The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The phase of evolution beginning in our own time has a very special character. The same may, of course, be said of each epoch but in every case it is a matter of defining the particular characteristics. The present phase of evolution may be characterised in a general way by saying that all the experiences confronting mankind in the physical world during the earth's further existence will represent a decline, a retrogression. The time when human progress was made possible through the constant refinement of the physical forces, is already over. In the future, too, mankind will progress, but only through spiritual development, through development on a higher level than that of the processes of the physical plane. Men who rely entirely on the processes of the physical plane will find in them no source of satisfaction. An indication given in spiritual science a long time ago, in the Lecture-Course on the Apocalypse,¹ namely that we are heading for the “War of All against All”, must from now onwards be grasped in all its significance and gravity; its implications must not remain in the realm of theory but also come to expression in the actions, the whole behaviour of men.

The fact that—to use a colloquialism—people in the future are not going to get much fun out of developments on the physical plane, will bring home to them that further evolution must proceed from spiritual forces.

This can be understood only by surveying a lengthy period of evolution and applying what is discovered to experiences that will become more and more general in the future. The trend of forces that will manifest in the well nigh rhythmical onset of war and destruction—processes of which the present catastrophe is but the beginning—will become only too evident. It is childish to believe that anything connected with this war can bring about a permanent era of peace for humanity on the physical plane. That will not be so. What must come about on the earth is spiritual development. Its direction and purport will be clear to us if, after surveying a comparatively lengthy epoch preceding the Mystery of Golgotha, we bear in mind something of the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha and then try to envisage the impulse of that Event working in the future evolution of mankind.

We have studied the Mystery of Golgotha from many different points of view and will do so again to-day by characterising, very briefly, the civilisation which preceded it—let us say as far back as the third millennium B.C.—and then continued for a time as Pagan culture in the period of Christian development itself.

Within this Pagan culture, the utterly different Hebraic-Jewish culture took root, having Christianity as its offspring.

The nature of Pagan culture can best be understood if we realise that it was the outcome of knowledge, vision and action born of forces much wider in range than those belonging to present earthly existence. It was actually through Hebraic culture that the moral element was first inculcated into humanity. In Paganism the moral element did not occupy a place separate and apart; this Pagan culture was such that man felt himself a member of the whole cosmos.

This is something we must particularly bear in mind.—The human being living on earth within the old Pagan world felt himself membered into the whole cosmos. He felt how the forces at work in the movements of the stars extend into his own actions, or, better said, into the forces taking effect in his actions. What later passed for astrology, and does so still, is but a reflection—and a very misleading one at that—of the ancient wisdom gleaned from contemplation of the stars in their courses and then used as the basis for precepts governing human action.

These ancient civilisations can be understood only if light is thrown by spiritual science upon human evolution in its outer aspect some four or five thousand years before Christ.

We are apt to speak in rather a matter-of-fact way of the second or the first Post-Atlantean epochs, but we err if we picture man's existence on the earth in the fifth, sixth or seventh millennia B.C. as having been similar to our present existence. It is quite correct that men living on the earth in those ancient times had a kind of instinctive soul-life, in a certain respect more akin to the soul-life of animals than to that of present-day man. But it is a very one-sided conception of human life to say that in those ancient times men were more like animals. In tenor of soul, the human being then moving about the earth was, it is true, more like the animal; but those human-animal bodies were used by beings of soul-and-spirit who felt themselves members of the super-sensible worlds, above all of the cosmic worlds. And provided we go back far enough, say to the fifth pre-Christian millennium, it may be said that men made use of animal bodies as instruments rather than feeling themselves within those bodies. To characterise these men accurately, one would have to say that when they were awake, they moved about with an instinctive life of soul like that of animals, but into this instinctive life of soul there shone something like dreams from their sleeping state, waking dreams. And in these waking dreams they perceived how they had descended, to use animal bodies merely as instruments. This inner, fundamental tenor of the human soul then came to expression as a religious rite, in the Mithras cult with its main symbol of the God Mithras riding on a bull, above him the starry heavens to which he belongs, and below him the earth to which the bull belongs. This symbol was not, strictly speaking, a symbol to these men of old; it was a vision of reality. Man's whole tenor of soul made him say to himself: When I am outside my body at night I belong to the forces of the cosmos, of the starry heavens; when I wake in the morning, I make use of animal instincts in an animal body.

Then human evolution passed, figuratively speaking, into a period of twilight. A certain dimness, a certain lethargy, spread over the life of humanity; the cosmic dreams receded and instinct gained the upper hand.

The attitude of soul formerly prevailing in men was preserved through the Mysteries, mainly through the Asiatic Mysteries. But in the fourth millennium B.C. and until the beginning of the third, humanity in general—when uninfluenced by the Mystery wisdom—lived an existence pervaded by a more or less dim, twilight consciousness. In Asia and the then known world, it may be said that during the fourth and at the beginning of the third millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, man's life of soul was dim and instinctive. But the Mysteries were there, into which, through the powerful rites and ceremonies, the spiritual worlds were able to penetrate. And it was from these centres that men received illumination.

At the beginning of the third millennium a momentous event took place.—The root-cause of this dim, more instinctive life may be characterised by saying that as a being of spirit-and-soul, man was still unable at that time to make use of the human organs of intellect. These organs were already within him, they had taken shape in his physical constitution, but the being of spirit-and-soul could not make use of them. Thus men could not acquire knowledge through their own thinking, through their own powers of intellectual discernment. They were dependent upon what was imparted to them from the Mysteries. And then, about the beginning of the third millennium, a momentous event took place in the east of Asia.

A child of a distinguished Asiatic family of the time was allowed to grow up in the precincts of the Mystery-ceremonies. Circumstances were such that this child was actually permitted to take part in the ceremonies, undoubtedly because the priests conducting the rites in the Mysteries felt it as an inspiration that such a child must be allowed to participate. And when the being incarnate in that child had reached the age of about 40—approximately that age—something very remarkable came to light. It became evident and there is no doubt at all that the priests of the Mysteries had foreseen the event prophetically—it became evident that this man who had been allowed to grow up in the precincts of one of the Mystery-centres in East Asia, began suddenly, at the age of about 4o, to grasp through the faculty of human intellect itself what had formerly come into the Mysteries through revelation, and only through revelation. He was as it were the first to make use of the organs of human intellect, but still in association with the Mysteries.

Translating into terms of our present language how the priests of the Mysteries spoke of this matter, we must say: In this man, Lucifer himself was incarnated—no more and no less than that!—It is a significant, momentous fact that in the third millennium before Christ an incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh actually took place in the east of Asia. And from this incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh—for this Being became a Teacher—there went forth what is described as the pre-Christian, Pagan culture which still survived in the Gnosis of the earliest Christian centuries.

It would be wrong to pass derogatory judgment on this Lucifer-culture. For all the beauty produced by Greek civilisation, even the insight that is still alive in ancient Greek philosophy and in the tragedies of Aeschylus would have been impossible without this Lucifer-incarnation.

The influence of the Lucifer-incarnation was still powerful in the south of Europe, in the north of Africa and in Asia Minor during the first centuries of Christendom. And when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place on earth, it was essentially the Luciferic wisdom through which it could be understood. The Gnosis, which set about the task of grasping the import of the Mystery of Golgotha, was impregnated through and through with Luciferic wisdom. It must therefore be emphasised, firstly, that at the beginning of the third Millennium B.C. there was a Chinese incarnation of Lucifer; at the beginning of our own era the incarnation of Christ took place. And to begin with, the significance of the incarnation of Christ was grasped because the power of the old Lucifer-incarnation still survived. This power did not actually fade from man's faculty of comprehension until the fourth century A.D.; and even then, it had its aftermath, its ramifications.

To these two incarnations, the Lucifer-incarnation in ancient times and the incarnation of the Christ which gives the earth its meaning, a third incarnation will be added in a future not so very far distant. And the events of the present time are already moving in such a way as to prepare for it.

Of the incarnation of Lucifer at the beginning of the third millennium B.C., we must say: through Lucifer, man has acquired the faculty of using the organs of his intellect, of his power of intellectual discernment. It was Lucifer himself, in a human body, who was the first to grasp through the power of intellect, what formerly could be imparted to man only through revelation, namely, the content of the Mysteries.

What is now in preparation and will quite definitely come to pass on earth in a none too distant future, is an actual incarnation of Ahriman.

As you know, since the middle of the fifteenth century we have been living in an era in which it behoves mankind to come more and more into possession of the full power of consciousness. It is of the very greatest importance that men should approach the coming incarnation of Ahriman with full consciousness of this event. The incarnation of Lucifer could be recognised only by the prophetic insight of the priests of the Mysteries. Men were also very unconscious of what the incarnation of Christ and the Event of Golgotha really signified. But they must live on towards the incarnation of Ahriman with full consciousness amid the shattering events which will occur on the physical plane. Amid the perpetual stresses of war and other tribulations of the immediate future, the human mind will become very inventive in the domain of physical life. And through this very growth of inventiveness in physical life—which cannot be averted in any way or by any means—the bodily existence of a human individuality in whom Ahriman can incarnate, will become possible and inevitable.

From the spiritual world this Ahrimanic power is preparing for incarnation on the earth, is endeavouring in every conceivable way to make such preparation that the incarnation of Ahriman in human form may be able to mislead and corrupt mankind on earth to the uttermost. A task of mankind during the next phase of civilisation will be to live towards the incarnation of Ahriman with such alert consciousness that this incarnation can actually serve to promote a higher, spiritual development, inasmuch as through Ahriman himself man will become aware of what can, or shall we say, can not be achieved by physical life alone. But men must go forward with full consciousness towards this incarnation of Ahriman and become more and more alert in every domain, in order to recognise with greater and greater clarity those trends in life which are leading towards this Ahrimanic incarnation. Men must learn from spiritual science to find the key to life and so be able to recognise and learn to control the currents leading towards the incarnation of Ahriman. It must be realised that Ahriman will live among men on the earth, but that in confronting him men will themselves determine what they may learn from him, what they may receive from him. This, however, they will not be able to do unless, from now onwards, they take control of certain spiritual and also unspiritual currents which otherwise are used by Ahriman for the purpose of leaving mankind as deeply unconscious as possible of his coming; then, one day, he will be able to appear on earth and overwhelm men, tempting and luring them to repudiate earth-evolution, thus preventing it from reaching its goal. To understand the whole process of which I have been speaking, it is essential to recognise the character of certain currents and influences—spiritual or the reverse.

Do you not see the continually growing number of people at the present time who do not want any science of the spirit, any knowledge of the spiritual? Do you not see how numerous are the people to whom the old forces of religion no longer give any inner stimulus?—Whether they go to church or not is a matter of complete indifference to large numbers of human beings nowadays. The old religious impulses mean nothing to them. But neither will they bring themselves to give a thought to what can stream into our civilisation as new spiritual life. They resist it, reject it, regard it as folly, as something inconvenient; they will not allow themselves to have anything to do with it. But, you see, man as he lives on earth is veritably a unity. His spiritual nature cannot be separated from his physical nature; both work together as a unity between birth and death. And even if man does not receive the spiritual through his faculties of soul, the spiritual takes effect, nevertheless. Since the last third of the nineteenth century the spiritual has been streaming around us; it is streaming into earthly evolution. The spiritual is there in very truth—only men are not willing to receive it.

But even if they do not accept the spiritual, it is there! And what becomes of it? Paradoxical as it may seem—for much that is true seems paradoxical to the modern mind—in those people who refuse the spiritual and like eating and drinking best of all things in life, the spiritual streams, unconsciously to them, into the processes of eating and digestion. This is the secret of that march into materialism which began about the year 184o, or rather was then in active preparation. Those who do not receive the spiritual through their souls, receive it to-day none the less: in eating and drinking they eat and drink the spirit. They are “eaters” of the soul-and-spirit. And in this way the spirit that is streaming into earth-evolution passes over into the Luciferic element, is conveyed to Lucifer. Thereby the Luciferic power which can then be of help to the Ahrimanic power for its later incarnation, is constantly strengthened. This must come to the knowledge of those who admit the fact that in the future men will either receive spiritual knowledge consciously or consume the spirit unconsciously, thereby delivering it into the hands of the Luciferic powers.

This stream of spirit-and-soul-consumption is particularly encouraged by Ahriman because in this way he can lull mankind into greater and greater drowsiness, so that then, through his incarnation, he will be able to come among men and fall upon them unawares because they do not confront him consciously.

But Ahriman can also make direct preparation for his incarnation, and he does so. Certainly, men of our day also have a spiritual life, but it is purely intellectual, unconnected with the spiritual world. This purely intellectual life is becoming more and more widespread; at first it took effect mainly in the sciences, but now it is leading to mischiefs of every kind in social life as well. What is the essential character of this intellectual life?

This intellectual life has very little to do with the true interests of men! I ask you: how many teachers do you not see to-day, passing in and out of higher and lower educational institutions without bringing any inner enthusiasm to their science but pursuing it merely as a means of livelihood—In such cases the interest of the soul is not directly linked with the actual pursuit. The same thing happens even at school. Think how much is learnt at the various stages of life without any real enthusiasm or interest, how external the intellectual life is becoming for many people who devote themselves to it! And how many there are to-day who are forced to produce a mass of intellectual material which is then preserved in libraries and, as spiritual life, is not truly alive!

Everything that is developing as intellectual life without being suffused by warmth of soul, without being quickened by enthusiasm, directly furthers the incarnation of Ahriman in a way that is after his own heart. It lulls men to sleep in the way I have described, so that its results are advantageous to Ahriman.

There are numerous other currents in the spiritual or unspiritual life which Ahriman can turn to his advantage. You have lately heard—and you are still hearing it—that national states, national empires must be founded. A great deal is said about “freedom of the individual peoples”. But the time for founding empires based on relationships of blood and race is past and over in the evolution of mankind. If an appeal is made to-day to national, racial and similar relationships, to relationships arising out of the intellect and not out of the spirit, then disharmony among mankind will be intensified. And it is this disharmony among mankind which the Ahrimanic power can put to special use. Chauvinism, perverted patriotism in every form—this is the material from which Ahriman will build just what he needs.

But there are other things as well. Everywhere to-day we see parties being formed for one object or another. People nowadays have no discernment, nor do they desire to have it where party opinions and party programmes are concerned. With intellectual ingenuity, proof can be furnished in support of the most radically opposing theories. Very clever arguments can be used to prove the soundness of Leninism—but the same applies to directly contrary principles and also to what lies between the two extremes. An excellent case can be made out for every party programme: but the one who establishes the validity of the opposite programme is equally right. The intellectualism prevailing among men to-day is not capable of demonstrating the inner potentialities and values of anything. It can furnish proofs; but what is intellectually proved should not be regarded as of real value or efficacy in life. Men oppose one another in parties because the soundness of every party opinion—at any rate the main party opinions—can be proved with equal justification. Our intellect remains at the surface-layer of understanding and does not penetrate to the deeper layer where the truth actually lies. This, too, must be fundamentally and thoroughly understood.

People to-day prefer to let their intellect remain on the surface and not to penetrate with deeper forces to those levels where the essential nature of things is disclosed. It is only necessary to look around a little, for even where it takes its most external form, life often reveals the pitfalls of current predilections. People love numbers and figures in science, but they also love figures in the social sphere as well. Social science consists almost entirely of statistics. And from statistics, that is to say from figures, the weightiest conclusions are reached. Well, with figures too, anything can be proved and anything believed; for figures are not a means whereby the essential reality of things can be proved—they are simply a means of deception! Whenever one fails to look beyond figures to the qualitative, they can be utterly deceptive.

The following is an obvious example.—There is, or at least there used to be, a great deal of argument about the nationality of the Macedonians. In the political life of the Balkan peninsula, much depended upon the statistics compiled there. The figures are of just as much value as those contained in other statistics. Whether statistics are compiled of wheat and rye production, or of the numbers of Greek, Serbian or Bulgarian nationals in Macedonia—in regard to what can be proved by these means it is all the same. From the figures quoted for the Greeks, for the Bulgarians, for the Serbians, very plausible conclusions can be drawn. But one can also have an eye for the qualitative element, and then one often finds it recorded that the father was Greek, one son was Bulgarian, another was Serbian.—What is at the back of it you can puzzle out for yourselves!—These statistics are taken as authoritative, whereas in this case they were compiled solely in support of party aims. It stands to reason that if the father is really a Greek, the two sons are also Greeks. But the procedure adopted there is just an example of many other things that are done with figures. Ahriman can achieve a great deal through figures and numbers used in this way as evidence of proof.

A further means of which Ahriman can avail himself is again one that will seem paradoxical. As you know, we have been concerned in our movement to study the Gospels in the light of spiritual science. But these deeper interpretations of the Gospels which are becoming more and more necessary in our time, are rejected on all sides, just as spiritual science as a whole is rejected.

The people who often profess humility in these matters—and they are insistent about it—are actually the most arrogant of all. More and more generally it is being said that people should steep themselves in the very simplicity of the Gospels and not attempt to understand the Mystery of Golgotha by entering into the complexities of spiritual science. Those who feign unpretentiousness in their study of the Gospels are the most arrogant of all, for they despise the honest search for knowledge demanded in spiritual science. So arrogant are they that they believe the highest revelations of the spiritual world can be garnered without effort, simply by browsing on the simplicity of the Gospels. What claims to be “humble” or “simple” to-day is often supreme arrogance. In sects, in religious confessions—it is there that the most arrogant of men are to be found.

It must be remembered that the Gospels came into existence at a time when the Luciferic wisdom still survived. In the first centuries of Christendom, men's understanding of the Gospels was quite different from what it came to be in later times. To-day, people who cannot deepen their minds through spiritual science merely pretend to understand the Gospels. In reality they have no idea even of the original meaning of the words; for the translations that have been made into the different languages are not faithful reproductions of the Gospels; often they are scarcely even reminiscent of the original meaning of the words in which the Gospels were composed.

Real understanding of the intervention of the Christ Being in earthly evolution is possible to-day only through spiritual science. Those who want to study, or actually do study the Gospels “without pretention”—as the saying goes—cannot come to any inner realisation of the Christ Being as He truly is, but only to an illusory picture, or, at very most, a vision or hallucination of the Christ Being. No real connection with the Christ Impulse can be achieved to-day merely through reading the Gospels—but only an hallucinatory picture of the Christ. Hence the prevalence of the theological view that the Christ was not present in the man Jesus of Nazareth, who was simply an historical figure like Socrates or Plato or others, although possibly more exalted. The “simple man of Nazareth” is an ideal even to the theologians. And very few of them indeed can make anything of an event like Paul's vision at the gate of Damascus, because without the deepened knowledge yielded by spiritual science the Gospels can give rise only to an hallucination of the Christ, not to vision of the Real Christ. And so Paul's vision at Damascus is also regarded as an hallucination.

Deeper understanding of the Gospels in the light of spiritual science is essential to-day, for the apathy that takes hold of people who are content to live merely within the arms of the denominations will be used to the utmost by Ahriman in order to achieve his goal—which is that his incarnation shall catch men unawares. And those who believe they are being most truly Christian by rejecting any development of the conception of the Christ Mystery, are, in their arrogance, the ones who do most to promote Ahriman's aims. The denominations and sects are positively spheres of encouragement, breeding-grounds for Ahriman. It is futile to gloss these things over with illusions. Just as the materialistic attitude, rejecting the spiritual altogether and contending that man is a product of what he eats and drinks, furthers Ahriman's aims, so are these aims furthered by the stubborn rejection of everything spiritual and adherence to the literal, “simple” conception of the Gospels.

You see, a barrier which prevents the single Gospels from unduly circumscribing the human mind, has been erected through the fact that the Event of Golgotha is described in the Gospels from four—seemingly contradictory—sides. Only a little reflection will show that this is a protection from too literal a conception. In sects, however, where one Gospel only is taken as the basis of the teaching—and such sects are quite numerous—pitfalls, stupefaction and hallucination are generated. In their day, the Gospels were given as a necessary counterweight to the Luciferic Gnosis; but if no attempt is made to develop understanding of their content, the aims of Ahriman are furthered, not the progress of mankind. In the absolute sense, nothing is good in itself, but is always good or bad according to the use to which it is put. The best can be the worst if wrongly used. Sublime though they are, the Gospels can also have the opposite effect if men are too lazy to search for a deeper understanding based on spiritual science.

Hence there is a great deal in the spiritual and unspiritual currents of the present time of which men should be acutely aware, and determine their attitude of soul accordingly. Upon the ability and willingness to penetrate to the roots of such matters will depend the effect which the incarnation of Ahriman can have upon men, whether this incarnation will lead them to prevent the earth from reaching its goal, or bring home to them the very limited significance of intellectual, unspiritual life. If men rightly take in hand the currents leading towards Ahriman, then simply through his incarnation in earthly life they will recognise the Ahrimanic influence on the one side, and on the other its polar opposite—the Luciferic influence. And then the very contrast between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic will enable them to perceive the third reality. Men must consciously wrestle through to an understanding of this trinity of the Christian impulse, the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic influences; for without this consciousness they will not be able to go forward into the future with the prospect of achieving the goal of earth-existence.

Spiritual science must be taken in deep earnestness, for only so can it be rightly understood. It is not the outcome of any sectarian whim but something that has proceeded from the fundamental needs of human evolution. Those who recognise these needs cannot choose between whether they will or will not endeavour to foster spiritual science. On the contrary they will say to themselves: The whole physical and spiritual life of men must be illumined and pervaded by the conceptions of spiritual science!

Just as once in the East there was a Lucifer-incarnation, and then, at the mid-point, as it were, of world-evolution, the incarnation of Christ, so in the West there will be an incarnation of Ahriman.

This Ahrimanic incarnation cannot be averted; it is inevitable, for men must confront Ahriman face to face. He will be the individuality by whom it will be made clear to men what indescribable cleverness can be developed if they call to their help all that earthly forces can do to enhance cleverness and ingenuity. In the catastrophes that will befall humanity in the near future, men will become extremely inventive; many things discovered in the forces and substances of the universe will be used to provide nourishment for man. But these very discoveries will at the same time make it apparent that matter is connected with the organs of intellect, not with the organs of the spirit but of the intellect. People will learn what to eat and drink in order to become really clever. Eating and drinking cannot make them spiritual, but clever and astute, yes. Men have no knowledge of these things as yet; but not only will they be striven for, they will be the inevitable outcome of catastrophes looming in the near future. And certain secret societies—where preparations are already in train—will apply these things in such a way that the necessary conditions can be established for an actual incarnation of Ahriman on the earth. This incarnation cannot be averted, for men must realise during the time of the earth's existence just how much can proceed from purely material processes! He must learn to bring under his control those spiritual or unspiritual currents which are leading to Ahriman.

Once it is realised that conflicting party programmes can be proved equally correct, our attitude of soul will be that we do not set out to prove things, but rather to experience them. For to experience a thing is a very different matter from attempting to prove it intellectually.

Equally we shall be convinced that deeper and deeper penetration of the Gospels is necessary through spiritual science. The literal, word-for-word acceptance of the Gospels that is still so prevalent to-day, promotes Ahrimanic culture. Even on external grounds it is obvious that a strictly literal acceptance of the Gospels is unjustified. For as you know, what is good and right for one time is not right for every other time. What is right for one epoch becomes Luciferic or Ahrimanic when practised in a later one. The mere reading of the Gospel texts has had its day. What is essential now is to acquire a spiritual understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha in the light of the truths enshrined in the Gospels. Many people, of course, find these things disquieting; but those whose interest is attracted by Anthroposophy must learn to realise that the levels of culture, gradually piling one above the other, have created chaos, and that light must penetrate again into this chaos.

It is interesting nowadays to listen to someone whose views have become very extreme, or to read about some burning question of the day, and then to listen to sermons on the same subject given by a priest of some denomination who is still steeped in the form of thought current in bye gone times. There you face two worlds which you cannot possibly confuse unless you avoid all attempts to get at the root of these things. Listen to a modern socialist speaking about social questions and then, immediately afterwards, to a Catholic preacher speaking about the same questions. It is very interesting to find two levels of culture existing side by side but using the words in an entirely different sense. The same word has quite a different meaning in each case.

These things should be seen in the light that will dawn if they are taken in the earnest spirit we have been trying to convey. People belonging to definite religions do also come, in the end, to long in their own way for spiritual deepening. It is by no means without significance that a man as eminently spiritual as Cardinal Newman, ardent Catholic though he was, should say at his investiture as Cardinal in Rome that he could see no salvation for Christianity other than a new revelation.

In effect, what Cardinal Newman said was that he could see no salvation for Christianity other than a new revelation! But he had not the courage to take a new spiritual revelation seriously. And so it is with many others. You can read countless treatises to-day about what is needed in social life.—Another book has recently appeared: Socialism, by Robert Wilbrandt, the son of the poet. In it the social question is discussed on the foundation of accurate and detailed knowledge. And finally it is stated that without the spirit nothing is achieved? That the very course of events shows that the spirit is necessary. Yes, but what does such a man really achieve? He gets as far as to utter the word “spirit”, to pronounce the abstract word “spirit”; but he refuses to accept, indeed he rejects, anything that endeavours to make the spirit really take effect.

For that it is essential above all to realise that wallowing in abstractions, however loud the cry for the spirit, is not yet spiritual, not yet spirit! Vague, abstract chattering about the spirit must never be confused with the active search for the content of the spiritual world pursued in anthroposophical science.

Nowadays there is much talk about the spirit. But you who accept spiritual science should not be deluded by such chattering; you should perceive the difference between it and the descriptions of the spiritual world attempted in Anthroposophy, where the spiritual world is described as objectively as the physical world. You should probe into these differences, reminding yourselves repeatedly that abstract talk of the spirit is a deviation from sincere striving for the spirit and that, by their very talk, people are actually removing themselves from the spirit. Purely intellectual allusion to the spirit leads nowhere.—What, then, is “intelligence”? What is the content of our human intelligence? I can best explain this in the following way.—Imagine—and this will be better understood by the many ladies present!—imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror and looking into it. The picture presented to you by the mirror is you, but it has no reality at all. It is nothing but a reflection. All the intelligence within your soul, all the intellectual content, is only a mirror-image; it has no reality. And just as your reflected image is called into existence through the mirror, so what mirrors itself as intelligence is called into existence through the physical apparatus of your body, through the brain. Man is intelligent only because his body is there. And as little as you can touch yourself by stretching your hand towards your reflected image, as little can you lay hold of the spirit if you turn only to the intellectual—for the spirit is not there! What is grasped through the intellect, ingenious as it may be, never contains the spirit itself, but only a picture of the spirit. You cannot truly experience the spirit if you get no further than mere intelligence. The reason why intelligence is so seductive is that it yields a picture, a reflected picture of the spirit—but not the spirit itself. It seems unnecessary to go to the inconvenience of penetrating to the spirit, because it is there—or so, at least, one imagines. In reality it is only a reflected picture—but for all that, it is not difficult to talk about the spirit.

To distinguish the mere picture from the reality—that is the task of the tenor of soul which does not merely theorise about spiritual science but has actual perception of the spirit.

That is what I wanted to say to you to-day in order to intensify the earnestness which should pervade our whole attitude to the spiritual life as conceived by Anthroposophy. For the evolution of humanity in the future will depend upon how truly this attitude is adopted by men of the present day. If what I have characterised in this lecture continues to be offered the reception that is still offered to it to-day by the vast majority of people on the earth, then Ahriman will be an evil guest when he comes. But if men are able to rouse themselves to take into their consciousness what we have been studying, if they are able so to guide it that humanity can freely confront the Ahrimanic influence, then, when Ahriman appears, men will acquire, precisely through him, the power to realise that although the earth must enter inevitably into its decline, mankind is lifted above earthly existence through this very fact. When a man has reached a certain age in physical life, his body begins to decline, but if he is sensible he makes no complaint, knowing that together with his soul he is approaching a life that does not run parallel with this physical decline. There lives in mankind something that is not bound up with the already prevailing decline of the physical earth but becomes more and more spiritual just because of this physical decline.

Let us learn to say frankly: Yes, the earth is in its decline, and human life, too, in respect of its physical manifestation; but just because it is so, let us muster the strength to draw into our civilisation that element which, springing from mankind itself, will live on while the earth is in decline, as the immortal fruit of earth-evolution.

• 1. Twelve lectures given at Nuremberg, 1908.

The phase of evolution beginning in our own time has a very special character. The same may, of course, be said of each epoch but in every case it is a matter of defining the particular characteristics. The present phase of evolution may be characterized in a general way by saying that all the experiences confronting humankind in the physical world during the earth's further existence will represent a decline, a retrogression. The time when human progress was made possible through the constant refinement of the physical forces is already over. In the future, too, humankind will progress, but only through spiritual development, through development on a higher level than that of the processes of the physical plane. People who rely entirely on the processes of the physical plane will find in them no source of satisfaction. An indication given in spiritual science a long time ago, in the lecture course on the Apocalypse,¹ namely that we are heading for the “War of All against All,” must from now onward be grasped in all its significance and gravity; its implications must not remain in the realm of theory but also come to expression in the actions, the whole behavior of human beings.

The fact that—to use a colloquialism—people in the future are not going to get much fun out of developments on the physical plane will bring home to them that further evolution must proceed from spiritual forces.

This can be understood only by surveying a lengthy period of evolution and applying what is discovered to experiences that will become more and more general in the future. The trend of forces that will manifest in the well-nigh rhythmical onset of war and destruction—processes of which the present catastrophe is but the beginning—will become only too evident. It is childish to believe that anything connected with this war can bring about a permanent era of peace for humanity on the physical plane. That will not be so. What must come about on the earth is spiritual development. Its direction and purport will be clear to us if, after surveying a comparatively lengthy epoch preceding the Mystery of Golgotha, we bear in mind something of the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha and then try to envisage the impulse of that event working in the future evolution of humankind.

We have studied the Mystery of Golgotha from many different points of view and will do so again today by characterizing, very briefly, the civilization which preceded it—let us say as far back as the third millennium B.C.—and then continued for a time as pagan culture in the period of Christian development itself. Within this pagan culture, the utterly different Hebraic-Jewish culture took root, having Christianity as its offspring.

The nature of pagan culture can best be understood if we realize that it was the outcome of knowledge, vision and action born of forces much wider in range than those belonging to present earthly existence. It was actually through Hebraic culture that the moral element was first inculcated into humanity. In paganism the moral element did not occupy a place separate and apart; this pagan culture was such that people felt themselves members of the whole cosmos.

This is something we must particularly bear in mind. Human beings living on earth within the old pagan world felt themselves membered into the whole cosmos. They felt how the forces at work in the movements of the stars extend into their own action, or, better said, into the forces taking effect in their actions. What later passed for astrology, and does so still, is but a reflection—and a very misleading one at that—of the ancient wisdom gleaned from contemplation of the stars in their courses and then used as the basis for precepts governing human action.

These ancient civilizations can be understood only if light is thrown by spiritual science upon human evolution in its outer aspect some four or five thousand years before Christ.

We are apt to speak in rather a matter-of-fact way of the second or the first post-Atlantean epochs, but we err if we picture human existence on the earth in the fifth, sixth, or seventh millennia B.C. as having been similar to our present existence. It is quite correct that people living on the earth in those ancient times had a kind of instinctive soul life, in a certain respect more akin to the soul life of animals than to that of present-day human beings. But it is a very one-sided conception of human life to say that in those ancient times people were more like animals. In tenor of soul, the human being then moving about the earth was, it is true, more like the animal; but those human-animal bodies were used by beings of soul and spirit who felt themselves members of the super-sensible worlds, above all of the cosmic worlds. And provided we go back far enough, say to the fifth pre-Christian millennium, it may be said that people made use of animal bodies as instruments rather than feeling themselves within those bodies. To characterize these people accurately, one would have to say that when they were awake, they moved about with an instinctive life of soul like that of animals, but into this instinctive life of soul there shone something like dreams from their sleeping state, waking dreams. And in these waking dreams they perceived how they had descended, to use animal bodies merely as instruments. This inner, fundamental tenor of the human soul then came to expression as a religious rite, in the Mithras cult with its main symbol of the God Mithras riding on a bull, above him the starry heavens to which he belongs, and below him the earth to which the bull belongs. This symbol was not, strictly speaking, a symbol to these people of old; it was a vision of reality. People's whole tenor of soul made them say to themselves: When I am outside my body at night I belong to the forces of the cosmos, of the starry heavens; when I wake in the morning I make use of animal instincts in an animal body.

Then human evolution passed, figuratively speaking, into a period of twilight. A certain dimness, a certain lethargy, spread over the life of humanity; the cosmic dreams receded and instinct gained the upper hand.

The attitude of soul formerly prevailing in human beings was preserved through the Mysteries, mainly through the Asiatic Mysteries. But in the fourth millennium B.C. and until the beginning of the third, humanity in general—when uninfluenced by the Mystery wisdom—lived an existence pervaded by a more or less dim, twilight consciousness. In Asia and the then-known world, it may be said that during the fourth and at the beginning of the third millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, people's life of soul was dim and instinctive. But the Mysteries were there, into which, through the powerful rites and ceremonies, the spiritual worlds were able to penetrate. And it was from these centers that human beings received illumination.

At the beginning of the third millennium a momentous event took place. The root cause of this dim, more instinctive life may be characterized by saying that as beings of spirit and soul, people were still unable at that time to make use of the human organs of intellect. These organs were already within them, they had taken shape in their physical constitution, but the being of spirit and soul could not make use of them. Thus human beings could not acquire knowledge through their own thinking, through their own powers of intellectual discernment. They were dependent upon what was imparted to them from the Mysteries. And then, about the beginning of the third millennium, a momentous event took place in the east of Asia.

A child of a distinguished Asiatic family of the time was allowed to grow up in the precincts of the Mystery ceremonies. Circumstances were such that this child was actually permitted to take part in the ceremonies, undoubtedly because the priests conducting the rites in the Mysteries felt it as an inspiration that such a child must be allowed to participate. And when the being incarnate in that child had reached the age of about forty—approximately that age—something very remarkable came to light. It became evident—and there is no doubt at all that the priests of the Mysteries had foreseen the event prophetically—it became evident that this man who had been allowed to grow up in the precincts of one of the Mystery centers in East Asia, began suddenly, at the age of about forty, to grasp through the faculty of human intellect itself what had formerly come into the Mysteries through revelation, and only through revelation. He was as it were the first to make use of the organs of human intellect, but still in association with the Mysteries.

Translating into terms of our present language how the priests of the Mysteries spoke of this matter, we must say: In this man, Lucifer himself was incarnated—no more and no less than that! It is a significant, momentous fact that in the third millennium before Christ an incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh actually took place in the east of Asia. And from this incarnation of Lucifer in the flesh—for this being became a teacher—there went forth what is described as the pre-Christian, pagan culture which still survived in the gnosis of the earliest Christian centuries.

It would be wrong to pass derogatory judgment on this Lucifer culture. For all the beauty produced by Greek civilization, even the insight that is still alive in ancient Greek philosophy and in the tragedies of Aeschylus would have been impossible without this Lucifer incarnation.

The influence of the Lucifer incarnation was still powerful in the south of Europe, in the north of Africa, and in Asia Minor during the first centuries of Christendom. And when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place on earth, it was essentially the luciferic wisdom through which it could be understood. The gnosis, which set about the task of grasping the import of the Mystery of Golgotha, was impregnated through and through with luciferic wisdom. It must therefore be emphasized, firstly, that at the beginning of the third millennium B.C. there was a Chinese incarnation of Lucifer; at the beginning of our own era the incarnation of Christ took place. And to begin with, the significance of the incarnation of Christ was grasped because the power of the old Lucifer incarnation still survived. This power did not actually fade from the human faculty of comprehension until the fourth century A.D.; and even then, it had its aftermath, its ramifications.

To these two incarnations, the Lucifer incarnation in ancient times and the incarnation of the Christ which gives the earth its meaning, a third incarnation will be added in a future not so very far distant. And the events of the present time are already moving in such a way as to prepare for it.

Of the incarnation of Lucifer at the beginning of the third millennium B.C., we must say: through Lucifer, human beings have acquired the faculty of using the organs of their intellect, of their power of intellectual discernment. It was Lucifer himself, in a human body, who was the first to grasp through the power of intellect what formerly could be imparted to humanity only through revelation, namely, the content of the Mysteries.

What is now in preparation and will quite definitely come to pass on earth in a none-too-distant future is an actual incarnation of Ahriman.

As you know, since the middle of the fifteenth century we have been living in an era in which it behooves humankind to come more and more into possession of the full power of consciousness. It is of the very greatest importance that people should approach the coming incarnation of Ahriman with full consciousness of this event. The incarnation of Lucifer could be recognized only by the prophetic insight of the priests of the Mysteries. People were also very unconscious of what the incarnation of Christ and the event of Golgotha really signified. But they must live on toward the incarnation of Ahriman with full consciousness amid the shattering events which will occur on the physical plane. Amid the perpetual stresses of war and other tribulations of the immediate future, the human mind will become very inventive in the domain of physical life. And through this very growth of inventiveness in physical life—which cannot be averted in any way or by any means—the bodily existence of a human individuality in whom Ahriman can incarnate will become possible and inevitable.

From the spiritual world this Ahrimanic power is preparing for incarnation on the earth, endeavoring in every conceivable way to make such preparation that the incarnation of Ahriman in human form may be able to mislead and corrupt humankind on earth to the uttermost. A task of humankind during the next phase of civilization will be to live toward the incarnation of Ahriman with such alert consciousness that this incarnation can actually serve to promote a higher, spiritual development, inasmuch as through Ahriman himself humanity will become aware of what can, or shall we say, can not be achieved by physical life alone. But people must go forward with full consciousness toward this incarnation of Ahriman and become more and more alert in every domain, in order to recognize with greater and greater clarity those trends in life which are leading toward this Ahrimanic incarnation. People must learn from spiritual science to find the key to life and so be able to recognize and learn to control the currents leading toward the incarnation of Ahriman. It must be realized that Ahriman will live among people on the earth, but that in confronting him people will themselves determine what they may learn from him, what they may receive from him. This, however, they will not be able to do unless, from now onward, they take control of certain spiritual and also unspiritual currents which otherwise are used by Ahriman for the purpose of leaving humankind as deeply unconscious as possible of his coming; then, one day, he will be able to appear on earth and overwhelm people tempting and luring them to repudiate earth evolution, thus preventing it from reaching its goal. To understand the whole process of which I have been speaking, it is essential to recognize the character of certain currents and influences—spiritual or the reverse.

Do you not see the continually growing number of people at the present time who do not want any science of the spirit, any knowledge of the spiritual? Do you not see how numerous are the people to whom the old forces of religion no longer give any inner stimulus? Whether they go to church or not is a matter of complete indifference to large numbers of human beings nowadays. The old religious impulses mean nothing to them. But neither will they bring themselves to give a thought to what can stream into our civilization as new spiritual life. They resist it, reject it, regard it as folly, as something inconvenient; they will not allow themselves to have anything to do with it. But, you see, human beings as we live on earth are veritably a unity. Our spiritual nature cannot be separated from our physical nature; both work together as a unity between birth and death. And even if human beings do not receive the spiritual through their faculties of soul, the spiritual takes effect, nevertheless. Since the last third of the nineteenth century the spiritual has been streaming around us; it is streaming into earthly evolution. The spiritual is there in very truth—only people are not willing to receive it.

But even if they do not accept the spiritual, it is there! And what becomes of it? Paradoxical as it may seem—for much that is true seems paradoxical to the modern mind—in those people who refuse the spiritual and like eating and drinking best of all things in life, the spiritual streams, unconsciously to them, into the processes of eating and digestion. This is the secret of that march into materialism which began about the year 1840, or rather was then in active preparation. Those who do not receive the spiritual through their souls receive it today nonetheless: in eating and drinking they eat and drink the spirit. They are “eaters” of the soul and spirit. And in this way the spirit that is streaming into earth evolution passes over into the luciferic element, is conveyed to Lucifer. Thereby the luciferic power, which can then be of help to the ahrimanic power for its later incarnation, is constantly strengthened. This must come to the knowledge of those who admit the fact that in the future people will either receive spiritual knowledge consciously or consume the spirit unconsciously, thereby delivering it into the hands of the luciferic powers.

This stream of spirit-and-soul-consumption is particularly encouraged by Ahriman because in this way he can lull humankind into greater and greater drowsiness, so that then, through his incarnation, he will be able to come among people and fall upon them unawares because they do not confront him consciously.

But Ahriman can also make direct preparation for his incarnation, and he does so. Certainly, people of our day also have a spiritual life, but it is purely intellectual, unconnected with the spiritual world. This purely intellectual life is becoming more and more widespread; at first it took effect mainly in the sciences, but now it is leading to mischiefs of every kind in social life as well. What is the essential character of this intellectual life?

This intellectual life has very little to do with the true interests of human beings! I ask you: how many teachers do you not see today, passing in and out of higher and lower educational institutions without bringing any inner enthusiasm to their science but pursuing it merely as a means of livelihood? In such cases the interest of the soul is not directly linked with the actual pursuit. The same thing happens even at school. Think how much is learned at the various stages of life without any real enthusiasm or interest, how external the intellectual life is becoming for many people who devote themselves to it! And how many there are today who are forced to produce a mass of intellectual material which is then preserved in libraries and, as spiritual life, is not truly alive!

Everything that is developing as intellectual life without being suffused by warmth of soul, without being quickened by enthusiasm, directly furthers the incarnation of Ahriman in a way that is after his own heart. It lulls people to sleep in the way I have described, so that its results are advantageous to Ahriman.

There are numerous other currents in the spiritual or unspiritual life which Ahriman can turn to his advantage. You have lately heard—and you are still hearing it—that national states, national empires must be founded. A great deal is said about “freedom of the individual peoples.” But the time for founding empires based on relationships of blood and race is past and over in the evolution of mankind. [Quote 1] If an appeal is made today to national, racial, and similar relationships, to relationships arising out of the intellect and not out of the spirit, then disharmony among humankind will be intensified. And it is this disharmony among humankind which the ahrimanic power can put to special use. Chauvinism, perverted patriotism in every form—this is the material from which Ahriman will build just what he needs.

But there are other things as well. Everywhere today we see parties being formed for one object or another. People nowadays have no discernment, nor do they desire to have it where party opinions and party programs are concerned. With intellectual ingenuity, proof can be furnished in support of the most radically opposing theories. Very clever arguments can be used to prove the soundness of Leninism—but the same applies to directly contrary principles and also to what lies between the two extremes. An excellent case can be made out for every party program: but the one who establishes the validity of the opposite program is equally right. The intellectualism prevailing among people today is not capable of demonstrating the inner potentialities and values of anything. It can furnish proofs; but what is intellectually proved should not be regarded as of real value or efficacy in life. People oppose one another in parties because the soundness of every party opinion—at any rate the main party opinions—can be proved with equal justification. Our intellect remains at the surface layer of understanding and does not penetrate to the deeper layer where the truth actually lies. This, too, must be fundamentally and thoroughly understood.

People today prefer to let their intellect remain on the surface and not to penetrate with deeper forces to those levels where the essential nature of things is disclosed. It is only necessary to look around a little, for even where it takes its most external form, life often reveals the pitfalls of current predilections. People love numbers and figures in science, but they also love figures in the social sphere as well. Social science consists almost entirely of statistics. And from statistics, that is to say from figures, the weightiest conclusions are reached. Well, with figures too, anything can be proved and anything believed; for figures are not a means whereby the essential reality of things can be proved—they are simply a means of deception! Whenever one fails to look beyond figures to the qualitative, they can be utterly deceptive.

The following is an obvious example. There is, or at least there used to be, a great deal of argument about the nationality of the Macedonians. In the political life of the Balkan peninsula, much depended upon the statistics compiled there. The figures are of just as much value as those contained in other statistics. Whether statistics are compiled of wheat and rye production, or of the numbers of Greek, Serbian, or Bulgarian nationals in Macedonia—in regard to what can be proved by these means it is all the same. From the figures quoted for the Greeks, for the Bulgarians, for the Serbians, very plausible conclusions can be drawn. But one can also have an eye for the qualitative element, and then one often finds it recorded that the father was Greek, one son was Bulgarian, another was Serbian. What is at the back of it you can puzzle out for yourselves! These statistics are taken as authoritative, whereas in this case they were compiled solely in support of party aims. It stands to reason that if the father is really a Greek, the two sons are also Greeks. But the procedure adopted there is just an example of many other things that are done with figures. Ahriman can achieve a great deal through figures and numbers used in this way as evidence of proof.

A further means of which Ahriman can avail himself is again one that will seem paradoxical. As you know, we have been concerned in our movement to study the Gospels in the light of spiritual science. But these deeper interpretations of the Gospels, which are becoming more and more necessary in our time, are rejected on all sides, just as spiritual science as a whole is rejected.

The people who often profess humility in these matters—and they are insistent about it—are actually the most arrogant of all. More and more generally it is being said that people should steep themselves in the very simplicity of the Gospels and not attempt to understand the Mystery of Golgotha by entering into the complexities of spiritual science. Those who feign unpretentiousness in their study of the Gospels are the most arrogant of all, for they despise the honest search for knowledge demanded in spiritual science. So arrogant are they that they believe the highest revelations of the spiritual world can be garnered without effort, simply by browsing on the simplicity of the Gospels. What claims to be “humble” or “simple” today is often supreme arrogance. In sects, in religious confessions—it is there that the most arrogant people are to be found:

It must be remembered that the Gospels came into existence at a time when the luciferic wisdom still survived. In the first centuries of Christendom, people's understanding of the Gospels was quite different from what it came to be in later times. Today, people who cannot deepen their minds through spiritual science merely pretend to understand the Gospels. In reality they have no idea even of the original meaning of the words; for the translations that have been made into the different languages are not faithful reproductions of the Gospels; often they are scarcely even reminiscent of the original meaning of the words in which the Gospels were composed.

Real understanding of the intervention of the Christ being in earthly evolution is possible today only through spiritual science. Those who want to study, or actually do study the Gospels “without pretension”—as the saying goes—cannot come to any inner realization of the Christ being as he truly is, but only to an illusory picture, or, at very most, a vision or hallucination of the Christ being. No real connection with the Christ impulse can be achieved today merely through reading the Gospels—but only a hallucinatory picture of the Christ. Hence the prevalence of the theological view that the Christ was not present in the man Jesus of Nazareth, who was simply an historical figure like Socrates or Plato or others, although possibly more exalted. The “simple man of Nazareth” is an ideal even to the theologians. And very few of them indeed can make anything of an event like Paul's vision at the gate of Damascus, because without the deepened knowledge yielded by spiritual science the Gospels can give rise only to a hallucination of the Christ, not to vision of the real Christ. And so Paul's vision at Damascus is also regarded as a hallucination.

Deeper understanding of the Gospels in the light of spiritual science is essential today, for the apathy that takes hold of people who are content to live merely within the arms of the denominations will be used to the utmost by Ahriman in order to achieve his goal—which is that his incarnation shall catch people unawares. And those who believe they are being most truly Christian by rejecting any development of the conception of the Christ mystery, are, in their arrogance, the ones who do most to promote Ahriman's aims. The denominations and sects are positively spheres of encouragement, breeding-grounds for Ahriman. It is futile to gloss these things over with illusions. Just as the materialistic attitude, rejecting the spiritual altogether and contending that the human being is a product of what people eat and drink, furthers Ahriman's aims, so are these aims furthered by the stubborn rejection of everything spiritual and adherence to the literal, “simple” conception of the Gospels.

You see, a barrier which prevents the single Gospels from unduly circumscribing the human mind has been erected through the fact that the event of Golgotha is described in the Gospels from four—seemingly contradictory—sides. Only a little reflection will show that this is a protection from too literal a conception. In sects, however, where one Gospel only is taken as the basis of the teaching—and such sects are quite numerous—pitfalls, stupefaction, and hallucination are generated. In their day, the Gospels were given as a necessary counterweight to the luciferic gnosis; but if no attempt is made to develop understanding of their content, the aims of Ahriman are furthered, not the progress of humankind. In the absolute sense, nothing is good in itself, but is always good or bad according to the use to which it is put. The best can be the worst if wrongly used. Sublime though they are, the Gospels can also have the opposite effect if people are too lazy to search for a deeper understanding based on spiritual science.

Hence there is a great deal in the spiritual and unspiritual currents of the present time of which people should be acutely aware, and determine their attitude of soul accordingly. Upon the ability and willingness to penetrate to the roots of such matters will depend the effect which the incarnation of Ahriman can have upon human beings, whether this incarnation will lead them to prevent the earth from reaching its goal, or bring home to them the very limited significance of intellectual, unspiritual life. If people rightly take in hand the currents leading toward Ahriman, then simply through his incarnation in earthly life they will recognize the ahrimanic influence on the one side, and on the other its polar opposite—the luciferic influence. And then the very contrast between the ahrimanic and the luciferic will enable them to perceive the third reality. Human beings must consciously wrestle through to an understanding of this trinity of the Christian impulse, the ahrimanic and the luciferic influences; for without this consciousness they will not be able to go forward into the future with the prospect of achieving the goal of earth existence.

Spiritual science must be taken in deep earnestness, for only so can it be rightly understood. It is not the outcome of any sectarian whim but something that has proceeded from the fundamental needs of human evolution. Those who recognize these needs cannot choose between whether they will or will not endeavor to foster spiritual science. On the contrary they will say to themselves: The whole physical and spiritual life of human beings must be illumined and pervaded by the conceptions of spiritual science!

Just as once in the East there was a Lucifer incarnation, and then, at the midpoint, as it were, of world evolution, the incarnation of Christ, so in the West there will be an incarnation of Ahriman.

This ahrimanic incarnation cannot be averted; it is inevitable, for humanity must confront Ahriman face to face. He will be the individuality by whom it will be made clear what indescribable cleverness can be developed if they call to their help all that earthly forces can do to enhance cleverness and ingenuity. In the catastrophes that will befall humanity in the near future, people will become extremely inventive; many things discovered in the forces and substances of the universe will be used to provide human nourishment. But these very discoveries will at the same time make it apparent that matter is connected with the organs of intellect, not with the organs of the spirit but of the intellect. People will learn what to eat and drink in order to become really clever. Eating and drinking cannot make them spiritual, but clever and astute, yes. Humanity has no knowledge of these things as yet; but not only will they be striven for, they will be the inevitable outcome of catastrophes looming in the near future. And certain secret societies—where preparations are already in train—will apply these things in such a way that the necessary conditions can be established for an actual incarnation of Ahriman on the earth. This incarnation cannot be averted, for people must realize during the time of the earth's existence just how much can proceed from purely material processes! We must learn to bring under our control those spiritual or unspiritual currents which are leading to Ahriman.

Once it is realized that conflicting party programs can be proved equally correct, our attitude of soul will be that we do not set out to prove things, but rather to experience them. For to experience a thing is a very different matter from attempting to prove it intellectually.

Equally we shall be convinced that deeper and deeper penetration of the Gospels is necessary through spiritual science. The literal, word-for-word acceptance of the Gospels that is still so prevalent today promotes ahrimanic culture. Even on external grounds it is obvious that a strictly literal acceptance of the Gospels is unjustified. For as you know, what is good and right for one time is not right for every other time. What is right for one epoch becomes luciferic or ahrimanic when practiced in a later one. The mere reading of the Gospel texts has had its day. What is essential now is to acquire a spiritual understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha in the light of the truths enshrined in the Gospels. Many people, of course, find these things disquieting; but those whose interest is attracted by anthroposophy must learn to realize that the levels of culture, gradually piling one above the other, have created chaos, and that light must penetrate again into this chaos.

It is interesting nowadays to listen to someone whose views have become very extreme, or to read about some burning question of the day, and then to listen to sermons on the same subject given by a priest of some denomination who is still steeped in the form of thought current in bygone times. There you face two worlds which you cannot possibly confuse unless you avoid all attempts to get at the root of these things. Listen to a modern socialist speaking about social questions and then, immediately afterward, to a Catholic preacher speaking about the same questions. It is very interesting to find two levels of culture existing side by side but using the words in an entirely different sense. The same word has quite a different meaning in each case.

These things should be seen in the light that will dawn if they are taken in the earnest spirit we have been trying to convey. People belonging to definite religions do also come, in the end, to long in their way for spiritual deepening. It is by no means without significance that a man as eminently spiritual as Cardinal Newman, ardent Catholic though he was, should say at his investiture in Rome that he could see no salvation for Christianity other than a new revelation.

In effect, what Cardinal Newman said was that he could see no salvation for Christianity other than a new revelation! But he had not the courage to take a new spiritual revelation seriously. And so it is with many others. You can read countless treatises today about what is needed in social life. Another book has recently appeared: Socialism, by Robert Wilbrandt, the son of the poet. In it the social question is discussed on the foundation of accurate and detailed knowledge. And finally it is stated that without the spirit nothing is achieved, that the very course of events shows that the spirit is necessary. Yes, but what does such a man really achieve? He gets as far as to utter the word “spirit,” to pronounce the abstract word “spirit;” but he refuses to accept, indeed he rejects, anything that endeavors to make the spirit really take effect.

For that, it is essential above all to realize that wallowing in abstractions, however loud the cry for the spirit, is not yet spiritual, not yet spirit! Vague, abstract chattering about the spirit must never be confused with the active search for the content of the spiritual world pursued in anthroposophical science.

Nowadays there is much talk about the spirit. But you who accept spiritual science should not be deluded by such chattering; you should perceive the difference between it and the descriptions of the spiritual world attempted in anthroposophy, where the spiritual world is described as objectively as the physical world. You should probe into these differences, reminding yourselves repeatedly that abstract talk of the spirit is a deviation from sincere striving for the spirit and that by their very talk, people are actually removing themselves from the spirit. Purely intellectual allusion to the spirit leads nowhere. What, then, is “intelligence?” What is the content of our human intelligence? I can best explain this in the following way. Imagine—and this will be better understood by the many ladies present!—imagine yourself standing in front of a mirror and looking into it. The picture presented to you by the mirror is you, but it has no reality at all. It is nothing but a reflection. All the intelligence within your soul, all the intellectual content, is only a mirror image; it has no reality. And just as your reflected image is called into existence through the mirror, so what mirrors itself as intelligence is called into existence through the physical apparatus of your body, through the brain. You are intelligent only because your body is there. And as little as you can touch yourself by stretching your hand toward your reflected image, as little can you lay hold of the spirit if you turn only to the intellectual—for the spirit is not there! What is grasped through the intellect, ingenious as it may be, never contains the spirit itself, but only a picture of the spirit. You cannot truly experience the spirit if you get no further than mere intelligence. The reason why intelligence is so seductive is that it yields a picture, a reflected picture of the spirit—but not the spirit itself. It seems unnecessary to go to the inconvenience of penetrating to the spirit, because it is there—or so, at least, one imagines. In reality it is only a reflected picture—but for all that, it is not difficult to talk about the spirit.

To distinguish the mere picture from the reality—that is the task of the tenor of soul which does not merely theorize about spiritual science but has actual perception of the spirit.

That is what I wanted to say to you today in order to intensify the earnestness which should pervade our whole attitude to the spiritual life as conceived by anthroposophy. For the evolution of humanity in the future will depend upon how truly this attitude is adopted by people of the present day. If what I have characterized in this lecture continues to be offered the reception that is still offered to it today by the vast majority of people on the earth, then Ahriman will be an evil guest when he comes. But if people are able to rouse themselves to take into their consciousness what we have been studying, if they are able so to guide it that humanity can freely confront the ahrimanic influence, then, when Ahriman appears, human beings will acquire, precisely through him, the power to realize that although the earth must enter inevitably into its decline, humankind is lifted above earthly existence through this very fact. When human beings have reached a certain age in physical life, the body begins to decline, but if they are sensible they make no complaint, knowing that together with the soul they are approaching a life that does not run parallel with this physical decline. There lives in humankind something that is not bound up with the already prevailing decline of the physical earth but becomes more and more spiritual just because of this physical decline.

Let us learn to say frankly: Yes, the earth is in its decline, and human life, too, with respect to its physical manifestation; but just because it is so, let us muster the strength to draw into our civilization that element which, springing from humankind itself, will live on while the earth is in decline, as the immortal fruit of earth evolution.

• 1. Twelve lectures given at Nürnberg, 1908.

This lecture is the second of fifteen lectures in the series entitled, The Polarity of Continuity and Change in Human Life. Another name for this lecture is, The Bridge between the Ideal and the Real, Part 2.

A full insight into those relationships which we are now contacting is not possible unless one looks more closely into the nature of man in the period between going to sleep and waking up; that is, the sleeping condition. Of course, diagrammatically, the sleeping condition is well-known to you. That which we call the astral body and Ego separate from the physical and etheric bodies, But if we wish to go more deeply into the nature of sleep; we must remember that it is just in the sleeping condition that a man experiences the reality of what we discussed in our last lecture, when we said that St Augustine sought in his own inner experience to grasp the real true certainty about the world, I told you in yesterday's lecture that in his waking condition, condition, man does not grasp the full reality of his inner being. We must be quite clear that what is described as the astral body and the ego, do not really come to the consciousness of man by day; in his waking condition there only comes to his consciousness a copy, a mirror-picture of his ego and astral body. If man were conscious in the sleeping condition, that is from going to sleep until waking up, or, let us say, if he became conscious through those exercises which you can find described in my various writings—(which are all at your disposal)—, if man could thus become conscious through his sleeping condition, he would experience not a mirror-image, as by day, but the true form of his Ego and Astral body. But we must quite clearly realise that the true form of the Astral body and Ego appear in such a way to the soul of man when he develops Imaginative Consciousness, that in the inner experiences during the sleep condition, he experience in his Ego end Astral body what we cull the third Hierarchy, the Hierarchy of the Angels, Archangels and Archai.

Although throughout the whole of man's working life he stands in intimate connection with what we must designate as the Angels, Archangels and Archai, he does not experience this consciously during the waking condition; and that constitutes the deception in man's waking condition. He remains aware only of an abstract Ego of those shadowy ideas and concepts which fill man's soul, or perhaps of half-dreamy feelings and willings. This is the essential—that throughout the waking condition man does not progress beyond experiencing this shadowy side of his Ego and Astral body; and that he cannot become conscious that all the time there is working into his Ego those Beings of the third Hierarchy to which I have just referred. But if he were really to wake up in his sleep, if I may use that expression, he would not have external nature around him, but would immediately feel in himself the Beings of the Angels, Archangels and the Time-Spirits.

Now because those Beings work in us, my dear friends we have in the constitution of our soul something which we would not have otherwise have had. For instance, if the Hierarchy of the Angels did not work into our and Astral body, we would never feel ourselves to be individuals. Therefore, just because the Hierarchy of the Angels work into our Spiritual, psychic nature, we can feel ourselves to be free persons.

Because the Hierarchy of the Archangels work into us, we can feel ourselves as members of the whole of humanity. We might also say, that because these Arch-Angelic Beings shine into our psychic, Spiritual nature, inspiring it, therefore we really feel ourselves as men.

And because the Beings of the Archai, the Spirits of Time, pulsate in our nature, filling it with their Intuition, therefore we feel ourselves as earthly human beings—that means members not only of the present humanity, but of the whole of earthly humanity, from the very start of earthly evolution to the very end of Earth-life. In that way we can feel ourselves as members of the entire earthly humanity. Of course, we only feel it dimly, because we can only dimly sense the influence of these Time-Spirits within us.

We cannot say that we behold ourselves as personalities; that we can only do when we attain the Imaginative Consciousness. There remains a kind of reflection of this Imaginative Consciousness when we so experience our thinking that, through the free life of thought we feel ourselves as individual beings. Let us once more make quite clear how it is that we feel ourselves as individuals. We feel ourselves as personalities because we can, of our own free will add one thought to another. You would at once cease to feel yourselves as personal beings if you were compelled to add one thought to another just as in the world of external nature one phenomenon is linked on to another. This experience of inner freedom for the developing of a thought, gives us the certainty of feeling ourselves as personalities. This feeling of inner freedom is what comes clearest of all to man's consciousness by day; and it comes to man by day when he is awake, because, from the moment of sleeping until waking he is permeated by his Angel, that Angelic Being belonging to his own Ego.

In the feeling oneself as a human being as a member of all humanity, we are generally speaking, already far more apathetic, we feel ourselves far less strongly and intensely as members of the whole of mankind; and that is because the Arch-Angels, who bring this about, stand further away from us than do our Angels; and that which inserts itself as Personality into the whole human stream of evolution, (and which comes from the Archai) that remains for most human beings something really quite shadowy. On the basis of Anthroposophy we seek to evoke this very feeling, of belonging to the entire earthly humanity, for it becomes clear to us that in the 5th Post Atlantean epoch man experiences things in a certain way; in the 4th in a different way; in the 3rd in a still different way. One thus sees how the mood of soul has altered in the various epochs of time, alterations brought about by the various Beings of the 3rd Hierarchy, the Archai, the Spirits of Time. It is of this that we seek to create a consciousness on the basis of Spiritual Science. This consciousness can alone give man the possibility of feeling himself an historical Being, of feeling conscious: “I am now living as a Personality, in the 20th Century.” The fact does not enter the consciousness of most human beings, that their personality can only be real as Personality, because it has been placed in a definite point of time. How this permeation of the human soul and spirit-being by the Beings of the third Hierarchy, is something of which men would become aware, if he were intensely enough to attain Imaginative Cognition.

In the ordinary path of human evolution, as you know, Imaginative Cognition is not present. From the moment of going to sleep until waking up, the reality of man's ego and astral body is dumped down; and by day, when man is awake, he loses his connection with the Beings of the third Hierarchy. That comes from the fact that especially in our present cycle of time, man, when he is awoke, is given over to an illusion. As we have seen, when he is asleep, man is subject to the deception that his so and Astral body are not then active; but they are not inactive. They are then in living interchange with the Beings of the third Hierarchy. In the waking condition, the state of affairs at the present cycle of tine is, that our physical and etheric bodies, “unjustly” illegally, as we night say, absorb our Spiritual, Psychic nature. They permeate themselves with our spirit and soul. Normally this should not be the case. It should be normal for a man to-day when awake, to feel himself an Ego and Astral body, and to feel his etheric and physical bodies as a kind of shell into which he crawls, to feel then as something which he carries consciously about with him. But man does not feel that today? he feels as if the physical and etheric bodies were himself. But this they are not. We are that Spiritual, psychic being which makes use of the physical and etheric bodies as an instrument; but we cannot raise ourselves above the deception which belongs to the working of our epoch of time. We are, us it were, compelled to identify ourselves with that which in the normal consciousness should be like a hammer which one takes in ones hand and gives blows with it; so should we regard our physical and etheric bodies. But in this epoch we have to identify ourselves with them,—to give ourselves over to the deception that we are these, that it is we ourselves who thus go in a fleshly way through space. But they are not ourselves. That is only because the consciousness of our ego is absorbed unjustly illegally, by the physical and etheric bodies. That simply rests in the fact that in the present cycle of time the Ahrimanic powers are stronger than they should be in the normal evolution of mankind.

They draw down the etheric and astral bodies into the physical and etheric bodies, so to speak, and they bring about in man the deception that the head which he carries is himself, that his hands and his whole body is himself. Wrongfully the physical body absorbs that consciousness, so that it appears as if the physical body brought about our personality. Anyone who thinks that his physical body brings about his personality is subject to the same deception as a person would be, who standing before a mirror, believes it produces him, because it radiates his reflection. To say that this fleshly form we carry round with us is ourselves, is no cleverer than to hold your hand before a mirror and believe that the mirror is producing your hand. Yet the whole of modern Science is subject to that deception, All modern Science believes that what we as individual persons experiences inwardly, is somehow produced by the physical and etheric bodies; whereas all the physical and etheric bodies do, is to radiate back our astral body and ego, forming the mirror-image which, while we are awake, we recognise to be our ego and our thoughts, in other words, our astral body.

That is the Fundamental Truth which we mast realise. With reference to this Fundamental Truth, modern humanity, by reason of the forces working through our present epoch of time, give themselves over to a deception of consciousness which consists, as I have just told you, in the delusion that all that we think, or experience as our thoughts or our feelings, is produced by our body. Mankind is subject naturally to this delusion to-day. With his present consciousness he cannot transcend that deception, just as the Sun when low on the horizon looks bigger than when high up in the heavens. One knows it is a delusion, yet it does seem to be so. At this point of time man help regarding his flash and blood as himself. That is a delusion of consciousness, my dear friends; but man was not always subject to this deception of consciousness; it is essentially a characteristic quality of the humanity of post-Christian tines, after the Mystery of Golgotha. Before the Mystery of Golgotha this delusion did not exist. Before the Mystery of Golgotha there existed another kind of deception, Before Golgotha man did not believe that his consciousness was united with his physical body. Of course, history tells nothing of this, but it is so. It would have been sheer nonsense for a man of the second or third millennium of the pre-Christian era to suppose that his soul was produced by his physical body; in olden times no man felt himself bound to his physical body as the modern man does. In those pre-Christian times man really had a living consciousness of the Beings of the third Hierarchy, and because he knew:—“My soul is not identical with my body,” he also knew that his soul was not bound up with the bone and muscles of his body, but that it was bound up with the Beings of the third Hierarchy,

He was subject to a different delusion, not in his consciousness but in his life. He believed that his soul was bound up with external nature, together with the Beings of the third Hierarchy, just as modern man believes his soul to be bound up with his physical body. Man to-day gives himself over to a delusion in consciousness, he believes that his soul is united with his body. The reason he cannot see the Beings of the Angels, Archangels and Archai, is because his physical body darkens them for him. The man of old, although he had a consciousness that these Beings were there and that his soul was bound up with them, could not see directly but only dimly into the external, sensible nature. A modern man, in the delusion of his consciousness, believes that his soul is bound up with his body; the man of old believed that the Beings of the third Hierarchy were bound up with the external nature which he perceived with his senses. At that time he confused the Divine Beings of the third Hierarchy with the phenomena of nature, and expressed this in his interpretation of natural phenomena. Man to-day places his soul in his flesh and blood, the man of old placed the Beings of the third Hierarchy in external nature. He had no Natural Science such as we have to-day, but he considered the phenomena of nature as brought about by this or the other demon, more or less Divine Spiritual Beings, concerning whom he gave himself to a life of deception, in that he thought of these Spiritual Beings as operative in the phenomena of Nature. It is an important fact, that this change took place in the development of man in pre-Christian times; he gives himself over to a characteristic delusion of life, and after the Mystery of Golgotha to a delusion in his consciousness. The reality, the effective working of Christ Jesus (and of this we shall speak further in the next lecture) should consist in this—of elevating, of raising that delusion in man's consciousness, elevating it, bringing it home to him that he is deceived; and through the “Christus in mir.” “Christ in me,” man should be brought to feel that what lives as astral body and ego, lives in free Spirituality, and is not bound up with his flesh and blood. Of course, this can only be seen on the path of Spiritual Science, but it can already be felt in the words of St Paul: “Nicht ich, aber das Christus in mich,” “Not I, Christ in me.”

From what I have told you, you can already, my dear friends see that there are reasons why man should experience this Duality up to a certain point; experiencing on the one hand the ordering of Nature which consists contains no ideals, which of necessity connects one event with another, an ordering in which merely cause and effect, effect and cause are incorporated, so that one can never think that through what goes on in Nature, any ideal, moral or otherwise, can be realised. On the other hand, man is conscious that he could not develop an existence worthy of man unless he had ideals, unless he could cling to something else than a mere external Ordering of Nature. But with the consciousness accessible to him to-day, he cannot regard his ideals as operative, as effective, in the same way as, let us say, electricity or magnetism or the force of heat,—so, that the ideals are able to enter into Nature, into the ordering of natural phenomena. For that reason the Ordering of Nature and his own ideals appear to him side by side, but he cannot build a bridge from one to the other. He cannot build that bridge my dear friends, because he cannot look into the Cosmos both by day and by night, where the bridge has to be built. If only man could have a normal consciousness by day—that means an Ahriman-free consciousness—so that he could feel: “I as an individual person, am not bound to my physical or etheric bodies any more than when I look into a mirror which reflects me, I am bound to the image before me.” If man could have this consciousness about his ego and astral body, he would regard the ego and astral bodies as reality and not as mere reflected images, and then he could also recognise his ideals as real forces, just as real as electricity and magnetism, only they are not working at the present time, they are acquiring reality in the present incarnation for the next; from this earthly existence they pass over into the next earthly existence.

If man in the waking condition could perceive that his ego and astral body are bound up with the Beings of the third Hierarchy, as I have pointed out,—in other words,—if man could but fully see himself, and not merely feel himself but realise himself as a free personality not bound up with flesh and blood, he would no longer believe that the external nature outside him as presented to his sense-organs is a strong enough reality to oppose the force of his Ideals, He would know that, that which is the Ordering of Nature to-day, will crumble away with all those substances; that there is no such thing as the conservation of matter, but that which in Nature destroys itself, and when that which to-day is Nature no longer exists, then another external sense-reality will appear in its place, and that which to-day constitutes our ideals will become Nature in the next epoch. So we can say, to-day we experience an Ordering of Nature, (see diagram red) we experience an Ordering of our Ideals (yellow). The physicist believes that this Nature is maintained by a conservation of force and a conservation of matter, that the Ordering of Nature persists—, that the same atoms, the same forces play into all future.

[Missing Diagram]

The physicist, if he is sincere, can say none other than this:—“The ideal Ordering was a dream, it must sink and vanish like dreams. At the end of the earth our dream-ideal will no longer be there, it will have been buried.”

Spiritual Science shows that this is a delusion, untrue. We have the Ordering of Nature, (red) but in reality there is no conservation of force or of matter, for that which is the Ordering of matter ceases at a certain definite point of time; and that which to-day constitutes our ideal Order, forms the continuation of the Ordering of Nature.

[A gap in the page ... another missing diagram?]

All that we see round us with our eyes, or that we hear with our ears, all that we perceive around us with all our senses, will, when the earth reaches the Venus-condition, be non-existent; but out of that nothingness the possibility will be given for the Ideals of modern humanity to become the external Ordering of Nature. No conception of the world, my dear friends, which fails to recognise the destruction of what is sensible, can ever have a hope that the Ideal has the power to realise itself, for if what is sensible were eternal, if the conservation of force and matter did exist, them our ideal world would simply be a dream. It is of immense significance that man should at the present time, have this illumination:—that the Ideals of the present constitute the Nature of the future. It is a great delusion to believe that the atoms and forces around us are the eternal. They are not the eternal; they are the temporal. That indeed is the fate of Spiritual Science, it has to contradict and refute a perception held by the present-day universal perception and view of science as an absolute certainty, and which is yet nothing but an Ahrimanic deception.

Now let us go back again to something else, to which I have drawn your attention. Before the Mystery of Golgotha what I have characterised to you as the delusion of man, can be described as a delusion of life; after the Mystery of Golgotha it was a delusion of consciousness. When one knows this, one can understand many things in the development of man. Above all one understands why, before the Mystery of Golgotha, those human beings who had atavistic clairvoyance, could not see things in their true form, but saw the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies as demons. That is why those ancient Mythologies consist essentially in a demonology. The Gods of the ancient Mythologies were seen as Demons, as for the most part they were. And that rests on the fact that a delusion of life was present then. Men had to think of a false Ordering of Nature as a Divine Ordering, just as they have to think to-day of a false Ordering of the body as ordained for mankind.

Then came the Mystery of Golgotha; and man had to take the soul-mood which resulted from the Mystery of Golgotha. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, man in his waking condition stood in a more direct relationship to the Beings of the third Hierarchy than to-day. He saw them. And through their delusion of life they “fantasised” these Beings into Zeus, Apollo, and so on. These are the Beings of the third Hierarchy, but they were poetically altered, as seen under the influence of that delusion of life, as we to-day see everything which refers to man under the influence of our delusion of consciousness.

In spite of all that however, a Divine Spiritual order was spread into humanity. Just think how close man of those ancient epochs felt his human world to be to the Divine Ordering of the Cosmos! There was the human Hierarchy, and then came the Divine Hierarchy. Man did not feel so cut off as to-day, for he continued the world straight up to the Gods! How close the Greek felt his world of the Gods to the world of Man.

Then came the Mystery of Golgotha, and that was then no longer the case! Not through the Mystery of Golgotha, for that was to give compensation for what has been lost. But time itself brought into human evolution that man was to be cut off from this conscious connection with the Divine-Spiritual world of the third Hierarchy; only a memory, an historical memory remained. Then came the time of the first epoch after the Mystery of Golgotha. Men certainly had to think somewhat differently to what they did before the Mystery of Golgotha; but something of that immediate past still worked in them, when men knew that the Divine Spiritual Beings work into the earthly events and arrange and ordain what man does on the Earth. Therefore man of old was convinced that when he founded a State, (if one wishes to use the word “State,” it is incorrect, but we are accustomed to speak like this to-day)—he knew that those social structures were founded under the influence of the third Hierarchy. Man felt that his arrangements on Earth were Divine arrangements. You need merely study Egyptian history, even without clairvoyance to see how fully convinced the Egyptians were that what man does here in his social life was all arranged by the Beings of the third Hierarchy. That was so before the Mystery of Golgotha. After the Mystery of Golgotha the Church established a kind of grade in the clerical dignitaries. Such gradations were arranged; but behind the arrangement of those degrees there was a quite different thought. This can be seen quite clearly in the early Church writers. In Dionysius the Areopagite, you can see it clearly for yourself. There was to be such an arrangement in the administration of the Church that it should be an image of the Divine Ordering! and the relation of the Deacon to the Archdeacon was to be an image of the relation of the Angel to the Archangel, Again the relation of Archdeacon to the Bishop was a copy of the relationship of the Archangel to the Archai. Thus it was endeavoured to make the social structure of the Church a sort of copy of that Theocracy! Above in the Spiritual world there is a sequence of Hierarchies, and down below, in the physical world, there should also stand as a copy of the Spiritual Hierarchies, a sequence in the clerical dignitaries. In the first epoch after the Mystery of Golgotha, that was not conceived juridistically, but theocratically. It was a copy. The clerical Hierarchy was conceived as a copy of the Third Hierarchy, Thus in the first Christian Centuries it was endeavoured to establish such organisations as should cause the position of man on Earth to each other to be a copy of the Hierarchies in the Spiritual world.

Then gradually men lost the consciousness that they still had in their memories. The historic memory of the old theocracy was lost, in which man still knew that the earthly arrangements were a consequence of a copy of the Deeds of the Gods. The consciousness of this was lost, and in the place of the consciousness of the living world of Divine Beings, which were seen by men in olden times, and of which they still knew, there come abstract concepts. And so came the centuries where, in place of the individual Gods,—the Christians called them Angels—they put abstract ideas, a metaphysic of abstract concepts. The Divine Ordering, which should have its copy in the human ordering became theocratic; the application of mere ideas to man's social arrangements produced something which was simply intended to bring some kind of order into human intercourse. As formerly it was thought to create an image of the Divine Cosmos in the human social structure, so in the metaphysical age which followed, it was simply striven to maintain some order by punishing evil and not punishing the good, perhaps even rewarding it,—thus creating an ordering in which the social order could exist. And so, as in the place of living Gods there now appeared abstract, metaphysical concepts, a human Ordering appeared which in a sense so stamped itself on man, that one was preferred before another, not because that was a copy so that order should be maintained on earth; one came to command and the other to obey. Abstractions appeared in the place of the living permeation of the social Ordering.

Essentially the epoch of real metaphysic prevailed throughout the middle ages. The Roman consciousness essentially provided the special element for this metaphysical Ordering, which spread everywhere; one finds memories of this in the very words. For instance the word “Prince” (Fürst), is a memory of the Theocratic Ordering. The Prince, (Fürst), was the first, because some one had to be first, just as in the Divine Hierarchies also, one had to be first. A memory of the metaphysical order of administration is given us in the word Count, “Graf,” which is connected with “grafo;”—to write. In the metaphysical Ordering, everything is registered! the social order was kept by writing documents, by making compacts.

And then came the modern age. This newer age brought disbelief in the abstract concepts, in metaphysics. Men could now only believe in the external sense-phenomena, even in human life. Those traditions which still existed in ancient times of a living consciousness which somehow worked thus into the social structure, was lost. First the Gods, later the metaphysical concepts; these things could no longer exist in modern times; but they must again be won on those paths indicated by Spiritual Science. All consciousness of the Spiritual basis, of a Spiritual structure, was radically obliterated by Industrialism. Therefore Auguste Comte and his teacher Saint-Simon, felt themselves so specially united with the epoch of Industrialism, for they allowed positivistic Science alone to have any value.—That means, only that which can be related to the external sensible natural ordering, permeated by causal necessity.

Therewith, my dear friends, the concept of truth itself has undergone a complete transformation. People to-day have not the right feeling for these things, they do not as yet realise aright the fact, that the very concept of Truth has undergone a history. These modern human beings who knew themselves to be under a theocratic Ordering, had no such idea of Truth as human beings get to-day under the authority of Natural Science. It is extraordinarily difficult to speak of these things. To-day a man may think that, with reference to the world around him, truth consists in the coinciding of an idea with external reality. He gets that thought from Natural Science. Such a concept of Truth simply did not exist in the first Christian Centuries. There was another idea of Truth then, which was essentially connected with the theocratic social order. The concept of truth which lives in all souls to-day really did not exist then. This extraordinary fact, my dear friends, is not realised now. It is more easy to recognise the concept of Truth which lived then, if one approaches the idea of Divine Judgment. Suppose two people are fighting a duel, (I will not touch upon the question of duels, I am simply giving an instance), it cannot be determined from the very start by some calculation that A, will win and B will not,—if that were so the duel would hardly occur; the truth only emerges in the course of the conflict. We ourselves still have this idea of truth at the present day, in the case of war. We should not wage war if we knew from the start, as in an experiment in a chemical laboratory, how the war was going to end. In this the old concept of truth is rooted even to-day, that truth itself can only he revealed in the course of what actually happens, that one can do nothing but watch how the Divine Judgment will fall. That is the old concept of Truth.

Those who think as Auguste Comte or as the Socialists to-day, have completely broken with this idea of Truth. They only recognise a truth as such, where the event in its course can be foreseen. The cry of Auguste Comte: “Know in order to foresee,” is the radical transformation of the concept of Truth in our modern age. But, my dear friends, with the concept which prevails to-day, one can only grasp external nature. Concerning this point, humanity to-day gives way to a colossal delusion. Men believe, for instance, that they can grasp historical life through this idea of Truth, which Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon taught. But it cannot be done, even with the old concept of Truth as divine Judgment, for that stood under the influence of the Delusion of Life. Our modern concept of Truth stands under the influence of our Delusion in Consciousness. There must come the concept of Truth of Anthroposophy; a concept gained in a far more widely embracing way than that in which St Augustine got his concept of Truth; for as I have explained to you, that too was subject to delusion.

This is connected with many things: and a great deal depends on it. It is not enough to speak abstractly on the evolution of the idea of Truth, one must in general, in all its details, know how the Concept of Truth can lead the soul of man along many different paths according to the nature of his idea of Truth. It is an anachronism to speak to-day in the same sense of Nationalism, as was possible in the pre-Christian age; because in the pre-Christian age it was not only a human view—that a Divine Ordering then permeated the human Ordering, it was actually the case. Now, the Divine Ordering no longer permeates it. Hence, wherever to-day man hangs his consciousness on the Ordering of Nature, on that which is merely produced by a sequence of births, on the Principle of nationality, for instance, there he is involved in an anachronism. It is laid on man to-day to find quite other structures of social order than those worked from outside. The man of old could look to his nationality, because he saw it determined by the divine Ordering. But man cannot do this to-day in the same sense without falling into an anachronism, and to-day to honour the Nation itself as something special, is an anachronism, he must consider other social structures. To regard a Nation as something special, would bring about the modern Ahrimanic delusion. “Nations” are relics of the pre-Christian Age, and modern humanity must rise above them through that development which I have indicated. We must see how concretely human beings strive after a special development of the concept of Truth. That is important, even if it is inconvenient to-day, my dear friends. But if we are unprejudiced in trying to grasp reality, we must assimilate many an uncomfortable truth.

You see, man now goes right against what Anthroposophy wills. That world-view which found its special advocate in Auguste Comte, limits itself merely to an external Ordering of Nature. We must press forward again to a Spiritual world, and a bridge must be found between Idealism and Realism. That is what I wont to emphasise in these lectures. But this cannot be done simply by speaking of these things, but by grasping the concrete impulses working in the world. We must look certain facts full in the face, without prejudice. Now there are very curious facts connected with the things we are now considering. Yesterday I spoke of Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon. Both consider positivistic Science as the only thing valid, positivistic Science which simply relates to the sense-life, to a what is in the causal Ordering of Nature. Nevertheless the extraordinary fact is before us, that Auguste Comte turned away from his teacher and guide, Saint-Simon, because gradually Saint-Simon had become too mystical; and the disciples of Auguste Comte gradually turned from him because he himself became altogether mystical in his old age. We are faced with this extraordinary fact,—that Saint-Simon as well as Auguste Comte, on the one side stand directly on the basis of the most Ahrimanic Science, consciously in the epoch of Industrialism, they stand on the soil of this Ahrimanic Science; and yet they become mystics! Extraordinary! That really is an extraordinary fact.

One has to ask the “why” of such a fact, but this can only be explained if without prejudice, one admits that on the other hand man is living towards Spirituality. Unconsciously human beings are striving towards Spirituality. Even such beings as Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon, who only want to grasp external nature, are also striving after Spirituality.

But now in the modern life of man something very peculiar is to be seen. We will take another fact which, without any national Chauvinism (which would not be seemly) we will try to keep in mind. In the views which result as the flower of modern nations, one can find characterised in a certain way what lies under the surface; and, starting from this, I should like to point to another very dominant English philosopher, Bentham, who lived from 1748–1832. Bentham can be taken as characteristic of the thinking of his people, and with a certain justice one must describe the views of Bentham as Utilitarianism even in a deeper sense. A certain basic sentence lies at the bottom of the ideal World-Ordering according to Bentham, This principle is usually called the “maximum of human happiness.” Human happiness consists in this dogma, which Bentham put forward: “The good (that means what should be striven for as an ideal) consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number of human beings on the Earth.” Let us get that sentence clearly in mind:—“The good consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number of human beings on the Earth.” That sentence, as a matter of fact, of the maximum of happiness on the Earth, is the root-nerve of the Utilitarian philosophy.

Now one must bear in mind that this sentence was regarded, not by Bentham himself nor by his disciples, but by those who stand on a Spiritual basis, as absolutely Ahrimanic. The occultists of his own Country say: Bentham put forward this purely devilish sentence—they call it devilish because, so say these occultists, if it were correct that good consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number, evil must then consist in the greatest happiness of the least number.

I am not now saying anything which I myself wish to bring before you as a definition or explanation, but simply quoting what has been said. Thus, on the one hand the English philosophy of Bentham, “The maximum of happiness;” on the other hand that English Spiritualism (Spiritualismus) which says, “Bentham's sentence is purely of the devil, because in that case evil would be the greatest happiness of the least number, and from this there would result that evil and happiness could exist side by side,” to which the Spiritualists would not under any condition agree.

I am only bringing before you here a fact of Spiritual life, significant in the most eminent degree, significant as regards the enormous opposition to be found in a certain sphere of the Earth between Spiritualism and external World-view.

And now again to-day, because I want you to realise that we shall solve these oppositions in tomorrows conditions, I want to put once more at the end, an apercus; you can put three things together:—Goetheism, Comteism, and Benthamism. These three things stand in a certain sense, in a threefold way to the Spiritual striving of man towards the future. The German Goetheism is so fashioned that out of it Spiritualism (Spiritualismus) can result. The French Comteism is so fashioned that Spiritualism can develop alongside it, for in Augusts Comte and Saint-Simon we find an extraordinary mysticism appearing side by side with their positive philosophy. With the English Utilitarianism, as in Bentham, nothing else is possible than the sharpest opposition from the side of Spiritualism against the national philosophy. That is something which lies in the soil of evolution itself. The French nature must so develop that Idealism, Mysticism and Positivism must develop side by side. Whereas in England within the British nature, things must develop more and more so, that, from the side of their Spiritualists, their own “racial nature” must be combated in the sharpest way possible. (That means, of course, what is put forward as the philosophical blossoms of the nation)

With Auguste Comte—I am not giving you theories but simply individual facts—there was such a distinct inclination to Mysticism existing, that, in spite of his application to Positivism and rejection of his teacher Saint-Simon, at the end of his life he very clearly assumes a Trinity. Auguste Comte honours three in his trinity:

1st. The great Fetish.
2nd. The great Medium.
3rd. The great Being.

And he says: the great Fetish is the Mother-bosom of humanity in space. Space itself is the great Medium out of which humanity comes. The great Being, the last person in his trinity, is humanity itself in the abstract, spread out over the Earth. Auguste Comte recognises this Trinity,—which is an extraordinary quickening of Positivism with Mysticism.

Now of this we shall speak further tomorrow.

A full insight into those relationships which we are now contacting is not possible unless one looks more closely into the nature of man in the period between going to sleep and waking up that is, the sleeping condition. Of course, diagrammatically, the sleeping condition is well-known to you. That which we call the astral body and ego separate from the physical and etheric bodies. But if we wish to go more deeply into the nature of sleep, we must remember that it is just in the sleeping condition that a man experiences the reality of what we discussed in our last lecture, when we said that St. Augustine sought in his own inner experience to grasp the real true certainty about the world. I told you in yesterday's lecture that in his waking condition, man does not grasp the full reality of his inner being. We must be quite clear that what is described as the astral body and the ego, do not really come to the consciousness of man by day: in his waking condition there only comes to his consciousness a copy, a mirror-picture of his ego and astral body. If man were conscious in the sleeping condition, that is from going to sleep until waking up, or, let us say, if he became conscious through those exercises which you can find described in my various writings—(which are all at your disposal)—if man could thus become conscious through his sleeping condition, he would experience not a mirror-image, as by day, but the true form of his Ego and Astral body. But we must quite clearly realise that the true form of the Astral body and Ego appear in such a way to the soul of man when he develops Imaginative Consciousness, that in the inner experiences during the sleep condition, he experiences in his Ego and Astral body what we call the third Hierarchy, the Hierarchy of the Angels, Archangels and Archai.

Although throughout the whole of man's working life he stands in intimate connection with what we must designate as the Angels, Archangels and Archai, he does not experience this consciously during the making condition; and that constitutes the deception in man's waking condition. He remains aware only of an abstract ego of those shadowy ideas and concepts which fill man's soul, or perhaps of half-dreamy feelings and willings. This is the essential—that throughout the waking condition man does not progress beyond experiencing this shadowy side of his Ego and Astral body; and that he cannot become conscious that all the time there in working into his Ego those Beings of the third Hierarchy to which I have just referred. But if he were really to wake up in his sleep, if I may use that expression, he would not have external nature around him, but would immediately feel in himself the Beings of the Angels, Archangels and the Time-Spirits.

Now because those Beings work in us, my dear friends, we have in the constitution of our soul something which we would not have otherwise have had. For instance, if the Hierarchy of the Angels did not work into our Ego and Astral body, we would never feel ourselves to be individuals. Therefore, just because the Hierarchy of the Angels work into our Spiritual, psychic nature wean feel ourselves to be free persons.

Because the Hierarchy of the Archangels work into us, we can feel ourselves as members of the whole of humanity. We might also say, that because these Arch-Angelic Beings shine into our psychic, Spiritual nature, inspiring it, therefore we rea11y feel ourselves as men.

And because the Beings of the Archai, the Spirits of Time, pulsate in our nature, filling it with their Intuition, therefore we feel ourselves as earthly human beings—that means members not only of the present humanity, but of the whole of earthly humanity, from the very start of earthly evolution to the very end of Earth-life. In that way we can feel ourselves as members of the entire earthly humanity. Of course, we only feel it dimly, because we can only dimly sense the influence of these Time-Spirits within us.

We cannot say that we behold ourselves as personalities; that we can only do when we attain the Imaginative Consciousness. There remains a kind of reflection of this Imaginative Consciousness when we so experience our thinking that, through the free life of thought we feel ourselves as individual beings. Let us once more make quite clear how it is that we feel ourselves as individuals. We feel ourselves as personalities because we can, of our own free will, add one thought to another. You would at once cease to feel yourselves as personal beings if you were compelled to add one thought to another just as in the world of external nature one phenomenon is linked on to another. This experience of inner freedom for the developing of a thought, gives us the certainty of feeling ourselves as personalities. his feeling of inner freedom is what comes clearest of all to man's consciousness by day; and it comes to man by day when he is awake, because, from the moment of sleeping until waking he is permeated by his Angel, that Angelic Being belonging to his own Ego.

In the feeling oneself as a human being as a member of all humanity, we are generally speaking, already far more apathetic, we feel ourselves far less strongly and intensely as members of the whole of mankind; and that is because the Arch-Angela, who bring this about, stand further away from us than do our Angels; and that which inserts itself as Personality into the whole human stream of evolution, (and which comes from the Archai) that remains for most human beings something really quite shadowy. On the basis of Anthroposophy we seek to evoke this very feeling, of belonging to the entire earthly humanity, for it becomes clear to us that in the 5th Post-Atlantean epoch man experiences things in a certain way; in the 4th in a different way; in the 3rd in a still different way. One thus sees how the mood of soul has altered in the various epochs of time, alterations brought about by the various beings of the 3rd Hierarchy, the Archai, the Spirits of Time. It is of this that we seek to create a consciousness on the basis of Spiritual Science. This consciousness can alone give man the possibility of feeling himself an historical Being, of feeling conscious: “I am now living as a Personality, in the 20th Century.” The fact does not enter the consciousness of most human beings, that their personality can only be real as Personality, because it has been placed in a definite point of time. How this permeation of the human soul and spirit-being by the Beings of the third Hierarchy, is something of which men would become aware, if he were intensely enough to attain Imaginative Cognition.

In the ordinary path of human evolution, as you know, Imaginative Cognition is not present. From the moment of going to sleep until waking up, the reality of man's ego and astral body is damped down; and by day, when man is awake, he loses his connection with the Beings of the third Hierarchy. What comes from the fact that especially in our present cycle of time, man, when he is awake, is given over to an illusion. As we have seen, when he is asleep, man is subject to the deception that his Ego and Astral body are not then active; but they are not inactive, They are then in living interchange with the Beings of the third Hierarchy. In the waking condition, the state of affairs at the present cycle of time is, that our physical and etheric bodies, “unjustly,” illegally, as we might say, absorb our Spiritual, Psychic nature. They permeate themselves with our spirit and soul. Normally this should not be the case. It should be normal for a man to-day when awake, to feel himself an Ego and Astral body, and to feel his etheric and physical bodies as a kind of shell into which he crawls, to feel them as something which he carries consciously about with him. But man does not feel that to-day; he feels as if the physical and etheric bodies were himself. But this they are not. We are that Spiritual, psychic being which makes use of the physical and etheric bodies as an instrument; but we cannot raise ourselves above the deception which belongs to the working of our epoch of time. We are, as it were, compelled to identify ourselves with that which in the normal consciousness should be like a hammer which one takes in ones hand and gives blows with it; so should we regard our physical and etheric bodies. But in this epoch we have to identify ourselves with them,—to give ourselves over to the deception that we are these, that it is we ourselves who thus go in a fleshly way through space. But they are not ourselves. That is only because the consciousness of our ego is absorbed unjustly, illegally, by the physica1 and etheric bodies. That simply rests in the fact that in the present cycle of time the Ahrimanic powers are stronger than they should be in the normal evolution of mankind. They draw down the etheric and astral bodies into the physical and etheric bodies, so to speak, and they bring about in man the deception that the head which he carries is himself, that his hands and his whole body is himself. Wrongfully the physical body absorbs that consciousness, so that it appears as if the physical body brought about our personality. Anyone who thinks that his physical body brings about his personality is subject to the same deception us a person would be, who standing before a mirror, believes it produces him, because it radiates his reflection. To say that this fleshly form we carry round with us is ourselves, is no cleverer than to hold your hand before a mirror and believe that the mirror is producing your hand. Yet the whole of modern Science is subject to that deception. All modern Science believes that what we as individual persons
experiences inwardly, is somehow produced by the physical and etheric bodies; whereas all the physical and etheric bodies do, is to radiate back our astral body and ego, forming the mirror-image which, while we are awake, we recognise to be our ego and our thoughts, in other words, our astral body.

That is the Fundamental Truth which we mast realise, With reference to this Fundamental Truth, modern humanity, by reason of the forces working through our present epoch of time, give themselves over to a deception of consciousness which consists, as I have just told you, in the delusion that all that we think, or experience as our thoughts or our feelings, is produced by our body. Mankind is subject naturally to this delusion to-day. With his present consciousness he cannot transcend that deception, just as the Sun when low on the horizon looks bigger than when high up in the heavens. One knows it is a delusion, yet it does seem to be so. At this point of time man [needs] help regarding his flesh and blood as himself. That is a delusion of consciousness, my dear friends; but man was not always subject to this deception of consciousness; it is essentially a characteristic quality of the humanity of post-Christian times, after the Mystery of Golgotha. Before the Mystery of Golgotha this delusion did not exist. Before the Mystery of Golgotha there existed another kind of deception. Before Golgotha man did not believe that his consciousness was united with his physical body. Of course, history tells nothing, of this, but it is so. It would have been sheer nonsense for a man of the second or third millennium of the pre-Christian era to suppose that his soul was produced by his physical body; in olden times no man felt himself bound to his physical body as the modern man does. In those pre-Christian times man really had a living consciousness of the Beings of the third Hierarchy, and because he knew:—“My soul is not identical with my body,” he also knew that his soul was not bound up with the bone and muscles of his body, but that it was bound up with the Beings of the third Hierarchy.

Hw was subject to a different delusion, not in his consciousness but in his life. He believed that his soul was bound up with external nature, together with the Beings of the third Hierarchy, just as modern man believes his soul to be bound up with his physical body. Man to-day gives himself over to a delusion in consciousness, he believes that his soul is united with his body. The reason he cannot see the Beings of the Angels, Archangels and Archai, is because his physical body darkens them for him. The man of old, although he had a consciousness that these Beings were there and that his soul was bound up with them, could not see directly but only dimly into the external, sensible nature. Modern man, in the delusion of his consciousness, believes that his soul is bound up with his body; the man of old believed that the Beings of the third Hierarchy were bound up with the external nature which he perceived with his senses. At that time he confused the Divine Beings of the third Hierarchy with the phenomena of nature, and expressed this in his interpretation of natural phenomena. Man to-day places his soul in his flesh and blood, the man of old placed the Beings of the third Hierarchy in external nature. He had no Natural Science such as we have to-day, but he considered the phenomena of nature as brought about by this or the other demon, more or less Divine Spiritual Beings, concerning whom he gave himself to a life of deception, in that he thought of these Spiritual Beings as operative in the phenomena of nature. It is an important fact, that this change took place in the development of man in pre-Christian times; he gives himself over to a characteristic delusion of life, and after the Mystery of Golgotha to a delusion in his consciousness. The reality, the effective working of Christ Jesus (and of this we shall speak further in the next lecture) should consist in this—of elevating, of raising that delusion in man's consciousness, elevating it, bringing it home to him that he is deceived; and through the “Christus in mir,” “Christ in me,” man should be brought to feel that what lives as astral body and ego, lives in free Spirituality, and is not bound up with his flesh and blood. Of course, this can only be seen on the path of Spiritual Science, but it can already be felt in the words of St Paul: “Nicht ich, aber das Christus in mich,” “Not I, Christ in me.”

From what I have told you, you can already, my dear friends see that there are reasons why men should experience this Duality up to a certain point; experiencing on the one hand the ordering of Nature which consists contains no ideals, which of necessity connects one event with another, an ordering in which merely cause and effect, effect and cause are incorporated, so that one can never think that through what goes on in Nature, any ideal, moral or otherwise, can be realised. On the other hand, man is conscious that he could not develop an existence worthy of man unless he had ideals, unless he could cling to something else than a mere external Ordering of Nature. But with the consciousness accessible to him to-day, he cannot regard his ideals as operative, as effective, in the same way as, let us say, electricity or magnetism or the force of heat,—so, that the ideals are able to enter into Nature, into the ordering of natural phenomena. For that reason the Ordering of Nature and his own ideals appear to him side by side, but he cannot build a bridge from one to the other, He cannot build that bridge my dear friends because he cannot look into the Cosmos both by day and by night, where the bridge has to be built. If only man could have a normal consciousness by day—that means an Ahriman-free consciousness—so that he could feel: “I am an individual person, am not bound to my physical or etheric bodies any more than when I look into a mirror which reflects me, I am bound to the image before me.” If man could have this consciousness about his ego and astral body, he would regard the ego and astral bodies as reality and not as mere reflected images, and then he could also recognise his ideals as real forces, just as real as electricity and magnetism, only they are not working at the present time, they are acquiring reality in the present incarnation for the next; from this earthly existence they pass over into the next earthly existence.

If man in the waking condition could perceive that his ego and astral body are bound up with the Beings of the third Hierarchy, as I have pointed out,—in other words,—if man could but fully see himself and not merely feel himself but realise himself as a free personality not bound up with flesh and blood, he would no longer believe that the external nature outside him as presented to his sense-organs in a strong enough reality to oppose the force of his Ideals, He would know that, that which is the Ordering of Nature to-day, will crumble away with all those substances; that there is no such thing as the conservation of matter, but that which in Nature destroys itself and when that which to-day is Nature no longer exists, then another external sense-reality will appear in its place, and that which to-day constitutes our ideals will become Nature in the next epoch. So we can say, to-day we experience an Ordering of Nature, (see diagram red) we experience an Ordering of our Ideals (yellow). The physicist believes that this nature is maintained by a conservation of force and a conservation of matter, that the Ordering of Nature persists—, that the same atoms, the same forces play into all future.

[diagram is missing]

The physicist, if he is sincere, can say none other than this:—“The ideal Ordering was a dream, it must sink and vanish like dreams. At the end of the earth our dream-ideal will no longer be there, it will have been buried.”

Spiritual science knows that this is a delusion, untrue. We have the Ordering of Nature, red) but in reality there is no conservation of force or of matter, for that which is the Ordering of matter ceases at a certain definite point of time; and that which to-day constitutes our ideal Order, forms the continuation of the Ordering of Nature.

[diagram (if any) is missing]

All that we see round us with our eyes, or that we hear with our ears all that we perceive around us with all our senses, will, when the earth reaches the Venus-condition, be non-existent; but out of that Nothingness the possibility will be given for the Ideals of modern humanity to become the external Ordering of Nature. No conception of the world, my dear friends, which fails to recognise the destruction of what is sensible, can ever have a hope that the Ideal has the power to realise itself, for if what is sensible were eternal, if the conservation of force and matter did exist, then our ideal world would simply be a dream. It is of immense significance that man should at the present time, have this illumination:—that the Ideals of the present constitute the Nature of the future. It is a great delusion to believe that the atoms and forces around us are the eternal. They are not the eternal; they are the temporal. That indeed is the fate of Spiritual Science, it has to contradict and refute a perception held by the present-day universal perception and view of science as an absolute certainty, and which is yet nothing but an Ahrimanic deception.

Now let us go back again to something else, to which I have drawn your attention. Before the Mystery of Golgotha what I have characterised to you as the delusion of man, can be described as a delusion of life; after the Mystery of Golgotha it was a delusion of consciousness. When one knows this, one can understand many things in the development of man. Above all one understands why, before the Mystery of Golgotha, those human beings who had atavistic clairvoyance, could not see things in their true form, but saw the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies as demons. That is why those ancient Mythologies consist essentially in a demonology. The Gods of the ancient Mythologies were seen as Demons, as for the most part they were. And that rests on the fact that a delusion of life was present then. Men had to think of a false Ordering of Nature as a Divine Ordering, just as they have to think to-day of a false Ordering of the body as ordained for mankind.

Then came the Mystery of Golgotha; and man had to take the soul-mood which resulted from the Mystery of Golgotha. Before the Mystery of Golgotha, man in his waking condition stood in a more direct relationship to the Beings of the third Hierarchy than to-day. He saw them. And through their delusion of life they `fantasised' these Beings into Zeus, Apollo, and so on. These are the Beings of the third Hierarchy, but they were poetically altered, as seen under the influence of that delusion of life, as we to-day see everything which refers to man under the influence of our delusion of consciousness.

In spite of all that however, a Divine Spiritual order was spread into humanity. Just think how close man of those ancient epochs felt his human world to be to the Divine Ordering of the Cosmos! There was the human Hierarchy, and then came the Divine Hierarchy. Man did not feel so cut off as to-day, for he continued the world straight up to the Gods. How close the Greek felt his world of the Gods to the world of Man.

Then came the Mystery of Golgotha, and that was then no longer the case! Not through the Mystery of Golgotha, for that was to give compensation for what has been lost. But time itself brought into human evolution that man was to be cut off from this conscious connection with the Divine-Spiritual world of the third Hierarchy; only a memory, an historical memory remained. Then came the time of the first epoch after the Mystery of Golgotha. Men certainly had to think somewhat differently to what they did before the Mystery of Golgotha; but something of that immediate past still worked in them, when men know that the Divine Spiritual Beings work into the early events and arrange and ordain what man does on the Earth. Therefore man of old was convinced that when he founded a State, (if one wishes to use the word `State,' it is incorrect, but we are accustomed to speak like this to-day)—he knew that those social structures were founded under the influence of the third Hierarchy. Man felt that his arrangements on Earth were Divine arrangements. You need merely study Egyptian history, even without clairvoyance to see how fully convinced the Egyptians were that what man does here in is social life was all arranged by the Beings of the third Hierarchy. That was so before the Mystery of Golgotha. After the Mystery of Golgotha the Church established a kind of grade in the clerical dignitaries. Such gradations were arranged; but behind the arrangement of those degrees there was a quite different thought. This can be seen quite clearly in the early Church writers. In Dionysius the Areopagite, you can see it clearly for yourself. There was to be such an arrangement in the administration of the Church that it should be an image of the Divine Ordering; and the relation of the Deacon to the Archdeacon was to be an image of the relation of the Angel to the Archangel. Again the relation of Archdeacon to the Bishop was a copy of the relationship of the Archangel to the Archai. Thus it was endeavoured to make the social structure of the Church a sort of copy of that Theocracy! Above in the Spiritual world there is a sequence of Hierarchies, and down below, in the physical world, there should also stand as a copy of the Spiritual Hierarchies, a sequence in the clerical dignitaries. In the first epoch after the Mystery of Golgotha, that was not conceived juridistically, but theocratically. It was a copy. The clerical Hierarchy was conceived as a copy of the Third Hierarchy. Thus in the first Christian Centuries it was endeavoured to establish such organisations as should cause the position of man on Earth to each other to be a copy of the Hierarchies in the Spiritual world.

Then gradually men lost the consciousness that they still had in their memories. The historic memory of the old theocracy was lost, in which man still knew that the earthly arrangements were a consequence of a copy of the Deeds of the Gods. The consciousness of this was lost, and in the place of the consciousness of the living world of Divine Beings, which were seen by men in olden times, and of which they still knew, there came abstract concepts. And so came the centuries where, in place of the individual Gods,—the Christians called them Angels—they put abstract ideas, a metaphysic of abstract concepts. The Divine Ordering, which should have its copy in the human ordering, became theocratic; the application of more ideas to man's social arrangements produced something which was simply intended to bring some kind of order into human intercourse. As formerly it was thought to create an image of the Divine Cosmos in the metaphysical age which followed, it was simply striven to maintain some order by punishing evil and not punishing the good, perhaps even rewarding it,—thus creating an ordering in which the social order could exist. And so, as in the place of living Gods there now appeared abstract, metaphysical concepts, a human Ordering appeared which in a sense so stamped itself on man, that one was preferred before another, not because that was a copy so that order should be maintained on earth; one came to command and the other to obey. Abstractions appeared in the place of the living permeation of the social Ordering.

Essentially the epoch of real metaphysic prevailed throughout the middle ages. The Roman consciousness essentially provided the special element for this metaphysical Ordering, which spread everywhere; one finds memories of this in the very words. For instance the word “Prince” (Fürst), is a memory of the Theocratic Ordering. The Prince, (Fürst), was the first, because some one had to be first, just as in the Divine Hierarchies also, one had to be first. A memory of the metaphysical order of administration is given us in the word Count `Graf,' which is connected with `grafe;'—to write. In the metaphysical Ordering, everything is registered; the social order was kept by writing documents, by making compacts.

And then came the modern age. This newer age brought disbelief in the abstract concepts, in metaphysics. Men could now only believe in the external sense-phenomena, even inhuman life. Those traditions which still existed in ancient times of a living consciousness which somehow worked this into the social structure, was lost. First the Gods, later the metaphysical concepts; these things could no longer exist in modern times; but they must again be won on those paths indicated by Spiritual Science. All consciousness of the Spiritual basis, of a Spiritual structure, was radically obliterated by Industrialism. Therefore Auguste Comte and his teacher Saint-Simon, felt themselves so specially united with the epoch of Industrialism, for they allowed positivistic Science alone to have any value. That means, only that which can be related to the external sensible natural ordering, permeated by causal necessity.

Therewith, my dear friends, the concept of truth itself has undergone a complete transformation. People to-day have not the right feeling for these things, they do not as yet realise aright the fact, that the very concept of Truth has undergone a history. These modern human beings who knew themselves to be under a theocratic Ordering, have no such idea of Truth as human beings get to-day under the authority of Natural Science. It is extraordinarily difficult to speak of these things. To-day a man may think that, with reference to the world around him, truth consists in the coinciding of an idea with external reality. He gets that thought from Natural Science. Such a concept of Truth simply did not exist in the First Christian Centuries. There was another idea of Truth then, which was essentially connected with the theocratic social order. The concept of truth which lives in all souls to-day really did not exist then. This extraordinary fact, my dear friends, is not realised now. It is more easy to recognise the concept of Truth which lived then, if one approaches the idea of Divine Judgment. Suppose two people are fighting a duel, (I will not touch upon the question of duels, I am simply giving an instance), it cannot be determined from the very start by some calculation that A, will win and B will not,—if that were so the duel would hardly occur; the truth only emerges in the course of the conflict. We ourselves still have this idea of truth at the present day, in the case of war. We should not wage war if we know from the start, as in an experiment, in a chemical laboratory, how the war was going to end. In this the old concept of truth is rooted even to-day, that truth itself can only be revealed in the course of what actually happens, that one can do nothing but watch how the Divine Judgment will fall. That is the old concept of Truth.

Those who think as Auguste Comte or as the Socialists to-day, have completely broken with this idea of Truth. They only recognise a truth as such, where the event in its course can be foreseen. The cry of Auguste Comte; “Know in order to foresee,” is the radical transformation of the concept of Truth in our modern age. But, my dear friends, with the concept which prevails to-day, one can only grasp external nature. Concerning this point, humanity to-day gives way to a colossal delusion. Men believe, for instance, that they can grasp historical life through this idea of Truth, which Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon taught. But it cannot be done, even with the old concept of Truth as Divine Judgment, for that stood under the influence of the Delusion of Life. Our modern concept of Truth stands under the influence of our Delusion in Consciousness. There must come the concept of Truth of Anthroposophy; a concept gained in a far more widely embracing way than that in which St Augustine got his concept of Truth,—for as I have explained to you, that too was subject to delusion.

This is connected with many things; and a great deal depends on it. It is not enough to speak abstractly on the evolution of the idea of Truth, one must in general, in all its details know how the concept of Truth can lead the soul of man along many different paths according to the nature of his idea of Truth. It is an anachronism to speak to-day in the same sense of Nationalism, as was possible in the pre-Christian age; because in the pre-Christian age it was not only a human view—that a Divine Ordering then permeated the human Ordering, it was actually the case. Now, the Divine Ordering no longer permeates it. Hence, wherever to-day man hangs his consciousness on the Ordering of Nature, on that which is merely produced by a sequence of births, on the Principle of Nationality, for instance, there he is involved in an anachronism. It is laid on man to-day to find quite other structures of social order than those worked from outside. The man of old could look to his nationality, because he saw it determined by the Divine Ordering. But man cannot do this to-day in the same sense without falling into an anachronism, and to-day to honour the Nation itself as something special, is an anachronism, he must consider other social structures. To regard a Nation as something special, would bring about the modern Ahrimanic delusion. “Nations” are relics of the pre-Christian Age, and modern humanity must rise above them through that development which I have indicated. We must see how concretely human beings strive after a special development of the concept of Truth. That is important, even if it is inconvenient to-day, my dear friends. But if we are unprejudiced in trying to grasp reality, we must assimilate many an uncomfortable truth.

You see, man now goes right against what Anthroposophy wills. That world-view which found its special advocate in Auguste Comte, limits itself merely to an external Ordering of Nature. We must press forward again to a spiritual world and a bridge must be found between idealism and realism. That is what I want to emphasise in these lectures. But this cannot be done simply by speaking of these things, but by grasping the concrete impulses working in the world. We must look certain facts full in the face, without prejudice. Now there are very curious facts connected with the things we are now considering. Yesterday I spoke of Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon. Both consider positivistic Science as the only thing valid, positivistic Science which simply relates to the sense-life, to a what is in the causal Ordering of Nature. Nevertheless the extraordinary fact is before us, that Auguste Comte turned away from his teacher and guide, Saint-Simon, because gradually Saint-Simon had become too mystical; and the disciples of Auguste Comte gradually turned from him because he himself became altogether mystical in his old age. We are faced with this extraordinary fact,—that Saint-Simon as well as Auguste Comte, on the one side stand directly on the basis of the most Ahrimanic Science, consciously in the epoch of Industrialism, they stand on the soil of this Ahrimanic Science; and yet they become mystics! Extraordinary! That really is an extraordinary fact.

One has to ask the `why' of such a fact, but this can only be explained if without prejudice, one admits that on the other hand man is living towards Spirituality. Unconsciously human beings are striving towards Spirituality. Even such beings as Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon, who only want to grasp external nature, are also striving after Spirituality.

But now in the modern life of man something very peculiar is to be seen. We will take another fact which, without any national chauvinism (which would not be seemly) we will try to keep in mind. In the views which result as the flower of modern nations, one can find characterised in a certain way what lies under the surface; and, starting from this, I should like to point to another very dominant English philosopher, Bentham, who lived from 1748-1832. Bentham can be taken as characteristic of the thinking of his people, and with a certain justice one must describe the views of Bentham as Utilitarianism even in a deeper sense. A certain basic sentence lies at the bottom of the Ideal World-Ordering according to Bentham. This principle is usually called the “maximum of human happiness.” Human happiness consists in this dogma, which Bentham put forward: “The good (that means what should be striven for as an ideal) consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number of human beings on the Earth.” Let us get that sentence clearly in mind:—“The good consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number of human beings on the Earth.” That sentence, as a matter of fact, of the maximum of happiness on the Earth, is the root-nerve of the Utilitarian philosophy.

Now one must bear in mind that this sentence was regarded, not by Bentham himself nor by his disciples but by those who stand on a Spiritual basis, as absolutely Ahrimanic. The occultists of his own Country say: Bentham put forward this purely devilish sentence—they call it devilish because, to any of these occultists, if it were correct that good consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number, evil must then consist in the greatest happiness of the least number.

I am not now saying anything which I myself wish to bring before as a definition or explanation, but simply quoting what has been said. Thus, on the one hand the English philosophy of Bentham, “The maximum of happiness;” on the other hand that English Spiritualism (Spiritualismus) which says “Bentham's sentence is purely of the devil, because in that case evil would be the greatest happiness of the least number, and from this there would result that evil and happiness could exist side by side,” to which the Spiritualists would not under any condition agree.

I am only bringing before you here a fact of Spiritual life, significant in the most eminent degree, significant as regards the enormous opposition to be found in a certain sphere of the Earth between Spiritualism and external World-view.

And now again to-day, because I want you to realise that we shall solve these oppositions in tomorrows conditions, I want to put once more at the end, an apercus; you can put three things together: Geotheism, Comteism, and Benthamism. These three things stand in a certain sense, in a three fold way to the Spiritual striving of man toward the future. The German Goetheism is so fashioned that out of it Spiritualism (Spiritualismus) can result. The French Comteism is so fashioned that Spiritualism can develop alongside it, for in Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon we find an extraordinary mysticism appearing side by side with their positive philosophy. With the English Utilitarianism, as in Bentham, nothing else is possible than the sharpest opposition from the side of Spiritualism against the national philosophy. That is something which lies in the soil of evolution itself. The French nature must so develop that Idealism, Mysticism and Positivism must develop side by side. Whereas in England within the British nature, things must develop more and more so, that, from the side of their Spiritualists, their own “racial nature” must be combated in the sharpest way possible. (That means, of course, what is put forward as the philosophical blossoms of the nation.)

With Auguste Comte—I am not giving you theories but simply individual facts—there was such a distinct inclination to Mysticism existing, that, in spite of his application to Positivism and rejection of his teacher St Simon, at the end of his life he very clearly assumes a Trinity. Auguste Comte honours three in his trinity:

1st. The great Fetish.
2nd. The great Medium.
3rd. The great Being.

And he says: the great Fetish is the Mother-bosom of humanity in space. Space itself is the great Medium out of which humanity comes. The great Being, the last person in his trinity, is humanity itself in the abstract, spread out over the Earth. Auguste Comte recognises this Trinity,—which is an extraordinary quickening of Positivism with Mysticism.

Now of this we shall speak further tomorrow. [The lecture of 8th September 1918, remains untranslated. – e.Ed]

My dear friends,

During these meetings, we are considering the truths which can be learned from the Guardian of the Threshold. And the Guardian's continuous admonition is that man be aware that he advances spiritually when he becomes conscious of his true relation to the world.

To become conscious of his true relation to the world, he first gets to know the world by observing the kingdoms of nature which are external to his own being - the animal kingdom, the vegetable kingdom and the mineral kingdom. These relations offer him the opportunity to admire them and to use them to carry out his own will impulses, etc. Man considers them to be hisexternal world, and with normal consciousness he is hardly aware of how he has evolved out of this world, how a deep relationship to that world exists within him.

However, one cannot feel this relationship by merely letting one's gaze wander over this exterior world. One must advance to a self-knowledge of belonging to this world. And when one wishes to gain this self-knowledge, my dear friends, then one may not simply continue to see things as first glances provide; rather must one return to what is revealed between them.

Since the modern phase of human evolution began, we seldom see what is revealed between the things. We see the three kingdoms of nature in the outside world. But as you know, my dear friends, behind the kingdoms of nature we have what is called the world of the elements.

We can say: our feet stand on the ground of thesolid earth.

[written on the blackboard]

Earth

And what the solid earth consists of is also present in the animals, plants and minerals and also in our physical human bodies. And when we lift our gaze from the ground beneath our feet to what is to a certain extent at our own height, what is present is not only air, for the air is always penetrated by the watery element. Although it is true that man's life on earth has developed in such a way that he only senses this watery element in fine solution in the air which surrounds him, and in order to use it in his own organism it must be condensed, it is nevertheless true that he also lives in this watery element.

[over “earth” is written]

Water

And man also lives in the air element through which he breathes.

[over “Water” is written]

Air

At the moment when we observe these elements we cannot speak of them as we speak of the other beings of the nature-kingdoms, which we see before us in sharply defined contours. But in the solid as such, in the earthly, we can only say that we live in it. We are too closely related to the earthly to specifically differentiate it. We do not specifically differentiate what is a part of ourselves. We do differentiate a table or a chair which exist outside of ourselves. We do not consider what is inside us as having clear boundaries. We do not see our lungs or heart within us as having clear boundaries. Only when they are made into objects, in anatomy, do we see them so. But just as we are related to our own bodies, we are also, to a larger extent, related to the elements. We live in earth, we live in water, we live in air, we live in warmth. They belong to us. They are too close to us to be understood as very sharply contoured in the world.

Let us now lay out this elemental world before us, a world which is around us and at the same time within us, so that we must consider it as the content of the world and of ourselves. So we have what we designate as Earth, what we designate as Water, what we designate as Air and what we designate as Warmth.

[over “Air” is written:]

Warmth

When we go further up out of the thicker substances into the etheric from warmth, which is already etheric, we come to the light.

[over “Warmth” is written:]

Light

and up to what we have always described with a dry, abstract expression: chemical ether and its effects. Because the ordering, the formation of the world is effected by it, we shall call that great chemicality of the cosmos “cosmic-formation”.

[over “Light” is written]

Cosmic-formation

And then we will call what is highest in the etheric: Life-Ether, Cosmic Life.

[over “cosmic formation” is written]

Cosmic Life

Well, my dear friends, you have already seen from the previous lesson that the human being, according to the manner in which he lives on the earth, is not equally related to all of these elements in the same measure. In fact, the human being only lives in a completely intimate relationship with the element of warmth. [A red cross is drawn on the blackboard next to the word “Warmth”.] For spiritual progress, it is necessary to be fully conscious of such things.

Just think how much you directly feel warmth and cold to be part of you. The difference between warm and cold affects you strongly. Even air circulation affects you less. Whether the air is good or bad you notice indirectly according to its effect on your organism. The effect of light is the same. Nevertheless, man is very closely related to air and light. [Yellow crosses are drawn next to the words “air” and “light”.] He is extraordinarily close to them.

But man is relatively distant from the watery elements - among the denser ones - even though he is related to them. Nevertheless, the watery element is very closely connected to human life. [A blue cross is drawn next to the word “water”.] Imagine, my dear friends, a very vivid nightmare and consider how your perspiration, that is, the secretion of the watery element, is affected by it. Notice how the watery element plays a significant role in sleep. The human being lives in the watery element. The liquid elements dissolved in his environment are of great importance for him, but none more directly than warmth. Whether it is warm or cold, man feels it as being part of himself. When it is warm, he is warm; when it is cold, he is cold. When we walk into fog, for example, the fog's moisture has an important but an indirect influence on us, something which normal consciousness isn't very aware of.

I'll put it this way: We walk into fog - and our own watery element merges in a certain sense with the outer world's watery element. And with this easy transition from our own watery element to the outer world's watery element we feel our connection to the whole cosmos - contrary to the transition from our watery element to dry outer air. Dry air lets us feel more human. Watery air lets us feel our dependence on the cosmos. But nowadays we have no training in such things. In a lecture cycle in The Hague, which has been printed, I went into detail concerning man's dependence on the elements. The elements exist, and it pertains to esoteric life to be aware of this dependence in practice.

Man's relation to the earthly elements lies even deeper in the subconscious. [A blue cross is drawn next to the word “Earth”.]

What does man know about his relation to the earthly element? He knows that salt is salty, that sugar is sweet. They belong to the earthly element. But about the processes of metamorphosis that salt and sugar undergo in his organism, how he acts together with the cosmos in dissolving the sugar or the salt within his organism, how certain cosmic forces work into the organism when the sugar's sweetness courses through his body, or the saltiness of salt courses through his body, he is mostly unaware, save for the slight reflex of the saltiness or the sweetness on his taste-buds. These are profoundly meaningful processes. The universe has opened its doors, so to speak, to certain forces when the human being dissolves sugar on his tongue and transfers it to his organism.

It is also the case that whereas these denser elements have an indirect influence on the human being, the etheric finer elements, Cosmic Formation and Cosmic Life also have an indirect influence on the human being, a hidden influence. [Blue crosses are drawn next to “Cosmic Formation” and “Cosmic Life”.]

The most evident influence on man comes from the middle element, Warmth. The influence of Light and Air are also strong - evident also to ordinary consciousness. But the influence of Water and Earth on one hand, and on the other hand of Cosmic Life and Cosmic Chemical Formation lie in the unconscious. Therefore, man should be aware during his earthly life that he lives closely with these middle elements [Air, Warmth, Light], whereas his consciousness has been withdrawn from his relation to Water and Earth and to Cosmic Formation and Cosmic Life.

In the days when the old instinctive consciousness prevailed, there was also a nuance of clairvoyance, and when the students in the Mysteries reached a certain stage in their development they were cautioned: Trust the Fire, trust the Air, also trust the Light; but beware of the underworld - Water, Earth; beware of the overworld - Cosmic Formation and Cosmic Life. For due to the fact that they lie so deeply in the unconscious, Lucifer's temptations appear in Cosmic Life and Cosmic Formation, and Ahriman's temptations appear in Earth and Water.

Cosmiclife X } Lucifer Cosmicformation X Light X Warmth X Air X Water X } Ahriman Earth X

In the Mysteries, esoteric instruction always indicated that man should find the right relation to these elements, feel his relationship with the elements in the correct way. When one advances to Imaginative life, he feels exactly this relationship to the elements. With normal consciousness: We look around, recognize the animals, plants and minerals as existing outside of us. When, however, we recognize the elements in their relationship with us, then we may not look around at the world, but we must feel, experience what is in us and the world at the same time.

Then, when we have advanced to Imaginative life, we are able to feel our relationship with the world.

If we develop this feeling in the right way, we will make a profound admission. This admission to ourselves is progressive, true self-knowledge. We realize that one is only human when he is released from the world to which he is inwardly connected, from the earthly world where he stands alone, as it were, where the plants, animals and minerals exist outside of us, are foreign to us. But if, through Imaginative knowledge, one becomes aware of his relationship with the earth, then he will no longer feel himself in his humanity, he will feel himself in his animality; he feels the inner relationship of man to the extended animal domain.

And when he feels himself as one with the water element on earth he becomes aware enough to say: In reality you are related to the vegetable kingdom. There is something in you that is as sleepy and as dreamy as the plants.

And if one becomes aware of his relationship with the air, he feels the mineral element within him. He feels something filling him through the whole skin.

As soon as we enter the elemental world with Imagination, we feel related to the animals, plants, stones. And we feel differently toward the kingdoms of nature when we feel that we belong to them as well. We feel the inner relationship to these kingdoms in the following way.

We look out at the animal kingdom. We observe the indolent animals which slowly take one step after the other. We observe the rapid ones, and the flying birds. We observe the inherent movement in the animals which fill the world with movement from out of their own being. And then we say to ourselves: All that which comes from the innermost being of the animals is revealed to be the same as our own will. And we feel the relationship of our own will with the animal world.

But there is something else. One feels fear of one's self. This is what is considered positive - that whoever enters into esoteric life feels this fear of himself. Not so that he gets stuck in it, but so that he may transform it into a higher psychic force.

It is like this: when we become aware that our human form exists because we stand alone and the kingdoms of nature are beyond us, where we can look at them, then we feel that the earth, in its true elemental nature, does not make us human, it makes us animal. We are animals. As far as the earth is concerned, we are animals. And because the earth-element is always present, the danger exists that we sink into animal nature. And when we don't merely understand this theoretically, as is mostly the case nowadays, but also feel it, we become fearful that at any moment we may fall into animality. But it is just this fear which encourages us to always wish to raise ourselves over this animality, to step out of the elemental life into the life which surrounds us with an external, perhaps strange world, but which also introduces us to true humanity. To feelingly recognize our relation to the world is what leads us to true esoteric knowledge.

And when we feel our relationship with the world's water, with the water elements, then we realize: as far as water is concerned, we should not be human, but vegetables. And our feelings, which have a dream-like nature, as I have often explained, our feelings have a continuous tendency to be vegetable-like. Just try to think seriously about your innermost feelings and you will feel the vegetative nature of the life of feeling. And then you will have the feeling that you are not only in danger of descending to animality, but also of living on with a lamed consciousness, like a vegetable - sleeping, dreaming. But this feeling of lameness, which lies deep in the [sub]conscious, must be transformed into the feeling of awakening to humanity. Fear of animality must be transformed into the courage to raise yourself to humanity. The feeling of vegetable lameness must be transformed into an awakening call to inner strength, to develop into a fully awake person in the world.

And when we become aware of how we live in the air-element, then we can see how in reality all thinking - this is unknown to people - is nothing other than a refined breathing. Thinking is refined breathing. The thoughts in which we live are absolutely a refined breathing process. On one side, the breathing-in stream, holding the breath, and breathing out act, in a more coarse way, into our blood circulation; on the other side, but more refined, into the vibration of the brain organs. And the breath circulating there is known as thinking in the physical world; sublimated breathing is thinking.

The individual who has advanced to Imagination no longer believes in this abstract thinking existing as a kind of tenuous substance in the brain. He feels the inhalation, the expanding of the breath in the brain; he feels how the breath spreads out. When the breath expands in this way, then ceases, the closed concepts arise, closed ideas. If it encloses something else, in waves, the ideas of self-movement arise. It is merely a refined breathing process which weaves and waves within us which we designate as thinking.

When one feels: I inhale, I draw the breath up to the brain, I let it strike my ear, and one feels: what I hear as tone, as sound, as clang, lives in me as thought. I let the breath strike my eye: it lives in me as what I see as color. It is the inner language of breathing which acts as representations in thinking. When breathing, completely refined, strikes the sense organs it creates my mental pictures [representations]. But when one becomes aware of this, becoming a thinker and a breather, so to speak, then one feels that this refined-to-thinking breathing process is like an organized mineral, like an organized stone, which fills him.

You know that oxygen is transformed into carbon dioxide in man. This reception of carbon dioxide in the finer branches of breathing in the human head is tantamount to the capture of the carbon dioxide. It is a mineralization process. And the more we are able to internalize this capture of carbon dioxide by oxygen, the more we are conscious of the mineralization process. We take the carbon into ourselves. And carbon is the Philosopher's Stone; thus, within man carbon is the Philosopher's Stone.

Read how the old instinctive clairvoyants described the Philosopher's Stone. You will find them saying: The Philosopher's Stone can be found everywhere, only people don't recognize it. It can be produced everywhere. It can found at its own place - in the earth. They describe in detail how carbon is produced, by burning wood. The Philosopher's Stone can be produced anywhere, it is carbon. It is in the coal mines ... [gaps here in the shorthand, possibly the result of rapid speaking ...] a mineralization process. One feelsmineralized within ... by the combustion process [?] ... just as we feel ourselves to be plant-like by the watery processes and identify with the animals by living on earth. [This passage is unclear.]

This is the exhortation the Guardian gives to man: He must be aware of his relationship to the kingdoms of nature. Therefore, we have these exhortations in the form of spoken meditations. And if man lets them work with deep feeling on his sensibility he will be aware of his relationship with the earth-element, which is related to his will; with the water-element which is related to his feeling; with the air-element which, in the way I have described it, is related to his thinking.

[Written on the blackboard:]

You climb down to the earth element
With forces of your will unfolding

This is an unconscious process. Every time we will something, we climb down into the earth-element. But normal consciousness knows nothing of this. At the moment when the downward climb becomes conscious, man transforms himself from a human to an animal nature, he seems like some kind of animal - at least in the etheric form which he then observes. I don't mean that he will exactly become an elephant or a bull, but something like that for the element of will, yes, he gives the impression of being bull-like, elephant-like, eagle-like, and so on.

[Written on the blackboard:]

As thinker you bestride the earthly realm,
Your animality will be shown
To you by your own force of thought

But such exhortations by the Guardian of the Threshold, my dear friends, are not to be taken as concepts or theories. They are meant to be experienced by the whole human being. If we look at where the will is heading, we become aware of our animality and we fear our own self which, however, must be transformed into psychic courage. Then one advances further. Then one can enter the spiritual world.

[The writing continues:]

The fear you feel of self
Transform in courage of soul you must.

Here we have the first descent, climbing downward to the kingdom where the Ahrimanic forces work so strongly. Our correct comportment is indicated by the exhortation just given by the Guardian of the Threshold:

You climb down to the earth-element
With forces of your will unfolding;
As thinker you bestride the earthly realm,
Your animality will be shown
To you by your own forceful thought;
The fear you feel of self
Transform in courage of soul you must.

As a rule, what helps us most toward spiritual advancement is the overcoming of something that drags us down. When we overcome something which drags us down, like this fear of our own animality, and transform it by our own inner act into psychic courage, then it becomes an impulse toward a higher humanity. It's something we need to advance spiritually.

We learn about the next descent, into the water-element, through the words of the following exhortation by the Guardian of the Threshold:

You live with the water-element
Through feeling's dream alone;
Pervading wakening water-being
Results in the soul becoming
Essentially plant-like dull
Your selfhood's lameness must
Lead you to self-awakening.

The transformation to the opposite of this sleep-filled dreaminess, if we really descend consciously, becomes a wakening in ourselves.

[The second verse is written:]

You live with the water-element
Through feeling's dream alone;
Pervading wakening water-being
Results in the soul becoming
Essentially plant-like dull
Your selfhood's lameness must
Lead you to self-awakening.

And when the human being feels his relationship with the air-element, then even with normal consciousness he feels the relationship more strongly. He descends less deeply into the subconscious. Nevertheless, a trace of Ahrimanic temptation remains in this descent. When we live in our remembrances, in our memories, we are mostly in an inner breathing activity. If we refine normal breathing to thinking of what is in our environment, then very little danger is present. If memories arise, however, with breathing coming from within, danger is still present, although it isthe easiest to observe. And it is in this descent from thinking to perception where we mostly are concerned with our memory's mental pictures. It is about this that the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes:

[Written on the blackboard:]

You perceive in the waves of air
Only memory's mental pictures;
Take in willingly the essence of air

We can do this, my dear friends, using the same inner force we use when combining one thought with another in the performance of normal activities. We are used to moving a chair from one place to another, when we make the effort. But we are not used to moving a thought from one place to another. We prefer to think according to the guidebook as events present themselves. We would like the book to show us the sequence of thoughts; that the newspaper indicate the sequence of thoughts to us, and we are satisfied when they do. It is as if we expected that everything we do through the exertion of our will be set in motion by an objective power from without: as if your arm is to be raised so you can grasp a chair - as if a spirit stood there and placed your legs one after the other so you can walk. As far as thinking is concerned, it is as though we expected our legs to be moved for us so we can walk.

[Writing continues:]

Your own soul will threaten you

As coldly hardened stone

(this mineralizing process)

Whoever does not know “Imagination” does not realize how hard ordinary thinking is. Ordinary thinking is stone hard. One really feels thinking with angles and edges when one finally gains admittance to the spiritual world. Such thinking actually hurts when it appears in its particular abstract forms. Whoever knows spiritual life is able to feel empathy for what is thought as a result of human feelings and impulses. He can feel it himself when fits of hate and anger are expressed in thoughts; but he feels inwardly wounded as if by sharp angles and edges when the abstract thoughts of contemporary civilization enter his being. He will not be aware of the suffering which is caused by today's thinking if he does not know this sentence: “Your own soul will threaten you as coldly hardened stone.” But when one consciously descends to the kingdom of memories, the kingdom of airy breezes, where breath is grasped by thinking, then what I described happens. But this inner death of thinking, this death by freezing, must inspire us to the contrary - to create spiritual vitality in thought from inner strength.

[Writing continues:]

But your selfhood's death by cold
Must give way to spirit-fire.

Those are the three exhortations concerning the nether world, the world of the lower elements, which the Guardian of the Threshold directs to those who come to the threshold by showing them how man must be aware of his kinship with the three kingdoms of nature if he wishes to be knowledgeable. How he must be aware of his animality and the animals in his environment by virtue of his kinship with the earth-element. How he must be aware of his own plant nature and therewith the plant life of his environment by virtue of his kinship with the water-element. How he must be aware of his own mineral kingdom, his own mineral nature, his own stone nature, by virtue of his kinship with the air-element, and therewith the nature of the mineral kingdom of his environment.

Fear, lameness and death must develop as negative characteristics, but must metamorphose into the positive characteristics of courage, wakefulness and vitalizing fire.

That is also what the Guardian of the Threshold calls out to the person striding by: first the inner feeling of fear of falling into animality; then the inner feeling of helplessness in plant-like lameness; then the desire to oppose the coldness of stone by engendering vitalizing fire in the soul.

Thus, the Guardian of the Threshold's threefold exhortation is:

You climb down to the earth-element
With forces of your will unfolding;
As thinker you bestride the earthly realm,
Your animality will be shown
To you by your own forceful thought
The fear you feel of self
Transform in courage of soul you must.

You live with the water-element
Through feeling's weaving dream alone;
Pervading wakening water-being,
Results in the soul becoming
Essentially plant-like dull
Your selfhood's lameness must
Lead you to self-awakening.

You perceive in the waves of air
Only memory's mental pictures;
Take in willingly the essence of air,
Your own soul will threaten you
As coldly hardened stone
But your selfhood's death by cold
Must give way to spirit-fire.

Here [in the lower part of the above list marked with blue crosses] we enter Ahriman's kingdom and are warned by the Guardian of the Threshold as to how we can save ourselves from Ahriman's temptations; and here [the upper part of the list] where we are in earthly life and wish to enter in the esoteric, in Light, World Formation and World Life. We absorb the light. Normally we do not know that the light unites with breathing when it penetrates the eye - warmth is between them - the breathing of air combines with the light [middle part of the list]: the representation [mental picture] of the perception arises. We live in light in that we form thoughts, just as toward the lower kingdoms we live in the air, in breathing. We hold thoughts back from the light. We don't realize that thoughts can only live in us if they are illumined by the light, if breathing is illumined by the light.

For those who have advanced to Imagination, thinking is a hushed breath illumined by ingested light, made vibrant by it.

Here are the gentle waves of breath. [Waving lines are drawn on the blackboard.] They are illumined by light. [Yellow marks.] For in spiritual science everything which works through the senses is designated as light. Not only what works through the eyes, also what works through sound, is light, also what is sensed as touch, is light. All perception through the senses is light. But when we become aware that thinking, this having thoughts, is refined breathing waving, weaving upon the light - it is as when one sees the surface of the sea upon whose waves the sun's light shines. Also, as though one were inside and could feel the surging of the waves and the light shining on them. It is all perception when one experiences it from within.

Now Lucifer's temptation appears, for this is all wonderfully beautiful, something which causes enormous delight and complacency. A terrible wantonness overcomes man. He becomes easy prey for Lucifer's temptations and enticements to pull him away from the earth into the beauty of the cosmos, where Lucifer reigns. He wants to tear man away from the earth-element and raise him up to the kingdom of angels so that after each sleep he no longer wants to return down to the physical body. Here is where the Luciferic temptation appears, whereas in the realm of the denser elements the Ahrimanic temptation appears.

What is important here is that we heed the Guardian of the Threshold's warning and not enter this realm without having determined not to forget the earth's needs. Then the bond with the earth, upon which we have still to stride, will remain unbroken. Therefore, the Guardian of the Threshold says:

From Force of Shining Light
Your thoughts only you sustain within;
When Shining Light in you does think
Will then an untrue spirit-being
As selfhood mania arise in you.
Reflecting on the earth's needs
Sustains you as a human being.

[The first part of the mantra is written:]

From Force of Shining Light
Your thoughts only you sustain within;
When shining light in you does think

Thus, man is totally related to the shining light through Imagination, and his thoughts are no longer abstractions, but as light playing upon the waves of breath.

Will then an untrue spirit-being
As selfhood mania be born in you.
Reflecting on the earth's needs
Sustains you as a human being.

If we advance further to the etheric element, the Luciferic temptation becomes more intense. There not only our thoughts, which are relatively easy to control, come into consideration, but also the element of feeling. For it is in his feelings that man holds on to the substantial - the Cosmic Formation, which works and weaves in the chemical ether. If he now advances to Imagination, really integrates with this cosmic chemistry, it is quite different from the comfortable, bourgeois earthly chemical laboratory, where the chemist stands at a bench and everything is outside and beyond him. Man must be within matter, be himself within the mixing and the separating. Then he will become a cosmic chemist and be integrated in his chemical processes.

With this integration in Cosmic Formation he feels the Luciferic temptation in the form ofhelplessness. First man is transported in a certain sense to inner voluptuousness so he can be spirit [an angel]. He is unwilling to return if he does not bear in mind the earth's needs. Now he is made helpless, not strong enough in his humanity to re-enter it. He must beware of this helplessness of soul in that he only enters this [spiritual] world once he has achieved a love for all that is worthy on earth, for the earthly values.

The Guardian of the Threshold speaks:

Of Cosmic Forming you only sustain
Your feelings held fast within;
When Cosmic Forming itself in you is felt
Experience of spirit helplessness ensues,
And stifles in you the essence of selfhood.
But love of earthly values
Will rescue your human soul.

[The second verse is written:]

Of Cosmic Forming you only sustain
Your feelings held fast within;
When Cosmic Forming itself in you is felt
Experience of spirit helplessness ensues,

(which comes from Lucifer)

And stifles in you the essence of selfhood;
But love of earthly values
Will rescue your human soul.

Man can only reach his cosmic goal if he becomes an angel at the right time. During the Jupiter evolution today's humanity will rise to angel rank. Lucifer's temptation consists of wanting to raise man to a stunted immature angel too early, during the Earth period. In that way the human soul would be lost and a stunted angel soul would take its place. We should listen to the Guardian of the Threshold's exhortation:

But love of earthly values
Will rescue your human soul.

The most intense temptation comes when we ascend to the last element, to general Cosmic Life. What is still present there is will which, however, is present as in sleep, as I have often explained. If it is awakened through Imaginative knowledge, we become aware - unlike in our limited earthly life which is enclosed in our skin - we become aware of sharing in Cosmic Life: and in that instant we are dead. Because to consciously live in Cosmic Life means to experience death as an individual being. Universal life kills us if it holds us. Like the insect that flies into the flame greedy for the fire, for the light. In the instant that it flies into the flame it dies, thus does man as an individual die in General Cosmic Life if he consciously enters it with his spirit.

We shouldn't even dare to think of entering into this element without having first developed a god-given, spirit-given will for the earth, that is, without being fully conscious that on earth we are carrying out the intentions of the spiritual beings. If we completely fill ourselves with inner dedicated glowing love toward this god-given will, then we shall not succumb to the temptation of becoming a degenerate angel instead of remaining a human being. Thus, therefore is the Guardian of the Threshold's exhortation:

Of Cosmic Life you only sustain
Your will within held fast;
If Cosmic Life takes hold in full
Destructive greed for spirit then
Will kill awareness of self in you;
But spirit-given will for earth
Allows the God in man to reign.

[The third verse is written on the blackboard.]

Of Cosmic Life you only sustain
Your will within held fast;
If Cosmic Life takes hold in full
Destructive greed for spirit then
Will kill awareness of self in you;
But spirit-given will for earth
Allows the God in man to reign.

And here we have the Guardian of the Threshold's threefold exhortation referring to the upper, ether region in the above list.

From Force of Shining Light
Your thoughts only you sustain within;
When Shining Light in you does think
Will then an untrue spirit-being
As selfhood mania arise in you.
Reflecting on the earth's needs
Sustains you as a human being.

Of Cosmic Forming you only sustain
Your feelings held fast within;
When Cosmic Forming itself in you is felt
Experience of spirit helplessness ensues,
And stifles in you the essence of selfhood.
But love of earthly values
Will rescue your human soul.

Of Cosmic Life you only sustain
Your will held fast within;
If Cosmic Life takes hold in full
Destructive greed for spirit then
Will kill awareness of self in you;
But spirit-given will for earth
Allows the God in man to reign.

You are being introduced to the practice of knowledge in these lessons, my dear friends. You should not understand the things being given to you in this way as theoretical matters. Rather will you experience the heart of the matter if you understand the fundamental condition: that what you are being told here are the instructions from the Guardian of the Threshold himself, directly arising from what can be learned through contact with the Guardian of the Threshold. For it is not my intention to give theories during these Class Lessons, my dear friends. The intention is to let the spiritual word itself speak. Therefore, in the first lessons I mentioned how the School should be seen as having been founded by the spiritual world itself.

That has been the nature of all Mystery Schools, that in them men spoke as representatives of the spiritual powers of the world. It must also remain the nature of the Mystery Schools. Therefore, I have so strongly insisted on the earnestness required of all members of this class, without which no one can be a real member of this School of spiritual life. That is the earnest exhortation I wish to direct to you once again, my dear friends. Consider this School as being constituted directly through the will of the spiritual world, and which we are trying to correctly interpret according to the conditions of our times in which we have entered after the darkness was over and a light has come again, a light which, however, has only manifested itself on earth poorly because human beings have retained the old darkness. Yet the light is there. And only those who realize that the light is there will understand the nature and intentions of this spiritual school.

My dear venerated guests! The organisers of this university course have asked me to introduce the reflections of the day through some remarks and so I will introduce today's work in a certain aphoristic manner to open our discussion. I am aware that this is no easy task at present. Once in Stuttgart I gave a short course to a smaller circle regarding the items I want to talk about today and it became clear to me that one really needs a lot of time to discuss such controversial things as we would like to talk about today. So I'm only going to suggest a few things about the spirit of our reflection which is required by Anthroposophy in relation to observing human speech.

When speech is the subject and when one sets the goal to treat speech scientifically, then one must be clear that it is not as easy to have speech as an object for scientific treatment as it is for instance about human beings relating to nature or to the physical nature of the human being. In these cases, one has at least a clear outline for the observation of the object. Certainly one can discuss to what a degree observation lies at its foundation, or if it is merely a process being grasped through human research capabilities of an unknown origin. However, this is then a discussion which happens purely within the course of thought. What is presented as an object of observation is a closed object, a given.

This is not the case in spoken language. A large part of speech means that through a person speaking, something is unfolding which was already in the subconscious regions of the human soul life. Something strikes upward from these subconscious regions and what rises, connects to conscious elements which gradually, like harmonics, move with it in an unconscious or subconscious stream. That which is momentarily present in the consciousness, what is present as we speak, that is only partially the actual object essential for our observation. One can, if one remains within the current speech habits of people, acquire a certain possibility of bringing language as an object into consciousness, also when one is speaking. I would like to present in a modest way an example which could perhaps illustrate this.

During Christmas in Dornach I held a lecture cycle at the Goetheanum regarding pedagogical didactic themes. This lecture cycle came about as a request which resulted in a row of English teachers coming to the lectures which they had asked for. When it became known that this course was going to take place, people from other countries in western and middle Europe, namely Switzerland, also gathered to listen to the lectures. Because this course couldn't contain the 900 visitors in the large auditorium of the Goetheanum, but could only be held in a smaller hall, I was notified to give the lectures twice, one after the other. Already before this I believed that to a certain degree it would be necessary to separate the English speakers from those who belonged to other nationalities—not out of political grounds; I stressed this clearly. The lecture cycle was given throughout also for the English speakers; because when people want to hear something about Anthroposophy, wherever it is presented, I always speak German to them. I thought this was something through which its “Germanic” nature could be documented, whereby the German character and German language can be served.

In one of these lectures I had to discuss ethical and moral education. I tried in the course of the lectures to show how the child can be guided in these steps inwardly in its earthly life, which could bring about a certain ethical and moral attitude in the child.

If I would today again speak in front of individuals who listen in the same way as some had listened yesterday, then one could again construe that I spoke out of direct experience, as it happened yesterday, when I spoke about the Trinity. However, Dr Rittelmeyer responded so clearly with a comparison between the book and the mind, which understandably I didn't wish to do.

In this lecture I want to indicate the ethical, moral education towards which the child needs to be orientated so that it is done in the right way: feelings of gratitude, interest in the world, love for the world and his or her own activity and action; and I would like to show how, through love imbuing their activity and actions they are steered to something which can be called human duty. It would be necessary for this trinity to be taken directly out of life's experience and express them in three words—we're talking about language here. I arrived at the first two steps, Gratitude and Love, then the third step: Duty. Despite having to give the lecture twice, once from 10 to 11 o'clock for the English audience, and a second time from 11 to 12 for other nationalities, the latter with their frame of mind being that of central Europeans, I actually had to do these lectures which should simply have been parallel, in quite a different way for the English than for the Germans because I needed to make an effort to live into the mood of my audience. Something similar applied to the other days but on this day, it was particularly necessary.

Why was this so? Yes, while I spoke about duty during the hour from 11 to 12, my entire audience experienced it through words of the German language; I had spoken in the first hour from 10 to 11 what I had to say about their experience of the “Pflicht”-impulse, which they call “duty.” Now it is quite a different experience when one expresses the word “Pflicht” to the word “duty” and in the 11 to 12 o'clock lecture I had to allow nuances of experience to flow into what happens when one says “Pflicht.” When one says “Pflicht” one touches an impulse through these words which comes out of the emotional life, which flows directly into experience as something—which I want to say verbatim—is related to “pflegen” (to care for). Out of this activity flows the feeling, as to what belongs to this activity. This is the impulse which one designates to the word “Pflicht.” Something quite different lives in the soul when this impulse is designated by the word “duty,” because just as much as the word “Pflicht” points to the feelings, so the word “duty” points to the intellect, to the mind, to what is directed from within, like how thoughts are being conducted when one goes over into activity. One could say “Pflicht” is fulfilled through inner love and devotion, duty is fulfilled from the basis of a human being, when sensing his human dignity, must say to himself: you must obey a law which penetrates you, you must devote yourself to the law which you have grasped intellectually. This is roughly characterised. However, with this I want to bring into expression how inner complexes of experience are quite different between one word and another, and yet despite this the dictionary says the German word “Pflicht” translates to the English word of “duty”. This is however transmitted by the spirit of the folk, in the folk soul and in the speech, you have nuances of the entire folk soul. You are going to see that in the soul of central Europeans, in relation to this, it looks quite different compared with souls of other nationalities; that the soul life is experienced quite differently in speech by central Europeans compared with the English nation.

A person who has no sense for the unconscious depths of soul where speech comes from, which lies deeper than what is experienced consciously, will actually be unable to obtain a sober objectivity for scientific observation of speech. One should be clear about one thing. With nature observation the objects present themselves, or one can clean them up through outer handling in order to have the object outside oneself and thus able to research it. To consider speech it is necessary to first examine the process of consciousness in order to come to what the object essentially is which one wants to examine. So one can, where speech is the subject, not merely consider what lives in human consciousness, but in considering speech one needs to have the entire living person before you who expresses himself in speaking and speech.

This preparation for the scientific speech observation is very rarely done. If such preparation would be undertaken then one would, if one takes linguistic history or comparative linguistics, move towards having a deep need to first contemplate the inner unconscious content of that language, the unconscious substance which in speaking only partly comes to expression.

Now we arrive at something else, namely, during the various stages of human development this degree of consciousness associated with language was quite varied. It was quite different for example during the times in which Sanskrit had its origins; different again during the time the Greek language developed, another time than we had here in Germany—but here nuances became gradually less recognisable—and in another time, it happened for instance in England. There are already great variations in the inner experience of the conduct in the English language when used by an Englishman or American, if I observe only the larger differences. Whoever takes up the study of dialects will enter into how the different dialects in the language is experienced by the people who use it, and take note of all the complicated soul impulses streaming through it which comes into expression as speech in the vocal organism. It is for instance not pointless that when the Greek speakers say “speech” (Sprache) or when they say “reason” (Vernunft), they consider both these words as essentially the same and can condense them into one word, because the experience within the words and the experience within thoughts, within mental images, flow together, undifferentiated, in the Greek application of speech, while in our current epoch differentiations show themselves in this regard. The Greek always felt words themselves rolled around in his mind when he spoke; for him thoughts were the “soul” and words streaming in formed the “body”, the outer garments one could call it, the word-soul streaming in thought. Today we feel, when we clearly bring this process into consciousness, as if on the one side we would say a word—the word streams towards what we express—and on the other side the thoughts swim in the stream of words; it is however soon clearly differentiated from the stream of words.

If we return for instance to Sanskrit then it is necessary to undergo essential psychological processes first, to experience psychic processes, in order to reach the possibility to live inwardly with what at the time of Sanskrit's origin was living in the words. We may not at any stage confront Sanskrit with the same feelings when regarding its expression, when regarding its language, as we would do with a language today.

Let's take for example a familiar word: “manas”. If you now open the dictionary you would find a multitude of words for “manas”: spirit, mind, mindset, sometimes also anger, zeal and so on. Basically, with such a translation one arrives at an experience of a word which once upon a time existed when it was quite clearly and inwardly experienced, not nearly. Within the epoch when Sanskrit lived at the height of its vitality, with a different soul constitution as it has today, it was essentially something different. We must clearly understand that human evolution already existed as a deep transformation of the human soul constitution. I have repetitively characterized this transformation as having taken place somewhere in the 15th Century. There are however ever and again such boundaries of the epochs when going through human evolution, and only when one can follow history as the inner soul life of the people can one discover what really existed and how the life of speech played its part.

It was during such a time when the word “manas” could still be grasped inwardly in a vital way, when something existed which I would like to call the experience of the meaning of sound. In an unbelievable intense way one experienced what lived inwardly in the sounds, which we designate today as m, as a, as n and as s. The life of soul rose to a higher level—still dreamily, yet in a conscious dream—with its inward living within the organism when the vocals and consonants were pronounced. Whoever uses such scientific tools for researching how speech lives within people, will find that everything resembling consonants depends upon people placing themselves into external processes, into things, and that the inner life of things with their own inner, but restrained gestures, want to copy it. Consonants are restrained gestures, gestures not becoming visible but which through their content certainly capture that which can outwardly be experienced in the role of thunder, lightning flashes, in the rolling wind and so on. An inner inclusion of oneself in outer things is available when consonants are experienced.

We actually want to, if I might express myself like this, imitate through gestures all that lives and weaves outside of us; but we restrain our gestures and they transform themselves within us and this transformation appears as consonants.

By contrast, by opposing external nature, mankind has living within itself a number of sympathies and antipathies. These sympathies and antipathies within their most inner existence form gestures out of the collective vowel system, so that the human being, through experiencing speech, lives in such a way that he, within the nature of the consonants, imitate the outer world—but in a transformed way—so that in contrast, through the vowels, he forms his own inner relationship to the outer world.

This is something which can certainly be understood and examined through today's soul life if one enters into the concrete facts of the speech experience. It deals with what is illustrated as imagination, not as some or other fantasy, but that for example the inner process of the speech experience can really be looked at.

Now in ancient times, in which Sanskrit had its original source, there was still something like a dreamlike imagination living within the human soul. Not a clearly delineated mental picture like we have today was part of man, but a life in pictures, in imaginations—certainly not the kind of imaginations we talk about in Anthroposophy today, which are fully conscious with our sharply outlined concepts, but dreamlike instinctive imaginations. Still, these dreamlike imaginations worked as a power. If we go back up to the time we are talking about, one can say these imaginations lived as a vital power in people: they sensed it, like they sensed hunger and thirst, only in a gentler manner. One painted in an internal manner, which is not painting as in today's sense, but in such a way as to experience the inward application of vocalisation, like we apply colour to a surface. Then one lives into the consonants through the vocalization, just as when, by placing one colour beside another, one brings about boundaries and contours. It is an inner re-experience of imaginations, which presents an objective re-living of outer nature. It is the re-living of dreamlike imaginations. One surrenders oneself to these imaginations and inverts the inner processed imaginations through the speech organs into words.

Only in this way does one imagine the inner process of the life of speech in the way it was once experienced in human evolution. If one becomes serious about such an observation, for example through the experience of tones, which we call ‘m’ today, we notice that with the experience of this sound, we stand at once on the boundary between what is consonant and what is vowel. Just like we paint a picture and then the colours, which have their inner boundaries and outer limitations and do not continue over the surface, just so something is expressed in the word “manas”. With ‘a’ something resembling human inwardness is sensed. If one wishes to describe the word “manas” I have to say: In olden times people lived in their dream-like imaginations in the language, just as we experience speech consciously now. We no longer live in relation to speech in dream pictures, but our consciousness lies over speech. Old dreamlike imaginations flowed continuously in the language. So when they said the word “manas” they felt as if in some kind of shell, they felt their physical human body in as far as it is liquid aqueous, like a kind of shell, and the rest of the body as if carried in a kind of air body. All of this was experienced in a dreamlike manner in olden times when the word “manas” was spoken out. People didn't feel like we do today in our soul life, because people felt themselves to be the bearers of the soul life—and the soul itself one experienced as having been born out of the supersensible and super-human forces of the shell.

You must first make this experience lively if you want to understand the content of older words. We must realise that when we experience our “I” today it is quite different from what it was when the word “ego” was for instance come across in humanity in earlier times, when the word “aham” was experienced in the Sanskrit language. We sense our “I” today as something which is completely drawn to a single point, a central point to which our inner being and all our soul forces relate.

This experience does not underlie the older revelations of the I-concept. In these olden times a person felt his own I as something which had to be carried; one didn't feel as if you were within it. One then experienced the I to some extent as a surging of soul life swimming independently. What one felt was not indicated by the linguistic context—what lay in the Sanskrit word “aham” shows it is something around the I, which carries the I . While we feel the I inwardly as will impulses—we really experience it this way today—which permeates our inner being, we say that as its central point it is a spring of warmth, which streams with warmth—to make a comparison—streaming out on all sides, this is how the Greek or even the Latin experienced the I like a sphere of water, with air permeating this sphere completely. It is something quite different to feel yourself living in a sphere of water within extended air, or to experience the inward streaming towards a central point of warmth and to stream out warmth to the periphery of the sphere and then—if I might use this comparison more precisely—to be grasped as a sphere of light.

These are all symbols. Yet the words of a language are in this sense also symbols, and if you deny the ability of words to indicate symbols, you would be totally unable to be impressed by such a consideration. It is necessary in the research of linguistics that one first lives into what actually has to become the object of linguistics. Now, one finds that in ancient times, the language had a considerably different character than what exists in civilisation's current language; further, one finds that the physical, the bodily, played a far greater part in the establishment of phonetics, in the establishment of word configuration. The human being gave much more of his inner life in speech. That is why you have ‘m’ at the start of “manas” because this enclosed the human being, formed a contour around him or her.

When you have Sanskrit terms in front of yourself, you soon notice you can experience the nature of the consonants and vowels within it. You notice how in this activity an inner experience in the external events and external things are present and how this results in the consonants being imitated, so vocal sympathies and antipathies are discovered where the word process and the speech process merge. In ancient times a much more bodily nuance came about. One had a far greater experience in the ancient life of speech. This one can still experience. If today you hear someone speaking in Sanskrit or the language of an oriental civilisation, how it sounds out of their bodily nature, and how speech absorbs the musical characteristics, it is because such an experience rises out of the musical element. Only in a later phase of human evolution the musical elements in speech split away from the logical, thus also away from the soul life, into mere conceptions.

This is still noticeable today. When for instance you compare the inner experience in the German and in the English language, you notice that in the English language the process of abstract-imagery-life have made greater progress. If we want to live in the German language today we must live into those forms of the speech which came about in New High German.¹ The dialects still lets our soul become immersed in a far more intensive and vital experience. The actual spiritual experience of the language is primarily only possible in High German. Thus, a figure such as Hegel who was born out of this spirit, for whom the mental images are particular to him and yet it is also quite connected to a particular element within the language, out of these causes it has come about that Hegel is in reality not translatable into a western language, because here one experiences the literal fluency (Sprachliche) even more directly.

When you go towards the west you notice throughout within the observation how the soul unfolds when it is given over to the use of language: the soul experiences it intensively, however the literal fluency (Sprachliche) is thrown out of the direct soul experience throughout; it flows away in the stream of speech and continuously, to some degree, out of the flowing water something is created like ice floes, like when something more solid is rolling over the waves—as for instance in English. When, by contrast, we speak High German, we can observe how a person in the stream of speech is in any case within the fluidity of it but in which there are not yet any ice blocks which have already fallen out of the literal fluency, which are connected with the soul-spiritual of the human being.

Now when we come towards the east, one finds this process in a stage which is even further back. Now you don't see ice floes which are thrown out of the stream of speech, and which are not firmly connected with it; here also, as not in High German, the entire adequacy of thoughts are experienced with the word but the word is experienced in such a way that a person retains it in his organism, while thoughts in their turn flow into the words, which one runs after but which actually goes before you.

These are the things which one has to live through when one wants to really understand literal fluency. One can't experience this if one doesn't at least to a certain degree take on the contemplation which Goethe developed for the observation of the living plant world and which, when in one's inner life, these are followed with inner consequential exercises, leading towards mental pictures about what is meant in Anthroposophy. Anyway, if you want to look at the language, you must observe it in such a way that you live within the inner metamorphosis of the organising of the language, experience in its inner concreteness, because only then will you have in front of you, what the speech process is. As long as you are unable to rise up to such inner observations of speech, you are only looking at speech in an outer way, and you will be unable to penetrate the actual living object of language. As a result, all kinds of theories of speech have appeared. Ideas about language have in many cases become thought-related regarding the origins of language; a number of theories have resulted from this. Wilhelm Wundt enumerated them in his theory of language and picked them apart critically.

This is the way things are today in many areas and how it was observed yesterday. When the bearers of some scientific angle today raises into full contemplation regarding what he has observed within the science and he represents it thus, then talk starts to develop about “decline”. This is actually not really what Anthroposophy wants to tell you. Basically, for example, yesterday very little was said about decline; but very much not so in the case of those who stand within theology, for they are experiencing a decline.

Similarly, there is also talk regarding the philosophy of language, of declining theories, for instance with the “theory of creative synthesis/invention” (Erfindungstheorie). Wundt lists his different theories. Following on the theory of invention the language developed in such a way that humanity, to some extent, fixed the designations of things; however, this is no longer appropriate for current humanity because today the question they ask is how could the dumb have fixed forms of language while still so primitive?

As his second, Wundt presents his “theory of wonder” (Wundertheorie) which assumes that at a certain stage of evolution human speech/language arrived as a gift from the Creator. Dr Geyer already dealt with this yesterday; currently it is no longer valid for a decent scientist to believe in wonder; it is prohibited, and so the theory of wonder is no longer acceptable. Further down his list is the “theory of imitation” (Nachahmungstheorie) which already contains elements which have a partial authorisation because it is based on elements of consonants in speech being far more on an inner process than what is usually imagined. Then the “natural sound theory” (Naturlauttheorie) followed which claimed that out of inner experience the human being aspired towards phonetically relating what he perceived out in nature, into the form of speech, according to his sympathies or antipathies. These theories could be defined differently. Today it is quite possible to show that on the basis of those who criticise these theories, it becomes apparent that these theories can't determine the actual object of language.

Dear friends, the thing is actually like this: Anthroposophy—even when people say they don't need to wait for her—can still show in a certain relationship, what can be useful in this case, through which—even in such areas as linguistics—firstly the sober, pure object is to be found, on which the observation can be based.

Obviously anything possible can be discussed, also regarding language, even when one actually doesn't approach it as a really pure object. Anthroposophy bears within it a profound scientific character which assumes that first of all one must be clear what kind of reality there is to be found in specific areas, in order for the relationships we have regarding truth and wisdom to penetrate these areas, so that these areas of reality can actually become inward experiences. As we saw happening here yesterday, then in relation to such earnest work which is not more easily phrased in other sciences, it is said that these Anthroposophists stick their noses into everything possible, then it must be answered: Certainly it is apparent that Anthroposophy in the course of its evolution must stick its nose into everything. When this remark doesn't remain in superficiality, this ‘Anthroposophy sticks her nose into everything possible’—but if one wants to make progress to really behold and earnestly study the results, when it comes down to Anthroposophy sticking its nose into everything, only then, when this second stage in the relationships to Anthroposophy is accomplished, will it show how fruitful Anthroposophy is and in how far its legitimacy goes against the condemnation that it merely originates from superficial observation!

• 1. Hochdeutch or High German is the pure German language without the influence of dialects, which is also understood by most Germans. New High German differs from Old High German as the latter refers to more historic times. Schriftliche Deutch is the German most widely used in school instruction, standardization, etc.—translator

From a poet who died some years ago. On one occasion, in the second half of the '80s of last century, he said to me that he was very anxious about the future of humanity. I admit that his expression of anxiety was somewhat of a paradox, but he was very much in earnest in his anxiety as to the tendency he wished to point out by his paradox; indeed, this anxiety inclined him to a certain pessimism. It seemed to him that the development of humanity in the future would be such that man would principally develop his head more and more, and that, compared with his head, all the other parts of a man would be stunted. He was very much in earnest over this idea, and he expressed this in paradox by saying that he was afraid the reasoning intellectual nature of man would get the upper hand to such an extent that the head would become like a great globe, and that men would then roll on earth as balls. The anxiety was very real to the man, for he reflected that we are living in the age of intellectualism, of the development of the intellectual powers which are expressed in the head, and that these reasoning powers would increase more and more, and that mankind was moving towards an unenviable future. Now that, of course, is a very paradoxical statement, and we might say also, in a certain sense, that even the anxiety which gave rise to his pessimism is also paradoxical. But the human intellect has a tendency to deteriorate, to draw conclusions when some or other observation has been made, and this is a case in point. This may be amply noticed in the realm of the theosophical movement as well as in the external, exoteric life. In external, exoteric life we do not have to look very far before we notice that the observations made by man at various times have always given rise to a great number of theories. How many hypotheses have been abandoned as worthless in the course of the evolution of humanity! In the theosophical-occult field it can also be observed that someone who has undergone occult training, and has thus acquired some clairvoyant power, may recount something from true clairvoyant observation, and then come the theorists who invent all sorts of schemes and theories, and so the matter develops. Very often the observation is quite an insignificant one, but the schemes and theories built upon it include whole worlds. That is always the danger; the intellect has this tendency. We have this tendency in a fairly passable sense in the well-known book, ‘Esoteric Buddhism’ by Sinnett. This book is based upon a number of genuine occult facts; these are in the middle of the book, and relate to the middle of the development of the earth. But upon these facts he built up a scheme of Rounds and Races, and this only rolls and turns, as it were, upon itself, always more or less in the same way. They are inferences, theories, made from the few genuine data to be found in the book. And this was the case also with my poet. In the background he had a sort of unconscious, instinctive imagination which told him something true; we might say, there is half an ounce of truth, and from this he made a hundred-weight, or many hundred-weight. We often find cases such as this in the world. Now, what is the truth of the matter? The truth is this, that in our age man's head is undergoing a certain evolution, the formation of the head, the whole structure of the head will undergo change in the future. If we direct our attention to a very far-distant period in the earth's evolution, we have to imagine that, for example, the formation of the human forehead, nose, and jaws will have undergone essential changes, and that, in a certain sense, all the rest which the human being bears as his earthly organism will have retrograded; but, of course, never, during the earth period, will the relation of the developing head to the rest of the body be that of a rolling globe. This must only be taken literally to a very, very limited extent. On the other hand, in ancient epochs of development on the earth, before the middle of the Atlantean epoch, the rest of the human organism was capable of change; it was engaged in a sort of development. Apart from the head, the human organism has changed comparatively little—and again I say comparatively little—since the middle of the Atlantean epoch; on the other hand, prior to that time the remainder of the human organism underwent great changes. From this you will be able to draw the inference—which will now be correct, because it is nothing but an actual observation clothed in words—that the further we go back into the Atlantean and Lemurian epochs the more essentially different man looked, even to his own observation. In the ancient Lemurian epoch, man looked quite different from what he now recognises as himself at the present day.

The appearance man would have presented to himself in the latter portion of the Lemurian epoch is apparent to him again, in a certain way, when he gradually approaches the clairvoyant impression leading to what we have described as the Paradise-Imagination. I have, indeed, told you—and it is true—that this Paradise-Imagination corresponds to a complete delineation of the human being, the physical human body, so to say, as the Paradise itself. Man separated—as it were—he divided; the present corporeal nature appeared outspread in the manner described; but at that time, the actual time to which we look back clairvoyantly, and we have the Paradise Legend before us, a mighty leap forward was made. And through this movement—which may also be observed by means of clairvoyance—what might be called the outspread human being was drawn together relatively rapidly into that which then became the starting-point of man for the development which followed. Directly after the time corresponding to the Paradise-Imagination, the form of man was, however, quite unlike what has developed out of it to-day. And, fundamentally, all that surrounded man in the kingdoms of nature was also quite unlike his present surroundings.

I have already mentioned in the previous lectures of this course that the pupil might attain to this Paradise-Imagination if he were suddenly to become clairvoyant for a moment during sleep, and to look back, as it were, at his physical body and etheric body, stimulated to this Imagination by these. On the whole, it may be said that a great deal of esoteric development is necessary before attaining to this Paradise-Imagination. The student must have gained many victories in order to transform his own personal interests into those common to humanity and the world. There then comes, when from the very deepest sleep—for there are degrees of sleep—he passes to a less deep sleep, and in this less deep sleep becomes clairvoyant—there comes what later in earthly evolution became reality: The condition of man in the ancient Lemurian epoch after he had made the great leap forward.

Thus we say that it is possible to see this primeval period of the earth through separation in the self and astral body from the physical body and etheric body, looking back at them. Now, as the order of nature comes to our aid—for in the night we are outside our physical body—we can make use of this arrangement of nature, and so regulate the training that, as if awaking out of sleep, but not returning to the physical body—as if awaking in a different state of consciousness—we see the physical body. From this you will be able to gather that the vision we have just spoken of provides the only true possibility of learning to know how man was formed in the primeval past.

In the far-distant future will come a time when we shall be able to say: How extraordinary were those people of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries! They believed themselves able to discover the origin of man by means of the external investigation of nature; they thought they could draw conclusions regarding the ancestry of man from the observation of the animals surrounding them on the physical plane. However, through the true development of human knowledge, it becomes evident that we can only arrive at a true idea of the origin of man upon the earth, and of his ancient form, by means of clairvoyant observation, and that we can never obtain insight into what man was like in the Lemurian epoch, for example, except through clairvoyant observation, through the retrospective vision stimulated by the impressions of one's own physical body and etheric body. But then it will be seen—this will be admitted in that future time—that man was never like any of the animal forms about him in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; for the forms which man had in that time, and which manifest themselves to his clairvoyant consciousness in the way we have described, are different from all the animal forms around man in the nineteenth century. And even the expressions we have made use of—bull, lion, etc.—are only used comparatively. The men of the future will say how very grotesque it is to see the way people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries traced back their ancestry to ape-like beings; for in the Lemurian epoch there were no apes at all in the form in which they later appeared upon earth; they only originated at a much later period, from degraded and degenerated human forms. Animal beings which may be compared to our present apes can only be found by clairvoyant vision about the middle of the Atlantean epoch of the earth's evolution. The further we go back in the development of humanity, the more we see that to the clairvoyant view, in the vision of our self during sleep in the night, our shape, our form in ancient times is to some extent preserved. And so it comes about that, when a student thus looks at himself, he learns to recognise his physical corporeality in an infinitely more delicate etheric body, one might say, though not in the sense of our present ether. Thus does man appear. His form appears more as a vivid dream-picture than as the form of flesh and blood he now bears. We have to become acquainted with the idea that when the self and astral body are outside the human being they can scarcely see the head; it is quite shadowy; not completely blotted out, but quite shadowy. On the other hand, the rest of the organisation of man is distinct. That is shadowy, too, but its condition is such that the human being does not appear as made of flesh and blood, but one has the distinct impression that he possesses a more powerful organisation. It may appear paradoxical, yet it is true that when a man looks at himself clairvoyantly in sleep he has at certain moments such an appearance—that is, to the self and astral body, his physical body and etheric body present such an appearance—that he is reminded of the form of the Centaur! The upper part, which appears in the Centaur as the human part, bears the human face, but in a very shadowy form; the other part, which is not exactly like any of our present animal forms, but which is reminiscent of them in certain respects, is more powerful, and the seer says to himself: ‘To the spiritual view this is stronger, even denser, than our present form of flesh and blood.’ I have already touched upon these matters in a previous course of lectures; but you must understand that all these Imaginations, except the Paradise-Imagination, are fugitive, and can be presented from different aspects. I might also present a somewhat different aspect—and you would see that this only corresponds to a different period of development—and then we should arrive at the form of the Sphinx. The consecutive order of the evolution of man is presented in various aspects, in different views. The mythological pictures, the so-called mythological symbols, contain much more truth than the fantastic intellectual combinations made by present-day science.

Thus, at night the human figure becomes very peculiar. Something else now becomes clear. When we consider with clairvoyant eye this lower part which reminds us of an animal, we become acquainted with something which makes a very definite impression upon us; as I observed in the last lecture, these impressions, these inner experiences, are really the essential thing. The pictures are important, but the inner experiences are still more so. We reach an impression so that we know afterwards: That which really drives me during the day to my personal interests alone, that which inoculates my soul with merely personal interests, is the outcome of what I observe at night as my lower animal part. During the day I do not see it; but it is within me as forces, and these are the forces which draw me down to a certain extent, and lead me astray into personal interests.

Developing this impression more and more brings us to the recognition of the place Lucifer really fills in our evolution. The further we direct our clairvoyant vision back towards the time that corresponds to the Paradise-Imagination, the more beautiful becomes the structure, which is really only reminiscent in a later time of what belongs to the animal—kingdom. And if we go back altogether into what belongs to Paradise, where the animal continuation of man appears as though separated from man himself, and multiplied into—bull, lion, and eagle, we may then say that these forms—which we know in those ancient times by these names—may also in a certain sense be for us symbols of beauty. More and more beautiful become these forms, and, going still further back, to the time of which we spoke in the last lecture, when we represented the impression of the sacrifice, we arrive at the period when Lucifer's true form appears to us in sublime beauty, just as he wished to preserve himself unchanged in the evolution from the ancient Moon to the earth.

From the account I have given in ‘Occult Science,’ you know that on ancient Moon the astral body was given to man. What we bear within us in our astral body played a great part on the ancient Moon. We have described it as personal selfhood, as egotism. This egotism had to be implanted in man on the ancient Moon, and, as man received his astral body on the ancient Moon, egotism has its seat in the astral body; and, as Lucifer has preserved his Moon-nature, he has brought egotism to the earth as the inner soul-quality of his beauty. Therefore, on the one hand he is the Spirit of Beauty, and on the other the Spirit of Egotism. And what we may call his error is only this: that he has transplanted to the earth something which, as far as man is concerned, if I may use the expression, belonged to the ancient Moon; that is, the permeating and impregnating of himself with egotism. But thereby, as has often been said, was given to man the possibility of becoming a self-contained, free being, which he never would have become if Lucifer had not carried over egotism from the Moon to the Earth.

Thus inner experience teaches us to know Lucifer as the Night Spirit, as it were. And it is part of the change that goes on in our self and our astral body that at night we feel—ourselves in the company of Lucifer.

You may perhaps at first think—if you only think superficially—that it must be disagreeable to a person, when he goes to sleep and becomes clairvoyant, to become aware that—during the night he comes into Lucifer's company. But if you reflect more deeply, you will soon come to the conclusion that it is wiser for us to learn to recognise Lucifer; it is better to know that we are in his company than to think that he is not there, and yet have him invisibly active with his forces within us, as, indeed, is the case during the day. The evil does not consist in Lucifer's being by our side, for we gradually learn to recognise him as the Spirit who brings—us freedom; the evil consists in our not recognising him. But after men had caught sight of him, as it were, when he misled them in the Lemurian epoch, they were not permitted to see him any more; for then, in addition to that original misleading in the Lemurian epoch, there would have been innumerable other smaller misleadings. Therefore, the divine-Spiritual Being who was watching over the progress of mankind had to draw a veil over the vision of the night. Thereby man lost as well all else that he would have seen during sleep. Sleep covers from man with darkness the world in which he is from the time of his going to sleep until he awakens. At the withdrawal of the veil which covers the night with darkness, we should instantly perceive Lucifer by our side. If man were strong enough, this would do no harm; but as at first he could not be strong in the sense required by our earthly development, this veil had to be drawn during his sleep at night. After the first great misleading, which left in its train the possibility of human freedom, no other misleadings, through the direct vision of Lucifer from the time of his going to sleep until reawakening, were to come to man.

Now, there is an equivalent. We cannot see Lucifer at night if during the day we do not see his comrade, Ahriman. Thus to the student who has progressed as far as this in the development of his self and his astral body, the daily experience which allows him to have the vision of outer objects becomes different from what it is to the ordinary man. He learns to recognise that he sees things in a different light from before the development of his self and his astral body. He first learns to look upon certain impressions, which ordinarily he considered in an abstract manner, as the activities of the Ahrimanic beings. Thus that which comes from outside, which awakens desire in him from outside—not that which comes from within, for that is Luciferic—but that which attracts him in the objects and beings around him, so that he follows this attraction from personal interests; in short, all that entices him to enjoyment from outside he learns to recognise as bearing the impress of Ahriman. We also learn to recognise this in all that rouses fear within us from outside. They are the two poles—enjoyment and fear. Around us are the so-called material world and the so-called Spiritual world; both these in our ordinary waking life are enveloped in illusion. The external world of the senses appears as maya, or illusion, for people do not see that whenever they are stimulated to enjoyment by outer objects and beings Ahriman peeps out and calls forth the enjoyment in the soul. But the fact that there is a true Spiritual nature everywhere in matter—which the materialists deny—that produces fear, and when the materialists notice that fear is beginning to appear from the astral depths of their soul, they then stupefy themselves, and think out materialistic theories; for what the poet says is profoundly true, ‘People never notice the devil (that is Ahriman), even when he has them by the collar.’ To what end are materialistic meetings held? In order to swear allegiance to the devil. This is literally true, only they do not know it. Whenever materialists gather together to-day, to explain in beautiful theories that nothing exists but matter, Ahriman then has them by the collar; and there is no more favourable opportunity for studying the devil to-day than by going to a gathering of materialists or monists. Thus, when a man has undergone a certain development in his astral body and self, Ahriman accompanies him at every step. When we begin to see him, then we can protect ourselves from him; we can see Ahriman spying out in the allurements of enjoyment and in the impressions of fear.

Again, on account of the immaturity of man, it was necessary that Ahriman should be hidden; that is, a veil was drawn over his nature. This was done somewhat differently from in the case of Lucifer; the outer world was plunged into maya for man, giving him the illusion that outside in the world, instead of Ahriman peeping out, there was matter everywhere. Wherever man dreams there is matter, there is, in reality, Ahriman; and the greatest illusion is the materialistic theory of physics about the material atoms, for in reality these are nothing but the forces of Ahriman.

Now, humanity as a whole is developing, evolving, and this evolution advances so that towards our future man will actually develop the powers of pure intellect more and more. This will cause his head to assume a different shape externally. In a certain respect the beginning of this development towards intellectuality was made with the dawn of modern natural science, about the sixteenth century. When intensified, this intellectual development will exercise great influence upon the self and the astral body of man. A time set in when there still remained traditions of the old clairvoyance. These came in contact with one another exactly at the dawn of our modern natural science. It was precisely in the sixteenth century; it was then known that a future would come when, through the higher development of the self and astral body, man would be able really to see Ahriman more and more clearly. Then, because in the early period of intellectual development it struggled against the perception of the Spiritual with all its might, a darkening set in; but in the figure of Mephistopheles, who is none other than Ahriman, at the side of Faust, the sixteenth century was able to point out that, fundamentally, Ahriman will become more and more dangerous in a conscious manner to the future development of humanity; that Mephistopheles will become more and more a sort of tempter of the human race. At that time this could only be demonstrated because man still had a remembrance of the ancient Spiritual figures. But this has now been forgotten by the general body of humanity, though in the future the knowledge will be forced on man that through all his waking life he is accompanied by Ahriman-Mephistopheles. Naturally, this corresponds to the complementary picture that man is living towards a future when, each time he awakes, he will have—at first like a fleeting dream, but later more clearly—the impression: ‘Thy companion during the night was Lucifer.’ You see from this that through the theosophical-occult development of the self and astral body we may have the fore-knowledge of what will come to humanity in the future, we can dimly sense the companionship of Ahriman and Lucifer. Through a definite law of evolution, Lucifer first came to man during the Lemurian epoch, then later, as the consequences of the Luciferic influence, came the Ahrimanic. In the future this will be reversed: The Ahrimanic will first be strong, and subsequently the Luciferic influence will be added. In the ever-developing clairvoyant conditions of the human soul, the Ahrimanic influence will work principally in the waking condition, the Luciferic influence principally during sleep, or in all the conditions which are indeed similar to sleep, but in which there is consciousness.

Thus, as Ahriman entered our external sensible life in our waking condition, man first needed a protection against Ahriman during this waking condition. These protective impulses are given in the development of humanity many, many centuries before the danger appears. Although the general body of humanity has not yet developed the full consciousness of Ahriman-Mephistopheles, the protective impulse came at the beginning of our era in the physical appearance of Christ in the earth-development. Christ once appeared in the physical body in the earth-development to make provision that man might be armed, through receiving the Christ-impulse, against the necessary influence which will come from Ahriman-Mephistopheles. The power through which man will be armed later on when the Luciferic influence is there, is an influence which will affect a different consciousness; man will be armed against this by the appearance of Christ in the etheric body, regarding which we have often said that it is drawing near. Just as Christ appeared once in a physical body and thence his impulse has proceeded further, so from this twentieth century onward Christ will be seen in an etheric form, at first by a small number, and then by an ever-increasing number of human beings. Thus we see that the progressive development of man is brought about by a kind of equilibrium; a kind of balancing of the different impulses. What is related in the Gospels as the story of the Temptation, the confronting of Lucifer and Ahriman by Christ, portrayed in different ways in the different Gospels—I have spoken of this on a previous occasion—is a sign that through the Christ-Impulse, through the Mystery of Golgotha, man will be able to find the right way of development in the future. It forms part of a true development of the self and the astral body of man that in this transformed self and astral body he can receive the impressions of the positions occupied by Ahriman, Lucifer, and Christ in the development of humanity, and a correct development of the self and astral body leads to this knowledge of the three impulses which condition the evolution of mankind.

A correct development, however, includes the extension of the sense of self in the astral body to interests common to humanity and the world. And it acts like poison when a man carries his personal aspirations into those regions of his clairvoyant observation which he ought only to observe when filled with interests common to humanity and the world. He cannot then perceive the truth, but has imaginations which are incorrect, untrue, which are only the reflections of his own personal interests and aspirations. It may sometimes happen that a clairvoyant who is still filled with personal aspirations and interests experiences something like the following. I received a letter in which someone wrote that he had to communicate something that I ought to know. He said that Christ was reborn in a physical body, and his address is somewhere in London, W.; that Mary is reborn in a physical body; her address is that of his niece, in such-and-such a street. Paul is reborn, and was his brother-in-law, and his address was also given. And all those mentioned in the Gospels were reborn among the relatives, and in this letter all their various addresses were given. I could show this letter to anyone: it is a document—grotesque as it may appear—which shows the effect of carrying personal interests into those heights where there should only be the interests of the world and of humanity.

But now we must clearly understand that when someone makes a mistake in abstract intellectual knowledge in general, this kind of error can easily be controlled, it is something that can be done away with comparatively quickly, although, indeed, human knowledge has the frightful origin, which was referred to in the last lecture. As the knowledge of man, which is expressed in our waking daily life, receives such diluted impulses that everyone may develop perfect freedom with respect to them, hence no one need be dazzled by the foolish things thought out by human intellect, and those who allow themselves to be dazzled by these foolish imaginings can be cured in a comparatively short time. But suppose that in this clairvoyant observation a person arrives at incorrect imaginations in the manner we have described; these incorrect imaginings then act as a poison in the soul in a certain way; they poison it by obliterating the healthy human reason and intellectual grasp. Thus they injure one much more deeply than do merely intellectual follies. If, therefore, we try to permeate everything obtained in the fields of occultism with the forms of sound human intellect, we do well. If an Imagination is simply given out, without any attempt to justify it, as we have tried to justify such in this course of lectures (and incorrect imaginations would only be cited as mere imaginations), then this will impose upon the very faculty in others which should bestir itself to reject such imaginations. And it might very well be that, while one who spreads intellectual follies may easily provoke criticism, one who spreads false imaginations by this means takes away from those who believe in him the power to criticise; that is, he blinds them to the challenge that ought to be given to the imaginations in question.

From this we may gather, my dear friends, how very necessary it is that the moment the knowledge goes beyond what is intended for man in the natural course of evolution, the moment a man uplifts himself to clairvoyant knowledge, how unconditionally necessary it is that his development should move unswervingly towards interests common to humanity and the world. This will always be recognised in true occultism. And to assert the opposite, that there can be sound entry into the Spiritual world, that is, a sound development of the astral body and the self apart from the extension of the human interests to selfless world-interests and interests common to humanity; that is, to make the opposite affirmation to the one made here, could only spring from a disposition that permeates occultism with frivolity. We must bear in mind the serious importance of these things in speaking of the changes which take place in the astral body and the Self of man during his higher Spiritual development.

In recent weeks we have been considering the human being from all kinds of different points of view, with the aim of getting a better idea of complex human nature and the relationship of the human being to the world.

Let us begin by recalling something very simple, something we know about the elemental aspects: the fact that in the present world cycle, the human being has four effective aspects—physical body, ether body, astral body and I. Let us also consider how these four essentially manifest. We have to say that the I mainly comes to revelation in all expressions of the human will. When we sleep, the will is essentially at rest. In other words: the will principle does not then come to expression through the physical organization. The I is outside the physical body when we sleep. The fact that the will principle does not come to expression reveals to us that the I is then not present in the physical body.

The activity of the astral body essentially can be observed in the whole sphere of feelings. The astral body is also outside the human being in sleep, when the sphere of feelings moves to the dim, dark part of the conscious mind. Consciousness is altogether silent in sleep, and we may thus be in some doubt as to what really comes to revelation through the physical body and the ether body. Let us leave this aside for the moment. The physical body is the most obvious part of the human being. Even someone not able to have imaginative vision can perceive the reality of the ether body in a number of ways. For the moment, however, let us leave aside the physical and the etheric from the point of view we have just taken of the I as the will aspect and the astral as the feeling aspect.

If we follow a person’s life from morning to evening, in the waking state, the I and astral body are at work in the physical and ether bodies with regard to will and feelings. Taking all the inner experiences arising in the waking state, we have first of all the world of sensory perceptions, which are bound to the physical body. We also have the world of thoughts and ideas as the consequence of sensory perception. We know very well that our world of ideas in the waking state has elements of will and feeling in it.

We have often stressed that in the sphere of the soul it is easy to make the abstract distinction between ideas, feelings and will elements. But in reality these three inner activities blend into each other. We can sense the will element in the linking or separating of ideas. We can also perceive that the idea is imbued with feeling. We can feel ourselves in sympathy with one idea and perhaps in antipathy with another. Let us now turn to the I and the astral body as they leave the living body on going to sleep. They leave something behind in the physical world which, while it does not appear at first sight to be the same as plant life, essentially is nevertheless like it, for it has a physical and an ether body just like a plant. In our astral principle we have something which comes to outward revelation in the animal world, and in our I we have something which emerges in the specifically human form, thus also coming to outward revelation. Since, however, I and astral body are outside the physical and ether bodies from when we go to sleep until we wake up again, we cannot say that this human form or animal nature is part of the inner nature of I and astral body. We have to realize that I and astral body do not come to revelation in that case; when I and astral body are on their own, during sleep, they cannot reveal themselves to the physical world in a way perceptible to the senses or to the rational mind.

I and astral body are therefore entirely beyond sensory perception. Now we also know that when we look at something in the plant world, we are not at all inclined to see it the way we see a human being. Looking at a human being we are interested in the moral element, for instance, whether the individual is good or bad. This means that there is no point in thinking in terms of good or evil with reference to the physical and ether body, the principles which remain in the physical world when we have gone to sleep. The whole human moral element is brought back when we wake up and I and astral body return to the physical and ether bodies.

Even people who do not have higher vision may take this as a sign that I and astral body have to do with what we call “the moral world order”. Our physical and ether bodies soak this up, as it were, as we wake up. And it is in no way absurd for those who do not have higher vision to say: Essentially, I and astral body belong to a completely different world, for the physical and ether bodies are neutral when it comes to being good or evil, just as plants are. I and astral body take moral responsibility into them.

Even those who do not achieve higher vision through the science of the spirit which takes its orientation from anthroposophy, but whose thinking relates to everyday life, will be able to realize that we are dealing with polar opposites here: physical body and ether body inclined to nature-given form, and I and astral body inclined to moral form. To take this further, however, we will need to draw on observations made through higher vision. When we use this to study the I and the astral body in the world to which they belong between going to sleep and waking up, they are seen to have the world of the spirit as their environment just as the natural world is the environment of the physical body. I and astral body bring the inner mortality to human beings from the world of the spirit. As the physical and ether bodies are morally neutral, they cannot possibly draw on them for moral impulses. They do in truth gain the moral impulses from the world in which they are between going to sleep and waking up.

In the science of the spirit, the following is said with regard to this: When human beings leave their physical and ether bodies on going to sleep, they meet, without being aware of it, the spiritual entities of the world, presenting to them all the inner morality they developed when conscious in their physical and ether bodies. They are compelled to let the world of soul and spirit work on the moral elements they have brought. This brings us to a different aspect of something we have often considered in our efforts to build a bridge between etheric and physical worlds on one hand and moral and spiritual worlds on the other.

The I has will quality. It develops its whole structure and constitution between waking up and falling asleep in the physical and ether bodies. When we go to sleep, the I meets the entities of the spiritual world. Here, as people walking around in the physical world, we perceive solid bodies with our organs of touch; we see colours, we use sensory perception. We relate to the physical forces of the world in a specific way The I also enters into a specific relationship to the powers of the world where it lives between going to sleep and waking up. Let me present this in graphic form It can only be schematic, of course. Let us say this is the physical man being in the process of going to sleep (Fig. 40, yellow).

This, which I am drawing here, is the ether body which fills the human being. If I were to draw the human being in the waking state, I’d have to draw in the astral body and the I. I am not going to do so, because I want to characterize the condition of going to sleep. The will element, that is, the I, meets the entities of the spiritual world.

It relates to them in the way we relate to physical entities with our physical body when awake. The relationship between the will-related I and the entities of the spiritual world is, however, much more real than the maya-like relationship which the physical body has with its environment. The relationship in sleep comes to expression above all in the following way, more or less, I can only put these things into images for you): When the I is in touch with the powers of the spiritual entities between going to sleep and waking up, everything evil in our state of soul makes the I waste away; everything good allows the will-related I to develop in freedom.

Showing this in graphic form we arrive at a specific form of the spiritual, will-related I form as it leaves the body (remember, these are only images). With regard to the human being of limbs, the I is quite intensely inside the human being even during sleep. Let me show it like this: These furrowed lines (light-coloured) have evolved from counter activities of the spiritual entities, their form depending entirely on the moral constitution. We may indeed say that the 1 assumes a spiritual form based on its moral constitution as it enters the world of the spirit.

When we go to sleep, the astral body also goes into the world outside us which is a world of soul quality. The will-related I meets the entities of the spiritual world, the feeling-related astral body enters into the soul sphere outside us.

The constitution of our will, with reference to good and evil, also has elements, or powers, of feeling in it. We merely have to recall the different feeling mood we have after doing a good deed compared to after doing something bad. 1 need only mention the whole sphere of self-reproach and inner satisfaction and you can see how our moral constitution is imbued with feeling. The feeling element as a whole enters the soul sphere when we fall asleep, and this enters into a relationship with the soul world outside. When we are awake we relate to the physical world around us through our ideas and in doing so develop the inner life of feelings—though the life of feeling merely connects with the life of ideas inside us. When we are asleep, our feeling-related astral principle makes direct contact with the astral world.

It is not given form, however. The will-related I is given form (I have shown this by drawing furrowed lines). Interaction between the astral body and the soul environment results in something I cannot draw as furrowing. I have to call it colouring, imbuing the astral body. To draw it I would, according to whether we are full of self-reproach or inner satisfaction, feelings of sympathy and antipathy, show the astral coloured by something with schematically may be shown as a particular colour (Fig. 41, reddish, blue).

Through the I, therefore, our higher nature is given form, and the astral is coloured through and through. This is of course a schematic way of putting it. It is perfectly justifiable to express these processes in colour images, but it has to be said that only part of the process can be expressed in this way. Instead of colouring the image I might just as well have all kinds of musical instruments at hand, for instance, and give expression to the above in combinations of sounds. One might even bring in qualities of taste. All this whirls and swirls together in the astral body when it is outside the physical body between going to sleep and waking up.

The situation is such, however, that the direction of the effective powers which bring about everything I have drawn, really derive, seen in schematic form, from the human being of limbs and metabolism. The spiritual entities and the soul world giving form and colour are working from below upwards, as it were.

If we try to discover the true nature of that which is given form and colour outside the human being between going to sleep and waking up, we finally arrive at the following. Between waking up and going to sleep the human form is complete, with I, astral body, ether body and physical body forming an interrelated whole. This goes hand in hand with a specific intensity of conscious awareness which is intellectual and has qualities of feeling and will. Compared to it, the element which is outside during sleep has an infantile quality. We think of a child’s dimmed-down state of consciousness, something we can only come close to when our consciousness is filled with dreams. Now imagine the child’s dimmed-down consciousness becoming even less developed—this would be closer to the nature of what is outside us during sleep. We might say: The element which is outside the human being during sleep is more infantile than the mind and spirit of a child.

What is the real nature of the element of human soul and spirit which lives outside during sleep? In the light of spiritual science, the determining factor is characteristically seen to come from the human being of limbs and metabolism. Studying what can be observed through higher vision one has the feeling—which gradually grows into the definite realization—that by taking this whole aspect here to be a photographic negative and visualizing the positive, we actually get the structure of the human brain. The scale is not the same, but if you see it as a negative and visualize the positive you get the human brain.

Think back to the various aspects I have presented. I have said that the structure of the human head in one particular life inwardly, in the structure of its powers, represents the individual from the previous life on earth, minus the head. What you are today contains the powers your head will have in your next life on earth. We see the same thing in what a human being puts into the outside world between going to sleep and waking up, except that it is infantile, childlike in form and, of course, converted into a negative.

Between going to sleep and waking up human beings in fact put an image into the world of what will incarnate into a physical form in their next life on earth. This is extraordinarily significant. If we now recall that it is the moral constitution of the soul which determines this form and coloration (Fig. 41), we must consider the powers inherent in the human head in the next life on earth to be the embodiment of the moral constitution of the soul in the present life. Since the powers of the human being come to expression in our ability to think and form ideas, this ability will therefore be the outcome of our moral constitution of soul in the present life. All of this exists as an image in what human beings put into the outside world on going to sleep.

In the light of the science of the spirit it would thus be fair to say: During the night, when we are asleep, we put a quite specific question to another world, the world of the spirit. We do not do this consciously but with a part of us that moves out of the physical and ether bodies at that time. The question we put is: How does my moral constitution of soul appear to the entities in the world of the spirit?

And we are given an answer which consists in the shaping of the furrows and the colouring we are given, both in accord with our moral constitution of soul. Every morning we enter into our physical and etheric bodies on waking up with an answer gained in the world of soul and spirit. Going to sleep, we always unconsciously ask a question; waking up, the answer is given at the unconscious level from the world of the spirit. At that level, we are all the time in dialogue with the world of the spirit, gathering there the answers which tell us the true state of our inner nature.

This allows you to see something which otherwise is always extraordinarily abstract. You see, when we speak of our conscience, this is something very real to us; yet when we are asked to speak of the specific nature of our conscience we immediately become rather vague. With reference to our moral impulses, conscience is something of which we have a real inner experience. Yet if we use the methods of ordinary science to reflect on conscience, we fall into chaos and are unable to arrive at anything definite. Here you are given something definite, which is, that your moral constitution of soul wins a continuous response from the world of the spirit. You bring the forms developed by the world of the spirit into your physical and etheric reality, and with this you bring the voice of conscience to it. In waking life, the answer given in form and colour is transformed into the voice of conscience. In fact we depend on the sleep state for everything we have by way of inner moral attitude.

Many examples have been given of the greater wisdom inherent in the instinctive perception of earlier times and the instinctive perception, which are not intellectual; it is greater than our modern science, though it takes the form of images. The moral principles of instinctive perception contain much of what comes back to us again through the true science of the spirit, though it is now clearer, more transparent and defined. One of the principles which is part of popular belief is that if someone has offended you, do not take your inner reaction to this through sleep but if at all possible settle the matter before you go to sleep. Do not take your anger through sleep, therefore, but try to calm it before you go to sleep.

When you know that going to sleep means you are putting a question to the world of the spirit and that waking up is the answer to your question, you will be able to say to yourself: The answer you receive from the world of the spirit and take into your physical body as you wake up will be different if you moderated your anger the night before, or reduced the offence you felt, than if you take the feelings of offence into sleep and put your question out of injured feelings or in such anger that the fire of your anger fills the whole question. If you take an angry mood into the world of the spirit it is as if a stream of volcanic fire were to pour into that world. The soul world outside then has to colour this stream of volcanic fire (Fig. 41, reddish). This is very different from the situation where you have let your anger go down before going to sleep.

The effects of much of what I have said here can be seen not only in the human heart and mind but also in the way physical life and the life of the internal organs, is tuned. The causes of many diseases lie in the questions we receive to the answers we unconsciously put to the spiritual world as we go to sleep. In the waking state, our physical and etheric organs have to deal fully with everything the will-related I and the feeling-related astral body bring with them from the world of the spirit as we wake up.

It is quite wrong to think we have lots of experiences when awake but none in our sleep. When awake we experience processes that mostly take place between ourselves and the physical outside world. Satisfaction feit about these processes accompanies our clear perception of our relationship to the world rather like an inner dream in heart and mind—you will remember that the feeling element only has dream-level intensity of consciousness. When we are between going to sleep and waking up, however, considerable inner activity goes an in the I and astral body: The will-related I is given form, the feeling-imbued astral body is imbued with the powers of the outside world of soul and spirit. These real, factual processes penetrate and stream through the physical and ether bodies, and the way we behave in the physical world is determined by this. We do more for our inner life during sleep than we do in our waking hours. 011 the other hand, what we do when asleep depends an those waking hours. I'd say that the whole significance of sleep essentially lies not only in physical experience but in the moral structure of our inner nature.

I have shown on a number of occasions that superficial ideas about the way in which the human physical and ether bodies relate to the process of going to sleep are wrong. It is usually said that human beings grow tired because they use their limbs, because they work, and they need to sleep to make up for this. Merely to remember that we do not always go to sleep because we are tired will put us on the right track. Think of the well-rested retired gentleman who may go to a lecture, for instance, because it is the done thing; he’ll usually be fast asleep after the first five minutes, which is hardly due to his being tired.

Considering the superficial experiences to be gained in this field, we come to realize that people generally confuse cause and effect in this instance. We are in fact tired because we want to go to sleep. The impulse to go to sleep is a much more inward one than the physical tiredness which is its counterpart. When the outside world offers nothing of interest, the longing arises to withdraw from it. Soul and spirit then leave the living physical body, which grows tired. We grow tired because we want to go to sleep, not the other way round. Anyone can see this, if they have the will to do so. It is of course extraordinarily difficult to accept the truth of things that are so closely bound up with people’s self-satisfied life interest. But if we are prepared to accept truth, we will reach the point where we do not merely see going to sleep as a physical and physiological process, but consider it in relation to the whole cosmos which, as I have shown from many different points of view, also contains the moral impulses as real impulses, not just mere words. The alternation between sleeping and waking thus shows us how a bridge can be built between the physical and the moral elements in our world order.

Du Bois-Reymond,⁴⁰ the physiologist who gave that famous lecture on the limits of natural science, once said: “It is utterly beyond us to grasp the human being as he is in waking life.” Well, we know what to think of such a statement. Du Bois-Reymond believes, however, that it is possible for us to grasp the sleeping human being. According to him, the laws and relationship of the physical world outside, which we are able to grasp, also pertain to the sleeping human being, only in a more complex fashion. We know this to be incorrect, but let us merely consider the statement, which is, that we can have scientific understanding of the sleeping human being, but not of the waking human being.

So here a scientist is admitting that we cannot use the tools of science to discover what pervades the whole human being in the waking sate, and that the sleeping individual as a physical entity looks very different from an individual who is awake even in the eyes of scientists.

Scientists know nothing, of course, of the will-related I and feeling-related astral body which leave the human being for the non-physical world. But this “nothing”, what is it in the light of our present study? It is something which belongs to the moral world order. The activity of the moral principle is a real world which begins at the very point where people taking the scientific approach cease their observations. After waking up, the real effects of the moral principle show themselves only in the inner constitution of the human being. To enter into the sphere where moral reality is to be found we must therefore consider the world in which human beings live between waking up and going to sleep. It is not surprising, therefore, that people who take the scientific view and do not enter into this world only know a real world which does not contain the moral impulses and therefore relegate moral impulses to the realm of pure belief.

Such belief, however, becomes insight as real as that achieved by the followers of the scientific approach once we turn our attention to the other sphere. Our discussion will, of course, have to be based on completely different premises if we want to consider this sphere of spirit and soul imbued with moral principles.

If my drawing represented something from the physical world, I would have to base myself on the physical. My drawing would be an image of this, and we would progress from external reality to something which is merely image. We have to take the opposite route if we want to represent the non-physical. We have to experience it inwardly and then go outside and represent inward experience in an image. This kind of inward experience is extremely mobile and I should really show this colouring as glittering and gleaming, shifting and changing, growing luminous and fading away again, which is exactly what the spiritual scientist observes when considering the human being as a whole.

If one gains a vision of the astral body and I during sleep—I am trying to be extremely accurate here—the form given to the I and the colouring given to the astral body is bright and distinct. When I and astral body return to the physical and ether bodies, this bright, glittering and gleaming principle grows dark and dull. Outside the body the I aspect has definite contours; inside the body it grows indefinite. You get quite a specific feeling when you watch the I and astral body becoming submerged in the physical and ether bodies on waking. To use abstract words to describe this, means expressing oneself rather clumsily as a rule. It is however possible to define it relatively clearly. Observing the process you have a feeling which is rather like being aware of the coming of autumn and winter and letting this influence your soul. To consider the waking-up process in terms of the whole human being is to enter into a mood like that experienced with the coming of winter. Going to sleep, with the spirit and soul principles going outside the human being, you experience an inner mood similar to the one experienced with the coming of spring and summer. It is indeed the case that you enter into something very special here.

Dear friends, for several weeks I have tried to show how by taking the approach of spiritual science we come to see the human in relationship to the whole cosmos. I have shown you the human form in its relationship to the world of the fixed stars, and the levels of human life in relation to the world of the planets. Considering the human being in the light of spiritual science, we are always taken outside the human being. Today we have considered the alternating states of waking and sleeping; entering into them with inner feeling, we are again taken outside the human being, this time not into the world of the stars but into the world of time. So we said to ourselves: We understand the waking-up process if we understand the coming of autumn and winter; we understand the process of going to sleep if we understand the coming of spring and summer. From the progress of time in the human being we are taken into the progress of time in the cosmos, into the changing seasons. The human being is seen to be an image also of what happens in time. In the preceding weeks we endeavoured to see the human being as an image of the macrocosm more in terms of space.

We thus relate the human being to the world, and understand him in terms of the world. And then the moral world order also becomes reality for us and not a world of empty words. If we enter into everything we are able to feel in considering our relationship to the world, religious impulses enter into our ethical and moral world. The ethical will then comes to express the divine will which reigns in the human being, and the ethical and moral sphere is lifted up into the ethical and religious sphere. This is how anthroposophy as science of the spirit seeks to find the way to the ethical and religious. We shall continue with this tomorrow.

• 40. Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), German physiologist born in Berlin of French parentage, professor of physics at Berlin. The lecture referred to was published in Leipzig in 1916.

As there is an opportunity for us to be together again today, I will speak of certain matters connected in one way or another with subjects we have been studying. I should like, first of all, to direct your minds to the fact that the attitude of which I spoke last time, the attitude which leads to a certain denial of the reality of the spiritual worlds, is fairly universal in the external world today. Fundamentally speaking—and indeed it is evident—willingness to approach the spiritual worlds in order to receive from them something that will enrich and invigorate life, is to be found in only a tiny handful of men. We can see that this is so.

My dear friends! The call to self-knowledge, which the soul of man can take up, when it listens impartially to all the beings and events of life, in nature and in the life of the spirit, we will once again, at the beginning of our lesson, allow to pass before our souls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are in the midst, my dear brothers and sisters, of our souls finding the answer to this question, having gone quite far in its contemplation, along the way to the Guardian of the Threshold, to the abyss of existence. We were infused with the instruction of the Guardian of the Threshold along the way. What had stood there previously dark and dull, a person knowing that it nevertheless held his being, that it held the source of his existence, what had been before him dark and dull started to lighten, and then became bright, quite bright. Then in the brightness we heard the Guardian’s call.

See the ethereal iris’s
Light-abundant round.
Through your eyes’
Light-forming force
Let your “I” penetrate through the arc,
And then behold from yonder watch,
Color flooding the world’s chalice.

And the Angels, Archangels, and Archai allow their voices to resound upon this word of the Guardian of the Threshold, as they focus on human souls.

Sense our thoughts
Color breathing living
In the chalice's flood of light;
We carry the sensory-semblance
Into spirit-being-realms
And turn ourselves world-infused
To the service of higher spirits.

And so we see how there, through the flooding light of the world chalice, with which we became acquainted in the last lesson, the beings of the Third Hierarchy become irradiated and illuminated. We see droves of these high beings of Angels, Archangels, and Archai going forth in service to the higher spirits, to the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kryriotetes. And we become witness to the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes speaking to the beings serving them, implementing what these serving beings require for humanity.

And so the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes speak:

What you have taken up,
Enlivened from dead sensory-semblance,
We wake it in existence;
We add it to the rays of light,
So that the emptiness of matter
Will bear spirit nature
And manifest endowed with love.

And then, urged on by what is within us, we then must turn our gaze to the highest spirits, to the First Hierarchy, turning to them as they turn themselves in blessing to human beings. From there we hear:

In your worlds of will
Feel our world-wide impact;
Spirit shines in matter,
When we are thinking working;
Spirit works in matter,
When we are living willing;
World is I-willing spirit-word.

We bear witness to what beings of the higher worlds discuss among themselves, to what the highest beings pour into human souls as world-words, to what inundates human hearts, and so we must feel ourselves within this dominion-over-all, moving-through-all world light, within which we ourselves live and move.

And now we come upon a truth, perceived there where disembodied spirit-beings live their lives, where spirits think their truths, where spirits are adorned in their beauty, where the work of spirits takes spirited effect. And we come upon the grand, the all-encompassing, the spirit-world-interwoven truth: that spirit is all that is. For we appear, we live, we move in spirit. We embrace spiritual existence.

And now we think about how spirit, within which we now live, is all that is. And now we know that there also where we otherwise are in life, there also in the world of sensory show is simply spirit. Spirit is alone, is all that is. This stands now before our souls as unwavering, almighty truth: that spirit is all. And it is good for us to envision this truth in imagery before the soul. [It was drawn in red.] That, illustrated in the image, is spirit. It is only spirit. [While speaking the word “is” was written within the red drawing in various places.]

That which appears here, is. It is spirit. And what is outside this red area, is nothing. That stands before our souls. And the spirit-world says to us, here it is, here it is, here it is, here it is. Everywhere the spirit is, is something.

[Presently while speaking on, the word “nothing” was written at various places between the areas drawn in red, and further away the words “minerals”, “plants”, and “animals.”]

And where there is no spirit, is nothing. And we are duly impressed, that that is the truth. Everywhere spirit is, is something, and where spirit is not, is nothing. And yet we ask ourselves, how does it appear to us, all that seems to show itself in the world of sensory appearance, out of which we have gone forth over the Threshold here into the spiritual world, where we find the truth of existence, the spirit, emplaced before our souls? Back over there we saw what here is drawn in red as nothing. We are too weak over there, concerning what is drawn in red, to see. What remains over there residually? Nothingness! What we see over there is nothingness, whether it is called minerals, it is a sort of nothingness, whether called plants, a second sort of nothingness, whether called animals, a third sort of nothingness, and so forth.

We perceive nothingness because we are too weak to see what is something. And this nothingness we talk about as the realm of nature. That is the grand beguilement, or as we say, the grand illusion. There are only various sorts of nothingness around us, before our eyes, as we gaze about embodied in corporeality. And we have the deeply felt impression that we are living there, and giving names to what fundamentally is nothing, to what is a grand illusion. And what appears to us presently, what lives over there as nothing and to what we give names, it appears to us as a summation of names, names that we give to the state of nothingness. For in their true state all beings are simply in existence, here where we have entered, here in the spiritual world. Names assigned to nothingness over there are wasted on what is bereft of being. And beings not from the realms of gods, to which we belong, and to which we rightfully belong, such beings can take possession of the names we have wasted on the nothingness. And henceforth they bear these names.

When we are not clear about this, that here upon the earth we give names to what has no real existence, we lapse with our names into a stark, strong illusion. We must know that we are giving names to what is intrinsically nothing. That stands out presently before our souls, while we are living and moving here within the light, so that it can be felt deep, deep, deeply by the spirit-craft of our hearts, which has remained with us in crossing over. Now we know that we have drawn out of the realm of illusion into the realm of truth. Earnest solemnity, sacred earnest solemnity in regard to truth begins to have dominion in our souls.

And now we look back at the trustworthy Guardian of the Threshold, who stands at the abyss of existence. He is not speaking just now. He spoke out of the darkness. He spoke as we were just feeling the luminosity. He spoke while the luminosity grew into brilliance. Now as we stand in the brilliance astounded by the grand truth that there is only spirit, he presently does not speak, he now silently indicates how on high the beings of the higher hierarchies are speaking among themselves. And we think for a moment in regarding the spirit, that down there in life on earth we have been struck with the impression minerals, plants, animals, and physical human beings have made on us, at what the clouds have to say, at what the mountains say, at what the gushing springs are doing, at the power of lightning, at the rolling thunder, at the stars whispering world mysteries. That was what we met with along the way down there. That was our experience. Now all is silent on this side of the abyss of existence. Presently we are witnesses as the gods speak with one another, as the whole choir of angels begins to speak.

Still looking upward, we see this choir turning to the higher spirits, turning to the spirits of the Second Hierarchy in service. We gaze at the loving, serving behavior of the Angels, Archangels, and Archai as they turn to the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes. We have the impression of the gathering of the Third Hierarchy in service.

We have the impression of the gathering of the Second Hierarchy in world-creating, in world-dominion, in world-illumination, and we hear what these beings, inwardly spirit illuminated, godlike in willing, and willing all that is godlike, what these beings are saying one to another.

We hear the Angels, as they allow their word to resound. Out of their care in guiding human souls they allow their word to resound.

Human beings are thinking!

That is carried by the Angels. That is what they are concerned with, in how they should be guiding human souls, for they note that there is thinking going on among human beings. They turn in supplication to the Dynamis, in order to obtain the force by means of which they can properly guide human beings in thinking.

Angels:
Human Beings are thinking!
We need the light from on high,
That we may shine in thinking.

The Dynamis from the realm of illumination, dominion, and action answer full of love, full of benevolence:

Receive¹ the light from on high,
That you may shine in thinking,
When human beings think.

And the flooding light, the force of illumination in thinking, streams forth from the Dynamis to the Angels. What the Angels receive, without human beings knowing it, illuminates within human thinking. Now we are aware of what works and moves within human thinking: the illumination of Angels! But the force of light belonging to this illumination, they have received it from the Dynamis. [The first part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

I) Angels:

There is thinking going on among human beings! That is their concern. That is what they put forth as their words of concern.

Human Beings are thinking!

Now they turn in their concern to the Dynamis:

We need the light from on high,
That we may shine in thinking.

The Dynamis answer:

Dynamis: Receive the light from on high,
That you may shine in thinking,
When human beings think.

Our spiritual gaze goes further. We see the gathering of Archangels turning in service to the spirits of the Second Hierarchy. Now they turn to the Exusiai and Kyriotetes, to these two categories of spirits of the Second Hierarchy. Angels have turned to the Dynamis, and Archangels have turned to the Exusiai and Kyriotetes. And their concern is that there is feeling among human beings. They appeal to the Exusiai and Kyriotetes for what they need for the feeling-life of human beings, in order to guide them.

Archangels:
Human beings are feeling!
We need the warmth of soul,
That we may live in feelings.

They must breathe life into feelings. And with mighty voice, since two choirs are answering, the answer from the Kyriotetes and Exusiai resounds in the spiritual world-all.

Receive the warmth of soul,
That you may live in feelings,
When human beings feel.

[The second part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

II) Archangels:
Human beings are feeling!
We need the warmth of soul,
That we may live in feelings.

It is answered.

Kyriotetes and Exusiai:
Receive the warmth of soul,
That you may live in feelings,
When human beings feel.

And we turn to the third gathering of the Third Hierarchy, to the gathering of the Archai. Their concern is that there is willing among human beings, the third concern of the Third Hierarchy.

We feel the Angels turning to the Dynamis, then we felt the Dynamis in action, far up in the heights, so that the light from on high is garnered and given to the Angels in their concern for human thinking. And we felt all that is encompassed by world-warmth is garnered by Exusiai and Kyriotetes, and is handed over to the Archangels, so that they can lead in feelings in human beings. And deep below, where the spirits and gods of the deep rule, from the abysses in which rules much that is evil, from there deep forces of goodness must be obtained. There all the gods of the Second Hierarchy pull together, for in their concern for human beings willing the Archai need the strength of the depths. And so they speak:

Human beings are willing!
We need the strength of the depths,
That we may work in willing.

And in answer to this, in mighty formidable cosmic voice, the mighty voices of the mighty spirits of the Second Hierarchy ring forth together, all three together, three choirs gathering into one choir, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai, three choirs in one:

Receive the strength of the depths,
That you may work in willing,
When human beings will.

[The third part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

III.) Archai
Human beings are willing!
We need the strength of the depths,
That we may work in willing.

It is answered by Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai together:

Kyriotetes, Dynamis, and Exusiai:
Receive the strength of the depths,
That you may work in willing,
When human beings will.

That is the world, the world present in the sacred creator-words, the resounding of which we become witness to in spiritual worlds, as we are witness to what goes on in mineral and plant-like realms here on the earth.

And we take it in, as it comes to us on our way, as it becomes our experience.

Human Beings are thinking!
We need the light from on high,
That we may shine in thinking.

Receive the light from on high,
That you may shine in thinking,
When human beings think.

Human beings are feeling!
We need the warmth of soul,
That we may live in feelings.

Receive the warmth of soul,
That you may live in feelings,
When human beings feel.

Human beings are willing!
We need the strength of the depths
That we may work in willing.

Receive the strength of the depths,
That you may work in willing,
When human beings will.

We grow into the spiritual world. Instead of what surrounds us here on this sensation-laden earth, surrounding us there are the choirs of the spiritual world. And we become witnesses to what the gods are saying, to what the gods are saying in their concern for the human world, in their caring works concerning the human world.

Only when our meditation undergoes this full disengagement from what we are here on the earth, and we feel engaged with a world the gods there in their divine speech allow to exist, only then do we experience true reality. And just when we have this reality, we also have what is really around us here between birth and death. For behind all that lives here between birth and death in apparency, is what comprises the true reality we live in between death and a new birth.

People of earlier times lived upon the earth, but in a dull, dream-laden clairvoyant state of existence. Their souls were filled with a sort of dream-laden pictures that spoke of the spiritual world. Imagine before us such a man of olden times. Then, when not working, even though the sun still stood in the heavens, when putting his work aside to rest awhile, then he might have paused for reflection, to bring up the pictures he was able to experience in his soul, which reminded him of what he had experienced in pre-earthly existence in the spiritual world. But he did not understand the connection of his earth existence with the other existence, the one that glowed there within in his clairvoyant dreams. But the teachings of the adepts, the initiates, were there to make it clear. They brought clarity at first to their students, and through their students to all people, about what the connection is. And so one lived in the earth-world by means of memories of pre-earthly existence.

In life on earth today, the memory of the pre-earthly existence has been lost. Initiates can no longer bring clarity about the connection of life on earth with pre-earthly existence, for people have forgotten what they experienced in pre-earthly existence. Such a clarification is simply not possible. Cosmic memory does not need to be brought into clarity, for today it is simply not there.

But what must be heard through initiation science, is what the gods are saying there behind sensory existence. Then people must experience it. And increasingly the time will come in which people, having gone through the portal of death, will only be able to understand the spiritual world, into which they have entered, when they can say the following:

When the person has stepped through the portal of death into supra-earthly existence and then finds himself in the reality of the spiritual world, within the world of Angles, Archangels, Archai, Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, when he experiences all this, then what he experiences there after death should not remain incomprehensible and dark for him, for then he must remember the things that he went through by means of initiation knowledge.

And it will be important, immeasurably important to the understanding of what can be experienced there in the life between death and a new birth, to have already heard it as such, for otherwise it cannot be understood, other than through a memory of having heard, back on earth, such as what resounds over there.

Human Beings are thinking!
Receive the light from on high.

Human beings are feeling!
Receive the warmth of soul.

Human beings are willing!
Receive the strength of the depths.

Those are the words, my brothers and sisters, that properly belong in the esoteric school today. They should ring forth there, by means of the instruction through which the power of the Age of Michael is channeled through the esoteric school. It can then be as follows. In the esoteric school the first to be heard within life on earth will be the voice of the Angels:

Human beings are thinking!

The answer of the Dynamis:

Receive the light from on high.

The voice of the Archangels is heard.

Human beings are feeling!

The answer of the Kyriotetes and Exusiai:

Receive the warmth of soul.

The words of the Archai:

Human beings are willing!

All three ranks of the Second Hierarchy answer, the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes:

Receive the strength of the depths.

Having heard this in esoteric schools, and on hearing them ringing forth again after having gone through the portal of death, people will hear both together, the esoteric school here and the life between death and a new birth there. They will understand what there resounds.

Or people may remain dull and unwilling to hear what the esoteric schools have to say about preparedness through Anthroposophy in general. They may not take up what can be gently heard through initiation knowledge from the higher realms. Then they go through the portal of death. There they hear what they should have heard earlier. They will not understand the incomprehensible ringing, the simple reverberation, the noise of worlds resounding in the words of power of the gods speaking among themselves.

The gospels speak of this. Paul speaks of it, that people should attend to the guiding wisdom of Christ before death brings them into the land of the spirit. For death in spirit-land comes also, at the same time, when we go through the portal of death and do not understand what resounds there, when instead we are only able to hear incomprehensible noise, instead of the understandable words of the gods. This is because what has befallen us, instead of life of the soul, is death of the soul. That the soul might live, for this reason there is initiation knowledge. That the soul remains alive when it passes through the portal of death, for this reason there are esoteric schools. This should permeate us thoroughly

And now let us recall the path we have been walking along in the spirit. Let us recall how we approached the Guardian in order to become acquainted with how someone might cross over the abyss of existence. And let us look just now upon the impressions that from over there have worked on our souls, let us take up into our souls what can parade before our souls as the inner drama of self-awareness.

We have gone down the path. Standing there in a certain way are three tablets. Presently we stand before the third, after we have taken up into our souls all the depths of the divine call. From the first tablet, a short time after having come to the abyss of existence, there it would peal forth:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now the Guardian of the Threshold approaches us. The second tablet looms. On it is written:

First come to know the earnest Guardian,
Who stands before the gates of spirit-land,
Denying entry to your sensory force
And to your intellect’s might,
For in weaving of sense
And in forming of thought
Out of space’s absence of being,
Out of time’s illusory powers
The truth of your own self
You must first forcefully master.

Then when we have arrived on the other side, passing by the earnest Guardian, standing there, we would hear a dialogue such as this:

Human Beings are thinking!
Receive the light from on high.

Human beings are feeling!
Receive the warmth of soul.

Human beings are willing!

Receive the strength of the depths.

From there we gaze back over here on the sensory world. From there we feel the words concerning this sensory world:

I walked within this world of sense,
Thinking’s heritage guiding me,
A god’s power having ushered me in.
Death, it stands at journey’s end.
I will feel Christ’s presence.
In matter’s death spirit-birth wakes,
So in spirit I’ll find the world
And in world-becoming know myself.

• 1. empfanget