The Rudolf Steiner Archive

There is often something tremendously important in simple expressions of the people. The language is not a random creation. In the language we can see the real spirit. Sometimes a saying points to deeper secrets of existence. We have spoken of the overturning of beings; this going over, jumping over a certain point, we find everywhere. Man, let us recall, consists of his three lower bodies. These three bodies are gradually built up and perfected by mankind. On the earth came to the appearance the real I.

During the third round on the moon, man lived in a dream-like consciousness. He did not see the colors on the objects, but the color came to life as an entity before his soul. /Gap in transcript]

On earth, the pictorial consciousness transforms into the representational consciousness. The color puts itself over the object. That one perceives something depends on the fact that we have sense organs. Now if the moon dweller perceived, he had to have senses; he had them, lotus flowers turning to the opposite side. In which body were these lunar sense organs? In the actual etheric double body. In the pralaya, these lunar sense organs disappeared, and the sensation body is formed, which has the powers that form the eyes, ears and so on. The I as such was also present during the lunar existence, but in an unconscious way. On earth the I looks through the sense organs with the help of this sensory body and perceives. Because the I is stuck in the sensory body, it has consciousness only as long as it can look out. When it cannot - in death - consciousness is interrupted. A

The next stage is that the ego works its way into the same world that it perceives from the outside. On the moon as image the object was perceived, on earth the human being threw these images over the objects. Now he slips into these objects/images and grows with them. This is called "the life in the causal body. It means a coming out over oneself. If this rushing out is done too early or incorrectly, man would lose the connection with his senses.

[Gap in transcript]

This gravitation must be especially strongly developed in the student of occultism.

Madness is nothing but losing harmony with the outside world. In every abnormal development this has happened. The soul has jumped out of the sentient body and is actually outside. It "snaps over.

Language is a powerful cultural factor in development. Great initiates imbibe into language that which is to be expressed in many centuries. In Germany, Christian mysticism should be expressed. This teaches that the Christ lives in Jesus, while the Oriental languages teach the threefold Logos. This is not mutually exclusive.

The ineffable name.

Folksstück in three acts and a prelude by C. Karlweis
Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

During the terrible boredom that this "folk play" causes for three hours, the thought arises again and again: Someone wanted to be a Raimund and didn't even make it as far as Birch-Pfeiffer and O.F.Berg. Something that is equally obtrusive and equally meaningless in its sentimentality and clumsy buffoonery will not be easy to find within the dramatic genre to which this play wants to belong. An obnoxious fellow with all the instincts of meanness and baseness torments his whole environment because he is only capable of loving his own self. He maltreats his wife, he condemns his son to idleness, even though he would like to work as an independent employee in his father's factory. The old egotist does not want to give up the "whip" as long as he can still take a breath. He refuses to give his consent when his daughter wants to give her hand to the man she loves, because it is better for his mean nature to set her up with someone else; and when a good friend comes into need and misery, the ego-lover can't get a penny out of him. This is the first act. It is preceded by a prelude depicting a quarrel between the fairy Humanitas and the Viennese fairy. It symbolizes how the "good Viennese heart" can be abandoned by all humanity and led down the path of self-interest and unkindness. But the Viennese must rediscover his golden heart. For this journey of discovery, "God Morpheus" joins forces with Humanitas and the Viennese fairy and - in the second act - lets the evil egoist fall into a bad dream that shows the dreamer where his hard mind will lead him when God wants to punish him and make him a poor man. And when the curtain rises again for the third act, the egotist is cured: with farcical agility, the "poet" has made the sinner the best father, a philanthropist and an exemplary husband.

All this takes place with unspeakable clumsiness. Karlweis wants to be naive like Raimund, but he is only childish. There is not even a hint of the spirit in the play that immediately wins us over when Raimund raises the curtain and his fairy tales play out before our eyes.

The role of the old egotist, Florian Heindl, was played by Mr. Bonn. He did everything he could to make the character even more repulsive than the poet had made him. Fräulein Groß, who has to play the Viennese fairy in the prelude and the young Heindl's fiancée in the drama, was only a "smart Viennese" in both roles, without being able to arouse any further interest. Carl Waldow alone gave a noteworthy performance as Heindl's house servant.

In which the Attempt is made to form a True Conception of the Elemental or Etheric Body

[ 1 ] Through the idea which the soul has to form in connection with the fact of death, it may be driven into complete uncertainty with regard to its own being. This will be the case when it believes that it cannot obtain knowledge of any other world but the world of the senses and of that which the intellect is able to ascertain about this world. The ordinary life of the soul directs its attention to the physical body. It sees that body being absorbed after death into the workshop of nature, which has no connection with that which the soul experiences before death as its own existence. The soul may indeed know (through the preceding Meditation) that the physical body during life bears the same relation to it as after death, but this does not lead it further than to the acknowledgment of the inner independence of its own experiences up to the moment of death. What happens to the physical body after death is evident from observation of the outer world. But such observation is not possible with regard to its inner experience. In so far then as it perceives itself through the senses, the soul in its ordinary life cannot see beyond the boundary of death. If the soul is incapable of forming any ideas which go beyond that outer world which absorbs the body after death, then with regard to all that concerns its own being it is unable to look into anything but empty nothingness on the other side of death.

If this is to be otherwise, the soul must perceive the outer world by other means than those of the senses and of the intellect connected with them. These themselves belong to the body and decay together with it. What they tell us can lead to nothing but to the result of the first Meditation, and this result consists merely in the soul being able to say to itself: “I am bound to my body. This body is subject to natural laws which are related to me in the same way as all other natural laws. Through them I am a member of the outer world and a part of this world is expressed in my body, a fact which I realise most distinctly, when I consider what the outer world does to that body after death. During life it gives me senses and an intellect which make it impossible for me to see how matters stand with regard to my soul's experiences on the other side of death.” Such a statement can only lead to two results. Either any further investigation into the riddle of the soul is suppressed and all efforts to obtain knowledge on this subject are given up; or else efforts are made to obtain by the inner experience of the soul that which the outer world refuses. These efforts may bring about an increase of power and energy with regard to this inner experience such as it would not have in ordinary life.

[ 2 ] In ordinary life man has a certain amount of strength in his inner experiences, in his life of feeling and thought. He thinks, for instance, a certain thought as often as there is an inner or outer impulse to do so.

Any thought may, however, be chosen out of the rest and voluntarily repeated again and again without any outer reason, and with such intense energy as actually to make it live as an inner reality. Such a thought may by repeated effort be made the exclusive object of our inner experience. And while we do this we can keep away all outer impressions and memories which may arise in the soul. It is then possible to turn such a complete surrender to certain thoughts or feelings exclusive of all others, into a regular inner activity. If, however, such an inner experience is to lead to really important results, it must be undertaken according to certain tested laws. Such laws are recorded by the science of spiritual life. In my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, a great number of these rules or laws are mentioned. Through such methods we obtain a strengthening of the powers of inner experience. This experience becomes in a certain way condensed. What is brought about by this we learn through that observation of ourselves which sets in when the inner activity described has been continued for a sufficiently long time. It is true that much patience is required before convincing results appear. And if we are not disposed to exercise such patience for years, we shall obtain nothing of importance. [ 3 ] Here it is only possible to give one example of such results, for they are of many varieties. And that which is mentioned here is adapted to further the particular method of meditation which we are now describing.

[ 4 ] A man may carry out the inner strengthening of the life of his soul which has been indicated for a long period without perhaps anything happening in his inner life which is able to alter his usual way of thinking with regard to the world. Suddenly, however, the following may occur. Naturally the incident to be described might not occur in exactly the same way to two different persons. But if we arrive at a conception of one experience of this kind, we shall have gained an understanding of the whole matter in question. [ 5 ] A moment may occur in which the soul gets an inner experience of itself in quite a new way. At the beginning it will generally happen that the soul during sleep wakes up, as it were, in a dream. But we feel at once that this experience cannot be compared with ordinary dreams. We are completely shut off from the world of sense and intellect, and yet we feel the experience in the same way as when we are standing fully awake before the outer world in ordinary life. We feel compelled to picture the experience in ourselves. For this purpose we use ideas such as we have in ordinary life, but we know very well that we are experiencing things different from those to which such ideas are normally attached. These ideas are only used as a means of expression for an experience which we have not had before, and which we are also able to know that it is impossible for us to have in ordinary life.

We feel, for instance, as though thunderstorms were all around us. We hear thunder and see lightning. And yet we know we are in our own room. We feel permeated by a force previously quite unknown to us. Then we imagine we see rents in the walls around us, and we feel compelled to say to ourselves or to some one we think is near us. "I am now in great difficulties, the lightning is going through the house and taking hold of me; I feel it seizing and dissolving me.” When such a series of representations has been gone through, the inner experience passes back to ordinary soul-conditions. We find ourselves again in ourselves with the memory of the experience just undergone. If this memory is as vivid and accurate as any other, it enables us to form an opinion of the experience. We then have a direct knowledge that we have gone through something which cannot be experienced by any physical sense nor by ordinary intelligence, for we feel that the description just given and communicated to others or to ourselves is only a means of expressing the experience. Although the expression is a means of understanding the fact of the experience, it has nothing in common with it. We know that we do not need any of our senses in having such an experience.

One who attributes it to a hidden activity of the senses or of the brain, does not know the true character of the experience. He adheres to the description which speaks of lightning, thunder, and rents in the walls, and therefore he believes that this experience of the soul is only an echo of ordinary life. He must consider the thing as a vision in the ordinary sense of the word. He cannot think otherwise. He does not take into consideration, however, that when one describes such an experience one only uses the words lightning, thunder, rents in the walls as pictures of that which has been experienced, and that one must not mistake the pictures for the experience itself. It is true that the matter appears to one as if one really saw these pictures. But one did not stand in the same relation to the phenomenon of the lightning in this case as when seeing a flash with the physical eye. The vision of the lightning is only something which, as it were, conceals the experience itself; one looks through the lightning to something beyond which is quite different, to something which cannot be experienced in the outer world of sense.

[ 6 ] In order that a correct judgment may be made possible, it is necessary that the soul which has such experiences should, when they are over, be on a thoroughly sound footing with regard to the ordinary outer world. It must be able clearly to contrast what it has undergone as a special experience, with its ordinary experience of the outer world. Those who in ordinary life are already disposed to be carried away by all kinds of wild imaginings regarding things, are most unfit to form such a judgment. The more sound—or one might say sober—a sense of reality we have got the more likely we are to form a true and, therefore, valuable judgment of such things. One can only attain to confidence in supersensible experiences when one feels with regard to the ordinary world that one clearly perceives its processes and objects as they really are.

[ 7 ] When all necessary conditions are thus fulfilled, and when we have reason to believe that we have not been misled by an ordinary vision, then we know that we have had an experience in which the body was not transmitting perceptions. We have had direct perception through the strengthened soul without the body. We have gained the certainty of an experience when outside the body.

[ 8 ] It is evident that in this sphere the natural differences between fancy or illusion and true observation made when outside the body, cannot be indicated in any other way than in the realm of outer sense perception. It may happen that some one has a very active imagination with regard to taste, and therefore, at the mere thought of lemonade, gets the same sensation as if he were really drinking it. The difference, however, in such a case becomes evident through the association of actual circumstances in life. And so it is also with those experiences which are made when we are out of the body. In order to arrive at a fully convincing conception in this sphere, it is necessary that we should become familiar with it in a perfectly healthy way and acquire the faculty of observing the details of the experience and correcting one thing by another.

[ 9 ] Through such an experience as the one described, we gain the possibility of observing that which belongs to our proper self not only by means of the senses and intellect—in other words, the bodily instruments. Now we not only know something more of the world than those instruments will allow of, but we know it in a different way. This is especially important. A soul that passes through an inner transformation will more and more clearly comprehend that the oppressive problems of existence cannot be solved in the world of sense because the senses and the intellect cannot penetrate deeply enough into the world as a whole. Those souls penetrate deeper which so transform themselves as to be able to have experiences when outside the body; and it is in the records which they are able to give of their experiences that the means for solving the riddles of the soul can be found.

[ 10 ] Now an experience that occurs when outside the body is of a quite different nature from one made when in the body. This is shown by the very opinion which may be formed about the experiences described, when, after it is over, the ordinary waking condition of the soul is re-established and memory has come into a vivid and clear condition. The physical body is felt by the soul as separated from the rest of the world, and seems only to have a real existence in so far as it belongs to the soul. It is not so, however, with that which we experience within ourselves and with regard to ourselves when outside the body, for then we feel ourselves linked to all that may be called the outer world. All our surroundings are felt as belonging to us just as our hands do in the world of sense. There is no indifference to the world outside us when we come to the inner soul-world. We feel ourselves completely grown together, and woven into one with that which here may be called the world. Its activities are actually felt streaming through our own being. There is no sharp boundary line between an inner and an outer world. The whole environment belongs to the observing soul just as our two physical hands belong to our physical head.

[ 11 ] In spite of this, however, we may say that a certain part of this outer world belongs more to ourselves than the rest of the environment, in the same way in which we speak of the head as independent of the hands or feet. Just as the soul calls a piece of the outer physical world its body, so when living outside the body it may also consider a part of the supersensible outer world as belonging to it. When we penetrate to an observation of the realm accessible to us beyond the world of the senses, we may very well say that a body unperceived by the senses belongs to us. We may call this body the elemental or etheric body, but in using the word “etheric” we must not allow any connection with that fine matter which science calls “ether” to establish itself in our mind.

[ 12 ] Just as the mere reflection upon the connection between man and the outer world of nature leads to a conception of the physical body which agrees with facts, so does the pilgrimage of the soul into realms that can be perceived outside the physical body lead to the recognition of an elemental or etheric body, or body of formative forces.

Anthroposophy conducts its research in a field that is not presented to humanity by fanciful arbitrariness of enthusiastic personalities, but that stands questioning before every healthy human feeling, so that man can indeed close himself off from these questions by numbing his soul: But the impulses of the inner being will awaken again and again from the stupor and bear witness to the fact that dealing with these questions is a necessity of life. The feeling of being closed in then appears as an illness, and the healthy person strives for its cure as for the cure of physical illnesses.

Nevertheless, in the age of scientific thinking, this field was only illuminated by a few isolated flashes of light: for example,

Fortlage: (Eight psychological lectures Jena 1869):

When we call ourselves living beings and thus ascribe to ourselves a property that we share with animals and plants, we necessarily understand the living state to mean something that never leaves us and that always persists in us, both when we are sleeping and when we are awake. This is the vegetative life of nourishment of our organism, an unconscious life, a life of sleep. The brain is an exception here in that this life of nutrition, this sleep life, is dominated in it by the life of consumption during the breaks in waking. During these breaks, the brain is exposed to a great deal of consumption, and [consequently] enters into a state which, if it extended to the other organs, would bring about the absolute enfeeblement of the body or death. [...] Consciousness is a small and partial death; death is a great and total consciousness, an awakening of the whole being in its innermost depths.

Fortlage wrote a lot: such flashes of thought remain isolated in his writings. And Ed. v. Hartmann criticized him for having them. They come from the fact that flames of insight shine up from the depths of the soul, which would otherwise be over-illuminated. Anthroposophy consciously wants to steer towards the light and turn it into a science about a field that cannot become a science in any other way.

It must come to powers of knowledge that appear to ordinary life as powers of imagination, as dream powers. But in the depths of the human being, a “second man” works. And if he can only be dreamt of, then what otherwise remains in dreams must be raised to luminous knowledge, otherwise this second man remains something that is overslept throughout life. In order to become complete in its own field, natural science must develop those insights that only extend to the fields where access to the spiritual world opens up. One consciously comes to these fields when one lives with natural science. When one consciously develops inner life at its borderline places. Then a state unfolds that can be compared to what one has to imagine in the case of lower organisms that develop sensory organs from within. One arrives at the process of forming spiritual organs of touch. This life at the border areas can be observed again in energetic cognitive natures.

Vischer:

No spirit where there is no nerve center, where there is no brain, say the opponents. No nerve center, no brain, we say, if it were not prepared from below on countless levels; it is easy to mockingly talk about the spirit's churning in granite and limestone, no more difficult than it would be for us to mockingly ask how the egg white in the brain soars to ideas. The measurement of the differences in levels is fading from human knowledge. It will remain a mystery how it comes about that nature, under which the spirit must slumber after all, stands as such a perfect counterpoint to the spirit that we bump into bumps on it; it is a direction of such an appearance of absoluteness that with Hegel's otherness and being beside oneself, however witty the formula, it says next to nothing, and simply covers up the crudity of the apparent dividing wall. The correct recognition of the cutting edge and the thrust in this counterblow can be found in Fichte, but no explanation for it.

Inner experience must come to the fact that with such thoughts the soul lives at the border of knowledge. Here it can become aware of its life independent of the body, the life that is otherwise overslept. But a twofold insight must open up here. One must recognize the nature of thinking that is gained from the sensual world.

Gideon Spicker: (Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin Friar):

Whatever philosophy one professes – dogmatic or skeptical, empirical or transcendental, critical or eclectic – all, without exception, start from an unproven and unprovable proposition, namely, the necessity of thinking. No examination, however deep, can ever get behind this necessity. It must be accepted unconditionally and cannot be justified by anything; every attempt to prove its correctness always presupposes it. Below it yawns a bottomless abyss, a dreadful darkness illuminated by no ray of light. So we do not know where it comes from or where it leads. Whether a gracious God or an evil demon has placed it in reason, both is uncertain.

Philosophy as a science of the supernatural has often believed that it could solve the human essence riddle in thinking itself. But such an attempt to overstretch thinking leads to a kind of malnutrition of the soul. Only the realization that so-called metaphysics is a hunger for knowledge can save us.

A second insight, which is particularly important in more recent times, is that sensual knowledge can only lead to satiety of the soul. Here it is important to come to the realization that the spirit is the creator of the body; the latter is neither the tool of the body nor a parallel phenomenon associated with the body. What can be observed sensually in the body has its laws in the past workings of the spirit. In the present workings of the spirit, the germ of future bodily activity is present. It is not knowledge as such that man strives for in knowing, but the shaping of future life. Remembrance is brought about by a process that still has a relationship to the processes that represent growth, in which heredity has an effect. But in the process of waking imagination, there is also a mental side process that prepares the germ from which the spiritual entity that passes through death is formed.

One must be content to gain knowledge of the immortal human being through imagination. For in this, everything mortal is eradicated for perception. And only the immortal is retained in them.

Only with such imaginations can the soul live in the supersensible realm. It can know in this way that what it does and thinks in a later period of time represents a coexistence of itself with the spirit in an earlier one. It becomes familiar with a world in which it recognizes spiritual realms just as one recognizes material realms in the natural realm.

We just have to gain a correct understanding of the soul's relationship to the body. The wonderful ramification of the nervous system contains the element into which the human being is constantly dying. Death resides in the nerves. The breakdown of organic processes resides there.

I would like to call what I have in mind anthroposophy, preferably Goetheanism. In Goethe, the concepts gained from nature are still such that they can be digested by the soul. He himself has only come to a conception interwoven with nature. But anyone who penetrates his way of thinking will undergo a metamorphosis of soul phenomena: will, feeling, thinking. Psychologists have at best arrived at a classification. Feeling is will transformed; but this is done by the body. Thinking is transformed from will and feeling. If you discover feeling in thinking, then you are dealing with supersensible beings. With those who have been involved before one has gone through birth to sensual existence; if one discovers the will, then the previous earth life. The will of which one is aware in ordinary life, which moves limbs, etc., the will that one finds in the supersensible nature of the ideas, comes from previous earth lives.

Just one thing should be mentioned regarding the practical fruitfulness of anthroposophy. In 1914, financiers expressed the conviction that the war would only last a few months because economic resources would not last longer. A respected teacher of international law hopes that they were not mistaken regarding reconstruction. But there will only be no helplessness if reality is grasped. And reality includes the spirit. For economics touches the area where nature reaches its limits: in hunger, in education, etc., man must see essential things that he cannot conquer with the ideas gained from nature. A weak beginning has already been made with the insight into spiritual impulses.

Oskar Hertwig: (The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance):

The interpretation of Darwin's theory, which is so ambiguous with its vagueness, also allowed for a wide range of applications in other areas of economic, social and political life. From it, everyone could, as from a Delphic oracle, draw their own conclusions about social, political, hygienic, medical and other issues, as they wished, and refer to the science of Darwinian biology with its unalterable laws of nature to support their assertions. But if these supposed laws are not such, should there not also be social dangers in their versatile application to other areas? Do they really believe that human society can use phrases such as “relentless struggle for existence”, “selection of the suitable, the useful, the expedient”, “perfection through breeding” etc. in their transfer to the most diverse areas, such as daily bread, for half a century without being influenced more deeply and lastingly in the whole direction of their idea formation! The proof of this assertion would not be difficult to obtain from many phenomena of modern times. Precisely for this reason, the decision about the truth or error of Darwinism also reaches far beyond the scope of the biological sciences.

Goetheanism has a view of nature that leaves room for the peaceful harmonizing influence of the spirit in the natural struggle for existence; the development of what is most suitable instead of the selection of what happens to be suitable; of what is ethically valuable and transcends mere utility; of what is spiritually willed in what is merely functional; of the perfection of the spirit in addition to that achieved through natural selection. But all this cannot be recognized by conveniently transferring the laws of nature to the spiritual realm. It must be investigated in the spiritual realm, as the laws of nature are investigated in the natural realm.

Why do people resist this? Between the natural and spiritual realms lies a field that must be worked through. If one wants to know immortality, one must go through the knowledge of death. When one is no longer afraid to overcome the fear of knowing death, one will be able to partake of the satisfaction that comes from life in immortality.

1. Introduction: On the spiritual necessity of anthroposophy.
2. It has always been there as flashes of inspiration from individuals. Continued.
3. What cognitive powers are necessary. Science cannot develop them.
4. The development of cognitive powers at the “places of knowledge” - Vischer.
5. The inability of mere thinking: G. Spicker. 6. The inability of sensory experience. 7. What the body – the nervous system – is. 8. Why only in imaginations. 9. The ramification of the nervous system and death. 10. Goetheanism. 11. Metamorphosis of soul life.
12. A practical perspective.
13. Why does one not want anthroposophy.

Anthroposophy is fully aware of its changeability over time.

Anthroposophy is linked to natural science, to being its complement and completion. It is not a doctrine of faith alongside other doctrines of faith, but the science of the spirit. Its origin in this way must be taken into account.

Thus its connecting power is not sectarian either. Yet such a connection is necessary because of the “secret”. But it must not be in the sense of the old mystery cults. In the “borderland” illusions must be distinguished from reality. “Inner opponents”.

Anthroposophy must grasp the meaning of the concepts differently than external science and also religion. It characterizes through the concepts. The so-called reality and the ideals.

In this way, anthroposophy comes to recognize the phenomena of the human spirit. Thomism. It stands in contrast to the most diverse recent attempts at creating religion. It recognizes how the forces that create religion are limited. The scientific disciplines that focus on the external world have repeatedly made such attempts at creating religion. Strauß. Ed. v. Hartmann.

For anthroposophy, sensual reality is an image of the spiritual. For this very reason, it leads the mind back to religious need. In this, too, it points man to something other than mere natural science: Mach.

The natural science direction always comes to treat religion like a prejudice. “Fear and adversity are the mothers of religion.” “Churches fill up and pilgrimages increase in times of war and devastating epidemics.” Attempts to make morality independent. - In 1873: cities, rural communities, the church faithful, one third of the French people. Albert Sorel: Histoire diplomatique de la guerre franco-allemande. W. James. Subliminal self.

Conflicts arise not from the essence of religion but from the former state of connectedness and non-separation. As late as 1822 the decrees against Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler were only repealed. Pater Secchi. In this subject, anthroposophy and religion will meet; in the soul experience they go different but parallel paths, each with equal right. Again and again I am confronted with the objection that Anthroposophy is not in harmony with the aims of certain schools of thought that strive for an internalization and deepening of Christian experience.

Bishop Ireland: “Religion needs new forms and ways of understanding in order to get in touch with modern times. We need apostles of thought and action.

The criticism is that the impulse for altruism is missing. Fate and repeated lives on earth. People say: an impersonal concept of God.

It goes without saying that there is opposition [to spiritual science or theosophy is widespread], which is why [this] topic [was chosen] for today's lecture. Spiritual science [it is called] in relation to the constitution that the human soul must have in order to be theosophically minded. This mood is called theosophical in the same sense as it has been for centuries. [It is] that mood of the human soul through which it experiences the conviction that there is an inner core of being that can be reached by man, which is linked to the divine-spiritual that pervades and permeates the world. The theosophical mood gives a very general characteristic of knowing oneself as one with the cosmos.

[Gap in the transcript. What is spiritual scientific research?] There are certain soul activities through which the soul itself undertakes the experiment, whereby something like spiritual chemistry is brought about. This makes one so detached in soul and spirit from the physical and bodily that one connects a meaning with the words: I live, I feel myself spiritually independent of my body, so that I look at this body from the outside. Just as inorganic chemistry separates hydrogen from water, so spiritual chemistry separates the soul-spiritual from the physical-bodily. In this way, the human being experiences himself as having been emancipated threefold in the soul-spiritual. What is otherwise experienced in sleep, unconsciously, the spiritual researcher experiences consciously; for he works consciously, from outside, on the physical-bodily.

We can call this a conscious sleep experience. The physical body is like a mirror. The spent forces of the physical body are in a state of constant disintegration during wakefulness. The growth forces are depleted, hence [comes] sleep. The researcher consciously becomes acquainted with what then occurs during the replacement. A kind of reproduction occurs, a reawakening of pure growth forces.

The second thing is the wonderful mystery of the onset of physical life. The first periods of childhood appear to us like a dream. Our powers of consciousness are still as in dream life. We only remember back to a certain point in childhood, [to] where full self-awareness sets in. We can then say “I”. In these early days, the same powers and abilities are already present that will later break out. How are these powers present in the child? In such a way that they are used for the plastic development of the physical body. Only the formal, the form-like, has been inherited by the human being. He himself refines these plastic powers into individual talents. One can see this in the physical organization of a being who works plastically. One observes how this spiritual core descends from above and works into the inheritance from father and mother. I have said before that this core is the fruit of previous earthly experiences. A moment comes when the physical organization is, so to speak, hardened, to use a rough expression, so that the spiritual soul can no longer work plastically on it. This is comparable to standing in front of a mirror. If we can stand in front of it, we cannot go through it, but the reflection that arises in front of us is reflected back. The process just described can be compared to that. What has been flowing in earlier is now reflected back into itself. This is the emergence of self-awareness.

These forces are the same ones that work on our body. The spiritual researcher is in the spiritual world, knows that he is within the Divine-Spiritual that permeates the world. This spiritual-soul experience is the fruit of a soul practice full of renunciation that lasts for years and years. Thus, in what is reflected in the hardened organism, the spiritual scientist is absolutely on the ground of a theosophical view. We could not live this life without the soul-spiritual emerging from the soul's subconscious in its reflection. But at that moment it is only the part that is not allowed to penetrate into our work and creativity. It is the non-creative part. That remains with us for our everyday life. With this, we must turn our attention to what [gap in the transcript]. This is how it presents itself to the spiritual researcher at the moment of our life when we remember a later existence on earth; our spiritual and soul core is there, but it is covered by what can only experience itself in its self-reflection. We do not see what lies behind the reflecting surface as our spiritual and soul core.

Then it becomes clear that our spiritual and mental core is hidden within the physical organism, which acts like a mirror that covers everything. All diligence is based on developing this self-awareness. Our organism has to create something to cover the spiritual and mental core in order to be diligent in the world. This is the anti-osophical mood. It is no wonder that it is so. The spiritual researcher also has to make sure that this is intact in him. He has to forget his theosophical mood and behave exactly as if he were an anti-osophist.

Now it is always the case that abilities develop in a one-sided way. It is natural for most people to let the pendulum of their soul life swing according to the anti-sophical mood. This is rooted in human nature in the deepest sense. Life itself produces this; there is no need to be surprised. We may extinguish our consciousness of the spiritual for external purposes, But there are moments when every human being experiences a kind of yearning, a dawning of consciousness of his spiritual core. Then he is apt to let the theosophical mood enter into the anti-Sophical mood. In itself it is so understandable that this theosophical mood can be overgrown by the everyday mood. We therefore see the two currents: earlier the scientific, antisophical, now the theosophical longing of the soul in our time. The consequence of this is that the antisophical mood has taken hold in another current. You are probably familiar with the beautiful story of Pythagoras, who, when asked by Cleon why he was a philosopher, replied: “Human life seems to me like a fair, full of people who are supposed to buy and sell or enjoy games. But I am like someone who wants to see everything.” In our time, this saying can no longer be used in this way. But what is the meaning of the words? What did Pythagoras want to say with them? His saying is based on the feeling that man achieves something particularly valuable with knowledge that cannot be readily applied in outer life. To let the soul rule freely is a kind of theosophical mood. In our inclination, born of the theosophical mood, towards that which leads man away from the physical, we now transcend centuries.

But now the opposite of the above is coming from America: pragmatism in the form of many brilliant aphorisms. This attitude says: whether there is truth in a perception is not important, but whether what is perceived proves useful. For example, immortality: there is no need for objective reasons to prove it. But it makes life more secure, and a person becomes useful if they perceive it to be true. So we act as if a god et cetera were there. This attitude has found a kind of companion in the “Philosophy of As If”. The book is already in its second edition. While the author wrote the preface as a young man, he only completed the work itself after his retirement. This philosopher claims that whatever can be said about transcendental things can be regarded as if they were there. It is therefore the direct opposite of the theosophical sentiment of Pythagoras and Socrates, because that philosophy of “as if” knows no objective truths in the transcendental. The anti-Sophian mood is dominant today among certain leading minds, and it is to be found in the broadest scope of human mental life. I would also like to refer to some other significant minds, but I do not want this reference to be taken as a disparagement of intellectual capacities. I only mention the opponent because a certain acknowledgment can lie in the mention. I would like to remind you of the famous speech by the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond about the limits of knowledge of nature. According to this attitude, the world is to be regarded only as an enormous mass of interacting atoms.

Where does a science based on such arguments end up? It says: we can understand the mathematical processes underlying the visible world, but not what matter is, not what consciousness is. What lies beyond the realm of the sensually perceptible is not only “ignoramus”, but “ignorabimus” – we will never know. It is characteristic that Du Bois-Reymond assigns a strictly defined area to science. But beyond that, there is supposedly nothing more to be known. Then, at the end of the speech, we find the following striking statement: “There are limits to our knowledge of nature. Supranaturalism would have to be applied to that which haunts space as matter. But here is how Du Bois-Reymond expresses it: Where supernaturalism begins, science ends. — This statement is eminently anti-sophistic. It virtually forbids man to penetrate to the spiritual core of his being.

As one searches in the broadest periphery today, one encounters this anti-sophistic mood everywhere in leading science. It is characteristic of our time. But the strange thing is that, despite all the great logic with regard to external science, despite all the education of human thought when it comes to the theosophical mood, an assertion pops up like a shot, a counter-assertion that is not even attempted to be justified. Is this justification omitted out of affect or out of antipathy towards the spiritual world? Where does this antipathy come from? Where it begins, it penetrates from the depths of the soul as an impulse with a certain passion.

I must mention here that there are subconscious depths of the soul life that are much greater than we suspect. Many things emerge from the subconscious that give impulses. Our entire, so mysterious, soul condition depends largely on the subconscious soul activity. Is the spiritual researcher able to explore this? He can explore it and substantiate it with expressions of the conscious soul life. We have many kinds of subconscious urges. One can clearly feel that a sentence like the one just mentioned by Du Bois-Reymond about supernaturalism emerges from the subconscious soul regions. [gap in the transcript]

Consider someone who is overcome by fear. There is great tension in their soul life; certain subconscious soul powers are vividly active. I would like to refer here to the excellent research by the Danish physiologist Lange. These phenomena can be scientifically proven. Fear affects the organic body down to the vessels, so that certain irregularities occur in the organism. When someone is in fear, it is very easy for him to get into the mood that can be described with the words: Above all, give me something to hold on to, otherwise I will fall over.

Let us observe a scholar who occupies himself only with science. His organism develops in such a way that a mood is awakened in him by his stay-at-home thinking, which can express itself like a sudden shock, like fear in increased measure. This mood of fear sits deep down in organic processes. What happens there are instinctual, subconscious forces.

The spiritual researcher must now move from the passive to the active. If one is primarily concerned with sensory perception, then it is precisely out of a subconscious mood of fear that one can come to such a conclusion: Give me something material that I can hold on to, otherwise I will fall. Materialism breeds fear. It breeds the belief that you are only in front of a reality when you are in front of something you can hold on to in space. So the anti-sophical mood, as a mere belief in sensual quality, is basically nothing more than a mood of fear. You will have to get used to the fact that this is true, however paradoxical it may sound. The “Ignorabimus” has the same reason: fear. The anti-soph falls over when it has nothing to hold on to as reality. This shows us what we have to hold on to if we want to explore the reasons for the anti-sophic mood.

Never can it be missing [...] that this soul of mine, like a compressed ball, suddenly springs open and feels the longing for the home from which it comes.

These explanations should lead us not to disdain anti-philosophy, but to learn to understand it. The achievements of our time, especially the great technical ones, all that in a certain sense signifies the greatness of our time, needs an anti-philosophical mood as its correlate. But anti-philosophy will produce the theosophical mood as a natural reaction.

All those who have delved deeper into the knowledge of the world with all their soul have had the theosophical mood. The human soul cannot do without it. One must recognize that anti-philosophy may well produce efficiency in the outer life, but that in the long run man cannot be satisfied with it. The core of the soul proves to be the reality of human life and asserts itself from the deep sources of the soul. There will always be moments of celebration in life when the theosophical mood arises and rises. Then man is at one with all that is great and sublime in all times. Goethe, for example, was such a spirit. He, in particular, expressed the theosophical mood in many places.

Not a lesser man next to Goethe, but a great man, the naturalist Albrecht von Haller, who deserves the highest respect, made the following statement out of an anti-theosophical mood:

No created spirit can penetrate into the innermost nature
. Blessed is he to whom she only
The outer shell shows.

This is anti-philosophy. Only the shell, not the actual core, which is connected to the cosmic soul! Goethe sensed this as an anti-philosophical sentiment and, speaking from his theosophical perspective, said:

“Into the innermost part of nature,”
O you philistines! —
“No created spirit,“
May you and your brothers and sisters
Not remember me of such a word.

We think: Place by place
We are within.
“Happy the one to whom she only
Shows the outer shell!”
I hear this repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly,
Nature has neither core
Nor shell,
She is everything at once;
You, above all, prove yourself,
Whether you are core or shell.

First of all, one must consider the various states of consciousness through which man has passed. He is now in the state of bright day-consciousness. Before that, he has passed through three other states of consciousness. The first consciousness was a kind of dull all-consciousness, such as the stone that lives in space has today, but brooding in a dull state of consciousness. This condition can still be caused pathologically even now. In a deep trance, people often begin to draw world systems; but they have no control over their consciousness.

In the second state of consciousness, that of dreamless sleep, man can perceive everything alive. Every night, man undergoes this state. He is then in a kind of plant trance; he carries out the [vegetative] functions quite well during this time. The state of consciousness is that of dream sleep, which is much lighter than the previous one; but even then, man does not receive any sensory impressions as he does in the waking state. Then people did not see things, but an image of the soul arose in them.

Now we find ourselves in the fourth state of consciousness. The previous states of consciousness were linked to other planets just as our waking consciousness is linked to the earth. Man is a product, born out of the circumstances in which he moves. Esoterically, the first planet is Saturn, the second the Sun, the third the Moon and the fourth is the Earth. On Saturn, man has already gone through the various states of form. In the middle of the first round - that is, of the first elementary realm - Saturn became physical. With Saturn, it depends on the first round. The following six rounds on Saturn are not of particular importance for humans. Other beings from earlier world cycles have completed their development there. During the seventh round on Saturn, humans had reached the point of becoming physical, but they had a body that was merely oval-shaped, spherical. This state was subject to neither birth nor death. This physical body went through the entire Saturn development.

One could imagine that the whole of Saturn is composed of individual human spheres, a mulberry; a morula stage was Saturn. The whole thing slept from one pralaya to another manvantara, the solar condition. There the human being was in a kind of plant trance. It was only during the second round of the sun that man attained the new. There his consciousness developed into a kind of human plant trance. There, man no longer had an immortal physical body. The whole was an all-life, a living organism that secreted new human spheres from itself. The third to seventh rounds on the sun are not important for humans, but only for other beings. On the sun, a second realm is emerging alongside the human realm, namely a special mineral realm. The minerals there are still growing, they are still more plant-like. They are still so similar to the human kingdom and not yet as separate as they are now.

After a pralaya, the moon manvantara begins. This is when the image consciousness of dream sleep develops. In the third moon round, this actual moon stage is developed. Man then becomes an image-conscious being, outwardly like a kind of animal state. In the first round on the moon, he has repeated Saturn; in the second round, the sun. In the third round of the moon, he develops the new, the actual moon state. The fourth to seventh rounds on the moon are not of great importance to him. They are a descent on the moon.

Now the development of the earth begins. In the first round, there is a repetition of the Saturn condition, in the second round a repetition of the sun condition, and in the third round there is a repetition of the moon condition. In the fourth round, the actual earth condition occurs, the state of waking consciousness. In the fourth round, the human being passes through the state of the unmanifest form, then through the astral state, and finally through the physical. Now, in the first round on earth, he has gone through the stage of Saturn, the mineral kingdom; in the second round, the stage of the sun, the plant kingdom; in the third round, the stage of the moon, the animal kingdom. In the fourth round, the human being proper emerges.

The external differences between the four stages are as follows: On Saturn, there is a silent, dark existence. One would not have seen anything at that time, not even clairvoyantly. On the sun, everything begins to shine. There, the spiritual resounding begins. This resounding of the sun is transferred to the human being in the solar round - the second round on earth. In the second round, the human being is a resounding being. Everyone received their own tone. Every person has their own special tone, which signifies them in the world. They still have this tone, it resounds within.

On the moon, he was physically a luminous being. What he is today only in the astral, that was the physical of the human being then, namely, luminous. He was a star, a luminous being on the moon. This state was repeated on earth in the third round. In the fourth round, the new was added on earth.

After passing through the arupa state, the rupa-mental state and the astral state, in the fourth round man became physical. It was only in the finest physical etheric matter that man developed, in the polaric race, at the beginning of our physical development. The polaric people were ether people. They repeated the Saturn stage once more. They were spheres at the beginning of the physical formation of the earth and immortal. An immortal race inhabited the pole at that time. Then man passed into the sun stage. Before that, everything was still dissolved, ethereal. Then man separated himself as an air being in the Hyperborean period. He formed a kind of sphere that sounded, vibrated, trembled and reacted to impact and pressure internally. This is how he perceived the changes in the outside world. The solar stage of the Hyperborean period came to an end when the finest substances withdrew, leaving only coarser substances that began to glow.

At the beginning of the Hyperborean Age, the present physical sun emerged from the earth. This caused a tremendous catastrophe on the earth. All life was drawn out.

Now man begins to reproduce in two sexes. At the beginning of the Lemurian period, that is, during the third root race, the coarser substances emerged from the earth that the earth could no longer use. That is the physical moon that was then separated from the earth. Again, a great catastrophe took place on the earth. Now all beings had their own warmth. Until then, all humans were in a kind of light state. In the Lemurian period, the fourth stage was that of intrinsic warmth.

Man was a sounding being on the sun, a luminous being on the moon, and became an intrinsically warm being on the earth. All animals that have intrinsic warmth only split off from humans after that. It was only through intrinsic warmth that Kama could move into humans. Only humans and animals with their own warmth have Kama. The fish is still a sleeper today, dispassionate. From the middle of the Lemurian period, man himself becomes inwardly warm, kamic, passionate. In the past, the maturing of man was brought about from the outside. At that time, the general warmth incubated man, the warmth that surrounded the earth. Man then absorbed this warmth within himself.

This is what the Prometheus myth points to. The warmth was brought into man from heaven. Man became a fire being. In this way he acquired passion; before that he had no passion, no inner warmth of his own. That is why it is said of the earlier time: “The Spirit of God brooded over the waters - human souls.” This was the warmth that brings everything to maturity.

Now, on the other hand, man is a creature with its own warmth. These conditions had not existed before. Man had learned the earlier conditions on earlier planets. He learned this new condition on earth. Now the earth was left to its own devices after it had acquired its own warmth.

But there were great leaders who could give humanity a jolt. Such beings studied the conditions that were beyond the conditions of the earth. These were the Manus, leaders, divine beings. They had to study a planet from which one could learn what the earth still needed. The planet was Mars. Mars looks to the clairvoyant as if people had already lived on it. The discarded Kama shells can be found on Mars. These Kama shells look like a kind of snake skin that has been left behind. It is Kama that is capable of being fertilized with the spirit. Such a stage had to be studied on another planet, where the beings had just reached the point of having left this stage behind.

Another stage was found by the Manus on Mercury; the Kama-Manas stage. This was necessary for the Earth. The Kama stage of Mars had to be fertilized with the Manas stage of Mercury. Repetitions for the Earth were the Saturn, Sun and Moon stages. The Mars and Mercury stages were added. The influx of Mercury forces is represented by Mercury's snake staff. The Hermes staff represents the impact of the spirit's monad.

The clairvoyant does not count the Earth itself in the planetary development. He says it is Mars and Mercury together. The Earth still has three rounds to go through. These are important for the following planetary stages. In the fifth round, it enters the plant kingdom. It then lives in a kind of paradise, in the Garden of Eden. There the lowest realm will be the plant kingdom. Everything that man produces there will be a plant. In this way, man prepares what will be on the next planet. This next planet is esoterically called Jupiter. It is the Jupiter that will arise from the earth. The sixth round, the animal kingdom, is a preparation for the sixth planet, Venus - so-called because of its similarity to Venus. On the seventh planet, Vulcan, completion follows. No mere physical brain can conceive the state of the last planet. Only for the clairvoyant arises the possibility of knowing something about Vulcan.

The great sages have written down this planetary development, and everyone can read it in the days of the week. You start with Saturday: Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Mars day, Mercury day, Jupiter day, Venus day and Saturday again - Vulcan. Mars day and Mercury day stand together for the earth. Mars corresponds to the god Tin and Mercury to the Wotan of the Germans - see Tacitus' Germania. In all nations, the days of the week have names that reflect occult development. Thursday, Jupiter Day, represents the future; therefore, it is especially sacred to occultists. For the occultist, the next Saturday would always be Volcano Day, which coincides with Saturday. The periods of time that are traversed on the planets cover many millions of years. On Earth, everything that has already occurred is repeated. Every idea is a repetition, every work of art is a repetition. The outer, bright consciousness of the day is repetitive. On the next planet, a psychic state of consciousness occurs. It differs from the present state in that the human being enters a luminous state from the state of his own warmth, developing his own light. There he consciously becomes a luminous being. There he can consciously produce glowing colors. There he can transform the light into a glowing imagination.

In the fifth round of the fifth planet, the human being will have become a luminous form, an apparition. Today, the clairvoyant can produce glowing forms in the astral realm; in doing so, he anticipates the state of the fifth round of the fifth planet. But he must work with earthly powers. [...]

On the sixth planet, super-physical consciousness sets in. This is magical. The created being of light remains. There, the human being has a magical consciousness. On Vulcan, he will have reached the consciousness of the seventh stage; he will be spiritual. This can only be expressed in a symbolic language, but not in an ordinary language. From Earth onwards, the last rounds are preparations for the following planets. The deeper essence in man goes through this whole development. In the spherical being of Saturn, man was already present as a point. A thread runs through all states of consciousness. Man goes through all stages.

Since the Martian stage, since man has warm blood, his own warmth, conflict has also arisen. Before that, he was a peaceful being, had no passion. In the lower animal species with cold blood, there is no conflict - Kessler, a Russian naturalist, has confirmed this. The thread that was already found on Saturn and that extends to Vulcan is called the Pitri being.

The smallest expresses the greatest. When man got blood, his astral body began to take on the form that it now has. It developed through five races in the Lemurian period, then through seven in the Atlantean period, and finally through five in the Aryan period. In the races, there is a repetition of the earlier conditions. The religious consciousness of the ancient Indian people recognized the One God; this is the germ of all later religions. This was a repetition of the polar stage of the earth. In the Persian race we find a repetition of the Hyperborean stage, and in the Chaldeans and Egyptians the trinity, a repetition of the Lemurian time with the impact of Kama in the fourth sub-race of the fourth stage of the earth. Kama-Manas joins them.

You know that if we go back in the development of our race, we come to the Atlantean root race, whose realm is the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. And if we go back even further, we come to the Lemurian root race; this is a race that you have to imagine as being quite different in its organization than our present-day root race and even different from the Atlantean one. These people lived on a continent that extended south of the Far East and the Indian subcontinent and which has now also become the bottom of the sea. Some descendants of this population are still present in Australia. But where do we find the second human race? It should be noted that the third human race, the Lemurians, looked quite different from us and also quite different from the fourth human race, the Atlanteans. The Lemurians did not have what we call memory, imagination, intellect; the Lemurians had only developed these in the germ. On the other hand, the second human race was endowed with a high spirituality, which, however, was not located in the heads of men, but which is to be imagined as a continuous revelation from outside. The second human race was called the Hyperboreans. They lived around the North Pole, in Siberia, Northern Europe, including the areas that have become seas. And if you imagine this country with a kind of tropical temperature, you get a rough idea of what the country was like back then. It was originally populated by people who, as individuals, wandered around like dream beings. If they had been left to their own devices, they would not have been able to do anything. There was, so to speak, wisdom in the air, in the atmosphere. It was only in the Lemurian period that the marriage of wisdom with the soul took place, so that before that we have to imagine the whole spirituality of man as nebulous. These were the seeds of the nebulous spirit and the seeds of the spirit of light. The spirituality that arose as a germ in the sons of the fire nebula, which still seems familiar to us, can be found in the southern regions, in Lemuria. In the regions that are located north of us, there lived people, nations, who were endowed with a dream consciousness that was more distinct than the Pitri consciousness. On the whole, we must not imagine that the people who lived up there also remained up there. They made migratory journeys that went south. And these migratory journeys extended far into the times when the Lemurian race had sprouted in the south. There was, so to speak, a northern Lemurian race and a southern Lemurian race. There were twelve great migrations. These twelve great migrations gradually brought the inhabitants of the different areas into contact with each other. They also brought these people to areas that are not far from ours, to areas that can be identified as central Germany, France, central Russia, and so on.

Now you have to imagine that we are talking about a time when what we call higher animals already existed. The Lemurians were depicted as a kind of giant, and they came into contact with the people coming from the north. This resulted in two sexes. One sex that emerged in the prehistory of humanity became the basis of the Atlanteans; all these people intermingled in what is now Europe at that time. We must not imagine it as simply as it is put into words here. Now, from this mixing of the Hyperboreans, the Lemurians and later also the Atlanteans, there emerged initiates who were different from the initiates whom we have to regard as our teachers today; these latter originated essentially from the South, the Lemurian continent. In the north, I would say, a kind of foggy world developed, and the three main initiates that we have to look for here on this island of humanity were called in the time that itself extended into the emergence of our Christianity: Wotan, Wili and We. These are the three great Nordic initiates. They derived their origin in a very proper way, in a popular way one could say, from the earthly realm, in which everything that is now distributed among people was still contained unmixed. In a popular way, one could say that a race emerged from this earthly realm that was very unlike present-day humanity. This race was ruled by an omniscience. This All-Wisdom was called by the teaching priests “All-Father”. Then there is mention of the two realms, of the Misty Home and the Muspelheim. The Misty Home is the Nifelheim of the North, the dawning misty state of the Hyperborean root race, in contrast to Muspelheim. It describes twelve rivers that dammed up and then turned to ice. From this arose a human race, represented by the giant Ymir, and then the animal race, the cow Audhumbla. From Ymir came the sons of the frost giants. The intellectually gifted humans emerged later, also in the sense of the “Secret Doctrine”. And so the German saga also tells that [the descendants of Ymir and Audhumbla], Wotan, Wili and We, walked on the beach and formed humans. This refers to those humans of the “Secret Doctrine” who only emerged later and who were endowed with intellect.

There is an ancient truth in this ancient Germanic saga. We are also told what the two great migrations were like that went from the Far East to the West [and from the West to the East]. We have to imagine that the Celtic population was there first, and then formed a colony. This original Celtic population was completely under the influence of their initiates. These have propagated the original doctrine of Wotan, Wili and We and their priesthood. The Celts had priests, whom we call Druid priests. These were centered in a great lodge, in the Nordic Lodge. This has been preserved in the saga of King Arthur and the Round Table. In fact, this lodge of Nordic initiates did exist, the sacred lodge of Ceridwen - the White Lodge of the North. Later it was called the Order of Bards. This lodge existed for a long time until later periods. It was only dissolved in the age of Queen Elizabeth. Then the order withdrew completely from the physical plane. All the old Germanic legends are based on this. All Germanic poetry goes back to the original lodge of Ceridwen, which was also called the Cauldron of Ceridwen. The one who was most influential until the first centuries after the birth of Christ was the great initiate Meredin, who is known to us as the magician Merlin. He was called “the magician of the Nordic lodge”.

All this is directly contained in the old Celtic secret teachings. There you will find an indication of what the initiates of the East had to give. And what the Celts gave them was the saga of Baldur, the saga of the god of light and the god of darkness. Thus the initiates of the West slowly introduced this saga to the initiates of the East, with the well-considered intention of imparting something important to them. And in the belief that something more must follow, they added to this saga something that was still in the future, namely, the downfall of the gods in the future. Baldur could not resist this downfall. Therefore, a second procession was prepared after the twilight of the gods. It was said that a new Baldur would arise, and this “new Baldur”, which was announced to the people, is none other than the Christ. Here in the North these things could not develop in the same way as in the South, for example in Greece. In the North there were more male gods, in the South there was more devotion to the cult of beauty. The whole Nordic element had something peculiar to it that had existed for a long time, but which was at the same time the germ of destruction, the fighting nature. So in the North we have Wotan, Wili and We and next to them Loki. Loki is the covetous one, the desire, and that makes the Nordic world a fighting nature, which has the element of the Valkyries in it. These inspire to fight. They are something that the Nordic element has always had. Loki was the son of desire; Hagen is the later form for the original Loki.

And now a few words about what an initiate was like in those days. When he was initiated and thus introduced to spiritual powers, it was expressed by saying that he had undertaken the journey into the realm of the good dead, into the realm of the elves, to Alfgard, to get the gold of Nifelheim there – gold being the symbol of wisdom. Siegfried was the initiate of the old Germanic element at the time when Christianity was spreading. He was actually invulnerable, but still had a vulnerable spot because Loki, the god of desire in the guise of Hagen, was still present in this Nordic initiation. Hagen is the one who kills the initiate at the weak point. Brünhilde is a similar figure in the Nibelungen saga, a similar female deity to the Pallas-Athena of the Greeks. In the North she is the personification of the wild, killing element of battle. In Siegfried you have given us the old Teutonic initiate. The fighting element is expressed through the old Teutonic knighthood. Since it was primarily a worldly element, worldly knighthood had to trace its origin back to Siegfried as an initiate until the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th century. The origin of this knighthood was the Round Table of King Arthur. From there came the great knights, or rather, those who wanted to become leading secular knights had to go to the Round Table of King Arthur. There one learned worldly wisdom, but it was mixed with the will to fight, the Loki-Hagen element.

In particular, something was prepared in the Germanic element that could emerge particularly strongly in the Nordic element. Here something could be prepared that was connected with the development of the human being on the physical plane. We know that the descent of the Highest to the physical plane took place there; the personal is the form of the Highest on the physical plane. So the personal element developed, the personal fighting ability, which was perhaps most highly developed in Hagen.

Let us go back to the Lemurians. Among the Lemurians, there was not yet what man of today calls love. There was no love between man and woman. Sexuality did arise, but love was to sanctify sexuality only later. Love in the modern sense was also not present in the Atlanteans. Only when the personal element had acquired that importance, only then could love develop. At the end of the Lemurian period, there was a peculiar system in certain areas. It was systematic that a human race living in certain areas was divided into four groups. This was interpreted in such a way that a person from the first group – let us say group A – was never allowed to marry a person from group B. People from group A had to marry people from group C and people from group B had to marry people from group D. This avoided personal arbitrariness, that is, the personal was excluded. This division was made in the service of all humanity. At that time there was nothing in it of personal love. Only slowly did personal arbitrariness develop in love; that was namely the love that came down completely to the physical plane, and this was only being prepared at that time. The further back you go in time, the more you will find that eroticism plays a minor role. Even in the early days of Greek poetry it plays almost no role. But it plays a special role in German poetry of the Middle Ages. There you see love represented in two forms, you see love represented as courtly love and as desire. The fate that Siegfried had to suffer was the result of the personal being drawn into it. Go back to Rome and you will find that marriages there were contracted according to quite different principles. In Greece, too, personal love was not known at the beginning; it only arose later.

Then Christianity came to Central Europe. We have seen that in Central Europe in the early days, Christianity was introduced with the maintenance of the old. Slowly, the idea of the figure of Baldur transformed into the idea of the figure of Christ. This went through several generations; Boniface therefore found a prepared ground.

The legend of King Arthur and his Round Table gradually combined with the legend of the Holy Grail. This combination was brought about by a true initiate of the 13th century, Wolfram von Eschenbach. The Siegfried initiation was still the old initiation. In this, the worldly knighthood still played a role, as did the danger of being betrayed by the element of desire and self-love. Only when one had overcome this element, only when one had completely cast it off and when one had risen from the principle of worldly knighthood to the principle of spiritual knighthood, could one achieve spiritual initiation. This is what Wolfram von Eschenbach presents in Parzival. At first Parzival belongs to the worldly knighthood. His father died because of a betrayal during a campaign in the Orient. The reason for this is that the father was already seeking higher initiation; but because he still held the element of the old initiation, he was betrayed. Through his mother Herzeleide, Parzival was to be alienated from the physical plane; she put a fool's cap on him. Nevertheless, Parzival is caught up in the current of worldly knighthood and thus comes to the court of King Arthur. That Parzival is destined for the Christian current is indicated to us by the fact that he comes to the castle of the Holy Grail. He has been given an important teaching: not to ask many questions. This means nothing other than to find the resting point within himself, to have found inner peace and quiet and no longer to walk curiously through the outer world. Parzival also does not ask when he wants to enter the castle. He is therefore rejected at first. But then he does come to the sick Amfortas. He is led higher through Christian initiation.

Wherever you look up Wolfram von Eschenbach, you will find that he was an initiate. He combined these two cycles of legends because he knew that what we call the union of the Artus Lodge with the Grail Lodge had already happened. The Artus Lodge has been completely absorbed into the Grail Lodge.

The question often arises today as to why the teachings of spiritual science must be imparted now, while one hundred and twenty years ago, for instance, one heard nothing of it. Actually, the communication of spiritual truths has always taken place, but in a different form from today. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the teachings penetrated out of small brotherhoods and, for well-considered reasons, were put into writing not by the originators but by other people. Only scanty accounts penetrated out of those early mystery schools. One can still find today, however, one or two books in whose dim pages—dim only on the surface—are quite wonderful things. Such a book, Aurea Catena Homeri, was mentioned by Goethe. What its pages reveal will seem like fantasy or nonsense to modern readers, especially the most “enlightened.” If one approaches this “nonsense” with the tools of spiritual science, however, one will find something quite different. The greatest secrets are disclosed to one who studies its pages carefully. In earlier times, only a few individuals could advance into this occult science, but now there is unlimited opportunity for everyone whose heartfelt longing leads him there. How has this come about and why may these secrets now be brought to the public?

There is almost no historical age that cannot be described as a time of transition. Every age is asserted to be so, with more or less justification. Our present time, however, in which such fundamental events are occurring, can rightly be called an era of transition. To understand the deep foundations of our time, it is necessary to consider some well-known facts. We are approaching an era in which the ascent to higher worlds must take place with clear, clairvoyant consciousness. The old clairvoyance of Atlantis expired in 3101 BC, and then the time came when human beings began to perceive everything around themselves with an understanding bound to the brain. (This date is not to be taken as an absolute but as an approximate date.) The clairvoyant consciousness of humanity had to be darkened for a certain time in order that man should fully master the physical plane. The lesser Kali Yuga, or the Dark Age, now began and lasted 5,000 years; it had run its course by 1899. Now a time is being prepared in which it will become possible for people to unfold delicate clairvoyant faculties even without special training. From 1930 to 1950 there will already be people who will say, “Around that person I can see something like a bright band of light.” Another will see something rising before him like a dream-picture with a strange content. If this person has just performed a deed or action, something will appear to him that will rise like a picture in his soul. This picture will show him what action he must undertake sooner or later to compensate for this deed. It may happen that a person in whom these faculties are found relates them to a friend who will perhaps tell him, “Yes, there have always been human beings who know what you have seen. They call it ‘the etheric body of man,’ and what rises up in you like a dream-picture they call ‘karma.’”

Spiritual science has had to appear so that this age of etheric clairvoyance, which redeems the age of thinking that is controlled by an understanding bound to the brain, should not pass by unrecognized. As the Christ had to have a forerunner, so spiritual science had to appear in order to prepare for this clairvoyant age. Something could certainly happen now that would crush the bud of these delicate faculties of soul. This danger exists when people will not listen to the teachings of spiritual science, when they close themselves to them. Then the persons in whom these faculties appear will be called fantastic and foolish and will be locked up in mental hospitals. Many will themselves believe that they have had hallucinations; others will be afraid to speak about them, dreading to be laughed at or ridiculed. All this can lead to destruction of the new faculties of soul. Clever and enlightened persons in that era—you can put “enlightened” in quotation marks—will then say, “Look here! People lived long ago who declared that in our age there would be individuals with special faculties of soul. Where are these people? We are not aware of them.” Nevertheless, the prophecy of spiritual science will have been fulfilled. Although everything could be stifled by the increasing power of materialism, one can expect from souls today an understanding for that freer and lighter age just beginning.

Everything that happens in the world has an effect on everything else. The microcosm corresponds to the macrocosm. Let us study the events in the world that are connected with us. People are so easily satisfied when they can assert the truth of something. For spiritual science, however, it is of less concern always to emphasize that something is true than that this truth is also important. Much, for instance, is spoken and written about the similarity between human and animal skeletons. That is certainly a fact to which there could be no objection; yet there are truths that are much, much more important. There is, for example, the truth everyone can observe, a fact standing right before our eyes and yet connected with a great cosmic event. This is the truth that man is the only being who walks erect, who has raised himself up. Concerning the oft-mentioned similarity of the human skeleton to that of the ape, the erect gait of the ape has been botched. The ape tried to raise himself up but did not succeed. His erect gait is bungled. The erect gait of man is directly connected with the sun and the earth, with their spiritual working one upon the other. In order for man to walk upright, the sun and earth had to separate from each other. The animal is earthbound, but man has raised himself, and his countenance is turned upward. He walks in a vertical line, and with his erect gait he is a continuation of the earth's radius. That this truth is of importance is something we must feel; we must learn to feel it.

Let us look at another important instance of correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. In outer form a human being appears as either masculine or feminine. It is important to consider, however, that only in the outer form is one a man or a woman, not in one's inner being (we are speaking now of the outer characteristics in one incarnation). What contrast in the macrocosm corresponds to what appears in us as masculine and feminine? To clarify this, we must cast a glance into world space. There we find material substances that have remained backward; they have not taken on the laws of the sun and earth but have remained at the ancient Moon stage of evolution. Just the opposite is the case with the present moon, which is a body that has precipitated its own evolution. On account of this, it has become too strongly hardened. It had to dry up and freeze because it overshot its normal development. It is a future Jupiter condition that has miscarried, as if in human life a child had the constitution of an old man. The moon has thus missed its strength by going too far, thereby causing its own death.

In general, people will swear to a truth if it comes to them as an abstract principle; in concrete terms, however, this same truth appears to them as illusion. In all theosophical books one finds the remark that the world is an illusion or maya. Every theosophist knows this as truth and often repeats it. To say that the masculine or feminine body is only an illusion contributes something concrete to the abstraction. It is a fact that neither the masculine nor the feminine body, with the exception of the head, is properly developed. The feminine body is not fully developed, whereas the masculine has gone too far in its development. There is no middle position here. The feminine form is untrue in its backwardness, the masculine because it went too far beyond the middle position of development. Great artists have always felt these imperfections. Clothing arose from an exalted feeling for this fact. The ancient robes of priests were supposed to represent what the human body should be. Only sensual people can devote themselves to nudist colonies, because they recognize no higher expression than the body they see before them.

There is thus a lunar body, the moon, which has gone too far in its evolution, and such bodies as have remained at an earlier stage of evolution, namely, the comets. You may ask what all this has to do with man and woman. A comet brings with it the laws of the earlier Moon and therefore renews these ancient laws. It also brings with it the cyanide compounds, as has recently been established by outer science and has been known for a long time to occult science. Just as oxygen and carbon compounds are necessary to us on earth, so the cyanides were essential on the ancient Moon. In 1906 I enlarged on this in Paris, at the annual meeting of the Theosophical Society, in the presence of Colonel Olcutt, our president at that time, and various others. (see Note 2)

Because a woman's body has remained behind in its development, it has preserved a softer, more flexible, less substantial materiality; her brain can more easily be ruled by the spirit. A man, however, having rushed ahead in his development, now has difficulty prevailing over his rigid material and more impermeable brain substance. For this reason, a woman is more receptive to new ideas, her soul takes possession of them, and she can more easily direct her thoughts through the brain. It is harder for a man to set into motion the rigid parts of his brain. It thus stands to reason that there are, for example, more women than men in the Theosophical Society, a fact much deplored on various sides. Perhaps the men who stand in such dread of appearing as women in a later incarnation will find these thoughts somewhat consoling.

We will now apply the law of correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, between the large and small worlds, to another important matter. Just as in ordinary life we have our humdrum days—waking up, going to bed, waking up again, going about our usual tasks—so it is also in the far reaches of space. There, too, everything goes about its usual course; the rising and setting of the sun are repeated in a regular rhythm. Just as a family's methodical pace is interrupted when a child appears, since a completely new impulse enters earthly existence with a new spiritual being, so the appearance of a new heavenly body, such as a comet, has the same effect in space. All material is the expression of something spiritual, and occult science is able to indicate what lies behind the phenomena. The way in which modern science tries to occupy itself with comets is similar to a fly observing the Sistine Madonna. When it crawls over the Madonna, it certainly sees the colors, sees a spot of red here, a spot of blue there, but beyond this it sees nothing at all. This “fly-science”—the term is naturally used only in reference to what was mentioned above—knows nothing of the inner lawfulness whose outer sign is the comet. Halley's Comet particularly has the tendency to drive humanity still further into materialism. Without Halley's Comet, the books of the Encyclopedists would not have appeared, and there would not have been articles by Moleschott and Büchner after 1835. Today the ominous sign of the comet is appearing again, and if people do not listen to the teachings of spiritual science and do not make use of what is offered through it, spirituality will receive a death-blow. (see Note 4)

There is another significant sign, however, one that makes it possible for humanity to escape the destructive influence of the comet; its forces are even stronger than the comet's. This is the spring sign of Pisces, the Fish, in which we have stood for several centuries; at the time of Christ the vernal equinox was in the constellation of Aries, the Ram. We are thus well into this sign of great spiritual forces that will carry us upward. Through understanding these forces, we will develop the faculties that we will be able to attain in this age of Pisces.

Man rises to true human dignity only when he grasps from the depths the relationships that lie at the foundation of the spiritual. People should not rush so blindly past what the heavenly signs have to show them. Wisdom should inflame and enlighten its association with small and great. You may take as an example of this the wisdom-filled organization of an anthill. There the whole has a meaning; every ant feels itself to be a member of a whole. Human beings, however, regulate their social life according to what each individual considers useful for himself. They run around each other senselessly, without understanding. Human life is really nonsensical in many ways.

Whenever a person takes on an inner discipline, however, he makes himself ripe for what should be brought forward as a third fact: the possibility of looking out into the etheric with newly awakened faculties. There the soul will see what Paul once saw: the Christ in His etheric body. Without books and documents this great event—the second coming of Christ—will take place for those who have made themselves worthy of it. It is the obligation of anthroposophy to announce this. There are already human beings who sense that we have overcome the Dark Age and are approaching a more luminous era. Anthroposophists must walk this path consciously. Anthroposophy must bring its fruits to humanity, so that souls are made capable of uniting themselves with Christ. Whether these souls inhabit a physical body or not makes no difference; He has descended to the dead as well as to the living. The great and sublime event of Christ's appearance in the etheric thus has significance for all the world.

Dear attendees!

We will attempt to give you a sample of our eurythmic art. Please allow me to precede this presentation with a few words about what our eurythmic art actually seeks to achieve. It is, after all, only at the beginning of its development, and we can only hope that, when what is inherent in this eurythmic art has been developed, it will be able to stand alongside the other art forms as something that is truly drawn from the highest artistic sources. But I would ask you always to bear in mind that we are only at the beginning of this artistic development.

Like everything that is done here as an anthroposophical movement, and of which this building, when it is finished, is intended to be the representative, the representation, so too, even if in a very limited area, this eurythmic art is drawn from a spiritual teaching based on Goethe's world view and his view of art. What Goethe's world view is, what Goethe's attitude towards art is, has not yet been sufficiently appreciated, and it will probably play a much greater role in the future spiritual development of humanity than today's humanity can even dream of.

What is being attempted here can invoke a beautiful saying of Goethe's, used by Goethe when he begins to glorify the great, art-loving Winckelmann, to bring him to full recognition. Goethe says: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he feels himself in turn as a whole nature, and he brings together in his own soul life measure, harmony, meaning, in order to rise to the production of the work of art. - If one now tries to make the whole human being, with his inner possibilities of movement, into an instrument of the work of art, then something like a summary of the secrets of the world must indeed come out of such art. For in the human being himself, as in a great context, all the secrets of the world are expressed.

What we want to try through eurythmy, my dear audience, is to help the whole person to express a silent language, a language that arises from making the whole person a larynx, so to speak. You know that when we listen to a person speaking, we first of all exercise our sense of hearing. We turn our attention to what can be heard. But the one who – to use this Goethean expression – can see, sensually and super-sensually, what is hidden as the actual essential secrets behind the outer appearances of nature and the human being, knows that in the larynx and its neighboring organs, while the sound reaches our ear, movements are constantly taking place or at least movement systems are active.

We can also imagine the same thing physically by saying: when I speak here, for example, my speech organ sets the air in regular motion. These movements are basically the outward expression of the movement systems present in the larynx and its neighboring organs. If you observe this, learn to recognize it, in contrast to the way you tend to ignore it in your daily life, then you can transfer it to the movement of the arms and the movement of other limbs of the human organism, and then you can create a mute language in which the whole person brings to full expression, to full revelation, that which is otherwise hidden as movement patterns in the larynx and its neighboring organs.

The same thing can also be expressed differently. We can say: when we speak, two elements of the human being flow together. From the head, more visibly speaking, what we have in our thoughts flows into our speech. But combined with these thoughts is what comes from the human will. We can feel it if we have a predisposition for such feeling, that actually, when someone speaks, especially when we listen to artistic language, to poetry, our whole human being comes into a kind of inner resonance, a kind of inner coexistence, in a sense into a dancing movement. In ordinary life, we suppress this dancing movement. Only someone who is familiar with our speech organism knows that something is actually always resonating in our larynx and neighboring organs when we listen to another person.

This is something that science is now beginning to recognize: that more delicate vibrations and movements also take place in the speech organs of the person listening. There is something mysterious in the whole human being, especially when listening, but also when speaking. We only try to keep the human being himself calm and [gap in the text], that is, movements of the will and those organs that are connected with the larynx and its neighboring organs when we speak in ordinary life.

What is otherwise brought to rest by the will in ordinary life is particularly brought to expression in eurythmy. So that the whole human being expresses that which otherwise, I would say, is only expressed more on the surface of the body, at the larynx and its neighboring organs. In doing so, we suppress our thinking and imagining life of our own accord. We shut out ideas completely. So that a mute language is expressed through the whole human being, who, as it were, moves on the stage as an enlarged larynx,

If we create such a language, we must be clear about the fact that it must be different from what is otherwise effective as pantomime, as mimicry, as representations by any gestures. Everything that is arbitrary movement, mere facial expression, mere pantomime, must actually be excluded in this eurythmic art. Just as the actual artistic quality of musical art does not lie in tone painting, but in the lawful succession of melody [and other elements], so too in eurythmy everything rests on the lawful succession of those movements that the whole human being expresses. Everything arbitrary is eliminated. Everything that is based on the laws of eurythmy can be seen in the movements of the human speech organism itself.

Therefore, when two people or two groups of people in different places present the same thing, there is no greater scope for personal interpretation than when two pianists in different places play the same Beethoven sonata in their own way and with their own personal interpretation.

On one side you see the actors, and with them what is taking place on the stage, for certain parts of it the musical element – for the musical element is only another way of expressing what lives in the soul than eurythmy – and again other parts you will find accompanied by recitation, by the artistically formed language of poetry. What is expressed audibly in poetry and recitation is made visible in eurythmy, albeit silently. But the recitation must be taken back to its good old forms. Today recitation has gone astray. In modern life, it is actually the prosaic element that underlies poetry that is given special consideration, not the metrical, rhythmic, or artistic-formal element that underlies the actual poetry. It would not be possible to accompany eurythmy with today's art of recitation.

This is only possible if one goes back to the true art of recitation, as Goethe, for example, also had in mind when he did not rehearse his “Iphigenia” - that is, even a a dramatic work - with his actors: He rehearsed it with the baton in his hand like a conductor, in order to place the main emphasis on the rhythmic, on the actual artistic design. Today, we do not have a very clear idea of how Goethe actually wanted a drama to be staged. But if we look into the soul of the poet, then, ladies and gentlemen, we will also find that the actual artistry of the poetry does not lie in the literal content. Schiller did not initially have the literal content in mind for many of his best poems, but rather a melodious element. At first, the meaning of the poem was unimportant to him; the melodious content was what mattered to him, and only then did he seek out the literal content to go with it. As a companion to eurythmy, we too must lead the art of recitation back to the truly artistic.

In eurythmy itself, you will see everything that is otherwise expressed in spoken language through the laws of spoken language, in the silent language of eurythmy itself. But you will find everything that otherwise glows through speech with inner warmth of soul, with joy and suffering, with delight and pain, represented in the movements of the eurythmists in space, in the relative movements of the groups in relation to each other. Everything that can be represented by spoken language can also be represented by eurythmic silent language.

In the second part, after the break, we will now give a sample of how poetry can be presented through eurythmy. However, we are convinced, my dear attendees, that we can also bring spiritual sources of expression to the dramatic arts, especially to a dramatic art that rises from the merely realistic human, from the mere physical earthly existence to the supersensible spiritual existence, through eurythmy. This is particularly the case in Goethe's “Faust” poetry.

Goethe has his Faust, namely [in] the first part – you know, Goethe worked on his “Faust” for 60 years – he has secreted into this “Faust” all the inner experiences of a sensual and supersensory nature that he has experienced in his long life. In its first part, he did not even consider shaping the “Faust” poem in such a way that it should be staged. As he himself says, when he was a youth and was working on the first part of his Faust, Goethe had only the secret of what lived in his soul in mind when he was working on this great poem. It was far from his mind to think of any theatrical representation.

Individual parts were indeed soon presented, with or without music. But Goethe was never quite in agreement – my dear audience, you know that the second part, which he then conceived in a completely theatrical way, was only published after his death – Goethe was never in agreement when the first part was to be brought to the stage. And how little he was inclined to bring what he had only in his mind's eye to the stage, is evident from a fact that is truly characteristic of this matter.

One of the greatest German actors, Laroche, was a contemporary of Goethe and a friend of Goethe's in Weimar. I myself knew a good acquaintance of Laroche through my old teacher, Karl Julius Schröer. And Laroche told old Schröer how he, Laroche, as a respected actor, went with a deputation of respected gentlemen in Weimar to Goethe to present the plan of bringing “Faust” to the stage to Goethe - relatively late, at the end of the twenties. At that time, since only the first part was available, it could only be a matter of staging the first part. And Laroche described how he still had the old Goethe before him, as present, in his anger. Goethe's anger was so strong that they thought of staging the “Faust” play that was never intended for the stage, that in his anger, despite having a number of respected gentlemen in front of him, he hissed at them: “You fools!” This is how Goethe met the first deputation that wanted to stage his “Faust”.

Now, of course, no one would dream of excluding Faust from the stage. However, those who deal with such things know how difficult it is in the art of directing to really present this Faust in such a way that everything that lived in Goethe's soul comes out.

Now, with regard to those scenes in which, as is always the case in Goethe's “Faust”, supersensible processes intermingle with purely earthly processes – processes that reach into the spiritual world with regard to the life of the human soul – we have tried various things to make use of eurythmy. And so, in the first part before the break, we will show you the scene where Faust translates the Bible, sits in his study and meets Mephisto. We will show you this scene, where the supersensible world actually plays a part in Faust's life, where you have to look for ways to express in outwardly visible forms what plays a part there as the supersensible world.

This and other scenes have shown us how to present something that is not possible with other stage techniques with the help of eurythmy. So in the first part before the break, we will present you with a Goethean scene, a scene from Goethe's “Faust”, which will of course be presented in its other parts in the usual dramatic way. But where the plot takes a turn towards the supersensible, eurythmy is used to help with the presentation. We will therefore see a rehearsal of how eurythmy can be a great help in the theatrical presentation of poetry and dramatic poetry when they take on a supernatural element.

After the break, we will present poems that have been eurythmized from beginning to end. Before we begin with such performances, I would like to ask you to bear with us, as what I said at the beginning is meant seriously: we are only at the first attempt at this eurythmic art. We are, however, convinced that if our contemporaries show an interest in these attempts, eurythmy will develop to ever greater perfection, either through us or probably through others, the results of which will be presented today as a beginning, so that eurythmy can establish itself alongside other art forms as a fully-fledged new art form.

Etheric body (etheric body). A coarser (externally perceptible) human body (and that of other living beings) underlying finer body (body). It is characterized by the newer theosophy as the system of forces, which have their lawful content from the spiritual basis of the world and which find their expression (objectification) in the organic forms of the physically perceptible body. The etheric body has nothing in common with the speculative-mystical “vital force” of the old vitalists. However, it does coincide with the “inner man” of earlier philosophies, referred to as the “scheme”, and also appears in the world view of Origenes and Augustinus. In more recent times, it found a representative in the philosophers Troxler, I. H. Fichte, among others. In Kant, it is found, albeit surrounded by skepticism, in the dreams of a spirit-seer as a soul-like inner man who bears all the limbs of the outer man within him as a possibility. For modern theosophy, the etheric body is a reality that can be perceived when the “inner senses” of the observer are awakened and brought to perception through appropriate soul training from their latent state in which they are in ordinary human life. It then reveals itself as a system of forces that changes its forms (never taking fixed forms), flows through the physical body and merges into the indefinite (into the forces of the cosmos) in the area of the anterior physical body (like a kind of mirror image of the spine). It forms an intermediate link between the physical body and the higher components of the human being, the soul and the spirit. In the state of sleep, the etheric body remains fully connected to the physical body, while the soul and spirit detach themselves from the region of the sensory organs and the central nervous system (but not from the other organs and the sympathetic nervous system). During dreaming, the spirit is detached from the sense organs and the central nervous system, but the soul is not detached from them. (This detachment is not to be thought of as spatial, but as dynamic). In death, the etheric body, soul and spirit (the soul is also called the astral body, the spirit of man is called the “ego body”) detach themselves from the physically perceptible body (spatially and dynamically); these three parts of the human being remain connected for a short time (several days); then the etheric body detaches itself from the soul and spirit. It then passes over, in accordance with natural law, into the general cosmic forces: one part into the etheric sphere of the earth, another part into the etheric world that does not belong to the earth. This dissolution of the etheric body takes place at different times and also varies in character according to the individual. An observation of the laws of this dissolution is one of the most difficult problems of spiritual science. This kind of dissolution is connected with the character of the physical life on earth and forms part of the causes of destiny that affect soul and spirit after they have passed into the spiritual world after their separation from the etheric body.