The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] The road which is indicated by the way of thinking of Nicolas of Cusa was walked by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1487–1535) and Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493–1541). They immerse themselves in nature and, as comprehensively as possible, seek to explore its laws with all the means their period makes available to them. In this knowledge of nature they see at the same time the true foundation for all higher cognition. They themselves seek to develop the latter out of natural science by letting science be reborn in the spirit.

[ 2 ] Agrippa of Nettesheim led an eventful life. He was descended from a noble family and was born in Cologne. He studied medicine and jurisprudence at an early age and sought to inform himself about natural phenomena in the way customary at the time in certain circles and societies, or by contact with a number of scholars who carefully kept secret whatever insights they gained into nature. With such purposes he repeatedly went to Paris, to Italy, and to England, and he also visited the famous Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim in Würzburg. He taught in scientific institutions at various times and here and there entered the services of rich and noble personages, at whose disposal he placed his talents as a statesman and scientist. If his biographers describe the services he rendered as not always above reproach, if it is said that he acquired money under the pretext of being adept in secret arts, and of securing various advantages to people by means of these arts, this is counterbalanced by his unmistakable and ceaseless urge to acquire the entire learning of his time honestly and to make this learning deeper in the spirit of a higher cognition of the world. In him distinctly appears the endeavor to achieve a clear position with regard to natural science on the one hand, with regard to higher cognition on the other. Such a position is attained only by one who has an insight into the ways by which one reaches the one and the other cognition. Just as it is true that at last natural science must be raised into the region of the spirit if it is to lead into higher cognition, so it is true that it must at first remain in the field proper to it if it is to provide the right foundation for a higher level. The “spirit in nature” exists only for the spirit. As certainly as nature is in this sense spiritual, as certain is it that nothing perceived in nature by bodily organs is immediately spiritual. Nothing spiritual can appear to my eye as being spiritual. I must not seek the spirit as such in nature. I do this when I interpret a process of the external world in an immediately spiritual way: when, for instance, I ascribe to plants a soul which is only distantly analogous to the human soul. I also do this when I ascribe a spatial or temporal existence to the spirit or the soul itself; when, for instance, I say of the eternal human soul that it lives in time without the body, but still in the manner of a body, rather than as pure spirit. Or when I even believe that the spirit of a deceased person can show itself in some kind of sensorily perceptible manifestations. Spiritualism, which commits this error, thereby only shows that it has not penetrated to the true conception of the spirit, but wants to see the spirit directly in something grossly sensory. It fails to understand the nature of the sensory as well as that of the spirit. It deprives of spirit the ordinary sensory phenomena, which take place hour by hour before our eyes, in order to consider something rare, surprising, unusual as spirit in a direct sense. It does not understand that for one who is capable of seeing the spirit, what lives as “spirit in nature” reveals itself, for instance, in the collision of two elastic spheres, and not only in processes which are striking because of their rarity and cannot be immediately grasped in their natural context. In addition, the spiritualist draws the spirit down into a lower sphere. Instead of explaining something that takes place in space and that he perceives with the senses by means of forces and beings which in turn are only spatial and sensorily perceptible, he has recourse to “spirits,” which he thus equates completely with the sensorily perceptible. Such a way of thinking is based on a lack of capacity for spiritual comprehension. One is not capable of looking at the spiritual in a spiritual manner, therefore with mere sensory beings one satisfies one's need for the presence of the spirit. To such people the spirit does not show any spirit; therefore they seek it with the senses. As they see clouds sailing through the air, so they also want to see spirits hurrying along.

[ 3 ] Agrippa of Nettesheim fights for a true natural science, which does not attempt to explain the phenomena of nature by spiritual beings which haunt the world of the senses, but sees in nature only the natural, in the spirit only the spiritual.—One would of course completely misunderstand Agrippa if one were to compare his natural science with that of later centuries, which has altogether different data at its disposal. In such a comparison it might easily appear that he still refers what is due only to natural causes, or based on erroneous data, to the direct action of spirits. Moritz Carriere does him this injustice when he says—although not with ill will—, “Agrippa gives a long list of the things which belong to the sun, the moon, the planets, or the fixed stars, and receive their influences; for instance, related to the sun are fire, blood, laurel, gold, chrysolite; they bestow the gift of the sun: courage, serenity, light ... The animals have a sense of nature which, more exalted than human reason, approaches the spirit of prophecy ... Men can be enjoined to love and hate, to sickness and health. Thus one puts a spell upon thieves that enjoins them from stealing somewhere, upon merchants so that they cannot trade, ships and mills so that they cannot move, lightning so that it cannot strike. This is done with potions, salves, images, rings, charms; the blood of hyenas or basilisks is suitable for this purpose,—one is reminded of Shakespeare's witches' cauldron.” No, one is not reminded of it, if one understands Agrippa aright. He did of course believe in things which were considered to be indubitable in his time. But we do this today also with regard to what is nowadays considered “factual.” Or is one to believe that future centuries also will not throw much of what we set up as indubitable facts into the store-room of “blind” superstition? It is true that I am convinced that there is a real progress in man's knowledge of facts. When the “fact” that the earth is round had once been discovered, all earlier suppositions were banished into the realm of “superstition.” Thus it is with certain truths of astronomy, of biology, etc. The doctrine of natural descent, in comparison with all earlier “hypotheses of creation,” represents a progress similar to the insight that the earth is round compared to all previous suppositions concerning its shape. Nevertheless I am aware that there is many a “fact” in our learned scientific works and treatises which will no more appear as fact to future centuries than does much of what is maintained by Agrippa and Paracelsus to us today. It is not a matter of what they considered to be a “fact,” but of the spirit in which they interpreted these facts.—In Agrippa's time one found, it is true, little comprehension of the “natural magic” which he advocated, and which seeks in nature the natural, and the spiritual only in the spirit; men clung to the “supernatural magic” which seeks the spiritual in the realm of the sensory, and against which Agrippa fought. This is why the Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim advised him to communicate his views as a secret doctrine only to a few chosen ones, who were able to rise to a similar conception of nature and spirit, for “one gives only hay to oxen and not sugar, as to songbirds.” It is perhaps to this abbot that Agrippa himself owes the right point of view. In his Steganographie, Steganography, Trithemius has written a work in which he treats, with the most veiled irony, the way of thinking which confounds nature with the spirit. In this book he appears to speak entirely of supernatural phenomena. One who reads it as it stands must believe that the author is speaking of the conjuring of spirits, of the flying of spirits through the air, etc. But if one omits certain words and letters of the text there remain, as Wolfgang Ernst Heidel showed in the year 1676, letters which, when assembled into words, describe purely natural phenomena. (In one case for instance, in a formula of incantation, one must completely omit the first and the last word, and then cross out the second, fourth, sixth, etc. of those remaining. In the remaining words one must again cross out the first, third, fifth, etc. letter. What remains, one then assembles into words, and the formula of incantation is transformed into a communication of a purely natural content.)

[ 4 ] How difficult it was for Agrippa to work his way out of the prejudices of his time and to raise himself to a pure conception, is proven by the fact that he did not let his Philosophia occulta, Secret Philosophy, appear until the year 1531, although it had been composed as early as 1510, because he considered it to be immature. Further evidence of this is given in his work, De vanitate scientiarum, Of the Vanity of the Sciences, where he speaks with bitterness about the scientific and general activity of his time. There he says quite plainly that only with difficulty has he liberated himself from the delusion of those who see in external events direct spiritual processes, in external facts prophetic hints about the future, etc. Agrippa proceeds to the higher cognition in three stages. At the first stage he deals with the world as it is presented to the senses, with its substances, and its physical, chemical, and other forces. Insofar as it is viewed at this stage he calls nature elemental. At the second stage one regards the world as a whole in its natural connections, in the way it arranges everything belonging to it according to measurements, number, weight, harmony, etc. The first stage brings those things together which are in close proximity to each other. It seeks the causes of a phenomenon which lie in its immediate environment. The second stage looks at a single phenomenon in connection with the whole universe. It carries out the idea that each thing is under the influence of all the remaining things of the universal whole. This universal whole appears to it as a great harmony, of which every separate entity is a part. The world, seen from this point of view, is designated by Agrippa as the astral or celestial one. The third stage of cognition is that where the spirit, through immersion in itself, looks directly upon the spiritual, the primordial essence of the world. Here Agrippa speaks of the spiritual-soul world.

[ 5 ] The views which Agrippa developed about the world and man's relationship to it we encounter in a similar, but more complete form in Theophrastus Paracelsus. They are therefore better considered in connection with the latter.

[ 6 ] Paracelsus characterizes himself when he writes under his portrait, “No one who can stand alone by himself should be the servant of another.” His whole position with regard to cognition is given in these words. Everywhere he himself wants to go back to the foundations of natural science in order to ascend, through his own powers, to the highest regions of cognition. As a physician he does not simply want to accept, like his contemporaries, what the old investigators who at the time were considered authorities, as for instance Galen or Avicenna, had affirmed in times gone by; he himself wants to read directly in the book of nature. “The physician must pass through the examination of nature, which is the world, and all its causation. And what nature teaches him he must commend to his wisdom, not seeking anything in his wisdom, but only in the light of nature.” He does not recoil from anything in order to become acquainted with nature and its manifestations from all sides. For this purpose he travels to Sweden, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, and the Orient. He can say of himself, “I have pursued the art in danger of my life and have not been ashamed to learn from strollers, hangmen, and barbers. My teachings have been tested more severely than silver in poverty, anxiety, wars, and perils.” What has been handed down from old authorities has no value for him, for he believes that he can only attain the right conception if he himself experiences the ascent from natural science to the highest cognition. This experiencing in his own person puts the proud words in his mouth, “One who wants to pursue the truth must come into my realm ... After me, not I after you, Avicenna, Rhases, Galen, Mesur! After me, and I not after you, you of Paris, you of Montpellier, you of Swabia, you of Meissen, you of Cologne, you of Vienna, and whatever lies on the Danube and the river Rhine, you islands in the sea, you Italy, you Dalmatia, you Athens, you Greek, you Arab, you Israelite; after me, and I not after you! Mine is the realm!”—It is easy to misjudge Paracelsus because of his rough exterior, which sometimes hides deep seriousness behind jest. He himself says, “Nature has not made me subtle, nor have I been raised on figs and white bread, but rather on cheese, milk, and oat bread, and therefore I may well be uncivil to the hyperclean and the superfine; for those who were brought up in soft clothes and we, who were brought up among fir-cones, do not understand each other well. Thus I must seem rough, though to myself I appear gracious. How can I not be strange for one who has never gone wandering in the sun?”

[ 7 ] Goethe has described the relationship of man to nature (in his book on Winkelmann) in the following beautiful sentences: “When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, when he feels himself to be in the world as in a great, beautiful, noble, and valued whole, when harmonious ease affords him a pure and free delight, then the universe, if it could experience itself, would exult, as having attained its goal, and admire the climax of its own becoming and essence.” Paracelsus is deeply penetrated with a sentiment like the one that expresses itself in such sentences. Out of this sentiment the mystery of man shapes itself for him. Let us see how this happens, in Paracelsus' sense. At first the road which nature has taken in order to bring forth its highest achievement is hidden from the human powers of comprehension. It has attained this climax; but this climax does not say, I feel myself to be the whole of nature; this climax says, I feel myself to be this single man. What in reality is an act of the whole world feels itself to be a single, solitary being, standing by itself. Indeed, this is the true nature of man, that he must feel himself as being something other than what, in the final analysis, he is. And if this is a contradiction, then man can be called a contradiction come to life. Man in his own way is the world. His harmony with the world he regards as a duality. He is the same as the world is, but he is this as a repetition, as a separate being. This is the contrast which Paracelsus perceives as microcosm (man) and macrocosm (universe). For him man is the world in little. What causes man to regard his relationship with the world in this way is his spirit. This spirit appears to be bound to a single being, to a single organism. By its whole nature, this organism belongs to the great chain of the universe. It is a link in it, and has its existence only in connection with all the others. The spirit, however, appears to be an outcome of this single organism. At first it sees itself as connected only with this organism. It tears this organism loose from the native soil out of which it grew. For Paracelsus a deep connection between man and the entire universe thus lies hidden in the natural foundation of existence, a connection which is obscured by the presence of the spirit. For us humans, the spirit, which leads us to higher cognition by communicating knowledge to us and by causing this knowledge to be reborn on a higher level, has at first the effect of obscuring for us our own connection with the universe. For Paracelsus human nature thus at first falls into three parts: into our sensory-corporeal nature, our organism, which appears to us as a natural being among other natural beings, and which is just like all other natural beings; into our hidden nature, which is a link in the chain of the whole world, which thus is not enclosed within our organism, but sends out and receives influences to and from the whole universe; and into the highest nature, our spirit, which lives its life only in a spiritual manner. The first part of human nature Paracelsus calls the elemental body; the second the ethereal-celestial or “astral body;” the third part he calls soul.—In the “astral” phenomena Paracelsus thus sees an intermediate level between the purely corporeal phenomena and the true phenomena of the soul. They will become visible when the spirit, which obscures the natural foundation of our existence, ceases its activity. We can see the simplest manifestation of this realm in the world of dreams. The images which flit through our dreams, with their peculiar, significant connection with events in our environment and with our own internal states, are products of our natural foundation which are obscured by the brighter light of the soul. When a chair collapses near my bed, and I dream a whole drama, which ends with a shot fired in a duel, or when I have palpitations of the heart, and dream of a seething stove, then meaningful and significant natural manifestations are appearing which reveal a life lying between the purely organic functions and the thinking processes taking place in the bright consciousness of the spirit. With this realm are connected all the phenomena which belong to the field of hypnotism and of suggestion. In suggestion we can see an acting of man on man, which points to an interrelationship between beings in nature that is obscured by the higher activity of the spirit. In this connection it becomes possible to understand what Paracelsus interprets as an “astral body.” It is the sum of the natural influences to which we are exposed or can be exposed through special circumstances, which emanate from us without involving our soul, and which nevertheless do not fall under the concept of purely physical phenomena. That in this field Paracelsus enumerates facts which we doubt today, has no importance when looked at from the point of view I have already adduced above.—On the basis of such views of human nature Paracelsus divides the latter into seven parts. They are the same as we find in the teachings of the ancient Egyptians, among the Neoplatonists, and in the Cabala. Man is first of all a physical-corporeal being; hence he is subject to the same laws to which every body is subject. In this sense he is thus a purely elemental body. The purely corporeal-physical laws combine in the organic life process. Paracelsus designates the organic laws as “Archaeus” or “Spiritus vitae;” the organic raises itself to spiritlike manifestations which are not yet spirit. These are the “astral” manifestations. From the “astral” processes emerge the functions of the “animal spirit.” Man is a sense being. He combines his sensory impressions in a rational manner by means of his reason. Thus the “rational soul” awakens in him. He immerses himself in his own spiritual products; he learns to recognize the spirit as spirit. Therewith he has raised himself to the level of the “spiritual soul.” At last he understands that in this spiritual soul he experiences the deepest stratum of the universal existence; the spiritual soul ceases to be an individual, separate one. The insight takes place of which Eckhart spoke when he felt that it was no longer he himself who spoke in him, but the primordial essence. Now that condition prevails in which the universal spirit regards itself in man. Paracelsus has expressed the feeling aroused by this condition in the simple words: “And this which you must consider is something great: there is nothing in Heaven and on earth which is not in man. And God, who is in Heaven, is in man.”—It is nothing but facts of external and internal experience that Paracelsus wants to express with these seven fundamental parts of human nature. That what for human experience falls into a plurality of seven parts is in higher reality a unity, is not thereby brought into question. The higher cognition exists precis to show the unity in everything which in his immediate experience appears to man as a plurality because of his corporeal and spiritual organization. On the level of the highest cognition Paracelsus strives to fuse the living, uniform, primordial essence of the world with his spirit. But he knows that man can only know nature in its spirituality if he enters into immediate intercourse with it. Man does not understand nature by peopling it, on his own, with arbitrarily assumed spiritual entities, but by accepting and valuing it as it is as nature. Paracelsus therefore does not seek God or the spirit in nature; but for him nature, as it presents itself to his eye, is immediately divine. Must one first attribute to the plant a soul like the human soul in order to find the spiritual? Therefore Paracelsus explains the development of things, insofar as this is possible with the scientific resources of his time, entirely in such a way that he regards this development as a sensory process of nature. He lets everything arise out of the primordial matter, the primordial water (Yliaster). And he regards as a further process of nature the separation of the primordial matter (which he also calls the great limbus) into the four elements, water, earth, fire, and air. When he says that the “divine word” called forth the plurality of beings from the primordial matter, this is only to be understood in somewhat the same manner as the relationship of force to matter is to be understood in modern natural science. A “spirit” in the real sense is not yet present on this level. This “spirit” is not an actual cause of the natural process, but an actual result of this process. This spirit does not create nature, but develops out of it. Many words of Paracelsus could be interpreted in the opposite sense. Thus, for instance, he says: “There is nothing corporeal that does not carry a living spirit hidden within it. And not only that has life which stirs and moves, such as men, animals, the worms in the earth, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the water, but all corporeal and substantial things.” But with such sayings Paracelsus only wants to warn against the superficial view of nature which thinks that it can exhaust the nature of a thing with a few “rammed-in” concepts (to use Goethe's apt expression). He does not want to inject an invented nature into things, but rather to set all the faculties of man in motion in order to bring forth what actually lies within a thing.—It is important not to let oneself be misled by the fact that Paracelsus expresses himself in the spirit of his time. Rather, one should try to understand what he has in mind when, looking upon nature, he sets forth his ideas in the forms of expression of his time. For instance, he ascribes to man a twofold flesh, that is, a twofold corporeal constitution. “The flesh must therefore he understood to be of two kinds, namely, the flesh whose origin is in Adam, and the flesh which is not from Adam. The flesh that is from Adam is a coarse flesh, for it is earthly and nothing but flesh, and is to be bound and grasped like wood and stone. The other flesh is not from Adam; it is a subtle flesh and is not to be bound or grasped, for it is not made of earth.” What is the flesh that is from Adam? It is all that has come down to man through his natural development, which he has therefore inherited. To this is added what in the course of time man has acquired for himself in intercourse with his environment. The modern scientific concepts of inherited characteristics and of characteristics acquired through adaptation emerge from the above-mentioned thought of Paracelsus. The “subtler flesh,” which makes man capable of spiritual activities, has not been in man from the beginning. He was “coarse flesh” like the animals, a flesh that “is to be bound and grasped like wood and stone.” In the scientific sense the soul is therefore also an acquired characteristic of the “coarse flesh.” What the natural scientist of the nineteenth century has in mind when he speaks of the inheritances from the animal world, is what Paracelsus means when he uses the expression about “the flesh whose origin is in Adam.” These remarks, of course, are not intended to obliterate the difference which exists between a natural scientist of the sixteenth and one of the nineteenth century. After all, it was only the latter century which was capable of seeing, in the full scientific sense, the forms of living organisms in such a connection that their natural relationship and their actual descent as far as man became evident. Science sees only a natural process where Linnè in the eighteenth century still saw a spiritual process, which he characterized in the following words: “There are as many species of living organisms as there were, in principle, forms that were created.” While Linnè thus had to transfer the spirit into the spatial world and assign to it the task of producing spiritually, of “creating” the forms of life, the natural science of the nineteenth century could ascribe to nature what is nature's and to the spirit what is the spirit's. Nature itself is assigned the task of explaining its creations, and the spirit can immerse itself into itself where it alone is to be found, within man.—But while in a certain sense Paracelsus thinks quite in the spirit of his time, yet just with regard to the idea of development, of becoming, he has grasped the relationship of man to nature in a profound manner. In the primordial essence of the world he did not see something which in some way exists as something finished, but he grasped the divine in its becoming. Hence he could really ascribe a self-creating activity to man. If the divine primordial essence exists, once and for all a true creating by man is out of the question. Then it is not man, who lives in time, who creates, but God, Who is eternal. For Him there is only an eternal becoming, and man is a link in this eternal becoming. That which man forms did not previously exist in any way. What man creates, as he creates it, is an original creation. If it is to be called divine, this can only be in the sense in which it exists as a human creation. Therefore in the building of the universe Paracelsus can assign to man a role which makes him a co-architect in this creation. The divine primordial essence without man is not what it is with man. “For nature brings forth nothing into the light of day which is complete as it stands; rather, man must complete it.” This self-creating activity of man in the building of nature, Paracelsus calls alchemy. “This completion is alchemy. Thus the alchemist is the baker when he bakes the bread, the vintager when he makes the wine, the weaver when he makes the cloth.” Paracelsus wants to be an alchemist in his field, as a physician. “Therefore I may well write so much here concerning alchemy, so that you can know it well and learn what it is and how it is to be understood, nor be vexed that it is to bring you neither gold nor silver. Rather see that the arcana (remedies) are revealed to you ... The third pillar of medicine is alchemy, for the preparation of remedies cannot take place without it, because nature cannot be put to use without art.”

[ 8 ] Thus Paracelsus' eyes are directed in the strictest sense upon nature, in order to discover from nature itself what it has to say about its products. He wants to investigate the laws of chemistry in order to work as an alchemist in his sense. He considers all bodies to be composed of three basic substances, namely, of salt, sulphur, and mercury. What he so designates of course does not correspond to what later chemistry designates by this name, any more than what Paracelsus considers to be a basic substance is one in the sense of later chemistry. Different things are designated by the same names at different times. What the ancients called the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, we still have. We call these four “elements” no longer “elements” but states of aggregation, for which we have the designations: solid, liquid, aeriform, etheriform. Earth, for instance, for the ancients was not earth but the “solid.” The three basic substances of Paracelsus we can also recognize in contemporary concepts, but not under the homonymous contemporary names. For Paracelsus, solution in a liquid and combustion are the two important chemical processes of which he makes use. If a body is dissolved or burned it is decomposed into its parts. Something remains as residue; something is dissolved or burns. For him the residue is salt-like, the soluble (liquid), mercury-like; the combustible he calls sulphurous.

[ 9 ] One who does not look beyond such natural processes may be left cold by them as by things of a material and prosaic nature; one who at all costs wants to grasp the spirit with the senses will people these processes with all kinds of spiritual beings. But like Paracelsus, one who knows how to look at such processes in connection with the universe, which reveals its secret within man, accepts these processes as they present themselves to the senses; he does not first reinterpret them; for as the natural processes stand before us in their sensory reality, in their own way they reveal the mystery of existence. What through this sensory reality these processes reveal out of the soul of man, occupies a higher position for one who strives for the light of higher cognition than do all the supernatural miracles concerning their so-called “spirit” which man can devise or have revealed to him. There is no “spirit of nature” which can utter more exalted truths than the great works of nature themselves, when our soul unites itself with this nature in friendship, and, in familiar intercourse, hearkens to the revelations of its secrets. Such a friendship with nature, Paracelsus sought.

The idea of other worlds lying beneath or behind the physical world is very familiar to us, and as an introduction to what I propose to put before you, I want to speak today of certain characteristics of these worlds. By widening and extending the knowledge we already possess, still other aspects of this subject will become clear to us.

As you know, the world bordering upon that known to our ordinary consciousness is the so-called world of Imagination. The world of Imagination is far more inwardly mobile and flexible than our physical world with its clear-cut lines of demarcation and its sharply defined objects. When the veil formed by the physical world is broken through, we enter an ethereal, fluidic world, and when we experience this first spiritual world, the feeling arises that we are outside the physical body. In this spiritual world we are at once conscious of a new and different relationship to the physical body; it is a relationship such as we otherwise feel to our eyes or ears. The physical body in its totality works as if it were a kind of organ of perception; but we very soon realize that, properly speaking, it is not the physical but the ether-body that is the real organ of perception, The physical body merely provides a kind of scaffolding around the ether-body. We begin, gradually, to live consciously in the ether-body, to feel it as a sense-organ which perceives a world of weaving, moving pictures and sounds. And then we are aware of being related to the ether-body within the physical body just as in ordinary life we are related to our ears or eyes.

This feeling of being outside the physical body is an experience similar in some respects to that of sleep. As beings of spirit-and-soul we are outside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, but our consciousness is dimmed during the experience, and we know nothing of what is really happening to us and around us.

You will see from this that there can be a relationship to the physical body quite different from that to which we are accustomed in ordinary life. This is a fact to which attention must be called by Spiritual Science and it is an experience which will become more and more common in human beings as evolution leads on into the future.

I have said repeatedly that the cultivation of Spiritual Science today is not the outcome of any arbitrary desire, but is a necessity of evolution at the present time. This feeling of separation from the physical body is an experience that will arise in human beings more and more frequently in the future, without being understood. A time will come when a great many people will find themselves asking: “Why is it that I feel as if my being were divided, as if a second being were standing by my side?” This feeling will arise as naturally as hunger or thirst or other such experiences and it must be understood by men of the present and future. It will become intelligible when, through Spiritual Science, people begin to understand what this experience of division within them really signifies.

In the domain of Education, particularly, attention will have to be paid to it; indeed we shall all have to learn to pay more heed than hitherto to certain experiences which will become increasingly common in children as time goes on. It is true that in later life, when the whole impression made by the physical world is very strong, these feelings and experiences will not be particularly noticeable in the near future, but as time goes on they will become more and more intense. They will occur, to begin with, in children, and grown-up people will hear from children many things which in the ordinary way are pooh-poohed but which will have to be understood because they are connected with deep secrets of evolution.

We shall hear children saying: “I have seen a being who said this or that to me, who told me what to do.”—The materialist, of course, will tell such a child that this is all nonsense, that no such being exists. But students of Spiritual Science will have to understand the significance of the phenomenon. If a child says: “I saw someone who came to me, he went away again but he keeps on coming and I cannot get rid of him”—then anyone who understands Spiritual Science will realize that a phenomenon which will appear in greater and greater definition as time goes on, is here revealing itself in the life of the child. What does this really signify?

We shall understand it if we think of two fundamental and typical experiences, the first of which was particularly significant in the Greco-Latin age, while the other is significant in our own time, when it is beginning, gradually, to take shape. Whereas the first experience reached a kind of culmination in the Greco-Latin epoch, we are slowly moving towards the second.

Experiences deriving from the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman are all the time playing into human life. In this basic experience of man during the Fourth Post-Atlantean or Greco-Roman epoch, Lucifer's influence was the greater; in our own epoch, Ahriman is the predominant influence. Lucifer is connected with all those experiences which, lacking the definition imparted by the senses, remain undifferentiated and obscure.

Lucifer is connected with the experience of breathing, of the in-breathing and the out-breathing. The relationship between a man's breathing and the functioning of his organism as a whole must be absolutely regular and normal. The moment the breathing process is in any way disturbed, instead of remaining the unconscious operation to which no attention need be paid, it becomes a conscious process, of which we are more or less dreamily aware. And when, to put it briefly, the breathing process becomes too forceful, when it makes greater claims on the organism than the organism can meet, then it is possible for Lucifer (not he himself but the hosts belonging to him) to enter with the breath into the organism.

I am speaking here of a familiar experience of dream-life. It may arise in many forms and with growing intensity. A nightmare in which the disturbed breathing process makes a man conscious in dream, so that experiences of the spiritual world intermingle with the dream and give rise to the anxiety and fear which often accompany a nightmare—all such experiences have their origin in the Luciferic element. When, instead of the regular breathing, there is a feeling of being choked or strangled, this is connected with the possibility that Lucifer may be mingling with the breathing.

This is the cruder form of the process, where, as the result of a diminution of consciousness, Lucifer intermingles with the breathing and, in the dream, takes the form of a strangler. That is the crude form of the experience. But there is an experience more delicate and more intangible than that of being physically strangled. It does not, as a rule, occur to people that a certain familiar experience is really a less crude form of that of strangulation. Yet whenever anything becomes a problem in the soul or gives rise to doubt concerning one thing or another in the world, this is a subtler form of the experience of being strangled. It can truly be said that when we feel obliged to question, when a riddle, either great or trifling, confronts us, then something seems to be strangling us, but in such a way that we do not heed it. Nevertheless, every doubt, every problem is a subtle form of nightmare.

And so experiences which often take a crude form, become much more subtle and intangible when they arise in the life of soul itself. It is to be presumed that science will be led some day to study how the breathing process is connected with the urge to question, or with the feeling of being assailed by doubt; but whether this happens or not, everything that is associated with questioning and doubt, with feelings of dissatisfaction caused when something in the world demands an answer and we are thrown back entirely upon our own resources—all this is connected with the Luciferic powers.

In the light of Spiritual Science it can be said that whenever we feel a sensation of strangulation in a nightmare, or whenever some doubt or question inwardly oppresses or makes us uneasy, the breathing process becomes stronger, more forceful. There is something in the breathing which must be harmonized, toned down and modified if human nature is to function in the right and normal way.

What happens when the breathing process becomes excessively vigorous and forceful? The ether-body expands, becomes too diffuse; and as this takes effect in the physical body, it tends to break up the physical body. An over-exuberant, too widely extended ether-body gives rise to an excessively vigorous breathing process and this provides the Luciferic forces with opportunity to work.

The Luciferic forces, then, can make their way into the human being when the ether-body has expanded beyond the normal. One can also say that the Luciferic forces tend to express themselves in an ether-body that has expanded beyond the limits of the human form, that is to say, in an ether-body requiring more space than is provided within the boundaries of the human skin.

Of attempts made to find an appropriate form in which to portray this process, the following may be said.—In its normal state, the ether-body moulds and shapes the physical form of man. But as soon as the ether-body expands, as soon as it tries to create for itself greater space and an arena transcending the boundaries of the human skin, it tends to produce other forms. The human form cannot here be retained; the ether-body strives to grow out of and beyond the human form. In olden days men found the solution for this problem. When an extended ether-body—which is not suited to the nature of man but to the Luciferic nature—makes itself felt and takes shape before the eye of soul, what kind of form emerges? The Sphinx!

Here we have a clue to the nature of the Sphinx. The Sphinx is really the being who has us by the throat, who strangles us. When the ether-body expands as a result of the force of the breathing, a Luciferic being appears in the soul. In such an ether-body there is then not the human, but the Luciferic form, the form of the Sphinx. The Sphinx is the being who brings doubts, who torments the soul with questions.

And so there is a definite connection between the Sphinx and the breathing process. But we also know that the breathing process is connected in a very special way with the blood. Therefore the Luciferic forces also operate in the blood, permeating and surging through it. By way of the breathing, the Luciferic forces can everywhere make their way into the blood of the human being and when excessive energy is promoted in the blood, the Luciferic nature—the Sphinx—becomes very strong.

Because man is open to the Cosmos in his breathing, he is confronted by the Sphinx. It was paramountly during the Greco-Latin epoch of civilization that, in their breathing, men felt themselves confronting the Sphinx in the Cosmos. The legend of Oedipus describes how the human being faces the Sphinx, how the Sphinx torments him with questions. The picture of the human being and the Sphinx, or of the human being and the Luciferic powers in the Cosmos, gives expression to a deeply-rooted experience of men as they were during the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, and indicates that when, in however small a degree, a man breaks through the boundaries of his normal life on the physical plane, he comes into contact with the Sphinx-nature. At this moment Lucifer approaches him and he must cope with Lucifer, with the Sphinx.

The basic tendency of our Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch is different. The trend of evolution has been such that the ether-body has contracted and is far less prone to diffusion or expansion. The ether-body, instead of being too large, is too small, and this will become more marked as evolution proceeds. If it can be said that in the man of ancient Greece, the ether-body was too large, it can be said that in the man of modern times the ether-body is compressed and contracted, has become too small. The more human beings are led by materialism to disdain the Spiritual, the more will the ether-body contract and wither. But because the organization and functions of the physical body depend upon the ether-body—inasmuch as the ether-body must permeate the physical in the right way—the physical body too will always tend to dry up, to wither, if the contraction of the ether-body is excessive; and if the physical body became too dry, men would have feet of horn instead of the feet of a normal human being. As a matter of fact, man will not actually find himself with feet of horn, but the tendency is there within him, owing to this proclivity of the ether-body to weaken and dry up. Now into this dried-up ether-body, Ahriman can insinuate himself, just as Lucifer can creep into an extended, diffuse ether-body. Ahriman will assume the form which indicates a lack of power in the ether-body. It unfolds insufficient etheric force for properly developed feet and will produce hornlike feet, goat's feet.

Mephistopheles is Ahriman. There is good reason, as I have just indicated, for portraying him with the feet of a goat. Myths and legends are full of meaning: Mephistopheles is very often depicted with horses' hoofs; his feet have dried up and become hoofs. If Goethe had completely understood the nature of Mephistopheles he would not have made him appear in the guise of a modern cavalier, for by his very nature Mephistopheles-Ahriman lacks the etheric forces necessary to permeate and give shape to the normal physical form of a human being.

Yet another characteristic of Mephistopheles-Ahriman is due to this contraction of the ether-body and its consequent lack of etheric force. The best way to understand this will be to consider the nature of man as a whole. Even physically, the human being is, in a certain respect, a duality. For think of it.—You stand there as a physical human being. But the in-breathed air is inside you, is part of you as a physical being. This air, however, is sent out again by the very next exhalation, so that the “man of air-and-breath” pervading you, changes all the time. You are not merely a man of flesh, bone and muscle, but you are also a “breath man.” This “breath man,” however, is constantly changing, passing out and in. And this “breath man” is connected with the circulating blood.

Within you, separate as it were from this “breath man” is the other pole: the “nerve man” with the circulating nerve-fluid. The contact between the “nerve man” and the blood is a purely external one. Just as those etheric forces which tend towards the Luciferic nature can only find easy access to the blood by way of the breath, so the etheric forces which tend towards the Mephistophelean or Ahrimanic nature can only approach the nervous system—not the blood.

Ahriman is deprived of the possibility of penetrating into the blood because he cannot come near the warmth of the blood. If he wants to establish a connection with a human being, he will therefore crave for a drop of blood, because access to the blood is so difficult for him. An abyss lies between Mephistopheles and the blood. When he draws near to man as a living being, when he wants to make a connection with man, he realizes that the essentially human power lives in the blood. He must therefore endeavor to get hold of the blood.

That Faust's pact with Mephistopheles is signed with blood is a proof of the wisdom contained in the legend. Faust must bind himself to Mephistopheles by way of the blood, because Mephistopheles has no direct access to the blood and craves for it. Just as the Greek confronted the Sphinx whose field of operation is the breathing system, so the man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch confronts Mephistopheles who operates in the nerve-process, who is cold and scornful because he is bloodless, because he lacks the warmth that belongs to the blood. He is the scoffer, the cold, scornful companion of man.

Just as it was the task of Oedipus to get the better of the Sphinx, so it is the task of man in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch to get the better of Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles stands there like a second being, confronting him. The Greek was confronted by the Sphinx as the personification of the forces which entered into him together with excessive vigor of the breathing process. The human being of the modern age is confronted by the fruits of intellect and cold reason, rooted as they are in the nerve-process. Poetic imagination has glimpsed, prophetically, a picture of the human being standing over against the Mephistophelean powers; but the experience will become more and more general, and the phenomenon which, as I have said, will appear in childhood, will be precisely this experience of the Mephistophelean powers.

Whereas the child in Greece was tormented by a flood of questions, the suffering awaiting the human being of our modern time is rather that of being in the grip of preconceptions and prejudices, of having as an incubus at his side a second “body” consisting of all these preconceived judgments and opinions. What is it that is leading to this state of things?

Let us be quite candid about the trend of evolution. During the course of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, so many problems have lost all inner, vital warmth. The countless questions which confront us when we study Spiritual Science with any depth, simply do not exist for the modern man with his materialistic outlook. The riddle of the Sphinx means nothing to him, whereas the man of ancient Greece was vitally aware of it. A different form of experience will come to the man of modern times. In his own opinion he knows everything so well; he observes the material world, uses his intellect to establish the interconnections between its phenomena and believes that all its riddles are solved in this way, never realizing that he is simply groping in a phantasmagoria. But this way of working coarsens and dries up his ether-body, with the ultimate result that the Mephistophelean powers, like a second nature, will attach themselves to him now and in times to come.

The Mephistophelean nature is strengthened by all the prejudices and limitations of materialism, and a future can already be perceived when everyone will be born with a second being by his side, a being who whispers to him of the foolishness of those who speak of the reality of the spiritual world. Man will, of course, disavow the riddle of Mephistopheles, just as he disavows that of the Sphinx; nevertheless he will chain a second being to his heels. Accompanied by this second being, he will feel the urge to think materialistic thoughts, to think, not through his own being, but through the second being who is his companion.

In an ether-body that has been parched by materialism, Mephistopheles will be able to dwell. Understanding what this implies, we shall realize that it is our duty to educate children in the future—be it by way of Eurythmy or the development of a spiritual-scientific outlook—in such a way that they will be competent to understand the spiritual world. The ether-body must be quickened in order that the human being may be able to take his rightful stand, fully cognizant of the nature of the being who stands at his side. If he does not understand the nature of this second being, he will be spellbound by him, fettered to him. Just as the Greek was obliged to get the better of the Sphinx, so will modern man have to outdo Mephistopheles—with his faunlike, satyrlike form, and his goat's or horse's feet.

Every age, after all, has known how to express its essential characteristic in legend and saga. The Oedipus legends in Greece and the Mephistopheles legends in the modern age are examples, but their basic meanings must be understood.

You see, truths that are otherwise presented merely in the form of poetry—for instance, the relations between Faust and Mephistopheles—can become guiding principles for education as it should be in the future. The prelude to these happenings is that a people or a poet have premonitions of the existence of the being who accompanies man; but finally, every single human being will have this companion who must not remain unintelligible to him and who will operate most powerfully of all during childhood. If adults whose task it is to educate children today do not know how to deal rightly with what comes to expression in the child, human nature itself will be impaired owing to a lack of understanding of the wiles of Mephistopheles.

It is very remarkable that indications of these trends are everywhere to be found in legends and fairy-tales. In their very composition, legends and fairy-tales which seem so unintelligible to modern scholars, point either to the Mephistophelean, the Ahrimanic, or to the Sphinx, the Luciferic. The secret of all legends and fairy-tales is that their content was originally actual experience, arising either from man's relation to the Sphinx or from his relation to Mephistopheles.

In legends and fairy-tales we find, sometimes more and sometimes less deeply hidden, either the motif of the riddle, the motif of the Sphinx, where something has to be solved, some question answered; or else the motif of bewitchment, of being under a spell. This is the Ahriman motif. When Ahriman is beside us, we are perpetually in danger of falling victim to him, of giving ourselves over to him to such an extent that we cannot get free. In face of the Sphinx, the human being is aware of something that penetrates into him and as it were tears him to pieces. In face of the Mephistophelean influence he feels that he must yield to it, bind himself to it, succumb to it.

The Greeks had nothing like theology in our modern sense, but were very much closer to the wisdom of Nature and the manifestations of Nature. They approached the wisdom of Nature without theology, and questions and riddles pressed in upon them.

Now the breathing process is much more intimately connected with Nature than is the nerve-process. That is why the Greek had such a living feeling of being led on to wisdom by the Sphinx. It is quite different in the modern age when theology has come upon the scene. Man no longer believes that direct intercourse with Nature brings him near to the Divine Wisdom of the world, but he sets out to study, to approach it via the nerve-process, not via the breathing and the blood. The search for wisdom has become a nerve-process; modern theology is a nerve-process. But this means that wisdom is shackled to the nerve-process; man draws near to Mephistopheles, and owing to this imprisonment of wisdom in the nerve-process, the premonition arose at the dawn of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch that Mephistopheles is shackled to the human being, stands at his side.

If the Faust legend is stripped of all the extraneous elements that have been woven around it, there remains the picture of a young theologian striving for wisdom; doubts torment him and because he signs a pledge with the Devil—with Mephistopheles—he is drawn into the Devil's field of operations. But just as it was the task of the Greek, through the development of conscious Egohood, to conquer the Sphinx, so we, in our age, must get the better of Mephistopheles by enriching the Ego with the wisdom that can be born only from knowledge and investigation of the spiritual world, from Spiritual Science.

Oedipus was the mightiest conqueror of the Sphinx; but every Greek who wrestled for manhood was also, at a lower level, victorious over the Sphinx. Oedipus is merely a personification, in a very typical form, of what every Greek was destined to experience. Oedipus must prove himself master of the forces contained in the processes of the breathing and the blood. He personifies the nerve-process with its impoverished ether-forces, in contrast to those human beings who are altogether under the sway of the breathing and blood processes. Oedipus takes into his own nature those forces which are connected with the nerve-process, that is to say, the Mephistophelean forces; but he takes them into himself in the right and healthy way, so that they do not become a second being by his side, but are actually within him, enabling him to confront and master the Sphinx.

This indicates to us that in their rightfully allotted place, Lucifer and Ahriman work beneficially; in their wrongful place—there they are injurious. The task incumbent upon the Greek was to get the better of the Sphinx-nature, to cast it out of himself. When he was able to thrust it into the abyss, when, in other words, he was able to bring the extended ether-body down into the physical body, then he had overcome the Sphinx. The abyss is not outside us; the abyss is man's own physical body, into which the Sphinx must be drawn in the legitimate and healthy way. But the opposite pole—the nerve-process—which works, not from without but from within the Ego, must here be strengthened. Thus is the Ahrimanic power taken into the human being and put in its right place.

Oedipus is the son of Laios. Laios had been warned against having a child because it was said that this would bring misfortune to his whole race. He therefore cast out the boy who was born to him. He pierced his feet, and the child was therefore called “Oedipus,” i.e., “club foot.” That is the reason why, in the drama, Oedipus has deformed feet.

I have said already that when etheric forces are impoverished, the feet cannot develop normally, but will wither. In the case of Oedipus this condition was induced artificially. The legend tells us that he was found and reared by shepherds after an attempt had been made to get rid of him. He goes through life with clubbed feet. Oedipus is Mephistopheles—but in this case Mephistopheles is working in his rightful place, in connection with the task devolving upon the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch.

The harmony between ether-body and physical body so wonderfully expressed in the creations of Greek Art, everything that constituted the typical greatness of the Greek—of all this, Oedipus is deprived in order that he may become a personality in the real sense. The Ego that has now passed into the head becomes strong, and the feet wither.

The man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch has quite a different task. In order to confront and conquer the Sphinx, Oedipus was obliged to receive Ahriman into himself. The man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, who confronts Ahriman-Mephistopheles, must take Lucifer into himself. The process is the reverse of that enacted by Oedipus. Everything that the Ego accumulates in the head must be pressed down into the rest of man's nature. The Ego, living in the nerve-process, has accumulated “Philosophy, Law, Medicine, and, alas, Theology too”—all nerve-processes. And now there is the urge to get rid of it all from the head—just as Oedipus deprived the feet of their normal forces—and to penetrate through the veils of material existence.

And now think of Faust standing there with all that the Ego has accumulated; think of how he wants to throw it all out of his head, just as Oedipus deprives his feet of their normal forces. Faust says: “I have studied, alas! Philosophy, Jurisprudence and Medicine too, and saddest of all, Theology” ... he wants to rid his head of it all. And moreover he does so, by surrendering himself to a life that is not bound up with the head. Faust is Oedipus reversed, i.e., the human being who takes the Lucifer-nature into himself.

And now think of all that Faust does, so that having Lucifer within him, he may battle with Ahriman, with Mephistopheles who stands beside him. All this shows us that Faust, in reality, is Oedipus reversed. The Ahriman-nature in Oedipus has to get the better of Lucifer; the Lucifer-nature in Faust has to help him to overcome Ahriman-Mephistopheles. Ahriman-Mephistopheles operates more in the external world, Lucifer more in the inner life. All the misfortunes that befall Oedipus because he must take the Ahriman-nature into himself, are connected with the external world. Doom falls upon his race, not merely upon himself. Even the doom that falls upon him is of an external character; he pierces his eyes and blinds himself; similarly, the pestilence which sweeps his native city—this, too, is an external doom. Faust's experiences, however, are of the soul—they are inner tragedies. Again in this respect, Faust reveals himself as the antithesis of Oedipus.

In these two figures, both of them dual—Oedipus and Sphinx, Faust and Mephistopheles—we have typical pictures of the evolution of the Fourth and Fifth Post-Atlantean epochs.

When history, in time to come, is presented less as a narration of external happenings and more as a description of what human beings actually experience, then and only then will the significance of these fundamental experiences be fully understood. For then man will perceive what is really at work in the onflowing evolutionary process, of which ordinary science knows only the external phantasmagoria.

In order that the Ego should be strengthened, it was necessary for Ahriman-Mephistopheles to enter into Oedipus—the typical representative of the Greeks. In the man of the modern age, the Ego has become too strong and he must break free. But this he can only do by deepening his knowledge of spiritual happenings, of the world to which the Ego truly belongs. The Ego must know that it is a citizen of the spiritual world, not merely the inhabitant of a human body. This is the demand of the age in which we ourselves are living. The man of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch was called upon to strive with might and main for consciousness in the physical body; the man of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch must strive to become conscious in the spiritual world, so to expand his consciousness that it reaches into the spiritual world.

Spiritual Science is thus a fundamental factor in the evolution of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch.

The manifold studies which we have recently pursued have shown that all true Art eventually issues from the secrets of Initiation. We have frequently spoken of this fact, and we have indicated many examples. Great epochs of Art, when artistic deeds raying far and wide over humanity have taken place, derive their sources again and again from Initiation. This shows how Art brings spiritual life into the physical. Initiation opens out to man the possibility to advance from the physical plane into the spiritual worlds. That which can then be experienced, more or less consciously in spiritual worlds, true Art carries down into the physical forms wherein it finds expression.

But the inner connection of the facts to which we are here referring, cannot be fully penetrated unless we also bear in mind that the last few centuries of evolution have in reality eclipsed—made imperceptible to the vast majority of men—things that were not by any means a secret to the same extent, five, six or seven centuries ago, as they are today for those who call themselves civilised mankind.

To point to one significant example, we may choose a work of art which does indeed ray out over the ages—the Divine Comedy of Dante.

No one who lets the Divine Comedy work upon his soul will fail to perceive the spiritual note that pervades what Dante has here expressed. Nowadays, if it be a question of studying how Dante arrived at the magnificent pictures of his poem, people will readily be inclined to use the word fancy or imagination. Dante, they say, was filled with artistic imagination. They are content to leave it at that. Needless to say, I shall not deny that artistic imagination was at work in Dante. But even in the light of outer history it would be wrong to suppose that he created the whole of his magnificent poem, as it were out of the void, out of mere fancy.

Dante had a friend and teacher Brunetto Latini, who, as I think you will recognise from what we shall presently say, may be described as an Initiate in the true sense of the word. It is this connection between Dante and a man who was initiated according to the conditions of his time, which we, in the light of our ideas, must fundamentally point out.

One thing at any rate was known to that time. They knew that man, to reach the secrets of existence, must take the path that leads through his own re-birth. This above all was fully and absolutely living in that time: the recognition that the path to knowledge of the world must necessarily lead through self-knowledge. Self-knowledge, however, must not be thought of in the superficial sense in which people often speak of it today. Who does not think himself able to know about himself? By way of introduction, let me bring home to you with an example, how difficult self-knowledge is even in the most elementary matters. How little a man is inclined to set out for what can truly be called self-knowledge!

I have here a book by a famous philosopher of today—Dr. Ernst Mach, who has written a number of works highly characteristic of the present time. At the very beginning of his book on the Analysis of Sensations, dealing with the connections of the physical and the psychical, the following remark occurs: ‘As a young man,’ he writes, ‘I was once going along the street when I saw a face which was highly distasteful to me. How astonished I was when I observed that it was my own face which I had seen by the chance combination of two mirrors in a shop-window!’

Thus, as he went along the street, his karma led him past a shop where two mirrors were so inclined that he could see himself. He saw the face, highly distasteful to him, and then discovered that it was his own. We see that even with respect to this most outer aspect, it is not quite easy for us to acquire the most elementary self-knowledge. But Mach makes another remark as well. He becomes a University professor; so he has some idea of the appearance of a scholar or a pedant.

‘Not long ago,’ he writes, ‘tired after a long railway journey, I got into an omnibus. Simultaneously another man entered from the opposite side. What a wretched-looking pedant, I said to myself, and presently discovered that I had only seen myself, for a looking-glass was hanging opposite the entrance.’ ‘Thus,’ he continues by way of explanation, ‘the class-type was far more familiar to me than my own special type.’ He had formed an idea in his mind of the typical pedant. He knew that the man, getting in opposite, looked rather like an out-of-work schoolmaster. Not until afterwards did he discover that it was himself. A pretty example of the often very deficient self-knowledge of men, even as regards their outer form. As to the knowledge of the soul, it is a great deal more difficult. Nevertheless, personal and individual self-knowledge is none other than the first elementary beginning of the path which leads through man into the universal secrets of existence.

When we regard the world externally, here in the physical world we have before us only that which belongs to the outermost nature of man—to the system of his physical body. Look out over the widespread environment which we can see on the physical horizon of this world; there we have everything that is related to our own outer body—the physical human body. We know that this is only a portion of our total being. Behind it is the etheric body; but man in the first place is unaware of all that in his environment which resembles his etheric body. Still less does he surmise that which resembles his astral body and his Ego.

Man, to begin with, on the Earth, is for himself the only example—the only document he has brought over from the spiritual world. Therefore he must pass through this, the document of his own being. He must go through himself. This was always known to those who experienced anything of Initiation. Thus it was known to Brunetto Latini, teacher and friend of Dante. Moreover, it is characteristic how Brunetto Latini's Initiation, as we may call it, was eventually brought about. It happened by a particular event. That is what frequently occurs. Fundamentally speaking, every one who sets his foot on the path of spiritual science is waiting for the portal of the spiritual world to be opened to him sooner or later, as indeed it will be. It may be—indeed it often is so—that the entry to the spiritual world takes place by degrees. Then we grow slowly into the spiritual world. Nevertheless, very, very frequently it happens that the world is opened to us as by a kind of shock which breaks in upon our life—by a sudden and unexpected event.

Thus, as Brunetto Latini himself relates, he had been sent as ambassador to the ruler of Castile. On his way back he learned that his party, the Guelphs, had been expelled from Florence. Florence had utterly changed during his absence. This message brought him into confusion. Such confusion of our state of soul which is suited to the outer physical world, often goes hand-in-hand with what becomes the starting-point for an entry into the spiritual world.

Brunetto Latini goes on to relate how as a result of his confusion, instead of riding home, he rode into a neighbouring forest, quite unaware of what he was doing (or so at any rate he afterwards believed when he looked back on it). Then, when he came to himself, he had a strange and unwanted impression. He saw no longer the ordinary world of the physical plane around him, but something that looked like an immense mountain. He did not come to himself again in that consciousness which normally confronts the physical world. He came to consciousness over against quite another world than that which was physically there around him. There was an immense mountain; but these things were such that they came and went—came into being and passed away again. There at the side of the mountain stood a woman, according to whose commands that which arose, arose, and that which passed away, passed away again.

Brunetto Latini now beheld the laws and principles of Nature's working in the forms of Imagination. All Nature's laws—the living and creative essence of Nature herself—came before him in an Imagination, in the figure of a woman who gave her orders for all these things to arise and pass away again.

We must imagine ourselves living in the time of the thirteenth, fourteenth century, when the natural scientific way of thought was slowly entering. In later times, men spoke abstractly of the Laws of Nature; they would on no account imagine that there was any reality of being behind the totality of Nature's laws. Brunetto Latini, however, saw it in the form of Imagination, as a woman, out of whose spirit proceeded all that was subsequently felt as abstract Laws of Nature, like a Word that held sway throughout this Nature, which stood before him in living Imagination.

This woman, he relates, then bade him deepen the forces of his soul; so would he enter more and more deeply into himself. Here it is interesting. Raying out over him her forces, as it were, she gives him the possibility to enter more and more deeply into himself. He dives down into his own being, and the sequence he now indicates is indeed, under certain conditions, the true sequence of Initiation.

The first thing, he tells us, which he now learned to know were the forces of the soul. Diving down into himself, man does indeed learn to know what otherwise remains unconscious in him—the forces of his soul. This recognition of his own soul-forces is a thing from which man will often flee, when he draws near to it. For when we perceive the forces of the soul, it often seems to us that we say to ourselves: ‘What an unsympathetic soul that is!’ We do not like this feeling, any more than the worthy professor did when he saw his own form, which was distasteful to him. We do not want to see. For with the chorus of the soul's forces we often see many a thing we have within us, which we by no means attribute to ourselves in ordinary life. We see it as something that is at work in the totality of our own being—enhancing our being, or making it smaller; making us of greater or lesser value for the Universe.

Thus, to begin with, we rise into the soul-forces. At the next stage, we experience the four temperaments. There it becomes clear to us how we are woven together, of the choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic, and how this weaving together lies deeper down than the soul-forces.

Then, when we have gone through the temperaments, we come to what may be called the five senses—in the occult sense. For in the way man ordinarily speaks of the five senses, he only knows them from outside. You cannot learn to know the senses inwardly till you have descended through the temperaments into the deeper regions of your own self. Then you behold the eyes, the ears, the other senses from within. You experience your own eyes, for instance, or your ears—filling them from within. You must imagine it thus. Just as you came into this hall through this door, and perceived the objects and persons that were already here, so when you undergo this descent into yourself you come into the region of your eyes or your ears. There you perceive how the forces are working from within outward, to bring about your seeing and your hearing. You perceive an altogether complicated world, of which a man who only knows the outer physical plane has no idea at all.

Some, no doubt, will say: ‘Maybe, but this world of the eyes and the ears will not impress me greatly. The world of the physical plane which I have around me here is great, and the world of the eyes and ears is very small. I should be gazing into a minute world.’

That, however, is maya. What you envisage when you are within your ears or within your eyes is far greater, fuller in content, than the outer physical world. You have a far more abundant world around you there.

Then and then only, when you have gone through this region, you come into the realm of the four elements. We have already spoken of all the properties of the several elements; but it is only at this stage that you feel really within them—within the earthy, the watery, the airy, and the element of warmth.

Man ordinarily knows his senses from without. Here now he learns to know them from within. Consciously entering into the eye from within, he then breaks through the eye, and breaking through the eye comes into the four elements. But he can likewise break through the ear, or the sense of taste.

By these four elements he is perpetually surrounded, only he does not know what they are inwardly. He cannot see it with outer organs of sense. He must first get out of the sense-organs—albeit, get out of them from within. He must leave them again, as though by a gateway. He must get out, through his eye or his ear. So he slips through—through the eye, through the ear—and comes into the region of the elements. And in the region of the elements he learns to know all the spiritual beings who are living there—the manifold Nature-spirits, and Beings who belong to the Hierarchies nearest to man.

Then, going on and on, he comes into the region of the seven Planets. He is already farther outside, and learns to know what is creatively connected with man, in the great Universe. And then at last he has to cross Oceanos—the great Ocean, as it has always been called.

The Soul-forces
the four Temperaments
the five Senses
the four Elements
the seven Planets
the Ocean.

What does this passing through the ocean signify? Man can approach the planets while with the last portion of his soul's being he still remains within the physical. But when he thus goes inward through the gates of the senses, eventually he must take with him the very last relics of his soul, so that he may consciously enter the condition in which he is normally only in sleep. Ordinarily, when he is with the planets, he still remains in the body with a portion, as it were, with a fragment of his soul. But when he draws even this last out of the body, it seems to him as though he were floating through the universal ocean of spiritual being.

All this, Brunetto Latini undergoes. He tells how he undertook one after another of these steps, at the behest of the woman who appeared to him in his Imaginative cognition. Then she instructed him that he must go still farther. This, however, was at a particular moment, which again is highly characteristic.

Think of the situation. Perplexed, at a loss on account of what has happened in his paternal city, he rides into a forest. He comes to himself again, but this awakening leads him not into the physical world. It leads him through all the regions which we have here described. Then, however, the moment arises when, not by accident, not by mere chance, but by the definite summons of this woman he sees himself in the forest once more. Having undergone all these things, having passed through the soul-forces and the temperaments and through the senses outward into the elemental world, where he already perceived abundant spiritual life; having perceived the seven planets, and through them the higher Hierarchies, circle on circle; having felt himself at length not on the solid ground but swimming as it were, swimming through the great ocean; now he awakens again in the physical world.

That is the very significant thing we recognise in all these Initiations. The disciple passes through a complete cycle and returns again into the physical world.

Having lived through all this, Brunetto Latini feels himself once more in his forest. Now he is really surrounded by all that is physically about him. And anon the woman is there again at his side, albeit he now has the physical forest around him. She tells him to ride on towards the right, and she gives him instruction, how he shall come to Philosophy and to the four Virtues of man, and to the knowledge of the God of Love.

Mark what a significant truth lies behind these things! A man of today will be quick enough with his reply: Philosophy—with that I am familiar! I have studied the whole history of philosophy. I know what philosophy is, and what it teaches. As to the four Virtues—Plato already named them: Wisdom, Courage, Balance or Moderation, and Justice. And the God of Love, who does not know of Him! You need only read the four Gospels. The man of today is familiar with all these things. But it is precisely the characteristic of spiritual knowledge: we begin to see that we do not really know all these things. We must first go through the understanding of the spiritual world and then return to what the physical provides. Then only do we understand the physical world.

If Brunetto Latini were to arise again today and a very learned man of our time were to approach him—a learned professor of philosophy, a famous man, let us assume—and were to say: ‘I am familiar with the whole range of philosophy,’ Brunetto Latini would answer: ‘Yes, yes, no doubt you are, but in reality you know nothing of it. You must first learn to know the aspect of the super-sensible worlds, you must know what things are like in the super-sensible. Then you can come back again to philosophy, and it will be something quite new to you. Then only will you begin to divine what you now imagine that you know quite well.’

The same thing may be put in another way. After all, who would not think it absurd! ... A famous thinker of our time writes a philosophic book. Surely then he must understand it. How should he not understand what he himself has written? ... And yet, it is literally true: he may have written the book and may yet understand nothing of what he has written. It is not at all difficult nowadays to write a book. Books almost write themselves. One pieces together the things one has learned to repeat. One need not penetrate into the deeper meaning to do so.

That is the greatness that meets us in Brunetto Latini. What others learn to know by external study—he only will claim to know it after having penetrated through the spiritual world. Then he meets it again. He meets again what others imagine that they know of the physical world—the knowledge of Philosophy, of the four Virtues, and of the God of Love.

I should like my meaning at this point to be quite fully understood. No doubt a certain kind of knowledge is also attainable without spiritual cognition. But these things appear in a new light when one has first made oneself familiar with that which lies behind the physical. So do we see it in this example of Brunetto Latini, whom I have only cited to show how outer artistic creation is concerned with Initiation. We see it in this example, in the relation of Brunetto Latini to Dante, revealing how Dante's great work of art is connected with Initiation.

Dante could never have reached his peculiar relation to the spiritual world if he had not had Brunetto Latini for his friend and teacher, to educate him into the spiritual world.

Every age has its own way of seeking the spiritual world. Already in the centuries preceding Dante's age, we find again and again with the most varied Initiates the woman of whom Brunetto Latini speaks—the guidance of man into the spiritual world by this woman. This line of evolution reaches back to the seventh and eighth centuries. Some of them actually refer to her as Natura—the living, creative Being of Nature. Initiates of old describe her living and creative Nature—as the counsellor of nous, of the Intelligence that works creatively throughout the world, Intelligence or Reason that permeates the world. Moreover, they call her a kinswoman of Urania. Out in the Cosmos, nous is counselled by Urania; here in this earthly realm, by Natura.

When we see clearly through this, we are led into still more ancient times, when the Initiates tried in another way to come near to certain secrets of existence. We find the same woman again in Proserpine—Persephone who weaves the garment for her mother Demeter. Thus do the Imaginations change in the course of centuries, showing, however, that the secrets of Initiation are always working in the progressive stream of human evolution.

To come thoroughly near to these things, it is also necessary for us to permeate ourselves with the living feeling, that in all that happens in the world, not only those forces and beings are at work which outer senses and intellect can perceive, but that the spiritual is working everywhere. We must take this into our reckoning. What man today describes—and for some time past has described as spiritual or intellectual development, is the development of forces that are bound to the physical body. This condition has developed gradually. We know that there was in ancient times the normal condition of clairvoyance. This gradually ebbed away and died down, and what we call spiritual today is altogether bound to the physical man. It is true that with the Mystery of Golgotha something great and mighty entered the evolution of humanity—so great that it will only be able to be understood in its fullness in the course of time. What man had hitherto was a kind of tradition. With the last relics of atavistic clairvoyant power, the writers of the Gospels wrote down what had happened. That, as I say, was a last exertion of the old powers. Now we are once more beginning, with a newly awakened, newly discovered power of clairvoyance, to understand the first truths of the Mystery of Golgotha. We must realise that coming ages will penetrate more and more deeply into these secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha. We are only at the beginning, but we are indeed beginning.

The impulse, however, of the Mystery of Golgotha has been working ever since the moment when the life of Christ passed through the Earth. Had the Christ-Impulse only been able to work through that which men were capable of understanding, they would only have had very little of Christ in the past centuries.

I have often given two examples—and I might give many more—to show how the Christ works in the human soul, in that which passes through mankind's historic evolution, but of which men know nothing. Truly, what the Emperor Constantine knew of the Christ-Impulse when he himself, being converted, made Christianity the State religion, was very little. But the whole arrangement which came about by his victory—the victory of Constantine, son of Constantius Chlorus, over Maxentius—was such that we see the Mystery of Golgotha at work on every hand. The Sibylline Books were consulted by Maxentius. I mentioned it in the Leipzig Lecture-Cycle a year ago. They told him how he should act, over against the advancing army of Constantine. Moreover, he had a dream. In obedience to his dream and to the Sibylline Books, he, with an army many times stronger, went forth from the city to meet Constantine—a grave error, according to all the rules of war.

Constantine also dreamed. He dreamed that he would be victorious if he let the symbol of the Cross of Christ be carried before his army, and he did so.

Not through all human wisdom of which one could partake at that time, but by dreams, all these things were decided. Something was working through these dreams which could not be understood or received into consciousness. None the less, it was the living impulse of Christ. Truly, these men could not understand what was working in them—livingly, actively carrying forward the evolution of the world, determining for that time the face of the European Continent.

Again we find an epoch when we observe men—not only with reason and intellect but with their faculty of feeling—wrangling with one another about all manner of dogmatic questions. These dogmas seem very strange to the ‘enlightened’ people of today. The question, for instance, whether it is right to receive the Holy Communion in one or in two forms, and the like ... Yet we know what an important part these conflicts played, for they subsequently worked themselves out in the Hussite movement, in Wycliffe and in others. There were all these conflicts, showing how little the intellect of man could reach to what the Christ-Impulse was in its reality. Where, then, did the Christ-Impulse really appear, in an important historic moment? This, too, I have often indicated. In a peculiar kind of vision, the Christ-Impulse manifested itself in a shepherd maid—the Maid of Orleans. We must know what this signifies. It represents a kind of helping hand, held out by the super-sensible, the spiritual forces that worked into the feeling of man at a time when they could not yet work into human concepts. In Joan of Arc it is particularly interesting to see how this happened. Her inner being was opened, as it were. But it was not that part of her inner life which was bound to the physical body. It was the perception of her ethereal and astral being that was spiritually opened, so much so that we find in her case a true analogy to the events of Initiation.

Recently, you will remember, at an appropriate season we spoke of the story of Olaf Asteson, who slept through the days after Christmas and did not reawaken until the day of the Three Kings, the 6th of January. In this connection we remarked, that in the season when the outer physical rays of the Sun have the least power, the spiritual power enveloping the Earth is greatest. Therefore the Christmas Festival is rightly placed in the season when the darkness is physically greatest. Then it is that illumination comes over the soul that is capable of illumination. Therefore, the legend tells, it was just in this season that Olaf Asteson attuned his inner life of soul, so that it was taken hold of by those forces which as spiritual light pass from the Sun into the aura of the Earth, at the time when the outer forces of the Sun are weakest. Until the 6th of January he really underwent an entry into the spiritual world.

The soul of the Maid of Orleans had to be kindled for a great historic mission. There had to be present in her soul the impulses that surge and weave their way throughout the world with the Christ-Impulse. They had to be there in her soul. How should they enter her? They could indeed have entered her, if at some time in her life she had undergone an experience similar to that of Olaf Asteson; if she had slept for the thirteen days after Christmas and had awakened on the 6th of January. And so indeed it was. Though she did not do so in the way of Olaf Asteson, still in a certain sense she underwent in sleep this time which is so favourable to Initiation. She underwent it in the last thirteen days of her embryonal life. She was borne by her mother, so as to pass through the Christmas season in the body of her mother in the last thirteen days of her embryo life. For she was born on the 6th January. That is the birthday of Joan of Arc. Thus she passed through the very time in which the spiritual forces weave and work most strongly in the Earth's aura.

Therefore we need not wonder, if even outer documents relate that on that 6 January 1412, the villagers ran hither and thither, feeling that something momentous had happened,—though what it was that happened on that 6th of January they did not know until a later time, when the Maid of Orleans fulfilled her mission. For one who penetrates into the spiritual facts, it is of great significance to find it recorded in our calendar of births that Joan of Arc was born on the 6th January.

Thus, even in such facts as shine out far and wide in history, we see how necessary it is to pass through an understanding of the spiritual and thence to return to earthly affairs, for it is only then that we can fully understand the latter.

I have put this before you once more in order to show how old and dry and arid has become what is commonly known as the spiritual and intellectual culture of our time. He who can understand anything of the deeper impulses flowing through the evolution of the world and humanity, will realise that we must now be approaching a renewal, wherein we ourselves must play an active part through our understanding of and longing for the spiritual world. The more intensely we realise that a renewal is necessary, the better shall we find the possibility to co-operate.

With pale and petty changes and reforms of the old, we cannot serve this future. Radically we must renew the spiritual life of humanity. Great as is the difference between ‘spiritual science’ in our sense of the word, and that which is taught about the spiritual life in wide circles in the outer world—equally great will be the difference between the civilisation of the future and that of today. And if the people of today find it so easy to judge the pursuits of spiritual science fantastic, foolish and absurd, it only means that they describe as foolishness and as absurdity all that will dominate the spiritual culture of the future.

Yet, in precisely such a time, a rebirth of the life of the human soul must take place. All branches of human life must find their way into the impulses of this renewal, this rebirth. And among other things, all the artistic life must come near again to Initiation. These are the real reasons why we with our Goetheanum had to make the attempt to create a beginning—I have often emphasised that it is only a beginning—which, with all its imperfections, is nevertheless related in all detail to what the science of Initiation has to say for our time.

The results of spiritual science must come to life in our souls. As a living and vital result they must find expression in the outer form. By this alone can that which is arising in our Goetheanum have its corresponding value. Then it will indeed have its value—not as anything complete, but as a new beginning. Would that there were an intensive consciousness in our circle of the intimate relation that exists between the spiritual science which we have been seeking to acquire for all these years, and that which our Building contains in every line, in every feature. If we ourselves are once filled with this recognition, then we shall be able to say to the world through our Goetheanum what must needs be said. Then we shall look with satisfaction into that future which will be destined to create, out of the primitive beginnings of this Building, something increasingly complete and perfect, it is true, yet in the same style and character.

In these two final lectures I shall try to deal with as many as possible of the questions before us. In a preliminary outline, such as has been offered in this series, the main purpose is to learn more accurately, in the way that can be given by Spiritual Science, the path taken within the human organism by substances external to man, and also their counter-effects. If we have a complete bird's eye view, as it were, of the way in which any substance operates, we have at the same time an indication of its therapeutic value, and can use our own judgment. To use individual judgment is far better than to keep to prescriptions which say that is for this and the other for that. On this occasion, I shall again start from something apparently remote, in order to reach something very near to us all. Among the written questions put to me, one continually reappears, and it must, of course, be of interest to you all—the question of heredity in general. Both in judging healthy—or at least relatively healthy—persons and the sick, it plays an extremely important part.

In the materialistic biology of the present day this heredity is only studied in a very abstract manner. Certainly it is not studied in such a way as to provide much practical use in life. But if we give it earnest and careful study, we shall find it remarkable (at least to the exoteric student, whereas the esoterist knows it as an obvious law) that all that mankind needs to know about the world and its relations, reveals itself somewhere in an externally visible form. There is always something that reveals externally those secret but—for mankind—most effective forces of nature. And if we investigate heredity we must keep that very specially in mind for on the other hand all the factors associated with heredity are continually confused and concealed by illusions, so that sound judgment becomes most difficult. If a judgment is formed on a question of heredity, there are always other phenomena to which it does not apply. For indeed, the facts of heredity are wrapped in the most powerful illusions which spring from the character of its law. But the very nature of this law implies that its regularity does not always become obvious. The manifestations of heredity follow a pattern of law, but one very hard to regulate. Just as the horizontal position of the arms of a balance depends on a special law, but is upset by adding to the weight of one side or the other, so that the law is difficult to regulate—so is it also, we may say, with the operation of heredity. It is a similar to that of the horizontal tendency of the scales; but it is sealed through a wide range of varying manifestations. This is due to the fact that always in heredity different elements, male and female, play their parts. The male always transmits what man owes to earthly existence, what he owes to earth-forces; whereas the female organism is more apt to transmit the cosmic influence from beyond the earth. We might express this difference as follows. Earth makes continual demands on the man; the earth organises his forces. Earth is the cause from which the male sexuality originates. On woman the heavens, as it were, make continual demands; they cause her shape, and prevail in all the internal processes of her organisation. This contrast may remind you of something already touched upon in these discussions. Now there follows this result; suppose a female being comes into existence through conception, and develops; it is inclined to become more and more attuned to the extra-terrestrial processes, to be taken up as it were by the heavens. If a male being develops it becomes more and more inclined to be taken hold of by the earth. Thus heavens and earth actually co-operate, for neither acts exclusively nor on one sex alone, but in the female the arm of the scale rises towards the heavens and in the male it inclines to the terrestrial. It is a strict law but is subject to variation, and hence arises the following result. In woman, the organism includes internal tendencies which wage permanent contest with the terrestrial elements. But the strange thing is that this only holds good with regard to her own individual organism, and not in the terms of life and the seed. This contest between cosmic and telluric forces is restricted in woman to all the processes apart from the formation of the ovule, that is to say from the organs which serve the functions of reproduction. Thus woman continually withdraws her organisation from the inherent forces of reproduction; the organs surrounding the reproductive tract are continually kept back. And we might say that there is a tendency to transmit through the male what is contained in the reproductive forces and can therefore be inherited. In woman there is a tendency to withdraw from this heredity—and concurrently in her own oogenous powers there is the stronger tendency of inheritance.

So we must ask how the human community can counteract the destructive forces of heredity? For we know, do we not, that heredity finds no barrier between the spiritual and the physical. For instance, in families subject to mental disorders, these may alternate in successive generations with diabetes; there is thus a metamorphosis which swings to and fro. Therefore it is a matter of immense urgency to find out how to shield mankind from the ravages of heredity. The chief preventative measure is first and foremost to do everything to preserve and improve the health of women, for in that case, the extra-telluric influence is drawn more actively into our earth process, and those processes which work continuously to transmit the harmful influences of heredity through the germ, can be combatted through the maternal organism. Thus a community which gives thought and care to the health of their women, wages war against the harmful influence which springs from the earth-forces in heredity, by means of an appeal to the forces proceeding from outside the earth, and acting as a counterbalance. For these cosmic celestial forces have, as it were, their earthly accumulator solely in the organism of a woman. This is most important, and holds good for all forces of telluric and cosmic origin; it is universally true. It becomes conspicuously evident in the case of hæmophiliacs, of so-called “bleeders.” It would be well if there were less vague talk about heredity, and more study where concrete facts point unmistakably to its operation. Observe this as shown among “bleeders.” You will find a striking phenomenon, known to you all, and illustrating what I have just pointed out. In the family descent among hæmophiliacs bleeding itself only appears in males, but the transmission of the illness occurs only through females. A woman whose father was a hæmophiliac, though she does not exhibit the disease herself, is liable to bequeath it to her male descendants. She gets it because she is part of the family. The males, however, become bleeders. But if these marry women free from hæmophiliac descent, the disease is not transmitted.

If you analyse the aforesaid facts, you will find a striking concrete expression of my statements, and indeed the facts of hæmophilia are far clearer proofs than all the recent experiments by Weismann, etc., of what happens in heredity. And they are also important for the general judgment of the human bodily organisation; this organisation must be to some degree estimated in the light of that which is apt to influence it.

What is the actual basis of hæmophilia? This can in fact be detected by superficial consideration. The blood does not coagulate properly, so that the slightest external scratch or prick may cause the hæmophiliac to bleed to death; they may die from attacks of nose bleeding, or the extraction of a tooth, for what would lead to coagulation in other persons does not do so in the case of a hæmophiliac. So the blood of these persons must possess some constituent or quality, which counteracts the power of coagulation. If this quality exists in too potent a degree, it is not neutralised by the external forces which begin to work from outside when the blood coagulates. For coagulation of the blood is caused by forces working from outside. If the blood possesses a quality which does not allow these external forces to prevail, there is an excessive tendency to fluidity of the blood.

It is easy to detect that a strong tendency to excessive fluidity is connected with the whole formation of the human ego. And not superficially but deeply, and with that which manifests in the human ego as will, not with that which manifests as “Ideation.” The constitutional tendency to excessive fluidity in the human blood is associated with all that either strengthens or debilitates the human will. And there is a fine historical example which proves that certain of nature's secrets are accessible to a proper interpretation. Both history and science are aware of the Engadine case; you will probably know it—the case of those two young girls of the Engadine district who have furnished us with a light on some profound—and medically helpful—aspects of human nature. Both of these young women came of hæmophiliac stock, and both formed and kept the steadfast and courageous resolution to refrain from marriage. So they have their place in history as personal champions of the fight against hereditary hæmophilia.

Of course we must lay stress on the real core of this case. It is certainly not peculiar to all the girls in hæmophiliac families to withdraw in this way from propagation. For such a course of action a strong subjective will must be developed; just the kind of strong subjective will that operates in the ego, and not in the astral body. Such a peculiar will power must have distinguished both of those young women. They must have both had something in their egos, in their power of will, that was connected in some manner with the forces operative in bleeders. If such forces are augmented in a conscious way, this could be done more easily in such cases than in persons who are non-bleeders. A just estimate of this interaction leads us to look into the specific forces and properties of the blood and their interplay with the extra-human world. And in studying those properties of blood that are associated with the conscious will, we can learn something of the general connection between the human will and the forces external to man. Certain of these external forces have a particular inner kinship with the forces of the human will, a kinship based on the course of evolution for the very last to be separated out in the natural realm, has been all that is connected with the conscious will of mankind. That is the latest precipitation to emerge in the realm of nature.

Let us now study something in external nature which is among the creations by which nature framed mankind, and which shows by its inherent qualities its association with that formative process of humanity. A substance of that description has long been a subject of study, and there are great difficulties in surveying the results because it is hard to make the forces preserved by atavistic medicine into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries active still in the intellectual modern man. The substance thus studied was antimony and all that is linked with it. Antimony is a most remarkable substance; it has attracted the most profound attention from all who have had much to do with it, including the legendary Basilius Valentinus. Certain attributes of this substance will reveal the peculiar manner in which it is interwoven with the whole process of nature. Consider, for example, what is perhaps the least of antimony's attributes: its extraordinary affinity to other metals and other non-metallic substances, so that it often appears in combination with other substances, especially with sulphur compounds. Now we have already touched on the specific operation of sulphur in this respect and antimony tends to appear together with the sulphur compounds of other substances. This inclination of antimony shows how it is interwoven in the nature-process. Yet another quality is even more significant. Whenever possible, it forms sheafs of needle-shaped crystals. That is, its urge is along a straight line, outwards and away from the earth. Whenever antimony collects longitudinally, we behold the lines along which the forces of crystallisation are directed from outer space to the earth. For the formative forces in crystallisation which generally work in more regular patterns, produce in antimony the spear-shaped and sheaflike structures. In this way antimony reveals how it is inserted into the whole of nature. The characteristics of the smelting process also indicate antimony as revealing—or betraying—the forces of crystallisation. By means of the smelting process we can obtain antimony in a delicately fibrous form.

Then there is this further quality: if antimony is exposed to temperatures it can oxidize—burn in a peculiar manner. The white smoke that forms from it reveals a certain kinship to cold bodies and attaches itself to them. The well-known “flowers” of antimony produce something in which the force of crystallisation as it were discharges itself in contact with other bodies.

And the most remarkable of all antimonial properties, is its peculiar form of resistance to all the forces which I have grouped together as sub-terrestrial, in a certain sense; those forces that play through electricity and magnetism. Suppose that we treat antimony with electrolysis, bring it to the cathode, and touch the antimonial deposit on the cathode with a metal point—the antimony produces tiny explosions. This active resistance of antimony to electric processes—if the substance is given a little stimulus—is most characteristic and distinctive, revealing its real position in the whole process of nature, no other substance reveals its interactions so emphatically.

We can only interpret the lessons so graphically presented by that substance, on the supposition that the forces present in nature are working throughout, are in fact ubiquitous; and that if certain substances show their operation to a marked degree, it is because the forces are especially concentrated in those substances. What operates in antimony is present throughout nature; the antimonising power—if we may coin the term—is everywhere. It has also a regulative action in man, so that in normal conditions human beings draw the antimonising force from the extra-telluric sphere. That is to say, mankind draws from the cosmos what in concentrated form is manifested as antimony. In normal conditions man does not have recourse to the antimonising force as present on earth and in its specific concentrated form, but turns towards the external, extra-telluric antimonial force. So we must obviously ask: What is the extra-telluric form of this antimonising force?

Speaking in terms of the planets, it is the co-operation of Mercury, Venus and the Moon. If these three do not operate separately but together their action is not specifically of the nature of mercury, copper or silver; but is comparable with the action of antimony in the earth. And of course this can be and must be investigated, by observing and registering the effects of such constellations upon man—constellations, that is to say, in which the three forces of Moon, Mercury and Venus neutralise each other, through the aspects of opposition or square. If all three are in such an aspect of neutralisation, there is the precise interaction which in the case of antimony is laid hold of by the earth. In all the antimony in and on the earth, the same force is exerted from our planet itself, as is exerted by these three planetary bodies upon the earth.

Here it is necessary to warn against a mistake. The constitution the earth is such as to make it erroneous to refer piecemeal, so to speak, to such substances as antimony. All the antimony on the earth is a unity in the earth's structure, just as all the earth's stores of silver or of gold are unities. If you remove separate lumps of antimony from the earth, you are simply extracting or amputating a part of that antimonial body which is incorporated into the earth. We have now attempted to delineate all the perceptible effect of antimonial action: and here, as everywhere in nature, actions meet counteractions. This oscillation between action and reaction, is just what gives rise to bodily form.

Let us then look for those forces which act counter to the antimonial forces. They reveal themselves if we are able to detect that the antimonial forces act on man at the moment in which something presses outwards which is regulated while within him. It is these antimonial forces which are operative in the coagulation of the blood. Wherever the consistency of the bloodstream shows a tendency to coagulate the antimonising force is active. Wherever the blood tends to withdraw from coagulation the counteracting forces are at work. So that hæmophiliacs manifest the forces antagonistic to antimony curiously enough. And these anti-antimonising forces are identical with those for which I should like to coin the term “albuminising forces,” the albumen forming forces, which work in such a health-giving way—that they promote the formation of albumen. For, let us emphasise once more: the forces that hinder coagulation are the albuminising forces.

Thus we arrive at some knowledge of the relationships between the antimonising and albuminising forces in the human organism. In my belief, careful study of the interplay of these two processes would reap very important harvests of knowledge as regards disease and its cure. For what are the processes which form albumen—the albuminising processes? They are those by virtue of which all that is plastic and formative in nature is incorporated into the human or the animal organism, in order to supply its actual substance. And the antimonising forces are those which, working from the outside, so to speak, take the part of the artist, the sculptor, giving the substance which builds the organs its form.

Thus the antimonial forces have a certain kinship to the internal organising forces of the organs. Please take as a concrete example, one organ, the alimentary canal. It is of course internally organised. You are able to follow up its inner structure, without considering the purpose it serves, or the manner in which food stuffs are carried along it and worked upon. It is possible, that is to say, to separate in the abstract the internal processes of the organ and those that take place in working upon the substance introduced from outside. This is an important separation, for the processes are indeed different. In the organ itself, the antimonising force works in man. For man is actually antimony, if we disregard all the ingredients brought into him from the external world. Man himself is antimony. But the internal organic formative force must not be overloaded with the antimonising force in the normal course of life, for the effect would be excessively stimulating, in fact a form of poisoning. But, if strong stimulation is necessary, we may supply antimony to the organism—which normally must not be supplied. The effect of antimony owing to these peculiar properties, varies greatly according as it is applied from within or without. If it is administered from within it is necessary to dilute it so far as to make it absorbed by the upper bodily sphere of man. If you are thus able to introduce antimony into the upper sphere, it will have an amazing stimulant effect on disturbed organ formations and internal organic processes. Thus very fine potencies of antimony can be most useful in certain forms of typhus or typhoid.

In the other case the effect is somewhat different, and is achieved by using lower potencies of antimony externally, in ointments, salves, and so forth. There may be occasions when it is desirable to have recourse to higher potencies in external application; but as a general rule, external application will have their beneficial effect in lower potencies.

This remedial substance is an extremely useful remedy in many different directions. It is at work within the law of polarity just referred to, yet shows constant slight oscillations. Thence arises a rule that should not be disregarded. Antimony should be administered internally by preference, in the treatment of individuals of very strong will power, and externally by preference, in treating persons of weaker will. Here is a first line of differentiation. Antimony represents, within the mineral realm, a substance with an inner kinship to the human will; that is to say, as the human will becomes more conscious, it feels more inclined to call forth the counter-effects to antimonial action. Human will has a destructive effect on all the forces previously described, constituting the characteristic operation of antimony. On the other hand, all that builds up the human constitution under the influence of thought and especially of unconscious thought—including the still unconscious thought forces at work in the child—all these are supported by the antimonial forces; antimony is, as it were, their ally. Thus if antimony is introduced, by any route, into the human organism and is thus able to exert its own properties, it forms a strong phantom (scaffolding or network) within the body. The internal organic forces are thus stimulated, and there is nothing left for co-operation with the substances brought into the human organism. There follow fits of vomiting and diarrhœa—showing that the effect is confined to the organs, instead of including their surroundings. The same is true in the counteracting process. You will be able to counter injurious effects of antimony in yourself by the methods instinctively employed by people when they want to keep their own circulatory and rhythmic processes regular. They drink coffee, through which the rhythmic processes are made even and harmonious. Please note that I am stating a fact; I make no recommendation here, for it may be very harmful in other ways, to relieve the ego of the task of regulating these human rhythms. If man is not strong enough in his soul to regulate his rhythmic processes, then coffee can bring about a certain harmony. And so in cases of antimonial poisoning coffee acts in some degree an antidote, restoring the rhythms between the working of the inner organic forces and their surrounding. For there is a regular interplay through rhythm. Indeed the real reason for drinking coffee, is to establish a continuous regulation of rhythm between our internal organs and what is happening in their vicinity to the food-stuffs we have consumed.

From this point we are led to inquire into the albuminising processes. These are reinforced—that is to say, all those processes are reinforced that lie on the other side of the dividing line, where there is no longer the inner organising force of the organs, but where they unfold their external digestive activity. All the mechanical processes of the movement of the intestines, and of the other digestive activities, are closely interwoven with the albuminising forces, which are virtually the formative forces of albumen, i.e., the complementary polar opposites of the antimonising forces.

Now I must once more refer to something already dealt with. That is the instructive object of study—or subject, if you like—the shell formation of the oyster. To a somewhat less degree the same occurs in the calcareous secretion in the egg. What is the key to these phenomena? What precisely is an oyster shell and egg shell? It is a product that the oyster or the essential substance of the egg must eject, because were it retained it would kill them. This shell formation is necessary for the preservation of life. And so, when eating oysters, we consume that life process which is manifested externally in the formation of the shells. (I put the facts to you in these simple terms; if I sought to impress current science, more intricate and technical terms would of course be necessary.) In eating the oyster we eat this albuminising process, a process which is the antithesis to the antimonising process. Through its absorption we promote and stimulate all that leads in man to typhoid manifestations. The consumption of oysters is an extraordinarily interesting operation. It activates the formative force, that is the albuminising force, within the human abdomen. This relieves the head, drawing certain forces downwards, so that after eating oysters man feels much less burdened by the forces which tend to work in his head. Oysters empty the head, in a sense. And we have need of developing the albuminising forces continually, for we cannot let our head continually be charged with formative forces. But the habitual epicure in oysters exaggerates this, and strives at all costs for an empty head. By so doing, he increases the possibility of a downward eruption of certain forces towards the abdomen, as I have already described, that is to say he promotes the tendency in the lower organic sphere to diarrhœa and typhoid. And as you will readily perceive, such a condition demands antimonial treatment. There would be good results in stimulating the forces to which appeal must be made, if the typhlitic tendency is to be combated in its innermost stronghold, by administration of antimony externally and internally at the same time; especially rubbing with antimonial ointment and simultaneously taking by the mouth antimony in high potency. These would be mutually regulated and thus react beneficially on the typhlitic tendency.

Such are treatments that attempt to realise man within his whole universal surroundings. The significance of such a method is shown if you investigate man's relationships and reactions to such manifestations in nature as arise from a certain defensive resistance to the direct telluric forces. Plants are able to defend themselves against these direct telluric forces; they store up much of their formative power for their seasons of blossom and seed. Our most frequent type of plant structure, of which most edible plants are examples, is based on the employment of a definite amount of telluric power for the formation of the plant itself. If, however, the plant has a defensive attitude to these telluric forces, it becomes exposed to the extra-telluric forces, when the final processes of fructification and seed-formation ensue; and thus the plant becomes something with an urge to contemplate the world from the same point of vantage as the higher beings of the realms above the vegetable. The plant shows an urge to perceive. But the plant has no specialised structures for that purpose: it remains a plant, and yet it has the urge to develop something analogous to the formation of the human eye. But no eye can develop, in what is, after all, neither a human nor an animal body but the body of a plant. And so the plant becomes a deadly nightshade, Atropa Belladonna. I have tried to show by means of pictures what takes place in the emergence of the fruit of belladonna. That plant has already in its roots the force culminating in the growth of its black berries, and with this it becomes akin to all that urges in the human organism towards moulding the form and beyond. It urges towards things only possible in the sensory sphere, lifting man out of the world of his organisation into the sphere of the senses. A process of extraordinary interest occurs, if small potentised quantities of belladonna are administered. This is because it bears a striking resemblance to the process of awakening from sleep which is still interwoven with dreams. In such an awakening, interspersed with dreams, the process is within the limits of normality. In awakening, when perception has not yet begun but when sense perception is still inwardly potentised to the permeation of the consciousness with dreams, there is actually always a kind of deadly nightshade activity in man. And belladonna poisoning consists in the provocation of this same process that occurs when in awaking dreams still hold their sway; but the process called forth in man by belladonna poison is made lasting, not taken up into consciousness, but the transition phenomena remain. This is the interesting point, that the processes which are caused in man by toxic action, are of such a nature that at the right tempo they are part of the whole human organisation.

As I have already described, the birth of the belladonna means a frantic and excessive urge towards becoming man. And further it might be said that the awakening from sleep in man has something of the nature of an urge towards atropa belladonna: but an urge held in leash and tuned down: confined to the moment of waking. Now suppose you wish to relieve the body of the internal albuminising processes, influencing the organism so that the too powerful albuminising is retarded and the bodily event, so to speak, deflected towards the soul, so that the bodily processes become hallucinations—then give potentised doses of belladonna. Thus you will lift something into the soul, something of which you wish to relieve the body. This is the essence of what we meet in the usual macroscopic operation of belladonna—although here again full of perplexities and illusions, as I have already pointed out. Of course, if you give the human being a shock that prevents the normal passage over from the state of awakening to that of full waking consciousness, and makes permanent the transitional state—well, you kill him. For man is always in danger of death during that brief transition of awakening—but we awake so rapidly that we escape that peril. Such are the interesting inter-actions between what is accepted as normal, and is sound in measure and tempo, and what becomes anti-normal as soon as it exceeds that measure and tempo.

It seems to me that these were the processes that the physicians of old time sought ever and again to pursue. If they spoke of the creation of the Homunculus, they did so because their surviving clairvoyant faculties revealed something resembling the phantom of antimony. For there appeared to them, in the forming process which they carried out in their laboratory when antimony unfolded its forces, something projected into it by their own nature, which fights against the power of antimony as albuminising force. That appeared to them as a definite force. That which normally remains concealed within the human organism, they projected externally, and thus they beheld the Homunculus, who appeared during the various metamorphoses of antimony. What appeared in the interplay of these processes and metamorphoses they saw as the Homunculus.

(For a different translation of this lecture, see: The Proclamations to the Magi and the Shepherds)

Let us begin to-day by considering certain questions connected with this time of festival, with this season which yearly renews the memory of the Mystery of Golgotha, renews also a direct experience of it in our feeling.

We really have three such times of festival in Christian tradition: the Christmas, the Easter and the Whitsuntide festivals. And we may say that, each in a different way, these three festivals bring man into connection, into relationship, with that in which the Christian tradition sees the meaning of all earth-evolution. These three festivals also differ as regards the human soul-forces. Christmas appeals more to the feeling and in a certain sense is the most popular festival, because to understand it requires a deepening of the feeling-life, and because it is the most readily approachable for the large masses of humanity. The Easter festival, which requires that we raise ourselves to an understanding of the real Mystery of Golgotha, of the entrance of a super-sensible Being into human evolution, is the most challenging to the human powers of understanding. It is a festival which lifts human understanding to the highest level, and which, although it is also generally celebrated, cannot however be popular in the same sense as the Christmas festival.

The third, the Whitsun festival, establishes a relationship particularly between the human will and the super-sensible world, the world to which the Christ-Being as such belongs. The carrying over of will-impulses into execution in the world is brought to human consciousness through a right understanding of the Whitsun festival.

Thus what we may call the secret of Christianity is given form in these yearly celebrations. The way in which the Christmas mystery touches man can be brought before our consciousness in the most manifold ways; and with the recurrence of the Christmas festival during the course of the years, we have considered the Christmas-Thought from the most varied standpoints. This time let us call to mind something which can become clear to any one who considers the Christmas mystery in the light of the Gospels.

In the Gospels we find a twofold announcement of the birth of Christ Jesus. One annunciation is made to the poor shepherds out in the fields. An Angel announces the birth of Christ Jesus to them—in a dream, or however one may wish to call it. Here we have to do with the perception of this event through inner soul-forces, soul-forces which, in the case of these shepherds in the vicinity where Christ Jesus was born, were in a special condition. And a second annunciation is set forth in the Gospels, the annunciation to the Three Kings, the Three Wisemen from the Orient. We are told that they followed a star which announced to them the advent of Christ Jesus on the earth.

Thus we are shown two ways by which this earlier humanity reached what we may call its higher knowledge. This is another example of something which is never properly grasped in the present age. To-day we usually conceive of human beings as possessing thought and perception, and we imagine this thinking and perceiving, in fact, all use of the inner soul-forces, to have been in all past centuries and millenia essentially the same—only more primitive—as it is to-day. We know from anthroposophical spiritual science how the soul-constitution of man has changed with the passage of time; how differently in ancient times—for instance, seven or eight thousand years after the beginning of the post-Atlantean period, or even earlier—humanity regarded its own life and the nature of the surrounding universe. Moreover we know how this soul-constitution underwent many changes before it became that reasoning analytical faculty existing to-day, which in its approach to the outer world knows only the purely sense-perceptible aspect of things. This evolution takes its starting-point from a certain ancient instinctive clairvoyance and proceeds through the state found in our modern soul-condition, to return again in future to a clairvoyant perception of the world which will be permeated by full human consciousness.

At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth the ancient instinctive clairvoyance was already greatly dimmed. Men's souls were indeed differently constituted than they are to-day, although they no longer had the old clairvoyance; gone also were their old wise ways of fathoming the universe. The ancient wisdom-teachings as well as the old instinctive clairvoyance had grown very dim as the Mystery of Golgotha approached humanity. But remnants of both still existed, and we are clearly shown in the Gospels, if we rightly understand them, that this was the case. Such remnants were still present among single favoured individuals. We may recognise as such the poor shepherds out in the fields, who in the piety of their hearts possessed a certain clairvoyant capacity of a dreamlike nature. And we also recognise as such the Three Magi from the East, who are pictured as standing on the topmost rung of human society, and had retained from ancient times a capacity gained from a certain stream of wisdom, giving them insight into the course of world-events. Thus, on the one hand, the poor shepherds could be approached in a kind of dream-experience, in inward perception, by the event of Christ Jesus' birth, while, on the other, the Three Magi from the East developed a science which enabled them, by the study of world-phenomena, the appearances in the heavens, to be aware of significant events taking place open the earth quite beyond ordinary human ken.

Thus there are pointed out to us two quite definite, but widely differing, modes of knowledge. Let us turn our attention for the moment to what was present as the last remnant of an ancient stream of wisdom in the Three Wisemen from the Orient. We are shown clearly that these Wisemen were able to read the riddles in the movements of the stars. In the existing descriptions we are made aware of an ancient knowledge of the stars whereby access was gained to the mysteries of the starry worlds and wherein the secrets of human events were also revealed. This ancient knowledge of the stars was something quite different from that of to-day. Our astronomy is in a certain sense also prophetic; it can prophesy eclipses of the sun and moon and so on, but it is merely mathematical and mechanical. It only speaks of space and time-relationships in so far as these may be represented mathematically, whereas the ancient wisdom of, the stars perceived in these movements something of higher significance, remote from space and time, taking place in the inner life of man. If we examine the science of humanity in olden times, we find its content essentially one of this wisdom of the stars. Men sought in the stars for a deeper understanding of earthly happenings. For to them the starry world was not the abstract mechanical thing it has become for modern humanity. For them the starry world was something full of life. They felt the presence of an essential Being in the universe, in the case of every planet. By means of an inner soul-language, in a certain sense, they even spoke with the individual planets, as we to-day speak merely from man to man in external words. People were conscious of inward soul-experience which was a reflection of what was going on out in universal space in the movement of the stars. This was a living, spiritualized way of looking at the universe. And man felt himself connected as a soul and spirit with this universe. This wisdom of the world was fostered in schools, in what may be described as Mystery schools, where the pupils were prepared in a careful, intimate and inner way to gain an understanding of the movements of the stars such as might illuminate human life upon the earth.

Of what nature were these preparations? These preparations for a knowledge of the starry heavens and their influences were of such a character that, even then, in the age of instinctive clairvoyance, the pupil was led to develop a more wide-awake life than normally. The large mass of mankind had a kind of instinctive clairvoyance, corresponding to a state of soul which was less wide awake than the one normal for us to-day. In ancient periods of human evolution people were not able to think as clearly as we can now. Geometry and mathematics as we know them could not then exist. The whole of life between birth and death had more of a dreaming character; but just because it was dreamlike it had a far more lively way of perceiving the surrounding universe than does our waking life to-day. And the strange thing was that the pupils of those ancient Mysteries existing 2000 years, or even 1000 years, before the Mystery of Golgotha (such men as the Magi may be counted among the last remaining disciples of this training), were trained in a knowledge which was very similar to our geometry and mathematics. Euclid was the first to give geometry to humanity; but he merely communicated it to humanity in general. What Euclid gave in the way of geometry had already lived in the Mysteries for thousands of years as something communicated only to the most carefully selected Mystery-pupils. It had a different effect then than in later times. It may seem strange and paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true, that what our children learn as arithmetic and geometry was taught in the Mystery-schools to selected individuals who were considered specially endowed and so accepted in the Mysteries.

To-day we often hear reference made to the mysterious matters supposedly taught in the Mysteries. Actually, in their purely abstract content, these mysterious matters are none other than those taught to children to-day. They are nothing else; and their Mystery-character lies not in the fact of their being unknown to us, but in the different way in which at that time they were taught. It is quite a different matter to call upon the reasoning of children through the content of geometry in an age in which, from the moment of awaking until falling asleep again man lives in a wide-awake consciousness, than it was to present these matters to specially selected human beings, whose consciousness was more mature, during the age of ancient instinctive clairvoyance and dreaming consciousness.

Our modern conceptions of these things are by no means always accurate. For example, there is a poem to Varuna in Oriental literature describing Varuna as appearing in the air, as wafting like the wind through the woods; Varuna appears in the lightning flashing out of the dripping clouds; in the human heart when the will is roused to action; in the heavens when the sun moves across them. Varuna is to be found on the mountains in the juice of the Soma.

What the juice of the Soma is, modern books profess not to know. To-day in our great learning we agree that we do not know what the juice of the Soma is, although there are people who drink it by the quart, and certainly know it very well from a certain standpoint. But it is a different matter to know these things—from the standpoint of the Mysteries than from the standpoint of waking consciousness in profane feeling.

You can read to-day of the Philosopher's Stone, which was accounted precious in an age when the nature of substance was somewhat differently regarded than it is to-day. Again the historians of alchemy will tell you that the Philosopher's Stone is quite unknown. Here and there in my lectures I have indicated that the Philosopher's Stone is quite familiar to most human beings; they simply do not know its qualities, or why it is so named. But since it is used by the ton, it is very familiar to most human beings.

The facts are simply upon occasion quite different from the concepts we hold of them with our present-day abstract, theoretical grasp of things, so remote from life and reality. There is not even a true grasp of what it might mean to take in the sciences of arithmetic and geometry with quite another soul-constitution than we have to-day, with a mature soul-condition. I have referred to this particular type of Mystery-schooling in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”; but just such important things as these are usually not properly understood, they are not ordinarily understood in their real significance. The fact that the way in which people were approached with things constituted the very kernel of the Mysteries in ancient times is something which should be grasped. And it was thus also in the case of such purely mathematical considerations, the content of feeling and the human fullness of which Novalis still sensed when he felt mathematics to be like great poetry—something which most people now-a-days will not agree with. And it is to such grasping of the world, permeated as it was with feeling, but poured into mathematical mould, that the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was led. And when the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was thus brought to a mathematical understanding of the universe, he developed just such a world-outlook as that possessed by the Wisemen from the East, as they are described to us.

The mathematics of the universe, which have become so thoroughly abstract to us, revealed at that time something really living, because the revelation found completion in what was brought to understand it. Thus what sprang as science from an ancient culture, and was still preserved in its last fragments to the Magi, made possible the one annunciation, through the channel of the teachers of wisdom, through external science, the annunciation experienced by the Magi.

On the other hand, it was possible for the inner experience of the secrets of humanity to develop in human beings who, like the shepherds in the fields, had a special predisposition in this direction. In such cases the inner forces of man had to reach certain heights; then what took place in the world of men became direct imaginative perception, an instinctive, imaginative picture-perception. Thus, through inner vision, the poor shepherds in the fields partook in the annunciation: “God makes revelation of His Being in the heavenly heights, and His peace shall be with all men of good will.” Thus did the secrets of the universe speak to the innermost being of the poor shepherds in the fields, as well as to the utmost heights attainable to human wisdom at that time, to the Wisemen of the East. Thus the great mystery of earthly life was imparted from two different sides.

What did these Wisemen of the East experience? What was the special development brought about in the souls of these pupils through the introduction of mathematics into their soul-condition, when this was found especially mature and ready? Kant speaks of mathematics as being “a priori” truth. With “a priori” he means a truth which is present within us before our external, empirical knowledge, before our experience of it existed. This is mere word-wisdom; nothing at all is said with this “a priori”! A meaning attaches to it only when it can be shown by spiritual science that mathematics is something that rises up within us, that rises to consciousness out of man's inner being.

Whence does it come? It proceeds from the experiences we went through in the spiritual world before birth, or conception. There we lived in the great wide universe. There we experienced what could be experienced before we had bodily eyes and ears. There we had “a priori” experience, when considered in relation to our life on earth. These “a priori” experiences rise in an unconscious way out of our inner being into the sphere of consciousness. Unless modern man has a premonition of this, as had Novalis, he does not know that when he does mathematics, experiences of the time before conception and birth are rising up within him. But for a person with true insight into these matter the mathematical capacity is in itself a proof of man's life in the spiritual world before conception. As far as those are concerned for whom this is not a proof of pre-natal existence, the fact remains that they do not think thoroughly enough about life's phenomena and have no idea what the true origin of mathematics is.

The pupils of the ancient Mysteries who possessed that wise outlook, still extant in its last fragments in the Wisemen of the East, had the clear impression: “When we study the stars and apply our mathematical forms and reckoning to them, we are spreading out again over the outer reaches of universal space what we actually lived in before our birth.” And it seemed to such a pupil of the ancient Mysteries as though he must say: “Now I am living on earth; my eyes look out into universal space and see my spatial surroundings. In these same phenomena of the spatial universe I lived before my birth; there I myself counted from star to star what I now merely copy and symbolize in mathematics. With my innermost forces I moved from star to star, living in what I now merely draw.”

Thus they experienced again all they had gone through before birth, or conception, and consequently it was holy to them. They realized that they had lived in a spiritual world before they walked on earth. This knowledge of the world in which man lives before he descends to the earth was present in its last remnants in the Wisemen of the East, and by its means they knew of the advent of the Christ-Being.

Whence came this Christ-Being? He came out of that time which we live through between death and rebirth, and He united Himself with the life we live through between birth and death. For this reason the science that concerns itself with the world we live in between death and rebirth can unveil such a mystery as the Mystery of Golgotha. And out of this science announcement was made to the Magi of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christmas Mystery.

As man lives here on the earth and concerns himself with gaining knowledge of his surroundings, with developing impulses for his actions, for his social life, he has still another unconscious experience. He knows nothing of it; but just as he experiences the after-effects of his pre-natal life, so does he also experience what passes through the gates of death and becomes the content of life after death, namely, the forces already present like a seed between birth and death, which only come to their full blossoming in the life after death. These forces worked with great intensity in the ancient instinctive clairvoyance. And they worked in their last remnants in the poor shepherds in the fields because of their special piety. Moreover, it is in these forces especially that we live between falling asleep and awaking, when our souls are outside of our bodies in outer space. The soul then lives as it will live consciously in future when it has laid aside the physical body after death. These forces, which under special conditions can penetrate from the world of sleep and dream into waking life, were once very active in the ancient instinctive clairvoyance. And these the poor shepherds experienced, receiving through them a revelation of the Mystery of Golgotha from a different quarter than that from which the annunciation came to the three Magi.

What does one experience by means of the forces peculiar to man between death and rebirth when, as in the case of the Wisemen from the Orient, they are kindled in the life between birth and death? One experiences what takes place beyond what is earthly. One is borne away from the earth out into the world of the stars where we live between death and rebirth. This was the world into which the Wisemen of the East were led away from the earth out into cosmic space.

And what does one experience by means of the forces which rise up from the inner being of man, especially in the world of dreams? One experiences what goes on within the earth. Here the Tellurian forces, the forces of which we partake because we live in our bodies, are at work. These forces work particularly in what we live through between falling asleep and awaking. Here, too, we are in the outer world, but essentially in that outer world belonging to the earth.

You will say that this is a contradiction of the truth that we are outside of our bodies. But it is not a contradiction. We always perceive only what is external to ourselves; that wherein we live is never perceived. Only people who are especially ignorant about certain subjects, and who are bent on establishing a knowledge consisting solely of phrases, are capable of skipping lightly over such matters with their phrases and of saying, for example, that the point is not to found a science of the spirit upon knowledge gained outside man, but to add to natural science a science derived from man's inner being.

With such a torrent of phrases Darmstadt wisdom-schools may indeed be founded, but one may still remain a mere phrase-maker even when founding schools of wisdom. For rightly understood, the matter is as follows. We may indeed say that, to arrive at the super-sensible, the world must be described from within; but we must first get into the inner being and then look at what is external from outside the body, by looking back upon the body. Keyserling's talks concerning observation from the standpoint of the soul do not attempt to enter man's inner being, they merely use phrases.

The fact really is such that when we are in the condition experienced between falling asleep and awaking, we look back, we feel our way back, as it were, into our bodies. We feel what is of the earth in our bodies; for they are of the earth. The poor shepherds in the fields really, felt the revelation of the earth through their bodies when in a dreamlike condition, they perceived what was happening in the form of the perception of an angel's voice.

These are the two absolute contrasts: the Magi with their knowledge of the heavens, and the shepherds with their earth-revelation. And it corresponds completely to the Mystery of Golgotha that the revelation came from two such different quarters. For a heavenly Being, as yet untouched by earth, was descending to it, and this descent had to make itself known by means of the wisdom of the heavens, which knew that something heavenly was descending.

In the shepherds' wisdom we learn to know the earth by feeling our way into its weaving life as it perceived the descent of the heavenly Being. It is the same annunciation, only from another side. Wonderfully unified, we thus see what, although it was one and the same event, was announced in a twofold way to men.

And when we see how humanity received the event of Golgotha, we must say that, in regard to this and other matters, there were only the merest remnants of the ancient wisdom left to man. I have already shown how the Mystery of Golgotha was grasped in the first centuries of Christianity with the help of the fragments of an ancient wisdom known as Gnosis. From then on it became more and more a matter of trying to penetrate into the nature of the event of Golgotha with analytical reasoning powers alone. And in the 19th century naturalism gradually made its appearance in the confessional sphere. The super-sensible content of the event of Golgotha was no longer grasped at all, Christ became merely the “wise man of Nazareth”, naturalistically conceived. A new, spiritual grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha became necessary. The fact of the Mystery of Golgotha must not be confused with the way in which human understanding has dealt with this fact.

Now a soul-constitution such as the shepherds in the fields and the Wisemen of the East possessed still existed in its last fragmentary form at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. But all this changed in the course of human evolution. Everything changes and undergoes metamorphosis. What then became of the wisdom of the Eastern Magi? It has become our mathematics, with its knowledge of the heavens! The Magi possessed a super-earthly science based on sublime recollections of pre-natal life. All this has been shrunken and cramped into our mathematical, mechanical grasp of the heavens, so that we apply nothing but the laws of mathematics and mechanics to their phenomena. What we have in the way of mathematical astronomy is all that still rises up out of our inner being as the modern metamorphosis of what the Magi once possessed.

And looking at our external sense-knowledge, which is merely a perceiving with eyes and ears, we find it to be the externalized inner knowledge of the shepherds in the fields. What could once convey to the shepherds in the fields the inner secrets of earthly existence now permits only of that cold, natural-scientific observation of the outer world which is the offspring of the shepherds' wisdom. The child bears but slight resemblance to its mother. And our mathematics, our astronomy, are the offspring of the wisdom of the Magi.

Humanity had to go through this development. Our scientific researchers, sitting in their laboratories and clinics, have very little in common with the shepherds but theirs is a direct metamorphosis of the shepherds' wisdom. And our mathematicians likewise are in direct line of descent from the Eastern Wisemen. The outer has become the inner, and the inner, outer. And so we have indeed grown remote from the Mystery of Golgotha. We must become aware of this fact. We have become far removed indeed from such understanding. Perhaps many of those who call themselves preachers and ministers of Christianity in the official sense are the most remote from it of all.

The forces of knowledge, faith and feeling that live in man to-day can never penetrate through to the true being of the Mystery of Golgotha. It must be found entirely anew.

The wisdom of the Magi too has become dry mathematics, perceiving the heavens only in designs. It has become an inner thing. But inwardness must take on life once more. What was once outer must be built up again from within.

And now let us try to understand the content of a book such as my Occult Science from this standpoint. The Magi had a real penetration into the starry heavens; they saw what was spiritual there because they had insight into human pre-natal experience. This has become abstract in our mathematics. But the very same forces out of which we develop mathematics can be brought back to life, and intensified as imaginative vision. Then there is born from out our inner being a world which, although we create it within us, we see as the outer world, as though: containing Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. We see the heavens in inner vision just as the Eastern Wisemen externally perceived the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha. The external has become an inner thing, has become mathematical abstraction; and in like manner the inner must be widened out until it becomes a universe around us, until inner vision leads us to a new astronomy experienced within.

Only by thus reaching out for a new understanding of the Christ can we fill the festival of Christmas with a certain meaning. Has the Christmas festival any meaning for most human beings nowadays? It is a very beautiful custom, scarcely 150 years old, to have the Christmas Tree as a symbol of the Christmas festival. The custom of having a Christmas Tree came into being only in the 19th century. What is this Christmas Tree really? It is not so easy to find its meaning. In making the effort to find it, and by discovering how the Christmas Tree gradually came into use, how it grew from being the little branch, carried on St. Nicholas' arm on the 6th of December, into being our Christmas Tree, we come to realize that this Christmas Tree is also directly connected with the Tree of Paradise.

Human consciousness thus looks back here to the Tree of Paradise, to Adam and Eve. What does this signify? This is one aspect of the way we make the Mystery of Golgotha known to-day. We turn back from the Mystery of Golgotha to the creation of the world, to the beginning of the world. We fail to grasp the meaning of the world's redemption, and instead turn back to the God who created the universe. This is expressed in the gradual disappearance of the real Christmas symbol, of the manger—so sublime a part of the Christmas plays of earlier centuries—and in the appearance of the Christmas Tree which is really the Tree of Paradise.

Thus the old Jehovah-religion again took the place of the Christ-religion; the Christmas Tree is the symbol of the reappearance of the religion of Jehovah. This Jehovah-religion makes its appearance in many shapes and forms to-day. For Jahve was once rightly worshipped as the one and only God in an age when his people felt themselves to be a unified folk, content within their limits, and living in the expectation of some day filling the entire earth. In our age people talk of Christ Jesus, but really worship only Jehovah. For, as we saw during the war, the people of the various nations talked of Christ, but were really concerned with the original God, Jehovah, who lives in the forces of nature and heredity.

On the one hand, the Christmas Tree, on the other, the national gods so remote from Christianity—with these humanity has turned back from grasping the Mystery of Golgotha to lay hold again on something belonging to a much earlier period. There has been a retrogression into the ancient Jehovah religion in the adherence to the nationalistic principle, in the announcement that the various peoples would follow their national gods.

You see, what must be taken into consideration is that in the annunciation, to the shepherds, and in the annunciation that came to the Magi, there is a human element common to all men. For the earth is the common property of all. The earth-annunciation received by the shepherds was one which could make no national distinctions and differentiations. And the Magi, who received a sun-annunciation, an annunciation from the heavens, also received a purely human element. For after the sun shines upon the lands of one folk, it shines on the lands of others also. Heaven and earth belong to all in common. With Christianity, a common human element is roused in all humanity.

This fact is pointed to in the twofold annunciation of the Christmas story. Such matters which were fully understood when man's soul-constitution was an entirely different one, will only be comprehensible to-day with the help of spiritual science.

We should inscribe this into our hearts to-day when we think of the Christmas festival. To-day, in thinking of the Christmas Mystery, we have need to look for a birth. We should not merely busy ourselves with idle talk about the Christmas festival and our own feelings, but should look for what must be born anew in this our age. For truly, real Christianity must be born anew. We need a cosmic Christmas festival for humanity.

I have often pointed out that an ancient wisdom present in mankind can be characterized by the fact that through this ancient wisdom, people were aware that they were citizens of the universe, not merely of the earth. Take a mental look at what is present in the consciousness of thinking humanity today and what is present in the consciousness of those who, from certain scientific backgrounds, reflect on the human being's place in the world. Both are actually the same. For just as the broad masses of people in primeval times on earth thought and felt what was taught in the mysteries, in the mysteries that were the centers of the surrounding culture and civilization, so today people in wide circles absorb what is taught and researched in the profane mysteries of the present, at the universities and colleges. Just as the mysteries of ancient times were related to the beliefs of the general population, so too are the universities of today related to the general public. What the ancient teachers in the mysteries believed about the relationship between man and the sun, between man and the zodiac, was naturally believed by the masses. What the professors of the universities and colleges say and do not say about the relationship between man and the sun, between man and the moon, is believed by the masses. The fact that the entire wisdom about man is exhausted by pointing out that man has gradually developed physically from his animal ancestors is a one-sided, a very, very one-sided truth; it does not exhaust the real facts. But modern people relate to their initiates, to the university professors, as the ancients related to their initiates in the mysteries. There is actually no particular psychological difference between these two relationships. It is just that the ancients knew: All that is in man is connected not only with what develops on earth, but with what is seen by the eye into the space of the stars. That which takes place in man, even physically, is connected with the activity of the sun and the other planets belonging to the solar system.

If you read my “Occult Science in Outline”, you will see that through that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which this “Occult Science” wants to serve, this consciousness of people is to be restored, that the human being not only has a relationship to the earth, but also to extra-terrestrial worlds. It is pointed out that our Earth itself is only a temporary embodiment of that which was there before in its essence as the Moon, as the Sun, as Saturn, and it is pointed out that the human being continues to develop and that these further developmental forms of the human being will be connected with future developmental forms of the Earth planet, with Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. Thus that which belongs to man is raised up out of the merely earthly. Man's gaze is again directed from the earth to the Cosmos. This is one of the facts which humanity must again become aware of if it is not to degenerate on earth: that man belongs to the Cosmos, that man is connected in his inner being with extra-earthly spheres.

Why is this knowledge necessary? It must be known because self-knowledge is necessary; not the self-knowledge that consists of brooding over one's own dear self, but the knowledge of man as a universal being. This self-knowledge must spread; it must become general and ever more general. For without a grasp of the human being, there will be no support for him, especially no psychological support in the future of human development. But it cannot be a matter of merely brooding a little over the subordinate, chaotic human being; rather, it must be a matter of concretely surveying this inner human being in his structure, just as one does not characterize the outer nature merely by saying: nature, nature, nature! but by pointing out: there are plants, there are animals, and distinguishing the individual species and varieties within the individual plants. In the same way, within the soul of man, one must distinguish above all the individual metamorphoses of this soul life. Now let us characterize these individual metamorphoses of the soul life, I would say, the one side of it. First, there is the metamorphosis of our soul life that is most closely connected with our physical body, that is most dependent on our physical body. It is the soul faculty that we denote by the term memory or the ability to remember. Through memory, we are able to renew the experiences of our individual life. Through memory we are able to draw a thread from a certain moment, which lies two, three, four years or even longer after birth, to the phenomena of the respective present moment, and man would be inwardly ill if this thread were to be torn. I have already explained this several times. If we had to look back on a part of our lives in such a way that we would lose the memory of certain events, the context of our experiences would not be there. And that would mean that we would be ill in our sense of self. But on the other hand, a person will at least be able to know how strongly memory is connected to his physical constitution. One need only remember the fact, which I have often mentioned and which is actually widely known, that when we suffer from insomnia or when we are prevented from sleeping properly by external events, our memory suffers. This and much else that can occur in cases of illness proves how memory depends on the physical constitution.

What we call our intelligence is less dependent on this bodily constitution, and thus more independent of it. However, this intelligence is still very much dependent on the bodily constitution. After all, memory only relates to the individual. We have intelligence in common with other people, at least to a high degree. Of course, one person is more intelligent, the other less so; each usually considers himself the most intelligent; but in general one can say: the fact is that one person is more intelligent, the other less so. But a certain uniformity of human intelligence is emerging. While everyone has their own memory content that no one else can see into, and while this memory content is very individual, the content of intelligence is something more common to humanity. It is simply less bound to the physical constitution of the human being. The physical constitution of the human being is actually only like a mirror to what unfolds as intellectual processes. Anyone who claims that the processes in the human nervous system, in the brain, cause thoughts, is saying no more than someone standing in front of a mirror and saying to themselves, “Miss Scholl, Miss Laval, Dr. Grosheintz,” and saying, “The mirror has produced Miss Scholl, Miss Laval, Dr. Grosheintz.” Just as the mirror relates to the images of the three named individuals, and just as the three named individuals are also outside the mirror and actually have nothing to do with it other than being reflected by the mirror, so too does the intellect have to do with the brain only insofar as it is reflected for our consciousness by the brain; but the processes of the intellect itself are outside the brain. We would know nothing of the processes of the senses if we had no brain. The processes of intelligence would not be reflected in our brain. But these intelligent processes themselves are a being outside the brain, which is only mirrored by the brain.

And then we come to the third faculty of the human being, which is at least to a large extent most independent of our bodily constitution. But people believe it least of all, because they consider it to be most dependent on our bodily constitution. This is the activity of the senses. Take the eye. The eye itself as such has nothing to do with the processes that are the visual processes. The visual processes are much less bound to the tool of the eye than the intelligent processes are to the tool of the brain. What the eye has to do with seeing is something quite different. The processes that occur in our consciousness as the content of seeing have nothing to do with the eye. What happens in the eye merely causes us to be present with our consciousness, with our ego, during the visual processes. Please note this fundamental, but not easily grasped, difference.

Take, for example, a person who has lost both eyes due to some disease. He has not lost the visual process as such, but he has lost the perception of what the visual process is through his ego. His ego knows nothing about it. The ego knows nothing of what the visual process is. It is simply the ego that is excluded from the visual process. What happens can be compared to the following.

Suppose you have three telegraph stations, A, B, C; at each telegraph station you have a telegraph operator. When the man at A telegraphs to €, the man at € can read what is being telegraphed from A to C. There is no question of the Morse apparatus at A producing the content of the telegram. It is only the mediator. The Morse telegraph in C cannot read either, but it mediates. But if apparatus B is switched on in the A-C path, then the man operating B can sit down and listen or read along; he only needs to let the stripe run so he can read along. B is then switched on in the path of the current that conveys the contents of the telegraph. But the content that goes from A to C has nothing to do with the processes that take place in the Morse telegraph at B. They are only perceived because the device is switched on.

Of course, if the apparatus is not switched on, one cannot perceive the processes. It is the same with the human eye. What is going on in the eye has nothing to do with seeing in terms of inner truth. The eye is only switched on to the processes. And because the eye is switched on to the processes, the I can watch the processes of seeing. But the eye is not at all what actually conveys or brings about the content of the visual processes or does something with them. It is only the receiving apparatus for the I. One could say, without running the risk of being thought paradoxical, that the human brain, which today is equipped with a somewhat thick brain, finds the following paradoxical: Our sense organ of sight has nothing to do with seeing, but everything to do with the fact that our I knows about seeing. Sensory organs, as we have them today, that is, the higher sensory organs, are not there for seeing, but rather they are there so that the I can know about seeing. I would even like to write this sentence on the board: Higher sensory organs are not there to mediate sensory processes, but rather so that an I knows about sensory processes.

We have the three so-called higher soul activities: memory, intelligence, and sensory perception and activity. The I is involved in them; it is most strongly involved in the memory with its physical body, less strongly in the intelligence, and least strongly in the sensory activity.

What I have described to you now comes from the following. Memory was not always in man as it is today. It has developed. And what was at the basis of the development of memory was an essential activity of man during the last embodiment on earth, preceding our earth, the old moon time. At that time memory was a kind of unconscious, dream-like imagination. “Dream-like imagination was memory. The fact that our bodily organization on earth has become what it has become is the living dream-like imagination, of which the soul being of man was completely filled during the old moon time, has become what is now our memory.

During the old sun time, when we had no physical body at all as we have now, when we were still those beings that I have described in my “Occult Science”, our intelligence was dormant inspiration. This dormant inspiration then developed further and is now our intelligence. But during the old Saturn, our sensory activity was quite dull intuition. Again, you can find the more precise description in my “Occult Science”. And this dull intuition has developed into our present-day sensory activity.

Now one might ask: Why do people have such a hard time grasping such extraordinarily important truths? And if someone imparts them to them, why do they resist them so much? Yes, you see, there are reasons for this in the nature of things themselves. We have had a vague intuition during the old Saturn time. This has gradually developed further and further and has become our sensory activity. But actually today we can only prove that one sensory activity has developed relatively most perfectly from the disposition of the old Saturn sensory activity, and that is hearing. Hearing had its clearest disposition in the old Saturn sphere. Vision arose somewhat later — you can read about these things in my 'Occult Science' —, mainly during the time of the sun. But from this you can already see that, while the first foundation was laid on the old Saturn time in the form of a dull intuition, later on new sense faculties are constantly being added. On the Sun, new sensory abilities were added that are not yet as developed as those from Saturn. On the Moon, new sensory abilities were added again, and on Earth itself, again. On Earth, the sense of touch was added, which is actually the most imperfect of the senses. If we were to recognize the sense of touch purely, we would still describe it today as a dull intuition in the physical body, a low, dull intuition.

It is similar with the sense of smell. There is something extraordinarily peculiar about it. I would recommend to those of you who like to do such things: pick up a psychology or physiology, especially a psychology, a soul science, as they are written today; they all write about sensory activity. What is written there about the activity of the senses — for the unprejudiced person it applies only to the sense of touch. You may remember what I said in my “Theosophy” about the relationship of the higher senses to the sense of touch, which Goethe also noted. Our learned gentlemen want to describe the senses, but they only describe that part of the senses that has arisen directly on the earth, that has received its first impulse on the earth. This applies, for example, to seeing, as when you strike your fist on the eye, you could almost say literally. Because what is described in the psychology is not seeing, but what is described would arise if you punched yourself in the eye; hence the nice theory that has emerged of the so-called specific sensory energies, which in the case of the eye does not come from seeing, but from the fact that when you strike the eye, you see all kinds of sparks. These learned gentlemen describe something that works like a fist to the eye, quite literally. And they want to understand vision through this.

One understands the activity of the senses only when one regards it in connection with what is no longer there at all: Saturn development, sun development, moon development. One understands human intelligence only when one regards it in connection with that which is no longer there at all: the development of the sun, the moon. One understands memory only when one regards it in connection with that which is no longer there at all: the old development of the moon. And from the earth, one only understands the appropriation of sensory activity, of intelligence, of memory by the I, because the I has only been incorporated into the human being during the time on earth. And the organs that have been formed in the human being during the time on earth are not there at all to convey his higher soul abilities, but to convey that these higher soul abilities reveal themselves in an I. We have eyes for an ego, ears for an ego, a nose for an ego, not a nose for smelling, which would be most correct, because it has been formed during the time on earth; but it is also no longer quite correct, because it will change during the time on earth. But we don't have eyes to see and ears to hear; we have ears so that a self can know something of what is going on in the ear, like a Morse telegraph is switched on here so that someone, not the Morse telegraph itself, can know something of what is being negotiated between A and C. By still saying today that we have eyes to see and ears to hear, and by clothing everything in this kind of language, we are talking about something that has no reality at all. We talk constantly in illusions, we talk in untruths. We do not know what we actually have our whole physical organization for. We do not have it to mediate the higher soul activities, but we have it so that the I can learn something from these higher soul activities. Our whole physical being is an image of the I. And we are constituted as we are because we are an I. In our outer form we are meant to become aware of the outer image of the I. For our body, as we now carry it, we have only received through the earth. And it is unthinkable that what the earth has not given us should be derived from the events of the earth, that the cause of it should be sought in the events of the earth.

Just as we have been able to point out that for our memory activity the old moon development is the decisive factor, because the predispositions were formed in it, and we have been able to point out that for our intelligence the old sun development is the decisive factor, because the first predispositions were formed there, and so on to Saturn activity, we must also point out that these higher soul abilities have something to do today with the beings of the higher hierarchies, and in such a way that our memory activity has something to do with the hierarchy of the Angeloi, our intelligence with the Archangeloi, our sensory activity with the Archai.

And this brings me to an important chapter of spiritual knowledge. Suppose you reflect on memory, on the ability to remember, in human self-knowledge. You say: I turn my inner organ, my soul organ, to the ability to remember. But when you look at it with full consciousness, you have to look at it in such a way that you say to yourself: In this whole activity, in this process of remembering, the Angelos lives and weaves within. Now try to remember something that happened to you yesterday, any event. You have allowed an inner soul process to unfold. In what is unfolding, and in that a yesterday's thought arises in you, a yesterday's experience reveals itself anew to you in memory, an angel is at work in it. And when you reflect intelligently - however, it must be intelligently, that is, with inner activity, not a mere brooding, not what most people call intelligent thinking, which is only the boiling of memories, where people let the memories boil out of their bodies, thinking only begins when one actively grasps the thoughts inwardly - when one develops an inner activity, then an archangel is present. And if you listen and look around, you must say: in my ears, in my eyes, there are the thrones of the archai, the spirits of time. If you ask yourself: where are the spirits of time, the archai, which rule the successive world ages of the earth? Then you should not look for them in completely unknown areas, you should look for them in the sensory organs of people. That is where they are. A decadent time, in terms of the abilities of the soul, sought the gods up there above the blue, which does not actually exist. If man asks: Where then are the spirits of time? — they sit in his eyes, in his ears, there they have their thrones.

This is illuminated from another side, which I once made clear to you by pointing out that in man himself are the localities from which the events of nature are controlled. If you have the formulas recited in certain secret societies and interpret them correctly, you will find that these formulas, handed down from very ancient times, point to truths such as the ones I have now developed before you; that man is the temple for the gods that stand above him, that is, for the beings of the higher hierarchies. He is so in the most literal sense. For if one asks: Where do the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai dwell? - I must say: In the organs of human memory, human intelligence and human sensory activity. Man is, if you speak in a real language, you have to say that, really spirit-filled, that is, filled with spirits. The Church did not want people to realize that, so at the Eighth Ecumenical Council in 869 she forbade knowing or believing anything about the spiritual; she established the dogma that man consists only of body and soul. This human being is a very, very complicated creature, and if, let us say, for example, one were to stand on a distant star and observe the processes of the earth from a different point of view, the mineral kingdom would immediately disappear; it would only appear as a luminous shine. Little of the plant kingdom would be perceived, and not much of the animal kingdom either. From the outside, the individual human beings would not be perceived, but the thrones in the universe would be there and occupied by the angels, archangels and archai. And a being with the necessary ability to see from a distant star would say: The Earth is a body in space that is the dwelling place of archai, archangels and angels. In the language of the gods, this would mean that the earth is the dwelling place of the spirits of time, archangels and angels. In the everyday language of people, this means: Man has sense organs, tools of intelligence and a memory constitution. But humanity is called upon to really get to know man, to seek out the real relationship of this man to the spiritual world.

The pendulum swing of civilization has been different up to now. People have studied the chemical substances that make up food in order to find out what a person absorbs through food. The relationships between the body and the matter of food and so on have been investigated. It has been said: What is out there in the various plants or in the various animals enters the human being; sometimes it is active outside in the cabbage, sometimes in the ox, sometimes it is active inside the human being and constitutes him. — So you see an ox outside, you look at it. Then you see a human being and know that he has eaten the beefsteak that was made from this ox, and you follow the part that the beefsteak that he has eaten, which was still active in the ox outside a number of days ago, plays in the inner workings of the human being; that is the relationship between the physical and the natural world. There one follows how the beefsteak, which was sitting in the ox's loins, is later inwardly active in man.

This has now been sufficiently pursued, and from it a world view has been brewed that has caused the pendulum of the human world view to swing to one side. Now the pendulum must swing to the other side. Now we must know that the soul of man is also related to the spiritual world, to spiritual substances. And what spiritual substances are, archangels, archai, angels, they are within man, as the ox is within man when he eats his beefsteak, in his body. Today's science admits the one, the other it still laughs. But for the further development of humanity, it is necessary that man knows just as much about his relationship to the angel as he knows today about his relationship to the ox or to cabbage – I mean the physical cabbage!

We are at this turning point in time, that there is indeed a need for the development of humanity to turn to what plays out of the spirit into the soul, after we have long enough directed our attention one-sidedly to what plays out of the physical world into the bodily side of man. For the human being who begins to develop today, it is no longer enough to convey certain religious truths to him in a dogmatic and abstract way, as in the confessions of the past. Today's human being has occupied himself with reflecting on the relationship between his earthly body and the spiritual. This earthly body initially only has a relationship to the ego. We will get to know other relationships tomorrow. But that which appears in our earthly body, the constitution for the ability to remember, is related to the hierarchy of the angels. That which is embedded in this earthly body as the constitution for intelligence has relationships to the world of the archangeloi. That which manifests itself in our higher senses, namely that which arises in our higher art, has a relationship to the world of the archai, the spirits of the age. We human beings must become capable of more than just generalizing about the existence of a spiritual world; we must become capable of sensing the concrete relationships between human beings and this spiritual world. We must become capable of sensing how that which echoes within us as hearing is a series of facts that permeate our world and in which the archai are active. We must become capable of grasping that while we are thinking, we dwell in a world that is permeated and permeates the archangeloi; while we are remembering, we dwell in a world that permeates and is permeated by the angeloi; and when we become aware of our self, for which we always most fully use our body, it is a revelation of our self. Only then are we in the world in which man lives and moves. In the Greek mysteries, they still said: If you approach the Guardian of the Threshold, you learn to recognize what is in man in a higher way. This side of the threshold, you only get to know thoughts that remind you of past experiences. On the other side of the threshold, you are surrounded by the beings of the world of the angels. On this side of the threshold one learns to recognize the intelligent being; on the other side of the threshold one perceives how the archangeloi surround one. On this side of the threshold one perceives the external sensory world; on the other side of the threshold one knows how, through our eyes and ears, the spirits of the times enter and leave.

It is necessary to ensure that this awareness is awakened in man, whether he is simply related to the spiritual world by his constitution. But this must be awakened in a concrete way for the individual organs. Man must learn to feel himself in a spiritual world, whereas the world view that has reached its climax today only makes him feel that he lives in a physical world. This feeling that one lives in a physical world would have to dominate man completely if the event of Golgotha had not occurred. That man can develop back to an awareness of his spiritual relationship is due to the mystery of Golgotha. But one must seek out of one's own free inner drive what one owes to the mystery of Golgotha. Christianity presupposes freedom.

What we can know about the relationship between human beings and the spiritual world can actually have a practical effect on us. And the educational principles we want to apply at the Stuttgart Waldorf School are based on the awareness that human beings are more than just a synthesis of external natural processes. Education and teaching should be such that we are aware that within us is not only the baby that is growing physically and that, when it is weaned, gradually absorbs cabbage and oxen, but that is the soul being, in which, little by little, the beings of the higher spiritual world have a share. And by teaching in an educational way, we guide the activity of the beings of the higher hierarchies into the developing child. Man should not just learn to kneel at the altar and pray for his selfishness; man should learn to make a service out of everything he does in the world. Today, it is an urgent task to convey to people that everything they do in the world must be a service to God. But those who do not want to let people partake in these higher tasks of humanity oppose this.

Yesterday, while I was in St. Gallen trying to develop the activity and fruitfulness that can flow from spiritual knowledge in relation to the field of education, I was told that we have now reached the point where the clerical newspapers in St. Gallen have not only not included a text note for this lecture, but have not even accepted an advertisement for it, thus refusing to include an advertisement for it. This opposition is becoming more and more well organized. They understand organization on their side. I only want to make you aware of the fact that resistance to the truth becoming established in the world will become more and more pronounced. I will gradually inform you of these things. I do not want you to remain unaware of this small fact either, so that you may feel that little by little it will not be a task for sleeping souls to stand up for the Christ-Truth, but that it will increasingly become a task for waking souls. Organizations are also needed to be able to deal with the organization on the other side. We will talk about this further tomorrow.

Yesterday we looked at the way in which a person functions in his various limbs – physical body, etheric body, astral body and I-bearer – by taking into account what is actually going on in these limbs from the human soul. You have seen that we had to attach particular importance, on the one hand, to the consideration of sensory perception and how the human being, according to his or her ego, lives in this sensory perception. On the other hand, remembering has led us more into the inner being of the human being itself. Here we have something that must be carefully considered, and I must ask you today to follow me into what may be difficult-to-grasp areas, because only through such an understanding is a serious comprehension of what is actually connected with the nature of the human being possible. Let us once again bring to mind some of what was said yesterday.

For ordinary consciousness, the I lives in sensory perception. As far as our sense perceptions reach, so far reaches this ordinary I-consciousness. I do not say the I, I say the I-consciousness. And we tie in with what we experience as I and sense perception, our imaginative experiences. With these imaginative experiences we live in our astral body.

Let us visualize the situation again schematically. We have sensory perception in the realm of I-consciousness, so we have activated our I in this sensory perception, and then, so to speak, extended this activity through our astral body and are experiencing the perceptions there. We have then seen that through the activity of our etheric body, memories arise. And in the physical body — as I said yesterday — all images are formed. Now we are trying to bring something to consciousness that can already be brought to consciousness through subtle introspection. If you, so to speak, cast your spiritual gaze over the field of sensory perception and become imbued with how the sense of self unfolds within it, then you will say to yourself: for sensory perception we are stimulated from the outside. So, if I want to draw a schematic representation of the human being's relationship to his or her sensory perceptions, I actually have to draw it in such a way that I say: if there is an outside world, then the sensory perceptions are stimulated by the outside world (see drawing, blue), but within these sensory perceptions, which are stimulated, the I lives (orange). So it is quite clear that we should not actually say: Our I is, insofar as we become aware of it, within us — but rather: we experience it from the outside in. Just as we experience sensory experiences from the outside in, we experience our I from the outside in. So it is actually an illusion to speak of our I being within us. We breathe in, so to speak, the I with our sense perceptions, if we think of the grasping of sense perceptions as a finer breathing. So that we have to say to ourselves: This I, which actually lives in the external world and fills us through the sense perceptions, then continues to fill us by attaching to the sense perceptions (orange), penetrating to the astral body, the perceptions (yellow).

So you see: if you want to imagine this relationship of the I to what is usually called a human being and what you think of as being limited within the skin, then you actually have to imagine – if I first draw the eye as a representative of sensory perception here – that the I is not inside, but that the I lives here outside and penetrates inwards through the senses. We usually succumb to the illusion that our ego lies within what we call our physical organism. But the ego is actually situated in relation to this physical organism in the outer world and, as it were, extends its tentacles into our inner being, first in our imagination, after the astral body, or up to the astral body.

Let us now take a closer look at the world of memories. Memories are propelled upwards from what we call our inner being. As they are propelled upwards, they initially represent an activity in the etheric body, and this in turn stimulates perceptions in the astral body; but these now come in reverse (see diagram on page 135, arrows). But ultimately they must come from what are the images in the physical body.

Now you can see that, starting from the physical body, the arousal flows to the etheric body, which underlies the memory, and because the I is in it, the I is also here. So I have to draw the thing in such a way that I not only think schematically of the ego here on the outside, but that the ego is also in the physical body (reddish) and stimulates the memories (green) from the physical body, which then become perceptions (yellow).

So you see, I cannot actually get by with the scheme I have drawn. I would have to draw differently. I would have to say: I, astral body, etheric body, physical body. But if I consider the memory, then I would have to put that which is up there as I, also into the physical body. At the same time it is separate from itself, and on the other hand it also fills the physical body. You see, through the careful knowledge of what is going on in a person, it is possible to get an idea of the integration of this ego, how it is on the one hand in the outside world, and on the other hand inside.

And now consider the following process. Imagine you meet a person on the street, and there you have the sensory perception of the person. Your I is there, but at the same time, memory arises from within: you recognize the person. The memory comes from within, and the sensory perceptions come from without. They interlock. This phenomenon of interlocking was already known to the old instinctively trained spiritual researchers. We are bringing it out of the sum of facts again. What I am now bringing to you from the sum of facts was known to the old spiritual researchers, and they were accustomed to drawing such things in pictures. They depicted what I have just told you, the existence of the ego, the coming together here with what comes from outside, as the snake that bites its own tail. The way in which man is related to the outer world was thus depicted as the snake that bites its own tail. When one has before him older pictures that have emerged from instinctive visions, one can often see how deep insights are hidden in such visions. Abstractions come and interpret all kinds of things. In this way, something terribly ingenious sometimes comes about; it is just of no value if it is symbolized and interpreted out of it, because one cannot grasp the facts with the intellect after all, but can only really find what is present if one again penetrates to the sources themselves.

But let us also visualize what is actually present in a different way. Let us think about this human ego as it is in sensory perception and in the imagination that follows from it. It is the case that we really live in an illusion, which has come about in the following way. Imagine that you have a mirror and you see yourself in it. Now, hypothetically, let us assume that you have never had any opportunity to gain any knowledge other than the knowledge that you have always seen yourself in the mirror. This would have led you to confuse yourself with your mirror image. The mirror image goes back and forth. Now, let us say you do not feel yourself within your skin, but you see the mirror image moving back and forth, and so you think: That is me — and you keep saying: That is me. — You are actually looking at your mirror image, but you mistake it for yourself. That is what a person actually does. In fact, the ego is like a stream that carries the sensory stimulus to the body. The body reflects it back, first of all that in which the actual self is seated. The self is here, but it is also in the outer world. It is even in the physical body, but it is reflected back to you. The human being does not perceive his real self, but the reflection. He does perceive the reflection, in that he has the sense perception. These are mirror images.

I have explained this in more detail in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln'. The images are also mirror images, they are the reflection of experiences in the external world. The ego actually lives in the external world and experiences itself in consciousness, in that what it, as the unconscious ego, stimulates in the body is reflected back to it. That is if we consider the sensory perceptions and the images.

The situation is different, however, when memory comes into play. There we really are here below in the images that have come about, with our ego within them. There, indeed, an unconscious is at work to a high degree. Just consider how difficult it is for you to bring up memories, how little you can do with your full mental consciousness. There is an unconscious at work. There is indeed — and you can feel this — a reality at work. There it is different. You no longer confuse what you see with your ego, because you feel yourself in this activity. But it also remains very dark; the ego, as I have often mentioned, remains in an inner activity like a dream or even like something asleep, because the will is at work in it. And in remembering, it is essentially the will that is at work. A will that is strangely vacillating and changing is at work within. And if we want to use an image, we can say: let us imagine that we are looking spiritually with our ego. When we have this perception and imagination, we look in this way. When we form memories and everything that belongs to them, we turn around spiritually, so to speak. Indeed, when we move from sensory perception to memory, this concept of turning around spiritually is an important concept: spiritual turning around. Because if you imagine such a spiritual turning around, you get an inner concept of mobility.

They can no longer be stored so easily next to each other: I, astral body, etheric body and physical body. This is convenient when you are presenting anthroposophy to groups of anthroposophists who want to get quite calm, gentle presentations that can be easily absorbed while sitting on armchairs. But that is not how it is in reality. In reality, when we approach the human being by wanting to grasp the soul life, we have to envisage a continuous turning and turning around of the whole inner human being, that is, the true human being. The I is like that, and in being like that, it shines through the sense perceptions; in being like that (turned around), it shines up from the physical body. The concepts must be made mobile.

This is something that shows us how we must proceed to achieve flexible, inwardly living concepts if we want to grasp the human being. Just think about what our ordinary mental life is like! You only have to think of a very small part of everyday mental life to see this person in the outer world, that person in the outer world. That is all sense world. It penetrates in as a world of ideas. In the process, all kinds of memories arise. And you can only imagine that, while there are sense perceptions, you are, as it were, looking at one side of the soul and, as the memories arise, you are looking from the other side. But since this is constantly happening in a confused manner, you must constantly think of the soul as being in an inward whirling motion.

And that is also what is to be thought of as an image: the soul in inward whirling motion. That is also what presents itself to the gaze. That is why I have indicated in my books and also repeatedly emphasized: anyone who wants to make drawings that adequately represent what is actually present as the higher aspects of human nature is in the same case as a painter who wants to paint lightning. Just as lightning cannot be painted in reality, so the higher structure cannot be painted either. Even the etheric body cannot be painted in reality. You can make a diagram of it, but you cannot paint it in reality, because there is actually no such thing as a state of rest.

Memory and impressions of the external world meet, as I said. We are dealing here with something that should be grasped very precisely. If you look at the human physical body as such, then the I is in it for the purpose of remembering. But the I is also in the external world. So the I is actually in everything that underlies sensory perception. But it is also in the physical body of man. If you go through all kinds of philosophies of modern times - and these modern times have been going on for a long time - you will hear a lot about subjective and objective. You can also do that if you stop at the stage of imagining, because you can indeed distinguish between what lives in you and what lives outside of you. But if you delve deeper into the matter, these terms lose their meaning. For what is it that makes what lives behind the sense perceptions and from which the ego brings in the sense perceptions, what is it that makes it objective? It is objective precisely through the same thing that makes the physical body objective here. There is no difference between subjective and objective. The ego lives in the external world just as it lives in its own physical body. That is where the difference between subjective and objective ceases to exist.

This difference between subjective and objective only arises when we are up here in the realm of imagination. And why does it arise here? Not for the reason usually imagined either, but here it arises because we are only dealing with images. Up here we only experience images. But images are not real in themselves. We feel this by experiencing images. We therefore speak of the images as something subjective, and of the processes on which the images are based as something objective. But we cannot do that with the impressions of the outside world, because the processes in which the ego lives are of course objective here, as are the processes through which the ego works by releasing the memory images into the physical body. That is all objective, and if you like, all subjective. Here subjective and objective become completely mixed up and intertwined and can no longer be distinguished. And that is the important thing, because it is this concept of subjective and objective that occupies people and is juggled with in much philosophy.

But now, however, there is something deeper underlying it all. Man lives first of all in his everyday experiences. There he brings it to such a soul life, as is well known everywhere. But behind all this, of course, lives a completely different world. I have described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science in Outline”, how this world can be penetrated. But what spiritual research penetrates is, of course, a reality for every human being. It is always there, whether one knows it or not. So when one speaks of reality, one must take this into account. If one now develops those insights that arise in imagination, inspiration and intuition, then one arrives at what is present in every human being, what every human being carries around with them continually. When one ascends, as I have described, to imagination, one initially has a different soul world than the one that exists in everyday life. Through imagination, one receives images instead of the usual abstract ideas – that is why the term imagination, imaginative presentation, has been chosen – images that are clearly recognized as images. One is absolutely clear that one is dealing with images. That is the difference between what is really presented to the spiritual researcher and what lives in dreams or hallucinations: those who live in dreams or hallucinations consider their images to be reality. The spiritual researcher never does that. Only those who want to write foolish refutations talk about the fact that what is presented to the spiritual researcher could also be a hallucination or a dream. The spiritual researcher never confuses what is presented to him in pictures with reality. He is also clearly aware from the nature of these images that they are not invented images, not images conjured up by the imagination, but that they are images that point to spiritual reality.

First of all, he never confuses his images with realities, but he is clear about the fact that these images point to spiritual realities. There are many things that can lead a person to become fully aware of this pictorial quality on the one hand and the way these images point to a spiritual world on the other. If you are a fully conscious person, you are clearly aware that you link and separate your own ideas. You just have to reflect on something like this carefully. Just imagine how different your inner life would be if you could not arbitrarily combine the ideas you have, but rather if these ideas were forced together: you would be like an automaton. This inner ability to combine and separate ideas does, however, in a sense cease when one enters the imaginative world. And one must know that it stops, because through that one gets a clear consciousness of the fact that freedom, as man values it, can actually only be experienced and acquired in this physical world between birth and death. Then one also gets a clear feeling that we do not descend unnecessarily from spiritual worlds into this physical world. If we only lived in the spiritual worlds, which are otherwise accessible to us between death and a new birth, we would never be able to gain our freedom there. We gain this freedom within the physical world. Only people who do not care about freedom, who hate or undervalue this world, which man lives through between birth and death.

We particularly appreciate this freedom when we develop it as a force, let us say as a memory, namely after death. Only by feeling our way back into earthly life do we partake of freedom between death and a new birth. We must remain connected to earthly life in order to partake of freedom between death and a new birth. This can be felt by the spiritual researcher when he immerses himself in the imaginative world. If he did not stand firmly on the ground within physical reality before immersing himself in the imaginative world, he would not enter the spiritual world in a healthy state. That is why it is emphasized again and again: One must have prepared oneself well in the physical world if one wants to penetrate into the spiritual world. One must really have achieved everything that can be achieved in the physical world, namely, not to be at the mercy of one's instincts, which means bondage; not to be at the mercy of any automatic rules of habit, to which man so willingly submits. Man must really have come to the consciousness of his freedom before he can enter the spiritual world. Man should already have brought to life within himself the ideas that I have developed in my Philosophy of Freedom if he really wants to achieve his ascent into the spiritual world. This has also been emphasized in How to Know Higher Worlds.

Since we are talking about the imagination of pictures here, it must be understood that these are something thoroughly subjective. I would like to say that the degree of subjective experience is even stronger in the imaginative life than in the ordinary everyday life of the soul. The soul life is richer in the imaginations, but it is an experience of images. One knows that behind this pictorial experience is the true reality; but first one has the pictorial experience.

But there is something living in the images that does not allow them to appear so free to us. We cannot connect and disconnect in the same way, nor would we be able to penetrate to a reality if we could connect and disconnect these images of imaginative knowledge in the same way that we can connect and disconnect what we experience as ordinary ideas. We experience ordinary ideas in this way: here is an idea, here is the second, here is the third idea. We experience these, we form connections. We have the idea “rose”, we have the idea “beautiful”, the idea “I like it”. I form the connection: I like the beautiful rose. —- What I form here as a connection is definitely an inner activity; it depends on me, in that I am free. In this way, one is not free in the imaginative world. When you have images from the imaginative world, it is not the case that you now feel an inner activity through which you connect and separate these images. Just think, that cannot be the case, because although you feel free in the physical world, you can connect and separate, but you still separate and connect in the physical world in the way that the external physical-sensory world demands. So you have a regulative for connecting and disconnecting. You must also have such a regulative in the imaginative world. You just must not take what the physical world has dictated to you and put it into this imaginative world. That is what those Nebulists do, those fantasists or perhaps even people who are imaginative in the best sense of the word. They take some means of the sensuous-physical world and combine and separate them according to some judgment of taste. This may be very beautiful, but it cannot happen in the case of imaginative knowledge. There must be something there that gives rise in such a way to linking one element to another, to creating connections.

If you now take this idea, you will see: you arrive at something that lives in the imaginative world, that works in the imaginative world in the same way that our own mind otherwise works, in that it connects and separates the ideas of the ordinary world. There you come out into the objective. You come behind the worlds that are given as sensory perceptions; but you come into something that connects and separates.

What is it then? I would like to say that it is experienced in such a way that the imaginations begin to unfold their own life. I may use a comparison here: if you look at a human embryo at a very early stage, it has a highly developed head, with only the beginnings of the other organs attached to it; but these then take shape. In the same way, what lives in the imaginative world grows inwardly. One cannot place images there in an arbitrary way. It arises of its own accord. So there is something living within it that arises of its own accord. And this is gradually recognized as the world we call the world of the third hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.

It is a thoroughly real process of human experience, in which one lives. I have now described it to you as a process of knowledge. But it is not a mere process of knowledge, because what is effective there is that which lives in the I and the astral body.

Now consider: we are children, we grow up. First, up to the age of seven, we receive the world of imitation within us, then the world that we accept on authority up to the age of fourteen or fifteen, and so on. If we observe life, we will find how much – not all, of course – of what we absorb in this way, through the sensations of the senses being brought to us and our processing of the sensations and perceptions, is later reflected in our face. Compare the dull face of someone who could not take in anything, who could not process anything from sensory perceptions in the life of ideas, with the speaking face, the speaking physiognomy of someone who, as a child, was introduced to the sensory world and to its processing in the imagination in the right way. This is something that lives in us from the soul-spiritual. We are shaped there. It is, I would say, the most subtle thing that works in us, and which only extends its forces into the whole physical life of the human being in a very subtle way.

Those who are able to observe people can still see from their gait at a later age whether they had a happy childhood or a childhood such as is sometimes the case among today's teaching staff. This is not an unreality that works from the I and the astral body into the whole human being. The spiritual researcher looks only into what actually lives in the I and astral body, and he discovers it through his imaginative world. There he discovers the world of angels, archangels, archai. But this is inherent in what develops in the human being as the spiritual-soul develops him, develops him in such a way that his development is initially an individual one. We can observe it in the way I have just explained. But this development also belongs to a group of people, to a nation. We distinguish between what grows within a person in so far as he belongs to a group of people, a nation, and in turn we distinguish between a modern person and an ancient Greek. In short, we distinguish the individual development of the human being, depending on the hierarchy of the angels; the development within the various ethnic groups, brought about by the hierarchy of the archangels; and we distinguish the human beings in different epochs, brought about by the hierarchy of the archai.

What is being discovered through spiritual science are realities that are effective in the spirits of the times, effective in the spirits of nations, and effective in those spirits that carry the life of the individual from consciousness into constitutional and organic life. We do not create our own physiognomy, just as the watchmaker makes a watch, by the fact that we may have been educated to joyful contemplation in our youth and have acquired a friendly physiognomy; something must help there. The nature of the hierarchy of the angels also plays a role. And we certainly do not put ourselves in the place of a people and imagine the various national physiognomies, just as the watchmaker makes the watch.

You see, we come across realities that are only shown in knowledge, but which are effective within the human being. We have, so to speak, the human being from one side, to speak with the old clairvoyants: from the side of the snake's head. Let us now approach the matter from the other side. We can approach that other side, the snake's tail, by turning to the world of memories that emerge from below, from where the human being also recognizes this world, where subjective and objective lose their meaning.

Yes, what emerges as the power of memory is grasped by the ego, but it emerges from the very subterranean depths of the human being. We know, or at least we can know, how intimately connected we are with our human nature when we unfold this power of remembrance. This points us even more to such depths, which we do not reach in ordinary life with our mental experience. This points us precisely to something that we are, but that is also how the outer nature is. There is something in us that is exactly the same as the outer nature. We do not have the same intimate connection with it as we do with the world, which we understand in terms of the hierarchy of the angels, archangels, and archai. Something is at work here that is not at all close to our present consciousness. I would like to say that there is only a thin veil between our present consciousness and the angels, archangels, and archai. But we enter a world that is deeply hidden from ordinary consciousness when we descend into that inner being of man from which only the power of memory shines forth, which we can still, I would like to say, just intercept. But what we intercept there is connected with contents that lie beyond ordinary consciousness.

But just as we can reach the world that I just characterized and from which we are separated in our imaginations as if by a thin membrane, we can now also, by progressing in spiritual science, recognize the world to which we are pointed on the other side: the side we reach when we turn around or turn to the other side of the snake. But we only reach this world when we rise to the third stage of spiritual knowledge, to intuition. And there we reach those beings that are referred to in my books as seraphim, cherubim, thrones. The world of cherubim, seraphim, thrones is just as much behind what shines up in our memory as activity in our life, as it is behind the sense perceptions and representations of the world of the angeloi, archangeloi, archai.

We will speak about these connections between the human world, which lives among our memories, and these hierarchies and what stands in between, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai, tomorrow.

Anyone today who strives from within to gain knowledge of the supersensible world is usually referred to the methods and results that come from ancient times. If one then takes a closer look at what is referred to, one encounters the so-called mysteries in the development of mankind. These were places where, on the one hand, religious and cultic life was cultivated - the spiritual flowed through the religious and cultic - and, on the other hand, what we call scientific knowledge was cultivated. The spiritual flowed into this other form of human perception. And a third aspect was the artistic, which was expressed in the mysteries. On the one hand, what flowed through religion, cult and science revealed itself to the senses, to the directly perceptible view of life. And on the other hand, what flowed through art revealed itself. Basically, humanity, which strives for the supersensible, still lives today from what tradition has preserved from ancient times.

In today's lecture, I do not want to speak of these old traditions, nor of the old mysteries; but I would like to speak of the possibility of a new mystery life, of the possibility of a new path to the supersensible worlds, which in its meaning and conception can be greater than what is demanded today as scientific knowledge by the enormous progress of scientific thinking in modern times.

When we look into our own inner being, we find the following activities within it: thinking, feeling and willing. Of these soul activities, only our thinking is independent of our physicality, as long as this thinking is healthy. The person who is able to completely surrender to the character of thinking with their soul knows that there can only be independent, logical laws because healthy thinking in the natural human being is independent of the physical. It is only when a person begins to think pathologically, when something morbid enters his thinking, that he becomes dependent on the physical. But what does that mean? It means nothing other than this: as long as thinking is healthy, it remains outside the physical; it only submerges into the body, only enters the unconscious when it becomes ill.

This is not the case with our feelings, nor with our will. In its completely normal state, our feeling submerges into physicality and is hardly conscious to us as something dream-like. It dwells entirely in physicality. It is the same with our will. In our ordinary lives, we are not aware of the actual process of willing because it is deeply submerged in physicality.

If we now want to attain a higher knowledge, then we must develop abilities as human beings that are just as independent as our ordinary thinking is from this physicality, but which are capable of perceiving higher worlds than this ordinary thinking, which in the present state of humanity is only capable of perceiving and dissecting the physical-sensual environment.

In the ancient mysteries, this release of spiritual abilities from the physical organization was brought about by external processes. Let us realize, for example, what effect a sound, a tone, that moves quickly, has on our soul, a sound that startles us. This rapid impression does not allow us to immerse what is happening emotionally in our soul in the physical. And if we experience shock, fear and dread in quick succession, we are able to hold the soul qualities outside the physical. The very methodical events of the ancient mysteries consisted of freeing the soul from the physical in this way. Frightening, dramatic processes that lead the soul life to a peak and then let it fall were designed to let people experience the soul life as something that remains outside the physical, not submerged in the physical. When a person came to after such processes, it was clear to him: during such experiences he had gained insight into a world into which he would not otherwise have seen. And he called this world the “supersensible”. Such external practices, which for the most part have taken on a cultic form in the old mysteries, are no longer suitable for modern humanity. They also presuppose that those who have been led to higher knowledge isolate themselves. The mysteries were strictly segregated sites, strictly governed by priestly sages who could arrange the external performance in such a way that a person really did develop the habit of keeping their soul independent of the body and, with this independent soul, of entering the spiritual world, by undergoing the process over a period of years.

Modern man would have no trust in people who have to seek the way into the spiritual world in this way. For these methods require strict separation of the spiritual seeker from the world, and in ancient times it was the case that one only had trust in the spiritual man when he separated himself from the rest of humanity. Today, one can only have trust in the man of knowledge if he is fully involved in life, if nothing is alien to him from the full, direct human life. Therefore, the present time and the near future will require methods for the path to the spiritual world that are more inwardly soul-based, so that in pursuing these methods, man is independent of external activities and influences. I would like to speak to you about methods for the path to the spiritual world that work quietly within the soul, but which lead just as surely to knowledge of the spiritual world, that is, to initiation, as the older methods of the mysteries led to this initiation.

In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” which has been translated into French as “Initiation,” I discuss the modern methods of initiation. This evening, I would like to speak in principle about what these modern methods of initiation are.

The beginning of the path to knowledge of spiritual worlds must be made through a special inner soul treatment of our world of thoughts, our powers of thought. In our ordinary life we devote ourselves to the outer world or to the thoughts that arise from our inner being. And however much we develop relative activity in this ordinary consciousness, in our thinking as a whole we are still passive, devoted to the sensual or the inner soul world. Indeed, modern man even places great value on remaining in this passivity of thought because he is afraid that in the moment when he forms his thoughts out of himself, he will enter the unreal, the realm of fantasy. This whole attitude towards thinking must change if man wants to enter the supersensible world. He must activate his thinking. I have named this activation of thinking 'meditation' after an old custom. It consists of our not giving ourselves over to our thinking, to anything objective, but rather, out of the inner strength of our soul life, we place a clear thought content of the simplest possible kind at the center of our consciousness and, for a certain period of time, with the exclusion of any other attention, we focus all the soul's attention on this one soul content.

When we rest actively with our whole soul on a soul content, something occurs with the soul forces that otherwise occurs with the physical forces when, for example, we use a muscle repeatedly in the course of our work. The muscle grows stronger. In the same way, the soul forces are strengthened and invigorated inwardly when the soul's activity is repeatedly directed towards one content. This content must be clear and transparent, because it must not contain anything that can come from the unconscious. We must rest entirely on this soul content with all the deliberation of which we are capable. If we take something complicated, something that may have been brought up from memory as reminiscences, something that is linked intellectually or emotionally to these old soul contents, that must not be. We therefore do best if we allow such soul content to approach us either by, let us say, taking a completely unknown book that we have certainly never read before, we open it somewhere, we read a sentence that otherwise does not interest us at all, the content of which otherwise has no interest for us. We place this sentence at the center of our consciousness and rest on it. We concentrate all our soul life on such content for a long time. It is even better if we can gain the confidence to go to someone who really has knowledge in these matters and have them give us a soul content of the characterized kind. Then, if he is already a spiritual researcher, he will have practice in simply telling us, from the mere sight of us, what kind of spiritual content is best for our meditation. If we take such a content, which is fully present in our consciousness and easy to grasp, concentrate on it, and remain in that concentration in a completely meditative way, our thinking will gradually be completely transformed. All abstractness in our thinking disappears, all coldness disappears. Thinking becomes entirely pictorial; we gain the ability to think in saturated images that become ever more saturated and colorful. Images that gradually resemble living dream images, but have a completely different soul character, enter our consciousness. We experience something that we have never experienced before in this consciousness. We experience the possibility of thinking as calmly as only the most calm logician or mathematician can think, but not in the abstract, not thinking natural laws, but thinking in images that we do not initially know where they come from.

This first step in the recognition of the supersensible may be called imaginative knowledge. We must develop these faculties if we want to enter the first sphere of the supersensible world. If such exercises are continued long enough — for some people, depending on their individuality, they take years, for some months — then the person finally comes to develop, in a sense complete, an ability to think in images, in the same way that one can think abstractly in ordinary consciousness; not dreaming in images, but being able to think in them. But then, when one has progressed far enough with such pictorial thinking, then one knows through direct awareness: this pictorial thinking does not descend into physicality, it is free and independent of physicality. One now feels oneself in this independent pictorial thinking, one lives entirely in it, one now lives in this independent pictorial thinking as one otherwise lives in one's physical body. Just as one feels in one's physical body with one's general bodily feelings, with all that one feels flowing from this body into the soul, perhaps in the form of pain or general well-being, in short, just as one feels in one's physical body, one now feels in a finer, in a second human being. One has detached this second person from this physical body and one can then say from inner experience, from direct life: I experience myself as a human being not only in the physical body, I experience myself as a human being in an etheric body, in a body of finer substantiality. One now knows from experience that a second person is contained in the first. Just as one can perceive through the physical tools of the physical body in the physical world, through the eye the colors, through the ears the sounds, so one can now - when one feels in the etheric body and knows oneself as a second person through this etheric body, which is organized in the same way as the physical body - perceive a new world that remains impenetrable to the physical body.

The first new world that one perceives is the world of one's own last life on earth. In a mighty tableau, majestically standing, everything that was in succession in time – simultaneously as in a panorama – our life on earth stands before us from the present moment in which we live, looking back to our birth. Just as things usually stand next to each other in space, so in this retrospective, the experiences we went through in the eighth year of life, for example, stand simultaneously with those we went through in the twentieth and fiftieth year of life. Time becomes like space. And what we experience there in vivid images in a majestic panorama of life, we learn to distinguish well from ordinary memory. The ordinary memory, which we bring forth in individual thoughts, ideas, images from our human nature, is weak and pale. What we see in this overview is full of content, powerfully colored, if I may use the expression. But everything also appears to us as external things appear to us. We now know, in the overview of a moment that is, however, expanding somewhat, how our life appears to a soul's gaze. And there it shows us that in every moment of our earthly existence since our birth, or rather since our conception, a spiritual-soul element has been surging and weaving within us. This spiritual-soul substance condenses into the power of growth, the power of nutrition, into all that surges and weaves in our physical body, but ultimately it is a spiritual substance that we see when we ascend to the first step of supersensible knowledge. But at the same time we learn to recognize, besides our own etheric body, the etheric world that is around us and to which our etheric body belongs; we learn to recognize how differently we relate to this etheric world - which is there like the physical world - than to the physical world. In the physical world, the thing is there, I am there. I speak of physical things as something that is strictly separate from me; I point to it. With the etheric world, I am connected through my etheric body in the same way that a limb of my organism is connected to the whole organism. And just as a limb, my finger, separates itself from my organism, so the etheric body separates itself from the etheric universe, but it is still a limb in it. We are much more one with the world that stands behind the physical world than the physical body is one with the physical world. That is the first step in the supersensible world, and that is also the first supersensible world that we reach on the way to supersensible knowledge. The level of supersensible knowledge that I have described so far does not go further than an insight into this essence of human nature, which from birth to death develops and changes as a unity, but remains permanent remain throughout our entire life on earth, while the individual substances that we absorb are absorbed by us and then expelled by us, so that we, as physical human beings, are constantly renewing ourselves, even during our life on earth. That which is the etheric body remains as a unity from birth to death.

But if we want to go beyond this first supersensible realm, then a second level of knowledge must be developed within the soul. This can be done by activating our thinking, which we had to do in order to grasp and take hold of ourselves in our etheric body, so that we can grasp and take hold of ourselves in our etheric body, and then, for the second level of knowledge, we must again remove from our consciousness everything we gain in this way through activated thinking. Once we have firmly brought a content into our soul by concentrating with all our might, we must now leave it out again. You know what state a person enters when they have to remove the usual content of their soul, the world that the senses give them: they fall asleep. Gradually, they sink into a paralysis of the soul. This must not happen and does not happen. It is difficult to remove from the soul the content that we have brought into consciousness with all our strength. It is harder to remove this content than the content of ordinary consciousness. But if we succeed in removing it, something has occurred that is otherwise never there. A complete emptiness of consciousness has occurred in the human soul life. Through what the human being has gone through in the powerful experience of his own etheric body, he becomes able to abstract, to detach himself from all the sense world and from all ordinary thinking. He lives in a higher region. If he now removes this higher region, his own life tableau, then his consciousness becomes empty and we are in that state that is significant for all higher knowledge: we are in the state of mere waking, without this waking having any soul content. We direct an intensified, strengthened consciousness out into the emptiness of the world. We do not fall asleep while performing this task, but we remain awake, but for a moment we are only confronted with nothingness. This does not last long. When we have maintained mere waking in our consciousness, real empty consciousness, then a spiritual world penetrates into us that is not our etheric body, not that which is related to it, but which is now a spiritual world that is initially very distant. The real spiritual world penetrates into mere waking and empty consciousness, but this empty consciousness and waking must be acquired through long soul exercises, which I could only describe in principle. For this suppression of all content does not succeed at the first attempt. It must be practiced again and again. Again, for some it takes years, for some, if they are predisposed to it, depending on their destiny, it takes months to achieve that they can keep their consciousness empty without lulling it to sleep, so that the spiritual world can penetrate them.

Of course, one could say that when a person enters the spiritual world, it could be mere suggestion, an autosuggestion. How can one distinguish between suggestion and what the spiritual researcher, the initiate, calls the real spiritual world? One can only distinguish between them through life. Just as one distinguishes in life between a hot potato that has been imagined and a real hot potato, because one does not get burnt by an imaginary hot potato, but one does get burnt by a real hot potato, so one experiences real facts in the spiritual world that flows into the empty consciousness. One simply knows, just as one can distinguish a real live issue from an imagined one, through life, whereby this spiritual reality is distinguished from mere autosuggestion.

In the book mentioned earlier, I referred to this second stage of supersensible knowledge as inspired knowledge, according to an old usage that need not be objected to – we need a terminology. When one arrives at inspired knowledge, one experiences oneself, as it were, still in a third man. First there is the physical human being, then the etheric human being, and now one experiences oneself in a third human being. But by experiencing oneself in this third human being, one knows oneself not only through the strengthened, imaginative thinking independently of one's physical body, but completely outside of one's physical body. One has attained the state that can be called: life in the spirit outside of the physical body. Then the human being is also able to leave the etheric body, that is, as he has erased all imaginative content from his consciousness, he can completely erase this life tableau, to which he first came, and dive into the unconscious and live outside of his physical and etheric existence. But then, when a person achieves this, the retrospective view extends further into the past than just to the birth or conception: we look into a spiritual world in which we were as spiritual beings before we descended into the physical world. We see ourselves acting and living in this spiritual world, just as we see ourselves as physical human beings in the physical world. We learn to recognize that what nature develops as our physical human germ must unite with what descends from the spiritual worlds, for that is what we now see for ourselves. And when we have attained this knowledge, through which we go completely out of our physical and etheric bodies, then, when we go back again – that is, when the moment of our beholding the spiritual world has ceased – we look into our own physical and etheric bodies and find that our earthly life is a reflection in the soul-spiritual of what we were in the spiritual-soul before we descended to earth. And precisely by entering into our body again, into the physical and etheric body, we acquire the power of a, I would say, configured, individualized vision. Now that we are experiencing more of the general spiritual world that we passed through in our pre-earthly existence outside of our physical body and our etheric body, now that we are returning to the physical and etheric body, now we are learning, not by immersing ourselves, dive into them, but I would say to dwell in them, to live in our physical and etheric bodies, now we learn to distinguish between the spiritual beings of a higher world, with whom we were united before we descended to earthly life, and how we distinguish between individual human beings here. We learn to recognize beings that never descend to earth, that never take on a physical body, divine spiritual beings. We are fellow inhabitants of the spiritual world with them before we descend to this earth. And we learn to see, precisely because we can now be alternately outside and inside our body with the spiritual and soul, we also learn to recognize how human souls are now among these higher spiritual and soul beings, among whom we were before we descended to earth, waiting to descend to earth in order to experience it in a later time than we did.

And so, through this stage of inspired knowledge, we learn to recognize that part of the eternity of the human being that is very little considered by our sense of time, even by the religious. The present does not like to look at the pre-earthly existence. It is true that man is interested in facing up to what lies beyond death, even if only through faith or tradition, because that must come first, while man is present and therefore does not need to reflect particularly on what existed before birth. He is here, after all! But whether he will also remain here is of interest to him; in his selfishness he is interested in the second part of eternity, immortality. We do not even have a word in modern languages for the other half of eternity, for the pre-earthly existence, which is as infinite in the past as immortality is in the future. For in truth, one only comes to recognize the eternity of human life when one can again point to the words that the original languages had for eternity, and which spoke just as meaningfully of unbornness as of immortality. More recent esoteric teachings on initiation again define the eternity of the human being as consisting of the unborn and the immortal. However, the unborn is needed less for selfishness than for true knowledge. People can remain with mere belief when it comes to the immortal. Only by looking at the unborn within me, not only at the immortal, can I learn to recognize the unborn, the certainty that a spiritual essence, existing before my physical formation, is my being.

When one has emerged from one's physical and Arther body in this way and feels among spiritual beings, as one previously felt among physical beings and things in the physical body, one always knows oneself as a human being, as this particular self. And so, in a sense, one only has to start the journey back, going backwards through the sequence of times into the world that one has lived through before life on earth. But if a person, when he feels himself outside his physical and etheric bodies within a spiritual world, then looks down at the world of the stars, and the stars no longer appear to him as stars, but as worlds where higher or even lower entities dwell, then everywhere where there is a star for the physical eye, there is a world sphere of other entities. When man, as he otherwise feels in the physical body on earth, now feels in the starry world in a spiritual world, then one can speak of the astral body, as one speaks of the etheric body in the first stage of supersensible knowledge, because one is now within the spirituality of the starry world.

If man wants to progress further, then he must add to imagination and to the empty consciousness a third faculty of perception, a faculty of perception that is very often not regarded as a faculty of perception by today's consciousness. It is an ability that plays the greatest conceivable role in human life, but which is not recognized as having any right to be part of knowledge. That is the human power of love: love that brings people together in such a way that they approach the being they love through the physical body or through the embodied soul or embodied spirit. By further developing this love, so that this love can reach into the experience of the etheric body first, but that one can also bring this love over into the experience in the astral body, by further developing this ability to love, we finally not only come to but we gradually develop the ability to increase our love to such an extent that we not only see other beings, but also enter into a relationship with these other spiritual beings – we ourselves then become spirit – in the same way that we have entered into a relationship with physical people on earth. Intuition gives us the opportunity to interact with spiritual beings, just as physical abilities give people the opportunity to interact with physical people on earth. But when we have developed our ability to love to such an extent that the spiritual becomes objective to us, as the sensual is objective to us in the physical world, then we not only look back into our pre-earthly spiritual existence, but we look back into earlier earth lives, and it becomes a fact that we go through the whole human life in forms of existence between birth and death and then between death and a new birth, again from birth to death, again from death to a new birth, that we live through life in successive earthly lives and in successive purely spiritual lives. We learn to look back on our previous earthly lives and see the present, current life as a repetition of these earlier ones.

But no one can arrive at the realization of what he was like, what he was, that he even existed in a past life, who has not progressed to the point of developing love to the point that he can face himself as well as another, as another being faces him. There must be a mighty difference between the ordinary power of perception and that power of perception steeped in love, through which we see our previous lives on earth as we see the life of another person in the present. When we ascend to this level, which I have called the intuitive, the truly intuitive level, we see ourselves in our mind's eye as spiritually effective beings in repeated earthly lives. Only then are we completely outside of our physical life. But he who experiences this, he knows what death is. Death now stands before him as the external, objective realization of what he himself has experienced in knowledge. Just as he has discarded his physical and etheric bodies in knowledge, so he knows that death only discards the physical and etheric bodies, and that through the gate of death man enters into a spiritual world. Belief becomes knowledge, opinion becomes insight. We are given certain, exact, vivid science by that which we otherwise call immortality in life. We look at the immortality of our own human life, at the entry of this own human being into a post-mortal life, as we look at a prenatal spiritual life, at a pre-earthly life.

But we also look at what has developed between people in physical life during physical life on earth, at the relationships that exist in the family, where one person comes into contact with another, at the relationships that are brought about through love and friendship in human life. We look at all of this. Just as the physical body of the individual falls away at death, and the soul ascends into a spiritual world, so too, when people who have been brought together on earth by their destiny have passed through the gate of death and find themselves there among higher beings, what is physical in friendship, in love relationships on earth, falls away, and a more soulful, all the more intimate life together then occurs. Modern initiation can only show how to find the path that is otherwise a matter of mere belief, through seeing, to secure for knowledge that which is immortality, the other side of eternity.

Thus man ascends through imaginative knowledge to the view of that which lives between birth and death. Man then ascends when he acquires this knowledge to his etheric body. Inspired knowledge leads man to his astral body, and through it he enters the world he passed through before his birth, which he will enter again after death. In the astral body, one becomes acquainted with the pre-earthly and post-mortal life spheres of the human being. In the ascent to intuitive knowledge, one becomes acquainted with the fourth aspect of the human being, the true, eternal self, which passes from earth-life to earth-life and which, between individual earth-lives, has purely spiritual forms of existence.

In conclusion, now that this path of modern initiation has been sketched out in a few strokes, at least in principle, let me say this: when one looks at the ancient knowledge that was acquired in the manner described at the beginning, through external cultic and other events, this knowledge was more dream-like, instinctive. And from old instinctive, dream-like knowledge, men's convictions about the supersensible, about the spiritual, have finally emerged and remained as tradition. But today one can already sense that more people than they realize have the urge, the deep longing to rediscover the paths to the spiritual worlds. Few people are the first to admit this consciously, but in the subconscious, if one is able to see such things, one can see today how numerous people are who long for mysteries again because they want to find the way to supersensible worlds.

We were only able to make a timid beginning with what we call the Goetheanum in northwestern Switzerland, where a place of mystery was created, where man was to find a way into the supersensible in a similarly modern and prudent way as he found a way into the mysteries in ancient times in a more instinctive way. Enemies have snatched this place from us. It was destroyed by arson some time ago. These things also have their eternity. The physical fire could take from us the physical building, the Goetheanum, the physical building in which until then that spiritual science had been cultivated, of which I was allowed to give you a hint. But there is also a spiritual fire. This spiritual fire does not burn physical sites, but will always let them arise again. In the new mysteries, the students of spiritual wisdom will approach their task quietly and not as noisily as in the old mysteries. They, in turn, will bring people the knowledge of the eternal in man and the world that they so urgently need. For people need this knowledge for their thinking, for their feeling and willing, so that they may come to clarity within themselves, to a life of inner harmony, and so that they may also gain strength and security for their outer life. He needs the connection with the spiritual world. And something like the spiritual school in Dornach, on the border of Switzerland towards the northwest, will awaken more and more as a longing in human souls, born out of humanity's eternal urge for the spiritual. This urge rested for a while through centuries. These centuries have brought people the magnificent external knowledge of nature. Today, man stands and knocks again at the door that leads to the supernatural, because he cannot advance his soul with knowledge of nature. That which yearns for the spiritual world, consciously in a few people but unconsciously in a large part of humanity, can only be satisfied by the modern mysteries. Anyone who is sincere about the spiritual world will see that people will definitely crave new mysteries in the future, because spirituality will only come back to people when new mysteries arise in which people can find the spirit in a more sober and enlightened way than in the old mysteries, but in which they can be led in a more developed and perfect way through the mysteries back to the spiritual, divine world and thus to the source of humanity.

Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, which I had occasion to speak of here last week and this week, is pretty well none of the things which people who do not know it believe it to be. This may already have been apparent from the two previous lectures. Above all you will hear people who have only superficially considered this spiritual scientific approach say that the results, or let us say, for the moment, the results that have been referred to, of this approach have to be completely ignored in the light of present-day natural scientific insights.

You may also hear it said that in the light of the most significant, major and crucial issues in our present time—all of them more or less in the social sphere—something said to have been brought down from the spiritual world, said to be the result of supersensible insight, proves impractical and without significance. Finally there are a third group of people who will keep stressing that this spiritual science serves to draw people away from genuine, well-founded religious responses and feelings, that it contributes to the lack of religion in our time, and that it does in fact present considerable dangers in this respect.

Today I want to speak mainly about these three misconceptions concerning anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. The day after tomorrow I’ll then attempt to present a picture of historical development in more recent times from the point of view of this supersensible science.

To enter more deeply into the whole configuration of people’s thinking in our time, we simply must look at everything which in the course of the last three or four centuries, and especially the 19th century, has given natural scientific thinking the radical significance of which I have spoken sufficiently, I think, in the earlier lectures. We need to look at this origin of natural-scientific thinking because people think in this way not only in the natural sciences. All over the world any question is—quite justifiably—considered in some way in the light of natural science. So we may indeed say that in so far as we see that the historical development of recent times has in a wholly elementary way given people’s inner life a natural-scientific orientation, this orientation has its justification. On the other hand we may also say that spiritual science would immediately give itself bad marks if it were to enter into any kind of conflict with the natural-scientific thinking of recent times. It does not get into conflict, however; quite the contrary—natural-scientific thinking and hence the whole orientation of present-day thinking, in every aspect of life, will only gain a solid foundation if those taking the natural-scientific approach are prepared to base themselves on spiritual science, making it their foundation.

Wanting to consider this question, initially I would say in a negative way, we have to take a bit of a look at how not modern natural science, but the specific way of modern thinking in natural science has arisen. And we have to say that anyone who considers history not in an outer, superficial way but by asking himself: How did the most profound abilities humanity has, also in the soul, develop through the ages? Just as an individual person develops and we cannot say that he is inwardly the same at 30, 40 or 50—how did humanity develop its ideas, its whole way of thinking, until they finally came to the ideas that tend to be dominant at the present time? Studying the evolution of the human mind without prejudice, one will find that in earlier times, and we may say until the 17th century, this humanity had different ideas on the inner life of man, on the divine principle in the world, and on nature. Going into this development more deeply we will also find confirmation in outer ways. Go back to earlier times and you’ll never find people looking at the outer world perceived through the senses, the natural world outside, and the ‘nature of the human soul’ as they called it, as separate from each other. Even in the 16th and on into the 17th century, writings on the natural order of things would always also include what people had to say about the nature of the human soul at the time. Indeed, in those days they had not only the teachings of theology that came through revelation but also a theologia naturalist¹⁰⁷ a theology that wanted to derive its teachings, its view of life, from the nature of the human soul.

This is an outward sign of a significant fact. In earlier times, before the scientific thinking of more recent times arose, people had the ideas which at one and the same time could give a satisfactory explanation of the natural world and also say something about the inner life of human beings. Concepts of soul and spirit were not as separate then from those of nature and world as has been the case from the 17th and 18th centuries onwards, when modern scientific thinking came fully into its own. And those different concepts—this is the important point—were not established in an arbitrary way in those days and changed at will. The fact that concepts changed has to do with human powers of evolution that are a necessity in the course of that evolution as is the change in body and soul constitution in the process of individual human development as we grow older, moving on from childhood to old age.

The situation is that today we have arrived at concepts, through natural science, that will no longer serve if we want to use them directly to explain the life of the human psyche. This we have seen last week. Someone who is able to think in terms of modern science, doing so in a straight and honest way, accepting the inevitable consequences, must ask himself: If we gain insight into nature, what significance does this have for the evolution of modern humanity?

A satisfactory answer to this question can only be found if one is able to investigate natural science and establish its essential nature. If you base yourself from the beginning on the belief that natural science is all and everything when it comes to explaining the world, you will not find a satisfactory answer to this question. You need to be able to ask yourself: How does natural science relate to the whole of human evolution? Only this will give a clear idea of what natural science is able to achieve.

We need to be able, as it were, to study natural science itself in a natural scientific way. And here we may well point out that significantly, even great minds who considered the matter have come to the conclusion that natural science has natural limits, as it were, limits of which we spoke in the first lecture. Thoughtful people of our present age do feel that when they try to gain an overview of what natural science registers in its different fields, they have to say to themselves: With all these ideas, all the concepts which natural science provides on the basis of the strict methods of investigation we have, we do not really get to the natural need for insight that we have in our souls. They feel, in a way, that natural science exists and cannot be other than it is—leaving aside errors and exceptions, of course—but that exactly when it meets its ideal it cannot satisfy the most profound need for insight that human beings have with regard to the world of nature.

Perhaps I may put their feelings in the following paradoxical way. People are agreed—developments have gone that way in more recent times—that our ancestors were at a childlike level of knowledge until the more recent natural science brought a change. The ancients developed ideas out of a soul quality that was more or less given to fantasy. They had ideas in which they assumed all kinds of spiritual elements in the natural world, and they also developed their concepts in accord with this. It has been said that they looked for the forces that lay behind natural phenomena. But the ideas of the ancients were childlike, so that they did not find forces but only spectres of nature. And people who are proud of the achievements of modern science were to some extent arrogant when they looked back to those earlier thinkers, people of an earlier time on earth who sought to discover what lay behind the visible world of nature. And instead of the actual forces of nature, which are at last being discovered today, those ancients were looking for all kinds of spectres, spirits that had personal qualities and the like and were behind the phenomena of nature, spirits of which in the age of natural science one could only think that they have absolutely nothing to do with the natural order but arose from a power in the human soul that was unable to penetrate to the reality of nature, and therefore developed all kinds of ideas about the natural world.

Until quite recently this was a dogma which everyone thinking in terms of natural science would consider quite natural. Today, however, some individuals, whose views are certainly worth noting, are coming to realize: If we take a real look at our concepts of nature, not given to the prejudiced idea that we are able to grasp the essential nature of the natural world with those concepts of nature, but taking these concepts of nature as they are and waiting to see how they relate to what we really experience with regard to nature when we bring the whole human being into play and not only the intellect and skills of experimentation, then these concepts of nature are like those ancient spectres when compared to unbiased insight. There are people without prejudice today who say: The ancients thought up spectres out of their inner state of soul; but we are not really doing anything different, especially if we are real natural scientists. For the ideas of nature we imagine we have in our heads are just as unreal in relation to nature as the old spectres which natural scientists believed to be unreal.

This insight has its justification. And you find the justification by asking: How does the human being gain insight into nature? Initially we are at most observing nature, having no insight. And as we observe nature what we see has a very different kind of life to it than the life of the image we are able to have in our scientific ideas. If we meet the world of nature with eyes and ears, as whole human beings, which also includes the thinking mind, and do not only think in natural laws or do experiments in laboratories; if we observe nature as it presents, and think through the observations we make, then we live with nature. And when we begin to investigate nature, we cannot take the life from nature with us. Being unable to take the life from nature with us because as living beings at one with nature we are only in immediate living experience in our observation, we really make nature poorer when we try to grasp it with natural science, sucking it in, as it were. And when we want to gain real natural scientific insight, we make nature into a spectre in doing so. This is simply a fact and can be observed just as anything else is observed.

It is important, however, to have the courage to admit that this is the case and that in gaining insight into nature we really come to a kind of view that takes the image gained of nature as a spectre. We come to put this truth to our souls, saying that insight into nature is therefore something that takes us into something ghostly. In the hither and thither of gaining scientific insight into nature the human being behaves in such a way that he moves away from nature, from the observation of nature, and nurtures a ghost of nature.

There has been someone in more recent human history who has said what I have just been saying in a less open and therefore also less paradoxical way, but who had a profound feeling for this. This was Goethe. He already knew how to approach nature in this way, a way that was in harmony with itself. He was misunderstood as a result and considered an amateur in the field of science. Even today, it takes a lot of effort—I am allowed to say this because I have been trying for decades to get people of our time to develop an understanding of Goethe in this direction—to understand Goethe’s way of looking at nature.

What way is this? This way, which will be developed more and more and which may indeed still have been amateurish or imperfect in Goethe’s case, needs to be developed further in a truly scientific way. It will then lead to genuine insight into nature in all spheres. What is it? It is that we can approach the gaining of insight, in so far it moves away from nature itself and is more reflective—I spoke of this last week, but from a different point of view—in such a way that we use this reflection not only to give nature opportunity to present the human mind with its ghostly nature. Goethe did not seek to establish natural laws. These are always abstractions, something dead compared to living nature. Goethe sought to find pure phenomena, or archetypal phenomena, as he called them. He wanted to use human thinking not as something that might provide explanations for nature, discovering laws such as the conservation of energy or of matter, which are entirely thought up. No, Goethe sought to use thought to bring phenomena together in such a way that nothing of the human being himself would speak any more through these natural phenomena but the phenomena would speak purely out of themselves.

If we now progress from the instinctive quality of Goethe’s thought to gaining insight in full conscious awareness, in a reflective way, where does this take us? We will then answer the question in a way which is only possible with perception that goes beyond the senses. We will ask: What is it, really, which we observe in the natural world when we use our senses? It is a spectre of the kind I mentioned, a making ghostly. It is, of course, already there in the natural world, for we suck it out of it. But what else is there in the world of nature, apart from this, when we are in lively interchange with it, using our eyes and ears, giving ourselves up directly to the impressions gained through the senses?

Someone who trains his power to form ideas on the one hand and his powers of will on the other to develop supersensible perceptiveness will reach a point where he says to himself: ‘The supersensible is actually therein anything the senses perceive in the natural world around us.’ It is merely that we leave the supersensible aside, and indeed have to leave it aside when we seek insight into the natural world. Why? Because we human beings, being organized in our physical bodies the way we are whilst here on earth between birth and death, have transformed our own spiritual and eternal aspect into a body that is perceptible to the senses. We are not human by virtue of dwelling in a house of the supersensible that lives in us but by virtue of having entered, through birth or conception, from a supersensible world into the sensual sphere. The supersensible element which before this lived in a purely spiritual sphere has changed into a sensual body that lives to the full as something sensual and on death returns to the supersensible, as I have shown in the previous lecture.

Being human and therefore organized for the senses, observation of nature has to move away from the supersensible in us when it becomes scientific insight into nature. A truly supersensible way of thinking will thus tell us the following here. We come to realize that when we have nature before us in all the rich variety of light and colours, in many shades, and all the other phenomena perceived through the senses, something supersensible is revealed that is not separated from what we perceive through the senses; it is a supersensible element within the sensual. Yet when we look at it as human beings and seek to explain, we can only take from nature what we human beings—being sensual creatures that belong to sensuality between birth and death and not to the supersensible that comes to revelation in the sensual—are able to digest. Being organized in that way, we make our science of nature into a mere image of the sensual because of our own sensual nature. This image of the sensual must be a spectre, for the world of nature that surrounds us also has the supersensible within it.

Someone who truly develops the ability to observe the supersensible—you will also find the way described in my Occult Science or Knowledge of the Higher Worlds (How to Know Higher Worlds)—will say to himself: Supersensible aspects exist for everything in the universe outside. And if we go beyond the spectre which we have to create for ourselves in the image we have of nature, we come not to dead atoms, nor to energy or matter, but to a supersensible, spiritual aspect. This can and must make it possible for us to find a way of gaining supersensible insight.

Someone who gains insight into the way human beings relate to nature around them will not look for dead atoms, nor molecules, nor for something that is super-sensibly sensual, but for the truly supersensible. Supersensible investigation does not provide material bases for the colours and sounds that surround us. Instead you find spiritual, supersensible entities that are present everywhere in the natural world. If the study of nature is taken in the right sense, which is when it purely seeks to consider phenomena inwardly, in the Goethean way, you do not have something dead with regard to the truths that lie beyond the phenomena, but something that is alive and spiritual. It is particularly if you investigate the natural world honestly and consistently, if rational thinking and experimentation skills do not lead you to think that you can discern something relating to nature, but if you know that you can do no other but let nature become phenomenon, letting it express itself, then you will know that with these phenomena, which Goethe called ‘archetypal phenomena’, you have the supersensible immediately before you. It will then not be necessary to use laws of energy and matter to explain things. Instead you will find it becomes necessary to explain things out of the spiritual aspect. Essentially this leads to a view that is genuinely objective and unbiased, I would say a natural scientific study of the process of gaining insight into nature itself.

How does the science of the spirit, which seeks supersensible insight of its own accord, relate to this? If you follow the way to supersensible perception which I characterized for you last week, you will say: When a person transforms his ability to form ideas and powers of will and truly becomes able to perceive the supersensible in the way we see colours with our eyes and hear sounds with our ears; when a person sees this supersensible element the way he normally sees the sensual sphere in life, this transition to supersensible vision is truly like an awakening in the inner experience of the soul. And the spiritual investigator does indeed go through this living experience. We may say that just as in ordinary life someone wakes from the life of sleep and dreams and realizes that during his sleep and in the life of dreams he lived merely in images, and then knows how to connect his will with outward reality, the person with spiritual perception who advances to supersensible investigation will awaken from the world in which we are in our ordinary waking state. He will have another world before him that relates to the everyday world of the senses the way this everyday world of the senses relates to the world of dream images. It is an awakening. This can come to life in the soul.

The phenomena we have all around us in the world then become images relating to the higher, supersensible world, just as someone thinking in a healthy way will take dream images to be images of what we have in the world of the senses. Let me give an example to indicate how the everyday world perceived through the senses changes into a world of images for someone with spiritual perception. These things just have to be rightly understood, not in some kind of mystic dream, nor in any kind of nebulous way. In ordinary natural science the way of looking at the human being is to attach equal value to the head, the trunk, the extremities—with the part that continues in an inward direction, I mean now, so that from the morphological point of view everything sexual also belongs to the extremities. From the usual point of view, these three parts of human nature are something absolute, I would say, something of equal value. From the spiritual point of view, the human being who is before us as a creature perceived through the senses becomes the image of his higher, supersensible nature, just as everyday experiences turn into images when we dream of them. And when we thus consider the human being in the light of his eternal supersensible nature, our understanding of the human being will also change.

Bringing image nature into our search for insight completely changes human perceptiveness. Head and—to take just these two parts of human nature—extremities nature are then no longer equal in value, for in the configuration of the head, if studied exactly, you see something which in it forms resembles the life in the spirit that preceded the individual’s entrance into the world of the senses. And in the nature of the extremities you see what is there already as potential—embryonic as yet, but it will develop—for what the individual will be in the future, above all when he goes through the gate of death to enter into the supersensible world. It may still sound strange today, but this is what will develop from Goethe’s theory of metamorphosis if it is taken up in a truly spiritual-scientific way.

Goethe considered the changing form of an individual plant, the changing form of an individual animal or human being to be like images of a basic configuration. In a comprehensive spiritual theory of metamorphosis, the head will be seen as a metamorphosis of the person’s extremities, but in such a way that the one refers to the past, the other to the future. The human being’s external configuration will then be the image of what he is in spirit. And everything then becomes image of the supersensible, just as a dream becomes image when we enter into sleep. The human being’s reality in the supersensible sphere becomes image of this supersensible whilst he is awake in the sensual sphere, just as the sensual becomes image when he falls asleep. This is an immediate finding made in the supersensible, something I may call an empirical finding.

Let us now compare what this supersensible perception gains out of itself concerning the nature of the world and indeed the human being when it seeks to penetrate the nature of the human being. The human being and the whole of nature becomes image and this needs to be related to a supersensible reality. This does not entirely agree with anything a thinking modern natural scientist finds in final conclusion. He finds that his natural phenomenon turns into a spectre, an image. Supersensible insight shows that everything we perceive in the sphere of the senses must turn into image and needs to be related to something that is supersensible. In short, nothing brings us as much to a harmonious concept of the world as the discoveries made not as a modern natural scientist adhering to dogma but as a thinking natural scientist, someone who is able to observe his natural science itself in a natural scientific way. His findings will agree with anything the spiritual scientist has to say about the natural world in so far as it is open to observation. This is something that must come for humanity.

People need to be in a position where they can truly see how the way to the supersensible and the way to the sensual which is penetrated with thought come together. This alone will give a total image of the world that makes us not merely possessors of a ghostly reflection of nature but lets us realize, lets us admit that using the ordinary way of explaining nature we had to create such a ghostly reflection, yet at the same time shows us how we can go beyond this image of nature and enter into the supersensible realm of the spirit. This is the way in which natural-scientific thinking will also have to go if it is to go beyond the sphere into which it has to take itself of necessity, especially when meeting its own ideal. Contradictions arise when we believe we have grasped nature in the study of it but have really only taken hold of something that will not allow us to look down on the old ‘spectres’, for it is but spectre itself, and the spiritual reality must be sought behind it.

Insight in the spirit, of the kind which is meant here, thus is not in opposition to natural science. Quite the contrary, it provides natural science with the element that it must find to understand itself; it provides something which unconsciously is the goal of every true natural scientist’s search; it provides the element which alone can give satisfaction, for natural scientific investigation must by its very nature inevitably lead to dissatisfaction, especially if done in the accepted way.

If people will gradually perceive the true nature of supersensible insight they will find that natural science of the more recent kind can only survive if they complement it with the science of the spirit. People working in the field must themselves desire to have supersensible insight. This alone will bring true insight into nature, that is, access to the supersensible realm.

I only wanted to mention this briefly. One could give many lectures and show that the very idea of natural science demands a science of the spirit if it is not to come to nothing, with misunderstanding arising about the findings made in natural science. I just wanted to show that natural scientists must themselves look for this science of the spirit. Great triumphs have been celebrated in natural science, and tremendous advances have been made on the human road to knowledge. But if natural science continues along the way it is going now, it will go beyond itself and take us to the spirit. Today the situation is that only people who are able to think scientifically themselves should take a critical attitude to natural science, not taking a negative stance from either ignorance or antipathy, but a positive one. If I may make a personal remark, which I am only doing because it is perhaps connected with the factual situation, it is this. Many people have accused me of publishing some works in which intense efforts were made to justify 19th-century natural science, so that they are wholly based on natural science—as far as this is possible when using the natural scientific way of thinking. However, I would not be entitled to say a single word to you today or to other audiences where I take the direction I have taken today if I could not also say that I knew how to be very positive, wholly in agreement in so far as agreement is justifiable, with natural science. I think you have to know natural science and appreciate its achievements before you are allowed to speak about it. All the talk about natural science by ‘mystics’ or theosophists who know nothing about it is wholly inappropriate.

This, I think, will suffice to refer briefly to the first misapprehension suffered by people who know nothing about anthroposophically orientated spiritual science but who talk about it.

The second misapprehension is that people consider anything that goes in the direction of supersensible insight to be impractical and of no use in everyday life. A negative view is taken of this especially in the present time because present-day people are truly, in the fullest sense of the word, compelled to throw themselves into practical life. Well, let us consider this from just one aspect, though it is an important one, and that is the view taken of human social life. Scientific and other views of this have in fact become slogans and major themes in more recent times. Essentially the things that have happened in this field are also wholly in accord with the natural-scientific way of thinking. In my view it is not helpful for the people who want to be sociologists, being such in the right sense of the word for our time and wanting to establish a science of sociology, to try more and more to adopt ideas and concepts from natural science, applying them to human social life. I would actually consider this to be a great deal less helpful because theories really have very little significance when it comes to practical life in the real sense, something which is particularly evident from the supersensible point of view.

Think of everything Lasalle was thinking of when he developed the approach which he then presented in his famous lecture on science and the workers.¹⁰⁸ His ideal was that human social life would need to be taken out of the instinctive sphere into a scientific approach, exactly through modern socialism. He believed that the proletariat needed to learn to think in scientific terms and that this would bring about a new age. We then saw how in Marxism, with its materialistic view of history, and with a thinking that was deliberately scientific, people tried to establish an approach on the basis of a theory that was to be taken up into human minds and would lead to social structures for the world. Well, people who today, when the last four years have swept across the world, are still unable to see that human minds will be little influenced by anything based on such theories, will no doubt come to see it in the decades which lie ahead. Theories really count for little when it comes to what we should really be considering here, and that is social community life, structuring it out of the human impulses in the most comprehensive sense possible. A great deal lies in these few words ‘structuring social relationships out of the human impulses.’

Again one might say a lot about the many attempts made to structure this social life in a way that would be worthy of humanity as it is now. I do, however, consider this less important. I would consider it much more important to consider that life has indeed taken on a structure, though this has led to the terrible world disaster we have seen evolve over the last four years. At least some of the causes that led to this terrible world disaster must be sought in the very real contradiction and opposition among the impulses into which human social life has driven itself in every part of the world.

People have rightly said that in earlier times—the very times when natural scientific thinking did not yet have the modern form I have been characterizing for you—life was corporate. They had trade and craft guilds, and a wide variety of ways that brought people together.

Then came the age of modern individualism with its ideal of human freedom. People felt they owed it to this ideal of freedom, to this impulse of individualism, to dissolve the old corporations. If you look at history you’ll find that they were gradually dissolved. You could see how economic life progressed, and how in recent times corporations have arisen again in life. I can’t and won’t go into detail, for otherwise one would have to show how step by step on the one hand corporate associations or unions such as consumer associations arose, and how people tried to cope with life partly by the old style of community life persisting or coming alive again. The old corporations have not returned, but new ones have arisen and are part of our social structure, including the trusts that have formed. I would attach much more value to this practical configuration of social life, as it has arisen, rather than to theories that people have developed on the subject.

However, the way it all came to be configured, even if we have to take account of a wide variety of interests coming into it, and other impulses in modern life, we nevertheless have to say that the modern corporation has evolved in many different spheres; something belonging to earlier times persists because it is still in accord with human instincts and will impulses. And the inmost impulse in the way people have configured the world—‘configured’ is the operative word here, for it is not what people thought about it but how they have configured the world, creating communities, relating person to person, though unconsciously so—has again been the natural scientific thinking of more recent times, but in a quite specific way.

Looking back with understanding on what brought people together in the past, when they lived in trade and craft guilds—I do not, of course, defend them, knowing that it was right to get rid of them—and how they lived in those communities, we see a considerable difference from the element which brings them together today. A most outstanding characteristic—everyone who knows about these things has to admit this—of the old communities was that people understood one another both within such communities and from community to community. Of course, everything always only goes to a certain point in the world; but the people understood one another. Masters and journeymen understood one another, for the master knew what lived in the journeyman’s soul. They had a positive attitude to each other. Why? Because the instincts and impulses of will from which those communities arose still had a spiritual and soul element in them, a spiritual and soul element that was connected with the bodily element.

The element which brought it about in earlier times that people were able to look not only at the natural world with the ideas which they then had but also at the soul, with ideas that lived instinctively, unconsciously in human beings and made the natural world and the inner life into one, also lived in the instincts and brought it about that people were close through the blood—son connected with father, daughter with mother, or as a member of a nation or a guild—if there was a blood connection or some other interest, this meant that people demanded community out of their instincts, yet those instincts had inborn impulses of spirit and soul in them.

Then came the thinking that goes with natural scientific culture. Our more recent times have not been configured in their actual structure where human beings are concerned by anything but exactly the thinking that goes with natural science. It is because people came to think about nature in a way where they presented the phenomena in such a way, even if they did not admit to this, that with their ghostly content they no longer had anything to do with the human being. Because of this, the human being stands on his own. Earlier peoples were connected with the natural world. Lightning would flash out there, and thunder roll, with rain coming from the clouds. People of old would see a force of nature reflected in this. They would be aware of one drive or another within themselves and instinctively see such drives reflecting also the same as such a force of nature. They would act out of nature, as it were, for their perception of nature was such that they had not yet set themselves apart from it.

In the last few centuries, the human being was set apart from nature by the very fact of progressing to the pure natural phenomena. Perception of nature will finds its proper mission in the progress of human evolution when it does not provide absolute knowledge—which is today’s superstition, the natural-scientific superstition—but makes human beings free. We will only understand the mission which natural science has in the progress of human evolution when we see that it is nature’s task to teach us freedom.

In the more recent natural science, the human being has to set the natural phenomena apart, making himself remote from nature, and he therefore stands on his own as an individual. Before coming to the supersensible world by taking the supersensible way to which I have been referring so that he would relate to the world again—super-sensibly now, as he had done in a natural way in earlier times—before the human being entered on the road which he will have to take for the future, he was, as it were, poised wholly on the point of his individual person. Natural science placed him on the needle point of his individual nature. Natural science has determined the state of the human soul. It had taken up his instincts. Because of this modern people relate to one another not like the people of earlier times, through blood or guild, but as individuals, as persons. They have to find their associations and social communities in freedom. Initially they thus found them only from instinct, but their instincts in this direction were contradictory, because the time for instincts had passed. On the one hand people can no longer think in terms of instincts but must think consciously, letting natural science educate them in this. On the other hand people did not yet have the opportunity to make themselves part of the world again through supersensible perception. They thus became part of a new world, which they thought about, and related to the old world in a way in which they no longer thought about it. They transplanted the old instincts into a world which thanks to modern natural-scientific thinking was no longer present in their minds. It was because of this that the schism and contradiction arose in modern social life which we perceive if we see what lives at a deeper level of the soul for the humanity of more recent times.

Socialism, distinctly an ideal of humanity, was established with inadequate means. Why? Insight into nature does not place human beings in the world but sets them apart, with awareness of being an individual person growing all the time. Because of this, they can only form communities out of selfish instincts. Their thinking is different from anything created by instinct in communities. Disharmony results, with the consequence that a disharmonious social order must arise if you only have natural science and apply only natural-scientific concepts to the structuring of social life. A contradiction must arise, a living inner objection, and this will continue until humanity finally decides to say: In modern life in particular people inevitably create disharmony in establishing social order unless they bring supersensible insight into social community life, supersensible sentience and purpose. For as long as we do not relate person to person in such a way that we see in the other individual the image, the phenomenon, of the immortal human being, for as long as we do not see in every individual with whom we live in a social context an individual who does reflect a supersensible reality, for as long as we are not willing to add to the knowledge natural science can provide for sociology and social impulses, the insights gained from spiritual insight, modern social thinking, and above all modern social structures, with concepts applied in practice, will result in a life that must dissolve itself and lead to strife and disharmony.

Anyone who understands this inner connection will know how much the situation I have just outlined has influenced events in the last four years. I would not say that it was the only cause, but it did play quite a considerable, and indeed a very major role. Anyone who wants and seeks socialism, honestly so, must guide humanity to concepts that are not merely natural-scientific, for the element that lives and has its being in life from person to person is different from anything that can be found with the natural-scientific approach.

This is apparent in that there is a specific ideal in natural science, an ideal that is indeed justifiable. It is to do more and more experiments, with less and less description and observation. What is an experiment? Initially it is something made up by the rational mind, which actually takes us away from nature and—as I have shown in last week’s lecture—into the nothingness of person. Anything we show experimentally essentially only appears to have to do with the life of nature. In reality it has to do with the element in nature that is dying. This is evident if we try and apply anything gained in the experimental way of thinking to the configuration of social life. Anyone who wants to bring purely natural-scientific concepts, utterly honest, straight and indeed ideal natural-scientific concepts, into social life, brings something into life that does not lead to ascent, to life, but to social death. If humanity is not prepared to bring supersensible elements as well as natural-scientific knowledge to social life it will be found that with all social purpose, with all socialism, the structures created would bring disorder and decline.

A socialism that directs people away from the supersensible will create social structures of destruction, social structures that direct us elsewhere. At most people will use old things and bring out-of-date ideas to realization. For what has happened until now, not through social theories but through practical socialism? Has socialism led to a radical configuring of the world? Then people would not have accepted the old forms, which is what they have in fact been doing until now. Socialism in those old forms is rather like someone who disapproves of the crinoline, yet does not try and get beyond it but puts padding into it instead. And so we see people keeping the old forms, padding them out, in the social thinking of more recent times. For what do most of the leaders of our more recent socialism want? To gain power where others gained power, taking over power rather than giving it a new form.

I would say that this, too, is experimental proof, only in another aspect, that we can only speak of socialism if we also have the will to take humanity to the realm of the supersensible, to the impulses that we must give to modern humanity if they are to get out of the tendency to create the disasters to which purely natural-scientific impulses have taken them. In social life in particular, those impulses must be supersensible ones.

Spiritual science truly is not impractical in this field. For the time being one can only express regret that there are many people who deem themselves really practical, terribly practical, feel really pleased about their own life practice, and look down on the impractical people who want to introduce something to the world out of ideas, out of the spirit. Well, we know this element of middle-class thinking which today considers itself to be great in practical life and brutally rejects anything that might come from the spirit. This life practice will reduce itself to absurdity, to impossibility. For to be truly practical, we have to go for the whole of reality, not half or a quarter of it. If you have a horseshoe magnet and someone comes and says: ‘You can use it to attract other iron; it’s a magnet’ and you then say: ‘Oh no, the shape shows me it’s a horseshoe for shoeing a horse’, you are like someone who wants to organize social life only according to concepts that leave aside anything not perceptible to the senses. Someone who knows that for a true life practice you need the whole of reality and that includes the supersensible, is like someone who does not misuse a horseshoe magnet to shoe a horse but uses it as a magnet. This, then, is the second misapprehension of which I wanted to speak today, again just referring to it briefly.

The third concerns something that is entirely part of the inner life, having to do with the element which in many respects must be most sacred to people—religious life.

Very many people in that field speak ill of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, among them above all official representatives, and also non-official representatives, of one positive religious confession or another, people who, of course, do not indulge in the authority principle, as people put it politely today. They speak ill of this spiritual science as something that would take people into irreligiosity, giving them apparent insight into the spirit rather than the element that will directly show the way by which they can come into the supersensible, religious sphere on the basis of their own essential nature. It would be tempting, but time is short and there are also other things to be considered, so I won’t talk about any particular religious confession but about inner religious feeling as such.

If we consider the true nature of gaining insight in the spirit as it is meant here, we will, I believe, very soon find that just as it is not impractical nor antisocial nor unscientific, so, too, it is not irreligious and not in the least liable to deflect anyone from profoundly religious feeling. Considering what has been said so far, we have to ask what the essence is of the newer form of supersensible insight which we seek to find through anthroposophy.

The essence is that the way that leads to supersensible investigation must ultimately reach an impersonal sphere. Just consider how radical I had to be last week in saying that the things human beings see by way of spirit lie before birth or after death, and that the essence of life between birth and death is that the human being has assumed material form. We may say that spiritual science, which through supersensible insight takes us to the truly immortal aspect, the indisputably immortal aspect of the human soul, can actually be in agreement with materialism in this area. In spiritual science we know that the material human being is a metamorphosis, a transformation of the spiritual, and that the spiritual gains from going down into the material abyss where it can develop freedom by the very fact of gaining insight into nature.

It is not a precondition that in doing their investigations human beings must move from the personal, from immediate experience here in the body, to the impersonal. Supersensible insight presupposes an inner state of mind that progressively enters into the impersonal in spirit, just as in earlier times human beings who did not yet have insight into nature were physically—physically in general terms—in the supersensible sphere.

We must make spiritual investigations in an impersonal way if we want the light of the spirit to shine into matter and substance. However, the more we make this supersensible way of investigation our own and the further we go with this method of investigation which demands an impersonal approach, the more do we feel something flowing out as if from the other pole of the human being, the will pole, and this is an immediate religious response. This immediate inner response also seeks to go towards the supersensible, but in such a way that our individual nature is not lost and that everything directly connected with our individual nature between birth and death can unite with the supersensible element.

If we know the right way of going into the supersensible through science, then an inner power, which makes itself known above all as a need to venerate the spiritual, points the way for us to the religious element. The true evolution on the way into the spiritual world through supersensible perception is that we feel driven more and more to deepen our religious life and actually come to understand what the religious life means to us. The science of the spirit inevitably takes us from the personal to the impersonal so that the light of the spirit may once again shine into the sensual world.

Religious life will thus inevitably be deepened if we approach the spirit in this way, for it is a deep-down part of our human nature that we not merely behold the spiritual as it shines out, full of wisdom, but venerate it. This veneration must come from our individual, personal nature, however. Anything seen in the spirit cannot enter into this region of human experience as it is but has to go through renewal, metamorphosis; it needs to change, to be transformed into something personal. When the human being is on the one side receiving the light of the spirit, he must go and venerate this spiritual principle and search for the place where he can find religious life, religious deepening.

On the other side, the side of representatives of religious life, it will also be necessary to see things in the right light. In early times it was said by people who professed themselves religious, and it is still being said to this day, that the old pagan approach had consisted in wanting to find the way to the divine through mere wisdom. Again and again we may, however, repeat, with full justification that wisdom does not reveal the divine in the world—not the divine, but certainly the supersensible element in which human beings have their immortality. The divine cannot, however, be recognized in its divine nature, for it needs to meet with an inner response of veneration. The spiritual must first find its way to the personal, a way to where the human being is an individual person. There he either comes to serve Jehovah by taking the route of studying nature—so that he perceives the spirit which from generation to generation is active as a supersensible principle in the blood—or he looks to the spirit which relates to his soul as the redeemer, and that is Christ Jesus ... [record of the lecture incomplete at this point].

Human beings must find the way to the sensual world, where they are in their individual nature. On the other hand they need the kind of understanding that not only says that wisdom will not reveal the divine because this needs veneration, but that the supersensible cannot be perceived out of wisdom alone, nor from religion alone. Religion must be complemented with vision of the supersensible, otherwise it will only appear to be adequate in a natural-scientific age, at the same time persisting with old views and turning against new ones. Religion, taken in the right way, is not threatened by the emergence of new truths, including those that are supersensible.

Many other misapprehensions exist. If religious people believe that supersensible perception could in some way be harmful, going against their own, justifiable endeavours, anyone who believes this is not taking account of the progressive evolution of humanity. Being part of modern evolution, where on the one hand we do not have any opportunity for finding the right kind of social life unless the way to the supersensible is taken, have we not also seen how this very natural-scientific thinking has made people abandon religion, so that taking up the natural-scientific approach made the individual go towards irreligiosity? [Part of lecture not taken down.] Present-day spiritual science addresses human nature more powerfully so that religious veneration may develop, unless people want to turn away from this, like some who are superficial in their natural science. Supersensible life must address the soul more strongly today, for the soul has gained greater conscious awareness and individuality. The power of religious life needs to be stronger if it wants to develop in its old form.

Another misapprehension in this particular field is that people think the science of the spirit, as it is meant here, would serve to create a sect or establish a religion. In the science of the spirit, one sees human evolution far too clearly for this. One knows that effective principles come into play consecutively in human evolution just as they do in the life of the individual. People cannot have the same inner attitudes when they are 40 as they had when they were 20. In the same way, humanity cannot have the same inner attitude in the 20th century as in earlier centuries and millennia.

In spiritual science one always considers reality and does not judge it by thought-up concepts. Because of this, one does not talk the way some people do today who want to establish a religion of the future in a scientific way; instead one knows that the time for creating religions has passed; it came to an end exactly when Christianity arose. The inner attitude in which humanity could be taken hold of by a religious inner experience which then had to be propagated was closely bound up with the state of the world as it was in earlier times. Today we, as humanity, have entered into an inner attitude that truly had to be developed by means of natural science, and in which one also seeks to penetrate into the supersensible sphere, using the approach of natural science, and in gaining this supersensible knowledge seeks to gain ever greater clarity concerning the principle which in religious ages came to revelation in a religious way, but can now no longer found religions itself. A true science of the spirit will help us to gain increasing insight into what was given to humanity by way of religion; it will also free this religious element from the bonds created by people who in their desire for power and other things took it in the wrong direction. I can only refer to this briefly, for it would take us too far to go into detail here.

With these brief references I merely wanted to indicate that spiritual science by its very nature can neither make people irreligious, nor can it found any kind of new religion or the like. All these things come up because people are not fully considering what the science of the spirit which is meant here is really intended for, yet people will insist on their views. We may thus also say that the attacks that are currently raining down on this anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, coming also from representatives of religious confessions, are due to misapprehensions and misinterpretations, which sometimes are quite deliberate. People who are serious about the religious life of humanity would have least reason to cast aspersions on the science of the spirit. For this will take humanity back to true religiosity, whereas the age of natural science on its own and merely positive religion that seeks to preserve traditions must inevitably take humanity away from true religion. Positive religion comes from a time when human beings related differently to the world. But people will not let themselves be pushed back, just as a 40-year-old cannot be 20 again.

A religious confession that resists supersensible insight of the recent kind will thus dig its own grave, however great the desire to consolidate by means of external power. Again and again I have to remind you, as I also did here in Zurich last year, that the Roman Catholic priest who gave his inaugural lecture as rector of a university on the subject of Galileo,¹⁰⁹ drawing attention to the fact that the Roman Catholic Church, his own Church, went against Galileo in the past, continuing to do so until 1822,¹¹⁰ was a much better representative of theology and religion. This was Professor Muellner, Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher. Beginning his rectorate at Vienna University, he had to stress that true religiosity, and indeed also true Roman Catholicism, should not go against advances in human knowledge, since every further advance in human knowledge only showed the marvels of the divine in the world in an even more magnificent and glorious light. That is a truly religious and also truly Christian way of thinking.

Just as some who have a true feeling for the religious element do not need to feel that external natural-scientific knowledge goes against this, so there is no need for them to feel this about insight into spheres beyond that of the senses, which actually and inevitably must take human beings straight back to religiosity, though this would be an independent religiosity that is anchored in the individual nature of a person. It would be reasonable to say, therefore, that one should take a very good look exactly at the attacks made on anthroposophical spiritual science from this direction; for they really and truly do not come from where people pretend they come from. They arise from the fear and from lack of interest which I have characterized as a general human attitude to the science of the spirit in the first of these lectures. One only has to read aright what is said in this respect. However, it will not be possible to get the people who write these things to change their minds, and we should not be so naive as to think that one can make them change their minds. Refutation would not help at all. What is more, it will be equally impossible to get the people for whom these things are usually written to see how wrong they are. Yet the progress of human evolution will not be held up for people who have an honest feeling for the things that the powers behind developments in more recent times have brought to human souls.

In today’s lecture—the day after tomorrow I will round it off with another, again very positive look at recent history considered in the light of spiritual science, which will take us directly into human life today and to the most burning questions we have today—I believe I have shown that the search for supersensible insight, which is the endeavour in the science of the spirit, is neither inimical to natural science nor impractical in social terms, let alone a danger to religious life. On the contrary, I believe I have shown that for those who are able to see clearly the powers which our present time must bring to the human soul, and especially the powers which the future will bring, will understand that spiritual-scientific knowledge is important for three burning questions of our time and the immediate future.

For centuries, and especially also today and even more so in future, science has been and will be at the heart of human endeavour. The question will arise as to what science can do for the extreme human need to find the supersensible world. The answer can only be given by a science that does not leave spiritual science aside.

Another burning question of today and the immediate future will be: How do we find the impulses that can configure our social life? The answer will have to be: Only insights gained through the science of the spirit go through the metamorphosis when they enter into human life that will enable them to lead to an immediately conscious social life from person to person and hence also to the social configuration of the human race around the globe.

And the third burning question will be: How can the inmost need, the need in the human soul to revere the divine in an age that through science has taken us to individual and personal awareness, be met by means of greater powers than those which people have been able to have in earlier times? Again the answer must be: This needs the supersensible vision which when it comes to the human individual in a living way, metamorphoses into the individual human nature, becoming personal within it. Such powers can only come from the supersensible through the science of the spirit, through supersensible perception that gives the knowledge and vision which modern religiosity needs. This should truly meet the deepest needs of the soul, indeed the very depths of soul for human beings in our present time and in the future.

• 107. Theologia naturalis, also called ‘natural theology’—understanding God on the basis of the natural world, the existence and nature of this world and of the human being; an important element in Greek philosophy, with Thomas Aquinas and in Enlightenment.
• 108. Lasalle, Ferdinand (1825–1864). Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter. Eine Verteidigungsrede vor dem Berliner Kriminalgericht gegen die Anklage, die besitzlosen Klassen zum Hass und zur Verachtung gegen die Besitzenden öffentlich aufgereizt zu haben. (Speech in defence made at the Berlin Criminal Law Court to counter the accusation of having publicly incited the unpropertied classes against property-owning people). Zurich 1863.
• 109. Laurenz Müllner, Die Bedeutung Galileis für die Philosophie, Inaugurationsrede gehalten am 8. November 1894 an der k. k. Universität Wien, Wien 1894. Reprinted in Anthroposophie, Zeitschrift für freies Geistesleben, vereinigt mit der Monatsschrift Die Drei, 16. Jg., 1. Buch, Okt.-Dez. 1933, S. 29-57; dort auch eine kleine Zusammenstellung ‘Rudolf Steiner über Laurenz Muellner’ (S. 25-28) und eine Photographic Muellners.
• 110. See note 38.

Sophia's room. The colour scheme is a yellow red. Sophia, with her two children, a boy and a girl; later, Estella.

Children (singing, whilst Sophia accompanies them on the piano):

The light of the sun is flooding
The breadths of space;
The song of the birds is filling
The heights of air;
The tender plants are shooting
From the kind earth;
And human souls in reverent gratitude,
Rise to the spirits of the world.

Sophia: Now, children, go to your rooms and think over the words we have just practised.

(Sophia leads the children out.)

(Enter Estella.)

Estella: How do you do, Sophy? I hope I'm not intruding?

Sophia: Oh no, Estelle. I am very glad to see you.

(Asks Estella to be seated and seats herself.)

Estella: Have you good news from your husband?

Sophia: Very good. He writes to me saying that he is interested in the Congress of Psychologists; though the manner in which they treat many great questions there does not appeal to him. However, as a student of souls, he is interested in just those methods of spiritual shortsightedness which makes it impossible for men to obtain a clear view of essential mysteries.

Estella: Does he not intend speaking on an important subject, himself?

Sophia: Yes, on a subject that seems important both to him and to me. But the scientific views of those present at the Congress prevent his expecting any results from his arguments.

Estella: I really came in, dear Sophy, to ask whether you would come with me this evening to a new play called Outcasts from Body and from Soul. I should so like to hear it with you.

Sophia: I'm sorry, my dear Estelle, but to-night is the date set for the performance of the play, which our society has been rehearsing for a long time.

Estella: Oh yes, I had forgotten. But it would have been such a pleasure to have spent this evening with my old friend. I had set my heart on having you beside me, and gazing with you into the hidden depths of our present-day life. ... I only hope that this world of ideas, in which you move, and which is so strange to me, will not finally destroy that bond of sympathy, which has united our hearts since we were at school together.

Sophia: You have often said that before; and yet you have always had to admit that our divergent opinions need not erect barriers between those feelings which have existed between us in our companionship from our youth upwards.

Estella: True, I have said so. Yet it always arouses a sense of bitterness in me, when, as the years roll on, I see how your affections are estranged from those things in life that seem to me worth while.

Sophia: Still, we may be of much mutual help to one another if we recognize and realize the various points of view which we reach through our different inclinations.

Estella: Yes! My reason tells me that you are right. And yet there is something in me that rebels against your view of life.

Sophia: Why not candidly admit that what you require of me is the renunciation of my inmost soul-life?

Estella: But for one thing, I should admit even that. And that is, that you always claim that your view is the more profound. I can readily understand that people whose conceptions differ radically may still meet in sympathy of feeling. But the nature of your ideas actually forces upon you an inner assumption of a certain superiority. Others can compare views and realize that they do indeed diverge towards different standpoints, but they nevertheless stand related by an equality of values. You, however, seem unable to do this. You regard all other views as proceeding from a lower degree of human development.

Sophia: But you realize, I hope, from our previous discussions, that those who think as I do, do not finally measure the character of man by his opinions or by his knowledge. And while we consider our ideas such, that without vital realization of them life has no valid foundations, we nevertheless try most earnestly not to over-estimate the value of the individual, who has been permitted to become an instrument for the manifestation of this view of life.

Estella: All that sounds very well, but it does not remove my one suspicion. I cannot close my eyes to the fact, that a world-view which ascribes to itself illimitable depth must needs lead through the mere appearance of such depth to a certain superficiality. I rate our friendship too high to point out to you those among your companions who, whilst they swear allegiance to your ideas, yet display spiritual arrogance of the most unmitigated sort, despite the fact that the barrenness and banality of their soul speaks in their every word and in all their conduct. Nor do I wish to call your attention to the callousness and lack of sympathy shown by so many of your adherents towards their fellow men. The greatness of your own soul has never permitted you to stand aloof from that which daily life requires at the hands of the man whom we call good. And yet the fact that you leave me alone on this occasion, when true and artistic life comes to be voiced, shows me that your ideas too with reference to this life are to a certain extent superficial—if you will forgive my saying so.

Sophia: And wherein lies this superficiality?

Estella: You ought to know. You have known me long enough to understand how I have wrenched myself away from that manner of life, which, day in and day out, only struggles to follow tradition and convention.

I have sought to understand why so many people suffer, as it seems, undeservedly. I have tried to approach the heights and depths of life. I have consulted the sciences, so far as I could, to learn what they disclose.

But let me hold fast to the one point which this moment presents to us. I am aware of the nature of true art; I believe I understand how it seizes upon the essentials of life and presents to our souls the true and higher reality. I seem to feel the beating of the pulse of time, when I permit such art to influence me, and I am horrified when I have to think what it is that you, Sophy, prefer to this interest in living art. You turn to what seem to me the obsolete, dogmatically allegorical themes, to gaze on a show of puppets, instead of on living beings, and to wonder at symbolical happenings which stand far away from all that appeals to our pity and to our active sympathies in daily life.

Sophia: My dear Estelle, that is exactly the fact that you will not grasp—that the richest life is to be found just there where you only see a fantastic web of thoughts: and that there may be, and are, people who are compelled to call your living reality mere poverty—if it be not measured by the spiritual source from whence it comes. Possibly my words sound harsh to you. But our friendship demands absolute frankness. Spirit itself is as unknown to you as it is to the multitude. In its place you know only the bearer of knowledge. It is only the thought side of spirit of which you are aware. You have no conception of the living, the creative spirit, which endows men with elemental power, even as the germinal power of nature shapes living entities. Like many another, for instance, you call things in art which deny the spirit, as I conceive it, naive and original. Our conception of the world unites a full and conscious freedom with the power of spontaneous creation. We consciously absorb this power, and do not thereby rob. it of its' freshness, its fullness, and its originality. You believe that the character of man shapes itself, and that we can merely form thoughts and considerations about it. You will not see that thought itself actually merges into-creative spirit; reaching the very fountain of Being; and developing thence into an actual creative germ.

Our ideas do not teach, any more than the seed-power within a plant teaches it how to grow. It is the actual growth itself, and in like manner do our ideas flow into our very being, kindling and dispensing life. To the ideas that have come to me, I am indebted for all that makes life worth while; not only for the courage, but also for the insight and power that make me hopeful of so training my children, that they shall not only be capable and useful in ordinary everyday life, in the old traditional sense, but that they shall at the same time carry inward peace and contentment within their souls. I have no wish to stray from the point, but I will say just one thing. I believe—nay I know—that the dreams which you share with so many can only be realized when men succeed in uniting what they call the realities of life with those deeper experiences, which you have so often termed dreams and fantasies. You may be astonished if I confess it to you: but much that seems true art to you is to me a mere fruitless critique of life. No hunger is stilled, no tears are dried, no source of degeneracy is discovered, when merely the outer show of hunger, or tear-stained faces, or degenerates are shown upon the stage. And the customary method of that presentation is unspeakably distant from the true depths of life, and the true relation-ship between beings.

Estella: I understand your words indeed, but they merely show me that you do prefer to indulge in fancies, rather than to look upon the realities of life. Our ways, indeed, part.—I see that my friend is denied me to-night. (Rises.) I must leave you now. But we remain friends, as of old, do we not?

Sophia: We must indeed remain friends. (While these last words are spoken, Sophia conducts her friend to the door.)