The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I spoke about a kind of ascending movement that is rooted in human nature. And basically, by contemplating this ascending movement, we have rediscovered everything we already know, namely, at the lowest level, knowledge that is applicable only to the facts of the physical plane, physical knowledge, which is called objective knowledge in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. So today I will call it physical knowledge. We then came to know the next higher stage of knowledge, the so-called imaginative knowledge; but we considered it as archetypally conscious imaginative knowledge; conscious imaginative knowledge can only be present in the human being who tries to work his way up to it in the way described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. The words “physical knowledge”, “unconscious imaginative knowledge”, “conscious imaginative knowledge” were written on the blackboard; see diagram.

But the fact is that the content of imaginative knowledge, that is, imaginations, are in every human being. So that the development of the human soul in this respect is nothing more than an expansion of consciousness to include a realm that is always present in the human soul. We may say, then, that the situation with imaginative knowledge is no different than it would be with objects in a dark room. For in the depths of the human soul all the imaginations that come into question for the human being are present just as the objects of a dark room are. And just as the objects in a dark room are not increased in number when light is brought into the room, but remain as they are, only illuminated, so, after the consciousness for imaginative knowledge has been awakened, there is no different content in the soul than there was before; they are only illuminated by the light of consciousness. So, in a sense, by struggling to the imaginative level of knowledge, we experience nothing other than what has long been present in our soul as a sum of imaginations.

If we look back again at what we were able to understand yesterday, we know that when our perceptions of the objects around us through our physical senses descend into the realm of memory, that is, into the unconscious, , so that we are in a position to be unaware of them for some time, but they have not been lost, but can be brought up again from the soul, then we have to say that we are sinking down into the unconscious that which we have in ordinary physical consciousness. Thus the world of representations that we gain through physical knowledge of the external world is constantly being taken up by our spiritual, by the supersensible; it continually slips into the supersensible. Every moment we gain representations of the external world through physical perceptions, and these representations are handed over to our supersensible nature. It will not be difficult for you to consider this in the light of everything that has been said over the years, because this is the most superficial supersensible process imaginable, a process that takes place continuously: the transition from ordinary perceptions to perceptions that we can remember. So it seems obvious, and this is also true according to spiritual research, that everything that takes place when we perceive the external world is a process of the physical plane. Even when we form ideas about the physical external world, this is still a process of the physical plane. But in the moment when we let the ideas sink down into the unconscious, we are already standing at the entrance to the supersensible world.

This is even a very important point to be taken into account by anyone who, not through all kinds of occult chatter but through serious human soul-searching, wants to gain an understanding of the occult world. For there is a very important fact hidden in the saying I have just applied: When we as human beings face the things of the external world and form ideas, it is a process of the physical plane. At the moment when the idea sinks down into the unconscious and is stored there until it is brought up again by a memory, a supersensible process takes place, a real supersensible process. So that you can say to yourself: If one is able to follow this process, which consists in the fact that a thought that is up in the consciousness sinks down into the subconscious and is present there as an image, one can, in other words, follow an idea as it is down in the subconscious, then one actually begins to glide into the realm of the supersensible. Just think: when you go through the usual process of remembering, the idea must first come up into consciousness, and you perceive it up here in consciousness, never down in the unconscious. You must distinguish between ordinary remembering and pursuing the ideas down into the unconscious. What takes place in remembering can be compared to a swimmer sinking under the water, whom you see until he is completely submerged. Now he is down and you no longer see him. When he comes up again, you see him again! [It was drawn.] It is the same with human perceptions: you have them as long as they are on the physical plane; when they go down, you have forgotten them; when you remember them again, they come up again like the float. But the process I am talking about, which already points to imaginative knowledge, could be compared to you diving under yourself and thereby being able to see the swimmer down in the water, so that he does not disappear when he submerges.

But from this follows nothing less than that the line I drew earlier, the level surface, as it were, below which the imagination sinks into the unconscious, into the realm of memory, is the threshold of the spiritual world itself, the first threshold of the spiritual world. This follows with absolute necessity. It is the first threshold of the spiritual world! Just think how close the human being is to this threshold of the spiritual world. [The words 'threshold of the spiritual world' were written next to the diagram.]

And now take a process by which one can try to really get down there, to submerge. The process would be to try to follow ideas down into the unconscious. This can actually only be done by trial and error. It can be done by doing something like the following. You have formed an idea about the outside world; you try to artificially evoke the process of remembering independently of the outside world. Think of how it is recommended in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, where the very ordinary rule of looking back at the events of the day is given. When one looks back at the experiences of the day, one trains oneself to enter into the paths that the imagination itself takes by descending below the threshold and then ascending again. So the whole process of remembering is designed to follow the images that have sunk below the threshold of consciousness.

But in addition, it is said in “How to Know Higher Worlds” that one does well to trace the ideas one has formed in reverse order, that is, from the end back to the beginning; and if one wants to survey the day, to follow the stream of events backwards from evening to morning. In doing so, one must make a different effort than is made in the way of ordinary recollections. And this different effort of will brings one to grasp, as it were below the threshold of consciousness, what one has had as an experiential image. And in the course of trying, one comes to feel, to experience inwardly, how one runs after the images, runs after them below this threshold of consciousness. It is really a process of inner experiential probing that comes into play here. But it is important to do this review really seriously, not in a way that after a while you lose the seriousness of the matter. But then, if you do this process of looking back for a long time, or in general do the process of bringing up an experience from memory, an experienced world of ideas, so that you imagine the matter in reverse, thus applying a greater force than you when you remember in the usual sequence, then you also experience that you are no longer able to grasp the idea from a certain point on in the same way as you would have grasped it in ordinary life on the physical plane.

On the physical plane, memory expresses itself in such a way – and it is best for memory on the physical plane to express itself in this way – that if one brings up the image that one wants or is supposed to remember, one does so in a way that is true to the context of one's life, one brings it up in the way one has formed it on the physical plane. But if, through the suggested trial, one gradually gets used to chasing the ideas, as it were, under the threshold of consciousness, one does not discover them down there as they are in life. That is the mistake people always make when they believe that they will find a copy of what is in the physical world in the spiritual world. They have to assume that the ideas will look different down there. In reality, they look like this below the threshold of consciousness: they have stripped away everything that is characteristic of the physical plane. Down there they become entirely images; and they become so completely that we feel life in them. We feel life in them. It is very important to keep this sentence in mind: we feel life in them. You can only be convinced that you have really followed an idea down below the threshold of consciousness when you have the feeling that the idea is beginning to live, to stir. When I compared the ascent to imaginative knowledge with sticking one's head into an anthill, I explained it from a different point of view. I said: everything begins to stir, everything becomes active.

Now, for example, let us say you have had an ordinary experience during the day – I will take that – sat at a table and held a book in your hand. Now, at some time in the evening, you vividly imagine what it was like: the table, the book, you sitting there, as if you were outside of yourself. And it is always good to visualize the whole thing pictorially from the outset, not in abstract thoughts, because abstraction, the ability to abstract, has no significance at all for the imaginative world. So you imagine this picture: sitting at a table, with a book in your hand. - With table and book I simply want to say, imagine as vividly as possible some detail from everyday life. Then, if you really let your soul gaze upon this image, if you really imagine it intensely in meditation, then from a certain moment on you will feel differently than usual; yes, I will say comparatively, it is similar to when you would take a living being in your hand.

When you pick up an inanimate object, you have the feeling that the object is still, it does not tingle or crawl in your hand. Even if you have a moving dead object in your hand, you calm down when you feel that this life does not come from the object, but is mechanically assigned to it. It is a different matter if you happen to have a living object, let's say a mouse, in your hand. Let's say, for example, that you reached into a cupboard and thought you were taking some object in your hand and discovered that you had a mouse in your hand. And then, you feel the crawling and tingling of the mouse in your hand! There are people who start screaming at the top of their lungs when they suddenly feel a mouse in their hand. And the screaming is no less when they cannot yet see what is crawling and tingling in their hand. So there is a difference between having a dead or a living object in your hand. You have to get used to the living object first in order to tolerate it to a certain extent. Isn't it true that people are accustomed to touching dogs and cats, but they have to get used to it first. But if you put a living being in someone's hand in the middle of the night, in the dark of night, without their knowing it, they will also be shocked.

You have to realize this difference you feel between touching a dead and a living object. When you touch a dead object, you have a different feeling than when you touch a living one. Now, when you have an idea on the physical plane, you have a feeling that you can compare to touching a dead object. But as soon as you really go below the threshold of consciousness, that changes; so that you get the feeling: the thought has life within, begins to stir. It is the same discovery you have – as a comparison for the feeling of the soul – as when you have grasped a mouse: the thought tingles and crawls.

It is very important that we pay attention to this feeling if we are to get an idea of imaginative knowledge; for we are in the imaginative world at the moment when the thoughts that we bring up from the subconscious begin to tingle and crawl, begin to behave in such a way that we have the feeling: down there, under the threshold, everything is actually swirling and churning. And while it is very quiet up there in the attic and thoughts can be controlled so nicely, just as machines can be controlled, down there one thought follows another, the thoughts tingle and crawl, they churn and roll, down there they suddenly become a very active world. It is important to appropriate this feeling, because at that moment, when you begin to feel the life of the world of thought, you are in the imaginative or elementary world. That is where you are! And one can enter so easily if only one follows the very simplest rules given in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, if only one refrains from trying to enter by the way of all kinds of “practices” hinted at in recent days. One can really enter so easily. Just think that one of the very first things clearly stated in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” is that one should try to follow the life of a plant, for example: how it gradually grows and gradually fades away. Yes, if you really follow this, you have to go through the life of the plant in your thoughts. First you have the thought of the very small seed, and if you do not make the thought flexible, you will not be able to follow the plant as it grows. You have to make the thought flexible. And then again, when you think of the plant shedding its leaves, gradually dying, withering, you have to think of shrinking and wrinkling. As soon as you begin to think in terms of living things, you have to make the thought itself mobile. The thought must begin to acquire inner mobility through your own power.

There are two beautiful poems by Goethe. One is called “The Metamorphosis of Plants” and the other “The Metamorphosis of Animals”. These two poems can be read, you can find them beautiful, but you can also do the following. You can try to really think the thoughts in these poems as Goethe thought them, from the first line to the last, and then you will find that if you go through with it, the thought can move inwardly from beginning to end. And anyone who does not follow the thought of these poems in this way has not understood the metamorphosis. But anyone who follows the thought in this way and then lets it sink down into the unconscious, and then, after having done this several times, remembers precisely this thought of the metamorphosis – for this is no different from the thinking that you are supposed to follow in 'How to Know Higher Worlds' Knowledge of Higher Worlds?», will sink into the unconscious, and will then, after he has done this often, remember precisely this thought of the metamorphosis. So he who carries this out, who sinks this thought down and then makes the effort to do it fifty, sixty, a hundred times, and a hundred and one times it will perhaps take, will one day bring it up. But then this thought, which he has practiced in this way, will be a mobile one. You will see that it does not come up like a small machine, but forgive me for using this example again, like a small mouse; you will see how it is an inwardly mobile, living element.

I said that it is so easy to delve into this elemental world if you just tear yourself away from the human tendency towards abstract thought. This tendency to have limited, abstract thoughts instead of inwardly mobile thoughts is so terribly great. Isn't it true that people are so eager to say what this or that is and what is meant by it, and are so satisfied when they can say that this or that is meant by it, because it gives them a thought that does not move like a machine. And people become so terribly impatient in their ordinary lives when you try by all means to convey to them flexible and not such abstract boxed thoughts. Because all outer life of the physical plan and all life of outer science consists of such dead boxed thoughts, of nested thoughts. How often have I had to experience that people asked me about this or that: Yes, what about it? What is that? They wanted a complete, rounded thought that they could write down and then read again, repeating it as often as they liked. But the aim should be to have a thought that is flexible within, a thought that lives on, really lives on.

But you see, there is also a very serious side to the mouse. Why do some people scream when they discover that they have reached into a cupboard and are holding a mouse in their hand? Because they are afraid! And this feeling really does arise at the moment when you realize, really realize: the thought is alive! Then you start to be afraid too! And that is precisely what good preparation for the matter consists of: unlearning to be afraid of the living thought. The materialists do not want to come to such living thoughts, I have emphasized this often. Why? Because they are afraid. Yes, the master of materialism, Ahriman, appears once in the Mystery Drama with the expression “fear”. There you have the passage in the Mysteries where it is indicated how one feels when thoughts begin to become mobile. But now, all the indications in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, if followed, lead to getting rid of this fear of the mobile, of the living thought.

So you see, you enter into a completely different world, a world at whose threshold you must truly discard abstract thinking, which dominates the entire physical plane. The endeavor of people who want to enter the occult world with a certain degree of comfort always consists of wanting to take with them the ordinary thinking of the physical plane. You cannot do that. You cannot take ordinary physical thinking into the occult world. You have to take mobile thinking into it. All thinking must become agile and mobile. If you do not feel this within you – and as I said, you are not doing it right if you do not feel it relatively soon – if you do not pay attention to what I have just said, then it is very easy not to grasp the peculiarity of the spiritual world. And one should grasp it if one wants to deal with the spiritual world at all.

You see, it is so difficult to struggle with human abstractness in this field; because once you have grasped this flexibility of thought, you will also understand that a flexible thought cannot occur in any old way, here or there. You cannot, for example, find a land animal in the water; you cannot accustom a bird, which is suited to the air, to live deep down in the water. If you go to the living, you cannot do otherwise than to accept the idea that one must not take it out of its element. You have to keep that in mind.

I once tried, in a very strict way, initially in a small area – I always try to do it this way, but I will just mention it now as an example – with a very important idea, to show vividly, precisely with an example, how things must be when one takes into account the inner life of the thought. In Copenhagen I gave a small lecture cycle on 'The Spiritual Guidance of the Human Being and of Humanity', which is also available in print. At a certain point in this lecture cycle, I drew attention to the mystery of the two Jesus children. Now take it as it is presented there. We have a lecture cycle that begins in a certain way. It draws attention to how man can already acquire certain insights if he tries to look at the first years of a child's development, tries to look back at these things. The whole thing is designed. Then it continues. The part of the hierarchies in human progress is presented - the book is printed, it is probably in everyone's hands, so I am talking about something very well known - then there is a certain connection, at a very specific point, about the two Jesus children. It is part of the discussion of the two Jesus children that it happens at a certain point. And anyone who says, “Well, why shouldn't we be able to take this discussion of the two Jesus children and present it exoterically, even though it has been taken out of context?” is asking the same question as someone who asks, “Why does the hand have to be on the arm, on this part of the body?” They could even say, “Why isn't the hand on the knee?” It could perhaps be there too. He does not understand the whole organism as a living being, he believes that the hand could also be somewhere else, right? The hand cannot be anywhere other than on the arm! So in this context, the thought of the two Jesus children cannot be in a different place because it is tempting to develop the matter in such a way that the living thought is included in the presentation.

Now someone comes along and writes a piece of writing and takes this thought in a crude way and puts it in context with other thoughts that have nothing to do with it! But that means nothing other than: he puts his hand on his knee! What does someone do who puts his hand on his knee? Yes, you can't do it to an organism, but you could draw it. Paper is patient, you could just draw a human figure, supported here, and the two knees so that hands grow out of them. [This drawing has not been handed down.] Not true, you could draw that, but then you would have drawn an impossible organism; you would have proved that you understand nothing of real life! One could also use the comparison: he has placed the eagle, the bird that is meant for the air, in the depths of the sea or something similar.

What did such a person try to do? Yes, you see, what he tried can be done with all things that relate only to knowledge of the physical plane. One professor can write a book by starting with one, another can start with another, and it does not matter so much there: things can be taken out and so on. But there one is not dealing with living beings, but with thought machines. That is the essential point.

A person who does something like this, who tears something out of context and puts it into an impossible context, has proved that he is completely ignorant of the essence that has been the driving force and inspiration of our entire spiritual scientific movement since its inception, because he is trying to apply the very ordinary materialistic scheme to the spiritual as well. This is very essential. It is very important to face these things squarely, otherwise one does not understand the inner significance of higher knowledge. One cannot say everything at any given point. And it is really true with regard to the exoteric, which borders on the esoteric, that Hegel has already said that a thought belongs in its place in context. I hinted at this recently when I tried to make some suggestions in this direction on Hegel's birthday. In this way, one achieves nothing less than to submerge into life with thinking, whereas otherwise one always lives in the dead; one submerges into life.

But through this, something also reveals itself that could not be recognized at all before and that cannot be examined at all on the physical plane, namely, arising and ceasing. You can also see this from “How to Know Higher Worlds.” On the physical plane, nothing else can be observed than what has come into being. The arising cannot be observed at all; only what has come into being can be observed on the physical plane. The passing away cannot be observed either, because when the object passes into the passing away, it is no longer on the physical plane, or at least it moves away from the physical plane.

So one cannot observe arising and ceasing on the physical plane. The consequence of this is that we can say: we enter into a completely new world element when we discover the movable thought, namely into the world of life and that is the world of arising and ceasing.

Occultly speaking, this could also be expressed in the following way: During the old moon time, man was - albeit only in the dream consciousness - in the world of becoming and passing away. It was not that he saw with his senses what was arising, for he had not yet developed the senses to perceive with, but was still immersed in things. He imagined in a dream-like way, but the images that he imagined in a dream-like way allowed him to really follow the arising and passing away. And that is what he must first strive for again by developing mobile thoughts. So the ascent to imaginative knowledge is at the same time a return, only a return to the level of consciousness. We return to something we have outgrown; we return properly.

So that we can say: This imaginative knowledge is the return to the world of becoming and passing away. We discover becoming and passing away when we return. And we cannot learn anything about becoming and passing away if we do not come to imaginative knowledge. It is quite impossible to discern anything about becoming and passing away without coming to imaginative knowledge.

That is why what Goethe wrote about the metamorphosis of plants and animals is so infinitely meaningful, because Goethe really wrote it from the point of view of imaginative knowledge. And that is why people could not understand what was actually meant when I wrote my comments on “Goethe's Scientific Writings”, which, in the most diverse turns of phrase, repeatedly express that it does not depend on the current scientific but to delve into Goethe's scientific knowledge and to see something tremendously outstanding in it, something quite different from current scientific knowledge. That is why I referred to a sentence that Goethe expressed so beautifully and in which he indicates what is important to him. Goethe made the Italian Journey and followed not only art but also nature with interest. When reading the 'Italian Journey', one can see how he gradually immersed himself in everything that the mineral, plant and so on could offer him. And then, when he had arrived in Sicily, he said that, after what he had observed there, he now wanted to make a journey to India, not to discover anything new, but to look at what had already been discovered by others in his way. In other words, to look at it with flexible concepts! That is what is important: to look at what others have discovered with flexible concepts. That is the tremendously significant fact that Goethe introduced these flexible concepts into scientific life.

Therefore, for those who understand occultism, the following is a fact that is otherwise misunderstood. Ernst Haeckel and other materialistic, or as they are also called, monistic scholars, have spoken very appreciatively about Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants and Animals. But the fact that they were able to express their appreciation is based on a very strange process, which I will also make clear to you through a comparison.

Imagine you have a plant in a flowerpot in front of you, or even better, outside in the garden, and you want to enjoy this plant. You go out into the garden to enjoy it, to enter into a relationship with it. And now imagine that there is a person who cannot do anything with the plant. And if you ask yourself why, you discover: He is actually disturbed by life! And so he makes a cast of the plant very finely, so that the plant is now like the real one, but in papier-mâché. He puts it in his room and now he enjoys it. Life disturbed him; only now does he enjoy it!

I cannot tell you what torments I suffered as a boy when comparing, which is also characteristic of the attitude of people, I often had to hear as a boy that someone wanted to emphasize the beauty of a rose particularly by saying: Truly, as if made of wax! - It's enough to make you want to tear your hair out! But it does exist. It really does exist that someone emphasizes the excellence of a living thing by saying, in his phrase, that it is like a dead thing. It really does exist. For those who have a sense for the matter, it is something terrible. But if you don't have such feelings, you really can't develop according to reality.

Now, the following happened with Ernst Haeckel. Goethe wrote “The Metamorphosis of Plants” and “The Metamorphosis of Animals”, Haeckel reads them and Ahriman transforms what is alive that Goethe has written into mock-ups, into something that is actually made of papier-mâché, and Haeckel grasps that. He actually likes it. So that in what he praises, he has not praised what Goethe really meant, but Haeckel has only translated it into the mechanistic. Ahriman steps between Goethe and Haeckel, transforming the living into a dead one.

Now, as I said, this conscious upward leap to imaginative knowledge is a return. I said at the beginning of the lecture: the imaginations are actually already within us, they have been within us since the time of the moon, and the development on earth consists in the fact that we have covered them with the ordinary layers of consciousness. Now we are returning through what we have acquired in our ordinary earthly consciousness. It is a real return.

And now one can ask: how can one describe the whole thing? One can now say: it is a descent and a re-ascent. Only now is there any justification for drawing this line at all [the words on the blackboard are connected by a line, see diagram]; there would be no sense in drawing it from the outset. And only now can we say: on the level of ordinary physical cognition, there we are below; here is unconscious imaginative cognition, which now sits below in our nature and has to do with the forces of becoming and passing away; and on the other side, in the ascent, is conscious imaginative cognition. [Both were marked on the blackboard.]

If we take Goethe as an obvious example – I will only look at him as an example – we can say that in Goethe's later works, the point has been reached where the outer development of humanity embraces imaginative knowledge, where it is actually introduced into science.

Now one may ask: Now one can study whether or not very strange things are associated with it? Yes, they are associated with it, because basically the whole of Goethe's way of thinking is quite different from that of other people. And Schiller, who was unable to develop this way of thinking, was only able to understand Goethe with the greatest effort, as you can see from the correspondence between Schiller and Goethe at the point I have often quoted, where Schiller writes to Goethe on August 23, 1794:

”...For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have observed the course of your mind and noted the path you have mapped out with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it by the most difficult route, which any weaker force would do well to avoid. You take all of nature together to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations you seek the explanation for the individual. From the simple organization you ascend, step by step, to the more complicated, to finally build the most complicated of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the whole of nature. By recreating it, as it were, you seek to penetrate its hidden technology. A great and truly heroic idea, which shows sufficiently how much your mind holds the rich totality of its ideas together in a beautiful unity. You could never have hoped that your life would be enough for such a goal, but even just to embark on such a path is worth more than any other ending, and you have chosen, like Achilles in the Iliad between Phthia and immortality. If you had been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and had been surrounded from your cradle by a refined nature and idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps even made superfluous. You would have absorbed the form of the necessary into your first view of things, and the great style would have developed in you with your first experiences. Now that you have been born a German, since your Greek spirit has been thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but to either become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace what reality withheld from your imagination by the help of your thinking power, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within and in a rational way, so to speak. In that period of your life when the soul forms its inner world from the outer world, surrounded by imperfect forms, you had already absorbed a wild and Nordic nature into yourself, when your victorious genius, superior to its material, discovered this defect from within, and from without it was confirmed by your acquaintance with Greek nature. Now you had to correct the old, inferior nature, which had already been forced upon your imagination, according to the better model that your creative mind created for itself, and this could not, of course, be done otherwise than according to guiding concepts. But this logical direction, which the mind is compelled to take in reflection, does not go well with the aesthetic one, through which alone it forms. So you had more work to do, because just as you went from intuition to abstraction, you now had to convert concepts back into intuitions, and transform thoughts into feelings, because only through these can the genius bring forth... “

He considers him to be a Greek transplanted to the Nordic world, and so on. Yes, there you see the whole difficulty Schiller had in understanding Goethe! Some people could learn something from this who believe they can understand Goethe in the twinkling of an eye and thereby elevate themselves above Schiller, even though Schiller was not exactly a fool when it came to those people who believe they can understand Goethe so readily!

But the peculiar thing that can be discovered is that Goethe also has a very peculiar and different view in relation to other areas, for example in relation to the ethical development of the human being, namely in the way of thinking about what the human being deserves or does not deserve as reward or punishment.

It is impossible to understand Goethe's work from the very beginning if you do not consider his, I would say his entire environment's, divergent way of thinking about reward and punishment. Read the poem “Prometheus,” where he even rebels against the gods. Prometheus, that is of course a revolt against the way people think about rewards and punishments. For Goethe there is the possibility of forming very special ideas about rewards and punishments. And in his “Wilhelm Meister” he really did try to present this, I would say, in a wonderfully probing way in the secrets of the world. You don't understand “Wilhelm Meister” if you don't consider that.

But where does that come from? It comes from the fact that in the realm of physical knowledge one cannot form any idea at all of what punishment or reward is to be applied to anything human in relation to the world, because that can only arise in the realm of imagination. That is why the occultists always said: When you ascend to imaginative knowledge, you experience not only the elemental world, but also - as they put it - “the world of wrath and punishment”. So it is not only a return to the world of becoming and passing away, but at the same time a climbing up to the world of wrath and punishment. The words “return to the world of becoming and passing away” and “world of wrath and punishment” were written on the blackboard. ]

Therefore, only spiritual science can truly illuminate the peculiar chain of cause and effect between what a person is worthy and unworthy of in relation to the universe. All other “justifications” in the world are preparatory to this.

We have now reached an important point, and I will continue with this tomorrow.

after a eurythmic presentation of the scenes “Midnight” and “Entombment”

Once again we have allowed a piece of Goethe's 'Faust' to pass before our minds. In the last lecture here, I tried to develop some of the spiritual-scientific principles that can help us understand it when I spoke about the nature of the lemurs, the fat and scrawny devils. On such occasions, we always try not just to seek out something for the understanding of this poetry, but to gain something from the poetry in terms of general spiritual significance, to look into those true realities that Goethe tried to reach with his “Faust”.

Today I would like to tie in a few observations with what has just passed before our soul. It may seem significant to us that this scene, which we have just seen come to an end, is not the last scene of Goethe's “Faust”, but that, as we know, it is followed by that other scene that we performed here some time ago. You remember: mountain gorges, forest, rock, solitude, holy anchorites, chorus, echo, forest that staggers along and so on, where we are led through the devout meditation of the Pater ecstaticus, Pater profundus, Pater Seraphicus, through the chorus of the blessed boys , where we meet the angels again, who in the scene we saw today carry Faust's immortal into the upper regions, where we also meet the trinity of the penitent women, Doctor Marianus, and Mater gloriosa as Gretchen's guide until the final chorus, the actual mystical chorus:

All that is transitory
is but a parable.

All this follows on from the scene we have seen today, which depicts the battle of the spirits of light with the spirits of darkness for the soul of Faust.

When attempting to explain Faust, one often proceeds from scene to scene, sometimes even from sentence to sentence, without asking the questions that could be asked and that would actually shed light on this great, powerful work of literature. Today we have seen how Faust's burial took place, how Mephistopheles-Ahriman has lost his game, how the soul has been carried up into the spiritual regions. From a certain point of view, one might ask: Could the Faust epic not actually end here? Do we not now basically know everything that it is about? Do we not know that Mephistopheles has lost his wager, that all the efforts he has made throughout the lifetime of Faust, which he has been able to accompany, are lost, that Faust's soul has been accepted into the region of light, that thus the words spoken by Lessing with regard to a Faust epic vis-à-vis the spirits of darkness: “You shall not win” have been fulfilled? Could we not believe that with this everything is actually over, that the Faust epic has found its end? — The question presents itself to our soul: Why then does the conclusion known to us now follow on from what we have seen today? — And by raising this question and then dealing with its answer, one touches on significant secrets of human life in its connection with the whole world. The fact that Goethe shaped this conclusion of Faust as he did shows precisely how deeply he penetrated into the foundations of his life in an age when spiritual science had not yet come into being, and into the secrets of human existence. Much, much lies in the scene that was presented today, and even more lies in the fact that this scene is followed by other final scenes. Much of it proves that Goethe knew the deepest secrets of existence, but that he was also compelled to present the secrets of existence in such a way that they are only accessible to those who want to delve deeper into spiritual life, into its essence. Quite deliberately, Goethe expressed much of it in veiled terms, as he himself said, enwrapped in the poetry of Faust. Much of what is said in veiled terms, so to speak, triggers hatred and opposition in dull-witted people who, out of fear and laziness, do not want to approach the knowledge of the spiritual world. However, as a result, Goethe's Faust poetry has remained more or less misunderstood for eighty-four years and will only gradually, when we can live towards the future, reveal itself to humanity in its depths. Yes, it can be said that spiritual scientific knowledge will only be able to trigger those artistic perceptions that can convey an understanding of the Faust poetry.

Let us first look back at the hauntingly impressive scene in which Faust beholds the four gray women: Want, Guilt, Hardship, and Worry. Let us be clear about the fact that Faust has this experience with the four gray women at a moment when he has gone through many, many spiritual life experiences, or rather, life experiences that have evoked spiritual understanding in him. Goethe imagines his Faust in the time that is presented for Faust through this final scene, having reached the age of one hundred. Today, Faust first stood before us with all the spiritualized experiences in his soul, as he stands on the balcony of his home, which he created at a workplace from which he wanted to do work for the human future. We look at his soul in such a way that all his feelings of satisfaction, all that he has been able to achieve for humanity by wresting a free country from the sea for free men, are summarized in his soul.

The stars hide their gaze and glow,
The fire sinks and burns low;
A chilling wind fans it,
Bringing smoke and haze to me.
Offered quickly, too quickly done!

Now, seemingly before his eyes, but in reality in an inner vision, what the appearance of the four gray women forms:

What floats in the shadows?

We have to imagine that through the deepening that Faust's soul has experienced, this soul has become capable of having the vision of the four figures — of lack, of need, of worry, of guilt — from the deep inner source itself. This “scene at midnight” is an inward experience in the truest sense of the word, an inward experience as it is evoked in Faust by the soul slowly beginning to detach itself from the body. For that is the strange mystery that Goethe quite evidently intended, that from the moment the three gray women speak the words:

The clouds roll by, the stars fade away!
Back there, back there! From afar, from afar,
Here comes he, the brother, here comes he, the - death,

— that from this moment on, death already really spreads over Faust's life. And we only understand this scene correctly if we think of Faust from then on as a dying man, as one in whom the soul is slowly detaching itself from the body. And it would be wrong to think that what follows is meant to be merely realistic in terms of the external senses. It is not. As we see Faust in the room of his palace, where worry has entered, we find, as he sits there, that the soul has already loosened itself to a certain extent from the body, that the experiences of physical life merge with the experiences that the soul has when it has already loosened itself from the body. And only then do we understand the strangely interwoven sentences when we consider this interplay of the spiritual world, in which Faust is already empathizing through his loosening soul, this interplay of the spiritual world with the physical-sensual world, in which Faust is still, because the soul is loosening, has not yet detached itself. Lack, guilt, and need were powerless; they were only the heralds of death. But the consuming worry remains where the vision is transformed in such a way that it is already the vision of the soul released from the body:

Four I saw coming, three only going;
I could not understand the meaning of the speech.
It sounded as if it said - distress,
A gloomy rhyming word followed - death.
It sounded hollow, ghostly muffled.

If one knows what Goethe felt when he heard the word gespensterhaft (ghostly), he who felt much more concretely than today's dull materialists, then one does not take such a word

It sounded hollow, ghostly muffled

not light, but important and essential, and seeks the feeling that Goethe had when he put these words into the mouth of Faust. Among other things, Goethe uses a beautiful word in which he expresses the following. He says: “Sometimes life seems to me as if distant past events were entering into the present consciousness, and then everything that is distant in the past appears like a ghost that has entered the present.” Goethe had a very concrete concept of what he called ghostly. Visionarily, millennia-old times of his own life stood before him, which he often believed he saw moving into his present life like ghosts. These are not assertions that I make out of arbitrariness; this can be strictly proven from what Goethe himself expressed when he spoke intimately about the experiences of his inner life.

Now the views and thoughts that Faust has, half in the spiritual world and half still living on the physical plane, flow together. If you could imagine the interplay between these two worlds, that is what it is like for Faust. He is now experiencing something that can actually only be experienced in this interplay between the two worlds, which would not have developed if he had distanced himself more from his physical body. He still feels bound by the events of the beyond to the events of physical life:

I have not yet fought my way into the open.

And now for the remarkable speech, which to many will seem like a mere contradiction, but which becomes understandable if one understands the experience to take place between physical life and spiritual life. The spiritual world sought to reach Faust throughout his life. Spiritual science in the true sense did not exist at that time. He tried to recognize the spiritual world by means of magic inherited from the Middle Ages, the same magic that brought him into contact with Ahriman-Mephistopheles in the way we have often discussed, and also in the last lecture. This magic, by which he entered the spiritual world, cannot be separated from Mephistopheles. If you look back at what happened around Faust, you will see everywhere that Mephistopheles has set the magical actions in scene. We cannot hope that Faust wants to hold on to this magic now that he is already halfway into the spiritual world:

Could I remove magic from my path,
Unlearn spells altogether.

Those spells that he has drawn from old books and that have already become Luciferian and Ahrimanic because they have been preserved from ancient times. In this way, he now finds, when he really enters the spiritual world, that what he has achieved was not what he was looking for after all. And now he looks back. He begins to look back, as one does when one's soul is relaxed. Now he begins to look back at the life that has just passed. The moment stands vividly before him, the moment before he reached for the medieval books, before he uttered the fateful word:

That is why I devoted myself to magic.

He has been protected by good powers that have guided him mercifully in the sense of the “Prologue to Heaven” from the fruits of that magic that he would have had to pluck if these merciful workings of special powers had not passed through his path through life. Now he already sees into the spiritual world, now he knows differently. This plays a role. With the present knowledge, he would make the path different:

If I, nature! were a man alone before you,
it would be worth the effort to be a human being.

He could not say this earlier, before he had loosened his soul from his body, not in this way. Then he had to go the whole way of error. Now he looks back and sees that it was indeed the path through the darkness of Mephistopheles. He looks back first to the time in his life when Mephistopheles had not yet crossed his path:

That was I otherwise,

— a man alone

eh' I's in the dark sought,
With sacrilegious word me and the world cursed.
Now the air is so full of such spooks,
that no one knows how to avoid it.

The full weight of what has happened now weighs on his soul.

Even when a day smiles at us with clear reason,
the night entangles us in dream images;
we return joyfully from the young meadow,

— so he has spent his life, half naked in the physical world, half already - albeit in the physical body -— transferred by Mephistopheles to the spiritual world, looking into the spiritual world, but always having to return to the physical world, because Mephistopheles cannot find it, nor can he convey it, the access, because he cannot properly find the connection.

A bird caws; what does it caw? Misfortune.

Only superstition can be found on this path.

Entwined by superstition morning, noon, and night –
It lends itself, it shows itself, it warns –
And so, intimidated, we stand alone.

But the path of superstition has always mixed with the strong path that Faust was able to walk through his own strong nature. And now he has the vision that could remain with him as his soul loosens more and more: the vision of worry. And try to feel how Goethe also lets the highest in language resonate in his words here. One would like to say that the whole of world history lies on our soul when we feel the weight of these words. Worry creeps in. Is anyone there? Faust asks.

Is anyone here?

The answer sounds:

The question demands yes!

Not a simple answer: Yes! The question demands Yes! I said: The whole of world history forces its way into our soul through the arrangement of the words. For how could one think of those magnificent scenes, where before the court Christ Jesus is asked: “Is it you, the Son of God?” He does not answer simply: Yes – but: “You say it!”

Now it is not expressed in an abstract word whom Faust is now experiencing:

I am here.

But it is in him. It is basically a soliloquy. And it is a deep soliloquy. Only gradually will humanity learn, through inner experiences, the full weight of this soliloquy. With what is to be given to humanity as spiritual science, insights will also come to humanity that will be linked to deep, deep feelings and sensations about life, feelings and sensations that the dull, dull materialism dreams of, nor does the easily acquired worldview that believes that everything has been gained with sentences that characterize the physical or spiritual-real. We have such sentences. We know that they have been achieved through difficult inner experiences. We keep them in our souls, we carry them with us through life. But they are not what they can and must truly be for the human soul if they are not accompanied by all possible moods, by those moods that often make our soul life appear as if it were living over an abyss. And when we have attained spiritual knowledge, we can never lose the concern that comes over us about the relationship of spiritual knowledge to the whole reality of life. Man must feel, especially when he enters the spiritual world, that it is a platitude to speak of it in false asceticism, that this earthly life is only a low one that one would most like to cast off. Man feels the whole deep meaning of this earth-life for eternity precisely through spiritual realizations: that this earth-life must be gone through in order that that which exists can be incorporated into the impulses which we carry through death into the sphere of eternity. But how could it be otherwise than that at the end of a life of trial, just at such a moment, when the soul is loosened, man becomes aware, in serious, grave concern, of what may become of his life just experienced, when he now has to go through the spiritual world with his soul, what the fruits of this life just lived may be. Faust has struggled through much, much. But he is great because now, when he has just entered the spiritual world and is half in it and half still feeling back to his physical existence on earth, he knows in the very significant comparison that arises between the physical and the spiritual in such a life-and-death situation:

I have only run through the world;
I seized every desire by the hair,
What was not enough, I let go,
What escaped me, I let go.
I only desired and only accomplished
And wished again, and so with might
stormed through my life; first great and mighty,
but now it goes wisely, goes deliberately.

Feel the harmony that now arises in his soul: how he has passed through the small and the great world, as it says in “Faust”, and with an overall view that is just opening up, as in the moment he feels a flood of spiritual illumination in his vision, he can survey with wisdom and deliberation all that he has gone through in the rush of the floods of life. And now: what does he see? What does he begin to see? —- He begins to see what he has experienced in the circle of the earth. Think back to what we have discussed about the review that overtakes the soul, which is now slowly overtaking Faust, at the beginning of the life after death. Think of this review. He sees his life on earth. He sees it in such a way that he has to say to himself:

The circle of the earth is well enough known to me.

What he had experienced on earth, he now sees. He is already halfway into the spiritual world. You can feel the words in this mood:

The view to the other side has vanished.

That is what one can say when looking back on earthly life. This is not a philosophical confession of materialism, but an immediate experience after death has already taken hold of the soul. Dopes who have become Faust commentators have interpreted this passage as if Faust, in his old age, were once again reverting to a materialistic creed. But now, in this situation, Faust would truly be a fool if he wanted to look back on life and now, with a blink, see that spiritual world, which is often described here by those fools who build this spiritual world in such a way that they simply write about their own kind, as is done in many confessions. He wants to stand firm on the result of his life. And now words of deep significance are actually falling, before which every semblance of materialism must fade, must fade completely. The vague mystics, those dreadful mystics who always speak of wanting to merge with the universe, of wanting to grasp eternity mystically in the chaotic darkness of the universe, which they call universal light, want to wander into eternity. The one who wants to grasp the spiritual life in a concrete way grasps it where it can be grasped in its concreteness. He does not become a fool, losing himself in vague distances that actually contain nothing but emptiness and empty space, and into which the soul dreams itself away. He will not be seduced into roaming into such eternities, but will grasp knowledge concretely. That which he recognizes can be grasped:

Thus he walks along the day on earth.

Consider how wonderful this sentence becomes when one considers that it marks the beginning of the retrospective view of earthly life: the vision walks along the day on earth. Now he has arrived at the point where he can find the right relationship to those haunting ghosts to which Mephistopheles has seduced him here.

When ghosts haunt,

– now in retrospect

he goes his way;
In walking on, he finds torment and happiness,
He! unsatisfied every moment.

We have to imagine the not yet fully completed, but now incipient review, that review, which is still full of the concern, through which fruits from the experienced earth day can be carried into the spiritual world. And always like this: over, over. Spiritual experience, but because he still clings to the body, also physical experience, so we find Faust. Care still holds him to the physical body. He is meant to enter consciously into the spiritual world, made conscious precisely by the burden of care. That is why he grows into the spiritual world in such a way that, while already bearing the spiritual world in his soul, he still believes that he can command the physical world. Those people who hold the banal contemporary view that man has always been essentially as he is now, do not know that many Greeks died as Faust dies, or rather, as Goethe had Faust die. We can prove from Greek literature that this death was almost a desirable one for the Greeks, like reliving some of the physical existence, while the soul has already been released. In Sophocles you can find words that suggest how the Greeks saw something special in such a death, not a sudden death, but a slow dying, in which consciousness is already dimming for the physical world, but what enters physical consciousness as twilight is gradually illuminated to see fully into the spiritual world. And Goethe did indeed try to incorporate much of the Greek element into the second part of his Faust. We may well imagine that he wanted something of what could be characterized as if he had wanted to depict Faust as a dying Greek. Thus, what he puts into the words in terms of feeling flows over from the spiritual world, even when he is still commanding here. And we can follow this further, follow how Goethe consciously presents what I have been talking about.

You saw Faust arrive at the scene where his grave is already being dug. Again, one can say that those commentators who accuse Goethe of bad taste by having the grave dug while Faust is still alive are not very tasteful themselves! That would, of course, be mere bad taste. We see the dying Faust. Then it is not bad taste, but a wonderful imagination, when we see the grave dug not only by the dying Faust but also by those half-spiritual creatures, the lemurs, of whose nature I spoke recently. But how does Faust speak? Well, I will first pass over the words that he speaks as he gropes his way out of the palace and toward the doorpost. I will draw your attention to the words that Faust speaks when he gives the order, so to speak, to dig the ditch that will divert the polluting swamp. At first, one might think that everything is meant physically. But Goethe was well aware that Faust speaks half out of spiritual consciousness, and that is how he wants these words to be understood. And what is revealed from this physical-spiritual, spiritual-physical consciousness? First of all, a wonderful sense of well-being in Faust. Consider what Faust says:

A swamp extends along the mountains,
Polluting everything already achieved;
To strip the foul pool too,
The last would be the highest achievement.
I open spaces for many millions,
Not to dwell securely, but actively and freely.

Beautiful, but now other words follow:

Green the field, fruitful; man and herd

At once at ease on the newest earth,

Immediately settled on the strength of the hill,

Which the bustling, industrious people have rolled up.

— these words are consciously set down, consciously out of the physical-spiritual, spiritual-physical. The paradisiacal land is the play of the spiritual into physical consciousness, then back into the physical again:

There is a raging flood right up to the edge.

Of course, it also means the external situation, but the fact that the words are chosen is something that Goethe was fully aware of when he did it.

Community pride rushes to close the gap.

And now some strange words:

Yes! I am completely devoted to this idea,
That is the ultimate wisdom:
Only he deserves freedom and life
Who must conquer it daily.
And so, surrounded by danger,
Spends childhood, manhood and old age his active years.
I would see such a teeming mass, standing on free ground with a free people. For a moment I would dare to say: Stay, for thou art so fair! The trace of my days on earth cannot perish in the eons of time.

One must hear this word repeated over and over again as a beautiful word that Faust utters because he feels: You have done something for the common good, you have worked. — And now he is overcome by the tremendous feeling of how this will continue to work through eons, how he has, as it were, founded his fame in his deeds, and he surrenders to his sense of well-being. It is often quoted. I have even heard it quoted by people who wanted to say something nice to someone else and quoted these words. You can also say: “The trace of my days on earth – that is, of your days on earth – will not perish in aeons.” And yet, however much this is understood as a beautiful saying, let us be clear about it: it is a purely Luciferic saying, a feeling of well-being in fame. We feel once more how Faust's soul is completely seduced by Lucifer, not only contemplating his deeds, but also feeling his glory through the aeons in a wildly spiritual and selfish way. This egotism grows to gigantic proportions and is still sealed:

In the anticipation of such sublime bliss
I now enjoy the highest moment.

Truly, the devil is no drip. After such a Luciferian outburst, one might well think that the devil had him, for it is once again a completely Luciferian blissful feeling, a supreme eternal desire. And we must not think of the stupid devil, but of the clever Mephistopheles-Ahriman, when he now says, which is quite appropriate:

No desire satisfies him, no luck is enough for him,
So he continues to court after changing forms;
The poor man wishes to hold on to it.

The soul has completely loosened itself, but has separated from the body with a Luciferian quality. It connects quite well with the no less inwardly voluptuous words that Faust utters as he steps out of the palace and gropes his way along the doorjamb:

How the clatter of spades disgusts me!
It is the crowd that indulges me.

One should not think that it is not tempting to think again in this last moment that the crowd indulges you! The Luciferic temptation is there once more, clearly there. And Mephistopheles is not stupid if he believes that now is the moment to follow up on that conversation in which Faust signed over his soul to him. They have conversed with each other: we recall the first part, where Faust, not yet out of the half-won spiritual consciousness, but out of the physical consciousness, said the words:

First thou dost smash to ruin this world,
The other may arise thereafter.
From this earth my joys gush forth,
And this sun shines upon my sorrows;
When I can part myself from them,
Then may what will and can come to pass.
I will hear no more about it,

I have only been running around the world.

Mephistopheles says:

In this sense you can dare.
Connect yourself; you shall in these days
With joy my arts see,
I give you what no man has seen.

Faust:

What do you want, poor devil?
Was a human spirit, in its lofty striving,
Ever grasped by your kind?
But you have food that does not satisfy,
You have red gold that, without rest,
Like mercury, melts in your hand,
A game in which one never wins,
A girl who, at my breast,
With eyes already bound for the neighbor,
The beautiful gods of honor
That, like a meteor, disappear?
Show me the fruit that rots before it's broken,
And trees that turn green every day!
I'm not deterred by such a task,

Mephistopheles replies,

I can serve you with such treasures.
But, my good friend, the time is also coming
When we may feast on something good in peace.

And now the weighty words that Faust speaks:

If I can ever rest content on a lazy bed,
then let it be now around me!
If you can ever flatter me,
so that I may please myself,
you can betray me with pleasure;
that shall be the last day for me!
I offer the wager!"

Well, how is that not fulfilled? Fullest enjoyment, even in the anticipation of eternal fame, is there now.

Mephistopheles:

Top!

Faust:

And blow upon blow!
I shall say to the moment:
Stay, yet! Thou art so fair!

— Does he not say it? —

Then you may bind me in fetters,
Then I will gladly perish!
Then may the death knell toll,
Then you are free of your service,
The clock may stand still, the hands fall,
Let the time be past for me!

Mephistopheles:

Consider it well, we will not forget it.

And he does not forget it. He says it now, Mephistopheles, after Faust has enjoyed the highest moment:

No pleasure satisfies him, no luck pleases him,
So he continues to court changing forms;
The poor man wishes to hold on to the last, poor, empty moment.
He who so vigorously resisted me
Time becomes master, the old man lies here in the sand.
The clock stands still.

The situation has been completely fulfilled; for Faust says:

The clock may stand still, the hand may fall.

Mephisto:

The clock stands still –

The chorus of lemurs:

Stand still! She is silent as midnight.
The hand falls.

What was predicted when the bet was made has come to pass. Mephistopheles can accept that his work is done:

He falls, it is done.

From the mouth of Mephistopheles the words of the cross: “It is finished!” But immediately the chorus of the lemures, who give the voice of the earth:

It is past.

This fits dreadfully into the soul of Mephistopheles. He has said, “It is finished.” The chorus of lemurs answers him, “It is over.” That is the tremendous difference. Over – he does not want the word:

Over! A stupid word.
Why over?
Gone and pure nothingness, complete monotony!

These words are the key to what it is all about. Initially, Mephistopheles is talking to his lemurs; he believes it is done, but it is only over. And now he turns his attention to himself. He wants to understand the contradiction: done, over – he wants to understand it.

Gone and pure nothingness, perfect sameness!
What is the point of eternal creation!
To sweep away the created to nothing!
“There it is over!” What can be read in it?
It is as good as if it had not been,
And yet it goes in circles as if it were.
I would have loved the eternal emptiness for it.

As I said, these words contain what we are looking for. That Goethe chose such words, that he built the scene from the enjoyment of the highest moment, as it is presented, that he lets Mephistopheles converse with the lemurs in this way, testifies that Goethe was able to express something very profound, something so profound that even today it can only be touched upon, because it is this that determines why the last scene must follow. If the matter were as many commentators on Faust have supposed, that Mephisto has simply misunderstood, been tricked, then the last scene would truly be superfluous. Then the matter would be simple enough, then it would be that Faust had not thought that there could be such a high enjoyment as that which is expressed in the words:

Not in the aeons can the trace of my days on earth

Mephisto had not thought of that either; neither of them had thought of that. Neither of them had thought that Faust would ever say to the moment: “Stay, you are so beautiful.” But because it is something higher to feel the moment in this way, the stupid devil is cheated out of his wager: that is more or less how the interpreters of Faust explain it all together. — Well, then the devil would have lost the soul, the angels would have captured it — everything would be in order. We didn't need the last scene. And Goethe certainly wouldn't have written it, because he was a man of poetic economy. But you don't understand Faust if you take it so superficially. You only understand it if you fully realize: Yes, here Goethe wants to allow a Luciferian seduction, even when Death is already fully present, to approach Faust once more, a genuine Luciferian seduction. — And Lucifer is there again in the moment when Faust speaks:

In the anticipation of such supreme bliss
I now enjoy the highest moment.

Now follows the actual entombment and Mephisto's preparation to capture the soul with the demons. The angels arrive and triumph over the demons. The soul seems to be delivered and is carried away, but the poem is not over. What is actually going on? Yes, Goethe could not say what was going on there offhand. But there are many words in the poem through which he has made himself clear enough for those who want to understand. But the idea that is so easily formed of that choir of angels that is advancing to take the soul is not correct. It is not entirely incorrect that the angels who arrive are all too proud and now consider themselves the fullest spirits of light, and the devils – the fat and the scrawny devils – only despise, and now only consider themselves quite pious, so very good, so very pious. Goethe already indicated that he did not want to have the presentation just like that, by having Mephisto, who he truly does not depict as a completely stupid devil, say the words that are interspersed at one point:

The priestly mien will not dress you at all,

and especially the significant word:

They are devils, too, but in disguise.

They are also of Lucifer's race. This is not there for fun! As far as can be said at all, to what extent it is serious, we will continue to consider the matter tomorrow.

(The Manager and Romanus, pausing in their walk, speak as follows.)

Manager:
Thou know'st the mystic friends of Hilary,
And I perceive in thee a clever man
With power to give at all times judgment sure
Both in life's work and in the mystic arts:
And so I value thy considered thought.
But how shall I make sense of what thou sayst?
That Strader's friends should stay in spirit-realms
And not as yet use their clairvoyant powers
Upon the fashioning of things of sense
Seems right to thee. But will the selfsame path
For Strader not be just as dangerous?
His spirit methods seem to prove to me
That nature-spirits always blind his eyes
As soon as strong desire for personal deeds
Drives him to seek some outer work in life.
Within oneself, as all true mystics know,
Those forces must develop in their strength
In order to oppose these enemies;
But Strader's sight, it seems, is not yet ripe
To see such foes upon his spirit-path.

Romanus:
Yet those good spirits who conduct such men
As stand as yet outside the spirit-realms,
Have not yet left his side, but guide his steps.
These spirits ever pass the mystics by,
When they do make their pact with other beings
Who are of service for their spirit mood.
In Strader's methods I can plainly feel
How nature-spirits still give to his self
The fruits of their benign activity.

Manager:
So 'tis by feeling only thou art led
To think good spirits work in Strader's case;
Thou off'rest little and demandest much.

Are these the spirits I must henceforth ask
If I continue active in this place
Where for so long I have been privileged
To serve the work-plans and that spirit true
Which Hilary's own father ever loved,
And which I still hear speaking from his grave,
E'en if his son hath no more ears for it?
What saith this spirit of that brave strong man
When he perceives these crazy spirits now
Which his son tries to bring within his house?
I know that spirit who for ninety years
Lived in his body. He it was who taught
To me the truest secrets of my work
In those old days when he could work himself,
The while his son crept off to mystic fanes,

Romanus:
My friend, canst thou indeed be unaware
How highly this same spirit I revere?
His servant certainly was that old man
Whom for a pattern thou didst rightly choose.
And I myself have striv'n to serve him too
From childhood's days up to the present time.
Yet I too crept away to mystic fanes;—
I planted truly deep within my soul
What they were willing to bestow on me.
But reason swept aside the temple mood
When at the door it entered into life;
I knew that in this way I best could bring
This mood's strong forces into earthly life;—
From out the temple none the less I brought
My soul into my work. And it is well
That soul by reason should not be disturbed.

Manager:
And dost thou find that Strader's spirit-way
Is even distantly akin to thine?
I find myself at thy side ever free
From spirit-beings Strader brings to me.
I clearly feel, e'en in his random speech,
How elemental spirits, quick with life,
By word and nature pour themselves through him
Revealing things the senses cannot grasp.
It is just this that keeps me off from him

Romanus:
This speech, my friend, doth strike me to the heart.
Since I drew nigh to Strader I have felt
Those very thoughts which come to me through him
To be endowed with quite peculiar power;
They sway me just as if they were mine own.
And one day I reflected: What if I
Owe to his soul not to myself the power
Which let me ripen to maturity!
Hard on this feeling came a second one
What if for all that makes me of some use
In life and work and service for mankind
I am indebted to some past earth-life?

Manager:
I feel precisely thus about him too.
When one draws near to him, the spirit which
Doth work through him moves powerfully one's soul.
And if thy strong soul must succumb to him,
How shall I manage to protect mine own
If I unite with him in this his work?

Romanus:
It will depend on thee alone to find
The right relation 'twixt thyself and him.
I think that Strader's power will not harm me
Since in my thought I have conceived a way
In which he may have made that power his own.

Manager:
Have made—his own—such power—and over thee—
A dreamer—over thee—the man of deeds!

Romanus:
If one might dare to make a guess that now
Some spirit lives its life in Strader's frame
Who in some earlier earth-life had attained
To most unusual altitude of soul;
Who knew much which the men of his own time
Were still too undeveloped to conceive.
Then it were possible that in those days
Thoughts in his spirit did originate,
Which by degrees could make their way to earth
And mingle in the common life of men;
And that from this source people like myself
Have drawn their capability for work—
The thoughts which in my youth I seized upon,
And which I found in my environment,
Might well have been this spirit's progeny!

Manager:
And dost thou think it justifiable
To trace back thoughts to Strader and none else
That hold a value for mankind's whole life?

Romanus:
I were a dreamer if I acted thus.
I spin no dreams about mankind's whole life
With eyes fast closed. I ne'er had use for thoughts
That show themselves and forthwith fade away.
I look at Strader with wide-open eyes
And see what this man's nature proves to be,
What qualities he hath and how he acts,
And that wherein he fails;—and then I know
I have no option left me but to judge
Of his endowments as I have just done.
As if this man had stood before mine eyes
Already many hundred years ago,
So do I feel him in my spirit now—
And that I am awake—I know full well.
I shall to Hilary lend my support;
For that which must will surely come to pass.
So think his project over once again.

Manager:
It will to me be of more benefit
If I think over that which thou hast said.

(Exeunt Manager and Romanus. Johannes comes from another direction, deep in thought, and sits down on a boulder. Johannes is at first alone; afterwards appear his Double, the Spirit of Johannes' youth, and finally the Guardian of the Threshold, and Ahriman.)

Johannes:
I was astonished when Capesius
Made known to me how my soul's inner self
Revealed itself unto his spirit's eye.
I could so utterly forget a fact
Which years ago was clear as day to me:—
That all that lives within the human soul
Works further in the outer spirit-realms;
Long have I known it, yet I could forget.
When Benedictus was directing me
To my first spirit-vision, I beheld
Capesius and Strader by this means,
Clear as a picture, in another age.
I saw the potent pictures of their thoughts
Send ripples circling through the world's expanse.
Well do I know all this—and knew it not
When I beheld it through Capesius.
The part of me which knows was not awake;
That in an earth-life of the distant past
Capesius and I were closely knit,
That also for a long time have I known—
Yet at that instant I did know it not.
How can I keep my knowledge all the time?

(A voice from the distance, that of Johannes' Double.)

‘The magical web
That forms their own life.’

Johannes:
‘And clairvoyant dreams
Make clear unto souls
The magical web
That forms their own life.’

(While Johannes is speaking these lines his Double approaches him. Johannes does not recognise him, but thinks ‘the Other Philia’ is coming towards him.)

O spirit-counsellor, thou com'st once more;
True counsel didst thou bring unto my soul.

The Double:
Johannes, thine awakening is but false
Until thou shalt thyself set free the shade
Whom thine offence doth grant a life bewitched.

Johannes:
This is the second time thou speakest thus.
I will obey thee. Point me out the way.

The Double:
Johannes, give life in the shadow-realm
To what is lost to thee in thine own self.
From out thy spirit's light pour light on him
So that he will not have to suffer pain.

Johannes:
The shadow-being in me I have stunned
But not o'erthrown: wherefore he must remain
A shade enchanted amongst the other shades
Till I can re-unite myself with him.

The Double:
Then give to me that which thou owest him:
The power of love, that drives thee forth to him,
The heart's hope, that was first begot by him,
The fresh life, that lies deep hid in him,
The fruits of earth-lives in the distant past,
Which with his being now are lost to thee;
Oh, give them me; I'll bring them safe to him.

Johannes:
Thou knowest the way to him?—Oh, show it me.

The Double:
I could approach him in the shadow-realm
When thou didst raise thyself to spirit-spheres;
But since, desire-powers tempting thee, thou didst
Avert thy mind to follow after him,
When now I seek him my strength ever fails.
But if thou wilt abide by my advice
My strength can then create itself anew.

Johannes:
I vowed to thee that I would follow thee—
And now, O spirit-counsellor, again
With all my soul's strength I renew that vow.
But if thou canst thus find the way to him,
Then show it to me in this hour of fate.

The Double:
I find it now but cannot lead the way.
I can alone show to thine inward eye
The being whom thy longing now doth seek.

(The Spirit of Johannes' youth appears.)

The Spirit of Johannes' youth:
Thanks to that spirit I shall ever owe,
Who was allowed thy soul-sight to unseal,
So that when I appear by spirit-law
Thou wilt henceforth behold me open-eyed.
But thou must first this spirit truly know,
At whose side thou art now beholding me.

(The Spirit of Johannes' youth disappears: only now does Johannes recognise the Double.)

Johannes:
Is't not that spirit counsellor?
Is it mine other self?

The Double:
Now follow me—thou hast so vowed to me—
For I must now conduct thee to my lord.

(The Guardian of the Threshold appears and stands beside the Double.)

The Guardian:
Johannes, wouldst thou tear this shade away
From those enchanted regions of the soul,
Then slay desire, which leads thee aye astray.
The trace which thou dost follow disappears
So long as thou dost seek it with desire.
It leads thee to my threshold and beyond.
But here, obeying lofty Beings' will,
I do confuse the inward sight of those
Within whose spirit-glance lives vain desire;
All these must meet me ere they are allowed
To penetrate to Truth's pure radiant light.
I hold thy Self fast prisoned in thy sight
So long as thou approachest with desire.
Myself too as illusion dost thou see
So long as vain desire is joined with sigh
t And spirit-peacefulness of soul hath not
Become as yet thy being's vehicle.
Make strong those words of power which thou dost know,
Their spirit-power will conquer fantasy.
Then recognise me, free from all desire,
And thou shalt see me as I really am.
And then I need no longer hinder thee
From gazing freely on the spirit-realm.

Johannes:
But as illusion dost thou too appear?
Thou too ... whom I must ever see the first
Of all the beings in the spirit-land.
How shall I know the truth when I must find
One truth alone confronts mine onward steps—
That ever denser grows illusion's veil.

Ahriman:
Let not thyself be quite confused by him.
He guards the threshold faithfully indeed
E'en if to-day thou see'st him wear the clothes
Which for thyself thou didst patch up before
Within thy spirit from old odds and ends.
Thou as an artist surely couldst produce
Thy actors in a better style than this;
But thou wilt make improvements by-and-bye,
And e'en this clownish form can serve thy soul.
It doth not have to spend much energy
In showing thee that which it now still is.
Pay close attention to the Guardian's speech:
Its tone is mournful and its pathos marked,
Allow not this: for then he will disclose
From whom to-day he borrows to excess.

Johannes:
Then e'en the content of his speech deceives?

The Double:
Ask not of Ahriman, since he doth find
In contradictions aye his chief delight.

Johannes:
Of whom then shall I ask?

The Double:
Why, ask thy Self.
With my power will I fortify thee well
So that awake thou mayst find the place
Whence thou canst gaze untramelled by desire.
Increase thy power.

Johannes:
‘The magical web
That forms their own life.’
O magical web that forms mine own life
To me reveal the place of no desire.

(The Guardian disappears: in his place appear Benedictus and Maria.)

Maria:
Myself too as illusion dost thou see
Since vain desire is still allied with sight.

Benedictus:
And spirit-peacefulness of soul hath not
Become as yet thy being's vehicle.

(The Double, Benedictus, and Maria disappear.)

Johannes:
Maria, Benedictus,—Guardians
How can they as the Guardian come to me?

I have spent many years with both of you
And this commands me now to seek your aid—
The magical web that forms mine own self.

(Exit, right.)

(Enter Strader, Benedictus, and Maria, left.)

Strader:
Thou gav'st, when joined in spirit unto me
Before the dark abyss of mine own self,
Wise counsel to direct mine inward sight,
Which at that time I could not understand,
But which will work such changes in my soul
As certainly will solve life's problems, when
They seek to hinder what I strive to do.
I feel in me the power which thou dost give
To thy disciples on the spirit-path.
And so I shall be able to perform
The service thou dost ask for in this work
That Hilary to mankind will devote;
We shall, however, lack Capesius.
Whatever strength the rest bring to the work
Will not replace his keen activity;
But that which must will surely come to pass.

Benedictus:
Yea, that which must will surely come to pass.
This phrase expresseth thine own stage of growth.
But it awakes no answering response
In souls of all our other spirit-friends.
Thomasius is not as yet prepared
To carry spirit-power to worlds of sense,
So he too will withdraw from this same work.
Through him doth destiny give us a sign
That we must all now seek another plan.

Strader:
Will not Maria and thyself be there?

Benedictus:
Maria must Johannes take with her
If she would ever find in truth the road,
Which leads from spirit to the world of sense.
Thus wills the Guardian who with earnest eye
Unceasing guards the borders of both realms.
She cannot lend her aid to thee as yet.
And this may serve thee as a certain sign
That thou cant not at this time truly find
The way into the realm of earthly things.

Strader:
So I and all my aims are left alone!
O loneliness, didst thou then seek me out
When I did stand at Felix Balde's side?

Benedictus:
The thing which hath just happened in our group
Hath taught me, as I look on thy career,
To read a certain word in spirit-light
Which hitherto hath hid itself from me.
I saw that thou wast bound to certain kinds
Of beings, who, if they should take a part
Creatively in mankind's life to-day,
Would surely work for evil; now they live
As germs in certain souls, and will grow ripe
In future days to work upon the earth.
Such germs have I seen living in thy soul.
That thou dost know them not is for thy good.
Through thee they will first learn to know themselves.
But now the road is still close barred for them
Which leads into the realm of earthly things.

Strader:
Whatever else thy words may say to me,
They show me that my lot is loneliness.
And this it is must truly forge my sword.
Maria told me this at mine abyss.

(Benedictus and Maria retire a little way; Strader remains alone; the soul of Theodora appears.)

Theodora's Soul:
And Theodora in the worlds of light
Will make warmth for thee that thy spirit-sword
May keenly smite the foes of thine own soul.

(Disappears. Exit Strader. Benedictus and Maria come to the front of stage.)

Maria:
My learned teacher, ne'er yet did I hear
Thee tell disciples, who had reached the stage
Of Strader, in such tones the words of fate.
Will his soul run its course so fast
That these words' power will prove of use to him?

Benedictus:
Fate gave the order, and it was fulfilled.

Maria:
And if the power should prove no use to him,
Will not its evils also fall on thee?

Benedictus:
'Twill not be evil; yet I do not know
In what way it will manifest in him.
My gaze at present penetrates to realms
Where such advice illuminates my soul;
But I see not the scene of its result.
And if I try to see, my vision dies.

Maria:
Thy vision dies,—my guide and leader, thine?—
Who stays for thee thy seership's certain gaze?

Benedictus:
Johannes flees therewith to cosmic space;
We must pursue;—for I can hear him call.

Maria:
He calls,—from spirit-space his call rings out;
There sounds within his tone a distant fear.

Benedictus:
So from the ever empty fields of, ice
Our mystic friend's call sounds in cosmic space.

Maria:
The ice's cold is burning in my self,
And kindling tongues of flame in my soul's-depth;
The flames are scorching all my power of thought.

Benedictus:
In thy soul's-depth the fire loth blaze, which now
Johannes kindles in the cosmic frost.

Maria:
The flames fly off,—they fly off with my thought.

And there on distant cosmic shore of souls
A furious fight—my power of thought loth fight—
In stormy chaos—and cold spirit-light—
My thought-power reels;—the cold light-hammers out
Hot waves of darkness from my failing thought.
What now emergeth from this darkling heat?
Clad in red flames my self storms—to the light;—
To the cold light—of cosmic fields of ice.

The first thing the soul needs to get to know its own nature scientifically, not just by faith, is a sharp concentration of thought that appeals not only to ordinary thinking but also to the application of inner willpower in imagining and thinking. The thoughts that penetrate us from the external sense world cannot help us with this. If we seek the immortality of the soul, we must think differently. Outwardly these thoughts resemble those mental images, those inner experiences that are destined to be forgotten. We can see this in the experience of 'dreaming'. Why? Because the dream engages the physical body in a much less intense way and thus creates less opportunity to feel and experience the dream as reality. It is the same with our free thoughts, which we let pass through the soul; we call them musings and quickly forget them. But the more one trains oneself to unfold the power of retaining freely formed thoughts, as otherwise only experiences supported by memory, the more one approaches the concentration of thoughts. Thoughts as images of external reality are least suitable for this. In the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” I have set forth thoughts that are suitable for concentration.

If one wishes to hold fast to such freely-generated thought-images, one must exert a stronger will than in ordinary life. The experiences of everyday life are so coarse that they cannot serve as a basis for comparison. What spiritual science reveals as immortal is fundamentally different in its meaning from what we feel and want in everyday life. Man passes by heedlessly, all the more heedlessly because he is inclined not to ascribe reality to that which confronts him as the being within himself, which finds the way through birth and death.

It is easy to see that this inner being exists, but it is not easy to ascribe the most intense reality to it. One must speak again and again about immortality from different points of view, because only when one has characterized it from the most diverse points of view is it possible to gain a true idea of it. The reality of immortality must be grasped by soul forces that are brought forth from within. Now you might say that I maintain that only subjectively something can be achieved! — The beginning of spiritual research is indeed subjective: an inner overcoming, a working one's way up from darkness to light. This is certainly subjective, because most people lack the patience to go far enough with spiritual research and to develop themselves out of the most personal of personal realms. It is precisely through this inner struggle that the soul is driven to work itself out of this realm; then it can enter into a world that is revealed to it. But the path from subjective to objective spiritual research is an intimate one, which makes it necessary for the human being to acquire soul habits within himself that otherwise do not occur in everyday life. We have to develop little willpower in our everyday life to hold on to it, but the other requires a strong tensioning of the soul's inner powers. They have to be drawn from the deeper soul life. These are strong inner energies that otherwise remain untrained in everyday life. People who need the support of sensory experience soon become exhausted and fall into a state not unlike that of falling asleep. When a person has developed thinking united with the will over a long period of time, when they have strengthened their inner life of imagination to such an extent that they are completely absorbed in it, when the rest of the soul life sinks away, the world flows away on all sides, the soul becomes completely one with what it has attained in a healthy way through practice: only then does man realize what the power of thought is, and how it must be supported by strong will if it is to rule freely in the inner life. Then, after months and years of practice, certain experiences begin to occur. At first, he succeeds in concentrating more and more brightly, clearly and intensely. He notices that the thought-experience grows ever stronger, and he feels that his whole consciousness is heightened as it merges with the thought.

Then comes a critical moment when he has arrived at the experience of the full strength of the thought. The thought fragments and dissolves in the soul, darkens and ceases to be present for us. We feel our whole being going with the thought. This is not easy. This experience shakes up all the human soul forces, calling into question everything one has previously held to be valuable. One resists coming to terms with this experience. Human egoism does not allow the forces associated with the depths of the soul to enter into consciousness. If we do not exert all our willpower, we will not be able to do so. In the subconscious, we fear that something much worse could happen to us than physical “death”. The materialist says: compared to physical death, the experience would not be so bad after all! But it does not enter into ordinary consciousness in this way; it takes hold as an impulse of an elevated consciousness compared to the ordinary life of the soul. It is not fear of the destruction of the body, but of the outpouring of one's own being into the cosmos. These are unspeakable feelings, yet they can be called feelings of fear. If one overcomes them, then an experience comes that could be described as follows: By developing these forces, you pull something out of the body. This seems particularly dangerous. It is a feeling as if something were being pulled out of us, as if it remained in us and yet had to be pulled out. There is a clear awareness that something else must be pulled out, that it is not possible with thought concentration alone, that this only pulls out a part of us.

If we want to understand how a person arrives at these descriptions, we must start from everyday experiences. The person must enter into a new relationship with themselves, develop a much more precise self-knowledge. In ordinary life, nothing is as questionable as a person's relationship with themselves, the opinion they have of themselves. How inadequate man's self-knowledge is can be seen in numerous examples, such as in the story of the philosopher Mach: when he got on a bus and saw his face in a mirror, he wondered what kind of ugly schoolmaster it was, until he realized that he was seeing himself.

It is easy to laugh at such things, but they are deeply indicative of man's questionable relationship to himself. Man must seek to come into a relationship of self-knowledge with himself. He has accumulated the forces that prevent him from detaching himself from what is connected with his inner life throughout his entire life. But this must be added to the concentration of thought: that we gain a completely different relationship to what constitutes our destiny. In everyday life we see fate approaching us. It strikes us as sympathetic and antipathetic coincidences; we regard what happens to us as something external. Even ordinary reflection can teach us that so-called coincidences are not so external. If we look at what we are at any given time in our lives, such a look will be able to tell us, if we do not want to close ourselves off from real knowledge of human nature: that we would not be able to do this or that if this or that had not happened to us eighteen or twenty years ago.

We see how the whole bundle of our talents, gifts and habits of soul life grows out of our destiny. We look at ourselves concretely as a fifty-year-old person and try to follow the whole tangle of experiences of destiny. If one is serious about this, which does not happen too often, then one must say to oneself: Destiny is not external; I am in it, my I is in it, I go along with my consciousness and pour myself out into the stream of my destiny. — This must become a method, it must be added to what has been achieved through concentration of thought. We are within ourselves in our everyday thoughts; through thought concentration we go out of ourselves and believe we are losing ourselves in it. The reverse process occurs when we identify with fate: we go into something that flows to us in the outer stream; we grow together with something that we believed was outside us. What I believed to be experiencing as external fate, I was already in it; I brought it about myself. When such considerations have become habitual, we come out of ourselves again, draw our soul after us; a very hidden inner man is drawn out of us. In that in which we know ourselves to be living, we look as we usually look at tables and chairs in the outer life. In this way, we have two means of experimenting here that we would otherwise use in a physics laboratory or in a clinic; but these are not external experiments, but rather activities that relate to inner soul experiences.

Anthroposophical spiritual science does not speak in a general, abstract way about the fact that one can separate from the body, but speaks experimentally, as one speaks of the fact that oxygen can be separated from hydrogen by showing that oxygen is in the water. In the laboratory we can be relatively indifferent to the things we are dealing with, but it is not the same with the tragedies of the soul, with the struggles, with the inner disappointments when we are on shaky ground or have lost our footing. This is often dreadful, often blissful. Then, when the inner soul is separated from the body, it knows that what is now outside of it contains all the forces that begin with birth and are given back to the earth with death. It has grasped the eternal core of the soul at the same time as the destiny of man. She knows that what separates from the physical body every night is this eternal soul core, which just does not perceive itself in ordinary life because it does not have the powers to do so. At the same time, she has grasped what goes through birth and death and has united it with destiny, with what was given in the spiritual world and then flows through the forces of heredity through father and mother and through the formative forces into the physical body, what has been prepared in the spiritual world for new bodily life. The immortal life core, which is otherwise imperceptible, becomes more and more concrete and alive. In everyday life, one works all this into the life core, but continually darkens the formative forces if they remain the formative forces of the body and cannot be used as powers of knowledge. The body is not their cause, but their effect, which has descended from the spiritual worlds. It bears within itself the character of previous earthly lives. This is how it is now because it is not the first time that one has lived in the physical body.

Spiritual research does not pursue the eternal essence through abstract theories, but through a spiritual experimental method, which, from one earthly life to the next, is subject to fate. It will take a long time before a larger number of people will take part in spiritual science, but it will become a truly real part of human spiritual culture and will intervene in human life and in what moral impulses are, in the life of consciousness in one's own being. Then spiritual science will intervene when the prejudices that now still seem comprehensible will have been overcome. They will be overcome as radically as the former prejudices against science. People believed that what they dreamt up was reality, and they called it an error. They called Copernicus a fool because he said that the Earth revolved around the Sun, whereas common sense told them that the Earth stood still. Today, the five senses do not want to believe that by grasping the heightened thinking, one can draw out a piece of the inner man and draw the other piece by entering into destiny. Humanity will have to learn to no longer trust the senses. There is a stronger power of holding for true than relying on the five senses and the mind. This power is connected with all impulses of human wisdom progress. One must develop trust in this by kindling a strong moral power in the soul. When man appeals to the powers of realization in himself, he will carry himself courageously through the world, not merely trusting in what he can experience through the outer five senses. Today, we have reached the point in the development of humanity where science must become what it could not become before. What the spiritual researcher distills out was always in man: he does not create it, he only calls it into spiritual knowledge.

An obvious objection, which comes from mental laziness, is: Why do we care about the eternal soul core at all? He is eternal, we will live in it again. — That is too cheap a thought. Two things must be said against it. Firstly, it is not only important to man's moral sense that he knows this or that, but that the process of development on earth progresses from natural science to spiritual truths, which were first unknown and are now being brought out. All human progress is based on this. Those who do not want to take part in this should admit that they are indifferent. This point is important, but more abstract. Secondly, however, there is a very concrete progress. In ancient times, people on earth were essentially not the same as they are today; their souls were different from today's. We find there a clairvoyant consciousness originating from primeval times, from ancient epochs, in connection with the divine-spiritual forces of the world. Today, man has lost this; but he is taking his independence out of this earthly world to which he has connected himself. Now that man has attained the stage of detachment from earthly thinking, he must again be seized by spiritual life, must again enter through spiritual science. Today, however, we can say that we still have so much inherited strength that the soul's life after death cannot be stopped. But man must develop in such a way that he does not go through life between death and a new birth in dullness, but in clear experience. Man became free by breaking the thread that connected him to the spiritual world. Now he must tie it again. From the present time on, there is more and more necessity to recognize spiritual life. Therefore, where spiritual life has become more intense in recent times, repeated earthly life as a teaching occurs. For example, in the eighteenth century, in Lessing's 'Education of the Human Race', which he left behind as a testament to humanity, the basic idea of repeated earthly lives and a purely spiritual life in between occurs. There are those who say that Lessing had grown old and weak and that is why he had this complicated idea.

What was established by a mind like Lessing's forms a kind of predisposition that must be further developed in the German national soul, in order to flow into the stream of spiritual scientific research, in order to become real science, as was indicated today. This lies deeply as a predisposition in what Fichte felt to be the original source of German uniqueness. Fichte's idea is a wonderful one, in the sense that Not only when we have passed through death do we become immortal; already in the body we can perceive what is immortal and forms the body. Only in grasping this actual immortal do I recognize the meaning of life, for the sake of which everything in this mortal body may live itself out. What spiritual research is to carry out scientifically is present here as a predisposition. Fichte expresses it: if only the right powers are released, then the immortal can be grasped. Spiritual science is particularly present in the personalities of spiritual striving, which I characterized yesterday.

We encounter glimpses of it in the most diverse places, but here it is a straight line from German spiritual striving to what must develop into spiritual science. In the stream of Central European spiritual life, consciousness in grasping the spiritual core has never been completely lost. I will now draw attention to just one example of this consciousness, which only wanted to be given in a delicate way. Herman Grimm, an art lover and one of the intellectual giants of the second half of the nineteenth century, who stood firmly on the ground of Schiller's and Goethe's world view, expressed it in his novella “The Songstress”. In the 1860s, the time had not yet come for spiritual science, but the people who were immersed in it at that time felt the need to describe not only the sensory world but also the other part of the world. They knew that if you want to describe true reality, it is not enough to describe the sensual world. Take, for example, a horseshoe that has become magnetized, which still looks like an ordinary horseshoe. Man belongs to the spiritual world with his spiritual part, just as he belongs to the world of sense with his physical part. Out of the deepening of German idealism, these people knew how to develop a genuine spiritual worldview. They did this by objectively and impartially observing German intellectual life, which has a mission that should be fulfilled from within, out of an idealistic appreciation of intellectual life: to penetrate to the spirit as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel did, but to do so by still perceiving the world with the real spiritual eyes and ears that Goethe spoke of.

Where the view is directed towards German spiritual research, especially towards Goethe, a kind of hope for humanity is connected with the development of this spiritual life. If one reads between the lines of German spiritual life, one can often find a concise expression of how the world can come to an understanding of spiritual life precisely through the development of the German being. There is no need to be seized by pride, but one can feel how what the Goethe-Schiller era produced can be defended in Central Europe today so that it can develop.

Based on this fateful sense of time, I would like to present two images: We learned in the first days of August 1914 how the news of the coming event was received in the various countries of Europe. First in Germany. One stands before the great event – the Reichstag is convening – I do not want to go into day-to-day politics, not into what is related to the military events – the representatives of the various party directions stand there – and remain silent. That is a powerful impression, as if it were the herald of what was to come, before a great coming truth.

With a kind of inner weeping, one looks at the other picture, at the meeting of the State Duma. There was no silence: they all spoke – so that one gets the impression that it was formally convened, like a historical theater performance. The frenzy of false enthusiasm was spoken by many, in contrast to the silence further west. If you want to explore history, what runs through humanity, you will have to look at such moods. In this silence lies the confidence that trust can be placed in spiritual power, in spiritual truth, that it must be well guarded, that it must be defended – a confidence that carries the soul beyond death and destiny.

Emerson wants to describe Goethe and points out what Goethe culture means for humanity. Referring to him, he says: “The world is young. Great men of the past show us the way with the words: ‘We must write scriptures that bear witness to the eternal. It must not be that a lie remains for us.’ Emerson means that lie that there is no spirit behind the external world.

A bright solar horizon must develop out of the twilight of current events, heralding a lasting peace for the good of humanity. All that those who make the sacrifice of their lives have to endure in body and soul must become a warning for those who remain behind. The unspent forces of those who must leave their young lives before their time will help: the law of conservation of forces also applies in the spiritual world. In the future, we will know that this world is connected to the spiritual world. These unspent forces will be real forces for people who will have an awareness of the spiritual world.

The spirit world will remain closed to you,
unless you recognize within yourself
the spirit that shines in the soul
and can become a bearer of light for you
in the depths and heights of the world.

[ 1 ] In your philosophical poem “Nature”—so rich in thoughts—you have given expression to the basic mood asserting itself in modern man. This mood arises when he permits himself to be influenced by certain ideas about nature and spirit extant in our time and if he has a depth of feeling sufficient to make him recognize the discord between those ideas and the ideals of his heart and mind. Indeed those times are gone when a thoughtless, shallow optimism, relying on the belief that we are children of god, distracted man from perceiving the discord of nature and spirit. Those times are gone when it was possible to be so superficial as to lightheartedly look away from the thousands of wounds from which the world is bleeding. Our ideals are no longer superficial enough to be satisfied by a reality so often shallow and empty.

Yet, I cannot believe that it is impossible to find a means of elevating oneself above the deep pessimism that stems from such a recognition. Such an elevation becomes possible when I look into the world of our inner being, when I approach the essence of our world of ideals: a world complete and perfect in itself, which cannot gain, cannot lose anything through the ephemeral nature of outer things. Are not our ideals,—if they are truly living entities (individualities)—beings existing in themselves, independent of the favors and disfavors of nature? May the lovely rose be defoliated by the merciless thrusts of the wind,—it has fulfilled its mission, for it has brought joy to a hundred human eyes. May it please murderous nature tomorrow to destroy the entire starry heavens: through millennia men have looked up to it with reverence, and this suffices! No! Not the transient existence, but the inner essence makes them perfect. The ideals of our spirit comprise a self-sufficient world that must live out its own life and cannot gain anything through the cooperation of a beneficent nature.

[ 2 ] What a pitiful creature man would be if he were not able to gain satisfaction within his own world of ideals, but instead, would first need the cooperation of nature? What would become of divine freedom if nature, keeping us in a harness, guiding us, were to tend us and care for us like little children? No! She must deny everything, so that if good fortune comes to us it would be the product of our own free self. May nature destroy every day what we are building, so that every day we may look forward joyfully to creating anew—we don't want to owe anything to nature, but everything to ourselves.

[ 3 ] This freedom—one might say—is but a mere dream! While we deem ourselves free, we are heeding the iron necessity of nature. The most exalted thoughts are nothing other than the result of nature acting blindly within us.

[ 4 ] Oh, we should finally admit, that a being that knows itself (or: knowing itself) cannot be unfree. By investigating the eternal laws of nature we are separating out of it the substance which lies at the foundation of its manifestations. We see the fabric of laws ruling over the objects of nature, and that brings about necessity. In our cognition we possess the power to detach the lawfulness out of the objects of nature. Should we be will-less slaves of these laws nevertheless? The objects of nature are unfree because they cannot recognize these laws; they are governed by them without knowing of them. Who should force them on us, since we penetrate them with our reasoning? A being that knows cannot be unfree. Such a being first transforms what is law into ideals, and then accepts them as self-given laws.

We should finally admit that the god—imagined by effete humanity to dwell in the clouds—lives in our hearts, in our spirit. He fully divested himself of his being and poured it out completely over mankind. He did not want to retain anything of his own will because he wanted mankind to be a race that rules itself in full freedom. He emanated into the world. Man's will is his will, man's goals, his goals. By implanting into mankind an (entire being-ness) he gave up an existence of his own. A “god in history” does not exist. He ceased to be for the sake of the freedom of mankind, for the divine-ness of the world. We have taken into ourselves the highest potency of existence, therefore no external power, only our own creations can give us satisfactions. All lamenting about an existence that does not satisfy us, about this hard world, must vanish in the presence of the thought, that no power in the world could satisfy us if we ourselves did not bestow upon it the magic power through which it can gladden and elevate us. If a god from outside our world were to bring us the joys of heaven and we had to take them as he prepared them, without our participation, we would have to refuse, because they would be the joys devoid of freedom.

[ 5 ] We have no right to expect satisfaction from powers outside of us. Faith promised us reconciliation with the evils of this world, brought about by a god from outside this world. Such faith is in the process of fading away, a time will come when it will not exist anymore. But that time will come when mankind will not have to hope anymore for a redemption from outside, because mankind will recognize that it must bring about its own bliss, just as it afflicted deep wounds upon itself.

Mankind is the guide of its own destiny. Even the achievements of modern natural science cannot convince us otherwise. These achievements were acquired through conceptions of the outer side of things, while cognizance of our own world of ideals is attained through penetration of the inner depth of the matter.

[ 6 ] Since you, admired poetess, have been applying such vigorous pressure to the sphere of philosophy you might not be disinclined to hear what it has to say in response; and with this

[ 1 ] I am very respectfully yours,
Rudolf Steiner

Franz Wörther

Karl Weiß-Schrattenthal, who succeeded in discovering Johanna Ambrosius three years ago, has just brought another "poet and thinker from the people" into the public eye. This time the discovered person is a Bavarian shoemaker, Franz Wörther. Anyone who had a sincere interest in the poetry of Ambrosius should also feel the same for this shoemaker. I have occasionally formed my opinion about the causes of such an interest. At the time, the poet and literary historian Karl Busse lashed out like a bull at those who had warm words for the East Prussian poet. I believe the reason for his behavior is that Busse was unable to find the right point of view from which the Lober of Ambrosius judged. Busse took a naïve standpoint and allowed the poems as such to have an immediate effect on him. The Lober did not do this. They looked at these creations as one looks at happy memories from childhood alongside the experiences of the day.

Whoever is involved in the spiritual life of the present can only take such an interest in the poetry of the simple woman. No one who naively enjoys Dehmel's or Hartleben's poems can be captivated by Ambrosius with the same immediacy. But just as the serious man likes to remember his childhood, the modern educated or over-educated also enjoys the natural tones of the folk poet. We enjoy the memories of childhood, even if they tell of incomprehensible and stupid things. We do not question their reasonableness. In the same way, we do not ask about the aesthetic form in which we encounter such true natural sensations as those of Ambrosius.

For the same reason, poets such as Rosegger, for example, have a far more significant effect on the educated than on the people. The people live in the feelings that such poets portray to them from morning to night; the educated have outgrown them; but they like to put themselves in their place, because the memory of them is sacred to them.

When the thirteen-year-old Franz Wörther lost his father in 1843, he was alone in the world, without a friend or patron. He could now not think of becoming a master builder, as his father had wanted; with his idealism in mind, he had to learn shoemaking. After his apprenticeship, he traveled through northern and central Germany. He then spent five years as a soldier. After completing his service, he returned to the shoemaking trade. Wörther went through struggles with his soul. Sometimes the thinker and poet wanted to despair when the shoemaker had to provide bread for himself and his seven children. But the "man of the people" accepted his fate with true philosophical composure. He said to himself: "I regard the poetic gift I have been given as a gift from heaven for the happiness I have been robbed of. The dark defiance of former times no longer took hold of me; I dallied, as it were, serenely and calmly through the cliffs of life on the muses' rosebands." In his own way, this nature poet drew strength and courage to live from his own soul. And even if his poetry is often just a stammer, he stammers sounds that come from the chest of a whole man. Wörther does not speak in the perfect forms of the artist; what he speaks is as appealing and captivating as the products of nature. The fact that he seeks forms of art that he has not mastered is disturbing, indeed often tempts him to express a true sentiment untruthfully: but the genuine original source can always be discovered.

But the poems are not the most important part of the little booklet that Schrattenthal has published. The wisdom sayings are of far greater interest. A true nature Nietzsche comes to us in Wörther. It is true that the natural thinker did not go as far as to revaluate the concepts of value he inherited; nor did he harbor any anti-Christian sentiments, but remained "pious" to this day. But he coined the ancestral concepts anew for himself; he gave them an individual form. A man who wrote the following thoughts on "freedom" deserves our greatest attention.

"Freedom is the alarm clock of passion and the moving force of execution, it is the cauldron of all freedom and exuberance. - It is the dream of the imprisoned and the terror of the prison guards. - Freedom is the highest bliss for corner-cutters and drifters and the political glue rod for social robins and bloodthirsty finches." Wörther gives a clear, understandable verdict in a transparent, simple form on the concept of "equality": "Equality is the longing of the ugly and the horror of the beautiful. It is the colorful, iridescent soap bubble of all social democratic phrases and the necessary embellishment of agitation speeches. - Equality is the dissolution of civilization and the return of humanity to its original state of the Stone Age and the pile dwellings with the uniform fashion of Adam and Eve. It is therefore the beginning of the end of all tailoring. - Equality is the tablecloth for the Cinderellas of destiny." A subtle sentiment is reflected in the sentence: "Envy even puts dirt in the hands of the child who secretly wants to throw at his playmate the colorful rag that his parents hang around his shoulders in monkey-like love."

And the saying: "A heart without gratitude is like a faded rose bush that holds only thorns for the wanderer" reveals that a noble disposition can also thrive on the cobbler's chair. The pride of an independent personality built on its own strength and dignity is also characteristic of our shoemaker. He finds that "the cowardly sycophancy of the rich man is called pride of status, his avarice is called economic calculation, while the profligacy of a man's lower mind is called worldly noblesse, and the lack of character of a rich man is called miserable sycophancy diplomatic statesmanship".

Franz Wörther currently lives in his birthplace of Kleinheubach am Main. He provided for his seven sons with his shoemaking skills. He was a valiant craftsman. Schrattenthal has shown that he was even more through the commendable publication of his intellectual products. Those who can only enjoy the book aesthetically will soon put it down; those who have a sense for the contemplation of a self-contained personality, perfect in its own way, will read it through from beginning to end. The coarse naturalness will refresh such a connoisseur, and the clumsiness in the artistic will not bother him much.

The human soul is capable of development, its present state may be changed by training, particularly by a training of the etheric body. People who precede others in their inner development are called Initiates. The path which they tread and teach is that of occult schooling.

Our root-race (5th post-Atlantean epoch), the Aryan, descends from the most highly developed sub-race of the Atlanteans, the original Semitic race, that lived approximately in the region of present-day Ireland. The island Poseidonis mentioned by Plato may be considered as a last remnant of descending Atlantis. Manu, a leader of the Atlanteans, guided the most mature men to the East. From there, they wandered into the region of present-day India. An ancient civilisation arose: This ancient Indian civilisation arose long before the time of the Vedas. It still had a dream-like, altogether inner character. The soul-constitution of the ancient Hindoo was the very opposite of our modern one. To him everything external and visible was Maya, Illusion; he saw reality only in Brahman and in what could be grasped by Brahman.

A second civilisation arose further west. This second culture is the ancient Persian one, whose inaugurator and chief guide was the great Zarathustra, or Zoroaster. The Persias were already able to harmonize spirit and matter and. began to work and to transform the physical world through the human spirit.

A third civilisation arose still further west, namely the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian culture. Man's gaze turned still more towards the physical world, the external branches of science arose, with the study of the forces of Nature and of their laws.

From the very outset, this ancient primeval science revealed the following truths concerning our earth: The earth too is a being subjected to reincarnation. It passed through earlier stages and in future it will pass through further incarnations. One speaks of seven planetary conditions or Planets", through which the earth passes in its development. The names of these "Planets" are not identical with our present planets, but refer to past or future conditionof the earth. But these conditions are related to the planets after which they are named. The first incarnation of our earth is called. "Saturn". Then comes the "Sun", followed by Moon"; "Mars" and Mercury" are the designations for the first and second half of the earth's development. The conditions which will follow are "Jupiter" and "Venus", These seven incarnations of the earth are intimately connected with man's development and are therefore even mirrored in ordinary life; names of the days of the week.

Saturday - Saturn
Sunday - Sun
Monday - Moon
Tuesday - Zeus-day, Mardi - Mars
Wednesday - Mercredi, Mercury
Thursday - Wotan-day, Jupiter
Friday - Freya-day, Vendredi, Venus

The world of the stars is thus closely connected with ordinary life. The ancient Egyptians still arranged their whole civilisation in accordance with the stars, the affairs of State, agriculture, and so forth. The genius of the Dog-star, Sirius, was the one who indicated the inundations of the Nile, when that star appeared in a special constellation. A fourth epoch of culture is the Graeco-Latin one. It imprints on matter the Wisdom of things. This is how works of art arise. In the middle of this epoch falls the deed of Christ; the Mystery of Golgotha.

We ourselves live in the fifth epoch of culture, of the fifth root-race belonging to the fifth age of the earth. This is the Germanic-English-American culture; its chief task is the conquest of the physical plane. The task of the subsequent sixth epoch will be to lead external civilisation again to a more spiritual life. Its standard-bearer is Anthroposophy. The future task or civilisation as a whole consists in becoming reunited with the Spirit.

Every epoch has its particular tasks. Modern science has rejected the Ptolemaic world-system as erroneous and has adopted the world-systems of Galilei and Copernicus: but for the astral plane the Ptolemaic system is correct; for there one sets out from quite different perspectives. The sixth epoch of Culture still reposes as a seed in the East of Europe; it will be the carrier of the spiritual culture of the future.

A time will come when the human being will have overcome bi-sexuality. Lower forces, sexual instincts will change into higher ones. It is not a question of destroying any instinct, but of refining, ennobling them. Thus phantasy is a product of spiritual ennoblement, the result of already purified passions. When phantasy reaches a higher stage of development it leads to clairvoyant imagination. In future all human beings will be able to perceive as Initiates do now, the soul-content of their fellows. To-day the word can transmit spiritual experiences through the medium of the air; in the future spiritual beings will be produced through the word, and finally the word itself will become creative; then the human beings will be magicians of the word.

The indications on occult training come from a deeply-founded knowledge. There are two fundamental qualities which man must have; he must be able to bear what one calls great loneliness, and he must gain a certain fundamental mood of devotion. In regard to the first, the loneliness of a few minutes each day is meant, in the middle of the active life of daily living, minutes dedicated to concentration and meditation. Even this can give inner strength to the soul. At first there will be an inner feeling of emptiness and sadness; but this must be overcome. All people who achieved a great deal require this inner loneliness for their concentration. The second fundamental requirement is devotion, the capacity to look up to something with feelings of reverence and devotion. Those who wish to ascend to higher stages of development must first be below and feel that they are there below.

The occult training of India calls for a complete submission of the pupil to his Guru. The Rosicrucian Initiation is the right one for Modern people of the West.

Before that there was the Christian Initiation. All three kinds of Initiation are in reality the expression of one and the same initiation, but the forms of initiation must change with the times.

There's a nice remark by Hegel: The deepest thought is united with the figure of Christ, with the historical and outer one, and that's the great thing about the Christian religion, that for all of its profundity it's easy to understand in an outer way, and yet also challenges one to get into it more deeply. Thus it's for every stage of development and also satisfies the highest demands.

The fact that the Christian religion is understandable to every stage of consciousness is clear through the history of its development. It must be the task of spiritual science in general to show that this religion invites one to penetrate the deepest teachings of wisdom that mankind has. Theosophy is not a religion but an instrument for understanding religions. It's related to religion in about the same way that our mathematical theory is related to ancient math books. One can understand mathematics out of one's own intellectual forces and the laws of space without referring to Euclid's geometry book. But when one has taken in geometric teachings one will treasure that old book all the more, that first placed these laws before the human spirit. That's the way it is with theosophy. Its sources are not in documents and aren't based on tradition. Its sources are in the real spiritual worlds; that's where one must find them and grasp them in that one develops one's spiritual forces, whereas one grasps mathematics as one tries to develop one's intellectual forces. The intellect that enables us to grasp the laws of the sense world is carried by an organ, the grain. We also need corresponding organs to grasp the laws of spiritual worlds. How did our physical organs develop? When outer forces worked on them, sun forces, sound forces. That's how the eyes and ears developed out of neutral, dull organs that did not permit a penetration of the sense world at first and only opened slowly. Our spiritual organs will also open when the right forces work on them.

Now which forces storm in our spiritual organs that are still dull? During the day forces press into a modern's astral body that work against his development, and that even kill organs he had before he got his bright day consciousness. A man used to perceive astral impressions indirectly. The surrounding world spoke to him through pictures, through the astral world's form of expression. Living, differentiated pictures, colors float around free in space as an expression of pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and antipathy. Then thee colors laid themselves around the surface of things and objects received firm contours. This happened when man's physical body became even firmer and more differentiated. When his eyes opened completely to physical light, when maya's veil placed itself before the spiritual world, man's astral body received impressions from the surroundings via the physical and etheric bodies and transmitted them to the ego, from where they entered men's consciousness. Thereby he became continuously active. But what worked on him in this way wasn't plastic, formative forces that corresponded to his own nature; it was forces that consumed and killed him to awaken his ego-consciousness. Only at night when he dived down into the rhythmic spiritual world that was homogeneous to him did he strengthen himself anew so that he could send forces to the etheric and physical bodies again. The life of the single ego, ego-consciousness arose from the conflict of impressions, from the killing of the astral organs that worked unconsciously in man before. Death out of life, life out of death. The snake's circle was closed. Now the forces that rekindled life in the dead remnants of previous astral organs and molded them plastically had to come out of this awakened ego-consciousness.

Mankind moves toward this goal, it's guided towards it by its teachers, leaders and great initiates, whose symbol is the snake. It's an education towards spiritual activity, and therefore it's a long and difficult one. Great initiates could make the task easier for themselves and men if they would elaborate the astral body when it's free at night, so that they imprinted astral organs into them, worked on them from outside. But that would be a working within the dream consciousness of a man, an intervention into his sphere of freedom. Man's highest principle, the will, would never develop. Man is led step by step. There was an initiation in wisdom, one in feeling, and one in willing. Real Christianity is the integration of all initiation stages. The initiation of antiquity was the annunciation, the preparation. Man slowly and gradually emancipated himself from gurus. Initiation at first took place in a complete trance consciousness, but there was a way to imprint a memory of what had happened outside the physical body, into the latter. That's why it was necessary to separate the etheric body, the carrier of memory, and also the astral body. Both of them dived down into the sea of wisdom, into mahadeva, into the light of Osiris. This initiation took place in the deepest secrecy and seclusion. No breath of the outer world was permitted to push in between. The man was as if dead to the outer world, the delicate seeds were cultivated away from blinding daylight.

Then initiation stepped out of the darkness of the mysteries into the brightest daylight. The initiation of all mankind took place historically—symbolically to begin with—at the stage of feeling in a great, mighty personality, the carrier of the highest unifying principle, of the Word, that expresses the hidden Father, that is his manifestation, that since it took on human form it became the son of man and could be the representative for all mankind, the unifying band for all I's: In Christ, the spirit of life, the eternal unifying one. This event was so powerful that it could go on working in every human being who lived by it, right into the appearance of stigmata, right into the most excruciating pains. Feeling was shaken to its depths. An intensity of feeling arose that had never flooded the world in such mighty waves before. The sacrifice of the I had taken place for all in the initiation on the cross of divine love. The physical expression of the I, the blood, had flowed in love for mankind and it worked in such a way that thousands pressed to this initiation, to this death and let their blood stream out in love, in enthusiasm for mankind. How much blood flowed out in this way was never sufficiently emphasized, people are no longer aware of it, not even in theosophical circles. But the waves of enthusiasm that flowed down in this blood and ascended have fulfilled their task. They've become mighty impulse givers. They have made men ripe for an initiation of will.

And this is Christ's legacy.

There's a nice remark by Hegel: The deepest thought is united with the figure of Christ, with the historical and outer one, and that's the great thing about the Christian religion, that for all of its profundity it's easy to understand in an outer way, and yet also challenges one to get into it more deeply. Thus it's for every stage of development and also satisfies the highest demands.

The fact that the Christian religion is understandable to every stage of consciousness is clear through the history of its development. It must be the task of spiritual science in general to show that this religion invites one to penetrate the deepest teachings of wisdom that mankind has. Theosophy is not a religion but an instrument for understanding religions. It's related to religion in about the same way that our mathematical theory is related to ancient math books. One can understand mathematics out of one's own intellectual forces and the laws of space without referring to Euclid's geometry book. But when one has taken in geometric teachings one will treasure that old book all the more, that first placed these laws before the human spirit. That's the way it is with theosophy. Its sources are not in documents and aren't based on tradition. Its sources are in the real spiritual worlds; that's where one must find them and grasp them in that one develops one's spiritual forces, whereas one grasps mathematics as one tries to develop one's intellectual forces. The intellect that enables us to grasp the laws of the sense world is carried by an organ, the brain. We also need corresponding organs to grasp the laws of spiritual worlds. How did our physical organs develop? When outer forces worked on them, sun forces, sound forces. That's how the eyes and ears developed out of neutral, dull organs that did not permit a penetration of the sense world at first and only opened slowly. Our spiritual organs will also open when the right forces work on them.

Now which forces storm in our spiritual organs that are still dull? During the day forces press into a modern's astral body that work against his development, and that even kill organs he had before he got his bright day consciousness. A man used to perceive astral impressions indirectly. The surrounding world spoke to him through pictures, through the astral world's form of expression. Living, differentiated pictures, colors float around free in space as an expression of pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and antipathy. Then these colors laid themselves around the surface of things and objects received firm contours. This happened when man's physical body became even firmer and more differentiated. When his eyes opened completely to physical light, when maya's veil placed itself before the spiritual world, man's astral body received impressions from the surroundings via the physical and etheric bodies and transmitted them to the ego, from where they entered men's consciousness. Thereby he became continuously active. But what worked on him in this way wasn't plastic, formative forces that corresponded to his own nature; it was forces that consumed and killed him to awaken his ego-consciousness. Only at night when he dived down into the rhythmic spiritual world that was homogeneous to him did he strengthen himself anew so that he could send forces to the etheric and physical bodies again. The life of the single ego, ego-consciousness arose from the conflict of impressions, from the killing of the astral organs that worked unconsciously in man before. Death out of life, life out of death. The snake's circle was closed. Now the forces that rekindled life in the dead remnants of previous astral organs and molded them plastically had to come out of this awakened ego-consciousness.

Mankind moves toward this goal, it's guided towards it by its teachers, leaders and great initiates, whose symbol is the snake. It's an education towards spiritual activity, and therefore it's a long and difficult one. Great initiates could make the task easier for themselves and men if they would elaborate the astral body when it's free at night, so that they imprinted astral organs into them, worked on them from outside. But that would be a working within the dream consciousness of a man, an intervention into his sphere of freedom. Man's highest principle, the will, would never develop. Man is led step by step. There was an initiation in wisdom, one in feeling, and one in willing. Real Christianity is the integration of all initiation stages. The initiation of antiquity was the annunciation, the preparation. Man slowly and gradually emancipated himself from gurus. Initiation at first took place in a complete trance consciousness, but there was a way to imprint a memory of what had happened outside the physical body, into the latter. That's why it was necessary to separate the etheric body, the carrier of memory, and also the astral body. Both of them dived down into the sea of wisdom, into mahadeva, into the light of Osiris. This initiation took place in the deepest secrecy and seclusion. No breath of the outer world was permitted to push in between. The man was as if dead to the outer world, the delicate seeds were cultivated away from blinding daylight.

Then initiation stepped out of the darkness of the mysteries into the brightest daylight. The initiation of all mankind took place historically—symbolically to begin with—at the stage of feeling in a great, mighty personality, the carrier of the highest unifying principle, of the Word, that expresses the hidden Father, that is his manifestation, that since it took on human form it became the son of man and could be the representative for all mankind, the unifying band for all I's: In Christ, the spirit of life, the eternal unifying one. This event was so powerful that it could go on working in every human being who lived by it, right into the appearance of stigmata, right into the most excruciating pains. Feeling was shaken to its depths. An intensity of feeling arose that had never flooded the world in such mighty waves before. The sacrifice of the I had taken place for all in the initiation on the cross of divine love. The physical expression of the I, the blood, had flowed in love for mankind and it worked in such a way that thousands pressed to this initiation, to this death and let their blood stream out in love, in enthusiasm for mankind. How much blood flowed out in this way was never sufficiently emphasized, people are no longer aware of it, not even in theosophical circles. But the waves of enthusiasm that flowed down in this blood and ascended have fulfilled their task. They've become mighty impulse givers. They have made men ripe for an initiation of will.

And this is Christ's legacy.