The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the last few hours we talked about various myths and legends and characterized how in these myths and legends of different peoples that comes to light, which we have also come to know through the theosophical world view, that which we refer to as the appearance of the astral and spiritual world. We have also spoken of various signs and symbols, and we have repeatedly emphasized that there is nothing in these various signs and symbols that could be speculated upon, philosophized about, or reflected upon in any way, that could be interpreted one way or another, but that they must be said to be real renderings of processes in the higher worlds. Now, I always ask you to bear in mind that we have signs, fairy tales and legends from the broad currents of spiritual development on earth that express nothing other than what the seer, who is familiar with supersensible phenomena, can experience in the higher worlds. I need only refer to the simple sign of the so-called Swastika, the hooked cross, the sign that you all know and about which you have so many more or less ingenious explanations. Most of the explanations are nonsense, however ingenious they may be. Someone can be very clever, think a lot, and yet say something tremendously stupid if he does not know what it is all about. This swastika is nothing more than the reproduction of what are called astral sense organs - they are also called lotus flowers - which begin to stir when a person does certain exercises; they begin to stir when he undergoes a certain development. I have said time and again that one should think of a flower just as little as one thinks of wings when hearing the word lung. That is a word; and you have given no more in the Lotus Flowers than a pictorial description of what develops in the seer when he gradually brings the astral sense organs out of his astral organism. If we take this principle of explanation to heart, we will never be tempted to apply any speculation or the like to what we find in religious and other documents. Rather, we will endeavor to consult the real secret science or occult wisdom to let it tell us what one or the other means in each case. Much about Persian and Germanic mythology has already become clear to us in the last Monday lectures.

Today I would like to point out to you some things that you can find in a document much closer to you, in the Bible. I would like to draw your attention to the Bible today for the very reason that you can see how, from the point of view of spiritual science, the Bible coincides with the most diverse legends and myths of the peoples in many ways, and how deeply we can also look into the biblical document if we simply ask occult wisdom for information about it. Today we will place something from the beginning chapters of the Bible before our soul.

You know that it tells of the creation of the earth, of the world in general, in connection with man. You will find the most diverse explanations precisely about this so-called Genesis, about the secrets hidden behind the first, the introductory chapters of the Bible. We should preferably remember that when man first became an earth dweller in his present form, the conditions on our earth were quite different from those later on, which today's man knows. We know that after the earth had gone through earlier stages of development - a Saturn state, a sun and a moon state - that it then emerged again, initially in connection with the sun and moon. What looks at us today as the sun or the moon was once one body with our Earth. We know that the sun then separated with all its entities, that the moon then separated, also with certain substances and entities, and that our Earth remained behind in a period of time that we are accustomed to calling the Lemurian period. At that time, the Earth consisted of fiery liquid substances, which were basically the same as today's substances. The Earth was a fiery, fiery nebulous world body in which all the metals and minerals that are solid today were dissolved, and in which such beings as are on Earth today could not live. On the other hand, beings of a completely different nature and character could live there, and at that time man already belonged to them, whose existence was always connected with the development of our planet.

Now let us take a look at man himself. If you were to imagine man in his early stages, that is, at the time when the sun and moon had just separated from the earth, as he is today, listening with his ears and seeing with his eyes, you would be imagining him quite wrongly. Rather, you have to imagine that man in the early stages of the earth had a very different consciousness from that of today's man. Our present day consciousness, which perceives through the instruments of the outer senses, was not yet there. What kinds of consciousness do we know besides the day consciousness? You know the consciousness that for most people today is an unconscious one, the consciousness in deep sleep. You know that besides man, the plants living around man also have this consciousness. Plants have this consciousness all the time, whereas humans only have it when they are asleep. Today's human being, when looking at the plant, must therefore say to himself: the plant represents the consciousness that he himself has when he sleeps. One could say that when he sleeps, the human being is also a plant-like being. The plant has only a physical body and an etheric body. Man also has a physical body and an etheric body, and these lie in bed. Now comes the difference: the human being who lies in bed has an astral body with the I that belongs to him; these are in a certain way separate from the physical body and etheric body; but a single astral body belongs to the physical and etheric bodies that lie in bed. However, no individual astral body belongs to the individual plant, but the whole earth has an astral body, and you have to look at the individual plants as embedded in, as incorporated into, this common astral body of the earth. It is absolutely true that if you harm the individual plant or do anything to the individual plant, it does not feel it, but feels the earth as a whole in the common astral body. I have already pointed out that the seer knows: When you pick a flower, when you take the seeds of the plants in the fall or even mow the grain, then it is as if you take the milk from the cow for my sake, or when the calf sucks the milk from the cow. It is a feeling of well-being for the earth's astral body. A feeling of pain only occurs if you uproot the plant; then it is similar to tearing a piece of flesh out of the body of the individual animal. You must also be aware that there is a state of being similar to that of sleeping and waking for the earth, not for the individual plant. The individual plant is only aware of the state of consciousness that you have when you lie in bed with your etheric body and physical body. Between these two states of sleeping and waking, there is another state of consciousness that is little known to modern man; it is the state of dream-filled sleep, so to speak, as the last memory, like an atavism, an heirloom, where the consciousness of sleep is filled with the most diverse symbolic images that we have often described. Most of the animal world has such consciousness. Anyone who is familiar with these conditions can tell you that most of the animal world has a kind of dream consciousness; and it is complete nonsense to raise the question of whether animals have a similar sense of self as humans have. You describe to people exactly how a human being has to go through the time between death and a new birth, and then someone comes along and asks: couldn't a person go through this time on a completely different planet? Or someone asks: could this or that be? “Could be” can mean anything in the world. It is never about what could be, but about what is. This must be borne in mind above all. Some people today fall for it when, for example, a plant's love life is attributed to it. The craziest humbug is done with such things; and when the matter is called “science,” anything goes that would not otherwise be considered.

We have a kind of pictorial consciousness as a third state of consciousness, which is only present in a shadowy form in dreams, and this consciousness is present with increasing distinctness at the beginning of man's existence on earth. When man began his career as an inhabitant of the earth, he had no eyes to see with, nor could he have used his ears as he does today to perceive the outside world with his senses, although everything was present in the layout. The human being of that time did not experience physical forms and colors as they are experienced today through the senses; his consciousness was one of: image consciousness, through which primarily spiritual states were perceived. Certainly, there could also be objects similar to this rose in a person's environment. When a person approached these objects, he did not perceive the red color, not these shapes, not these green leaves, none of it in that way. But when he approached the object, an image arose in him that showed him a red shape at this point, where there is now green, and a greenish-bluish shape where there is now red; it appeared in colors that do not actually occur in the physical world, but which only expressed that it was a shape that was emotionally and spiritually pleasing to the person. When a person approached a well-disposed creature from the animal world, for example, certain colors arose before him that expressed the sympathy that the animal felt for him. If he approached an animal that wanted to eat him, it was expressed in a different color pattern. The friendship between two beings was expressed through colors and shapes. Now imagine that at that time, man himself was not at all able to see his own physicality, because that also belongs to everything for which one needs sensory instruments to perceive oneself. Man could see his soul itself, he saw the colors flowing out of him. What the seer sees today, he could see in an original, dull, dusky clairvoyant consciousness. But there was no question of his being able to see his own bodily forms; these were completely closed to him.

Let us now imagine this moment vividly. Man comes down from the bosom of the Godhead to plunge into the earth, which has just broken away from the sun and moon. Man comes down there. He does not have the slightest ability to see the sun and moon and the earth itself as physical bodies. But the moment has come for him when the ego, which dwells in all of you today, which used to be united with the divine substance, descended into the three bodies. Since the existence of the Earth, there was the physical body, since the existence of the Sun, the etheric body, and since the existence of the Moon, the astral body. The astral body, the etheric body and the physical body had come over from the Moon. When the Earth was Saturn, the I was in the sphere of Divinity. Even when the Earth was a sun and a moon, the I was in the sphere of divinity. Now let us clearly imagine the state of the Earth that has just come into being. We have the human being consisting of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body, and, one might say, a hollow in the astral body, a constriction. Into this cavity the I literally drips in and first connects with the astral body, and in this astral body it acquires a consciousness of images, as I have just described. Thus man has become a four-part being. The I has united with that which had prepared itself through the three stages of Saturn, Sun and Moon, when the I of man was up in the bosom of the Godhead. During the Saturn, Sun and Moon states of the Earth, the I, which now dwells in all of you, was united with the Godhead above, and below, your bodies were formed in preparation: your physical body on Saturn, your etheric body on the Sun and your astral body on the moon. That was preparing itself below. One could say that the Godhead looked down and saw how the bodies were preparing themselves for it, so that when the Godhead lowered these drops of egoity, they would be ripe to receive the egoity. What dwells in you today dwelled in the Godhead then and looked down on the three bodies. If at that time your soul, your ego, could have felt its existence as it does today, they would have sensed it by calling their home the “heavens.” For they were “in the heavens”; they had only a dull, dim consciousness, but they were in the heavens.

And now the important moment had arrived when the uniformly continuing earlier state was divided into two. At the beginning of their existence on earth, there was a state for human beings in which they were still in the heavens as actual consciousnesses, as I-ness. Then the I dripped down into the bodies. Thus was created the difference between where human beings used to be and where they are now: heaven and earth. That is the experience of your ego as it descends. What does it say at the beginning of Genesis?

In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.

While still in the bosom of the Godhead, your ego had been unable to see anything. Now, on earth, it is destined to see for the first time, although at first with a dull awareness of images. Before that, it had not yet seen anything; it first had to become familiar with the astral body in order to learn to see.

And the earth was waste and confusion.

This is again a subjective experience of your soul. What she experienced is described. The earth itself was still “desolate and confused,” and everything was liquid, because the earth was in a fiery, liquid state.

And the spirit of the deity

which you had just left,

brooded over the waters.

You see, what is described in Genesis, are the real experiences of your self. And what has now struck into the whole? Now comes the moment when the self begins to see astral, it became aware that there are other beings all around. From the darkness, the astral light sprouts on all sides.

And God said: Let there be light! And there was light.

This does not refer to physical light, but to astral light. Here too, facts are described that the human

ego experienced. And God saw the light, that it was beautiful, and God separated the light from the darkness.

What does that mean? You will learn more about this in the course of the lectures, that wherever an astral body is present, fatigue must occur. The life of an astral body cannot proceed otherwise than that fatigue occurs. Therefore, there must also be a compensation for the fatigue. A being that tires must undergo conditions in which this fatigue is made good again. Do not imagine anything external, but only the experiences of the ego. The ego is lowered into the astral body, it becomes tired by unfolding its image consciousness. It must then return to a state in which it can compensate for the fatigue. We have two states of consciousness into which the ego comes: one state in which the ego lives in images, in which spiritual experiences present themselves in images, and another in which everything plunges back into the darkness from which the ego is born, and where fatigue is carried away, but also where the state of light that surrounds the ego is interrupted. The Godhead had divided the life of the ego into two parts, one where there was light and the other where there was darkness. Imagine the life of the light beings on earth like this.

And God divided the light from the darkness and called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night.

This has nothing to do with the orbit of the sun or the moon, it has only to do with the spiritual difference between the astral illumination of consciousness and the dark state where there is no illumination. You must fully bear in mind that these are descriptions of inner facts, experiences of the I. Imagine very vividly how the sleeping person lies in bed according to his physical and etheric bodies, outside of the physical and etheric bodies are the astral body and the I. This was the case all the time in the initial state of the earth. The astral body was never completely within the physical and etheric bodies as it is today, not at all, but only in such a way that it filled part of the etheric body. It was more or less as it is with modern man when he is asleep, when the astral body has left the physical body but has not yet completely left the etheric body. You must imagine that the I, which has just come down from the bosom of the Godhead, belonged to a physical body and an etheric body with its astral body, but does not yet completely permeate them. The modern-day scientist would say that such a life is not possible at all. But it was possible, under different laws.

Let us imagine how it was by means of an image. Let us again imagine our Earth, but now flooded in a fire nebula, this fire nebula in perpetual motion, the astral bodies with the I's as spiritual beings floating above. Imagine that you would all suddenly fall asleep now. Then your astral bodies would come out. Only the physical bodies are inert; when the astral bodies come out, the physical bodies retain their shape. At that time, when the earth was in the fire mist, it was different, everything was in lively motion. It was similar to when you stand today at a mountain valley and see the masses of fog moving back and forth and taking on the most diverse shapes. Now your physical body remains inert in its fixed form. Then everything was in motion. The physical body of that time dissolved and reassembled. All this was caused by the forces that emanated from above. Thus, the existence of that time was different from today. When the earth was still liquid, all forms were dependent on the spiritual forces, to which you yourself belonged. Imagine what happened down there. The solid gradually prepared itself. From a completely liquid-watery state, these solid bodies gradually prepared themselves. More and more rigid forms settled. Just as in the mountains the moving mists take on solid forms and crystallize, so the first human forms gradually emerged from the swirling fire mist.

And God said, “Let there be a vault in the midst of the waters, and let the waters be separated from the waters.”

If you can visualize it correctly, you have the process that I have just described.

And God made the division of the waters, and divided the waters which were under the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse. And what was above he called heaven. This was the second day.

There is profound wisdom in this again. What are the two “extensions”? These refer to the two parts of human nature, which are always mixed together: man's lower nature and man's spiritual nature. The spiritual nature, which finds expression in what is inclined towards the sun, and the lower nature, which is inclined towards the center of the earth. These are the two natures that all religious documents describe as being dominated by two very different powers, by heavenly powers and by powers of the underworld. God separated the heavenly expanse from the earth expanse. What was not yet visible on the moon became visible here on earth. An immensely deep wisdom, which corresponds to a complete truth, is also expressed in this. On the old moon, individual human figures did not yet walk around as they do on earth now; that did not exist on the moon. The human ancestors, the ancestral bodies of human beings on the old moon, consisted of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. They only had an extension, an extension to the planet, not to the heavens. They were animal-like, no I yet dwelled in them. The animal has remained at this earlier stage of development. This can still be clearly seen today in the way it cannot raise its face to the sun, how it does not have free working organs in its front limbs to realize intentions and ideas of the spirit. The animal is like a beam standing on four pillars. Man has brought this beam out of the horizontal position into the vertical. Through the upward-facing countenance, he is not only a citizen of the earth, but a citizen of the world. The two front supports, the two front limbs, have become tools of the spirit. This is expressed in the separation of the part of the human form that belongs to the earth from the part that belongs to the universe.

And God made an expanse between the lower waters and the upper waters.

This diversity of the human form is meant by this; it is again an experience of the original human being.

Now the part of the human form that was to serve the ego had to have a center, a center. And this it did. The first center of this still soft human body came about through the fact that all the currents converged in the upward-facing part. The most diverse currents pass through it, which you have to imagine as the beginning of nerve and blood currents. They all gathered at the top in mighty tongues of fire, which used to dart out of the human being at the top of the head - but when the body was still completely soft. That organ, which man had then and of which the last remainder is the pineal gland, was the first organ with which man began to perceive physically. If he came near something dangerous for him, this organ perceived it and through it man felt that he was not allowed to go there. Through this organ he found his way. You should not imagine this organ as an original eye – such an idea gives rise to all kinds of errors – but you should imagine that it was a kind of heat organ, by means of which man, even at great distances, could distinguish cold and warm conditions, and those that were harmful or beneficial to him. At the same time, this organ was connected to the organs we call the lymph organs, which are related to the currents in the human body that are connected to the white blood cells. The well-being or distress of a person, who still had mainly white blood cells, depended on what this organ perceived. This was therefore a center in which everything that was present as a formation in the expanse of the heavens was collected.

And God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land become visible! And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called the Sea. And God saw that it was good.

Here you see a reference to another confluence of currents; these are in the lower currents, in the earthly nature of man. They relate to human reproduction, to procreation. But procreation in these ancient times – and this is very important – was completely covered by the most absolute unconsciousness. This is a profound secret of the evolution of the world. One could say that it is the original divine commandment that the deity gave to the earthly beings: You shall not know how you reproduce on earth. The entire act of reproduction was shrouded in profound unconsciousness. During the times when consciousness emerged on earth, no reproduction took place. So you can imagine that man's nature in this respect consisted in his starting out from a complete innocence or unconsciousness about this process on earth. So what did man know at the beginning of his existence on earth? He only knew his spiritual descent, he knew that he had descended as an ego from the bosom of the Godhead. Where he came from in a physical sense, where his bodies came from, was completely closed to him, he knew nothing about it, it was covered by a complete state of innocence. Let us imagine exactly what happened at that time.

People came into being in the way we have just described. People who had developed their physical body, their etheric and astral body on the moon, now received their ego. These people were completely innocent about everything that was going on in the physical world. They could not see that either; they did not see their own physical body. They saw spiritual conditions; they knew that they descended from the divinity. But there were other entities, not human beings, but entities, which had remained behind on the old moon, which could not become gods. What had reached a higher level on the moon now had its setting on the sun, where the Elohim are, who dwell on the sun as man dwells on earth. Now there was a parallel development of beings on the sun and on the earth. After the sun and the moon had come out of the earth, the earth was placed between the sun on one side and the moon on the other. The highest being that developed on Earth was a being with a physical body, etheric body, astral body and I: man. On the Sun, the highest being had a physical body but in a completely different form than the human one - etheric body, astral body, I, spirit self (Manas), life spirit (Budhi), spirit man (Atma), and in addition an eighth part, beyond Atma. Thus higher beings who had already developed an eighth limb are the Elohim, the sun spirits, who, when the earth and the sun had separated, took a different path. Human beings had taken the earthly path. The sun spirits had already developed their Atma on the moon; they went to the sun to develop there at a higher level. But now there were beings on the old moon who could not go with the sun because they had remained behind. Of course, they were much more highly developed than humans. They had something that humans had yet to achieve. They already had the consciousness through which one sees external physical objects. They could already use tools that humans could not yet use. Humans still had blind eyes and deaf ears. His eyes and ears were only developed in the beginning; they were to become seeing and hearing later. But lower animals of that time had retained forms from the moon that they could use in a certain way earlier than humans could use their bodies. And in that, those beings who had come over from the moon were actually embodied on earth first, and who were not yet ready to go with the sun, but who were further along than humans. They embodied themselves in forms that have long since disappeared, in beings that enabled them to see into the physical environment. These beings, who were between humans and gods, inspired and spiritualized such lower forms, for the higher human bodies were still too clumsy, just as a child is much clumsier than a young chicken when it is born. These lower beings were dragons or serpents, which at that time were provisionally inhabited by these beings between the gods and men. These beings were closely related to that which belongs to the earth in man; they had nothing of what lived in man from the part directed to the sun. But they had something the people who still lived in dull image-consciousness: They could already perceive the physical objects that were on the earth. Man lived in complete innocence about the physical process of sexuality; that was shrouded in darkness for him. These beings saw him as the gods saw him, and so they could approach man and say: You can become like the gods, you need only do one thing, you need only extend your desire into the lower regions; as soon as your desire extends into the lowest regions, you will see as the gods see; if you do that, you will see your own form.

In a sense, humanity's state of innocence was thereby taken away. That is one side of it. The other side is the freedom that man has gained as a result. [Gap in the transcription.] Entities that were between the inhabitants of the sun and the inhabitants of the earth, who could not gain the right to the sun, wanted to open people's eyes; they approached people as seducers and said:

Your eyes will be opened, and you will know good and evil.

You will see what is around you, and you will get to know the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.

Thus the religious documents are literally true. We just have to learn to understand them literally again. Today's reflection will have shown you that one must not speculate about these things. One must ask the real secret science, then light comes in a wonderful way into the religious documents.

In the history of German literary research, Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxony, who died on March 23, 1897, deserves a place of honour. Goethe's last grandson appointed her heiress to his grandfather's entire manuscript estate. He could not have entrusted the valuable treasures to anyone better than her. In April 1885, Goethe's papers passed into her possession. From then on, she regarded the administration of the legacy as a sacred and dear duty. She wanted to make it as fruitful as possible for science. She carefully discussed with men whom she considered to be good Goethe experts, Herman Grimm, Wilhelm Scherer, Gustav von Loeper and Erich Schmidt, how the property entrusted to her should be used for literary-historical research. She founded the "Goethe Archive" and appointed Erich Schmidt as its director. She believed that she could best serve the knowledge of Goethe and his time by publishing a Goethe edition that met all the scholarly requirements of the time. She invited a large number of scholars to collaborate on this edition. It was her heart's desire to see the completion of this monumental work. Unfortunately, it did not come true. Only half of the planned number of volumes have been published to date. The Grand Duchess took the most active part in the work of her archive. The current director of this institution, Bernhard Suphan, could only ever speak in terms of the greatest enthusiasm when he spoke of this interest. She went into all the details of the work.

Goethe's estate acted like a magnet on the papers left behind by other German poets and writers. In May 1889, Schiller's descendants made a gift of their ancestor's manuscripts to the Grand Duchess. The "Goethe Archive" thus expanded to become the "Goethe and Schiller Archive".

The plan emerged to gradually develop this into a German literary archive. Much has already been done to realize this plan. The estates of Otto Ludwig, Friedrich Hebbel, Eduard Mörike and others are already in the Goethe and Schiller Archive. In order to complete her creation, the Grand Duchess decided to build her own house to house the treasures. On June 28, 1896, the magnificent building on the Ilm, near the Residenzschloss, was officially opened. Anyone who was present at the ceremonial opening of this literary archive could observe the seriousness and love with which the Grand Duchess spoke of her creation. You could see how happy she felt to be able to serve science.

The Grand Duchess Sophie had a clear eye and a sure sense of what was great and important. She possessed a sharp power of judgment that allowed her to make the right decisions on the most difficult issues. Her indomitable energy and rare prudence enabled her to devote her attention to even the smallest details connected with her work. What she did for the cultivation of art, for the education of the youth in Weimar, for the material welfare of her country, cannot be overlooked today. It was in her nature to set herself beautiful tasks and to carry them out with a strong will. She is greatly revered in Weimar. She is held in high esteem by the members of the Goethe Society, the Shakespeare Society and the Schiller Foundation, who were able to see at their meetings in Weimar how great the interest this woman took in intellectual endeavors was and how great the understanding she had for cultural tasks. Her wish was that everyone should spend pleasant days in Weimar when they visited this place in order to revive the memory of great times of the past. It has often been said in recent times that people in Weimar live from the past. That is true. But this life of great memories is best understood. And it is hardly to be regretted that there is such a place where people gather from time to time who otherwise live only in the present. It is nice to see the past come alive in front of you from time to time, as if in a dream. The fact that Weimar is such a place today, which many people like to visit again and again to celebrate the great dead, and that they take good impressions home with them from their visits, is something to which the late Grand Duchess contributed a great deal.

To link Richard Wagner¹ with mysticism, as we shall do in today's consideration, will easily give rise to objections based on the misconception that to speak about an artist from a particular spiritual-scientific viewpoint is impermissible. Other objections will be directed against mysticism as such.

Today we shall look at Richard Wagner's relation to art on the one hand and mysticism on the other. The objection can be made that Wagner never spoke, or even hinted at, some of the things that will be mentioned. Such an objection is so obvious that anyone would have thought of it before speaking. It must be borne in mind that when a cultural phenomenon such as Richard Wagner is to be considered, one cannot be limited to say only what Wagner spoke about. That would make a discussion on any issue from a higher point of view impossible.

No one would suggest that a botanist or a poet should refrain from expressing what he discovered, or what he felt about plants and other phenomena. When discussing issues, whether cultural or natural, one cannot be limited to say only what the phenomenon conveys. In that case the plant should be able to convey to the botanist the laws of its growth; and the feelings and sentiments it aroused in the poet would be unjustified. The reality is that in the human soul, precisely what the external world is unable to say about itself is revealed.

It is in this sense that what I have to say about the phenomenon that is Richard Wagner must be taken. Certainly a plant knows nothing of the laws, however, it nevertheless grows and develops. Similarly, an artist need not be aware of the laws inherent in his nature of which the observer with spiritual insight is able to speak. The artist lives and creates according to these laws as the plant creates according to laws that are subsequently discovered. Therefore, the objection should not be made that Wagner did not speak about things that will be indicated today.

As regards other objections concerned with mysticism, the fact is that people, educated and uneducated alike, speak of mysticism as of something obscure. In comparison with what is known as the scientific world view, they find it nebulous. This has not always been so. The great mystics of the early Christian centuries, the Gnostics, have thought otherwise, as does anyone with understanding of mysticism. The Gnostics have called it “mathesis,” mathematics, not because mysticism is mathematics, but because genuine mystics have striven for a similar clarity in the ideas they derive from spiritual worlds. Properly understood, mysticism, far from being obscure or sentimental, is in its approach to the world crystal clear. Having now shown that the two kinds of objections are invalid, let us proceed with today's considerations.

Richard Wagner can indeed be discussed from the highest spiritual scientific viewpoint. No seeker after Truth of the nineteenth century strove, his whole life long, more honestly and sincerely to discover answers to the world-riddles than Richard Wagner. His house in Bayreuth he named, “Inner Peace” (Wahnfried), saying that there he found peace from his “doubts and delusions” (sein Wähnen Ruhe fand). These words already reveal a great deal about Richard Wagner.

What is meant by error and delusion is all too well-known to someone who honestly and sincerely pursues the path to higher knowledge. This happens irrespective of whether the spiritual realm a person believes he will discover finds expression through art, or takes some other form. He is strongly aware of the many deluding images that come to block his path and slow his progress. That person knows that the path to higher knowledge is neither easy nor straightforward—that truth is reached only through inner upheavals and tribulations. Moreover, he is aware that dangers have to be met, but also that experiences of inner bliss will be his. A person who travels the path of knowledge will eventually reach that inner peace that is the result of intimate knowledge of the secrets of the world. Wagner's awareness and experience of these things comes to expression when he says: “I name this house ‘Inner Peace’ because here I found peace from error and delusions.” (“Weil hier mein Wahnen Ruhe fand, Wahnfried sei dieses Haus genannt.”)

Unlike many artists who attempt to create out of fantasy that lacks substance, Wagner saw from the start an artistic calling as a mission of world historical relevance; he felt that the Beauty created by art should also express truth and knowledge. Art was to him something holy; he saw the source of artistic creativity in religious feelings and perceptions. The artist, he felt, has a kind of priestly calling, and that what he, Richard Wagner, offered to mankind should have religious dedication. It should fulfill a religious task and mission in mankind's evolution. He felt that he was one of those who must contribute to their era something based on the fullness of truth and reality.

When spiritual science is properly understood, it will be seen that, far from being a gray theory remote from the real issues, it can help us to understand and to appreciate on his own terms a cultural phenomenon such as Richard Wagner.

Wagner had a basic feeling, an inner awareness, that guided him to the same Truth about mankind's origin and evolution as that indicated by spiritual science. This inner awareness linked him to spiritual science and to all genuine mysticism. He wanted a unification of the arts; he wanted the various branches of art to work together, complementing one another. He felt that the lack, the shortcomings, in contemporary art forms was caused by what he called “their selfishness and egoism. Instead of the various art forms going their separate ways, he saw their working together as an ideal, creating a harmonious whole to which each contributed with selfless devotion. He insisted that art had once existed in such an ideal form. He thought to recognize it in ancient Greece prior to Sophocles,² Euripides³ and others. Before the arts separated, drama and dance, for example, had worked together and had selflessly created combined artistic works. Wagner had a kind of clairvoyant vision of such combined endeavor. Although history does not speak of it, his vision was true and points back to a primordial time when not only the arts but also all spiritual and cultural streams within various people worked together as a harmonious whole.

Spiritual science recognizes that what is known today as art and science are different branches originating from a common root. Whether we go back to the ancient cultures of Greece, Egypt, India or Persia, or to our own Germanic origin, everywhere we find primordial cultures where art and science are not separated. However, this is a past that is beyond the reach of external research, and is accessible only to clairvoyant vision.

In the ancient civilizations, art and science formed a unity that was looked upon as a mystery. Mystery centers existed for the cultivation of wisdom, beauty and religious piety before these became separated and cultivated in different establishments.

We can visualize what took place within the mysteries, with in these temples, which were places of learning and also of artistic performances. We can conjure up before our mind's eye the great dramas, seen by those who had been admitted to the mysteries. As I said, ordinary history can tell us nothing of these things. The performances were dramatic musical interpretations of the wisdom attained within the mysteries, and they were permeated with deep religious devotion. A few words will convey what took place in those times of which nothing is known save what spiritual science has to say. Those admitted to the Mysteries came together to watch a drama depicting the world's creation. Such dramas existed everywhere. They depicted how primordial divine beings descended from spiritual heights and let their essence stream out to become world-substance that they then shaped and formed into the various creature's of the kingdoms of nature: the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and that of humans. In other words, divine essence streamed into and formed everything that surrounded us, and it finally celebrated a kind of resurrection within the human soul.

Thoughtful people have always felt that the world is of divine origin, that the divine element attains consciousness in the human soul, and, as it were, looks out through human eyes observing itself in its own creation. This descent and resurrection of the divine element was enacted in Egypt, in the drama of Osiris, and dramatized also at various places of initiation in Greece. Those who were permitted to watch saw how art and knowledge combined to depict in dramatic form the creation of the world. Deep feelings of religious piety were called up in the onlooker by this drama, which might be said to be the archetypal drama. With reverence and awe the onlooker watched the gods descend into matter, to slumber in all beings, and resurrect within human beings. Filled with awe, the onlooker experienced a mood described once by Goethe in the following significant words: “When man's whole being functions as a healthy entity, and he feels the world to be a great, beautiful, worthy and estimable unity; when pleasure in the harmony gives him pure delight, then, had it self-awareness, the whole universe, feeling it had reached its goal, would shout for joy, and admire the pinnacle of its being and achievement.” A wondrous, deeply religious mood filled the hearts of those who watched this drama of the creation of the world.

And not only was a religious mood created, but the drama also conveyed the kind of knowledge that was later imparted in scientific concepts to explain the creation of the world and its beings. However, at that time one received, in the form of pictures, a knowledge that was both scientific and religious. Science and religion were one.

Richard Wagner had a dim feeling that such harmony had once existed. He looked back to a very old culture in ancient Greece that still had a religious character. He saw that in gray antiquity music, drama, dance and architecture did not operate as separate undertakings; they all functioned in conjunction with one another: Knowledge, art and religion were a unity. He concluded that as they separated the arts became self-seeking, egoistical. Wagner looked back as it were to a far distant past when human beings were not so individual, when a person felt as a member of his dass, of his whole tribe, when the folk spirit was still regarded as a concrete reality. In that ancient time a natural selflessness had existed. And the thought came to him that man, in order to become an individual, a personality, had to leave the old clan-community to enable the personal element to assert itself. Only in this way could man become a free being, but the price was a certain degree of egoism.

Wagner looked back to what in a primordial past had held people together in communities, a selflessness that had to be left behind so that human beings could become more and more conscious. He had an intuitive presentiment about the future; he felt that once individual freedom and independence had been attained, humans would have to find the way back to fellowship and caring relationships. Selflessness would have to be consciously regained, and loving kindness once more would have to become a prominent factor of life.

For Wagner the present linked itself with the future, for he visualized as a distant ideal the existence of selflessness within the arts. Furthermore, he saw art as playing a significant role in evolution. Human development and that of art appeared to him to go hand in hand; both became egoistical when they ceased to function as a totality. As we see them today, drama, architecture and dance have gone their independent ways. As humanity grew more and more selfish, so did art. Wagner visualized a future when the arts would once more function in united partnership. Because he saw a commune of artists as a future ideal, he was referred to as “the communist.”

He aimed to contribute all he could to bring forth harmony among the arts; he saw this as a powerful means of pouring into human hearts the selflessness that must form the Basis for a future fraternity. He was a missionary of social selflessness in the sphere of art; he wanted to pour into every soul the impulse of selflessness that brings about harmony among people. Richard Wagner was truly possessed of a deep impulse of a kind that could only arise and be sustained in someone with a deep conviction of the reality of spiritual life. Richard Wagner had that conviction.

Already his work The Flying Dutchman bears witness to his belief in the existence of a spiritual world behind the physical. You must bear in mind that I do not for a moment suggest that Wagner himself was conscious of the things I am indicating. His artistic impulse developed according to spiritual laws, as a plant develops according to laws of which it is not conscious, but which are discovered by the botanist.

When a materialist observes his fellowmen, he sees them as physical entities isolated from one another, their separate souls enclosed within their bodies. He consequently believes that all communication between them can only be of an external physical nature. He regards as real only what one person may say or do to another. However, once there is awareness of a spiritual world behind the physical, one is aware also of hidden influences that act from person to person without a physical agent. Hidden influences stream from soul to soul, even when nothing is outwardly expressed. What a person thinks and feels is not without significance or value for the person towards whom the thoughts and feelings are directed. He who thinks materialistically only knows that one can physically reach and assist another person. He has no notion that his inner feelings have significance for others, or that bonds, invisible to physical sight, link soul to soul. A mystic is well aware of these bonds. Richard Wagner was profoundly aware of their existence.

To clarify what is meant by this, let us look at a significant legend from the Middle Ages that to modern humans is just a legend. However, its author, and anyone who recognizes its mystical meaning, is aware that this legend expresses a spiritual reality. The legend, which is part of an epic, teils us about Poor Henry who suffered from a dreadful illness. We are told that only if a pure maiden would sacrifice herself for him could he be cured of his terrible infliction. This indicates that the love, offered by a soul that is pure, can directly influence and do something concretely for another human life.

Such legends depict something of which the materialist has no notion, namely, that purely spiritually one soul can influence another. Is the maiden's sacrifice for Poor Henry ultimately anything else than a physical demonstration of what a large part of mankind believes to be the mystical effect of sacrifice? Is it not an instance of what the Redeemer on the Cross had bestowed on mankind; is it not an instance of that mystical effect that acts from soul to soul? It demonstrates the existence of a spiritual reality behind the physical that can be sensed by man, and led Wagner to the legend of The Flying Dutchman—the legend of a man so entangled in material existence that he can find no deliverance from it. The Flying Dutchman is with good reason referred to as the “Ahasverus of the sea,” that is, The Wandering Jew of the sea.

Ashasverus' destiny is caused by the fact that he cannot believe in a Redeemer; he cannot believe that someone can guide mankind onwards to ever greater heights and more perfect stages of evolution. An Ashasverus is someone that has become stuck where he is; human beings must ascend stage by stage if they are to progress. Without striving, he unites himself with matter, with external aspects of life, and becomes stuck in an existence that goes on and on, at the same level. He pours scorn on Him that leads mankind upwards, and remains entangled in matter. What does that mean? Existence keeps repeating itself for someone who is completely immersed in external life. Materialistic and spiritual comprehension differ, because matter repeats itself, whereas spirit ascends. The moment spirit succumbs to matter, it succumbs to repetition.

That happens in the case of The Flying Dutchman. Various peoples related this idea to the discoveries of foreign lands; the crossing of oceans and reaching foreign shores was seen as a means of attaining perfection. He who lacked the urge, who did not sense the spirit's call, became stuck in sameness, in what belongs solely to matter. The Flying Dutchman, whose whole disposition is materialistic, is abandoned by the power to evolve, by the power of love, which is the means to ascend to ever greater perfection. He becomes entangled in matter and consequently in the eternal repetition of the same. Those who suffer inability to ascend, who lack the urge to evolve, must come under the influence of a soul that is chaste and pure. Only an innocent maiden's love can redeem the Flying Dutchman.

A certain relationship exists between a soul that is as yet untouched by material life and one that has become entangled in it. Wagner has an instinctive feeling for this fact, and portrays it with great power in his dramas. Only someone with his mystical sense, and perception of the spirit behind the physical, would have the courage to take on a cultural mission of the magnitude Richard Wagner has assigned to himself. It has enabled him to visualize music and drama in ways no one has thought of before. He has looked back to ancient Greece, to a time when various art forms still played an integral part in performances, when music expressed what the art of drama could not express, and eternal universal laws were expressed through the rhythm of dance.

In older works of art, where dance, rhythm and harmony still collaborated, he recognized something of the musical-dramatic element of the artistic works of antiquity. He acquired a unique sense for harmony, for tonality in music, but insisted that contributions from related arts were essential. Something from them must flow into the music. One such related art was dance, not as it has become, but the dance that once expressed movements in nature and movements of the stars. In ancient times, dance originated from a feeling for laws in nature. Man in his own movements copied those in nature. Rhythm of dance was reflected in the harmony of the music. Other arts, such as poetry, whose vehicle is words, also contributed, and what could not be expressed through words was contributed by related arts. Harmonious collaboration existed among dance, music and poetry. The musical element arose from the cooperation of harmony, rhythm and melody.

This was what mystics and also Richard Wagner felt as the spirit of art in ancient times, when the various arts worked together in brotherly fashion, when melody, rhythm and harmony had not yet attained their later perfection. When they separated, dance became an art form in its own right, and poetry likewise. Consequently, rhythm became a separate experience, and poetry no longer added its contribution to the musical element. No longer was there collaboration between the arts. In tracing the arts up to modern times, Wagner noticed that the egoism in art increased as human beings egoism increased.

Let us now look at attempts made by Wagner to create something harmonious within the artistic one-sidedness he faced. This is the sphere that reveals his greatness as he searched for the true nature of art.

To Richard Wagner, Beethoven⁴ and Shakespeare⁵ represented artists who one-sidedly cultivated the two arts he particularly wanted to bring together, music and drama. He only had to look at his own inner being to recognize the impossibility of conveying, merely through words, the whole gamut of human feelings, particularly feelings that do not manifest externally through gestures or words. Shakespeare was in his view a one-sided dramatist because dramatic words on their own are incapable of expressing things of deeper import. Only when inner impulses have become external action, have become part of space and time, can they be conveyed through dramatic art. When watching a drama, one must assume the impulses portrayed to be already experiences that are past. What one witnesses is no longer drama taking place within the. person concerned; it has already passed over into what can be physically seen and heard. Whatever deeper feelings and sensations are the basis for what is portrayed on the stage cannot be conveyed by the dramatist.

In music, on the other hand, Wagner regarded the symphonist, the pure instrumentalist, to be the most one-sided, for he conveyed in wonderful tone and scales the inner drama, the whole range of human feelings, but had no means of expressing impulses once they became gestures, or became part of space and time. Thus, Wagner saw music as able to express the inner life, but unable to convey what came to expression outwardly. Dramatic art, on the other hand, when refusing to collaborate with music, only conveyed impulses when they became externalized.

According to Wagner, Shakespeare conveyed one aspect of dramatic art, and Mozart,⁶ Haydn⁷ and Beethoven another. In Beethoven's Ninth Symphony Wagner sensed something that strove to break away from the one-sidedness of this art form, strove to burst the Shell and become articulate, strove to permeate the whole world and envelop mankind with love. Wagner saw it as his mission not to let this element remain as it was in the Ninth Symphony, but to bring it out still further into space and time. He wanted it not only to be an external expression of a soul's inner drama, but also to flow into words and action. He wanted to present on the stage both aspects of dramatic art: in music, the whole range of inner sensations, and in drama, the aspect of those inner sensations that come to external expression. What he sought was a higher unity of Shakespeare and Beethoven. He wanted the whole of humanity represented on the stage.

When we watch some action taking place on the stage, we should become aware of more than can be perceived by eyes and ears. We should be able to be aware also of deeper impulses residing in the human soul. This aspect caused dissatisfaction in Wagner with the old type of opera. Here the dramatist, the poet and the musician worked separately on a production. The poet wrote his part, the musician then came along and interpreted what was written through music. But the task of music is rather to express what poetry by itself cannot express. Human nature consists of an inner as well as an outer aspect. The inner cannot be portrayed through external means; the outer aspect can indeed be dramatized, but words are incapable of conveying impulses that live within human beings. Music should not be there to illustrate the poetry, but to complete it. What poetry cannot express should be conveyed by music.

That was Wagner's great ideal and the sense in which he wanted to create. He assigned to himself the mission to create a work of art in which music and poetry worked together selflessly. Wagner's basic idea was of mystical origin; he wanted to understand the whole human being, the inner person as well as what he revealed outwardly. Wagner knew that within human beings a higher being resides, a higher self that was only partially revealed in space and time. He sought to understand that higher entity that rises above the everyday. He felt that it must approached from as many sides as possible. His search for the superhuman aspect of man's being, for that which rises above the merely personal, led him to myths. Mythical figures were not merely human, they were superhuman: They revealed the superhuman aspect of a person's being. Characters like Siegfried and Lohengrin do not display qualities belonging to a single human being, but to many. Wagner turned to the superhuman figures portrayed in myths because he sought understanding of the deeper aspects of the human being.

A clear look at his work reveals how deep an insight he had attained into mankind's evolution. In The Ring of the Nibelung and Parsifal we witness, powerfully presented, great riddles of humanity's existence. They reveal his intuitive perception, his deep feelings for all mankind.

We can do no more than turn a few spotlights on Wagner's inner experiences as an artist. In so doing we soon discover his strong affinity with what could be called "man's mythical past." His particular interest in the figure of Siegfried can easily be understood when seen in connection with his concept of mankind's evolution. Looking back to ancient times, Wagner saw that formerly the bond between human beings was based on selfless love within the confines of a tribe. Human consciousness at that time was duller; he did not yet experience personal independence. Each one felt himself, not so much an individual, but rather as a member of his tribe. He experienced the tribal soul as a reality.

Wagner felt that especially traits in European culture can be traced back to the time when natural instinctive love united human beings in interrelated groups, a time of which spiritual science also speaks when showing that everything in the world evolves, and that today's clear consciousness gradually evolved from a different type, of which there are still residues. In pictures of dream-consciousness Wagner recognized echoes of a former picture-consciousness that had once been the normal consciousness of all mankind. The waking consciousness of today replaced a much duller type; while it lasted, human beings were much closer to one another. As Wagner recognized, those related were bound together by natural love connected with the blood. Not until later did individuality, and with it egoism, assert itself. However, this constitutes a necessary stage in man's evolution.

The subject I shall now bring up will be familiar to those acquainted with spiritual science, but others may find it somewhat strange. The lucid day-consciousness now existing in Europe evolved from the very different consciousness of a primordial human race that preceded our own—a humanity that existed on Atlantis, a continent situated where the Atlantic Ocean is now. Those who take note of what goes on in the world will be aware that even natural science speaks of an Atlantean continent. A scientific journal, Kosmos, recently carried an article about it. Physical conditions on Atlantis were very different; the atmosphere in which the ancestors of today's European lived was a mixture of air and water. Large areas of the continent were covered with huge masses of dense mist. The sun was not seen as we see it, but surrounded by enormous bands of color due to the masses of mist. In Germanic legends a memory is preserved of that ancient country, and given descriptive names such as Niflheim or Nibelungenheim. As the Hood gradually submerged the Atlantean continent, it also gave shape to the German plains. The Rhine was regarded as a remnant of the Atlantean "Being of Mist” that once covered most of the countries. The water of the Rhine was thought to have originated in Nibelungenheim or Nebelheim (Nebel means “mist”), to have come from the dense mist of ancient Atlantis. Through a dreamlike consciousness, full of premonition, all this is told in sagas and myths wherein is described how conditions caused the people to abandon the area and how, as they wandered eastwards, their dull consciousness grew ever more lucid while egoism increased.

A consequence of the former dull consciousness was a certain selflessness, but with the clearer air, consciousness grew brighter and egoism stronger. The vaporous mist had enveloped the people of Atlantis with an atmosphere saturated with wisdom, selflessness and love. This selfless, love-filled wisdom flowed with the water into the Rhine and reposed beneath it as wisdom, as gold. But this wisdom, if taken hold of by egoism, provides it with power. As they went eastward, the former inhabitants of Atlantis saw the Rhine embracing the hoard of the gold of wisdom that had once been a source of selflessness. All this is intimated in the world of sagas that took hold of Wagner. He had such inner kinship with that lofty spiritual being who preserves memory of the past, whose spirit lives in sagas and myths, that he extracted from myths the whole essence of his view of the world. We therefore witness, dramatized on the stage and echoing through his music, the consequences of human egoism.

We see the Ring closing, as Alberich takes the gold of the Rhine from the Rhine Maidens. Alberich is representative of the Nibelungs, who have become egoistic, of the human being that forswears the love through which he is a member of a unity—a dan or tribe. Wagner links to the plan that weaves through the legend the power of possession—that the ancient world arises before his mind's eye, the world that has produced Walhalla, the world of Wotan, and of the ancient gods. They represent a kind of group-soul possessing traits that a people have in common. But when the Ring cioses around man's “I,” the individual too is taken hold of by greed for gold.

Wagner sensitively portrays what lives in Wotan as group-soul qualities, and in human beings become egoistic craving for the Rhine-gold. We hear it in his music; how could one fail to hear it? It should not be said that something arbitrary is at this point inserted in the music. No human ear could fail to hear in that long E-flat major in the Rhine-gold the impact of the emerging human “I.” Wagner's deep mystical sense can be traced in his music.

We are shown that Wotan has to come to terms, not with the consciousness that had become individualized, but with that which had not yet become so, and still strongly acts as group-consciousness. When he tries by stealth to take away the Ring from the giant, he meets this consciousness in the figure of Erda. She is clearly representing the old all-encompassing consciousness through which knowledge is attained clairvoyantly of the whole environment. The words spoken at this point are most significant:

To thee is known
What lies hidden in the deep,
What weaves in air and water
Through mountain and valley.
Thou breathest through The wele of existence;
When heads ponder Thy sense emerges.
It is said that to thee All things are known.

The old consciousness that held sway in Nebelheim cannot be better described than in the words:

My sleep is a dreaming
My dream is a musing
My musing is ruled by wisdom.

The old consciousness was a dreaming consciousness, but in this dream human beings knew of the whole surrounding world. The dream encompassed the depth of nature and spun its wisdom from person to person, whose musing and actions all stemmed from this dreaming consciousness. Wotan meets it in the figure of Erda with the result that a new consciousness arises.

What is of a higher order is always depicted in myths and sagas as a female figure. In Goethe's Faust it is indicated in the words of the Chorus Mysticus: “The eternal feminine draws us upwards and on.” Various peoples have depicted a person's inner striving towards a higher consciousness as a union with a higher aspect of the being that is seen as feminine. What is depicted as a marriage is a person's union with the cosmic laws that permeate and illumine his soul. For example, in ancient Egypt we see Isis, and as always the female figure that is looked up to as the higher consciousness has characteristics that correspond to those of the particular people. What a people feels to be its real essence, its true nature, is depicted as a female figure corresponding to this ideal—a feminine aspect with which the individual human being becomes united after death, or also while still living.

As we have seen, man can rise above the sensual, either by leaving it behind, and in death uniting with the spirit, or he may attain the union while still living by attaining spiritual sight. In either case, this higher self is depicted in Germanic myths as a female figure. The warrior who fought courageously and died on the battlefield is regarded by ancestors of today's Middle European as someone who, on entering the spiritual world, would be united with this higher aspect of his being. Hence, the Walkyries are shown to approach the dying warriors and carry them up into spiritual realms. Union with the Walkyrie represents union with the higher consciousness. The Walkyrie Brunnhilde is created through the union of Wotan and Erda. Siegfried is to be united with her and guided into spiritual life. Thus, the daughter of Erda represents the higher consciousness of initiation. Siegfried represents the new, the different human being that has come into existence. Because of the configuration and higher perfection of his inner being, he is united with the Walkyrie already in life.

The hidden wisdom in Germanic legends comes to expression in Wagner's artistic creation. He shows that through the Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the old group-soul consciousness must die out as the new individual consciousness develops in Siegfried. Wagner had a deep awareness of the great mysteries connected with mankind's evolution. A human being's inner experiences he expressed through music, his action through dramatic art.

His sense for the mystical aspect of evolution enabled him to portray a person's higher development. It made him place at the centre of one of his dramas the figure of Lohengrin. Who is Lohengrin? He can be understood only when seen an the background of the momentous upheavals taking place all over Europe at the time when the legend was living reality. Only then can we understand what Wagner had in mind when he depicts Lohengrin's relationship with the Lady he names as Elsa von Brabant. Throughout Europe a new epoch was dawning; An individual's striving personality was coming to the fore. Though described in prosaic terms, these phenomena hide events of greatest significance. In France, Scotland, England and as far away as Russia, a new social structure was developing, in the form of the “Free City.” In rural districts, people still lived in groups, in clans; those who wanted to escape flocked to the cities. The urban environment promoted individual consciousness and feelings of independence. People in the city were those who wanted to strip off the bonds of clan or tribe; they wanted to live their own lives in their own way.

In reality a mighty revolution was taking place. Up till then a person's name decided where he belonged and his status. In the City, a person's name was of no importance, family background of no concern. What counted was personal ability; in the city individuality developed. The evolution from selflessness to individuality became an evolution from individuality to brotherhood. The legend depicted this. In the middle of the Middle Ages the old social structure was being replaced with a new structure, within which each person contributed according to his individual capacity.

Formerly, Leaders and rulers, were always descended from priestly and aristocratic families. The fact that they came from such a background was what mattered; they must have the “right” blood. In the future that would be of no account; someone chosen as leader might be completely unknown as regards descent, and it would be regarded as irreverent to link him with a particular name. The ideal was seen in the great individuality, in the anonymous sage who continued to grow and develop; he was not significant because of his descent, but because of what he was. He was a free individual acknowledged by others just because his achievements were his own.

In this sense, Lohengrin comes before us as representative of man, leading men to freedom and independence. The lady who becomes his wife represents the consciousness described as that of city-dweller of the Middle Ages. He who mediates between the Lofty Being that guides mankind and the people is always associated with great individuality, and is always known by a specific name. Through spiritual knowledge he is known by the technical name “Swan,” which denotes a particular stage of higher spiritual development. The Swan mediates between ordinary people and the Lofty Being that leads humanity. We see a reflection of this in the legend of Lohengrin.

If we are to do justice to the wisdom found in legends, to things revealed through Wagner's artistry, we must bring to it an open mind and mobile ideas. If taken in a narrow, pedantic sense, we are left with empty words instead of being inwardly fired with enthusiasm by the far-reaching vistas opened up through his work. I must be permitted to bring these things before you in concepts that point to a greater perspective. A figure like Lohengrin must be presented in light of its world-historical background and significance. And we must recognize that an understanding of this significance dawned in Wagner, enabling him to give it artistic
form.

The same also applies to Wagner's comprehension of the Holy Grail. We concerned ourselves with the Holy Grail in the previous lecture: “Who are the Rosicrucians?” It is indeed a remarkable fact that at a certain moment there arose in Wagner an inkling of the great teaching that flourished in the Middle Ages. Before that happened, another idea, as it were, prepared the way, but first it led him to create a drama called The Victor; this was in 1856.

The Victor was never performed, but the idea it embodied was incorporated into his Parsifal. The Victor depicted the following:

Ananda, a youth of the Brahman caste, was loved by a Tschandala maiden; because of the caste system he cannot reciprocate the love. Ananda became a follower of Buddha, and he eventually conquered his human craving: He gained victory over himself. To the maiden was then revealed that in a former life she was a Brahman and had overcome her love for the youth who was then of the Tschandala caste. Thus, she too was a victor. She and Ananda were spiritually united.

Wagner renders a beautiful interpretation of this idea, taking it as far as reincarnation and karma in the Christian-Anthroposophical sense. We are shown that the maiden herself, in a former life, brought about the present events. Wagner has worked on this idea in 1856.

On Good Friday, 1857, he was sitting in the Retreat, “the sanctuary on the green hill.” Looking out over the fields watching the plants come to life, sprouting from the earth, an inkling arose in him of the Power of the germinating force emerging from the earth in response to the rays of the sun: a driving force, a motivating force that permeates the whole world and lives in all beings; a force that must evolve, that cannot remain as it is; a force that, to reach higher stages, must pass through death. Watching the plants, he felt the force of sprouting life, and turning his gaze across the Lake of Zürich to the village; he contemplated the opposite idea, that of death—the two polar concepts to which Goethe gives such eloquent expression in his poem, Blessed Longing.

And until thou truly hast,
This dying and becoming,
Thou are but a troubled guest
O'er the dark earth roaming.

Goethe rewrote the words in his hymn to nature saying: “Nature invented death to have more life; only through death can she create a higher spiritual life.”

On Good Friday, as the symbol of death came before mankind in remembrance, Wagner sensed the connection between life, death and immortality. He felt a connection between the life sprouting from the earth and the Death on the Cross, the Death that is also the source of a Christian belief that life will ultimately be victorious over death, will become eternal life. Wagner sensed an inner connection between the sprouting life of spring and the Good Friday belief in Redemption, the belief that from Death on the Cross springs Eternal Life. This thought is the same as that contained in the Quest for the Holy Grail, where the chaste plant blossom, striving towards the sun, is contrasted with human desire filled nature. On the one hand Wagner recognized that human beings steeped in desires; on the other he looked towards a future ideal—the ideal that human beings shall attain a higher consciousness through overcoming their lower nature, shall attain a higher fructifying power, called forth by the Spirit.

Looking towards the Cross, Wagner saw the blood flowing from the Redeemer, the symbol of Redemption, being caught in the Graul Chalice. This picture, linked itself within him to the life awakening in nature. These thoughts were passing through Wagner's soul on Good Friday, 1857. He jotted down a few words that later became the basis from which he created his magnificent Good Friday drama. He wrote: "The blossoming plant springs from death; eternal life springs from the Death of Christ." At that moment Wagner had an inner awareness of the Spirit behind all things, of the Spirit victorious over death.

For a time other creative ideas pushed those concerned with Parsifal into the Background. They came to the fore once more near the end of his life, when, clearer than before, they conveyed to him a person's path of knowledge. Wagner portrayed the path to the Holy Graul to show the cleansing of a human beings' desire nature. As an ideal this is depicted as a pure holy chalice whose image is the plant calyx's chaste fructification to new creation by the sunbeam, the holy lance of love. The sunbeam enters matter as Amfortas' lance enters sinful blood. But there the result is suffering and death. The path to the Holy Grail is portrayed as a cleansing of the sinful blood of lower desires till, on a higher level, it is as pure and chaste as is the plant calyx in relation to the sunbeam. Only he who is pure in heart, unworldly, untouched by temptation, so that he approaches the Holy Grail as an "innocent fool" filled with questions of its secret, can discover the path.

Wagner's Parsifal is born out of his mystical feeling for the Holy Grail. At one time he meant to incorporate the idea into his work Die Wibelungen, an historical account of the Middle Ages. He wanted to elevate the concept of Emperor by letting Barbarossa journey to the East in search of the original spirit of Christianity, thus combining the Parsifal legend with history of the Middle Ages. This idea led to his wonderful artistic interpretation of the Good Friday tradition, so that it can truly be said that Wagner has succeeded in bringing religion into art, in making art religious.

In his artistic new creation of the Good Friday tradition, Wagner had the ingenious idea of combining the subject of faith with that of the Holy Grail. On the one hand stands the belief that mankind will be redeemed, and on the other, that through perfecting its nature humanity itself strives towards redemption; the belief that the Spirit permeating mankind—a drop of which lives in each individual as his higher self—in Christ Jesus foreshadowed humanity's redemption. All this arose as an inner picture in Wagner's mind already on that Good Friday in 1857 when he recognized the connection between the legend of Parsifal and Redemption through Christ Jesus.

We can begin to sense the presence of the Christ within mankind's spiritual environment when, with sensitivity and understanding, we absorb the story of the Holy Graul. And it can deepen to concrete inner spiritual experience when we sense the transition from the midnight of Maundy Thursday—events of Maundy Thursday—to those of Good Friday, which symbolize the victory of nature's resurrection.

Wagner's Parsifal was inspired by the festival of Easter. He wanted new life to pour into the Christian festivals, which originally were established out of a deep understanding of nature. This can be seen especially in the case of the Easter festival, which was established when it was still known that the constellation of sun and moon affected human beings. Today people want Easter celebrated an an arbitrarily chosen date, which shows that the festival is no longer experienced as it was when there was still a feeling for the working of nature. When the spirit was regarded as a reality it was sensed in all things. If we could still sense what was bequeathed to us through traditions in regard to the festivals, then we would also have a feeling for how to celebrate Good Friday. Richard Wagner did have that feeling, just as he also perceived that the words of the Redeemer: “I am with you to the end of the world,” called human beings to follow the trail that led to the lofty ideal of the Holy Grail. Then people who lived the Truth would become redeemers.

Mankind is redeemed by the Redeemer. But Wagner adds the question: "When is the Redeemer redeemed?" He is redeemed when He abides in every human heart. As He has descended into the human heart, the human heart must ascend. Something of this was also felt by Wagner, for from the motif of faith he lets sound forth what is the mystical feeling of mankind in these beautiful words from Parsifal:

Greatest Healing Wonder
Redemption for the Redeemer!

These words truly show Wagner's deep commitment to the highest ideal a person can set himself: to approach that Spiritual Power that came down to us and lives in our world. When we are worthy, we bring what resounds at the dose of Richard Wagner's Parsifal: Redemption for the Redeemer.

• 1. Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was a major German opera composer.
• 2. Sophocles (c. 495 B.C.–406 B.C.) was a great Athenian dramatist and one of the founders of Greek tragedy
• 3. Euripides (c. 480 B.C.–406 B.C.), a Greek dramatist.
• 4. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) was a German composer born in Bonn.
• 5. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English poet, playwright and actor-manager of the Globe Theatre.
• 6. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), Austrian composer.
• 7. Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), Austrian composer who established the accepted classical forms of the Symphony, string quartet, and piano sonata.

Now that we can be together again, it will be my task in the coming days to speak about important but rather difficult aspects of human and world existence, and we shall certainly not be able to reach any conclusion about these in this lecture; we can only make a beginning. As we proceed we will see how tremendously important these very questions are if we are to connect ourselves inwardly with the soul-stirring events of our times. If I had to summarize in a few words what I am going to speak about, I would say “necessity in world events and in human actions” and “human freedom in these two domains.”

There is hardly anyone who is not more or less intensely concerned with these problems, and perhaps there are hardly any events on the physical plane that urge us as strongly to deal with these questions as the ones that are at present overshadowing the peoples of Europe and reverberating in their souls. If we look at world events and our own actions, feeling, willing, and thinking within these events, considering them for the moment in conjunction with what we call divine cosmic guidance, wisdom-filled cosmic guidance, we see that this divine guidance is at work everywhere. And if we look at something that has happened and that perhaps we ourselves have been involved in, we can ask afterwards “Was the reason for this event we were involved in so much a part of wise cosmic guidance that we can say it was inevitable for it to happen as it did, and we ourselves could not have acted differently in it?” Or, looking more toward the future, we could also say “At some time in the future one or another thing will happen in which we believe we may be playing a part. Ought we not assume of the wise world guidance we presupposed that what happens in the future will also come about inevitably or, as we often say, is predetermined?” Can our freedom exist under such conditions? Can we resolve to use the ideas and skills we have acquired to intervene in some way? Can we do anything to alter things through the way we intervene if we do not want them to happen in the way they would be bound to happen without our intervention?

If we look back on the past, we tend to have the impression that everything was inevitable and could not have happened differently. If we look more toward the future, we have the impression that it must be possible for us to intervene in the course of events with our own will as much as we can. In short, we will always be in a conflict between supposing an absolute and all-pervading necessity on the one hand and necessarily assuming that we are free on the other. For without this latter assumption we cannot maintain our world view and would have to accept the fact that we are like cogs in the huge machine of existence, governed by the forces ruling the machine to the point where even the duties of the cogs are predetermined.

As you know, the conflict between choosing one thing or the other runs to some extent through all our intellectual endeavors. There have always been philosophers called determinists who supposed that all the events we are involved in through our actions and our willing are strictly predetermined, and there have also always been indeterminists who supposed that, on the contrary, human beings can intervene in the course of evolution through their will and their ideas. You know too that the most extreme form of determinism is fatalism, which clings so firmly to the belief that the world is pervaded by spiritual necessity as to presuppose that not one single thing could possibly happen differently from the way it was predetermined, that human beings cannot do other than submit passively to a fate that fills the whole world just because everything is predetermined.

Perhaps some of you also know that Kant set up an antinomian chart on one side of which he wrote a particular statement and always set its opposite on the other side.¹ For example, on one side stood the assertion “In terms of space the world is infinite,” and on the other side “In terms of space the world is finite.” He then went on to show that with the concepts at our disposal we can prove one of these just as well as the other. We can prove with the same logical exactitude that “the world is infinite with regard to both space and time” or that “the world is finite, boarded-up, in terms of space and that it had a beginning in time.”

The questions we have introduced also belong among the ones Kant put on his antinomian chart. He drew people's attention to the fact that one can just as well prove positively, in as proper and logical a way as possible, that everything that happens in the world, including human action, is subject to rigid necessity, as one can prove that human beings are free and influence in one way or another the course of events when they bring their will to bear on it. Kant considered these questions to be outside the realm of human knowledge, to be questions that lie beyond the limits of human knowledge, because we can prove the one just as easily and conclusively as the other.

Our studies of the last few years will actually have more or less given you the groundwork to get to the bottom of this strange mystery. For it certainly is a mysterious question whether human beings are bound by necessity or are free. It is a puzzling matter. Yet it is even more puzzling that both these alternatives can be conclusively proved. You will find no basis at all for overcoming doubt in this sphere if you look outside of what we call spiritual science. Only the background spiritual science can give will enable you to discover something about what is at the bottom of this mysterious question.

This time we will deal with our subject in very slow stages. I would just like to ask in anticipation, “How is such a thing possible that human beings can prove something and also prove its opposite?” When we approach a matter of this kind, we are certainly made aware of certain limits in normal human comprehension, in ordinary human logic. We meet with this limitation of human logic in regard to other things too. It always appears when human beings want to approach infinity with their concepts.

I can show you this by means of a very simple example. As soon as human beings want to approach infinity with their intellects, something occurs that can be called confusion in their concepts. I will demonstrate this in a very simple way. You must just be a little patient and follow a train of thought to which you are probably not accustomed. Suppose I write these figures on the blackboard one after the other, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on. I could write an infinite number of them: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc., couldn't I? I can also write a second column of figures; on the right of each number I can put double the number, like this:

Again I can write an infinite number of them. Now you will agree with me that each number in the right-hand column is in the left-hand column too. I can underline 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on. Look at the left column for a moment; an infinite series of numbers is possible. This infinite series contains all the numbers included in the right column. 2, 4, 6, and so on are all there. I can continue underlining them. If you look at the figures that are underlined, you will see that they are exactly half of all the numbers together because every other one is underlined. But when I write them on the right-hand side, I can write 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on into infinity. I have an infinite number both on the left and on the right, and you cannot say that there are fewer on the right than on the left. There is no doubt that I am bound to have just as many numbers on the right as on the left.

And yet, as every other number would have to be crossed out on the left to make the left column the same as the right, the infinite number on the left is only half the infinite number on the right. Obviously I have just as many numbers on the right as on the left, namely an infinite number, for each number on the right has one corresponding to it on the left—yet the amount of numbers on the right cannot but be half that of the numbers on the left.

There is no question about it, as soon as we deal with infinity, our thinking becomes confused. The problem arising here also cannot be solved, for it is just as true that on the right there are half as many numbers as on the left as it is true that there are exactly as many numbers on the right as on the left. Here you have the problem in its simplest form.

This brings us to the realization that our concepts cannot actually be used where infinity is concerned, where we go beyond the sense world—and infinity does go beyond the sense world. And do not imagine this to apply only to unlimited infinity, for you cannot use your concepts where limited infinity is concerned either, as the same confusion arises there.

Suppose you draw a triangle, a square, a pentagon, a hexagon and so on. When you reach a construction with a hundred sides, you will have come very close to a circle. You will no longer be able to distinguish the small lines very clearly, especially if you look at them from a distance. Therefore you can say that a circle is a polygon with an infinite number of sides. If you have a small circle there are an infinite number of sides in it; if you have a circle twice the size, you still have an infinite number of sides—and yet exactly twice as many!

So you do not need to go as far as unlimited infinity, for if you take a small circle with an infinite number of sides and a circle twice the size with an infinite number of sides, then even in the realm of visible, limited infinity you can encounter something that throws your concepts into utter confusion. What I have just said is extremely important. For people completely fail to notice that there is only a certain field where our concepts apply, namely the field of the physical plane, and that there is a particular reason why this has to be so.

You know, at a place where people are attacking us rather severely—which is now happening in many places from a great many people—a pastor gave a speech opposing our spiritual science, and thinking it might be especially effective, he concluded with a quotation from Matthias Claudius.² This quotation says roughly that human beings are really poor sinners who cannot know much and ought to rest content with what they do know and not chase after what they cannot know. The pastor picked this verse out of a poem by Matthias Claudius because he thought he could charge us with wanting to transcend the sense world—after all, had not Matthias Claudius already said that human beings are nothing but sinners who are unable to get beyond this world of the senses?

“By chance,” as people say, a friend of ours looked up this poem by Matthias Claudius and also read the verse preceding it. This preceding verse says that a person can go out into the open and, although the moon is always a round orb, if it does not happen to be full moon, he sees only part of the moon even though the other part is there. In the same way there are many things in the world people could become aware of if only they looked at them at the right moment. Thus Matthias Claudius wanted to draw attention to the fact that people should not confine themselves to immediate sense appearance and that anyone who allows himself to be deceived by this is a poor sinner. In fact, what the good pastor quoted from Matthias Claudius reflected on himself.

The sense world—if we happen not to be just like that pastor—at times makes us aware that wherever we look we should also look in the opposite direction and adjust our first view accordingly. However, the world of the senses cannot supply this immediate adjustment with regard to what transcends the sense world. We cannot just quote the other verse. That is why human beings philosophize away and, of course, are convinced of the truth of their speculations, for they can be logically proved. But their opposite can also be logically proved. So let us tackle the question today, “Why is it that when we transcend the sense world our thinking gets so confused?” And we will now look at the question in a way which will bring us closer to an answer. How does it happen that two contradictory statements can both be proved right? We will find this has to do with the fact that human life is in a kind of central position, a point of balance between two polar opposite forces, the ahrimanic and the luciferic.

You can of course cogitate on freedom and necessity and imagine you have compelling evidence that the world contains only necessity. But the compelling force of this argument comes from Ahriman. When we prove things in one direction, it is Ahriman who leads us astray, and if we prove their opposite, we are misled by Lucifer. For we are always exposed to these two powers, and if we do not take into account that we are placed in between them, we shall never get to the bottom of the conflicts in human nature, such as the one we have been considering.

It was actually in the course of the nineteenth century that people lost the feeling that throughout the world order there are, besides a state of equilibrium, pendulum swings to the right and the left, a swing toward Ahriman and a swing toward Lucifer. This feeling has been totally lost. After all, if you speak nowadays of Ahriman and Lucifer, you are considered not quite sane, aren't you? It was not as bad as this until the middle of the nineteenth century, for a very clever philosopher, Thrandorff, wrote a very nice article here in Berlin in the middle of the nineteenth century in an attempt to refute the argument of a certain clergyman.³ This clergyman let it be known—and it should be alright to say this in our circles—that there is no devil and that it is really a dreadful superstition to speak of one. We speak of Ahriman rather than of the devil. The philosopher Thrandorff spoke out against the clergyman in a very interesting article, “The Devil: No Dogmatic Bogy.” As late as the middle of the 1850s he tried as it were to prove the existence of Ahriman on a strictly philosophical basis.

In the course of the public lectures I am to give here in the near future I hope I can speak about this extinct part of human spiritual life, about an aspect of theosophy that completely disappeared in the middle of the nineteenth century. Right up to that time people had still spoken about these things, even if they called them by other names. The feeling for these things has now been lost, but basically it was there in a delicate form right into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, until it had to recede into the background for a while in the natural course of things. We know of course, as I have often emphasized, that spiritual science does not in the slightest way deny the great value and significance of progress in the natural sciences. But this progress in science would not have been possible unless the feeling for this opposition between Ahriman and Lucifer, which can be discovered only on a spiritual level, had been lost. It now has to emerge again above the threshold of human consciousness.

I would like to give you an example of how things stood in regard to Ahriman and Lucifer in the days when people had only a feeling left that there are two different powers at work. Here is an example to illustrate this.

In the old town hall in Prague there is a remarkable clock that was made in the fifteenth century. This clock is really a marvel. At first sight it looks like a sort of sundial, but it is so intricately constructed that it shows the course of the hours in a twofold way: the old Bohemian and the modern way. In the old Bohemian way the hours went from 1 or rather from 0 to 24, and the other way only to 12. At sunset the pointer or gnomon—and there was a shadow there—always pointed to 1. The clock was so arranged that the pointer literally always indicated 1 at sunset. That is to say, despite the varying times of sunset the hand always showed 1.

In addition to this, the clock also showed when sun or moon eclipses occurred. It also showed the course of the various planets through the constellations, giving the planetary orbits. It really was a wonderful construction and even showed the movable festivals, that is to say, it indicated on what day Easter fell in a particular year. It was also a calendar, giving the course of the year from January to December, including the fact that Easter is movable. A special pointer showed on what day Easter fell, despite it being movable, and it also showed Whitsun.

This clock, then, was constructed in the fifteenth century in an extraordinarily impressive way. And the story of how it was constructed has been investigated. But apart from this story—and the documents are there for you to read, with lots of descriptions—there is a legend that also aims at giving an account of the marvelous quality of this clock: first regarding its wonderful construction, and then regarding the fact that the man who was gifted enough to make such a clock always wound it up as long as he lived. After his death nobody could wind it, and they searched everywhere for people who could put it in order and get it going. As a rule they only found people who damaged it. Then someone would be found who said he could sort it out and did so, yet time and again the clock went wrong.

These facts grew into a kind of folk tale, which runs as follows: Once upon a time through a special gift from heaven a simple man acquired the ability to make this clock. He alone knew how to look after it. The legend attaches great significance to the fact that he was only a simple man who acquired this ability through special grace; that is to say, he was inspired by the spiritual world. But it came about that the governor wanted to keep this clock specially for Prague and prevent any other town from having one like it. So he had the inspired clockmaker blinded by having his eyes plucked out. Thus the man withdrew from the scene. But just before his death he begged once more to be permitted a moment in which to set the clock to rights again, and according to the legend he used this moment to make a quick manipulation and put the clock into such disorder that nobody could ever put it right again.

At first sight this seems a very unpretentious story. But in the way the story is constructed there is a sure feeling for the existence of Ahriman and Lucifer and the balance between them. Think how sensitively this story has been formed. The same sensitive construction can be found in countless such folk tales; it grows out of this same sure feeling for Lucifer and Ahriman. The story begins with the position of equilibrium, doesn't it? Through an act of grace from the spiritual world the man acquires the ability to construct an extraordinary clock. There is no trace of egotism in it, though anybody can give way to egotism. It was a gift of grace, and he really did not build the clock out of egotism. Nor was there any intellectuality in it, for it is expressly stated that he was a simple man. This whole description of the skill being an act of grace with no trace of egotism, and of his being a simple man who was free of intellectuality, was in fact given in order to indicate that there was no trace of Ahriman and Lucifer in this man's soul, but that he was entirely under the influence of divine powers that were good and progressive.

Lucifer lived in the governor. It was out of egotism that he wanted to keep the clock exclusively for his own town, and this was why he blinded the clockmaker. Lucifer is placed on the one side. But as soon as Lucifer is there, he always allies himself with his brother Ahriman. And because the man has been blinded, this other power acquires the capacity to attack from outside through skillful manipulation. That is the work of Ahriman.

Thus the power for good is placed between Lucifer and Ahriman. You can find a sensitive construction like this in many of the folk tales, even the simplest of them. But it was possible for this feeling of the intervention of Ahriman and Lucifer in life to get lost at a time when a sense had to gain ground that positive and negative electricity, positive and negative magnetism, and so on, are the basic forces of the material world. This feeling for perceiving the world spiritually had to withdraw in order for scientific investigation to flourish.

We shall now look at how Ahriman and Lucifer intervene in what human beings call knowledge, in what people call their relation to the world in general, in a way that leads to the very confusion we were speaking about. This confusion is especially evident in the questions we have introduced. Let us take a simple hypothetical example. I could just as well have taken this from great world events as from everyday occurrences. Let us suppose that three or four people are preparing to go out for a drive. They plan to travel, let us say, through a mountain pass. This pass has overhanging rocks. The people are ready for the drive and intend setting out at an arranged time. But the chauffeur has just ordered another mug of beer which is served a bit too late. He therefore delays the departure by five minutes. Then he sets out with the party. They drive through the ravine. Just as they come to the overhanging rock it breaks loose, falls on top of the vehicle, and crushes the whole party. They all perish, or perhaps it was only the passengers who were killed and the chauffeur was spared.

Here we have a case in point. You could ask whether it was the chauffeur's fault, or whether the whole thing was governed by absolute necessity. Was it absolutely inevitable that these people should meet with this disaster at that precise moment? And was the chauffeur's tardiness just part of this necessity? Or could we imagine that if only the chauffeur had been punctual, he would have driven them through the mountain pass a long time before the rock fell, and they would never have been hit by it?

Here in the midst of everyday life you have this question of freedom and necessity which is intimately connected with “guilty” or “innocent.” Obviously, if everything is subject to absolute necessity, we cannot say that the chauffeur was guilty at all from a higher point of view, as it was entirely inevitable that these people met their death.

We meet this problem in life all the time. It is, as we have said, one of the most difficult of questions, the kind of question in which Ahriman and Lucifer interfere most easily when we try to find a solution. Ahriman is the one who appears first when this question is being tackled, as we shall see.

We will have to approach this question from a different angle if we want to get at an answer. You see, if we set about solving a question like this by starting with the thought “I can easily follow the course of events: the boulder fell—that happened,” and then ask “Is this actually based on necessity or freedom? Could things have happened differently?” we are only looking at the external events. We are looking at the events as they happen on the physical plane. Now people follow this approach out of the same impulse that leads them, if they have a materialistic outlook, to stop short at the physical body when contemplating the human being. Anyone who knows nothing about spiritual science will stop short at the physical body nowadays, won't he? He will say “The human being you see and feel is what exists.” He does not go beyond the physical body to the etheric body. And if he is a thoroughly pig-headed materialist, he will jeer and scoff when he hears people saying there is a finer, etheric body underlying the dense physical body. Yet you know how well-founded the view is that among the members of the human being the etheric body is the one most closely associated with the physical body, and in the course of time we have become accustomed to knowing that we must not just speak of the human physical body but also of the human etheric body, and so on.

Some of you, however, may not yet have asked yourselves “What kind of world is that other world outside the human being, the world in which the ordinary world events occur?” We have of course spoken of a number of things in this connection. We have said that to begin with when we perceive the external events of the physical plane with our senses, we have no idea that wherever we look there are elemental beings; it is exactly the same when we first look at the human being.

Human beings have an etheric body, which we have often also called an elemental body. Outside in nature, in external physical happenings in general, we have a succession of physical events and also the world of elemental existence. This runs absolutely parallel: the human being with a physical and an etheric body, and physical processes with events of the elemental world flowing into them. It would be just as one-sided to say that external processes are merely physical as to say that a human being has a physical body only, when we ought to be saying that he also has an etheric body. What we perceive with our physical senses and physical intellect is one thing. But there is something behind it that is analogous to the human etheric body. Behind every external physical occurrence there is a higher, more subtle one.

There are people who have a certain awareness of such things. This awareness can come to them in two different ways. You may have noticed something like the following either in yourself or in other people. A person has had some experience. But afterwards he comes to you and says—or it may be something you experienced and you may say, “Actually I had the feeling that while this experience was taking place externally, something quite different was happening to me as well, in a higher part of my being.” This is to say, deeper natures may feel that events not taking place on the physical plane at all can yet have an important effect on the course of their life. First, such people know something has happened to them. Others go even further and see things of this kind symbolically in a dream. Someone dreams he experiences this or that. He dreams, for instance, that he is killed by a boulder. He wakes up and is able to say, “That was a symbolic dream; something has taken place in my soul life.” It can often be proved true in life that something took place in the soul that was of far greater significance than what happened to the person on the physical plane. He may have progressed a stage higher in knowledge, purified part of his will nature, or made his feelings more sensitive or something of that kind.

In lectures given here recently I drew attention to the fact that what a person knows with his I is actually only a part of all that happens to him, and that the astral body knows a very great deal more, though not consciously. You will remember my telling you this. The astral body certainly knows of a great deal that happens to us in the supersensible realm and not in the realm of the senses. Now we have arrived from another direction at the fact that something is continually happening to us in the supersensible realm. Just as in the case of my moving my hand, the physical movement is only part of the whole process and behind it there is an etheric process, a process of my etheric body, so every physical process outside me is permeated by a subtle elementary process that runs parallel with it and takes place in the supersensible realm. Not only beings are permeated by a supersensible element, but so is the whole of existence.

Remember something I have repeatedly referred to and which even seems somewhat paradoxical. I have pointed out that in the spiritual realm we often have the opposite of what exists on the physical plane, not always, but often. Thus if something is true here for the physical plane, the truth with regard to the spiritual aspect can look quite different. Not always, as I say. But I have counted many cases over the years where one would have to say that on the spiritual level there is exactly the opposite result from what one would expect to happen on the physical plane.

With regard to supersensible occurrences running parallel with those of the sense world, this is occasionally, in fact very often, the case. So let us examine it. If we see a party of people setting off by coach and taking a drive, and a piece of rock falls and crushes them, that is the physical occurrence. Parallel with this physical event, that is to say, within it in the same way as our etheric body is within us, there is a supersensible occurrence. And we have to recognize that this may be the exact opposite of what is happening here on the physical plane. In fact it is very frequently the exact opposite.

This can also create great confusion if we do not watch out. For instance, the following may happen. If someone has acquired atavistic clairvoyance and has a kind of second sight, he or she may have the following experience: Supposing a party of people is setting out on a journey, but at the last moment one of the party decides to stay behind, the person who has second sight, let us say. Instead of going with the others, that person stays behind and after a while has a vision. In this vision any event can appear to that person. He or she could of course just as well see the party being hit by boulders as see, for instance—and this can be a matter of disposition—that some especially good fortune happens to them. He or she could very well see the party having a very joyful experience, and might subsequently hear that the party had perished in the way I described.

This could happen if the clairvoyant were not to see what was happening on the physical plane—which he might very well have seen—but had seen what was happening as a parallel event on the astral plane: for the moment these people left the physical plane they may well have been called to something special in the spiritual world, something that filled them with an abundance of new life in the spiritual world. In short, the clairvoyant person may have seen an event of the supersensible worlds going on in exactly the opposite direction, and this absolutely contradictory event could be true. It might really be the case that here on the physical plane a misfortune exists that corresponds in the supersensible world to some great good fortune for those same souls.

Now someone who thinks he is smarter than the wise guidance of the world (and there are such people) might say, “If I ruled the world, I would not do it in such a way that I call souls to happiness in the spiritual world and at the same time shower them with misfortune here on the physical plane. I would do it better than that!” Well, all one can say to people like that is, “Surely one can understand that here on the physical plane people can easily be misled by Ahriman. But cosmic wisdom always knows better.” It could be a matter of the following: The task awaiting the souls in the spiritual world requires their having this experience here on the physical plane, so that they can look back, so to speak, to this physical event of their earthly lives and gain a certain strength they need. That is to say, for the souls who experience them these two occurrences, the physical and the spiritual one, may necessarily belong together.

We could quote hypothetical examples of all kinds, showing that when something takes place here on the physical plane there exists, as it were, an etheric body of this event, an elemental, supersensible event belonging to it. We must not merely generalize like pantheists do and stop short at the general statement that there is a spiritual world underlying the physical, but we must give concrete examples. We must be aware that behind every physical occurrence there is a spiritual occurrence, a real spiritual occurrence, and both together form a whole.

If we follow the course of events on the physical plane, we can say that we get to the point where we link together the events of the physical plane by means of thoughts. And as we watch things happen on the physical plane we actually reach the point of finding a “cause” for each “effect.” That is how things are. People everywhere look for the cause belonging to each effect. Whenever anything has happened, people always have to find the cause of it. But this means finding the inevitability. If you look with sufficient pedantry at the simple example I chose, you could say, “Well now, this party had gathered and had fixed their departure for a definite time. But if I follow up why the chauffeur was tardy, I will go in several directions. First of all, I may look at the chauffeur himself and consider how he was brought up and how he became tardy. Then I will look at the various circumstances leading to his getting his mug of beer too late. All I will be able to find in this way is merely a chain of causes. I will be able to show how one event fits in with the others in such a way that the affair could not possibly have happened otherwise. I will gradually come to the point where I completely eliminate the chauffeur's free will, for if we have a cause for every effect, this includes everything the chauffeur does as well.” The chauffeur only wanted another mug of beer, didn't he, because he had probably not been thrashed sufficiently when he was young. If he had been thrashed more often—and it is not his fault that he was not—things would not have turned out as they did. Looking at it this way we can base the whole thing on a chain of cause and effect.

This has to do with the fact that it is only on the physical plane that we can use concepts. For just consider: if you want to understand something, one thought must be able to follow from another, that is to say, you depend on being able to develop one thought out of another. It lies in the nature of concepts that one follows from the other. That must be so.

Yet, what can be clearly and necessarily linked together through concepts on the physical plane immediately changes as soon as we enter the neighboring supersensible world. There we have to do not with cause and effect but with beings. This is where beings are active. At every moment one or another being is working on or withdrawing from a task. There it is not at all a matter of what can be grasped by concepts in the usual sense.

If you tried using concepts for what is happening in the spiritual world, the following could happen. You might think, “Well, here I am. Certainly I am far enough advanced to perceive that something spiritual is happening. At one moment a gnome approaches, then a sylph, and soon afterwards another being. Now all the beings are together. I will do my best to fathom what the effects will have to be.” On the physical plane this is sometimes easy to do, of course. If we hit a billiard ball in a certain direction, we know which way the other one will go, because we can calculate it. Yet on the spiritual plane it may happen that when you have seen a being and now know “Ah, that is a gnome, he is setting out to do something and will do such and such; he is joining forces with another being, thus the following is bound to happen,” you think you have figured it all out. But the next moment another being appears and changes the whole thing, or a being you were counting on drops out and disappears and no longer participates. There, everything is based on beings. You cannot link everything together with your concepts in the same way as you can on the physical plane. That is quite impossible. There, you cannot explain one thing following from the other on the basis of concepts. Things work together in an entirely different manner in the spiritual world, in the series or stream of spiritual happenings running parallel with physical happenings.

We must become familiar with the fact that underlying our world there is a world we must not only assume to be spiritual in comparison to ours, but we must also assume its events to be connected with each other in a totally different way than those in our world. For we can do nothing at all in the spiritual world, in the actual reality of this spiritual world, with the way we are used to explaining things in the world of our concepts.

Thus we see that two worlds interpenetrate; one of them can be grasped with concepts and the other cannot, but can only be perceived. I am pointing to something that goes very deep, but people are not aware how deep it goes. Just consider for a moment that if someone were to believe he could prove everything, and that only what has been proved is true, the following could happen. That person could say, “As a matter of fact, everything has to be proved, and what has not been proved is unacceptable. Therefore everything that happens in the course of the history of the world must be capable of being proved. So I only need to think hard and I am bound to be able to prove, for instance, whether the Mystery of Golgotha took place or not.” Indeed, people are so very inclined nowadays to say that if the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be proved, the whole thing is nonsense and there never was such an event.

And what do people think of proofs? They think that one starts with one definite concept and proceeds from this to the next one, and if it is possible to do this right through, the matter is proved. But no world other than the physical functions according to this kind of proof. This reasoning does not apply to any other world. For if we were able to prove that the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place of necessity, and this could be concluded from our concepts, it would not have been a free deed at all! Christ would then have been compelled to come down to the earth from the cosmos simply because human concepts prove and therefore dictate it. However, the Mystery of Golgotha has to be a free deed, that is to say, it has to be just the kind of deed that cannot be proved. It is important that people come to realize this.

It is the same thing, after all, when people want to prove either that God created the world or that he did not. There, too, they proceed from one thought to another. But “creating the world,” at any rate will have been a free deed of a divine being! From this it follows that we cannot prove the Creation as following of necessity from our series of concepts; rather, we have to perceive it to arrive at it.

So we are saying something of tremendous importance when we state that the very next world to ours—which, as a supersensible world, permeates ours—is not organized in a way we can penetrate by means of our concepts and their conclusiveness, but that there a kind of vision comes into its own in which events are arranged in a totally different way.

Today I would just like to add a few words about the following. When I was here at Christmas, I drew your attention to the fact that in our time especially, such contradictory things are emerging, that they are quite confusing for human thinking. Just imagine, a book has just been published by the great scientist Ernst Haeckel called Thoughts about Eternity,⁴ I have already mentioned it earlier. These Thoughts about Eternity contain exactly the opposite of what many other people have concluded as a result of living through recent world events. Just think, there are many people today (we shall come to speak of this fact in its particular connection with our present studies, but today I just wanted to give an introduction) who have experienced a deepening of their religious feelings just because world events are having such a terribly overwhelming effect on their souls; for they say, “Unless there is a supersensible world underlying our physical world, how can we explain what is happening in our time?” Many people have rediscovered their feeling for religion. I do not need to describe their train of thought; it is obvious and can be discerned in so many people.

Haeckel arrives at a different train of thought. He explains in his recently published book that people believe in immortality of the soul. However, he says, current events prove clearly enough that any such belief is ridiculous, for we witness thousands of people perishing every day for no reason at all. With these events in mind, how can any sensible person imagine that there can be any talk about the immortality of the soul? How is it possible for a higher world order to stand behind things of this sort?

These shocking events seem to Haeckel to prove his dogma that one cannot speak of immortality of the soul. Here we have antinomy again: A large proportion of humanity is experiencing a deepening of religious feeling, while the very same events are making Haeckel tremendously superficial where religion is concerned.

All this is connected with the fact that nowadays people are unable to understand the relationship between the world accessible to their senses and their brain-bound intellect and the supersensible world underlying it. No sooner do they approach these things than their thinking gets confused. Yet despite all the disillusionment it brings, our time will certainly in one way also bring about a deepening of people's souls, a turning away from materialism. It will be necessary that knowledge of the way supersensible events complement happenings in the world of the senses arise from a pure activity of the soul devoting itself to an impartial exploration of the world. It is necessary that there should be at least a small number of people who are able to realize that all the pain and suffering being experienced at present on the physical plane are, from the point of view of the whole of human evolution, only one side and that there is also another side, a supersensible side.

We have drawn your attention to this supersensible aspect from various points of view, and we will speak of still further ones. But when peace returns to Europe's blood-stained soil, we will again and again experience the need for a group of people capable of hearing and sensing spiritually what the spiritual worlds will then be saying to humanity in times of peace. And we must never tire of impressing the following lines upon our hearts and souls, for it will be proved over and over again how deeply true they are:

Out of the courage of the fighters,
Out of the blood of battles,
Out of the grief of the bereaved,
Out of the peoples' deeds of sacrifice
There shall arise spirit fruit
If only souls, in spirit-mindfulness,
Will reach out to the spirits' realm.

• 1. Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804, German philosopher of the Enlightenment. For his antinomian chart see his book Critique of Pure Reason published in 1781.
• 2. Matthias Claudius, 1740-1815, German poet.
• 3. K. F. E. Thrandorff, 1782-1863. Wrote an open letter entitled “The Devil—No Dogmatic Bogy” to a preacher in Berlin in 1853.
• 4. Ernst Haeckel, 1834-1919, German scientist and philosopher. Adherent of Monism.

In the idea which I developed here yesterday, I wished to point out that it is necessary for the evolution of humanity to impress very clearly upon ourselves certain ideas in Spiritual culture which have not as yet appeared in the present era. This is something that is of main importance, that certain ideas now non-evident, or least not in current use, should again come into the spiritual life of man. If we follow up the spiritual life of modern times in its various ramifications, we see that its characteristic is that in spite of all the arrogance, all the self-conceit which comes to light at times, the spiritual life does not contain any new ideas. Although all sorts of world-conceptions have appeared, of an ethical, artistic, and even philosophical or scientific nature, they all deal with old ideas which have been in use for a long time, and which are then mixed together, as in a kaleidoscope. We need new conceptions, yes new conceptions such as should rise are lacking. For that reason certain old truths cannot be understood to-day, truths which appeared among the Ancients and which are handed down traditionally; for instance, ideas which appeared in Plato or Aristotle as being the latest in this respect. In earlier times they appeared with still more significance; but today they are either not understood at all or else rejected, but only because they are not understood. I will give you an illustration of such a conception. When a man today sees something, he thinks: “The object is outside, it sends the light to me; the light comes into the eye, and in that passive—one may not say mysterious—manner, is produced with the soul experiences as the sensation of color.” In Plato another conception is found. There something appears which we cannot understand otherwise, if we take it literally, than as if the eye sent forth something to the object which grasps it in a mysterious manner; as if the eye stretched out a feeler which grasps the object. This can be found in Plato. The more recent ideas of natural science can of course make nothing of this, can understand nothing of it. It is the kind of idea which you can find recorded in the ordinary textbooks—or even in the ‘scholarly’ books—on the History of Philosophy. But you cannot do much with such books either, because such ideas rests upon something which existed in ancient times in a certain atavistic second-sight or second-feeling, which has gradually died out, but which must be rediscovered in our time, in another way. Since olden times certain ideas have been lost which must be recovered.

These concepts have been lost chiefly because what one may call the Latin or Roman culture had to pour over Europe, especially over Western Europe. The study of this Latin, Roman culture in its expansion over Europe would yield very illuminating results, if we observed it aright. We must be clear on the point that as regards blood, nothing is left in Italy today of the race which we call the “Ancient Roman.” The present-day battalions, although they may be responsible for many things in our time, are certainly not responsible for what I'm about to relate now. What streamed forth from the Roman Empire merely streamed forth into Europe in a cultural way, but it had a parching, burning effect on certain fundamental, basic ideas; ideas which must, as it were, again be redeemed from their grave. We need only call to mind the following fact. With the overthrow of Alesia, that town which was destroyed in the last era before the birth of Christ and is situated in what is now the province of the Côte d'Or in France, a piece of old Celtic-Gaelic culture was entirely rooted out by the Romans. (On the scene of the old ruined Alesia, Napoleon III ordered a monument erected to Vercingetorix!) Perhaps today Alesia would be called a gigantic “Academy.” Ten-thousand Europeans studied there in the way in which science and knowledge was studied at that time. All that was done away with, and in its place came what was spread abroad as the Roman culture. This is only an historical observation, intended to show that in Europe, also, older concepts existed in the old places of culture which have since been destroyed.

Today I wish to draw your attention to two ideas which must be incorporated into science as well as into everyday life, in order that a better understanding of the world may become possible. One of these is that an idea exists that really the perception of the world comes about through the senses. This happens in the following way.

If we stand opposite a color object it certainly impresses us; what takes place between the colored object and the human organism is a destructive process in the latter. I have often laid stress on this. It is in a sense a death in miniature, and the nervous system is the organ for continuous destructive processes. These disturbances, which are continually being brought about through the action of the outer world on our own organism, and balanced again, however, by the action of the blood. In the human organism there is a continual counteracting process between blood and nerves. This process comes about because the blood furnishes a quickening process and the nerves a sort of death-process, a destructive one. For instance if we stand opposite a colored object which works on us from the outer world, a destructive process takes place in our nervous system. Something is destroyed in a physical body as well as in the etheric body, a sort of canal is hollowed out in our organism through the destructive process which runs along a definite course. Thus when we “see” something, a canal is bored from the eye to the edge of the brain. Not that something takes place that has to be analysed and solved, from the brain-covering to the eye; but, on the contrary, a hole is bored and through this hole the astral body slips, so as to be able to see the object. Plato was still able to see this. It could still be perceived through atavistic clairvoyance, and we must re-acquire it through learning really know the human organism with the newer clairvoyance, learning to know this canal, this hole which is bored, leading from the eye to the brain-covering, through which the Ego unites itself with what works from outside. Mankind must learn not to form such concepts as are customary in the present-day theory of knowledge or physiology, but must learn to say: “A canal, a tunnel, is forward from the brain-covering to the eye, and by this means a door opens through which the astral body and the ego come into connection with the outer world.” This is a concept of which the present day has no idea! For that reason it does not know what physiological facts result from this. Today students learn physiology at the Universities, and learn very exactly the customary concepts which I have just mentioned, but they do not learn how things are really related, they learn just the opposite, which has no sense. This is one such concept.

Another is very frequently found today if we go into that sphere which is called the sphere of learning and scholarship—of course with full justification. It is they are described (and this is of course unavoidable today) how man is born as an undeveloped being; how then gradually his ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ develop, and in this gradual development of soul and spirit are produced through the organism of the body becoming finer and more complicated. You can find this idea introduced by psychologists and especially by scholars, as also in all the popular books. Thus it appears to man; but what appears to thus is Maya. In many respects what we first encounter is the opposite of truth. This idea too is the opposite of what is true. Instead of this, we ought really to say (I may just remind you of what you said in “The Education of the Child,” where what I am about to say is expressed, though put somewhat differently): “While the child is quite young, soul and spirit are still ‘psychic’ and ‘spiritual,’ and as the child grows, his soul and spirit are gradually transformed into the material, the bodily. Soul and spirit gradually become of a bodily nature, man gradually becomes a complete image of soul and spirit.” It is very important that we should hold this idea. For if we do, we shall no longer say that what runs about on the ground on two legs is man; we shall become conscious of the fact that that is only the image of man, that man after being born in a super-sensible manner gradually grows in unity with the body and creates a full image of himself in his body. Spirit and soul disappear into the body, and appear less and less in their own nature. Thus we must adopt exactly the opposite concept to the customary one. We must know why, for instance, we really become “20 years old;” it is because spirit has descended into the body, because it has transformed itself into the body, because that which is body is an external image of the spirit. Then we shall also understand that gradually, when we are growing “old,” the reverse transformation is going on. The body becomes chalky and salted, but the spirit becomes more psychic and spiritual. Only man has not then the power of holding on to it, because while here, he stands face-to-face with the physical world and wishes to express himself through the body. What thus becomes more and more independent, only appears in its entirety after death. Thus it is not the case that the soul and spirit becomea blunted in old age; on the contrary, they become ever freer and freer. Of course the materialistic thinker, when these things are put before him, will frequently object that even Kant, for instance, who was a very clever man, grew weak in his old age; so that they are at any rate the soul and spirit could not have made themselves free. Materialistic thinker only makes that objection because he cannot observe the soul and spirit nature, and see how it had already grown gradually into the spiritual world. For very many people it will be a hard nut to crack if they are told to believe that when men grow old they do not become weak or even feeble-minded, but more psychic and more spiritual. Only, when the body is worn out, we can no longer express the psycho-spiritual which we have cultivated, through the body. It is like the case of a pianist: he might become a better and better player, but if his piano is worn out we cannot perceive this. If you were only to know his capabilities as a pianist from his plane, you will not be able to gather much if the piano is out of tune and has broken strings. So that Kant, when he was an old man and “feeble-minded” was not weak minded as regards the spiritual world; there he had become glorious.

Thus when we get the truth we have exactly to reverse certain conceptions. We must take it quite seriously that in the world we have to do with Maya, with the great illusion, for we must exactly reverse many of our ideas. If we seriously consider that in the external physical reality we are face to face with the great illusion, we shall also be able to accept the fact that external physical man when 70 years of age and apparently weak has his spirit somewhere else than on the physical plane. The obstacles in the way of understanding the teachings of Spiritual Science to a great extent consist in the fact that we are not able to form correct ideas as to what is happening on the ordinary physical plane. We form false ideas about what is happening on the physical plane, and the consequences is that these separate us from the true and right world and do not allow us to reach it. If we form such concepts as the second one to which I referred, we shall then no longer be very far from the knowledge which Spiritual Science is now giving out from its investigations concerning man immediately after death.

When man enters physical life through birth, he gradually enters more and more closely into relationship with his physical body. We have now become acquainted with a correct idea of this relationship. We do not always notice, because it would require too much explanation, that something similar also takes place between death and a new birth. The matter can be presented in a similar manner as regards the time between death and rebirth. We may say that man then gradually enters into relation with something similar to this physical body here on earth. Our physical bodily nature is not merely physical; it embraces, as we know: the physical body, the etheric body or body of formative-forces, and the astral body, the outer psychic or soul-body. As we have to appropriate these three ‘skins’ or ‘shells’ for physical life, so have we to put on coverings between death and rebirth, indeed three such coverings which, I will call: “Soul-Man,” “Soul-Life” or “Life-Soul,” and “Soul-Self.” As we take on the physical body here for use in the physical world, so do we take on the “Soul-Life” or the “Life-Soul.” Just as we take on the astral body, the Soul-body for our life Earth, so do we take on after death the “Individual Soul” or “Soul-Self.” I select these expressions for the reason that they should not be confused with what men will appropriate in another way for the Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan time; there is a resemblance, but, because it belongs to another stage of being, it must in consequence be differentiated. But names are not the important thing in this matter. It is only necessary for us to study a little how these coverings are appropriated.

When man enters that life which runs its course between death and rebirth, the first characteristic is that he finds himself surrounded by a number of pictures. These pictures all proceed from his experiences between his last birth and last death, or even from earlier times; but we will first of all limit ourselves to what happened in the last earth-life. Thus first of all appear pictures which proceed from the last life; they are to be found in the environment of man. The essential point is that these are in the environment of the dead. The remarkable thing is that at first he has a certain difficulty in developing a consciousness that these pictures are connected with himself. This world of pictures is what is referred to in the book “Theosophy” as the experiences in the Soul World; but this retrospect in pictures is only a part of the collective picture-world which surrounds him there. Other pictures besides these are present; and the life of the dead consist in gradually recognizing these pictures as belonging to himself. Consciousness has to set to work to make them fully recognize in the right way that these pictures belong to him. We can only thoroughly understand what is here in question when we become conscious that the life which we lead here between birth and death is much richer than we are aware of. Suppose you live in certain circumstances, in company with certain people—what takes place consciously between you is really only one part of what goes on. Things are continually happening. You must recollect that life here so runs its course that we observe but a small part of what we experience. Take an ordinary occurrence for instance. You have gathered together here this evening, each one of you present has entered into some relationship with the others. Did you probably consider how much of this you have carried over into your consciousness, you will find it is indeed but very little. For if you are three yards away from another person and then approach him, this drawing three yards nearer to him represents a whole sum of facial impressions; you see his face differently the nearer you approach and so on. The ordinary physical intellect is quite unable to grasp what we are really always experiencing during physical life. What we experienced consciously is but a quite small part of it; by far the most important part remains subconscious. For instance, if you read a letter; as a rule you become conscious of the content, but in your subconsciousness much more than that goes on; there is not only happens that you are always either slightly vexed or pleased by the beautiful or ugly handwriting, but with every feature of the handwriting something passes from the writer into you which you do not observe with your ordinary consciousness but which lives as a dream, continuously through your whole life. We indeed find it so difficult to really to understand dreams for the reason that much appears in them which is not taken into consideration at all in our waking consciousness. Suppose one lady sits here and another there. If the one lady does not particularly notice that another is sitting over there and does not look at her very closely, it may occur that she does not observe the other at all, does not become aware of her gestures, or what she's doing. But all that remains in the subconscious soul, and into our dreams may enter just that which we hardly observed or noticed in our waking consciousness. This may very easily happen when in waking consciousness one directs one's attention to a particular subject, for instance, if when walking along the street plunged in thought and a friend passes by; perhaps one may not even have noticed him, yet one may dream of him, in spite of not knowing that he had passed one in the street. A great deal happens in life, of which but very little enters the waking consciousness. But all the enormous amount that goes on in the life of man, especially what is concerned with the soul and which remains in the subconsciousness, all this becomes pictures around a man. The fact that you come here today and will go away again causes the picture of the whole room to remain bound up with you, and all the more so inasmuch as it has all made a more psychic impression; psychically it is not confined in rigid boundaries.

Thus innumerable pictures are connected with human life. They are all rolled up—I can find no other expression for it—within the life of man. You carry millions of pictures which are being rolled up all through your life; and the first thing that happens after death is the “unrolling of the pictures,” as one might call it; the unrolling of posthumous imaginations. Around each man a world of imaginations gradually forms; and his consciousness consists in recognizing himself in this imaginative world. This is described from somewhat different point of view in the Vienna lectures of life between death and rebirth; but one must observe things from the most varied points of view. The unrolling of the pictures: here we can draw a comparison with what we are, as little children just born, when we still have a somewhat unformed body. Many people (though not precisely the mothers of the children concerned) say that every little child looks like a frog; it is not yet quite human but gradually shapes itself. Just as the child shapes itself, and that grows of which we may say that we have it in us when we lived materially, so does the growth take place in life which we might call the “unrolling of life's pictures.” For in this unrolling of the pictures the “Soul-Man” is formed, one of the principles of man. You must absolutely imagine that this, which is there after death, spreads out, and that the Soul-Man, the picture-man, the imaginative spiritual-body, forms itself thus; it first of all develops in the imaginative images.

Herein we can help the dead tremendously if we go through such ideas together with him as are at the same time those of Spiritual Science, or such ideas as we evolved yesterday of the bluish-red Earth with the golden Jerusalem. These are concepts for which the dead man longs, for he yearns for well-directed and ordered Imaginations. By means of these we can help him, and especially do we help him if we go through with him what we have experienced together with him, for the pictures can hold onto that they may wish to unroll. If we live call up things which have passed unnoticed, and go through these with the dead man, he gains enormously thereby. For instance, I mean by this, if you call to mind the picture of him while he was still alive, how he went through the door as he came out of his office and reached home, how you greet him—incidents wherein the Soul came to expression in a visible pictorial manner. There may be loving memories connected with these things—and of course it may also be otherwise. You will by this means come together with the dead man in thought. I have shown in many different ways how we can mingle this picture-world, in which the dead man must develop, and in which his consciousness must expand, with our own concepts. Concepts and ideas which the dead man strove to attain but could not fully reach and which make something clear to him—these become his picture world. You must work with him at the forming of his Soul-Man.

Of course, in the time which follows on death, the other bodies, the Soul-Life or the Life-Soul and also the Soul-Self, are already formed in the dead. But these very principles form themselves more and more definitely, in such a way that at first, immediately after death, the dead feels them as something for the future which he will only gradually developed by and by. In this respect the deceased has the feeling that he must work out the “Soul-Man,” he must work upon that, but the “Life-Soul” he must allow to develop, that must develop itself gradually. It is of course already present, as is the intelligence in the child; but it must develop gradually as the intelligence does in the child. Thereby an inspirational force appears in the dead man immediately after his death, but this develops and becomes ever stronger and stronger; and when we help the dead, we help them to develop this inspirational force. For gradually something must speak to the deceased from out of the pictures. They must become more than merely the remembrance of life; they must tell him something new, something which life could not yet tell him; for what they now say to him must become the germ for what he builds up as his next Earth-life.

Thus the Soul-Life, the Life-Soul, begins to develop and the pictures become more and more speaking. The dead man first of all directs his attention chiefly to the Earth—if I may express myself thus. As we here on Earth direct our thoughts to the Spirit-world, so does the dead man turn his soul downwards to the Earth, which is seen by him, for example, as I described yesterday, as blue in the Eastern hemisphere and reddish in the Western hemisphere; into this come these pictures, they are interwoven in it. He always sees his own life within the universal picture of the Earth; he sees his life among us. Therefore we can help him to understand these pictures aright. He certainly leaves the Earth, but with the eye of his soul does not leave it. And as inspiration develops more and more, gradually the Earth begins to sound, the pictures gradually tell him more and more.

The question is often asked whether this help can only be given to the dead soon after death or can it also be given after years or tens of years. It never ceases! No one can live on Earth long enough for it to have become unnecessary to help someone who died before us. Even if a person has been dead for 30 or 40 years, the connection, if it was karmic, still exists. Of course we must clearly realize that when the soul of the friend who is still here is undeveloped, he may have a clearer consciousness of disconnection at the beginning. At the beginning the consciousness of the connection with the dead friend may be felt and experienced very strongly, because the pictures are still passive and chiefly still contain what they contained on earth. Later on, they begin to sound; the music of the spheres sounds forth from them. That is something strange and unknown, and we can only gain information about it from Spiritual Science, through which we learn what will take place on the Earth in the future epochs. But it is not very frequent that there is such an active need to approach the dead man after decades, as immediately after his departure. Gradually the inclination towards the dead disappears in the living (experience proves this)—the living feeling for them dies out . This is too a reason why a later time the connection with the dead is felt less actively. This calls our attention to the fact that the first part of life between death and rebirth is chiefly devoted to the formation of the “Soul-Man,” which floats around man is a world of Imagination. Later on, his time is devoted to the inspirational force of the soul: the Life-Soul—though of course it was there from the beginning. And before him, as an ideal, is what we may call the Soul-Self. That too was there from the beginning, fir the Soul-Self gives him individual consciousness. As the intelligence of the child must be cultivated, although present within him from the beginning, so does man develop the Soul-Self in his life between death and rebirth. The time when the soul is again slowly approaching the earth life is chiefly devoted to the cultivation of the Soul-Self. Between death and rebirth man's Soul-Self reaches its highest development in the time when he becomes, spiritually, blooming with youth. Here on Earth we speak of growing old; in the spiritual world between death and rebirth, we have to speak of growing young. Here we speak of becoming gray with age, there we speak of one becoming blooming with youth. These things were well known not so very long ago. Let me remind you of Goethe's “Faust;”, where it says: “He grew young in the Land of the Mist,” which means: “He was born in the Northern World.” In former times they did not say: “someone was born,” but “he has become young,” which referred to his life before birth. Goethe still used this expression “become young in the Land of the Mist.

Thus the last part of the time between death and rebirth is that in which the soul chiefly works out the intuitive side. The first part of the time after death the imaginative part of the soul is active; that is the Soul-Man. Then the inspirational part of the soul, the Life-Soul, develops gradually to its full height, and afterwords that which gives full individuality to the soul is developed, the Soul-Self, the intuitive part, the capacity of entering something different and other than oneself and of finding one's way into it. Into what does the soul find its way? From what do its intuitions chiefly proceed?

At a certain point of the life between death and rebirth the soul begins to feel itself related to the succession of generations which lead down to Father and Mother. It gradually feels itself related to the ancestors, as they are brought together in marriage and have children and so on. Immediately after death, we feel the unrolling of the pictures and looking down upon the Earth, we see these pictures grouped together in their great imaginative connections. And as we turn again to the Earth-life we become more and more intuitive, and the pictures which I called forth yesterday appeared before the soul in larger outlines: the sphere of the Earth gleaming bluish over Asia, India and East Africa; and on the other side where lies America (one circles around the earth) glittering reddish; between these there is green and other shades. The Earth also ‘sounds’ in manifold tones: melodies, harmonies, courses of the music of the spheres. Amidst all this, the pictures we had gradually began to move—the pictures of the successive generations which we had first of all. Gradually one learns no one's 36th and 35th pair of ancestors, then the 34th, 33rd, 32nd and 31st, right down to one's own father and mother. One learns to know this; it is interwoven into the imaginative images. Intuition is impressed into it until one comes to father and mother. This ‘impression’ is really an entering into what lives through the generations. The second half of life between death and rebirth is of such a nature that during this time a man becomes quite accustomed to live in what is below, to live in the outer world already in advance, in that which then becomes his nearest as well as his less near environment, to live not in himself but in this other world. That living in the other is the first experience of life after death. Then one is born again and that first one still retains something of this other life. For this reason we must say that in the first seven years the human being is an “imitator,” he imitates everything that he perceives. Read the book “The Education of the Child” on this subject . Imitation is like the last impression of this “living in the other”which continues into physical life. It is the pre-eminent quality when transformed into the spiritual element, between death and rebirth, and it is the first quality which appears in the child: to imitate everything it sees. This imitative faculty of the child will never be understood unless we know that it proceeds from the magnificent intuitive life in the psycho-spiritual world during the latter part of the time between death and rebirth.

Here is again a concept which the spiritual development of the future must grasp. In olden times—chiefly because men knew of the Spirit through atavistic clairvoyance—the belief in immortality, which has become doubtful to men who think materialistically, was actuated by direct perception; men knew that life continued. But in the future the thought of immortality must be aroused from the other end. Men will understand that life here is the continuation of the spiritual life. As formally in conformity with the nature of the times, men looked first to the continuation of life after death, so in the future they will learn more and more looked chiefly at all life here as a continuation of the life between death and rebirth. Certainly the churches have erected barriers against this. For nothing is considered so great a heresy by the church as the thought of the “pre-existence of the soul” and, as is well known, the old Church Father Origen was looked at askance, principally because he still knew of the pre-existence of the soul. It was not only because—as I have already said—the “spirit” was done away with in the ninth century by the Church Council at Constantinople, by setting up the dogma that man does not consist of body, soul and spirit, but only of ‘body and soul,’ though it conceded that the soul has something of a spiritual nature in it. “It is forbidden to think,” said the Council, “that man consists of body, soul and spirit; he has a soul-like in the spirit-like soul, but he only consists of body and soul.” That is of course still the law of the church today. But something else is bound up with this, which is at the same time “unprejudiced science.” And this is the more interesting part. Among philosophers you find men everywhere divided into body and soul; a threefold division into body, soul and spirit is still very little supporter. Read the “celebrated Wundt” and you will see that it is “unprejudiced science” to divide man into body and soul. It is not unprejudiced science. It is the last remnant of the dogma of the eighth Ecumenical Council! Only the philosophers have forgotten that and look upon it as unprejudiced science. That is the one barrier: the doing away with the spirit. The other barrier which the church has erected is the suppression of the believe in pre-existence. I recall the celebrated philosophical theologian or theological philosopher—whichever you like to call him—Frohschammer in Munich. His books are on the Index. But that has not prevented him, however, from turning against the thought of a pre-existence of the soul, because, he says, that if really the soul did not exist beforehand, if it were not conceived at the same time as the body, then the parents would only produce a “little animal”which later receives the soul. That to him is an uncomfortable concept. (I have introduced this as a note in my ”Riddles of the Soul.”) But it is not so. When we know the fact that man is connected for more than thirty generations with the blood running through the generations, we cannot say that the parents only produce a little animal; for the whole process of the spirit which passes through more than thirty generations, belongs to it. Only one must become conscious of this.

Thus in the future men will not only turn their minds to the question of whether this life lasts after death; they will be able to say, if they study the physical earth-life correctly, that this physical earth-life is the continuation of a spiritual life! Close attention will be directed to this in the future. It will be recognized that the spiritual life continues into the mortal one, and the mortal into the immortal one; and when men recognize the mortal in the immortal, they will have therewith a sure foundation for the knowledge of the immortal. If they understand this earth-life properly, they will no longer try to explain it out of itself alone. Of course it would then be necessary to acquire other ideas such as I have just now set forth. It is indeed necessary to correct many an idea. One acquires with much difficulty ideas which count in life, and popular language is a great hindrance in this respect. We must indeed reckon with popular language first of all, because otherwise we should not be understood at all. But it is a great hindrance to think that we acquire a “likeness” direct from the parents. That is nonsense. I have said in the public lecture that our method of science is suffering very much because what is acknowledged in regard to the science of the inorganic is not also apply to the organic. No one will seek to refer the magnetic power in the magnet to the horseshoe-shaped piece of iron, but will explain the magnetism in the magnet or in the magnetic needle by what pertains to the Cosmos; but the origin of the egg in the hen or the embryo in man—these are not explained from the Cosmos! The Cosmos, however, works everywhere. And strange as it may appear, just as though a sense-impression a canal is poured into the eye in order to open the door for the Ego to come out, so does propagation rest on the fact that in reality room is made for it. What happened is that the organism of the mother is so prepared that room is created and what originates therein is derived from the Cosmos, from the whole Macrocosm. It is a complicated process; but in the being of the mother the room only is prepared; the organization of the mother is so far disturbed as to provide a cavity into which the macrocosm can enter. That is the essential point and even embryology will grasp this before long. They will understand that the most important part connected with embryo is where there is nothing, where the substance of the mother is pushed back because the macrocosm wishes to enter. But man is already united with and beholds the forces which work from the Cosmos through this macrocosmic element, which prepared itself ever since he was intuitively bound up with his ancestors—in the longest case from 32 to 35 generations ago. From the sphere of his stars, to which he is assigned, man beholds the ray fall upon the Earth, he beholds the place where he will be incarnated. Then he gradually approaches the Earth.

These are things which—as I think—can fill our minds with a significant impression. We cannot take up Spiritual Science as we might perhaps take up mathematics, but we shall accept it as something deeply connected with our higher feelings, which makes us in reality different beings, and which deeply enriches human life and lays the foundation of a real cosmic consciousness. This vivifying, in the best sense of the word “quickening” effect of spiritually-scientific knowledge is both essential and important. We certainly should not fail to recognize that at the present time we are to a certain extent in a state of transition with regard to the things here meant. Our age must take this on itself, as its Karma. Today people still say lightly: “Must I indeed except such complicated ideas in order to understand your teaching of the destiny of man? Other teaching makes it easier for people.” the point is that we are living in a time of transition and these ideas are still strange to people; but you will have to become accustomed to them. The time must come when these things will even be taught to children and thereby the discovery will be made that children will understand them surprisingly well. They will understand much better than others what comes from the pictures of Spiritual Science, for they bring much imaginative faculty with them out of the spiritual world, which we set to work to drive out of them, do not take into account and sometimes brutally ignore; otherwise we should admit that many a child says uncommonly clever things, much cleverer than grown-up people. Sometimes what a child says is much more interesting than what the professor says, because it is more connected with the real being of the world. These things should really be taken with a certain coloring, then it will no longer be difficult to introduce things in a suitable manner to the child-mind. The transition to this is naturally not easy and therefore people very willingly abandon the thought. But just from many questions of a child-mind we can recognize, if we pay attention to the direction and tone of the question, that reminiscences of a former life are present in the child.

We must take what is called Spiritual Science absolutely in earnest and must be of the opinion that it must find its way into the social life to which education and instruction also belong. In this respect much more might be done today than is usually considered possible. For what I recently remarked is absolutely true: when those who wish to become teachers or educators are examined today, attention is paid above all to what they have acquired in the way of knowledge—which really is quite unnecessary, for when they are preparing themselves, they can always read up in a suitable compendium what it is necessary for them to have for teaching purposes. What is learnt on examination is very soon forgotten again. We can see this best when we remember how our own school life was carried on. I once had to go through an examination. At the appointed time the professor was ill. I went to the assistant who said: “Yes, the Professor is ill, and his illness may last another week; I can sympathize with you; if you have to go about in this grand condition for a week, you will have forgotten everything, but there is no help for it.” It is therefore reckoned that what one has to give out in the examination will very soon be forgotten! It is simply a comedy! But what will have to be taken into account will be to consider what sort of man is being let loose on the young. The question is to study the human being in each one, not only what he has squeezed into the mechanism of his life of ideas. The question is whether the real man is in a position to establish that mysterious relationship to youth which is necessary. It will then not be at all so difficult really to bring to youth what Spiritual Science can evolve for it.

I want chiefly to draw your attention today to such facts of the human collective life as can make clear to your consciousness that we must not only preserve old ideas, but that man needs new ideas, that our legacy of ideas must be enriched by many things. You will see how it will be sought after when once such a thing as Spiritual Science is spread abroad. Mankind has been longing for it for a long time. Most people wish to spare themselves from taking in too many ideas; for that reason they go so willingly to lime-light lectures, or other illustrative lectures, where they can look on and need not take in many ideas. As a rule when something new is offered to people they ask: “Now what does he really want?”But what do these people themselves want when they ask: “What is he really after?” they would like the matter to be translated into what they already know! But in the domain of Spiritual Science there can be no question of that; there one must take up new ideas which do not already exist, which once in olden times were partly present in another form, but which are not yet here today. One must resolve to penetrate into new ideas. This is often very difficult, for if men would really take up new ideas they would not ask: “What is he really after?” but would accept it. In future a much more useful question will be: “What ought I really think?” and not “What does he really want?” Then we should see how that which is developed as “opinion,” also sets free life-forces within us, so that we come to the truth; we should see that although vision is certainly subtle, it is not at all so far away. First, however, prejudices will have to be overcome. There is, for example, a popular little book called “Introduction to Philosophy.” In it are ideas which I criticized both yesterday and today. But the compiler is especially remarkable when he speaks about “Supernaturalism.” He considers the supernatural, the super-sensible as particularly harmful, for the reason that he is of the opinion that “what is natural”is something which every man can judge and test for himself, but with the super-sensible, supernatural, the danger would be in the fact that everybody would not be able to judge for himself but would have to accept a thing on the authority of others. Of course this is related to the other statement, that the priesthood of all times had made use of this and that men have become spoiled by supernaturalism, because they thereby became dependent on the belief in authority. If however we observe the true circumstances, we can say that when the official philosophies of today come to speak of the super-sensible, they simply become childish. For it is a childish conception, and implies that the man had no idea of how universally prevalent the belief in authority is, just as in our present time, even though people wish to hold themselves free from it. How many people are there who know upon what the Copernican teaching is based? They learn it by someone illustrating it to them by placing some spirit or other on a chair as it were in the universe and showing from there how the Sun moves and how the planets revolve around it. All that is nonsense. If men were shown all that really can be disclosed to them, they would have a quite different concept and would see how uncertain all the hypotheses are. But just think what an enormous amount men believe in authority today! How happy they are today in another sphere (to remind you of a side-phenomena) when secret acts are discovered through a Bolshevik Government, upon which the fate of countless people depend! There is a proof of the matter as regards what is “natural,” everyone can prove it; but as regards the supernatural, it is believed that men would lose their independence! This is really turning things upside down. And one of the tasks of Spiritual Science will in many respects consistt in setting things on their feet again. That things should have been turned upside down is quite natural, for the Consciousness Soul had to be developed. Now however they must again be set on their feet, in a proper manner.

In the next lecture we will follow this up and we shall see that this picture of “setting things on their feet” is by no means untrue, but has indeed an even deeper significance.

Today and the day after tomorrow I propose to discuss a few of the more important facts relating to consciousness and to karmic connections.

If you cast even a superficial glance at that which exists in your soul from awaking in the morning to falling asleep at night—in the form of ideas, moods, impulses of will, adding of course all the impressions that approach the soul from without—then you have everything that may be called the objects of ordinary consciousness.

It must be clear to us that all these details of our conscious activity are dependent, under ordinary conditions, upon the instrumentality of the physical body. The immediate, irrefutable proof of this is that one must awake in order to live within these facts of the usual consciousness. For us this means that the human being must submerge himself in the physical body with what is outside it during sleep, and his physical body must be at his disposal with its instruments. He must be able to make use of them if the activities of the ordinary consciousness are to go on.

The following question then arises: In what way does the human being, as a soul and spiritual entity, make use of his physical instruments, his organs of sense, his nervous system? In what way does he use his bodily organs in order to exist in his ordinary consciousness? In the outer, materialistic world there is, first of all, the belief that the human being possesses in his physical instruments that which produces the facts present to consciousness. It has been frequently pointed out that this is not the case; that it is no more sensible for us to imagine that our inner corporeality, our sense organs or brain, bring forth the details of consciousness than to imagine that a candle creates the flame. The relation of what we call consciousness to the bodily mechanism is quite otherwise. We might compare it with the relation of a man to the mirror in which he sees himself. When we sleep our state of consciousness is comparable, let us say, to walking straight ahead in a certain space. If we do this we do not see ourselves, how our nose or forehead looks, and so forth. Only when someone steps forward with a mirror and holds it before us do we behold ourselves. But then we are confronted by what has always belonged to us. It is then there for us. It is the same with the facts of our ordinary consciousness. They exist continually within us, and have, as they exist there, nothing whatsoever to do with the physical body—as little as we ourselves have to do with the mirror mentioned above. The materialistic theory in this field is simply nonsense; it is not even a possible hypothesis. For the materialist in this field affirms nothing less than would be asserted were someone to declare that because he sees himself in a mirror the mirror created him.

If you wish to give yourself up to the illusion that the mirror creates you because you see yourself only when it is held before you, then you may also believe that parts of the brain or the sense organs produce the content of your soul-life. Both statements are equally intelligent and true. That the mirror creates the human being is just as true as that the brain produces thoughts. The facts of our consciousness persist. It is necessary for our ordinary organization that we be able to perceive these existing details of consciousness. To this end we must encounter that which reflects them—our physical body. We have thus in our physical body what we may call the reflecting apparatus for the facts of our ordinary consciousness. These facts exist in our soul and spiritual entity. We cannot perceive them psychically any more than we can perceive ourselves without a mirror. We become aware of that which lives within us and is a part of us by having held before us the mirror of our bodily nature. That is the actual state of things, except that one has not to do with a passive reflector in the case of the body, but with something that contains processes of its own. Thus it may be imagined that instead of the mirror which is silvered to produce reflection, the physical body has behind it all sorts of processes. The comparison suffices to show the relation of our spirit and soul being to the body. We will hold before our minds the fact that for all we experience in normal, everyday consciousness, the physical body is an adequate reflector. Behind or, let us say, below all the details of this usual consciousness lie the things that rise up into our ordinary soul-life, and which we must designate as facts within the hidden depths of the soul.

Some of that which exists in the hidden depths of the soul is experienced by the poet or the artist who knows—if he is a genuine poet or artist—that he does not conceive his works by means of logic or outer observation. He knows instead that they emerge from unknown depths, and are there, really there without having been gathered together by the forces of ordinary consciousness. But from these hidden depths of soul-life other things also emerge which, although in everyday life we are unaware of their origin, play a part in our everyday consciousness.

We saw yesterday that we can go down deeper, into the realm of half-consciousness, the realm of dreams, and we know that dreams lift something up out of the depths of soul-life which we cannot lift up by straining the memory in the simple usual way. When something long buried in memory stands before a human soul in a dream picture—which happens again and again—the individual in most cases could never, through recollection alone, lift these things up from the hidden depths of soul-life because the ordinary consciousness does not extend so far down. But that which is inaccessible to this surface consciousness is quite within reach of the subconsciousness, and in the half conscious dream state much that has remained or been preserved, so to say, is brought up or rises up.

Only those things strike upwards that have failed to produce their effects in the way usual to that emanation of human experience which sinks into the hidden depths of the soul. We become healthy or ill, moody or gay, not due directly to our ordinary course of life, but because a bodily condition results from that which has sunk down from our life experience. It is no longer remembered, but there below in our soul this sunken something works, and makes us what we become in the course of our lives. Many a life would be quite comprehensible to us, if we but knew what hidden elements had descended throughout its course into these subconscious depths. We should be able to understand many a man in his thirties, forties, or fifties, should know why he has this or that tendency, why he feels so deeply dissatisfied in certain connections without being able to say what causes this discomfort. We should understand a great deal if we were to follow the life of such a man back into childhood. We should be able then to see how in his early years his parents and environment had affected him, what was called forth of sorrow and joy, of pleasure or pain, perhaps entirely forgotten, but acting upon his general condition. For that which rolls down, and surges out of our consciousness into the hidden depths of soul life continues its operation there. It is a curious fact that the force, acting in this way, works primarily upon ourselves, does not leave, so to speak, the sphere of our personality. Therefore when the clairvoyant consciousness descends, (and this happens through what is called imaginative cognition), when the clairvoyant consciousness descends to the realm where, in the subconsciousness, things rule which have just been described, the seeker always finds himself. He finds that which exists and surges within him. And that is good; for in true self-knowledge the human being must learn to know himself in order that he may observe and become acquainted with all the driving forces that work within him.

If he gives no heed to these facts; if when he gains clairvoyant consciousness through exercises in imaginative cognition, and forces his way down into the subconscious—if he does not recognize that in everything working within him he finds only himself—then he is exposed to manifold errors. For he cannot become aware of this in any way comparable to the ordinary activities of consciousness. There arises for the human searcher the possibility, at one step or another, of having visions, of seeing shapes which are quite new and do not resemble those with which he has become acquainted in average experience. This may happen, but to believe that such things are part of the outer world would be a serious mistake. These phenomena of the inner life do not present themselves as in the ordinary consciousness. If one has a headache it is a fact of the ordinary consciousness. One knows it to be located in one's own head. If anyone has a stomachache he is aware of it within himself. If we descend into what we call the hidden depths of the soul, we remain absolutely within ourselves, and yet what we encounter may present itself objectively, as if it were in the outside world.

Let us consider a striking example: Let us assume that someone has a longing to be the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. (I have already stated that I have counted during my lifetime twenty-four such Magdalenes!) Let us assume also that this wish is not as yet admitted: we do not need to admit to ourselves our own wishes, that is not necessary. But a woman reads the story of Mary Magdalene, and it pleases her exceedingly. The desire to be Mary Magdalene may arise at once in her subconscious mind while in the surface consciousness nothing is present but the attraction of this character. It pleases the person in question. In the subconsciousness, unknown to its possessor, there is a growing desire to be this Mary Magdalene. This individual goes through the world, and as long as nothing intervenes in her upper consciousness, that is to say, as far as she knows, she is simply pleased with Mary Magdalene. The ardent desire to be Mary Magdalene is in her subconscious mind, but she knows nothing about that, so it does not trouble her. She is guided by the details of the ordinary consciousness, and may go through the world as though she had no such injurious subconscious desire. But let us assume that, as a result of employing this or that occult method of reaching the subconscious, this woman succeeds in descending into herself. She might not become aware of a desire to be Mary Magdalene as she would of a headache. If she did her attitude towards her desire would be the same as towards a pain: she would just try to get rid of it. But in the case of an irregular penetration this desire presents itself as something outside the personality. The vision pretends to say: Thou art Mary Magdalene! It stands before her, projecting itself as a fact, and a human being, as evolution is today, is unable to control such a condition with the ego. With good, correct, and careful schooling this cannot happen, for then the ego goes along into every sphere; but as soon as something enters the consciousness without the accompanying presence of the ego it is produced as an objective fact. This observer believes that she recalls events surrounding Mary Magdalene, and identifies herself with her.

This is a real possibility. I emphasize this today in order that you may gather from it the fact that only careful schooling, and caution in regard to your entrance into the domain of occultism can save you from falling into error. It is to be understood that you must first see a whole world before you, must note objects around you, excluding however that which you relate to yourself, or which is within you, even though it appears as a world tableau—if you know that it is well to regard what you first see only as the projection of your own inner life, then you have a good corrective for the errors along the way. This is the best of all: regard, as a general rule, everything as phenomena emanating from yourself. Most of them arise out of our wishes, vanities, from our ambitions, in short, from characteristics relating to the egotism of humanity. These things project themselves, for the most part, outward, and you may now raise the question: How can we avoid these errors? How can we save ourselves from them?

We cannot save ourselves from these errors by the ordinary facts of consciousness. The deception arises from the fact that, although the human being is confronted in reality by a world-tableau, he cannot escape from himself, is all entangled in himself. From this you may see that it depends upon our coming, in one way or another, out of ourselves that we learn to differentiate: here you have a vision and there another. The visions are both outside ourselves; one is perhaps only the projection of a desire, the other is a fact, but they do not differ as radically as in ordinary life when someone else says he has a headache, and you have it yourself. Our own inner life is projected into space, just as the inner life of another person. How shall we learn to distinguish the one from the other?

We must undertake research within the occult field, and learn to distinguish true from false impressions, although they appear confused and all make the same claim to authenticity, as though we looked into the physical world and saw besides ordinary trees, imaginary ones. The real objective facts and those which arise from our own inner life are mixed together. How are we to learn to separate two realms which are so intermingled?

We do not learn this primarily through our consciousness. If we remain entirely within the confines of our mental life there is then no possibility of differentiation. This possibility lies only in the slow occult training of the soul. As we go on further and further we acquire real discrimination. This means that we learn to do in the occult realm what we would have to do in the physical world if trees born of phantasy and genuine trees stood side by side. If we run against phantasy-trees they let us pass through without resistance, but if we encounter real trees we bruise ourselves against them. Something similar, although of course only as a spiritual fact, must confront us in the occult field.

We can, if we go about it properly, learn in a comparatively simple way to distinguish between the true and false within this field, not however through ideas, but by resolution of will. This resolution may be brought about in the following way: If we look over our life we find in it two distinctly different groups of occurrences. We often find that this or that in which we succeed or fail is related to our abilities. That is to say, we find it comprehensible that in a certain field we do not succeed very well because in it we are not particularly bright. Where we assume on the contrary that we have ability, we find success quite natural.

Perhaps we need not always discern so distinctly the connection between what we carry out and our abilities. There is also a less definite way to realize this connection. If, for example, anyone in his later years is pursued by this or that blow of fate and, thinking back says to himself: “As a man I did little to make myself energetic”—or must say to himself: “I was always a careless fellow”—he may also say: “Well, the connection between my lack of success and my other omissions is not immediately apparent, but I do see that things cannot really succeed for a careless, lazy person to the same degree they are possible for one who is conscientious and industrious.” In short, there are successes and failures which we can comprehend and find natural, but there are others which happen in such a way that we cannot discover any connection, so that we say to ourselves: “Although in accordance with certain abilities this or that should have succeeded, it nevertheless did not succeed.” Thus there is distinctly a type of success or failure whose connection with our capacities we cannot see.

That is one thing. The other is that in regard to some things in the outside world which strike us as blows of fate, we can sometimes say: “Well yes, that appears to be just, for we furnished all the predisposing conditions;” but some other things that happen we cannot discover that we are in any position to explain. We have thus two types of experience; those whose relation to ourselves and our capacities we realize, and the other type just characterized, for which we cannot see that we are responsible. Our external experiences fall likewise into two classes: those of which we cannot say that we have produced the determining conditions, in contrast to others which we know we have brought about.

Now we may look around a little in our lives. That is a useful experiment for everyone. We could gather together all the things whose causes we cannot see, whose success led us to say “a blind chicken has found a kernel of corn”—things whose success we cannot attribute to ourselves. But we can remember and collect also failures in the same way, and those seemingly accidental outer events for which we know of no modifying influence. And now we make the following soul experiment: We imagine that we constructed for ourselves an artificial human being who, through his own abilities, brought about all our successes whose cause we do not understand. If something succeeded for us requiring wisdom just where we ourselves are stupid, then we conceive a person who is particularly clever in this field, and for whom the enterprise simply had to succeed. Or for an outer event we proceed in this way: let us say a brick falls on our head. We can see no reason, but we conceive someone who brought it about by running up to the roof and loosening the brick, so that he needed only to wait a little for it to fall. He runs down quickly, and the brick strikes him. We do this with certain events which we know have not been brought about by us in any ordinary way, and which happen very much against our will. Let us assume that at some time in our life we were struck by someone. In order that we may not find this too difficult we may place this event back in our childhood; we can pretend that then we contrived to be beaten by someone, that is, we had done everything to bring it about. In short, we construct for ourselves a human being who brings down upon himself everything for which we cannot account. You see, if progress in occultism is desired many things must be done which run contrary to ordinary events. If you do only what generally seems reasonable you get no further in occultism, for that which relates to higher worlds may seem to ordinary people quite foolish. It does no harm if the method does seem foolish to the prosaic outer man.

Well, we construct for ourselves this human being. At first it seems to us a merely grotesque performance, something the object of which we perhaps do not understand; but we shall make a discovery about ourselves, in fact everyone will who tries it, namely the astonishing discovery that he no longer wishes to detach himself from this being which he has himself built up, that it is beginning to interest him. If you try it you will see for yourself: you cannot get away from this artificial human being; it lives within you. And in a peculiar way: it not only lives within you but it transforms itself and radically. It changes so that at last it becomes something quite different from what it was originally. It becomes something of which we are forced to say “it really does exist within us.”

This is an experience which is possible to everyone. We admit that what has just been described—which is not the original self-created being of phantasy, but that which this has become—is a part of what is within us. Now this is just what has, so to speak, brought about the apparently causeless things during our lives. We find within ourselves the real cause of what is otherwise incomprehensible. That which I have described to you is, in other words, the way not only to peer into your own soul-life and find something, but it is the way out from the soul-life into the environment. For what we fail to bring off does not remain with us, but belongs to our environment. So we have taken something out of our environment which does not harmonize with the facts of our consciousness, but presents itself as if it were within us. Then we gain the feeling that we really have something to do with what seems so causeless in real life. A person acquires in this way a feeling of his connection with his destiny, with what is called Karma. Through this soul experiment a real way is opened to experience within himself, in a certain manner, his own Karma.

You may say: “Yes, but I do not understand exactly what you have said.” If you say that you do not fail to understand what you imagine, but you lack understanding for something which even a child can grasp, but about which you simply have not thought. It is impossible for anyone who has not carried out the experiment to understand these things. Only he who has done this can understand. These things are to be taken only as the description of an experiment that can be made and experienced by anyone. Each one comes to the realization that something lives within him which is connected with his Karma. If anyone knew this beforehand no rule would need be given him for the attainment of this knowledge.

It is quite in order that no one grasps this who has not yet made the experiment; it is not however a question of understanding in the ordinary sense, but an acceptance of information regarding something that our soul may undertake. If our soul follows such paths it accustoms itself not to live within itself only, in its own wishes and desires, but to relate itself to outer happenings, to consider them. Exactly the things which we ourselves have not desired, we have built into that which is here considered. And when we have come to face our Destiny so that we can calmly take it upon us, and think in regard to what we usually murmur and rebel against: “We accept it willingly, for we ourselves have decreed it,” then there arises a state of mind and heart in which, when we force our way down into the hidden depths of soul, we can distinguish with absolute certainty the true from the false. For then is shown with a wonderful clarity and assurance what is true and what false.

If you behold any sort of vision with the mental eye, and can as it were by a mere look, banish it, drive it away, simply by the use of all the inner forces with which you have become acquainted—then it is just a phantasm. But if you cannot get rid of it in this fashion, if you can banish at most that which reminds you of the outer world; if the really visionary quality, the spiritual thing remains like a solid fact—then it is true. But you cannot make this distinction until you have done what has been described. Therefore without the above-mentioned training there can be no certainty in the differentiation between the true and false upon the super-sensible plane. The essential thing in this soul experiment is that we always remain in full possession of our ordinary consciousness in regard to what we desire, and that by means of this experiment we accustom ourselves to look upon what we in our ordinary consciousness do not at all want, and is repugnant to us, as something willed into existence by us. One may in a certain sense have reached a definite degree of inner development; but unless, through such a soul experiment, we have learned to contrast all the wishes, desires, sympathy and antipathy which live in the soul with our relation to what we have not wished, then we shall make mistake after mistake.

The greatest mistake in the Theosophical Society was first made by H. P. Blavatsky; for although she fixed her spiritual attention upon the realm where Christ may be found, in the contents of her upper consciousness, in her wishes and desires, there was a constant antipathy, even a passion against everything Christian or Hebrew, and a preference for all other spiritual cultures on earth, and because she had never gone through what has been described today she conceived of the Christ in an entirely false way. That was quite natural. It passed over to her nearest students, and has been dragged along, although grotesquely coarsened, to the present day. These things extend to the highest spheres. One may see many things upon the occult plane, but the power of discrimination is something different from mere sight, mere perception. This must be sharply stressed.

Now the problem is this: When we sink down into our hidden soul-depths (and every clairvoyant must do this,) we first come into what is fundamentally ourselves. And we must learn to know ourselves by really making the transition, by having a world before us, of which Lucifer and Ahriman always promise to give us the kingdoms. This means that our own inner self appears before us, and the devil says: “This is the objective world.” That is the temptation that even Christ did not escape. The inner illusions of the inner world were presented, only He, through His inherent power, recognized from the very beginning that it is not a real world, but a world that is within. It is through this inner world alone, which we must separate into two parts in order to get rid of one—our own personal part—and have the other remain, that we pass through the hidden depths of our soul-life out into the objective super-sensible world. And just as our spiritual-soul kernel must make use of our physical body as a mirror for outer perception, for the facts of ordinary consciousness, so must the human being make use of his etheric body as a reflecting apparatus for the super-sensible facts which next confront him. The higher sense organs, if we may so describe them, open within the astral body, but what lives in them must be reflected by the etheric body, just as the spiritual and soul activity of which we are aware in ordinary life is reflected by the physical body. We must now learn to manage our ether body, and it is entirely natural since our etheric body is usually unknown to us, although it represents what vitalizes us, that we must become acquainted with it before we can learn to recognize that which enters us from the super-sensible objective world and may be reflected by this ether body.

You now see what we experience when we descend into the hidden depths of our soul life. It is primarily ourselves, and the projection of our wishes is very similar to what we usually call the life in Kamaloca [Region of Burning Desire, or of Cleansing Fire; also Purgatory.] It differs from it only in that when anyone in ordinary life thus pushes forward into imprisonment within himself (which is what it may be called,) he has still his physical body to which he can return. But in Kamaloca the physical body is gone, even part of the etheric body—the part which most immediately reflects for us—but the universal life-ether surrounding us serves as an instrument of reflection, and mirrors everything that is within us. Thus in the Kamaloca period our own inner world is built up about us as an objective world, all our wishes, desires, all that we feel, and to which we are inwardly attuned.

It is important to understand that the primary characteristic of the life in Kamaloca is our imprisonment within ourselves, and this prison is the more securely fastened by the fact that we cannot return to any sort of physical life to which our whole inner activity has been related. Only when we live through this Kamaloca period in such a way as to realize gradually (we do come to this gradually,) that it all may be got rid of by experiencing our-self otherwise than through mere desires and so forth, only then is our Kamaloca prison opened.

How is this meant? In the following way: Let us suppose that someone dies with a definite wish; this wish belongs to that which projects itself outward and is built up around him in some kind of imagery. Now as long as this desire lives within him it is impossible, in regard to it, to open Kamaloca with any sort of key. Only when he realizes that this wish cannot be satisfied except by discarding it, when his attitude towards it becomes the opposite to what it has been, then gradually with the wish everything that imprisons us in Kamaloca will be torn from the soul. Only then do we come into the realm between death and rebirth which has been called the devachanic [Devachan = Heaven.], and which may be entered also through clairvoyance when we have recognized that which belongs to the self alone. In clairvoyance it is reached through a definite degree of development; in Kamaloca through the passage of time, simply because time so torments us through our own desires that at last they are overcome. By this means that which has been dangled before us as if it were the world and its splendor is destroyed.

The world of super-sensible realities is what is usually called Devachan. How does this world of super-sensible facts appear before us? Here upon this earthly globe we can speak of Devachan only because in clairvoyance, when the self has been really conquered, we enter at once into the world of super-sensible facts, which are objectively present, and these facts coincide with those of Devachan.

The most important characteristic of this devachanic world is that in it moral actualities are no longer separable from the physical, that moral and physical laws are one and the same. What does that mean? Well, is it not true that in the ordinary physical world the sun shines upon the just and the unjust? Whoever commits a crime may be put in prison, but the physical sun is not darkened. That is to say: in the physical world there is a realm of moral and physical laws, leading in two very different directions. It is not so in Devachan, not at all; instead of this, everything proceeding from morality, from intelligent wisdom, from the aesthetically beautiful, and so on, leads to growth (is creative,) and that which arises from immorality, intellectual falsity, and aesthetic ugliness leads to withering and destruction. And there the laws of nature are such that the sun does not shine upon the just and the unjust alike but, if we may speak figuratively, it darkens upon the unjust; so that the just, passing through Devachan, have there the spiritual sunshine, that is to say, the influence of the fertilizing forces that bring about their forward progress in life. The spiritual forces draw back from the dishonest or ugly human being. The following is possible there which is impossible here on earth. When two people—just and unjust—walk here side by side, the sun cannot shine upon one and not upon the other; but in the spiritual world the effect of the spiritual forces depends absolutely upon the quality of the individual concerned. That is to say: the laws of nature and the spiritual laws do not follow two separate roads, but one and the same. That is the fundamental, essential truth. In the devachanic world the natural, moral, and intellectual laws act together as one.

As a result the following occurs: If a human being has entered and lives through the devachanic world he has within him what is left over from his last life of justice and injustice, good and evil, aesthetic beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood. All this residue acts however in such a way that it takes immediate possession of the natural laws. We may compare the law there with the following in the physical world: If anyone in the physical world had stolen or lied and, seeking the sunlight, found that the sun did not shine upon him, could not find it anywhere, and thus through lack of sunshine developed a disease ... or let us rather assume as an example that someone in the physical world who was a liar had difficulty in breathing; that would be an exact parallel with what would be the case in the devachanic world. To the person who has burdened himself with this or that, something happens in his spiritual and soul nature so that the natural law at once and absolutely expresses the spiritual law. Hence, if the further development of this personality is brought about in this way, as he progresses gradually and is more fully permeated by these laws, such characteristics develop in him that he becomes an expression of the qualities which he brought over from his past life. Just let us suppose that someone has been two hundred years in Devachan, and has gone through it, having been in his last life a liar: the spirits of Truth withdraw from him. There dies in him that which in a truthful soul would be invigorated.

Or let us assume that someone with a pronounced quality of vanity which he has not given up goes through Devachan. This vanity in Devachan is an extraordinarily evil-smelling emanation, and certain spiritual beings avoid a personality who gives out the offensive evaporation of ambition or vanity. This is not a figurative statement. In Devachan vanity and ambition are extremely evil exhalations, and lead to the withdrawal of the beneficent influence of certain beings who retreat before this atmosphere. This could be compared to the placing in the cellar of a plant which thrives only in sunlight. A vain person cannot thrive. He will grow up with this characteristic. When he reincarnates he lacks the strength to build in the good influences. Instead of developing certain organs in a healthy way, he forms an unhealthy part in his organism. Thus not only our physical limitations, but our moral and intellectual ones as well show us the kind of human beings we become in life. Only when we emerge from the physical plane do natural and spiritual law go side by side. Between death and a new birth they are a single whole. And in our soul are implanted the natural forces which destroy if they are the result of the immoral deeds of past lives, but which fructify if they are the result of noble ones. This is true not only for our inner constitution, but also for that which falls upon us from without as our Karma.

In Devachan the essential fact is that no difference exists there between natural and spiritual law, and it is the same for the clairvoyant who really penetrates to the super-sensible worlds. These laws of the super-sensible worlds are radically different from those which rule upon the physical plane. It is simply impossible for the clairvoyant to differentiate in the manner of the materialistic mind when someone says: “That is only a law of objective nature.” Behind this objective natural law there exists always in reality a spiritual law. A clairvoyant cannot cross a scorched meadow, for example, or a flooded district, cannot perceive a volcanic eruption without thinking that behind the facts of nature are spiritual forces, hidden spiritual beings. For him a volcanic eruption is at the same time a moral deed, even though its morality may lie in an entirely different, undreamed-of realm. Those who always confuse the physical with the higher worlds will say: “Well, when innocent human beings are destroyed by a volcanic outbreak, how can one assume that it is a moral deed?” We do not need to worry about that. Such a judgment would be as cruelly philistine as the opposite idea: namely, to regard it as a punishment from God upon the people who are settled around the volcano. Both judgments are possible only to the narrow-minded standpoint of the physical world. Such is not the question, which may have to do with much more universal things. Those who live on the slope of a volcano, and whose property is destroyed by it, may be for this life entirely innocent. It will be made up to them later. This does not make us hardhearted and unwilling to help them (that again would be a narrow-minded interpretation of the matter). But in the case of volcanic eruptions the fact is that in the course of the earth evolution certain things happen through human deeds which retard human evolution, and just the good gods must work in a certain way for a balance which is sometimes achieved through such natural phenomena.

This application of the law is to be seen only in occult depths: that compensation is created for what is done by men themselves against the genuine development of humanity. Every event, whether a mere activity of nature or not, is at bottom something moral, and spiritual beings in the higher worlds are the bearers of the moral law behind the physical fact. If you simply conceive a world in which no separation of natural and spiritual laws can be considered, a world in which, with other words, justice rules as a natural law, you have then the devachanic world. Therefore one need not think that in this devachanic world through any sort of arbitrary decision an unworthy action has to be punished, because in that realm the immoral destroys itself as inevitably as fire consumes inflammable material, and morality is self-stimulated, and advances itself.

We thus see that the essential characteristic, the innermost nerve of existence, so to speak, is quite different for the different worlds. We gain no idea of the several worlds if we do not consider these peculiarities which differ so radically upon different levels. We may thus correctly characterize physical world, Kamaloca, and Devachan: in the physical world natural and spiritual law run side by side as two series of facts; in Kamaloca the human being is confined within himself, as if in a prison of his own being; the devachanic world is the complete opposite of the physical; there natural and spiritual law are one and the same. These are the three characteristics, and if you consider them carefully, striving sensitively to realize how very different from our own a world must be in which the moral, intellectual, even the law of beauty are at the same time natural law, then you will gain an acute impression of conditions in the devachanic world.

In our physical world when we meet an ugly or a beautiful face we have no right to treat the ugly person as if he must be psychically revolting, or the beautiful one as if he must necessarily be worthy of high esteem. In Devachan it is quite otherwise. There we meet no ugliness that is not deserved, and it will be impossible for anyone who, because of his preceding incarnation, is obliged in this one to wear an ugly face, but who strives throughout this life to be true and honorable, to meet us in Devachan with any sort of unpleasant appearance. He will have transformed his ugliness into beauty. But it is equally true that he who is untruthful, vain, or ambitious in this life will wander about in Devachan with some hideous form. And something else is also true: In ordinary physical life we do not see that an ugly face continually robs itself, nor that a beautiful one contributes something to itself, but in Devachan it is like that; ugliness is an element of progressive destruction, and we cannot perceive beauty without assuming that it is the result of an equally continuous furtherance and help.

We must feel quite otherwise towards the devachanic or mental world than towards the physical world. And this is necessary: to differentiate in these sensations, to see the essential which matters, in order that you may appropriate not only the description of these things, but that you may take away feelings, sensitivity towards that which is described in spiritual science. If you try to soar upwards to an appreciation of a world in which morality, beauty, and intellectual truth appear with the inevitability of natural law then you have the feeling of the devachanic world; and this is why we must, so to say, collect so much material and work so much, in order that the things which we work out for ourselves may at last be merged into one feeling.

It is impossible for anyone to come easily or lightly to a real knowledge of what must gradually be made clear and comprehensible to the world through spiritual science. There are many different movements that say, “Oh why must so many things be learned in spiritual science? Are we to become pupils again? Feeling is all that matters.” It does matter, but it must be the right feeling, which must first be developed! This is true of everything. It would be pleasanter, would it not, for the painter if he did not have to learn the technique of his art, if he did not have to bring out upon the canvas, at first slowly, the final result, if he needed only to exhale in order to have his finished work before him! In our world today it is a curious fact that the more the realm of the soul is in question, the harder it is for people to realize that nothing is accomplished by mere exhaling! In music it would not be admitted that one could become a composer without learning anything of composition; there it is quite obvious. This is so also with painting, though people admit it less easily, and in poetry they admit it even less, otherwise there would be in our own time fewer poets. For actually no time is as unpoetic as our own though there are so many poets. If it is not necessary to have studied poetry, but only to be able to write (which naturally has nothing to do with poetic art) and of course to spell correctly—we need only to be able to express our thoughts! And for philosophy still less is required. For today, that anyone may judge straight away anything concerning the conceptions of life and the world is regarded as a matter of course, since everyone has his own point of view. One finds again and again that no value is set by such people upon the carefully worked out personal possession of the means and methods of cognition and of research in the world, gained through every resource of inner work. Instead, it seems to them obvious that the standpoint of one who has labored long before venturing to give out even a little about world secrets has no greater value than that of the one who simply takes it upon himself to have a standpoint. Anyone can count nowadays as a man with a world conception.

This, on the contrary, is what really matters, upon which everything depends; that we labor with all our energy in order that what we work out for ourselves we may at last gather together and carry over into feelings, which through their coloring give the highest, the truest knowledge. Struggle through, by working towards a feeling, an impression of a world in which natural and spiritual law coincide. Then if you work seriously—no matter though people believe you to have learned only theoretically, although you have striven hard in working through this or that theory—you will realize that it makes an impression upon the devachanic world. If you have not simply imagined a feeling, but evolved it by years of careful work, then this feeling, these nuances of sensibility, have a strength which will bring you further than they could reach of themselves; for through earnest, eager study, they have become true. Then you are not far from the point where these nuances burst asunder, and there lies before you the reality of Devachan. For if the nuances of feeling are truly worked out they become a power of perception.

Therefore, if work along these lines is undertaken by student groups upon a basis of truth, honesty, and patient practice, outside of all sensation, their meeting places become what they should be: schools to lead men into spheres of clairvoyance. And only those who cannot wait for this, or who will not co-operate, can have an erroneous view of these matters.

From: “Ludwig Jacobowski in the Light of Life”

A deep insight into human nature prompted Ludwig Feuerbach to make the significant statement: “God is the manifest inner being, the expressed self of man, the confession of his innermost thoughts, the public confession of his love”. It is the trait in the human soul that this sentence describes that led Ludwig Jacobowski to write the “Novel of a God” when he wanted to portray the dark forces that rule at the bottom of the mind. In doing so, he set himself a task that naturalistic art is bound to fail in. All the individual actions, moods and thoughts of a person seem to point to a struggle in his soul that accompanies him from the moment he becomes conscious until his death. No matter what course the individual events that bring a person to life take, the fundamental struggle always arises anew. It is impossible to depict this struggle in all its magnitude, in its overwhelming scope, if one limits oneself to the reproduction of real facts and real human characters. One would then only be able to show symptoms of this struggle. A personality like Ludwig Jacobowski had to feel this way. For him, it was a matter of constantly deepening his inner life. He wanted to descend into the deepest pits of his own inner being. There he had to encounter the two fundamental forces of the mind that pull people back and forth and mysteriously determine their fate. The one force contains: kindness, love, patience, benevolence, beauty, the other: hatred, hostility, savagery, ugliness, resentment. Anyone who is honest with themselves must admit that there is something of all these elements within them. And the course of world history shows a demonic war that these forces wage, as they emerge from the breast of the individual and guide the destinies of people and nations. The imagination of the poet must go beyond reality if it is to depict the eternal struggle of these powers. From the Nordic pantheon, Ludwig Jacobowski took the superhuman figures he needed to portray the primal demons of the human soul. But the characters that the Nordic sagas had invested in their deities were no more than a starting point for him. He freely developed them in such a way that he could say how modern man feels about the primal struggle that is hinted at.

Balder, the mildness and beauty that has become a god, and Loki, the friend of destruction, are the mythological figures through which Jacobowski was able to express his thoughts poetically. Their fates within the Nordic world of gods became the “apparent inner self” in his novel, the “expressed self of man”. One must point out two main characteristics of Jacobowski as a person if one wants to understand why he was so successful as a poet in his “Loki”: one, the power of plastic creation, and the other, an enchanting lyrical swing. To a great extent, the poet has solved the task of creating mere soul forces so that they do not appear as shadowy allegories, but rather as vivid personalities. This fact is understandable when one knows that these powers of the soul truly detached themselves from his inner being like independent personalities, like demonic entities, and always accompanied him. They played such a role in his life that he felt them like figures that guided him, with whom he held dialogues, and even with whom he fought. And this struggle was so intense that it confused all his feelings, that it stirred up all his passions. The latter circumstance explains the subjective element with which he describes and which naturally sought a lyrical form of expression.

Human nature has within it both the element of selfless devotion and ruthless selfishness. The love of which Goethe says: “No self-love, no self-interest lasts, before its coming they have shrunk away, we call it being pious,” this love has to fight a difficult battle against selfishness, which also appropriates love, according to the words of Max Stirner: “I love people because love makes me happy.” I love because I feel good when I love. In human life, good is followed by evil as a necessary complement. Balder, the all-embracing love, the sun of existence, cannot exist without Loki, selfishness, darkness. Life must proceed in opposites.

It does not seem easy to portray Loki as a sympathetic character. Can one feel sympathy for selfishness, for the desire to destroy? Jacobowski was able to show Loki's character in a sympathetic light, because he knew that good is not only good, but also finite, limited in its goodness. However, the source of the world holds infinite possibilities. A Balder must not seize power. He may spread an immeasurable abundance of good; he must not settle permanently. He must give way to a subsequent Balder who brings new good. One may lament the downfall of good, for one must feel this downfall as an injustice. But this injustice must happen. A power is necessary that destroys good so that new good can arise. The new good needs the destroyer to come into being. Balder needs Loki. And Loki, like the best of gods, can lament that he has to kill Balder; but he kills him out of necessity, and in doing so prepares the way for Balder's son. This is the deeply tragic aspect that Jacobowski has brought out in the character of Loki. It is Loki's fate to be bad, so that new good can always enter the world.

Thus Jacobowski's “Loki” has grown out of a philosophical view of life. And just as a philosophical understanding of life cannot harm man in his full, all-round activity, so the “Novel of a God” is not impaired in its poetic value by the fact that it is steeped in a world of philosophical ideas. Robert Hamerling said of his “Ahasver”: “Overarching, towering, mysteriously spurring and driving, accelerating the crises, standing behind the striving and struggling individuals as the embodiment of the balancing general life – that is how I imagined the figure of Ahasver.” And this is how Jacobowski imagined the character of his Loki. The overarching, superior nature of the philosophical ideas gives the constantly plastic characters and the vividly described events of the poem the character of a higher reality, without robbing them of the ordinary one.

One night, the Ases are terrorized by a terrible dream. Things never seen before are happening in the sky. Odin, the father of the gods, is awakened from his sleep. He sees his wife Frigg's bed unoccupied. Black mist rises from the bed. When the Ase rises to look for his wife, she is lying there with drops of sweat on her forehead and breathing heavily, as if she had just returned from a long journey. The other Ase experience similar things. In the morning they share their strange experiences with each other. Only Urd, the goddess of fate, can know what the mysterious events mean. But she cannot be asked, for her mouth only speaks when she is not asked. Urd's messenger, the black mountain falcon, announces that an Aesir child has been born this night. The mother is an Aesir, but Urd does not know who. Nor does she know who the father is. The Aesir women should take turns in nursing the child. It should be called “Loki”. Thus a being is placed in the world of the gods, sprung from it itself, but as a child of sin, the sin of the gods.

High up in the north, far from Valhalla, this child of sin grows up. Frigg, Odin's wife, has made a bed for him in a hut. And every day an Asin has to go to the distant hut to look after the little god. When Frigg was with him for the first time, the child smiled sweetly. But the goddess beats the boy. He learns to forget how to laugh. All the Asinnen mistreat the uncomfortable offspring of the gods. He is fed with glacier milk, wolf's foam and eagle meat. He is to atone for his sinful origin. This origin has made him an enemy of the entire world of gods. Through their treatment, the Asinnen plant the hostile attitude in him.

Soon they no longer bother about the boy. An elven old woman, Sigyn, continues to care for him in a motherly way. He grows up under her protection. He becomes a strong, serious being. The Asinnen have driven all cheerfulness out of him. He has to work hard to gain food from the earth. This is a mystery to him, and he asks Sigyn whether all beings have to create the bread of life in the sweat of their brow. The old woman's reply encompasses the feelings of all those who are burdened and weighed down, the anxious question that the disinherited must ask themselves at all times: “O wise world of the Ases! Some walk above the air and the sun, reaching into the lovely air to the right and to the left and grasping firm fruits and heavy stalks. And the others crawl laboriously over chasms and cliffs; and their hands tear at the rough earth, empty and only moist from their own sweat.” The god of the disinherited must therefore become Loki, and his feelings towards the other Ases are those of the joyless life burdened with toil towards the effortless, joy-producing happiness.

Loki sets out to meet the beings of his own kind who live in the sun of happiness. When he enters their circle, it becomes clear that he possesses something that they all have to do without, something that the one burdened with pain has over the one who enjoys undeserved happiness: true, supreme wisdom. Loki knows the future of the other gods, which remains hidden from them.

The happy man lives in the eternal present. He enjoys the moment, and it is far from his mind to ponder the causes that bring him the happiness of the moment. The one who is pained by the wheels of the world's course asks about their eternal play. From these questions, he gains insight into the course of things. Wisdom is born out of pain and privation. It makes one strong and hard against carefree dullness. Goethe once called (according to “Riemers Mitteilungen”) “dullness” the “beautiful, magical veil that places nature and truth in a more secret light”, and in the poem “To Fate” he praises this “dullness” with the words: “You have met the right measure for us, wrapped us in pure dullness, so that we, filled with the power of life, hope in the lovely presence of the dear future.” But Goethe also found a guiding principle for the other side of life: “Only he who must conquer it daily deserves freedom as well as life” (“Faust”, Part 2). Loki's life had to be conquered by himself from the very beginning. The path to wisdom leads through pain. That is why he also robs those who walk it of selfless love. Those who have not earned their fate through pain can give themselves selflessly. Those who have acquired their own through pain are all too easily reminded of their own suffering by the carefree happy. This is the case with Loki. He does not know love that is born of dull happiness. This love, which comes from the realm of the gods' joy, lives in Balder. But even the connoisseur of pain cannot close his mind to the power of this love. He must recognize its value. Loki trembles before this love, which he must appreciate, despite the fact that fate has denied it to him. He must confront Balder as an enemy; but he can only do so with the bitter feeling that he is fighting something great. The wisdom that comes from pain must thus give birth to new pain.

Why must the knowing Loki hate Balder, who lives in sweet ignorance but is full of love? Loki's wisdom ends before this question. For Loki's own fate is wrapped up in the answer to this question. And this fate of his is as unknown to him as it is to the other gods, but he sees through it with clairvoyance. What is destined for the other deities is open to his wisdom; what the dark powers have in store for him, this wisdom stops short of.

That is the fate of knowledge: it creates a new riddle by solving other riddles. But with happiness it robs us of our impartiality. That is why the happy believe that knowledge can only come from sin. Balder and Loki are always fighting in our soul. We could be completely happy if we were just pleasure-seekers. But then we would have no judgment of our happiness. We would have a joyful life, but one that would be like a dream. It is only through deprivation and misfortune that we learn what happiness is. But at the same time, they rob us of happiness along with insight.

It is a deep feature of Jacobowski's poetry that only two beings love Loki: Balder, the epitome of all happiness, and Sigyn, the elven old woman. Balder can do so because he does not know hatred, and Sigyn because she does not demand requited love. In the saga, Sigyn is a loving wife who naturally wants to be loved in return. In Jacobowski's poetry, she is a being who looks at the world and its happiness with sublime irony. She is equally distant from and close to Sigyn's hatred and love, because for her they are in the distance to which wisdom has pushed her. She is concerned that undeserved happiness should not become overpowering. That is why she cherishes and cares for the advocate of the disinherited in Loki.

The fight for a mere principle could not carry us away as Jacobowski's novel does. This fight would have to have something frosty about it if Loki were the opponent of the gods, just because he is supposed to represent the negating powers within the world plan. Loki does not fight alone for a general cause; he also fights for his own cause. Balder deprives him of the most beloved, the adored woman. And it is precisely from this personal misfortune of Loki that Balder's happiness springs. That Nanna becomes Balder's wife, not Loki's, completes the latter's happiness and thus that of the other Ases. “Nanna and Balder... These two names made the gods of Valhalla tremble with delight. Light came to light, sun to sun, and the love of the two shielded the glorious world of the gods from the fiends of darkness and the giants in icy Jötumheim better than enormous walls of rock and iron. Their name was like a shimmering breastplate and a deep-sounding shield. Misfortune struck against it, but the armor shone on, and the shield sounded deep, as if the blow had been struck with a light willow wand.»

The gods not only enjoy their undeserved luck, they have also stolen Loki's luck. This gives his opponents a personal coloration and personal right. The weaknesses in the lives and characters of the gods, the imperfections in the world they control: Loki uses everything to make life difficult for the Ases. “Loki's Pranks” describes the war of destruction that he wages against his divine enemies. Odin and Thor's way of life is thwarted by these pranks, so that divine omnipotence and strength must give way before the scorn that the wisdom disguised as cunning pours over them. Loki destroys the institutions in the human realm that the gods look upon with favor, indeed, on which they live: he does so with superior mockery. He protects the oppressed; he shakes the slaves from their stupor, so that the “holy”, the “divine” world order betrays its imperfection. The power of the gods over the children of earth is shattered by Loki's cleverness. He brings shame to the realm of the gods itself. Freya, the most beautiful of the Ases, loves the enemy of the Ases. It is precisely this love that Loki uses to bring the bitterest scorn upon Valhalla. He becomes the devil; he has Freya's love exposed by ugly dwarves.

The wildest of Loki's works is the destruction of Baldur and the realm in which only those people live who live according to Baldur's sense. It is the kingdom of a people “in which never a fist was raised against a foreign head, never a lewd word was attached to a maiden's footsteps, like dirty sand to wet heels, never a red gold ring or a brownish amber necklace awakened impure desire. There the stalks shot freely into the air, and clouds and winds, rain and sun, pressed to the mercy of being able to spread their abundance of blessings over Balders land. In the illuminated air, the noblemen strode along, their stately heads proudly raised, their golden locks cascading over their broad shoulders; and their wives walked beside them, their foreheads clear and calm, their gentleness softly illuminated by their eyes.” Loki brings ruin to this land. For everything that reminds people of Balder and his being is to be destroyed. Loki leads the people of the land, where hunger reigns, against the noblemen in Balders territory. The sons of Balders fall under the mighty blows of the oppressed. A dog is placed on Balders throne. “The noblemen bow their heads low before the snarling animal, one after the other, their faces white as linen in the field when the early sun licks over it. Then the women approach. The bright golden hair falls from their round heads and piles up next to the throne, then children again, wailing and weeping over the shame, and they rub their foreheads bloody on the ground out of shame."

With that, Loki has fulfilled his task. Balder and all that belongs to him has been overcome. The other Aesir have also followed Balder into the realm of the dead. But Loki cannot remain the victor. A youth steps out from among the sons of Balder, who are paying homage to the beast. The beast pushes itself down from the throne, glides to the ground and licks the youth's foot. Loki must confess: “Woe to you and to me. This is Balders son. The Lord and King!”... Far out Loki threw himself “into the field, so that his head struck against stones. But he did not pay attention to it. He cried incessantly: “This is Balders son! Balder is not dead! Balder lives, ... eternally like me ..., stronger than me ..., Balder, the sun son! ... Woe to me! ...

Thus the “Novel of a God” ends in the great mystery of the world, which encloses existence and becoming in a riddle. The creative is eternal. And the creative eternally produces its counterpart: destruction. We humans are enmeshed in this course of the world. We live the world's riddle. The creative is eternally right, and so is destruction. Balder and Loki belong together like creation and destruction. Creation is an usurper. But it is its fate that it must have destruction at its side. Balder needs Loki; and Loki must be evil so that new Balders can always arise in the eternal game of the world.

Jacobowski has built his poetry on the basis of great questions of world view. Through it, he has shown how deeply he himself has been gripped by the eternal riddles of existence. One must have seen the threatening abyss of life before one in order to have accomplished a rescue attempt such as the “Novel of a God.”

How does man spend the period between death and a new birth? To call death the elder brother of sleep is not unjustified, for between sleep and death there is a certain relationship; but even so there is a great, decisive difference between them. Let us consider what happens to a man from the moment when he falls asleep to the moment when he wakes up. This stretch of time appears to us as a kind of unconsciousness; only a few memories of the dream-state, sometimes confused and sometimes fairly clear, emerge from it. If we want to understand sleep properly, we must recall the separate members of the human entity.

We have seen that man consists of seven members. Four are fully developed, the fifth only partly so, and of the sixth and seventh only the seed and outline so far exist. Thus we have:

1. The physical body, which we can perceive with our ordinary senses.
2. The etheric body, which permeates the physical body with a delicate luminosity.
3. The astral body.
4. The Ego-body or consciousness body.

This “Ego-body” contains:

5. Spirit-Self, or Manas, partly developed, party still in embryo.
6. Life-Spirit, or Buddhi.
7. Spirit-Man, or Atma.

These last two are present only as seeds.

In the waking state a man has the first four of these bodies around him in space. The etheric body extends a little beyond the physical body on all sides. The astral body extends about two-and-a-half times the length of the head beyond the physical body, surrounds it like a cloud and fades away as you go from the head downwards. When a man falls asleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain on the bed, united as in the daytime. The astral body loosens its hold, and the astral body and Ego-body raise themselves out of the physical body. Now since all perceptions, concepts and so on are dependent on the astral body, which is now outside the physical body, man loses consciousness in sleep, for in this life he needs the physical brain as an instrument of consciousness; without it he cannot be conscious.

What does the loosened astral body do during the night? A clairvoyant can see that it has a specific task. It does not, as some Theosophists will tell you, merely hover above the physical body, inactive, like a passive image; it works continuously on the physical body. During the day the physical body gets tired and used up, and the task of the astral body is to make good this weariness and exhaustion. It renovates the physical body and renews the forces which have been used up during the day. Hence comes the need for sleep, and hence also its refreshing, healing effect. The question of dreams we will deal with later.

When a man dies, things are different. The etheric body then leaves him, as well as the astral body and Ego. These three bodies rise away and for a time remain united. At the moment of death the connection between the astral body and etheric body, on the one hand, and with the physical body, on the other, is broken, particularly in the region of the heart. A sort of light shines forth in the heart, and then the etheric body, the astral body and the Ego can be seen rising up from out of the head.

The actual instant of death brings a remarkable experience: for a brief space of time the man remembers all that has happened to him in the life just ended. His entire life appears before his soul in a moment, like a great tableau. Something like this can happen during life, in rare moments of great shock or anger—for instance a man who is drowning, or falling from a great height, when death seems imminent, may see his whole life before him in this way.

A similar phenomenon is the peculiar tingling feeling we have when a limb “goes to sleep”. What happens here is that the etheric body is loosened. If a finger, for example, goes to sleep, a clairvoyant would see a little second finger protruding at the side of the actual finger: this is a part of the etheric body which has got loose. Herein also lies the danger of hypnotism, for the brain then has the same experience as the finger has when it goes to sleep. The clairvoyant can see the loosened etheric body hanging like a pair of bags or sacks on either side of the head. If the hypnotism is repeated, the etheric body will develop an inclination to get loose, and this can be very dangerous. The victims become dreamy, subject to fainting fits, lose their independence, and so on.

A similar loosening of the etheric body occurs when a person is faced with a sudden danger of death. The cause of this similarity is that the etheric body is the bearer of memory; the more strongly developed it is, the stronger a person's faculty of memory will be. While the etheric body is firmly rooted in the physical body, as normally it is, its vibrations cannot act on the brain sufficiently to become conscious, because the physical body with its coarser rhythms conceals them. But in moments of deadly danger the etheric body is loosened, and with its memories it detaches itself from the brain and a man's whole life flashes before his soul. At such moments everything that has been inscribed on the etheric body reappears; hence also the recollection of the whole past life immediately after death. This lasts for some time, until the etheric body separates from the astral body and the Ego.

With most people, the etheric body dissolves gradually into the world-ether. With lowly, uneducated people it dissolves slowly; with cultivated people it dissolves quickly; with disciples or pupils it dissolves slowly again, and the higher a man's development, the slower the process becomes, until finally a stage is reached when the etheric body dissolves no longer.

In the case of ordinary men, then, we have two corpses, of the physical and etheric bodies; we are left with the astral body and the Ego. If we are to understand this condition we must realise that in his earthly life a man's consciousness depends entirely on his senses. Let us think away everything that comes to us through our senses: without our eyes, absolute darkness; without our ears, absolute silence; and no feeling of heat or cold without the appropriate senses. If we can clearly envisage what will remain when we are parted from all our physical organs, from everything that normally fills our daytime consciousness and enlivens the soul, from everything for which we have to be grateful to the body all day long, we shall begin to form some conception of what the condition of life is after death, when the two corpses have been laid aside. This condition is called Kamaloka, the place of desires. It is not some region set apart: Kamaloka is where we are, and the spirits of the dead are always hovering around us, but they are inaccessible to our physical senses. What, then, does a dead man feel? To take a simple example, suppose a man eats avidly and enjoys his food. The clairvoyant will see the satisfaction of his desire as a brownish-red thought-form in the upper part of his astral body. Now suppose the man dies: what is left to him is his desire and capacity for enjoyment. To the physical part of a man belongs only the means of enjoyment: thus we need gums and so forth in order to eat. The pleasure and the desire belong to the soul, and they survive after death. But the man no longer has any means of satisfying his desires, for the appropriate organs are absent. And this applies to all kinds of wishes and desires. He may want to look at some beautiful arrangements of colours—but he lacks eyes; or to listen to some harmonious music—but he lacks ears.

How does the soul experience all this after death? The soul is like a wanderer in the desert, suffering from a burning thirst and looking for some spring at which to quench it; and the soul has to suffer this burning thirst because it has no organ or instrument for satisfying it. It has to feel deprived of everything, so that to call this condition one of burning thirst is very appropriate. This is the essence of Kamaloka. The soul is not tortured from outside, but has to suffer the torment of the desires it still has but cannot satisfy.

Why does the soul have to endure this torment? The reason is that man has to wean himself gradually from these physical wishes and desires, so that the soul may free itself from the Earth, may purify and cleanse itself. When that is achieved, the Kamaloka period comes to an end and man ascends to Devachan.

How does the soul pass through its life in Kamaloka? In Kamaloka a man lives through his whole life again, but backwards. He goes through it, day by day, with all its experience's, events and actions, back from the moment of death to that of birth. What is the point of this? The point is that he has to pause at every event and learn how to wean himself from his dependence on the physical and material. He also relives everything he enjoyed in his earthly life, but in such a way that he has to do without all this; it offers him no satisfaction. And so he gradually learns to disengage himself from physical life. And when he has lived through his life right back to the day of his birth, he can, in the words of the Bible, enter into the “kingdom of Heaven”. As Christ says, “Unless ye became as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven.” All the Gospel sayings have a deep meaning, and we come to know their depth only by gradually entering into the divine wisdom.

There are some particular moments in Kamaloka which must be singled out as specially important and instructive. Among the various feelings a man can have as part of his ordinary life is the sheer joy of being alive, of living in a physical body. Hence he feels the lack of physical body as one of his worst deprivations. We can thus understand the terrible destiny and the horrible torments which have to be endured by the unfortunates who end their lives through suicide. When death comes naturally, the three bodies separate relatively easily. Even in apoplexy or any other sudden but natural form of death, the separation of these higher members has in fact been prepared for well in advance, and so they separate easily and the sense of loss of the physical body is only slight. But when the separation is as sudden and violent as it is with the suicide, whose whole organism is still healthy and firmly bound together, then immediately after death he feels the loss of the physical body very keenly and this causes terrible pains. This is a ghastly fate: the suicide feels as though he had been plucked out of himself, and he begins a fearful search for the physical body of which he was so suddenly deprived. Nothing else bears comparison with this. You may retort that the suicide who is weary of life no longer has any interest in it; otherwise he would not have killed himself. But that is a delusion, for it is precisely the suicide who wants too much from life. Because it has ceased to satisfy his desire for pleasure, or perhaps because some change of circumstances has involved him in a loss, he takes refuge in death. And that is why his feeling of deprivation when he finds himself without a body is unspeakably severe.

But Kamaloka is not so hard for everyone. If a man has been less dependent on material pleasures, he naturally finds the loss of his body easier to endure. Even he, however, has to shake himself free from his physical life, for there is a further meaning in Kamaloka. During his life a man does not merely do things which yield pleasure; he lives also in the company of other men and other creatures. Consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally, he causes pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, to animals and men. All such occasions he will encounter again as he lives through the Kamaloka period; he returns to the place and moment when he was the cause of pain to another being. At that time he made someone else feel pain; now he has to suffer the same pain in his own soul. All the torment I ever caused to other beings I now have to live through in my own soul. I enter into the person or the animal and come to know what the other being was made to suffer through me; now I have to suffer all these pains and torments myself. There is no way of avoiding it. All this is part of the process of freeing oneself—not from the working of karma, but from earthly things. A vivisectionist has a particularly terrible life in Kamaloka.

It is not for a Theosophist to criticise what goes on in the world around him, but he can well understand how it is that modern men have come to actions of this kind. In the Middle Ages no one would have ever dreamt of destroying life in order to understand it, and in ancient times any doctor would have looked on this as the height of madness. In the Middle Ages a number of people were still clairvoyant; doctors could see into a man and could discern any injury or defect in his physical body. So it was with Paracelsus,¹⁵ for example. But the material culture of modern times had to come, and with it a loss of clairvoyance. We see this particularly in our scientists and doctors; and vivisection is a result of it. In this way we can come to understand it, but we should never excuse or justify it. The consequences of a life which has been the cause of pain to others are bound to follow, and after death the vivisectionist has to endure exactly the same pains that he inflicted on animals. His soul is drawn into every pain he caused. It is no use saying that to inflict pain was not his intention, or that he did it for the sake of science or that his purpose was good. The law of spiritual life is inflexible.

How long does a man remain in Kamaloka? For about one-third of the length of his past life. If for instance he has lived for seventy-five years, his time in Kamaloka will be twenty-five years. And what happens then? The astral bodies of people vary widely in colour and form. The astral body of a primitive kind of man is permeated with all kinds of shapes and lower desires: its background colour is a reddish-grey, with rays of the same colour emanating from it; in its contours it is no different from that of certain animals. With a highly educated man, or an idealist such as Schiller or a saint such as St. Francis of Assisi,¹⁶ things are quite different. They denied themselves many things; they ennobled their desires and so forth. The more a man uses his Ego to work on himself, the more rays will you see spreading out from the bluish sphere which is his Ego-centre. These rays indicate the forces by means of which a man gains power over his astral body. Hence one can say that a man has two astral bodies: one part has remained as it was, with its animal impulses; the other results from his own work upon it.

When a man has lived through his time in Kamaloka, he will be ready to raise the higher part of his astral body, the outcome of his own endeavours, and to leave the lower part behind. With savages and uncultivated people, a large part of the lower astral body remains behind; with more highly developed people there is much less. When for example a Francis of Assisi dies, very little will be left behind; a powerful higher astral body will go with him, for he will have worked greatly on himself. The remaining part is the third human corpse, consisting of the lower impulses and desires which have not been transmuted. This corpse continues to hover about in astral space, and may be a source of many dangerous influences.

This, too, is a body which can manifest in spiritualistic seances. It often survives for a long time, and may come to speak through a medium. People then begin to believe that it is the dead man speaking, when it is only his astral corpse. The corpse retains its lower impulses and habits in a kind of husk; it can even answer questions and give information, and can speak with just as much sense as the “lower man” used to display. All sorts of confusions may then arise, and a striking example of this is the pamphlet written by the spiritualist, Langsdorf, in which he professes to have had communication with H. P. Blavatsky.¹⁷ To Langsdorf the idea of reincarnation is like a red rag to a bull; there is nothing he would not do to refute this doctrine. He hates H.P.B. because she taught this doctrine and spread it abroad. In his pamphlet he purports to be quoting H.P.B. as having told him not only that the doctrine of reincarnation was false but that she was very sorry ever to have taught it. This may indeed be all correct—except that Langsdorf was not questioning and quoting the real H.P.B. but her astral corpse. It is quite understandable that her lower astral body should answer in this way if we remember that during her early period, in her Isis Unveiled, she really did reject and oppose the idea of reincarnation. She herself came to know better, but her error clung to her astral husk.

This third corpse, the astral husk, gradually dissolves, and it is important that it should have dissolved completely before a man returns to a new incarnation. In most cases this duly happens, but in exceptional cases a man may reincarnate quickly, before his astral corpse has dissolved. He has difficulties to face if, when he is about to reincarnate, he finds his own astral corpse still in existence, containing everything that had remained imperfect in his former life.

• 15. Theophrastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541.
• 16. Francis of Assisi, I 181–1226.
• 17. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, 1831–1891, known in theosophical circles as H.P.B. See the section, “Reincarnation” in Isis Unveiled, Chapter X.

We shall now study man in the state of waking life in the physical world, in the state of sleep and in so-called death. Everyone is familiar, from his own experience, with the waking state.

When the human being sinks into sleep, his astral body and ego, together with what has been worked upon in the astral body by the ego, withdraw from the physical and etheric bodies. When you observe the sleeping human being clairvoyantly, physical body and etheric body lie there in the bed. These two members remain connected whereas the astral body emerges together with the higher members; with clairvoyance we can see how, when sleep begins, the astral body, bathed in a kind of light, draws out of the other two bodies. To describe this condition with greater exactitude we must say that the astral body of modern man appears as if it consisted in many streams and sparkles of light and the whole appears like two intertwining spirals, as if there were two 6-figures, one of which vanishes into the physical body, while the other extends far out into the cosmos like the trail of a comet. Both these trails of the astral body very soon become invisible in their further extensions, so that the phenomenon then has an ovoid shape. When the human being wakes, the trail no longer extends into the cosmos and everything draws again into the etheric and physical bodies.

Dreaming is an intermediate condition between waking and sleeping. Sleep that is filled with dreams is a condition where the astral body has, it is true, loosened its whole connection with the physical body, but is still connected with the etheric body. Man's field of vision is then pervaded with the pictures we call dreams. This is, in very truth, an intermediate condition because the astral body has detached itself completely from the physical body, while remaining connected, in a certain way, with the etheric body.

The human being, while he is asleep, lives in his astral body outside his physical and etheric bodies. The fact that he must sink into sleep has deep significance for his whole make-up. Do not imagine that the astral body is inactive and has no work to do during the night while it is outside the physical and etheric bodies. During the day, when the astral body is within the physical and etheric bodies, influences come to it from the outside world, impressions which man receives as a result of the functioning of his own astral body, through his senses, through his activity in the physical world. Feelings and experiences, everything that works in upon him from outside continues on into the astral body. This constitutes the actual feeling and thinking part of man, and the physical body, together with the etheric body, is only the transmitter, the instrument. Thinking and willing take place in the astral body. While the human body is active in the external world during the day, the astral body is receiving impressions all the time. But let us remember, on the other hand, that the astral body is the builder of the etheric and physical bodies. Just as the physical body with all its organs has hardened out of the etheric body, so everything that streams and is active in the etheric body has been born out of the astral body.

Out of what is the astral body itself born? It is born out of the universal astral organism which weaves through the whole of the cosmos. If you want to envisage, by means of a simile, the relation of the small portion of astral substantiality contained in your astral body to the great astral ocean in which all human beings, animals, plants, minerals, and planets too, are contained and out of which they are born, if you want to envisage the relation of the human astral body to the great astral ocean, think of one drop of a liquid in a glass. The drop derives its existence entirely from the liquid in the glass. Similarly, what is contained in an astral body was once embraced within the astral ocean of the cosmos. It has separated out from this ocean and having passed into an etheric body and a physical body, has become a distinct entity, like the drop of liquid.

As long as the astral body lay within the astral ocean, it received its laws and its impressions from this cosmic source. It had its life within this cosmic astral body. After its separation it is exposed, during man's waking consciousness, to the impressions received from the physical world; so that it is divided between the influences coming from the cosmic astral body and those which it receives from outside as the result of the activity imposed upon it by the physical world. When man has reached the goal of his earth-evolution, this division, will merge into harmony. Today, these two kinds of influences do not harmonise.

Now the astral body is the builder of the etheric body and indirectly—because the etheric body is in turn the builder of the physical body—also of the physical body. Everything that the astral body has built up piece by piece through the ages has been born out of the great cosmic astral ocean. Because only harmonious and sound laws proceed from this astral ocean, the work carried out by the astral body in building the etheric and physical bodies is originally sound and harmonious; but as a result of the influences which came to the astral body from outside, from the physical world, impairing its original harmony, there arise all those disturbances of the physical body which prevail in mankind today.

If the astral body remained all the time within the human being, the strong influences of the physical world would soon destroy the harmony brought by the astral body from the cosmic ocean. The human being would very soon be spent by illness and exhaustion. During sleep the astral body withdraws from the impressions of the physical world, which contain nothing that produces harmony, and passes into the cosmic harmony from which it was born. And so in the morning it brings with it the lingering effects of the refreshment and renewal it has experienced during the night. Every night the astral body renews its harmony with the cosmic astral ocean and reveals itself to the clairvoyant as anything but inactive. The clairvoyant perceives a connection between the astral ocean and the one comet-like trail and observes how this part of the astral body works to eliminate the debility caused by the world of disharmony. This activity of the astral body expresses itself in the feeling of refreshed vigour in the morning. Having lived during the night within the great cosmic harmony, the astral body has of course again to adjust itself to the physical world; hence the feeling of greatest vigour does not arise until a few hours have elapsed after waking, when the astral body has again drawn into the physical body.

We will now turn to death, the “brother” of sleep, and study the condition of the human being after death. The difference between a man who is dead and one who is only sleeping is that at death the etheric body passes away together with the astral body and the physical body alone is left behind in the physical world. From birth until death the etheric body never leaves the physical body except during certain states of Initiation.

The period immediately following death is of great importance for the human being. It lasts for many hours, even days, during which the whole of the incarnation that is just over comes before the soul of the dead as in a great tableau of memories. This happens to every human being after death. The peculiarity of this tableau is that as long as it remains in the form in which it appears immediately after death, all the subjective experiences of the man during his life are expunged.

Our experiences are always accompanied by feelings either of joy or pain, upliftment of sorrow, in other words our outer life is always associated with an inner life. The joys and sorrows connected with the pictures of the past life are not present in the memory-tableau. The human being confronts this memory-tableau as objectively as he confronts a painting; even if this painting depicts a man who is sorrowful or full of pain, we still look at him quite objectively; we can, it is true, discern his sorrow, but we do not experience it directly. So it is with these pictures immediately after death. The tableau widens out and in an astonishingly brief span of time man sees all the detailed events of his life.

Separation of the physical body from the etheric body during life can take place only in an initiate, but there are certain moments when the etheric body suddenly loosens from the physical body. This occurs when a man has had terrible experiences, for instance, a dreadful fall or has been in danger of drowning.—The shock causes a kind of loosening of the etheric body from the physical body and the consequence is that in such a moment the whole of the previous life stands before the soul like a memory-picture. This is analogous to the experience after death.

Partial separations of the etheric body also occur when a limb has “gone to sleep” as we say if a hand, for instance, has gone to sleep, the seer can perceive the etheric part of the hand protruding like a glove; parts of the etheric brain also protrude when a man is in a state of hypnosis. Because the etheric body is woven in the physical body in tiny, pinpoint formations, there arises in the physical body the well-known sensation of prickling in a limb that has gone to sleep.

After the lapse of the time during which the etheric body together with the astral body is emerging from the physical body after death, there comes the moment when the astral body, with the higher members, leaves the etheric body. The latter separates off and the memory-tableau fades away; but something of it remains; it is not wholly lost. What may be called ether- or life-substance dissipates in the cosmic ether, but a kind of essence remains and this can never be lost to the human being through his further journeyings. He bears this with him into all his future incarnations as a kind of extract from the life-tableau, even though he has no remembrance of it. Out of this extract is formed what is called, with concrete reality, the “Causal Body.” After every incarnation a new page is added to the Book of Life. This augments the life-essence and, if the past lives were fruitful, causes the next life to develop in the proper way. This is what causes a life to be rich or poor in talents, qualities and the like.

In order to understand the life of the astral body after its separation from the etheric body, we must consider the conditions obtaining in physical life. In physical life it is the astral body that is happy, suffers, satisfies its desires, impulses and wishes through the organs of the physical body; after death these physical instruments are no longer at its disposal. The epicure can no longer satisfy his desire for choice food because the tongue has passed away with the physical body; but the desires, being connected with the astral body, remain in the man and this gives rise to the “burning thirst” of the Kamaloca period. (Kama = desire, wish; “loca” is “place”, but it is in reality a condition, not a place.) A man, who during physical life learns to transcend the physical body, shortens his time in Kamaloca.

To take delight in the beauty or harmony of things means growth and development, for this leads us beyond the material world. To delight in art that is materialistic increases the difficulties of the Kamaloca state, whereas delight in spiritual art lightens them. Every noble, spiritual delight shortens the time in Kamaloca. Already during earthly life we must break ourselves of pleasures and desires which can be satisfied only by the physical instrument. The period of Kamaloca is a time of the breaking of material pleasures and impulses. It lasts for approximately one third of the time of the earthly life. There is something singular about the experiences undergone in Kamaloca. The human being begins actually to live backwards through the whole of his past life. Immediately after death there was a memory-tableau devoid of the elements of joy and suffering; in Kamaloca the human being lives through all the joy and all the suffering again in such a way that he must experience in himself all the joy and the suffering he caused to others. This has nothing to do with the law of karma.

The journey backwards begins with the last event before death and proceeds at triple speed, to birth. When in this backward passage of remembrance the human being reaches his birth, the part of the astral body that has been transformed by the ego combines with the causal body and what has not been so transformed falls away like a shade, a phantom; this is the astral corpse of the human being. He has laid aside the physical corpse and the etheric corpse and now the astral corpse. He now lives through new conditions: those of Devachan. Devachan is all around us, just as is the astral world.

When the life has been lived through backwards as far as earliest childhood, when the three corpses have been discarded, man reaches the condition mysteriously indicated in the Bible by the words: “Except ye become as little children, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Devachan, the spiritual world—this is the Kingdom of Heaven in the Christian sense.)

The world of Devachan must now be traversed. It is a world as manifold and differentiated as our physical world. Just as solid regions, continents, are distinguished in the physical world, with an expanse of water surrounding the solid land, with the air above and above the air still finer conditions, so there is a similar differentiation in Devachan, in the spiritual world. By analogy with conditions on earth, the phenomena to be found in Devachan have been given similar names.

Firstly, there is a region which may be compared with solid, physical regions: it is the Continental region of Devachan. What is physical here on the earth is, in this region of Devachan, found to be a multitude of spiritual Beings. Think, for example, of a physical human being. To devachanic vision he appears like this: what the physical senses perceive, vanishes, and light flashes up in the sphere immediately around the physical man, where otherwise there is a void; in the middle, where the physical body is, there is an empty, shadowy space—like a kind of negative. Animals and human beings appear here in negative pictures; blood appears as green—its complementary colour. All formations which are physical in our world are present in the Archetypes of Devachan.

A second region—not separated off, but like a second stage—is the Oceanic region of Devachan. It is not water it is a particular substantiality which in rhythmic streams pervades the world of Devachan in colour that may be compared with that of young peach-blossom in Spring. It is fluidic life and it pervades the whole of Devachan. What is divided among individual human beings and animals here below is present in Devachan as a kind of watery element. We have a picture of it when we think of the diffusion of the blood in the human organism.

The third region of Devachan can best be characterised by saying that what lives here, in the physical world, within beings in the way of feelings, of happiness and suffering, joy, pain and the like, is present there in external manifestation.

To take an example.—Suppose a battle is waged here on the earth. Cannons, weapons and the like—these are all on the physical plane. But within human beings on the physical plane there are mutual feelings of revenge, pain, passions; the two armies confront one another full of opposing passions. Think of all this translated into external manifestation and you have a picture of how it appears on the devachanic plane. All that happens here on a battlefield, appears, in Devachan, like the bursting of a fearful storm. This is the atmosphere, the surrounding air of Devachan. Just as our earth is surrounded by air, so all the feelings that break out here, whether they come to physical expression or not, spread out in Devachan like an atmosphere.

The fourth region of Devachan contains the archetypal forms, the archetypal foundations of all truly original achievements on the earth. If we examine closely the happenings of the physical world, we find that the vast majority of inner processes are instigated from outside. A flower or an animal gives us joy; without the flower or the animal we should not experience this joy. But there are also processes which are not instigated from outside. A new idea, a work of art, a new machine—all these things bring into the world something that was not there before original creations come into being in all these domains. If new creations did not arise in the world, humanity would make no progress. Original creations given to the world by great artists and discoverers are only higher in the sense of degree than every other truly original act—even the most insignificant. The point is that something original arises in the inner being.

Archetypes exist in Devachan even for the most insignificant original actions; all these things are already prefigured in yonder world; any original achievement of a human being is already present in the germinal state, even before his birth.

Thus in Devachan we find four regions whose counter-images on the physical plane are Earth, Water, Air and Fire. There is the Continental region as the solid crust in Devachan-in the spiritual sense, of course; then the Oceanic region, corresponding to our area of water; the Atmospheric region, the streaming flow of passions and the like—beauty, but also tumult is to be found there. Finally, there is the all-pervading world of the Archetypes. Everything in the way of initiatives of will and original ideas to which, later on, effect is given in the physical world by beings who return thither—all this must be lived through by the soul in yonder world in order that fresh power may be gathered for the new life.

Although the form of man, in those ancient times which have been already described, was very different from his present form, yet, if we go still further back in the history of humanity, we find conditions differing even much more widely. For it was only in the course of time that the forms of man and woman arose from an earlier, original form in which the human being was neither the one nor the other, but both at the same time. He who would gain for himself a conception of those primeval ages must free himself entirely from those customary ideas which are drawn from present conditions. The times to which we are looking back lie somewhat before the middle of that epoch called in the preceding extracts the Lemurian. The human body then consisted of soft plastic matter; and the rest of the earthly forms also were both soft and plastic. Compared with its later firmness, the earth was still in a bubbling and more fluid state. The human soul, being embodied in that matter, could then adapt itself in a much greater degree than later. For the clothing of the soul in a male or female body is due to the fact that the one or the other is forced upon it by the development of external nature. So long as matter had not become firm, the soul could enforce its own laws upon it. It moulded the body in its own likeness; but when matter had grown dense the soul had to suit itself to the laws stamped on that matter by external nature. So long as the soul was master of matter, it formed its body neither male nor female, but gave to it qualities common to both. For the soul is at once both male and female. In itself it bears these two natures. Its male element is related to that which we call Will, its female element to what is designated Imagination. The external formation of the earth has led the body to adopt a one-sided evolution. The male body has assumed a form determined by the element of Will; the female, on the contrary, bears rather the impress of Imagination. Thus it is that the bisexual male-female soul inhabits a unisexual male or female body. And so the body had in the course of evolution assumed so decided a form through the influence of external earth-forces that thereafter it was no longer possible for the soul to pour its entire force into this body. It had to retain within itself something of the force that belonged to it, and could allow only a part to flow into the body.

When we study the Âkâshic Records we see that, at a period in the far past, human forms appear soft, plastic, and quite unlike those of later times. They still retain in equal measure the nature of man and woman. As time passes and matter densifies, the human body appears in two forms, one of which resembles the man's later form, the other the woman's. Before the appearance of these differentiated forms, every human being could of itself bring forth another. The fructification was no outer process, but one which took place within the human body itself. When the body took on a male or a female form, it lost the possibility of self-fructification. Co-operation with another body was necessary in order to produce a new human being.

The separation of the sexes appears when the earth attains a certain condition of density. The density of matter partly checks the power of reproduction, and that portion of the reproductive force which is still effective requires completion from outside by the opposite force in another human being. But the soul must retain within itself a part of its earlier force, in man as well as in woman. It cannot expend this part in the outer corporeal world. Now this portion of his force is directed inwards in man. It cannot appear outwardly; therefore it is set free for the use of inner organs—and here comes an important point in the evolution of mankind. Before it, that which we call mind—the ability to think—could have found no place in man, for this capacity would have had no organ through which to act. The soul turned its whole force outwards to the building up of the body. But now the soul-force, which cannot find an object for its activity without, can unite itself with the mind-force; and, by such union, those organs of the body are evolved which, at a later period, make man a thinking being. Thus could man direct a part of the force that in earlier times he had turned to the bringing forth of his kind, to the perfecting of his own being. The force by means of which mankind formed for itself a thinking brain is the same force by which, in ancient times, man fructified himself. Thought is attained by unisexuality. Since man no longer fructifies himself, but the opposite sexes fructify one another, they can turn a part of their productive force inwards and become thinking beings. Thus the male and female bodies respectively present externally an imperfect picture of the soul, but because of this they become inwardly more perfect beings.

Very slowly and gradually this change is accomplished in man. Little by little the later single-sexed human forms appear side by side with those of the double sex.

It is again a kind of fructification which takes place in man on his becoming a thinking being. The inner organs which can be built up by the superfluous soul-force are fructified by the mind. The soul is in itself two-fold—male-female, and so in ancient times it also formed its body. At a later period it can only give to its body a form that can co-operate with another externally; for itself it retains the ability to co-operate with the mind. From this time forward man is fructified from without for the exterior part,—from within and for the interior part of his nature by the mind. It may be said, then, that the male body has a female soul, the female body a male soul. This inner one-sidedness in man is now balanced by the fructification of the mind. The one-sidedness is removed. The male soul in the female body and the female soul in the male body both become bisexual again through fructification by the mind. Thus do man and woman differ in their outer form, and, within, the one-sidedness of the soul unites itself in both sexes to a harmonious whole. Within, mind and soul melt into unity. The mind affects as female the male soul in woman, and thus makes it male-female; it works upon the female soul in man, as male, and so forms it female-male. The bisexuality in man has withdrawn from the outer world, where it existed in pre-Lemurian times, to his inner self.

We see that the higher inner man has nothing to do with male and female. Nevertheless the inner uniformity comes from a male soul in a woman and in like manner from a female soul in a man. The union with the mind brings uniformity at last; but the fact that before the appearance of this uniformity there exists difference, this fact contains a mystery of human nature. The knowledge of this mystery is of great importance to all occult science, for it is the key to weighty problems of life. For the present it is forbidden to raise further the veil that covers this mystery.

Thus did physical man develop from the bisexual body to the unisexual,—to the separation into man and woman. And because of this, man has become a being endowed with mentality, such as he now is. But it must not be imagined that there were not intelligent beings in connection with the earth even before this period. If we search the Âkâshic Records, we certainly see that in the first Lemurian period the physical man of the future was a very different being from that which we call man to-day. He was unable to connect any sense-perceptions with thoughts: he did not think. His life was one of instinct. His soul expressed itself simply in instincts, desires, animal wishes, and so on. His consciousness was dreamy; he lived in a kind of stupor. But there were other beings in the midst of this humanity. These were, of course, also bisexual; for with the prevailing conditions in the evolution of the earth at that time, no male or female human body could be brought forth. The external conditions were still wanting. But there were other beings who, in spite of their double sex, were able to acquire knowledge and wisdom. This was possible, because these beings had undergone an entirely different evolution at a still more remote period of the past. It had become possible for their souls to fertilize themselves with mind, without waiting for the development of the inner organs of the human physical body. It is only by the help of the brain that contemporary man is able to ponder upon those impressions which he receives from outside and through the senses. It is the evolution of the soul of man that caused this. The human soul had to wait till there was a brain to co-operate with the mind. The soul would have remained mindless had it not taken this indirect path. It would have remained at the stage of dream-consciousness.

It was different with the superhuman beings already mentioned. The soul of such beings had at earlier stages developed soul-organs which required nothing physical to enable them to unite themselves with the mind. Their knowledge and wisdom were supersensually acquired. Such knowledge is called intuitive. It is not until a later stage of his evolution that the man of the present attains to this intuition, which enables him to come into touch with mind, apart from the assistance of the senses. He must reach it indirectly through the material senses. This indirect course is called the descent of the human soul into matter, or popularly “The Fall” (into sin). Owing to an earlier evolution of a different kind, these superhuman beings did not need to undergo this descent into matter. As the soul of such beings had already attained a higher stage, their consciousness was not dreamy but inwardly luminous, and the comprehension of knowledge and wisdom by them was clairvoyance which needed no senses and no organs of thought. The Wisdom by which the world was built streamed directly into their soul.

Thus were they able to be the leaders of young humanity, still sunk in apathy. They were the bearers of an Ancient Wisdom, to comprehend which man must struggle upwards by the roundabout path described. They differed from what is called “man” by the fact that Wisdom poured out its rays on them “from above” as a free gift, just as the sunlight streams down on us. It was not so with “man.” He had to acquire wisdom for himself by the labour of the senses and of the organ of thought. It did not at first come to him as a free gift. He must desire it. Only when the longing for wisdom is alive in man does he strive to attain it for himself through his senses and thought-organ. So a new impulse must awaken in the soul,—desire, the longing for knowledge. The human soul could not possess this longing in its earlier stages. Its impulses were only towards embodiment in that which took on an outer form, in that in which it lived as a dreamy life, but not towards the knowledge of an outer world, not towards understanding. With the separation of the sexes first appeared the desire for knowledge.

It was just because the superhuman beings did not desire it, that wisdom became known to them by the path of clairvoyance. They waited till wisdom streamed into them, as we wait for the sunshine that we cannot create by night, but which must come to us of itself in the morning.

The longing for knowledge is evoked in this way, in order that the soul may build up inner organs (the brain, etc.) by which it comes into possession of knowledge. This result follows, because part of the soul-force works no longer from without but from within. But the superhuman beings who have not accomplished this separation of their soul-forces direct their entire soul-energy outwards.

They have thus also at their service, for the outer fructification by the mind, that force which man turns inward for the building up of his organs of knowledge. Now that force by means of which man turns outwards to unite himself with another is Love. The superhuman beings directed their whole love outwards to let the wisdom of the worlds stream into their souls. But man can turn outward only a part. Man became sensual, and thus his love grew sensual too. He withdrew from the outer world a part of his being which he then directed towards his inner building. And this produced what is called “selfishness.” When man became man or woman in his physical body he could only surrender a part of his being; with the other part he separated himself from the surrounding world. He became selfish. And his outer activity, as well as his striving for inward development, became selfish. He loved, because he desired, and he thought, because again he desired,—in this case, knowledge. In contrast to a childish and selfish humanity stood the leaders in their all-loving, unselfish natures. The soul which in them inhabits neither a male nor a female body is itself male-female. It loves without desire. The innocent soul of man loved thus before the separation of the sexes; nevertheless, it could not at that time know, for the very reason that it was still at a lower stage—in dream-consciousness. Thus too does the soul of the higher beings love; nevertheless, these beings can know in spite of this and on account of their advanced development. “Man” must pass through selfishness in order once more to reach unselfishness at a higher stage, but this time with an absolutely clear consciousness.

This, then, was the task of the superhuman beings, of the great leaders,—to stamp upon the young humanity their own character, that of love. They could do so only with that part of the soul-force which was directed outwards. Thus arose sensual love. And hence the latter accompanies the soul's activity in a male or female body. Sensual love became the force for human physical development. This love brings man and woman together in so far as they are physical beings. On this love rests the progress of physical humanity. It was over this love only that the so-called superhuman beings had power. That part of the human soul-force which turns inwards and must gain knowledge by the indirect path of sensuality withdraws itself from the power of those superhuman beings. They themselves had never descended to the development of corresponding inner organs. They could clothe the outward impulse in love, because they possessed as their very essence the love that was outwardly active. Thus there was a gulf between them and the young humanity. They could implant love in man, at first in a sensual form; knowledge they could not give, because their own knowledge had never taken the by-path through those inner organs which man was now developing in himself. They could speak no language which a being with brains could understand.

Now the said inner organs of man were, it is true, not ripe for contact with mind till that stage of earthly existence was reached which lies in the middle of the Lemurian period; but once before, at a much earlier period of development, they had been cultivated into an imperfect first beginning. For the soul had already passed through physical embodiments in times long gone by. It had lived, not indeed on the earth, but on other celestial bodies in densified matter. More exact information on this subject cannot be given till later. Only so much as this may now be said,—the beings of earth had formerly inhabited another planet, and, according to the conditions existing on it, they had developed to the stage at which they stood when they reached the earth. They laid aside the matter of the preceding planet like a garment, and became pure soul-germs at the stage of development reached then,—capable of sensation, of feeling, and so on; in short, able to lead that dreamlike life which still belonged to them in the first stages of their earth existence. But the superhuman beings spoken of, the leaders in the domain of love, had also lived on the preceding planets, and were even there so perfect that they no longer needed to descend in order to develop the first beginnings of those inner organs.

But there were other beings, not so far advanced as these Leaders of Love, but who might rather be counted as men on the preceding planet, who nevertheless outstripped mankind at that time. They were thus indeed, at the beginning of the earth formation, further advanced than man, but nevertheless still at the stage at which knowledge must be acquired through inner organs. These beings were in a peculiar position. They were too far advanced to pass through the physical human body, either male or female, and yet not far enough to be able to act by means of perfect clairvoyance, as were the Leaders of Love. They could not be, as yet, Beings of Love; and at the same time they could no longer be “men.” So it was only possible for them as semi-superhuman beings to continue their own evolution, but with the help of man. They could converse with the beings with brains in a language these understood. By this means the human soul-force directed inwards was aroused, and they were enabled to unite themselves to knowledge and wisdom. It was indeed only thus that wisdom of a human sort came to the earth. The “semi-superhuman” beings spoken of were able to absorb this human wisdom, and thus reach that perfection which they themselves still lacked. They thus became the creators of human wisdom. For this reason they were called “light bringers” (Lucifer). Thus had infant humanity leaders of two kinds—Beings of Love and Beings of Wisdom,—human nature was yoked between Love and Wisdom, when it assumed its present form on the earth. By the Beings of Love it was stimulated to physical development, by the Beings of Wisdom to the perfection of its inner self. In consequence of its physical development, mankind advanced from generation to generation, forming new tribes and races; through its inner development the individuals increased in inward perfection; they became scholars, sages, artists, technical scientists, etc. From race to race physical humanity advances; each race throughout its physical evolution transfers, to the following one, such of its qualities as are perceptible to the senses. Here the law of heredity reigns. The children bear the physical characteristics of their fathers. Beyond this lies an evolution towards perfection of mind and soul which can only be accomplished by the development of the soul itself. And here we are confronted with the law of the evolution of the soul within the bounds of earthly existence.