reality as it appears in the dream. It is not so, but what you wanted to communicate to the dead person when you fell asleep, that is received by the dead person, and what appears in the dream is how he receives it. So just when the dead person communicates something to you in a dream, it is intended to show you that you were able to communicate something to him. There you have what I characterized: You are much more likely to say, when the dead person appears to you in a dream and says something to you, than to believe that you dreamt of the dead person, that what you said to the dead person has really reached the dead person; by dreaming of him, he shows me that what I wanted to communicate to him has reached him.

For a message from the dead to come back – let's say a reply or something similar – the moment of waking up is again of particular importance. What is transmitted from the spiritual realms is what the dead person has to communicate to us living, as we say, at the moment of waking up. And then it comes up from the depths of one's own soul. It is peculiar to people that they do not like to pay attention to what comes up from the depths of their own soul. In our time, people do not have much sense of paying attention to what comes up from the depths of the soul. People prefer to be impressed only by the outside world, to absorb only what is outside; they would prefer to numb themselves to what rises from the depths of the soul. But when someone becomes aware that something is rising from the depths of the soul, a thought, an idea, they take it for inspiration. That satisfies vanity more. We consider all things that arise from the depths to be our inspiration. They may be, but mostly they are not. Most of the time, the things that arise from our soul as inspiration are the answers that the dead give us. For the dead live with us. What seems to come from you is actually what the dead say. It is only important that we interpret the experience in the right way. I have often mentioned what can be said in detail about our relationship with the dead: reading aloud and so on. The more vividly, the more emotionally, the more pictorially one lives in these things, the more meaningful the connection with the dead will be.

It is not meaningless to have these conditions clearly before one's soul. For our time has a great need to allow the truths that relate to such things as I have just mentioned to come closer together. We live in a time in which, for many long ages, the human organism has actually been in decline. We are all much more spiritual, much wiser than it appears because of the decline of our body. The Greek bodies were still better able to reflect what the person was in spirit. Actually, since the middle of the Atlantean period, the human being has been in decline in relation to his body, and in our age it is becoming particularly pronounced that the body can no longer reflect what the person actually is in spirit. Thus it happens almost incredibly often in our age that when we die - I would like to call it that - we are not yet finished with our development. If only people would understand that! We develop throughout our lives, but we can only become aware of this development to the extent that the body reflects it. We are sometimes so wise as people when we die – only our declining body is not able to bring these things out for us – that we could still do very important work for the earth, not only in the spiritual field, but could do great service to the earth through our insights if they could be applied. These services could be applied if people, as I have indicated, were to establish relationships with the dead. The dead still want to have an influence on physical life, but they can only do so indirectly through human souls, when human souls devote themselves to them in the appropriate way.

I have probably already mentioned here that I can actually express what is personally close to me on this very point: I have never believed that I only process in a literary-historical or historical way that which ties in with Goethe in the fields of world view, but I have always believed that I am not only dealing with the Goethe of 1832, but with the Goethe of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century: with the living Goethe. With the Goethe who in 1832 carried much out of the physical world, but which can still have an effect if one is only willing to grasp it. Therefore, what I have written has not been merely literary-historical research, but the communication of what he has told me. However, our so-called contemporary culture, our contemporary education, works radically against what I have just explained.

It is actually necessary that spiritual science always ties in with life and is made fruitful by life. In our time, I would say, there is an ideal that completely opposes what I have just expressed as a peculiarity of our time. This ideal can be characterized something like this: People are striving more and more to believe in life as little as possible. They actually only believe in life until their twenties. This can already be seen in the practical goals that people set. Even if we go to Greece, we see that people believed that when they got older, they would be wiser than when they were young. The older person can know better things about state and city institutions than a young person. This belief has been completely discarded, because the ideal of most people today is to set the age at which one can be elected to city or state parliaments as early as possible, because people only believe in life until their early twenties. But life really requires us to believe in it as a whole, to believe in the development of all life. Just think how our social life would change through moral impulses if we knew once more that all of life is developing around the human being. How young people would relate to the elderly if this were deeply rooted in the human soul! Imagine what a difference it makes to one's consciousness when one says to oneself again and again: Now I am just a young badger of thirty, thirty-five years old, but I will also get older one day, and growing older means hope for me, an expectation: there will be something that will come when I get older that cannot come while I am young. Do you realize how much joy and strength of life a human being has when he has this consciousness throughout his whole life until death and still says to himself before death: Yes, I cannot get so far as to reflect everything that life offers me into my consciousness; I will carry something through death; then people will believe in the dead and let the dead be co-advisors. Just think how foolish one would be considered if one were to express this, which must become a practical principle today, as such. I am quite serious when I say that our parliaments throughout the world would come up with better ideas than they do today if the dead were also consulted, if we were to ask today: What do not only the young badgers of thirty, thirty-five years say about this? – but: What does Goethe, for example, or what do other dead people say who are a hundred and so and so many years old? – This is something that must immediately become a practical reality for the future.

Today there are certain, well, let's say secret societies; they cultivate all kinds of old symbols. They would do better if they understood the times and made themselves into places where the counsel of the dead is explored. This is so infinitely significant! For humanity will not move forward if it does not imbue itself with the awareness that the divine-spiritual is at work in the development of our entire life; we are not finished in our twenties.

I have already drawn your attention to this here: in the early days of human development, it was the case that people felt their whole life developing, purely through their physical and bodily development, including emotionally and spiritually. Just as today people only feel their soul and spiritual life going along with their physical and bodily life during puberty or otherwise only into their twenties, so in ancient times people felt their soul and spiritual life going along with their physical and bodily life up to their forties or fifties. But from the age of thirty-five onwards, if one remains capable of development, precisely those spiritual powers develop, because the body then declines, which the human being does not come to if he does not allow them to sprout through spiritual science. In the past, people revered the elderly because they knew that something was revealed in them that cannot yet be revealed to young people. I have pointed out that humanity is getting younger and younger. If we go back to the original Indian culture, it was the case that at that time people remained capable of development until their fifties. In the original Persian culture, they remained capable of development until their forties, in the Egyptian-Chaldean culture until the second half of their thirties, and in the Greek-Latin culture until their thirty-fifth year. When Greco-Latin culture came to an end in the 15th century, people were only capable of development until the age of twenty-eight; today it is until the age of twenty-seven. Which person is therefore particularly characteristic of the present time, of this present age of materialistic development? You see, that would be a person who completely rejects being inspired by the soul for a spiritual development, who only absorbs what flows into him from outside, what the present itself offers.

Let us imagine, I would like to say, an idealized figure who is particularly characteristic of the present. It would be a personality who does not go through any of our intellectual high schools – because there one takes in the old, there one already stimulates the soul – but who only absorbs what comes to people from outside. A self-made man, a man who makes himself, who also absorbs everything else that one experiences in reality today in terms of feelings, sensations, emotions. So, from the age of seven, eight, nine, he grows up with a certain social aversion to the privileged classes, who does not tip his hat to anyone who has a title or power or the like, who then does not attend a Greek-Latin school, but learns by living life alone. He then enters a profession similar to that of a lawyer, not by studying law, but by going through the practical experience in a law firm and making his way through it; by the time he is twenty-seven, everything has come to him in this way, but not in the extraordinary way of repeating ancient culture, but what the present can bring to him. In the twenty-seventh year he should get himself elected to Parliament. Then he comes before his contemporaries, and as he has developed by himself until then, he presents himself to people, not believing in further development. One can become a minister from Parliament. Development is no longer good in the opinion of our contemporaries, otherwise people say that one contradicts oneself, one said something completely different earlier, and now one contradicts oneself. If you are elected to parliament, you can no longer say anything different. Is there such a person in the present? Do you know a particularly characteristic person who is the most concentrated expression of the present time? That is Lloyd George. You cannot understand the peculiarity of certain contemporaries today if you do not look at these things, do not really look at the peculiarity of the person in this way. Lloyd George is a self-made man. Up to the age of twenty-seven he has only taken in what the present itself offers; but because he has no inner drive of the soul, it stops at twenty-seven. He is then elected to parliament. Lloyd George is in Parliament, sitting there with his arms folded, his eyes turned inwards towards the axes, speaking aptly everywhere, watching for his opponents' weaknesses. Now came the Campbell-Bannerman Ministry. One wonders: what is to be done with Lloyd George? He criticizes everything the Ministry does! What is to be done? Well, he is taken into the ministry; inside he can do less opposition than outside. He becomes a minister. And it turns out that he quickly finds his feet in this situation too, because he is truly a representative of our time. Now, of course, people are asking themselves: Which portfolio should we give Lloyd George? After all, the important thing is that he is a capable person. So they agreed to give him the portfolio he didn't understand: public works. But lo and behold, in three months he had familiarized himself with the subject and achieved great things as a minister in precisely this field, which he had previously understood nothing about.

That is a characteristically modern figure. There are many of them in one sense or another. You only have to ask: what kind of people are they who, by the age of twenty-seven (which is the cut-off point today), have developed to such an extent that they have absorbed everything their environment has to offer, then immediately entered public life and no longer continued their development?

A personality who is somewhat closer to us is Matthias Erzberger. Study his biography and you will find the same if you look at it in this occult way. It is something that arises in the culture of our time in a very remarkable way. But to look a little into the human heart in an occult way is something that must be included in the history of the development of mankind. You see how the culture of our time reveals itself when we penetrate to its core in this way. Now, however, the culture of our time demands of us that we penetrate more deeply than we are accustomed to doing today. But this will only be possible if we become aware that the dead also have their say. Those who are truly characteristic representatives of our time will, of course, reject this in the most eminent sense.

If you want to study a person in whom you see the continuous striving for further development, this unconscious belief in the lasting reality of the divine-human in the human soul until death, it is Goethe. Goethe is much more characteristic in this respect than is usually thought. Goethe wanted to look back on the age, on the years of life in which he took in from the outside world what the outside world brings in, but he wanted to continue his development. He has described his youth in “Poetry and Truth”. It breaks off with his entry into Weimar. Born in 1749, he came to Weimar in 1775, and so he continued his life story, as he wanted to tell it, until the age of twenty-six. He ended it before the age of twenty-seven because he unconsciously knew that this was an especially significant moment. In the age of thirty-five, a person experiences a moment that today he usually sleeps through. It is the moment when the burgeoning, ascending life passes into the descending life in relation to the body. But then the spirit is driven to reveal itself, and to reveal itself more and more.

The thirty-fifth year of life is an important moment in human life. This is really something where man first truly gives birth to his soul in physical life. Ask yourself how this turns out for a person like Goethe, who remained capable of development throughout his entire life. In 1786, after the thirty-fifth year, just the important time from thirty-five to forty-two years, Goethe goes to Italy. If you look more closely at Goethe's biography, you will see what a turnaround this meant in his life. In an essay that will now appear in a small book, I have shown how Goethe actually personally relates to his Faust in “Goethe's Spiritual Nature as Revealed through his Faust and through the Fairy Tale of the Serpent and the Lily”. I have discussed it with a few hints at least. Precisely with regard to this, one is rather confused than enlightened by what is otherwise written. That is not particularly important, which is what people usually point out complacently, that Faust says right at the beginning:

I have now, alas, thoroughly studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
unfortunately! also theology
with great zeal.
There I stand, I poor fool

And I am no wiser than before... People are complacent and point out: He went through all four faculties and didn't get anywhere, doubts all knowledge. Especially the actors often feel that they have to despise the four faculties. But that is not the characteristic, that is not the specifically Goethean, what matters, that is just a prelude. Many people in Goethe's time said that. When the Goethean element in Faust comes into play, things change. It is when Faust picks up the book of Nostradamus and sees for the first time the sign of the macrocosm. This sign shows how man fits into the whole macrocosm. How his spirit is connected with the spirit of the world, his soul with the soul of the world, his physical body with the physical body of the world, all this is depicted in the great picture of the intermingling buckets of the world - planets and suns, with the hierarchies behind them. But Faust turns away with the words: “What a spectacle! But alas, only a spectacle!” He sees images, a spectacle. Why? Because at this moment, in a moment, he would like to grasp the secret of the world. But this can only happen in the whole of human life, insofar as the physical world exists, the whole of evolution. Knowledge can only give images. Then he turns to the sign of the microcosm. There he does not have the spirit of the macrocosm, but only the spirit of the earth. The earth spirit gives what history, what is human on earth encompasses.

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth!

Faust seeks self-knowledge through the earth spirit, he rejects world knowledge. That is the Goethean, that is where the Goethean begins. Before that, there is a prelude. In his youth, Goethe was indeed at a loss, and could say no more than: Everything that relates to the macrocosm gives me only images, we cannot penetrate it. Only from within can the riddle of life be solved. But this earth spirit, that is, the spirit of self-knowledge, said to him:

You resemble the spirit that you comprehend! Not me!

Faust falls to the ground. What spirit does he resemble? You see, here is an opportunity in 'Faust' to get to know a poet who does not theorize! There is nothing theoretical about it, but you have a poet who presents things in living artistic reality. Listen: “You resemble the spirit you comprehend! Not me!” There is a knock at the door: Wagner enters. That is the answer: you resemble Wagner, not me! - Here, we must change our thinking about this point in Faust. It must not be presented on the stage as it usually is: that Faust is only the ideal-striving man who wants to reach the heights of the spirit, who is absolutely right, and then Wagner limps along. I would, if I had to present it, present it in such a way that Wagner wears the mask of Faust, that both stand there in the same form, because Faust should be pointed out: Look at your own image, you are at a standstill! And what Wagner says is a conclusion in itself; what Faust says is actually all just stuff of longing. But the Faust expounders, and people in general, want to make things as comfortable as possible. People like to quote: “Feeling is everything, name is sound and smoke,” even though Faust coins this for a sixteen-year-old girl. So a teenage girl's wisdom is actually always dressed up as a philosopher's wisdom. Wagner confronts Faust with his self-awareness – as I said, I have expanded on this in the little book – but Faust has nevertheless been touched by the spirit. The earth spirit has appeared to him, he has come close to the spiritual world, he must go further and must make up for what he has neglected up to the age of forty. Faust is forty years old when he appears at the beginning of the poem. Yes, he must also make up for what he did not go through: the Bible. He begins a kind of retrospective view of the missed youth. Then another self-knowledge approaches him: Mephisto. After the self-knowledge through Wagner, another self-knowledge.

But now something strange happened. In the nineties, in 1797, Schiller became very urgent: Goethe was to continue his “Faust”. In 1797 Goethe was forty-eight years old. Another important point in time. Seven times seven is forty-nine; that is the point in time when a person comes out of the special development of the spirit self and into the spirit of life. Schiller urged him on. People have made it easy for themselves with the explanation. Minor, who wrote an interesting book about Goethe, says: Goethe is gripped by age, he is no longer really capable of poetry. But just think, if that were true, a “Faust” could never be written! It would be impossible to depict the life of a human being in old age, and Faust was indeed in old age! Goethe is now approaching the age at which the ancient Indians said: Now man enters the age when he can ascend into the realm of the fathers, can gradually ascend into the deeper secrets of spiritual life. - That is when Goethe encounters his Mephisto in a remarkable way.

You know that when one tries to get to know the powers that oppose man, there are two, Ahriman and Lucifer. Goethe has confounded the two, thrown them together. He did not feel this earlier, and so Mephisto has become a contradictory figure. You only need to consider a few aspects to see that Mephisto is not a unified figure: Goethe combined Lucifer and Ahriman. He realized this in 1797, which is why it became so difficult for him to continue Faust. The humanities had not yet reached the point where man's opponent could be split into two opponents; Goethe stopped at one. You can see Goethe's nature when you consider that he should have actually created two figures but threw them together into one. Goethe really went through something inwardly in that he felt Mephisto was a contradictory figure. That “Faust” was created after all and stands tall as a piece of poetry can, of course, be attributed to Goethe's great poetic power. But this, in turn, is something that Goethe found surging within him from the unconscious. You see, a person can be capable of development; in his soul, he can feel in a very elementary way that which works together with the spirit through the whole of life in us, not just into our twenties.

What you know as the “Prologue in Heaven” was not written by Goethe until 1798. What happened in Faust? He did not say it, but it is in his soul: he let Faust reach for the book again, and now he is face to face with the spirit! Now it is no longer a play. Here the spirits are weaving the spheres. Here Faust stands in the midst of the struggle between good and evil in the macrocosm. One should not view Faust from beginning to end in such a way that one sees everything as if it were the same. Goethe broke with the view of his youth and introduced Faust more and more into the spirit of the macrocosm. I just wanted to show you how regularly this developing Goethe life is shaped. In it one can show how the human developmental periods go from seven to seven years until death. One must lift the subconscious more and more into consciousness, according to the meaning and spirit of the present. There is much talk about the subconscious, but it is not viewed in the right way, not viewed deeply enough.

Today there is something called analytical psychology, psychoanalysis. This is, as it were, brought to bear on the subconscious spiritual and soul life in the human being, but with inadequate means; for the adequate means are the spiritual-scientific ones. The classic example, which psychoanalysts cite over and over again, shows precisely how people work with inadequate means. Let us introduce an example from the soul that actually led to the development of psychoanalysis: there is a woman who knows a man. The man is married; she knows him in a way that may have been all right for the husband, but not for the husband's wife. Lo and behold, the husband's wife falls ill for various reasons, one of which may have been this lady herself. She becomes nervous. These days, people get nervous, neurasthenic, so there's no need to be surprised. She has to go to a spa for several months. She is supposed to leave one evening, but before that, supper is organized – a souper, as they say in German – to which the lady, who is well acquainted with the man and with the whole family, is also invited. The supper goes quite well. Then the lady of the house has to go to the train. The company also gradually disperses, as they say. A group of the party is walking on the street with this lady, who is well acquainted with the gentleman of the house. Now, as it happens here and there, not only late at night, people no longer walk on the sidewalk, but in the middle of the street. But lo and behold, a cab, not a car, but a cab, turns the corner, and that lady, who is a friend of the gentleman of the house, does not move aside like the others onto the sidewalk, but she runs in front of the horses. The driver curses, cracks the whip; but she runs in front of the horses, runs and runs until they come to a bridge. Then she has an idea: she must save herself. It is a dangerous situation. So she saves herself by jumping into the water. She is pulled out and saved, and society carries her into the house from which she has just come: into the home of the master of the house. She stays there for the night. The others go home again. And something has been achieved, which I will not characterize further now. The psychoanalyst now studies this case for hidden psychological motives: perhaps the lady has gone through something special with horses in the last seven or eight years, which resounds again from the soul, and at that moment she loses consciousness, it only comes up through the fear of horses. So one searches for “hidden provinces of the soul”. But that is not the truth. The truth is this: there is a subconscious in the soul of a person that can be smarter and more sophisticated than the conscious mind. This lady was a very decent lady, but she was in love with the master of the house. Her conscious mind would not have admitted: I want to stay in this house – but the subconscious does. It considers very carefully: If I run in front of the horses and jump into the water, then they will take me back! – That is what happened. In her conscious mind, the lady would never admit this, but in her subconscious she goes through these things, that is where it is present. Man carries within himself this subconscious, which is much wiser, much more cunning, for good or ill, than the conscious mind. As I said, the present time is becoming somewhat aware of this subconscious, but it seeks it with inadequate means. It must be clear that it can only be found by adequate means through spiritual science if one wants to show that, alongside the ego, which lives through the body, the eternal spiritual lives in us, which is not just an angel and can therefore also be refined, depending on its karma. What this subconscious always is in its revelation through man must be studied in a spiritual scientific way. We must realize that we have to get to know the truth, reality. Today the subconscious is knocking at the consciousness, and we can no longer cope in life if we ignore this, if we do not also follow with our consciousness the paths that the subconscious takes. Many people do not want that, so they do not want to approach spiritual science.

So on the one hand there are certain reasons for not being able to understand spiritual science: people do not want to understand that things are completely reversed when it comes to the dead. One must completely change one's way of thinking. While in ordinary life we are accustomed to our words coming out of our mouths when we speak or ask something, in our intercourse with the dead it is the case that what we say comes out of his soul, what he says comes up out of our own inner being. This is a natural thing.

The other is the antipathy that people have towards the spirit because they do not like to admit how this spiritual strikes at the door of consciousness. In many places one finds this spirit knocking at the door of consciousness. In people who, for example, have been somewhat abnormal in their lives, a loosening of the spiritual and mental in the physical and bodily today results in the subconscious making a more correct impact on the conscious than in those who have nothing loosened in them. It is by no means certain that relaxation should be aimed at, truly not, but in some people something is relaxed in a natural way, as for example in Otto Weininger. He was truly a talented person; he had completed his doctorate at the beginning of the 1920s, then formed the book “Sex and Character” out of the doctoral dissertation, which is quite amateurish and even trivial in many respects, but is nevertheless a remarkable phenomenon. Then he took a trip to Italy, kept a diary during which something quite remarkable happened. Certain spiritual-scientific insights are expressed as a caricature. This relaxed spiritual-soul-like already sees many things, but it caricatures them! The moral is also usually somewhat tainted. But Weininger was a genius. He then rented a room in the Beethoven House in his twenty-third year and shot himself inside. From this you can see that he was a very abnormal person. But I just want to mention: if you read his last book, you will also find a strange passage among all the other things. There he says: Why does man not remember his life before birth? Because the soul has brought itself so low that it wants to submerge itself in unconsciousness with regard to the previous life! - I mention this only - and I could multiply the example a thousandfold - to show: There are many people who are very close to spiritual science but cannot find it because the present time does not want to let people approach spiritual science at all. I mention this as an example because it can certainly be seen: Weininger comes to it by loosening the spiritual and soul, as a matter of course, to express that the human being connects with the physical and bodily. He expresses it as a matter of course, as many other people still do today, only in a very shamefaced way. But this is a fundamental demand of our time: that people really pluck up the courage, educate themselves in strength, to face the spiritual world in its concrete manifestations.

And one such concrete manifestation is precisely the one I particularly wanted to talk to you about: that people allow the dead to have a say; that people's social lives are again determined by feeling the differences between people and people according to age, but also by the fact that something becomes different, that people believe in their entire human life. God does not only reveal Himself up to the age of twenty. In the past He revealed Himself physically, but now He must be felt through spiritual science. But the human being must believe in the gifts of the divine spiritual world. Throughout his entire life he must have the encouraging, sustaining feeling that When I am fifteen years older, I will bring to the Divine-Spiritual what it can take up differently than before. Imagine how one can live into the future when one is so expectant! How this pours a different soul-spiritual aura over our entire social life! It must be known that people will need this aura as they develop towards the future. This is of infinite importance. Try to feel how many things must change! We live in an age in which many, many things must change. Above all, it must be so that certain things are no longer seen in a hypocritical way, but are seen in reality. It is of no use to tell lies to oneself about certain things. And I would like to discuss one such self-lie.

How many people are there today who say: I do not look up to the various hierarchies, to angels, archangels and so on, but I look up to “my God”. And how many continue to declaim what great progress it is that humanity has come to the one God, to monotheism. But one must ask the question: To whom do people actually turn when they seek to enter into a concrete relationship with the spiritual world and speak of “their God” in doing so? Whether one is Catholic or Protestant, when one speaks of one's God, one can only speak of that which really enters one's consciousness. This can only be one of two things: either it is the one angel that protects him, whom man then calls God, who is no higher god than an angel – and since every human being has an angel whose task it is to protect him, we are in a pluralism – or he means his own ego. But man is mistaken in that he has the same name for it, because everyone calls their particular angel by the same name “God”. In contrast to this, one should consider one thing, which is actually very instructive. There is a word whose origin people know nothing about, despite all their research: that is the word “God”. That is interesting and makes one think! Look it up in the various dictionaries in which the words are treated linguistically and philologically: there is complete uncertainty about the word “God”. People do not know what they are actually designating with God. And in our time, people either mean their angel, or, by speaking of their God, they become, so to speak, unconscious followers of our teaching: they speak namely of their own ego, as it has developed since the last death until this birth. That is the concrete thing they call God: either the angel that protects them intervenes – it is only the angel, they call it God – or it is only the individual ego. Whether one reinterprets this or not, it does not matter: it is the egoistic religious confession that is in many souls today, but one does not want to admit it to oneself. Only spiritual science will make people aware of it. Then people will hate spiritual science and will fight it more and more because it is so convenient for people to call their closest neighbor, who stands above them in the hierarchical order, their god. When people talk about God today, they mean either their own ego or the angel.

One can only get beyond such a view by entering into the concrete spiritual-scientific relationship. This is one of the points about which people will have to become more and more enlightened as the future approaches. And there must be truth among people. This will have to be a particular demand in the future, and truth is not very widespread in the present, not at all widespread. Particularly in learned circles, one sometimes encounters very strange ideas about what truth is. You will recall from my book 'Puzzles of the Soul' (if I may refer to it briefly) the peculiar way in which the remarkable man Max Dessoir dealt with the truth. What one reads in the last issue of the Kant journal is truly heartbreaking! I may mention this in particular because anthroposophy is not mentioned there; so this essay does not hurt in relation to its own cause. But in this “scholarly” journal one finds an essay that is not only the most banal in the anthroposophical field, but also, through and through, the most amateurish for anyone who understands the matter. But it is taken seriously.

You know from my book how one has no choice but to point out to Dessoir, in a schoolmasterly manner, that he has not read my books but distorts everything possible. I would like to mention just one of the most stupid distortions: Dessoir states in the first edition of his book 'Beyond the Soul' that my 'Philosophy of Freedom' was my first work. Now, this 'Philosophy of Freedom' was published in 1894, ten years after my first work; but he is so superficial about everything that he does not get it right. So the 'Philosophy of Freedom' was my first work. I also dared to say this about it among more important things to show him his nature. A second edition is being published. In the preface, he asserts all kinds of things that are precisely such that one can see from them what kind of person this university professor is. But now he has said in the first edition that the Philosophy of Freedom is my first literary work; now he says that he did not mean that, but that it is my “theosophical first work”. If you now take this together with the way in which the Philosophy of Freedom is again taken by others as something that would be denied by my “theosophy”: you will see a real quagmire! But it is very easy to see into the present through such things, and it is very important to get complete enlightenment about these matters. And this is possible only if one unreservedly arms oneself with the weapons of spiritual science.

Historical observation, too, will have to become something quite different under the influence of spiritual science than it has been up to now, because history, for the most part, is actually nothing other than a fable convenue, as it is offered. Where one really gets to the facts, one is led into something quite different from what popular history presents.

I will give you one example. You will see shortly what my point is in this consideration. We know that the fourth post-Atlantic period ended with the 15th century. That is the Greco-Latin period; in its last stages it extends into the 15th century. In 1413, the fifth post-Atlantic period begins, and a mighty upheaval occurs. If we bear this in mind, we may perhaps ask ourselves: how did this Roman Empire, into which everything that is Greek-Latin culture was finally drawn, come to its downfall? There are various causes, but one of the important ones is the following: the Romans waged great wars; these wars gradually expanded the territory beyond its borders. Many new border peoples emerged. This had a very specific consequence. Anyone who studies the time of the first Christian centuries will find that the peculiar nature of the Roman Empire, in its administration and internal social structure, with the border peoples and towards the Orient, has resulted in a continuous outflow of metal money from the Roman Empire to the Orient. And this is one of the most important events in the second, third and fourth centuries A.D., when the Roman Empire was gradually coming to an end: that metal money flows over to the neighboring peoples in the Orient. And the Roman Empire, despite having a complicated military administration, is becoming increasingly poorer in gold and money. This is the external expression, the image of the internal processes. I mention this external picture, the impoverishment of the Roman Empire in gold and money, because it is the external expression of the inner mood of the soul. What arose out of this inner mood of the soul? Of course, this inner mood has a definite significance in the whole sense of world-historical events. Something had to come out of this impoverishment of the Romans in metallic money. And what came of it? Individualism arose, which is the characteristic feature of our age. There was much talk of the art of making gold. How did this art come about? Because Europe became materially poor in gold, this external physical longing for making gold arose until America was discovered and gold came from there. These great connections must be grasped. What one comes to know by really studying the fall of the Roman Empire had an effect all the way into alchemy and thereby into the development of human souls: poverty of gold through the expansion of the social structure beyond the peripheral peoples into the Orient.

We now live in a time when people have to admit to themselves: the time of instinctive living is over. We cannot achieve social structures if we are unable to invigorate social thinking with thoughts that come from an understanding of the spiritual world. That is why the social sciences are so sterile and why humanity has brought itself into this catastrophic present, in which social structures create chaos throughout the world because people cannot let spiritual scientific thoughts flow into community life. These thoughts should flow from the impulses of human development into social thinking. There are spiritual causes for this catastrophic present. This is the rebellion of people against the influx of the spirit. That is the true origin of the present catastrophe. For people everywhere turn against the spirit that wants to come in.

I will give you an example that you might find characteristic. Let us suppose that someone is thinking today about the different world views that exist and, purely superficially, classifies them as: Catholicism, Protestantism, socialism, naturalism and so on. Take the cycle that I once gave in Berlin, where I built the world views more on inner categories, on the number twelve and on the number seven. You really do get seven world views: Gnosticism, Logism, Voluntarism, Empiricism, Mysticism, Transcendentalism, Occultism. Of course, anyone who just picks them up will not call them by these names. And yet the music of the spheres reigns everywhere! So just imagine someone who is nothing more than a materialistic observer, who reads the world views as they are accessible to him. How many would he have to find? He would have to find seven. He may call them something else, depending on how they present themselves externally, but they must appear in seven links. Read the current issue of the “Preußische Jahrbücher”. In the first essay you will find an observation according to which a person wanted to register the worldviews as they currently exist. He lists them. How many does he find? Seven: Catholicism, Protestantism, rationalism, humanism, idealism, socialism and personal individualism. There are indeed seven. The categories are only shifted, but one cannot find more than seven. There you have an example of how what we find as a sense of development overlaps with ordinary external development. People do not want to admit this, but it is necessary to acknowledge it in the present; that we should not ignore these things, but have the courage to face them.

What is actually happening in the present? In ancient times, in the third post-Atlantic cultural period, there was a far-reaching impulse from east to west, across the entire globe, an impulse that did not come merely from material life, as do today's impulses, but from the spiritual. In those days, spiritual impulses also intervened in social life. A certain impulse developed from the East to the West. It can be characterized by saying that some people at that time were striving to pass on to others what they had obtained from the spiritual world as enlightenment, what came to them more or less through their age or through initiation from good or bad mysteries; they wanted to impose what they had on others. In those days there was an impulse that went from the Orient to the West: a few spiritual powers in the sense of spreading progress to humanity, filling the earth with a few spiritual maxims, with powers that came from the fading mysteries. Even then, social life was based on this. It was in the third post-Atlantic period; historically, little is recorded. But the repetition of what happened then is happening now. Imagine what spread in those days as the urge from east to west, implemented purely materially in the fifth post-Atlantic period: in those days it was the atavistic-spiritual forces that brought about a social structure in which strong spiritual impulses were to be given to people; these were to be brought into humanity. Now imagine the opposite: some people want to conquer the material world of the earth of their own accord, to take it away from other people. At that time, the aim was to give spiritually, and that is precisely what caused the catastrophes that befell the Earth so many years after the Mystery of Golgotha. In the process, the Roman Empire fell. At that time, spiritual catastrophes befell the Earth, culminating in the fact that certain peoples from the East wanted to flood the Earth's countries with individual maxims. The same is now taking effect, in that the British-American people want to take the earth away from people. That is behind the whole thing. And it is exactly the same: it appears as a mirror image. What is happening in the present can only be understood by looking at the real course of human development, by replacing what is taught as history with the real history. For it is necessary that people be placed in full awareness in what is really happening, in the direction of the future. Today's economic life has long been a chaos, and this is how the catastrophe developed. Now you have two things that are having an effect. From west to east: the mirror image; from east to west: what has become old. There you still have the remnants of the old spiritual outlook of the entire Asian Orient, what it did to spread the spiritual and push the soul into the background. If you study the present catastrophe, you have a war of souls from the east, with souls fighting to assert the oriental-Slavic concepts; and from the west, a purely material war for sales territories. These things can only be understood if they are viewed from the great perspective of human development. But it would be necessary to be able to speak freely about these things for once. People should be allowed to be enlightened about what it actually is that they live in. This is of tremendous importance. What must stop, however, is people literally oversleeping what is happening. The most important things can happen without people being able to understand them. They can no longer grasp their significance because at present one can only do so if one is able to illuminate them with the light of spiritual-scientific knowledge. They cannot be illuminated in any other way.

But what is the attitude of the most learned people today towards spiritual-scientific knowledge? Yes, here we have a good example. In various places I have repeatedly mentioned the interesting fact that a book was written by a Haeckel student, Oscar Hertwig, an excellent book: “The Origin of Organisms, a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance.” In it, Oscar Hertwig pointed out the various downsides of Darwinism. I have praised this book highly. But in our spiritual scientific movement you will have to get used to there being no absolute authority. For a short time ago another book appeared by the same Oscar Hertwig: 'In Defense of Ethical, Social and Political Darwinism'. Now you must not say: Well, Steiner praised Hertwig, so we will now also study his latest book with this in mind, because then you will be in for a disappointment. The disappointment that I have to say: While the one book is an excellent book, this latest book is the most amateurish, most nonsensical thing one can possibly say about the chapters in question. If you just want to say: Steiner praised it, so we can accept it as gospel in turn, then you can never be sure that I will not be forced to give the opposite rating to something that is created on the same ground. Blind faith must not flourish in our ranks, only our own observations and our own opinions. But where does that come from? It stems from the fact that Daf Hertwig is an excellent naturalist; but the concepts of natural science must not be introduced into social life. If they are, then one finds everywhere only the dead, the dying of history, as for example with Gibbon, who wrote the excellent history of the decline of the Roman Empire. That is one secret – I have already presented this too – of historical development, that if you want to observe this historical development with the concepts that apply in science, you will never find that which grows and sprouts, but only that which turns into a corpse. You only encounter signs of decay in historical life if you want to use the concepts that are well applicable in science. People have suspected this from time to time. That is why Treitschke said that the driving forces in history are the passions and follies of men. It is not so. There are unconscious forces that descend in historical becoming. Therefore it is true that if you want to introduce decay into public life, and thus also into practical life, then you put scholars and theorists into parliaments. These people will concoct nothing but laws that lead to decadent phenomena, because with what is considered scientific today, only the decadent phenomena in history can be found. These things must enter into the consciousness of the people. This is far more necessary than most people realize, and it must be grasped if one is honest and sincere about what is to lead humanity out of the present catastrophic time. It is no longer acceptable to continue to oversleep the important events that unconsciously occur in human life, which people will not be able to cope with through their consciousness if they do not illuminate them with spiritual science. But the point is to grasp life in its reality, to really look into the true nature of life.

Here we must take into account the interaction of these three impulses: the normal human, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. For we must not treat these things in such a way that we say: I want to be a normal human being, and so I avoid everything Ahrimanic, everything Luciferic! Those who want to be really good and avoid everything that is Ahrimanic or Luciferic will flounder all the more into the Luciferic on one side and into the Ahrimanic on the other.

The point is not to avoid things, but to bring the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic into balance. The Luciferic is more characteristic of youth, the Ahrimanic of the age that is passing away. The Luciferic is more characteristic of woman, the Ahrimanic of man. When we look into the future, we look mainly into the Ahrimanic; when we look into the past, into that which is still to germinate, we look mainly into the Luciferic. If we look at the British Empire, we look into an Ahrimanic realm; in the case of oriental state institutions, we look into a Luciferic realm. The point is that we find these forces interfering with human life everywhere. We must not be blind to these things.

Take just one example: in the entire social structure of human life, the Luciferic has sometimes played a highly disastrous role because people did not know how to channel it into a right current, because they allowed the scales of Lucifer to swing too far. That is why Luciferic impulses have played a major role in the way the social structure has developed. Even at school, young children are accustomed to 'being first', 'being second', 'being third'. Think of the Luciferian ambition that has been at work when people want to be first! Then there are the titles and medals and everything that goes with them! Imagine how the social structure has been built up by the Luciferian! But this time is coming to an end; that too would be something to be recognized! The time is coming to an end, the Luciferic is dwindling more and more to its shadowy areas. That too would be a good thing if people were a little more vigilant with regard to the dwindling of the Luciferic - for the time being, for the near future. But they are unwary of something that is coming in again in a different way to do harm. This is: an Ahrimanic takes the place of the Luciferic. The slogan has been dropped: Free rein to the brave! - I have already said: What use is it to say “Free rein to the brave” and then still consider the nephew to be the bravest! No, it depends on looking into the concrete, looking into the real. But that is not what I mean now. What I do mean is that an entire Ahrimanic system is emerging, with very dangerous side effects. This Ahrimanic system is somewhat connected with the buzzword that is now used in the field of education and is called the gifted test. This gifted test is praised everywhere. People are possessed of it in a purely devilish way when they talk about it. From a number of hundred gifted boys and girls who have particularly good grades, the most gifted are to be selected, the best in terms of intellectuality, power of concentration, memory and so on. And so they are tested using the latest psychological methods. For example, intelligence is tested in a very peculiar way in experimental psychology. Three terms are presented to the children: murderer, mirror, rescue. Now they are supposed to find the connection through their intelligence. The one who merely finds the connection: the murderer sees himself in the mirror like the other people – he is merely stupid. But the one who finds the “most obvious” connection: the person looks in a mirror, sees the murderer who is just creeping up on him, and can save himself - that person is normal. A “gifted” person would be the one who says, for example, that the murderer creeps up to the mirror, sees his own face in the mirror, is frightened and desists from murder. Particularly clever would be the one who would say something like this: Near the one whose life is to be ended by the murderer, there is a mirror; in the darkness, the murderer bumps into the mirror, makes a sound and then desists from the murder. That is even cleverer! This is how you test cleverness! This is supposed to be something particularly great, whereas it is nothing more than the transfer of a purely Ahrimanic method, which applies to machines, to humans. The most terrible thing will come out of the mechanization of human life if one wants to find out about giftedness in this way. People need only reflect on what they themselves assumed until recently. I could show you the evidence of how nonsensically people talk when they carry out such tests. Take a whole series of people whom those people themselves also regard as important, very important people, who are now the spiritual heirs of the gifted test, let us say, for example, Helmholtz, the physicist, and others. If all of them had been tested using the gifted test method, many would have been shown to be untalented, including Helmholtz, for example. These things must all be taken much more seriously, because the salvation of the future depends on them. Nothing can be left to chance in this area. Today, events themselves teach an enormous amount.

Take the following: Imagine the period from 1930 to 1940. There could be certain people then in their forties or early fifties. Imagine you had had this thought in 1913, you would have thought: Of those living in 1913, a certain number will still be alive in 1930 and will be in leading positions; the social structure, and even the outer physical life in various areas of the earth, will depend on them. You can roughly imagine how things would have gone from 1930 to 1940 if the eighteen- to twenty-year-olds, the current young people, had then turned forty. Now take another thought and ask yourself: How many of those who would have done what you assumed for 1930 have now fallen on the battlefields and will no longer be able to physically participate in the management of physical earthly affairs? Others will take part! Imagine these two pictures side by side: the one picture: if this catastrophe of war had not occurred, then what would have been formed from the antecedents would have been in accordance with how you would have imagined the future at that time. And now the other picture that you must now imagine: How perhaps all those who could have had the most important positions have fallen on the battlefields! If you paint such a picture for yourself, you will come to a very tangible concept of the Maja, of the great deception of the outer physical plane. Is this physical plane in 1930 as it should have been if all those who were young in 1913 had lived? It would have become quite different. To think through such things is not without significance. But only spiritual science, by thinking through such things, can offer the possibility in the right sense of thinking realistically in the real world as well. Spiritual science leads you to such concepts that break away from the merely physical brain. Our present concepts are mainly bound to the physical brain, which is why the thinking of the present has a certain quality. It is precisely because the concepts of natural science, which are most closely bound to the brain, dominate the present, that our thinking in the present has a special quality: narrow-mindedness, limitation. For that is the most limited thinking, which is preferably bound to our brain. Spiritual science must tear thinking away from the brain, must set thoughts in motion. Today we have tried to present a whole series of thoughts before our soul, thoughts that are easy to move, that broaden the horizon.

But not only the horizon of thought must become broader, but also the horizon of feeling. How people became philistine because their thoughts were tied primarily to physical life! Besides narrow-mindedness, philistinism is the most important characteristic of our age. Narrow-mindedness! Men are interested in the narrowest circle. Spiritual science must lead men out again into the vastness of the universe, must unfold before them great fields of happenings, because the present can only be understood from them. Spiritual science must lead men out of narrow-mindedness. It must fight against narrow-mindedness and philistinism.

The will, too, has gradually acquired certain qualities. As a result of a certain social structure having grown out of materialistic culture, people have become unskillful. Ineptitude has arisen! People are pigeonholed into very specific subjects and actually know nothing but their subject, and are highly inept with regard to everything else. Today one meets men who, because they have not become tailors, cannot sew on a button. But spiritual science has the peculiarity of developing such concepts that are alive, that pass into the limbs, that also make man more skillful. The remedy for narrow-mindedness, for philistinism, for clumsiness is spiritual science. We need an age that leads people out of narrow-mindedness, out of narrow-mindedness, out of clumsiness, into wide horizons, into broad-mindedness, into skill. Spiritual science must be taken as full of life and with a sense of life. If we just look at the simplest concepts from spiritual science in relation to our time, we will see that the misfortune, suffering and pain of our time, which have not yet reached their peak, are intimately connected with humanity's resistance to the spirit. People have cut themselves off from the divine spiritual life, people must find the connection again with the divine spiritual life.

That is what I wanted to bring before your soul this time. Do you get more and more the feeling: the signs of the times speak clearly and audibly! But only those who have learned to read them with the means of spiritual science will find what they speak. No matter how far one goes, one can never find enough spiritual science as a vigorous and serious matter. One must always go further and further in penetrating life through that which spiritual science gives. People in our time have little courage to think through life through the forces that come from the spirit. This must be learned; that is what is mainly missing. If it is not learned, if it continues to be lacking, then what has befallen humanity as a catastrophe will last a long, long time. Therefore, one can say that one should seek a way out of the conflict of the present with spiritual science. Please take it very seriously and very deeply: then what we wanted to speak to each other about at this meeting will bear the right fruit in your hearts, in your souls.

[ 1 ] I attempted to show in my last observations how, in the realm of human evolution, the psycho-spiritual existence is transferred to that of the physical senses. Now it depends on the understanding which man can bring to bear on this transference whether he can gain a relationship, in accordance with modern consciousness, to the event of Golgotha and its reference to man's development on earth.

[ 2 ] If one does not realize in one's own physical nature how something psycho-spiritual has so changed itself from a spiritual form of experience as to become manifest in the physical world of the senses, one will also never know how the Christ spirit coming from spirit worlds was made manifest in the man Jesus on earth.

[ 3 ] But it must be once more emphasized that it is not a case of individual knowledge derived from observation, but rather of understanding with one's whole nature and being what observation has brought to light. Only a few men achieve the former, but the latter is possible to all. The man who realizes the worlds through which the human soul has passed in its pre-earthly existence, learns also to look up to Him who before the event of the mystery of Golgotha had lived as Christ only in those worlds, and who through this mystery and since its occurrence had united His life with mortal humanity.

[ 4 ] Our earthly souls have attained the condition in which they now live only through a gradual development. Ordinary consciousness takes the condition of the soul as it is to-day and constructs a ‘history’, in which things are represented as if man in the grey dawn of time had thought and willed and felt practically as he does now. But that is not so. There have been times in which the soul condition was quite different—times when there was no such sharp distinction between sleeping and waking. Dreams now are the only bridge between the two; and their content has something deceptive and questionable about them. Primitive man knew a stage between full wakefulness and unconscious sleep, which was pictorial and remote from the senses, but revealing something really spiritual, just as the sense-observation reveals something of the actually physical.

[ 5 ] In this life of pictures, and not of thoughts, early man had a dream-like experience of his pre-earthly existence. He felt his pre-earthly soul-nature as an echo of what he had gone through. On the other hand he had not that sense of self which present-day man has. He did not find himself in the same degree as to-day as an ‘Ego’. [ 6 ] This feeling has arisen only in the course of human spiritual evolution, and the decisive epoch of this development is that in which occurred also the event of Golgotha.

[ 7 ] At this time in the ordinary consciousness the psychic experience of an echo from pre-earthly existence grew ever fainter. Man's knowledge of himself became more and more limited to what his physical sense-life on earth told him,

[ 8 ] Moreover from, this moment the perception of death took on a new meaning. Previously man knew, as I have described, of the central point of his being. He knew it through the contemplation of this echo in such case that he was convinced this echo could not be affected by death. At the moment of historical time when the view became limited to the physical nature of man, death became a disturbing problem for the soul.

[ 9 ] The further development of purely inner faculties of knowledge did not suffice to solve this problem. It was solved by the events of Golgotha occurring in the evolution of the earth.

[ 10 ] The Christ came down to earthly existence from those worlds in which man had passed his pre-earthly life. By combining the experience of the ordinary awake consciousness with the contemplation of the acts of Christ, man can find, since Golgotha, what he formerly found through a natural function of his consciousness.

[ 11 ] The ‘Initiates’ of the ancient Mysteries spoke to their followers in such a way that they saw in their considerations of pre-earthly life a gift of grace from that spiritual Sun-Being which has its counterpart in the physical sun.

[ 12 ] The Initiates who at the time of the mystery of Golgotha still continued the ancient initiation-methods, told those who had ears to hear how the Being who had before given to man the echo from spiritual worlds of pre-earthly existence that he could carry into the earthly life, had descended as the Christ upon the physical earth and taken flesh in the person of the man Jesus.

[ 13 ] Those who knew the truth about the mystery of Golgotha always, as in the early days of Christianity, spoke of the Christ-Being as one who had descended from spiritual worlds to an earthly one. The teachers of mankind of that time stressed particularly this aspect of the Christ coming from a higher world down to the earth.

[ 14 ] This view was conditioned by the fact that one still knew enough, from the ancient initiation, about the supernatural worlds, to see in Christ a Being of the spiritual world before his descent to earth.

[ 15 ] The remnants of this knowledge lasted into the Fourth Century, and then faded in man's consciousness. The event of Golgotha thus became an event which was known only through the construction of political history.

The principles of initiation of the old world were lost to the outer world, and took root only in almost unknown places. Only now in the last third of the nineteenth Century has a stage in human evolution been reached again in which the new Initiation, as has been described leads to an aspect of Christ's nature within the spiritual world.

[ 16 ] It was necessary for the complete unfolding of the ego-consciousness, which was to come into being in the development of humanity, that initiate knowledge should disappear for a few centuries, and that man should turn his attention to the outer world of the senses in which the ego-consciousness could be freely cultivated.

[ 17 ] Thus it was only possible for the Christian community to direct the attention of believers to the historical tradition concerning the mystery of Golgotha and to clothe what was once known by spiritual knowledge in ‘Dogmas of Belief’ for the Earth. The content of these Dogmas does not concern us here, but only the manner in which they affect the soul, whether through faith, belief or through knowledge.

[ 18 ] It is again possible to-day to have a direct knowledge of the Christ. The figure of Jesus stood for centuries in front of the ordinary consciousness, and the Christ who lived in him, had become an object of faith. But more and more the inclination to dogmatic faith grew less, precisely among the spiritual leaders of mankind; Jesus was seen more and more only as history made him appear to the ordinary consciousness. The sense of Christ was gradually lost; and so there grew up a modern branch of Theology which concerns itself really only with the man Jesus, and which lacks a living sense of the Christ. But a mere Jesus-Faith is really -no longer Christianity.

[ 19 ] In the consciousness which early man had of his pre-earthly existence, he had also an anchorage for a proper relationship to his existence, after death on earth.

In later times his union with the Christ was to give him in another way what had thus been given him in primæval time by nature, through the sense of his own life-experience concerning the problem of death. The Christ was so to permeate him, in the words of St. Paul, ‘Not I, but the Christ in me’, that He might be his guide through the gate of death. Man now had indeed something in the ordinary consciousness which could develop the complete Ego-sense, but nothing which could give the soul the strength to approach the gates of Death with certain knowledge of its living passage through them. For ordinary consciousness is a result of the physical body, and therefore can give the soul only such strength as must be regarded as extinguished in death.

[ 20 ] To those who could learn all this from their old initiation, the human physical organism appeared out of order, for they had to assume that it could not develop the power to give the soul such a comprehensive consciousness as to enable it to live its full life. Christ appeared as the soul-doctor of the world, as the Healer, the Saviour, and as such in His fundamental relationship to humanity He must be recognized.

[ 21 ] The event of death and its relationship to the Christ is to be the subject of my next study.

[ 22 ] Through the taking-up of the Christ-experience a Philosophy has grown out of what the ancient consciousness, deepened by the saying of the Initiates, had given to man as an experience of eternity, and a philosophy which can include the divine Father principle. The Father in Spirit can be regarded again as the all-pervading Being. Cosmology gains its Christian character through the knowledge of the Christ who, as a Being from outside the earth, assumed mortal shape in the person of Jesus. In the events of human evolution the Christ is recognized as the Being to whose lot has fallen a decisive part in this evolution. And through the re-awakening of the half-forgotten knowledge of the ‘Eternal Man’, the human mind is led out of the purely sense-world in which the ego-consciousness develops, to the spirit, which can be experienced with full understanding by the soul in conjunction with God the Father and the Christ in a renewed perceptive knowledge of Religion.