The Rudolf Steiner Archive

What I presented here yesterday seems to be something very remote. Nevertheless, anyone who really wants to form ideas about what is spiritually and socially necessary in our time must also familiarize themselves with such ideas. Our thinking and feeling, our whole human nature must be imbued with feelings that arise from such ideas. I will briefly summarize what, so to speak, formed the main focus of yesterday's discussions. It is that which we already knew from other, more abstract points of view, namely that the human being has essentially a twofold organization; we could also say a threefold one, but today we want to consider the third, the middle link, less.

First there is the organization of the head, the nerve-sense organization, and then there is the organization of the rest of the human being. For the convenience-seeking thoughts of the present day, such a thing is difficult to grasp because people today want to know everything neatly, almost spatially, divided up. When one speaks of the head organization and the organization of the rest of the human being, people prefer to imagine: the head up to the neck and then the rest of the human being. Of course, this is not how things are meant. What is meant is that in a certain respect the whole person is the head, only that being the head, being the head, is most clearly expressed in the head. And the whole person is also a trunk and limbs person, only that being a trunk and limbs is most clearly expressed in the trunk and the limbs. The senses are, as it were, distributed throughout the whole human being; but inasmuch as they are distributed throughout the whole human being, we count them as belonging to the organization of the head, because those senses that are localized in the head are the most highly developed senses. |

From these indications you will understand how I actually mean the cited structure of the human being. But now we have seen that not only is there a necessity for this structure that comes from inner forces and processes in the human being, but that in fact the human being is integrated into the cosmos in a different way as a head-human being and in a different way as a trunk-and-limb-human being. Our head is, so to speak, the most advanced; but it actually belongs – and this is shown not only by occult knowledge but also by embryology when it is really considered rationally – our head organization does not belong to the earthly and solar sphere, but to the lunar sphere. The forces that are inwardly active in our head organization are lunar forces. And in the rest of our organization, the forces of the earth and sun are active.

The whole evolution of humanity on earth is connected with this essence of man. And now the time has come to see how to take a step forward, which depends on how we can set our human organization in motion. In human evolution on earth, what has taken place in the life of the human spirit and soul, let us say up to the Mystery of Golgotha, is of primary importance. That is the great turning-point in the whole of human evolution on earth. And if we exclude from all that has developed up to the Mystery of Golgotha the ancient Hebrew, the ancient Jewish evolution, we can say that what has developed up to that point bears a thoroughly unified character.

The ancient pagan culture, which, as I have described in my “Occult Science in Outline”, starts from the mysteries of antiquity in the most diverse ways, has a unifying character in a certain respect. What is this unifying character? This unifying character consists in the fact that there is an original wisdom of humanity, that an original revelation has actually taken place all over the earth. Why could this primal revelation take place? It could take place because in the early days of the development of the earth, the human head, if I may put it that way, had not yet progressed as far as it has in our time or as it had already done by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In the sense I explained to you yesterday, it was still alive. He was still imbued with the possibility of having dreams that were not connected with what is given only by earthly experience. He was able to evoke in himself what man had in ancient dream experiences, when consciousness was still more dimmed than it is in our time.

All this was used by the revealers of ancient times to guide humanity, so to speak, to the point of development at which it was to be at the dawn of the Mystery of Golgotha. What was revealed there and could be received by humanity through the organization just characterized to you, was such that, compared to what today's humanity knows, there was a comprehensive body of wisdom in primeval times that decreased more and more. We would not be satisfied with this body of wisdom today, because in many cases it was only the content of old atavistic clairvoyant dream images. Today we want to have correct, clear ideas, but we have not yet come very far in these clear, bright ideas.

An ancient wisdom had been poured out over mankind. From this wisdom much was said about the beings that rule nature, about the forces that rule nature, but very little about man himself. Man had not yet come to his earthly consciousness. He was still, as it were, entirely led by the hand of higher powers. He could become wise, but self-awareness had not yet dawned. The Apollonian saying: “Know thyself” is like a yearning placed in humanity, like something that was called out into the future by the leading minds of Greece. A wisdom was there that dealt with nature, but also with the nature of the cosmos. The ancient Hebrew revelation was placed into this life of humanity. If you consider the ancient Hebrew revelation, it has a certain peculiarity. It differs completely from the pagan wisdom revelations that spread around it. It disdained, so to speak, to contain the wisdom of nature and the universe. Basically, it contained only one thing about nature and the universe: God created it with man, and man has to serve God in the world. The whole ancient Hebrew revelation is geared towards the goal of showing man how he can serve his God Yahweh. What is appealed to in this ancient Hebrew revelation? — That which is not appealed to is found in the ancient pagan revelation: the organization of the head, which could still evoke memories of the ancient moon time. This could not be appealed to in the Hebrew revelation. It had to be appealed to in the rest of the human organization. But remember what I said yesterday: This remaining organization of the human being can understand and absorb precisely because it is solar, that which comes from the moon. What comes from the moon is that which, in the extreme, leads to illusions, to that which can reveal itself within the human being. But that is the content of the ancient Hebrew revelation. At first it is only about the human being. In this ancient Hebrew revelation, the human being is at the center.

But in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha, man had not yet been led to self-awareness, to self-knowledge. A path had to be sought that was actually a detour. And that was through Jewish nationality. Therefore, the Jewish religion is not primarily a religion of humanity. It does not address the individual human being, but the entire Hebrew nation. It is a national religion. It speaks of the human being, but only indirectly, through the people.

Two things were in existence when the Mystery of Golgotha intervened in the evolution of the Earth: the dying embers of ancient pagan wisdom and humanity's consciousness in the form of the consciousness of a people. Into this was placed the Mystery of Golgotha. It could only be grasped with what was already there. One must distinguish between the fact of the Mystery and the means of comprehending and feeling it. The heathen could only grasp it with the remnants of their world-wisdom. The Jews could only grasp it with what had been revealed. And so it was grasped at first. The remnant of the old wisdom showed itself in the Gnostic view of the event of Golgotha. That which was due to Jewish revelation became more and more the content of the Catholic understanding, the Roman Catholic understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And now, in order to grasp anything at all of the Mystery of Golgotha, the detour had to be made through these two world currents.

The following became evident, however. The old pagan wisdom, because it was a dying ember, because its origin lay far back, increasingly lost the ability to be grasped by people. People became far too lazy to pass on the gnosticized wisdom about the Mystery of Golgotha. Only the thinnest remnants of the old pagan world view remained. This is one current.

The Jewish proclamation was fresher and more intense. But it had no worldly wisdom. It spoke only of man and of commandments for man. It placed man at the center of the world view. It was passed on in the churches of the Occident. The last remnants of pagan wisdom, the origin of which was no longer recognized, remained as concepts for what is now scientific experience. With the last remnants of ancient pagan wisdom, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Copernicus grasped the new world experiences that were available. It is no wonder that this gradually became very unsatisfactory. All that had been achieved was the application of the last abstract remnants of ancient pagan wisdom to the knowledge gained through the new means of natural science. And there was no bridge from what was known about man from Jewish revelation to this wisdom. And so it went on, and so it continued to be lived in until our days. On the one hand, we have a science that works only with the very last remnants of the ancient pagan wisdom and that cannot of itself find a way to understand the human being. This lack of understanding culminated in the 19th century in the decision to dispense with any attempt to understand the human being as such and to comprehend only that which appears when one regards the human being as the final consequence of the animal series. The ideal of this science, working with the last remnants of paganism, was not to understand man, but to understand the highest animal and call that man.

That which followed from Jewish revelation gradually lost the possibility of saying anything about nature from what it had to say about man. Try to take on the theology as it has developed, and see if you can find anything in it that could give a satisfactory explanation for today's consciousness of even the simplest natural processes. Of course, moral considerations can be linked from this tradition to natural processes. But today's sense of time is not satisfied with the moral consideration that God allowed an earthquake to occur in Messina to punish people, and theology has gradually become incapable of bridging the gap between what the gods work and what occurs and breaks out in nature. In many respects it is therefore a mere phrase, while our natural science has material upon material before it in a grandiose way, which contains infinite secrets but does not know what to do with them because it lacks the concepts to connect the things with each other. It was out of this conflict that the whole of modern consciousness developed, that something like agnosticism developed, for example, for which it became the hallmark of an enlightened mind when he could say to himself: Man is incapable of knowing anything about the essence of things. He is simply not organized to know anything about the essence of things.

What is deeply present in people as a longing must fight against such a view. It fights in what man wants to know about the world, it fights in the external social order. And one must realize how to make progress because in certain things our ideas are still in the distant past. What did Jewish revelation bring forth? The most characteristic of what it has produced is national Jewish politics. This national Jewish politics, after it had exerted its influence on Romanism, has taken its path into the most recent times. And the most influential nations of the present day, what do they strive for in the political field? — To pursue national politics! But that is ancient Hebrew politics. In our public life we have not yet advanced as far as Christianity. We are still in the Old Testament. And it is the task of the present time to advance as far as Christianity in the sphere of public life. It will not advance unless it is supported on the other side by scientific progress in the field of Christianity. But for this it is necessary to really get to know man.

Take, for example, my “Occult Science”. There is much talk about cosmic evolution, about the evolution of Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and so on, that people who are very clever today are either frightened or made to smile or annoyed. If you take a closer look at my “Geheimwissenschaft” (Occult Science), you will find that what is given there as knowledge of the world is at the same time knowledge of man. For man is actually everywhere in all knowledge of the world. What was developed by man in Saturn time and then further developed, how the other beings have joined, that is considered. You cannot separate knowledge of the world and knowledge of man.

But in the present day, this is a Christian demand from the point of view of the field of knowledge. It is also a Christian demand from the social point of view that we learn to disregard all other human contexts and to aim solely at the human being itself. From the point of view of the phrase, these things have been fantasized about for a long time, but from the point of view of reality, little has been done so far. From the standpoint of reality, the national connections in which the human being is largely and completely submerged today still exist as overwhelming forces in the political life of the world. What must take the place of these national connections is a relationship built on the perception of what the human being is, from person to person across the whole civilized earth. But to establish such a relationship requires a certain inner strength of spirit, a certain inner strength of the human soul. And if we ask ourselves: Has the human being actually become stronger in soul in the so-called blessed 19th century? — then, wherever we look, if we are sincere and honest, we find everywhere: in terms of the intensity of our concepts and ideals, the human being has not become stronger, but weaker. Those who know me will know how such a statement is meant.

I may insert a personal remark here. It is now decades since I was in Vienna in a conversation with a man who has since made a great name for himself as a historian. We were talking about the development of Germany. The man was of the abstract view, which he expressed at the time as follows: Well, this German development, it is there and it will continue in the way it is there. — I said: That is an abstraction, it is not something that is taken from reality. It seems to me something like someone saying: Here is a plant, it has already borne fruit, now new flowers will come, then again fruits, then again flowers, and it will continue to grow like this. When the plant has reached the stage of blossoming and fruit formation, one cannot say: it will continue as it is. Something new, a new plant, can indeed arise from the seed that came from the blossom; but one must not imagine that the old plant emerges again from the blossom in a new form and that it continues as it was. I said: That which is the substance, the essence of the German being, has reached its bloom and fruit in the time of Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Hegel. That is a high point. It cannot simply be continued. Since then we have been in decadence, since then we have been in a descending movement. I expressed these ideas at the time. As you can imagine, I received little understanding; for people had already entered the period when such ideas were too intense to be grasped by the human soul, and I had to think how it was quite different until the middle of the 19th century. For example, in the development of the Germans there was a man, Gervinus, who wrote a history of literature. One can have much against him; in the whole writing of this history of literature there is an enormous radicalism. It ends with the death of Goethe, and it denies the following generations the ability to continue to write in the old style, as if new blossoms were growing out of the leaves of the plant. At that time, people were still radical enough to say: with Goethe it is over; if you want to develop further, you have to look for new approaches! Gervinus could not give them, but he concluded the old, he made a line under it.

Of course, many beautiful things have been written in German since then, but they are epigonistic. They do not contain the essence that flows in Herder, Goethe, Schiller, not the philosophical essence, the Hegel-Schelling essence, the Fichte essence. The only thing is that Hamerling, in terms of his maturity, has introduced a new tone into his “Homunculus”, but it has become a satire.

Even then, the demands were already there to grasp something new, to develop a real sense for a new approach to the whole new civilization. This call for a new approach should resound throughout the world today. For it is only from this that any hope of salvation for the future development of humanity can be hoped for. Everything that does not connect with the feelings of the individual human being must be eradicated. You can see an outward sign of this in the way old ideas are being dragged out again today. In order to say something in the present, old ideas are being drawn upon. In one of the present leading spirits of Central Europe, one finds an outlook that is truly spoken out of this decadent sense of time, and which shows what humanity cannot hold on to today. This man asks: How do we come to a moral life again? He sees

In the last five years, the decrepitude of the old morality has become apparent, and lies have triumphed among all nations. The old Hebrew policy of Yahweh has gripped all nations to such an extent that one might think that there was a Judaism in Palestine at that time, and now all nations would like to pursue a policy for themselves that is similar to the one the Jews pursued in Palestine. They would all like to become like that, they would all like to pursue world politics to the exclusion of the achievements of Christianity. The content is missing. Therefore, one resorts to things that actually have no content. Instead of looking for new sources of morality from spiritual, new, fruitful views, one asks: Where are the sources of a new morality? - and gives the following answer: Power is an indispensable means to create good. Therefore, if you do not already possess it, you should strive for the power that is necessary to achieve the good in each case. - You want to have a good thing in the world and are given the good advice: seek the power to achieve the good. - The second reason for the new ethic is: with the power you have, you can create the good. Therefore, one should use power everywhere to achieve the good.

But first you have to have the good, you have to recognize the good first! To speak in this way is the opposite of what must spread through the spiritual science meant here in modern human civilization. Because it is not about basing something on power. You can only found something on power if you combine groups of people. If one person is to face another, you cannot found anything on power, but only on that which develops in the person so that he has value. Man must work to develop a value by which he accomplishes things for man, and at the same time he must develop a receptivity to recognize such human value.

That is the only possible basis for any morality of the future: developing human value and the ability to recognize human value. To put it in other words, this means: All morality must be built on real trust! — Because one did not want to penetrate to such views, one could not understand the moral demands contained in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. There is a reasoned justification for a so-called individualistic morality, and it is built on the idea that if what can be developed is developed in each individual human being, there is no need for legislation, but rather one can wait and see what people will do in their mutual dealings. And I had to say to many people at the time: Just look, when we walk down the street, one person going this way and the other that, do we need legislation to make us step aside for each other? That one goes to the left and the other to the right is done out of the demands of existence, which one reasonably recognizes. — Thus one acts morally when all the things that lie within the human being are truly developed. Without this there is no morality of the future.

But this is the only morality that will really be built upon a newly grasped Christianity. It must be built upon this: Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me. The Christ has come into the human race so that every single human being may recognize the value of his fellow man. And when people treat each other in the world in this way, the foundation for a new morality is laid. But only from our present point of view is the Mystery of Golgotha newly understood. This Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. It must be understood by each world-age in a new form. Not the teachings that are there are the decisive ones; they must change from age to age. The decisive thing is that the Mystery of Golgotha has happened once. For the creeds of the present day, it is becoming more and more apparent that they are becoming increasingly indifferent to the Mystery of Golgotha. They do not attach any importance to it being understood in terms of contemporary consciousness; they only attach importance to their teachings being propagated. But these teachings will be incapable of grasping the Mystery of Golgotha. And so today we already have a branch of theology that no longer speaks of the Christ at all, but only of the man Jesus of Nazareth, the “simple man” who walked in Palestine, a kind of Socrates. And then one cannot understand why those who speak of this Christ speak of him as the center of human development. Such are the serious issues facing the present age. And it is precisely this seriousness that must be recognized. But it will be necessary to work in harmony on the one hand with the scientific field and on the other with the social field. After all, things do converge. I believe that today the orthodox university graduate will be surprised if, for example, he is asked to accept that botany must become “Christian”. But it must become Christian, that is to say, the spirit that has seized humanity through the mind must also work its way into botany. And a few socialist-minded people, but only a few, only individual parts of this socialist-minded mass, talk about the fact that Christian sentiment - one then speaks of original Christian sentiment - must take hold in the mutual behavior of people. Nevertheless, no special value is placed on permeating social ideas with the Christian principle.

There is, of course, also a third variant; but the point is that we learn, on the one hand, to find the Christ in the world and, on the other hand, to ignite within us the ability to understand this Christ. What must work together in the great as well as in the particular in social life is the development of a certain human value and the development of the ability to recognize this human value trustingly and to act accordingly in the relationship between people!

In the 19th century, when people had the least understanding of how a new spirit was needed to grasp anew the mystery of Golgotha, they spoke of practical Christianity because they had become as impractical as possible with regard to Christianity. Now that the events of the past few years in the development of humanity have passed by, it would certainly be necessary for as many people as possible to realize how a new spiritual revelation actually wants to enter into human development and how it must be grasped by people. As long as we continue to pledge our entire spiritual life to external powers, to state powers or whatever else the world has, there will be no possibility for this spiritual life to really take in the spiritual revelation that wants to enter humanity. For this it is necessary that spiritual life really be put on its own feet, as is demanded in our threefold social order, that it develop out of its own impulses. Out of these own impulses, science will be imbued with spiritual methods, and the spiritual methods developed for science will ignite the power to morally permeate social life with what is spiritual. We must learn to actualize and actualize spiritual things in our social work and in the social life of people. But to do that, we must go beyond what we have to call empty words today. We live a spiritual life in empty words, in phrases. Today you can experience someone saying beautiful things that you may like in terms of content; if you get closer to them, you will find their soul empty of spiritual content. Why? Because nowadays you can pick up empty phrases anywhere. You don't need to be connected to the buzz of empty words in human life. There is no other way to find the connection with the spirit again than to first seek the guide, so that the human soul can truly reach the spirit on its own, but this guide cannot be found in any other way than by seeking him with the conviction that man can become what can become in the world today only by not remaining with what is present in him in the way of inheritance, of blood forces, but by developing something in himself that goes beyond what is merely inherited, beyond what is merely taken from the outer world. Today we are born into a world with certain predispositions; these predispositions are developed in school, but in such a way that only the traditions that have been handed down are used as a stimulus for this development. We must come to know that there is a hidden germ in every human being that is not there through mere inheritance, nor through what is included in education today as a stimulus. We must have the faith that there is something in every human being today that can only be awakened through spiritual forces and through the conviction of the existence of spiritual forces within him. From what is being educated and lived by today, only the consciousness of Yahweh can be experienced. Christ consciousness can only be awakened when one has faith not only in the development of the human being, but in the transformation of the human being, when one has faith that something will come of the human being that is not inherent in him simply because he has inherited a body from his ancestors, but that is seated within him because he has gone through earlier earthly lives in earlier human world cycles. At that time, however, the principle of inheritance predominated and shone forth in the human being, which came over from repeated previous earthly lives. Now the inherited qualities have become weak, and those characteristics in man become ever stronger, which come over from the earlier incarnations not with the blood, but with the soul.

This can be taken over into consciousness. And when it lives in the consciousness of one person, that person encounters another with quite different feelings than people usually have today.

Thus, although it is a very extensive subject and I may have stumbled over my words, I have tried to explain something of what must enter into our human development as an elementary necessity. When this demand arises in life, it still encounters the most serious prejudices in life today. It is fought against. And I have had to tell you about some of the fighting against what is being striven for with the anthroposophically oriented world view that is meant here, in recent times. I would like to mention just two more things in this direction today. Recently I read to you the letter of our friend Dr. Stein, which refreshingly showed how we had to confront a churchman whose helper, when he was shown Bible passages that sounded somewhat anthroposophical, even ventured the confession: “Then Christ is wrong - in his opinion!” So it is not he, the churchman, who is wrong, but Christ! When I came to Stuttgart, I was informed that all kinds of judgments had been registered from our circles about how it was so harsh to confront an old gentleman, who had even read my writings, in such a way. One must show consideration for, first of all, secondly, thirdly... Unfortunately, this is still widespread in our ranks, that precisely when it comes to taking a serious stand on any point, those people who would most like to keep our movement in a sectarian light will stab us in the back. That is one thing I must mention.

The other thing is that I have to familiarize you with the accusation that has now been made in the German press, the murky sources of which – and I am explicitly mentioning this here – I know very well, and where it is fairly unimportant what because the people who spread such things are not concerned with awakening belief in the things they spread, but only with fabricating something that can disparage an inconvenient personality or current trend. So, despite the not very enlightened hall, I will read these “unenlightened” remarks, which are now circulating in part of the press:

"The theosophist Steiner as a stooge of the Entente. - The “Mannheimer Generalanzeiger” reports from Berlin: Theosoph Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who influences a following of several million men and women” - - I expressly note: this sentence, which will be extraordinarily evidential for anyone who somehow looks into the affairs of the present, and in the time to come, when such attacks will intensify considerably, one will see why such attacks said, among other false things, “founded the League for the Threefold Social Organism in Stuttgart in the spring of 1919, which was originally supposed to be only a religious-communist community, but then came into political contact with the Bolsheviks and communists and is now engaged in a strange and repulsive political agitation. The learns the following from Dresden: “From reliable information, it is unequivocally clear,” - I ask you to take note of the tone — “that the League for Tripartite Division is determining the names of all officers allegedly active in a reactionary sense and collecting evidence against them of acts contrary to international law based on witness statements, which is then to be sent to the Entente for the purpose of extradition. Mr. Steiner and his comrades are completely unconcerned about the veracity of such accusations, and the fact that they do not even shrink from deliberately false statements is proven by the passage of a letter in which it says: “Accusations of theft are to be refrained from, since untruthfulness is easier to prove here. Likewise, one should not make accusations that are too incredible, such as the mutilation of children.”

Now, the fact that every sentence, every word – forgive me for using the expression in this context – is a “first-told” lie, that is quite obvious. But these things are fabricated in the present. They prove that what comes from the school of thought represented here is taken seriously enough to consider these malicious means necessary at all. You can be sure: small sectarian movements, that is, those that are supposed to be small in number, are not bombarded with such things. One would only wish – and I also expressed this in the article sent the day before yesterday for our next but one “Dreigliederungs” issue – that the number of naive people would become smaller and smaller, who still believe that by refuting such things, they are helping the people who are working today out of the murky sources that are at issue here. They are not interested in refutations; for they are not concerned with even touching the truth, but they fight with every means against all that is to move in as a new spirit in humanity. They follow the forces by which they are possessed.

I had to give you this example for the reason that a sense of the seriousness that should actually prevail among all those who find themselves somehow seriously inclined towards what is stated here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should be evoked little by little. One would really like to find words that our current worn-out language hardly has to awaken this seriousness in souls. But the souls are often paralyzed. Nothing that is necessary will penetrate them, if time is not to lead into complete decadence. You cannot continue to manage in the old way. Nor should we call 'ideals' what we take from the old currents. We should become more and more aware that a complete new beginning in human development is necessary.

Today I would like to present you with something specific from the whole sequence of ideas on which the considerations presented here are based, in order to expand on it tomorrow from a more general point of view. You have gathered from the reflections that we have been cultivating here for some time that, in order to revive the declining culture of the West, it is necessary to develop a true knowledge of the human being based on spiritual science. This knowledge of the human being has been prevented for a long time. In the form in which it is needed for the future development of humanity, it has been prevented, first of all, by the kind of intellectual life that emerged in the 13th and 14th centuries of the Middle Ages, and then, again, by the intellectual trend of the time from the middle of the 15th century to the present, which has moved more and more towards materialism. On the one hand, we have seen the development of a detached, unworldly, religiously colored way of looking at things, which separated the spiritual from the world, did not allow it to approach the human being and therefore left the human being unexplained in terms of his essence. One might say: In the last centuries of the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the last centuries of the Greek-Latin development up to the middle of the 15th century, humanity increasingly began to look up to a completely unworldly divine-spiritual and lost the opportunity to get to know the human itself in its divine origin. Then came the time when mankind directed its gaze to the subhuman, to what nature principles are, but which only explained everything in the world that is not human, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal , and in this way again left man unexplained, so that in a certain sense in an older time there was a looking up to a foreign spiritual, from the later time to our days a looking at a subhuman material. Man fell through in between. To consider the human being in his entirety, spiritually and soulfully, is the task of our time, and to this end we have tried to bring more and more elements into anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Today I would like to talk about how the human being initially finds himself in the world between two extremes in his inner experience. Let us dwell first on the inner experience of the human being. On the one hand, the human being experiences the world of ideas, but he experiences it in such a way that the more he immerses himself in this world of ideas, the more abstract and cold it appears to him. When man rises to the level of ideas, he feels that he cannot become inwardly warm. But he feels something quite different. He feels that in these ideas, which are then also expanded into natural laws, into world laws, he has something that, as an idea, does not include a reality, that as an idea is basically merely an image. Therefore, when faced with the world of ideas, the human being does not feel, let us say, that he wants to somehow implant his own existence in this world of ideas in a cognitive way. No matter how much the human being likes to reflect, he gradually retains the feeling, even with the most perfectly spun philosophy, that he cannot find proof of his real existence in the universe in the world of ideas. The ideas have something, as it were, rootless about them, as they are experienced in ordinary life between birth and death. That is the one, so to speak, the one pole of outer experience in ordinary existence: the abstract, sober, cold ideas, in which one cannot anchor, nor would one want to anchor, the reality of the actual human being. And finally, modern humanity has not warmed to Descartes' maxim: “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum), because no matter how much people think, they also feel: there is no getting out of thinking for the time being.

The other pole of inner experience is memory. Anyone who really practices psychology, not the art of words that is often practiced as psychology at universities today, knows that these memories we have are substantially exactly the same as the fantasies we create by working at them, so to speak, only that we use the same power we apply in weaving the fantasy differently when remembering. By remembering, by cultivating our memory, we ultimately live in the same element as in the creative process, only that we build on what we have experienced through the senses or through life in general and thus shape the “phantasms” in memory in a logical way, while in the imagination we let them roam freely. This is the other pole in our inner experience.

In the world of ideas, which we then also develop into laws of nature, we have the decisive awareness that our will cannot actually achieve anything through itself in the shaping of the world of ideas; it must submit to the inner logic, to the fabric of reality of the ideas. If we want to grasp reality, we cannot use our will to string one idea to another; we must adapt to the inner laws of this world of ideas, which is only pictorial and does not directly support any being. At the other pole, in phantasms, which also live in memory, we recognize very well: our will rules there – and our will is also quite appropriately there, and we notice in two respects that these phantasms, insofar as they shape memory, very much have to do with our ego, with our personality, with what our reality is. No matter how much we rail against mere fantasy or phantasmagoria, by sensing that our ego is at work in it according to its own arbitrariness, we feel at the same time that our ego, our personality, is contained in these phantasms. That is one thing.

The other is: in the moment when, due to some illness, our memory continuity is disturbed, when the thread of our memory breaks somewhere, so that we cannot remember a piece of our life, in this moment the real solidity of our inner I-experience is also disturbed. So, on the one hand, our sense of self is not directly connected to our world of ideas. On the other hand, we feel that this sense of self is part of what we call our world of phantasms, although we cannot rely on this world of phantasms and, in a sense, in this phantasmal world, although we know that it is active in it, and that it cannot properly live in our consciousness if this memory is not in contact with it.

The deepest riddles of life are contained in what I have now more or less abstractly discussed, and we can approach these riddles by taking together various aspects of what is scattered in our anthroposophical considerations today. The world of ideas appears abstract to us, pictorial to us! Where do we use it first? We use it when we think through what affects our senses from the outside world – colors, sounds, warmth and cold. We think through our perceptions. You will find more precise details in my books 'Truth and Science' and 'Philosophy of Freedom'. When we penetrate our perceptions with thinking, we use this world of ideas to imprint it, as it were, on our spiritual and psychological experience, on what we have as a world of perception. But we need to look a little more closely at what is actually happening. And this can be done by directing one's own soul abilities through spiritual scientific methods, as described in my books. One can actually raise the question: What would it be like if our sensory perceptions only penetrated us from the outside, if only what penetrates our eye as color, our ear as sound, our sense of warmth as heat, and so on, from the light, what would happen to us then?

Let us be clear about this: when we are awake, we never let this world flow into us alone. Even if we develop only a little active thinking in ideas, we nevertheless bring, as it were, from within ourselves, to meet these sounds, colors, smells, tastes, and all sensory qualities that are rushing towards us, the counter-attack of the world of ideas that rises from within us. And anyone who does not think according to the abstract psychology of words of the present time, but who has really learned to observe, can ask themselves: How do the contents of perception that rush in from outside and the counterattack from within, the world of ideas, meet in our sense organs? If we were merely given over to the world of perceptions, then we would actually live as human beings in our etheric body and with our etheric body in an etheric world. Just imagine how you, surrendered through your eyes to the world of colors, would live in a surging, ethereally surging world of colors, how you, surrendered through your ears to the sounding world, would live in a surging sea of sound. This is not ethereal at first, but it would be ethereal if you did not provide the counterblow through ideas. The way in which sounds are for us human beings is the way they are in the etheric. We swim in the ocean of air and thus in the condensed etheric. It is therefore aetheric that is only condensed materially up to the air; the tones are only the air-shaped material expression of the etheric. And so it is with the warmth qualities, with the taste qualities, with the smell qualities, with all sensory qualities. So, imagine the counterattack of the world of ideas from within. Imagine that you live in an ethereal sea as an ethereal being. You would never come to that human consistency with which you actually stand in the world between birth and death. How can you come to this consistency? By being organized to kill this ethereal, to paralyze it. And how do we paralyze it? How do we kill it? Through the counter-attack of ideas! It is really so: the world of the content of perception in living ethericity (red) would come from outside, so to speak — if I am to draw schematically — and we would swim as etheric beings in living etheric substance, if we did not send out from within the counter-impact of the world of ideas (blue), which, as it is the world of ideas between birth and death, kills the etheric substance and allows us to perceive the world as a physical world. We would have an etheric world around us if we did not kill this etheric substance through the world of ideas, bringing it down to physical form. The world of ideas, as we have it as human beings, connects with the sensory qualities in our organs, paralyzing these sensory qualities and bringing them down to what we experience as the physical world.

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That is the fact of the matter. You can see from Dr. Stein's short paper, from his dissertation, how close he has come to this, through a spirited interpretation of what can be gained in the field of anthroposophy, of the character of the world of perception. In fact, there is nothing in the current physiological literature as good as this little book by Dr. Stein regarding the physiology of the senses.

So on the one hand we have this fact: that through the world of ideas we dampen the etheric surge of the sense qualities. What is the broader context of this? It is connected with the fact that the world of ideas that we experience as human beings between birth and death, as rising up from within, does not appear in its true form. People cannot see through this, that the ideas as they are experienced by them as human beings in the physical body do not have the true form of these ideas. People are still so crudely organized in present-day civilization that they would never think of saying to themselves, for example: You wake up from sleep, you have experienced a whole dream that has symbolically expressed to you what is screaming “Fire!” outside on the street. One experiences symbolically something that is quite different outside. What we have in ideas is very different from the way an external event is formed in the dream fantasy; but in the world of ideas we nevertheless also have something that is nothing other than the reflection of a completely different world. And what world is it? We have often spoken of this. It is the world that the human being has gone through before birth, or let us say before conception. This is what is shadowed here in life, up to the abstract world of ideas, experienced in a concrete way. Between death and a new birth, we live in the reality of what is only present here in the world of ideas in these shadow images of concepts, perceptions and ideas. Just as the outer world shines into the dream, so the prenatal world shines into our world between birth and death, by having an effect on the formation of ideas. But while everything is alive in what the ideas are between death and a new birth, while what is real in the world of ideas touches our own being, while we touch our own substantial being by touching ourselves, as we now touch our physical body, only that which we do not even know is cast into this earthly life from the world of ideas. But we use this shadow of our spiritual existence to make our very existence on earth possible. What do the gods give us when they send us into this world through birth? They give us the shadow image of the existence we have between death and a new birth. These shadows are the ideas, and these ideas serve us here to become physical human beings at all, otherwise we would swim as ethereal beings in the ethereal sea. We kill off the etheric life with the shadow images of our life between death and a new birth.

In this way, we place the human being in the whole universe, in the cosmos. This is another point where we gain real human insight. Here we connect what we have in our present experience with eternal experience. Here we say: When you think, when you look at the outer world through your senses and dull the etheric life that takes place in your eyes and ears with your ideas so that you can bear it and be human, then you do so with the inheritance, with the after-effect of your eternal human being, as you have developed it between death and a new birth.

Thus expanding human consciousness, thus pouring into the human being some of the knowledge that connects us with the whole universe — that is a need of the present. And all outer science will wither away, all outer culture will lead to decline. The death of the West will occur when people do not decide to acquire such a knowledge of the human being that, by observing the external conditions of life, reconnects the human being to the cosmos and thus reconnects the human being to the cosmos in such a way that the human being, by experiencing the world of ideas here, becomes aware of the eternal. It is precisely for this reason that this world of ideas is something so sober and abstract, because it is only the shadow image of the eternal and because it is basically intended to deadening the sense life that otherwise floods us ethereally.

Thus we are connected with our life with the prenatal. The traditional religious denominations do not like to point to this prenatal, indeed they even decisively reject it. I have already touched on the fact that it is precisely the peculiarity of the present traditional religious denominations that they speak only of the after-death, not of the prenatal, of the pre-existence. They do not want to speak of this because then one cannot appeal to man's egoism, to which one appeals when one preaches to man only about the life after death; for man wants to enjoy the knowledge of the life after death between birth and death. That which imposes obligations on them for this life, because the gods have released them from the spiritual world to fulfill their mission, does not appeal to human selfishness, it appeals to human responsibility and human obligation. That is why one finds little agreement when one speaks of this prenatal life. And these religious beliefs have managed to make people sleep so much about this prenatal life that we may well have a word 'immortality', that is, we negate mortality, but we have no word 'unbirth', which would be equally justified. For just as little as we die with our spiritual-mental, just as little are we born with our spiritual-mental. We should have a word in the language that suggests this. Yes, the German language needs the word unbirthlich (unborn) as much as it needs unsterblich (immortal), for man recognizes only half of himself if he can only say the word unsterblich but not the word unbirthlich. From the inability of language we can recognize the inability to rise to spiritual heights in this realm.

If we now look at the other pole, we see that man has in the phantasms, from which he also forms his memory images, something in which his I surges and surges, but often surges and surges in a chaotic way. Although man knows that his I lives in it, he does not rely on letting himself be told something about the nature of this I from the phantasms. If we look at the facts — and you can see this in the most diverse passages of our anthroposophical literature —, we have to ask ourselves: What exactly is it that develops from within us as the sum of our memory images, or, for that matter, as the sum of our imaginative images? It is nothing other than the transformation of that which, before it is metamorphosed into the power of memory or the power of imagination, lives in us as a growth force. What lives in the body as a growth force, when it emancipates itself from the physical, becomes the soul-spiritual power of memory. You know that up to the age of seven, when the change of teeth occurs, the same force appears in the human being that later forms well-contoured memories in the soul memory; it works on the body, shaping it. What ultimately drives out the teeth is the same force that lives in us as the power of imagination. In short, in what lives in us as phantasms, we have the same power that actually makes us grow, that underlies our becoming organic. We emancipate it from the organism. What does that mean?

There is another significant life riddle hidden there; it says: We are, so to speak, tearing this phantasmagorical power out of our organism. If we think that we leave it inside, how would we stand in the world? Imagine that everything you detach from your organism, so to speak, so that you can control it at will with your ego, with your personality, everything would surge in your organism. You would not say: I will – but you would feel the surging of your blood that drives you to your movements; you would not say: I take up the pen – but you would feel the mechanism of your arm muscles. You would feel yourself inside, losing yourself in the world, if you did not tear the world of phantasms away from your organism. Your independence would disappear. What moves within you, what lives within you, would be only a continuation within your skin of what is outside. Man must therefore say to himself: the grass grows out of certain forces outside my skin, within my skin my spleen grows, my liver; but I would not feel any difference if I could not tear my phantasms away from what organizes within me. Out there, I do not tear something away; I take the entity in its totality. Within my skin, I tear away the world of my phantasms. In this way I come to my independence. This is how we can find the bed, the substrate for the 'I'-ness in man. That is the other pole of inner experience.

While we have to kill our sensory experience through the world of ideas so that we can place ourselves in the physical world, for otherwise we would flood as spectra in the etheric sea, we have to tear away the world of phantasms from our organic events, otherwise we would simply be a link in nature like the growing tree. We would not stand there as an independent entity, emancipated from the rest of the world.

In this way, we recognize ourselves as human beings in our essence within the human being. And if we look further, we say to ourselves: This personal life between birth and death is what makes us experience the ego here between birth and death. But we do not experience the whole of our inner life, that which lies within our skin; this remains a shadow of that which constitutes our being after death. Just as we are connected to the pre-birth through the pole of ideas, we are connected to the after-death through the pole of phantasms, in which the will lives. We are attached to our unborn through our world of ideas, and to our immortal through our world of phantasms, which is now a world of phantasms, so that when we pass through the gate of death, it is shaped into a regular cosmos in which we then weave, live and are after death.

This is the effect of a true knowledge of the human being, of a spiritual realization of one's place in the cosmos. By answering these questions in terms of what he really recognizes in himself, in terms of what has entered from the cosmos into our inner being, the human being knows where he comes from, where he stands, and where he is going. Such knowledge is not like the knowledge that has gradually destroyed the culture of the West. Such knowledge has a different significance. This culture of the West has really been destroyed by its knowledge. Look back at the knowledge that people had until the middle of the 15th century. People today scoff at this knowledge. They consider it the childish knowledge of a childish humanity. They say to themselves: We have come so gloriously far in the present; only now do we have real chemistry, real physics, real biology, and so on. But there is a significant difference between the old knowledge, when it can only be properly understood in its truth and the rootless knowledge of the present. If you look into the old knowledge, as it existed until the middle of the 15th century, you will see: by appropriating elements of knowledge from the world, the human being always took something with him, through which he was connected to the world. Just consider: however cleverly you reflect on a tree and however much conceptual content you absorb into your soul about the tree, you are still aware that more lives in the tree than you can absorb with your ideas; the same applies to a flower and even to a crystal. If you look at the modern world, which has gradually become machine-like, then the human being is, I would say, standing in front of the object that has become completely transparent in terms of ideas. The machine we build, the mechanism we construct, we see through it. We know: the machine is built from these forces, in this and that combination. - Following the pattern of what man has built in technology, he has then also formed a world view and he now also imagines the universe as a large machine.

Because we have lost reverence for the enigma in the mechanical cultural order, because the machine has become ideationally transparent to us, we need to reconnect with the human being today in order to rediscover spirituality. People who could still seek spirituality by looking for it in natural objects did not need knowledge that was brought forth from the human being as we need it. We, who have gradually torn ourselves away from the world to the point of mechanically grasping it, to the point of building a mechanized technology, need the living spiritual science in contrast to dead technology, which also impacts our thinking life. This spiritual science connects human beings to the spiritual universe, to the spiritual cosmos, in the way we have again indicated today. But we must achieve this connection in the present by truly transforming our inner being before we go to the outside world. This transformation is taken into account by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wherever it occurs in practice.

We founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Little by little, people come to observe in the Waldorf School. This is what people of the modern age do; when something interests them here or there, they go and see it, then they “know” it, and under certain circumstances they can also set something like that up. That is how our lives have gradually become. But that is not what the Waldorf School is about. What it is about is the fact that, above all, one can delve into the inner life that has been introduced into the didactics and pedagogy at the Waldorf School. It is about the fact that one can grasp the relationship between the human being and the world in a completely new way. In terms of the world of ideas, people are indeed generous. Man does not want to keep his world of ideas to himself. He would like everyone to have the same ideas, that is, he would like to give his ideas to all people. Man is not so generous with regard to other goods; he prefers to keep them to himself. He is happy to give everyone his ideas. This is precisely what makes the radical difference between the spiritual world on the one hand and the economic world on the other. This difference is radically present if one only wants to look at it, and basically, if someone under the old system tends to be a teacher, it only consists of generosity with regard to the world of ideas. This is because children are even better at accepting gifts than adults, who may encounter you with criticism and resistance. It is even easier to give gifts of knowledge to children.

Of course, these instincts must also be taken into account in Waldorf schools and by Waldorf teachers. But a new element is introduced that can only come from the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. That is, to what was always traditional in the earlier confessions, to the afterlife, is added the decisive view of the prenatal, so that we are clear that in the child that grows up, what comes down from the spiritual worlds is gradually revealed. We came down from the spiritual worlds at a certain time. The gods sent us into this world, and we carry out what the gods have placed in us. The children come down later; they have been in the spiritual world longer. We look to what shines out of the children's souls. They carry messages from the spiritual worlds, where they were longer than we were. A feeling that something is coming down from the spiritual world into the present, that falls into the children, that the teacher first has to unravel, that a giving, which one so gladly does, is joined by a taking - that can only come from the spirit of true spiritual science, when the idea of pre-existence is joined by the idea of post-existence in living feeling.

What is new and what is poured into the pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf school is what matters; that is to say, basically only someone who has taken up anthroposophically oriented spiritual science into his own heart and soul can understand the Waldorf school. And only then should he sit in on classes, otherwise the few hours he has sat in on classes at the Waldorf school will show him nothing but writing on the board or speaking to the children and so on. But it is so inconvenient for people in the present day to really find their way into spirituality. Basically, why should we want to find the cause of this? If we take such works, which are truly born out of a current of the old, into our hands, we can ask: What is thought about the acquisition of spirituality by the human being?

I have laid out in front of me the “Textbook of Philosophy on an Aristotelian-Scholastic Basis for Use in Higher Educational Institutions and for Self-Teaching” by Alfons Lehmen, a Jesuit priest, fourth expanded and improved edition, published by Peter Beck, a Jesuit priest. The work was first published in 1899 and the fourth edition was published in 1917. I would like to read to you what is written on page 8 of the introduction about the spirit of this philosophy, which is thus genuinely Catholic philosophy. We will see in a moment that we are dealing with genuine Catholic philosophy. It says:

"From what has been said, it is not difficult to see what is to be thought of the principle of the ‘absolute freedom of science’. This principle grants every individual the right to form and advocate any opinion they choose, without fear of any doctrinal authority objecting to it. But freedom is not boundless. The Church's teaching authority has the right to condemn a philosophical opinion if it contradicts a revealed teaching or logically leads to such a contradiction. We assume here that an ecclesiastical teaching authority has been established by God with the task of protecting and interpreting divine revelation. With this mandate, the right in question is directly established. For the execution of the mandate given to it, the teaching office of the Church must be able to explain the true meaning of the word of God and to designate false interpretations as false. Hence, when the opinion of a philosopher or of a school of philosophy directly or indirectly challenges the true meaning of the content of revelation, the teaching authority of the Church has the power to judge the error as such and the authority to condemn it before the public.

This is quoted as the preface to a textbook on philosophy! Now, if you take the whole spirit of such a controversy, as is also the case today, what does it reveal? It reflects the whole Christian spirit that Paul meant when he spoke the word: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” As the Christ lives in us, He awakens the spiritual element in us, and it is precisely through this Christ-ization that we become able to connect man to the spiritual cosmos. We have often spoken about this meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha and we will speak about it again in more detail tomorrow. But there is one thing the Christ had to make clear to people, in order to show people how man has to gain his truth from the spirit, from the divine spirit. One need only recall another saying of Christ Jesus, and everything in this direction is given: “My kingdom is not of this world”; that is, the kingdom that the Christ wants to ignite in man must not be established in this world. It must be established by man's finding the way out of this sensual world and into the supersensible world.

My kingdom is of that other world, which is not this sensual world. Who has sinned most against this Word of Christ? The one who claims that a kingdom founded on this world, a kingdom that has its center in Rome, in physical Rome, a kingdom that works with physical advice and counsel, such a physical kingdom that is entirely of this world, is the kingdom that can somehow spread the Christian truth. Since the Kingdom of Christ is not of this world, it is certainly not of Rome. We are thus pointing out that in the present time, all that is of this world, all that wants to stamp even the truth so strongly with the character of this world that it says: ” The teaching authority of the Church has the right to condemn a philosophical opinion when it is in contradiction to a revealed doctrine or when it leads consistently to such a contradiction,” that is, insofar as the Church decrees it! Therefore, such books do not appear as books, for example, by anthroposophists, that one enters with one's whole personality and only with this and says: What I have to represent, I represent out of my connection with the spirit of Truth” — but here is the title: ‘Textbook of Philosophy on an Aristotelian-Scholastic Basis’, by Alfons Lehmen S. J., fourth edition 1917. If you turn the pages, you will find: Imprimatur Friburg, Thomas, Archbishop. That is, here not a personality represents what she has to represent as a personality, but a worldly body, from which everyone who wants to publish something that is to be recognized must get the imprimatur. Here a body, which is of this world and stamps truth from this world, represents that which is established as truth!

Today, we must not be cowardly, but look courageously at what true Christianity is and what alleged Christianity is. We are living in a time that has led to this catastrophe because people have been cowardly enough not to live outwards what they have more or less recognized inwardly. Our catastrophe is, in its origin, a spiritual catastrophe – as we have often said – and we will not emerge from this catastrophe until we turn to the Spirit of Truth, which, in spiritual vision, seeks that power which gives it the “Imprimatur”, not an ecclesiastical authority established by a worldly organization.

It cannot be said that our present age has no ideals. On the contrary, it has a great many ideals which, however, are not viable. Why is this so? Well, imagine—please forgive the somewhat bizarre image, but it does meet the case—a hen is about to hatch a chick and we take the egg away and hatch it out in a warm place, letting the chick emerge from the egg. So far so good; but if we were to do the same thing under the receiving part of an air pump and therefore in a vacuum, do you think the chick emerging from the egg would thrive? We would have all the developmental factors which evolution has given except for one thing—somewhere to put the chick for it to have the necessary conditions for life.

This is more or less how it is with the beautiful ideals people talk about so much today. Not only do they sound beautiful, but they are indeed ideals of great value. But the people of today are not inclined to face the realities of evolution, though the present age demands this. And so it happens that the oddest kinds of societies may evolve, representing and demanding all kinds of ideals, and yet nothing comes of it. There were certainly plenty of societies with ideals at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it cannot be said that the last three years have brought those ideals to realization. People should learn something from this, however—as I have said a number of times in these lectures.

Last Sunday (14 October) I sketched a diagram to show the spiritual development of the last decades. I asked you to take into account that anything which happens in the physical world has been in preparation for some time in the spiritual world. I was speaking of something quite concrete, namely the battle which began in the 1840s in the spiritual world lying immediately above our own. This was a metamorphosis of the battles which are always given the ancient symbol of the battle fought by St Michael against the dragon. I told you that this battle continued until November 1879, and after this Michael gained the victory—and the dragon, that is the ahrimanic powers, were cast down into the human sphere. Where are they now?

Now consider this carefully—the powers from the school of Ahriman which fought a decisive battle in the spiritual world between 1841 and 1879 were cast down into the human realm in 1879. Since then their fortress, their field of activity, is in the thinking, the inner responses and the will impulses of human beings, and this is specifically the case in the epoch in which we now are.

You must realize that infinitely many of the thoughts in human minds today are full of ahrimanic powers, as are their will impulses and inner responses. Events like these which play between the spiritual and the physical worlds are part of the great scheme of things; they are concrete facts which have to be reckoned with. What good is it to get bogged down in abstractions over and over again and to say something as abstract as: ‘Human beings must fight Ahriman.’ Such an abstract formula will get us nowhere. At the present time some people have not the least idea of the fact that they are in an atmosphere full of spirits. This is something which has to be considered in all its significance.

If you consider just this—that as a member of the Anthroposophical Society you are in a position to hear of these things and to occupy your thoughts and feelings with them—you will be aware of the full seriousness of the matter and that you have a task today, depending on your particular place in this present time, which is so full of riddles, so much open to question and so confused. You have to bring to this the best kinds of feelings and inner responses of which you are capable. Let us take the following example. Suppose a handful of people who have naturally come together and become friends, know of the spiritual situation I have described and of other, similar ones, whilst many other people do not know of them. You can be sure that if this hypothetical group of people were to decide to use the power they are able to gain from such knowledge for a particular purpose, the group—and its followers, though these would tend to be unaware of this—would be extremely powerful compared to people who have no idea of this and do not want to know of such things.

Precisely such a group existed in the eighteenth century and still continues today. A certain group of people knew of the facts of which I have spoken; they knew that the events I have described as happening in the nineteenth and on into the twentieth century would happen. In the eighteenth century this group decided to pursue certain aims which were in their own interests and to work towards certain impulses. This was done quite systematically.

The masses of humanity go through life as if asleep, without thought; they are completely unaware of what is going on in groups, some of them quite large, which may be right next door. Today, more than ever, people are much given up to illusion. Just consider the way in which many people keep saying today: ‘lt is amazing how effective modern communications are and how this brings people together! Everybody hears about everybody else! This is totally different from the way it was in earlier times.’ You will recall all the things people tend to say on the subject. But we only need to take a cool, rational view of some specific instances to find some very odd things going on in modern times. Who would believe, for example—I am merely giving an illustration—that the Press, which understands everything and goes into everything, would ever fail to make new literary works widely known? You would not think, would you, that profound, significant, epochmaking literary works would remain unknown? Surely we must hear of them in some way or other? Well, in the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘the Press’, as we call it today—with due respect—was in the early stages of becoming what it is today. A new literary work appeared at that time which was more epoch-making and of more radical importance than all the well-known authors taken together, people like Spielhagen,¹ Gustav Freytag,² Paul Heyse³ and many others whose works went through numerous editions. The work in question was Dreizehnlinden by Wilhelm Weber,⁴ and it really was more widely read in the last third of the nineteenth century than any other work. But I ask you, how many people in this room do not know of the existence of Wilhelm Weber's Dreizehnlinden? You see how people live alongside each other, in spite of the Press. Profoundly radical ideas are presented in beautiful, poetic language in Dreizehnlinden, and these are alive today in the hearts and minds of thousands of people.

I have spoken of this to show that it is entirely possible today for the mass of people to know nothing of radically new developments which are right on their doorstep. You may be sure, if there is anyone here who has not read Dreizehnlinden—and I assume there must be some among our friends—that these individuals must nevertheless know three or four people who have read it. The barriers separating people are such that some of the most important things simply are not discussed among friends. People do not talk to each other. The instance I have given concerns only a minor matter in terms of world history, but the same applies to major matters. Things are going on in the world which many people fail to see clearly.

Thus it also happened that in the eighteenth century a society spread certain views and ideas which were taking root in people's minds and became effective in achieving the aims of such societies. The ideas entered into the social sphere and determined people's attitudes to others. People do not know the sources of many things that live in their emotions, inner responses and will impulses. Those who understand the processes of evolution do know, however, how impulses and emotions are produced. This was the case with a book published by such a society in the eighteenth century—perhaps not the book itself, but the ideas on which it was based; the book shows the way in which Ahriman is involved in different animals. The ahrimanic Spirit was, of course, called the devil then, and it was shown how the devil principle comes to expression in different ways in individual animal species. The Age of Enlightenment was at its height in the eighteenth century, and, of course, enlightenment still flourishes today. Really clever people, many of them to be found as members of the Press, managed to turn it into a joke and say, ‘Once again, some ...—I'm putting dot dot dot here—has written a book to say that animals are devils!’ Ah, but to spread ideas like these in such a way in the eighteenth century that they would take root in the minds of many people, and in doing so take account of the true laws of human evolution—that really had an effect. For it was important that the idea that animals were devils should exist in many minds by the time Darwinism came along and the idea would then arise in many nineteenth-century minds that people had gradually evolved from animals. At the same time, large numbers of other people had the idea that animals were devils. A strange accord was thus produced. As this really happened, it was perfectly real. People write histories about all kinds of things, but the forces which are really at work are not to be found in them.

We need to consider the following: animals can only thrive if they have air—not in the vacuum to be found under the receiver of an air pump. In the same way, ideas and ideals can only thrive if human beings enter into the real atmosphere of spiritual life. This means, however, that spiritual life must be encountered as a reality. Today, people like generalities better than most other things. And they easily fail to notice that since 1879 ahrimanic powers have been forced to descend from the spiritual world into the human realm—this is a fact. They had to penetrate human intellectuality, human thinking, responses and perceptions. And we will not find the right attitude to those powers by simply using the abstract formula: ‘Those powers must be fought.’ Well, what are people doing to fight them? What they are doing is no different from asking the stove to be nice and warm, yet failing to put in wood and light the fire. The first thing we must know is that, seeing that these powers have come down to earth, we must live with them; they exist and we cannot close our eyes to them, for they will be more powerful than ever if we do this. This is indeed the point: The ahrimanic powers which have taken hold of the human intellect become extremely powerful if we do not want to know them or learn about them.

The ideal of many people is to study science and then apply the laws of science to the social sphere. They only want to consider anything which is ‘real’, meaning anything which can be perceived by the senses, and never give a thought to the things of the spirit. If this ideal were to be achieved by a large section of humanity the ahrimanic powers would have gained their purpose, for people would then not know they existed. A monistic religion similar to Haeckel's materialistic monism⁵ would be established and prove to be the perfect field for the work of these powers. It would suit them very well if people did not know they existed, for they could then work in the subconscious.

One way to help the ahrimanic powers, therefore, is to establish an entirely naturalistic religion. If David Friedrich Strauss⁶ had fully achieved his ideal, which was to establish the narrow-minded religion which prompted Nietzsche to write an essay about him,⁷ the ahrimanic powers would feel even more at ease today than they do already. This is only one way, however. The ahrimanic powers will also thrive if people nurture the elements which they desire to spread among people today: prejudice, ignorance and fear of the life of the spirit. There is no better way of encouraging them.

Just think how many people there are today who actually make it their business to foster prejudice, ignorance and fear of the spiritual powers. As I said in yesterday's public lecture,⁸ the decrees against Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and others were not lifted until 1835. This means that until then Catholics were forbidden to study anything relating to the Copernican view, and so on. Ignorance in this respect was actively promoted, and gave an enormous boost to the ahrimanic powers. This was a real service given to those powers, for it gave them the opportunity to make thorough preparations for the campaign they would start in 1841.

A second statement should really follow the one I have just made to render it complete. However, this second statement cannot yet be made public by anyone who is truly initiated into these things. But if you get a feeling of what lies behind the words I have spoken, you may perhaps gain an idea of what is implied.

The scientific view is entirely ahrimanic. We do not fight it by refusing to know about it, however, but by being as conscious of it as possible and really getting to know it. You can do no better service for Ahriman than to ignore the scientific view or to fight it out of ignorance. Uninformed criticism of scientific views does not go against Ahriman, but helps him to spread illusion and confusion in a field which should really be shown in a clear light.

People must gradually come to the realization that everything has two sides. Modern people are so clever, are they not?—infinitely clever; and these clever modern people say the following: In the fourth post-Atlantean age, in the time of ancient Greece and Rome, people superstitiously believed that the future could be told from the way birds would be flying, from the entrails of animals and all kinds of other things. They were silly old fools, of course. The fact is that none of these scornful modern people actually know how the predictions were made. And everybody still talks just like the individual whom I gave as an example the other day,⁹ who had to admit that the prophesy given in a dream had come true, but went on to say: Well, it was as chance would have it.

Yet conditions were such in the fourth post-Atlantean age that there really was a science which considered the future. Then, people would not have been able to think that the kind of principles which are applied today would achieve anything in a developing social life. They could not have gained the great perspectives of a social nature, which went far beyond their own time, if they had not had a ‘science’, as it were, of the future. Believe me, everything people achieve today in the field of social life and politics is actually still based on the fruits of that old science of the future. This, however, cannot be gained by observing the things that present themselves to the senses. It can never be gained by using the modern scientific approach; for anything we observe in the outside world with the senses makes a science of the past. Let me tell you a most important law of the universe: If you merely consider the world as it presents itself to the senses, which is the modern scientific approach, you observe past laws which are still continuing. You are really only observing the corpse of a past world. Science is looking at life that has died.

Imagine this is our field of observation (Fig. 10a, white circle), shown in diagrammatic form; this is what we have before our eyes, our ears and our other senses. Imagine this (yellow circle) to be all the scientific laws capable of being discovered. These laws do not relate to what is in there now, but to what has been there, what has been and gone and remains only in a hardened form. You need to find the things that are outside those laws, things which eyes cannot see and physical ears cannot hear: a second world with different laws (mauve circle). This is present inside reality, but it points to the future.

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The situation with the world is just like the situation you get with a plant. The true plant is not the plant we see today; something is mysteriously inside it which cannot yet be seen and will only be visible to the eyes in the following year—the primitive germ. It is present in the plant, but it is invisible. In the same way the world which presents itself to our eyes holds the whole future in it, though this is not visible. It also holds the past, but this has withered and dried up and is now a corpse. Everything naturalists look at is merely the image of a ‘corpse, of something past and gone. It is also true, of course, that this past aspect would be missing if we considered the spiritual aspect only. However, the invisible element must be included if we are to have the complete reality. How can it be that people on the one hand set up Laplace's theory and on the other hand talk about the end of the world in the way Professor Dewar¹⁰ does—I spoke of this in yesterday's public lecture. He construes that when the world comes to an end, people will read their newspapers at several hundred degrees below zero in the light of luminous protein painted on the walls; milk will be solid. I would love to know how people are going to milk such solid milk! Those are completely untenable ideas, as is the whole of Laplace's theory. All these theories come to nothing as soon as one goes beyond the field of immediate observation, and this is because they are theories of corpses, of things which are dead.

Clever people will say today that the priests of ancient Greece and Rome were either scoundrels and swindlers or that they were superstitious, for no one in their right mind can believe it is possible to discover anything about the future from the flight of birds and the entrails of animals. In time to come, people will be able to look down on the ideas of which people are so proud today; they will feel just as clever then as the present generation does now in looking down on the Roman priests conducting their sacrifices. Speaking of Laplace's theory and of Dewar they will say: Those were strange superstitions. People in the past observed a few millennia in earth evolution and drew conclusions from this as to the initial and final states of the earth. How foolish those superstitions were! Imagine the way in which those peculiar, superstitious people spoke of the sun and the planets separating out from a nebula and everything beginning to rotate. The things they will be saying about Laplace's theory and Dewar's ideas concerning the end of the world will be much worse than anything people are saying today about finding out about the future from sacrificial animals, the flight of birds and so on.

They are so high and mighty, these people who have entered fully into the Spirit and attitudes of scientific thinking and look down on the old myths and tales. ‘Humanity was childish then, with people taking dreams seriously! Just think how far we have come since then: today we know that everything is governed by a law of causality; we've certainly come a long way.’ Everyone who thinks like this fails to realize one thing: The whole of modern science would not exist, especially where it has its justification, if people had not earlier thought in myths. You cannot have modern science unless it is preceded by myth; it has grown out of the myths of old and you could no more have it today than you could have a plant with only stems, leaves and flowers and no root down below. People who talk of modern science as an absolute, complete in itself, might as well talk of a plant which is alive only in its upper part. Everything connected with modern science has grown from myth; myth is its root. There are elemental spirits which observe these things from the other worlds and they howl with hell's own derision when today's mighty clever professors look down on the mythologies of old, and on all the media of ancient superstition, having not the least idea that they and all their cleverness have grown from those myths and that not a single justifiable idea they hold today would be tenable if it were not for those myths. Something else, too, causes those elemental spirits to howl with hell's own derision—and we can say hell's own, for it suits the ahrimanic powers very well to have occasion for such derision—and this is to see scientists believe that they now have the theories of Copernicus, they have Galileo's ideas, they have this splendiferous law of the conservation of energy and this will never change and will be the same for ever and ever. A shortsighted view! Myth relates to our ideas just as the scientific ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries relate to what will be a few centuries later. They will be overcome just as myth has been overcome. Do you think people will think about the solar system in 2900 in the way people think about it today? It may be the academics' superstition, but it should never be a superstition held among anthroposophists.

The justifiable ideas people have today, ideas which do indeed have some degree of greatness in the present time, arose from the mythology which evolved in the time of ancient Greece. Of course, nothing could possibly delight modern people more than to think: Ah, if only the ancient Greeks had been so fortunate as to have our modern science! But if the Greeks had had our modern science, then there could have been no knowledge of the Greek gods, no world of Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Plato or Aristotle. Dr Faust's servant Wagner would be a veritable Dr Faust himself compared to the Wagners we would have today!¹¹ Human thinking would be dry as dust, empty and corrupt, for the vitality in our thinking has its roots in Greek and altogether fourth post-Atlantean mythology. Anyone who considers mythology to have been wrong and modern thinking to be right, is like someone who cannot see the need for roses to grow on bushes, making it necessary for us to cut them if we want to have a bouquet. Why should they not come into existence entirely on their own?

So you see, the people who consider themselves to be the most enlightened today are living with entirely unrealistic ideas. The ideas evolved in the fourth post-Atlantean age seem like dreams rather than clearly defined ideas to the people of our present age; yet that particular way of thinking has provided the basis for what we are today. The thoughts we are able to evolve today will in turn provide the basis for the next age. They can only do so, however, if they evolve not only in the one direction, where they wither and dry up, but also in the direction of life. The breath of life comes into our thinking when we try and bring the things which exist to consciousness and also when we perceive the element which gives us a wideawake mind and makes us into people who are awake.

Since 1879 the situation is like this: people go to school and acquire scientific attitudes and thinking; their philosophy of life is then based on this scientific approach and they believe only the things which can be perceived in the world around us to be real, whilst everything else is purely imaginary. When people think like this, and infinitely many people do so today, Ahriman has the upper hand in the game and the ahrimanic powers are doing well. Who are these ahrimanic powers which have established their fortresses in human minds since 1879? They are certainly not human. They are angels, but they are backward angels, angels who are not following their proper course of evolution and therefore no longer know how to perform their proper function in the spiritual world that is next to our own. If they still knew how to do it, they would not have been cast down in 1879. They now want to perform their function with the aid of human brains. They are one level lower in human brains than they should be. ‘Monistic’ thinking, as it is called today, is not really done by humans. People often speak of the science of economics today, a science in which it was said at the time when the war started that it would be over in four months—I mentioned this again yesterday. When these things are said by scientists—it does not matter so much if people merely repeat them—they are the thoughts of angels who have made themselves at home in human heads. Yes, the human intellect is to be taken over more and more by such powers; they want to use it to bring their own lives to fruition. We cannot stand up to this by putting our heads in the sand like ostriches, but only by consciously entering into the experience. We cannot deal with this by not knowing what monists think, for example, but only by knowing it; we must also know that it is Ahriman science, the science of backward angels who infest human heads, and we must know about the truth and the reality.

Of course, it can be said like this here, using the appropriate terms—ahrimanic powers—because we take these things seriously. You know that you cannot speak like this to people outside, for they are totally unprepared. This is one of the barriers which divide us from others; but it is, of course, possible to find ways and means of speaking to them in such a way that the truth comes into what we say. If there were not a place where the truth can be said, this would also deprive us of the possibility of letting it enter into the profane science outside these walls. There must be at least some places where the truth can be presented in an honest, straightforward way. Yet we must never forget that even people who have made a connection with the science of the spirit often have almost insuperable difficulties in building the bridge to the realm of ahrimanic science. I have met a number of people who were extremely well informed in a particular field of ahrimanic science, being good scientists, orientalists, etc., and had also made the connection with our spiritual research. I have gone to a great deal of trouble to encourage them to build bridges. Think of what could have been achieved if a physiologist or a biologist who had all the specialized knowledge which it is possible to gain in such fields today had reconsidered physiology or biology in the light of the spirit, not exactly using our terminology, but considering those individual sciences in our spirit! I have tried it with orientalists. You see, people may be good followers of anthroposophy, and on the other hand they are orientalists and work in the way orientalists do. They are not prepared, however, to build the bridge from one to the other. This, however, is the urgent need in our time. For, as I said, the ahrimanic powers are doing well if people believe that science gives a true image of the world around us. If, on the other hand, we use spiritual science and the inner attitude which arises from it, the ahrimanic powers do not do so well. This spiritual science takes hold of the whole human being. It makes you into another person; you come to feel differently, to have different will impulses, and to relate to the world in a different way.

It is indeed true, and initiates have always said so: ‘When human beings are filled with spiritual wisdom, these are great horrors of darkness for the ahrimanic powers and a consuming fire. It feels good to the ahrimanic angels to dwell in heads filled with ahrimanic science; but heads filled with spiritual wisdom are like a consuming fire and the horrors of darkness to them.’ If we consider this in all seriousness we can feel: filled with spiritual wisdom we go through the world in a way which allows us to establish the right relationship with the ahrimanic powers; doing the things we do in the light of this, we build a place for the consuming fire of sacrifice for the salvation of the world, the place where the terror of darkness radiates out over the harmful ahrimanic element.

Let those ideas and feelings enter into you! You will then be awake and see the things that go on in the world. The eighteenth century really saw the last remnants of the old atavistic science die. The adherents of Saint-Martin, the ‘unknown philosopher,’ who was a student of Jacob Boehme, had some of the old atavistic wisdom and also considerable foreknowledge of what then was to come, and in our day has come. In those circles it was often said that from the last third of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century a kind of knowledge would radiate out which had its roots in the same sources, the same soil, where certain human diseases have their roots—I spoke of this last Sunday (14 October); people's views would then be rooted in falsehood, and their inner feelings would come from selfishness.

Let your eyes become seeing eyes in the light of the inner feelings of which we have spoken today and let them see what is alive and active in the present time! It may well be that your hearts grow sore with some of the things you find. This does no harm, however, for clear perception, even if painful, will bear good fruit today, fruit which is needed if we are to get out of the Chaos into which humanity has entered.

The first thing, or one of the first things, will have to be a science of education. And one of the first principles to be applied in this field is one which is much sinned against today. More important than anything you can teach and consciously give to boys and girls, or to young men and women, are the things that enter unconsciously into their souls whilst they are being educated. In a recent public lecture I spoke of the way in which our memory develops as though in the subconscious, and parallel to our conscious inner life. This is something especiaily to be taken into account in education. Educators must provide the soul not only with what children understand but also with ideas they do not yet understand, which enter mysteriously into their souls and—this is important—are brought out again later in life. We are coming closer and closer to a time when people will need more and more memories of their youth throughout the whole of their lives, memories they like, memories which make them happy. Education must learn to provide systematically for this. It will be poison in the education of the future if later on in life people look back on the toil and trouble of their schooldays, on the years of education, and do not like to think back to those days. It will be poison if the years of education have not provided a source to which they can return again and again to learn new things. On the other hand, if one has learned everything there is to be learned on a subject, nothing will be left for later on.

If you think on this, you will see that principles of great consequence will have to be the future guidelines for life, and this in a very different way from what is considered to be right today. It would be good for humanity if the hard lessons to be learned in the present time were not slept through by so many, and people would use them instead to become really familiar with the thought that a great many things will have to change. People have grown much too complacent in recent times and this prevents them from comprehending this thought in its full depth and, above all, also in its full intensity.

• 1. Friedrich Spielhagen (1829–1911), German novelist.
• 2. Gustav Freytag (1816–1895), German novelist and playwright. Works translated into English are Soll und Haben (1855; Debit and Credit 1858), Die Verlorne Handschrift (1864; The Lost Manuscript 1865) and Reminiscences (English translation in 1890).
• 3. Paul Johann von Heyse (1830–1914), German writer, Nobel Prize and ennoblement in 1910. Wrote novels, plays, epic poems and translations of Italian poems but was especially famed as a writer of short stories.
• 4. Friedrich Wilhelm Weber (1813–1894), Westphalian poet. Dreizehnlinden, an epic work on the time when the Saxons were converted to Christianity, was published in 1878.
• 5. The German naturalist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel was Professor of Zoology at Jena and one of the first to outline the tree of animal evolution. His theory was one of materialistic monism. Works translated into English are Creation, 4th edn. 1892 (Natuerliche Schoepfungsgeschichte, 1868) and Evolution of Man, 1879 (Anthropogenie 1874). (See also Note 1 of lecture 2.)
• 6. David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), German theologian. His Leben Jesu (1835/36) was designed to show the Gospels to be a collection of myths with perhaps just a little historical truth to them. His second Life of Jesus, composed for the German people (1864; translated 1865) sought to create a positive life of Christ. In Der alte und der neue Glaube (translates as ‘Old and New Religious Belief, 1872) he aimed to show that religious belief was dead and a new faith had to be created on the basis of modern science and of art.
• 7. ‘David Friedrich Strauss, der Bekenner und Schriftsteller’ (translates as ‘David Friedrich Strauss, Confessor and Writer’) is part one of Nietzsche's volume of essays Unzeitgemaesse Betrachtungen (translates as ‘Untimely Thoughts’), Leipzig 1873.
• 8. Lecture given in Basle on 19 October 1917. Not translated. Published in German in GA 72, Freiheit—Unsterblichkeit—Soziales Leben (1990).
• 9. See lecture 6.
• 10. Sir James Dewar (1842–1923), Professor of Physics at Cambridge. (Earlier editions referred to Professor Drews (1865–1935) in error.)
• 11. Wagner, Faust's narrow-minded, pedantic servant and pupil in Goethe's Faust.

So far we have attempted to see the human being in relation to the universe as regards form and as regards life. We found that human beings relate in different ways to the universe at the head end and at the limb end. All these things essentially hold true for the period of human evolution in which we are today, i.e. the post-Atlantean period, and it has to be understood that anything we are able to say about the phenomena of this world always applies only for specific periods, for the world is in a process of evolution and changes radically from one stage of evolution to the next.

We saw that human beings tear themselves away, as it were, from the relationship to the zodiac. Unlike the animal head, which lies within the zodiac, the human head has been lifted out of it, going through an angle of about 90 degrees. The head end of the human being is fully in a way of life that inclines towards inorganic, lifeless nature. Here life is more or less in decline; it is dying. Both form and life tear themselves away from their connection with the cosmos, and because of this enter into a kind of frozen state, the beginning of lifelessness.

Essentially we are the outcome of previous development in this area. Think of the individual aspect of the human being and the fact that the human head is the metamorphosis of the other person who lived on earth before, and you will recall that the head points to the past, whilst the limbs point to the future.

The head part of the human being also points to the cosmic expanses of the past in another way. As you know, the head is the principal bearer of the sense organs and these had their origin on ancient Saturn. The most highly developed senses—other senses developed on ancient sun and moon—go back to the earliest stages of cosmic earth evolution. Everything connected with the human head therefore points to the past and in some respects it would be right to say: The mineral world evolved in the course of earth existence, and the human head, being the oldest part, is more than any other part involved in this process of mineralization.

Tearing themselves away from the cosmos, human beings keep the form that is no longer connected with the cosmos during their life between birth and death, and they also keep the life that is dying and becoming mineralized. We may also say that if human beings had kept the animal form, that is, if their heads had maintained the orientation given by the zodiac and therefore the weightier life that is to be found in the animal head, they would be entirely the outcome of earlier times in their heads. The head would have something that would immediately make it apparent that it has arisen out of the whole past cosmic evolution. By tearing the head away from this, human beings are in a way destroying their cosmic past.

It is tremendously important that we consider the things that were presented yesterday and the day before and realize that in the development of the head human beings essentially destroy their cosmic past. In fact, they go beyond the actual mineralization process, entering into a process in which matter is finely dispersed to an extraordinary degree. Organic forms are of course also to be found in the head, and embedded in the organic element is a process in which matter is reduced to dust to a degree that actually goes beyond the mineral level. Fig. 18.

If we look at the human head in the right way we have to say it is the focus of a process in which matter as such is reduced to nothing and it is this which makes it the bearer of a distinct inner life. The generally accepted materialistic view is entirely wrong when it comes to the form of the human head. Thanks to the head being part of the organism, human beings have a life of thoughts and ideas. This becomes possible because the material life is reduced to dust in a strange process which you may be able to picture as follows.

Imagine—as I said, it is a picture, but it will give you some idea of the extremely subtle process involved—imagine, then, a painting, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, for example. For the painting to exist in this world, it is necessary for it to have physical substance. Imagine that the physical substance falls to dust, but a fine etheric tissue would remain. So now the Sistine Madonna has turned into dust, but everything that was painted by using physical paints, including the nuances of colour, continues to exist in etheric form and someone with etheric perception would be able to perceive the etheric form that remains.

That is what the thinking process is like, the process of forming ideas. When we become conscious of a thought or an idea, this is due to the fact that because the head has been taken out of the wholeness of the cosmos, as we have seen yesterday and the day before, matter loses all significance and human beings face the constant need to let their heads come alive again because they are always disintegrating, and dying in every detail. The etheric aspect of their heads lifts out of it in the process (Fig. 18, red line on the outside) and thoughts evolve. Matter turns to dust and falls away, as it were, and the etheric remains and that is how people become aware of their ideas.

You’ll remember me saying that in the senses we already have something of a physical apparatus. The eye is a physical apparatus, except that the human ether body is active in it. There it already is the way I am now also going to describe for the rest of the head, for nerve tissue. Please take careful note of what I am going to say now. In the senses, and especially in the senses connected with the head, a separate etheric principle is active in the process of perception. In the sphere of the senses, therefore, we have a kind of independent etheric process.

Take the eye. It is a physical apparatus, but the etheric is active in it. Independent etheric life is to be found in an organ that is all the time tending to disintegrate and is really a mechanical, if not sub-mechanical, object. This is the situation in the sphere of the senses.

In the sphere of the nerves, which is an inward continuation of the sphere of the senses, the situation is such that the ether body is more closely bound up with the physical substance, but the whole of our life of the nerves wants all the time to become life of the senses. Imagine, therefore, that you are seeing a coloured surface. The ether body moves independently in this process of sensory perception. If you now leave this process aside and give yourself up to the life of the nerves, the whole sphere of the nerves becomes sphere of the senses and you have a idea of the coloured surface in your mind. We may say that in so far as human beings are nerve human beings, they become entirely sphere of the senses in their mental images or ideas.

Now comes the reaction. The senses are geared towards the physical and are able to take things in continually. The organism of the nerves takes in what the senses present to it. It changes into sphere of the senses and in doing so it partly dies. It seeks to become all eye, or all ear, for instance. To prevent this happening, the vital principle, the principle of life, enters from the rest of the organism and pervades it and the human individual lets the idea go, as it were.

To sum up, we may say that towards the head end, human beings destroy their past. They thus become human beings with nerves and senses that hold images and they have a living experience of images that moves in the etheric realm. You see if we base ourselves on the spiritual science of anthroposophy it is perfectly possible to describe the life of ideas that arises in the conscious mind.

As human beings develop their head end with regard to form, they do so in a way that in the present age exposes them to the influence of forces that evolve in the cosmos when the sun is in the Fishes, the Ram, the Bull, and so on, but they lift their heads out of this, as far as the form is concerned. The result is that the head does not become an animal head but assumes what we may call the “human vertical”, whilst the animal remains within the zodiac.

With regard to life we are able to say that towards the head end, life evolves under the influence of the outer planets Saturn and Jupiter, as we saw yesterday. But human beings lift their life out of this, and thus the following happens: If those planets were never blocked out by the sun, the whole life of the nerves would increasingly become life of the senses. People would perceive with their eyes, or their ears, but this would continue on into the life of nerves. The life of the twelve senses would be in total, inorganic chaos in their life of nerves. Due to the fact that those outermost planets are blocked out, the life of nerves is torn out of the life of senses, and human beings are able to be conscious and act with deliberation in the life of ideas—entering into sensory function and leaving it again by deliberately suppressing ideas, and so on.

Thus an independent etheric principle is active in the senses during sensory perception and a reduced life of senses that is bound to the physical body is active in the nerve organism.

The whole has image quality because by going into the vertical human beings destroy the principle that would give them not image quality but the quality of physical substance. Animals remain within the zodiac and have only dream images and not the conscious images that human beings have. Dream images grow out of the vital principle of the organism; conscious images are lifted up into an etheric life that has become independent of the physical body. It is important to realize that human beings develop an independent etheric life towards the head end because they raise that part out of both the zodiac and the movements of the planets. Then the astral body and the I enter into the independent etheric life and are able to take part in the thought and idea activity of the ether body.

We thus see that the nature of the soul principle can be understood if we know that human thought life has soul quality, that is, it does not take part in material life.

We have seen how human beings develop with regard to both form and life at the other extreme. The day before yesterday we saw that human beings become active in the world through their limbs; going back to ancient Greek times we saw how they became hunters, animal breeders, tillers of the soil and traders who sailed the oceans. Human beings continue in these activities by withdrawing from the influence of the relevant images in the zodiac. Animals remain fully under the influence of Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes and therefore develop forms that relate to the earth. A study of the zodiac will show why animal limbs have developed in a particular way. Human beings develop their system of limbs in such a way that they relate it to the earth when those zodiacal images are beneath the earth, when the earth is at that point in the zodiac in the northern hemisphere for a time. This is also why the geography of the earth offers different living conditions. Human beings are however able to transfer something they have developed in one place to another. I am speaking of things that apply to earlier times; today the different human forms mingle on the globe and the study of geography will no longer give a real idea of the way human beings relate to the macrocosm.

Here, then, human beings tear themselves away from the line of the zodiac in a different way, entering into the “human vertical” in the opposite direction. They remain fully exposed to the constellations of the zodiac with regard to form and to the outer planets with regard to the head, but withdraw from both influences by standing on the earth and letting the earth cover up the other side. Saturn and Jupiter influence human beings by letting their light shine on the earth. Living in images in their heads, human beings also receive the images of those starry worlds, just as they receive images of the planetary movements by developing the principle of life towards the head end. Images from the cosmos, the macrocosm, are taken up into the life of images that human beings develop.

At the other end, images are taken up and thus the forms develop that I showed you the day before yesterday—the limbs, forms that are the opposite of those seen in the head. Human beings also develop activities that are beyond the influence of the macrocosm, that do not allow those influences to enter.

At the head end, therefore, human beings destroy their past. The opposite is the case at the limb end. If we stood on a transparent earth so that both zodiac and planetary movements could influence us from the other side as well, we would not be able to act freely and independently but only under the influence of the life of the planets and fixed stars. Freedom of action is only possible because the earth blocks out the life of the planets and fixed stars. Furthermore, if we were fully exposed to them, then in view of the special nature of the human life span, with repeated earth lives, the life of our limbs would grow wooden, it would harden in itself. We would be unable to let matter fall to dust, and our organic substance would become cornified (horn-like) before it matured. Human limbs would be cornified in a way that is utterly different from the hoofs of horses or cows—almost all the way up. We are protected from this horny development because as human beings we are lifted out of the zodiac.

The process which results from this is the opposite of the process of reducing to dust in the head, where the past is destroyed and matter turns to dust. Development of the limb end is such that matter is not allowed to reach full cosmic maturity. It is held back. We have fingers and toes because we do not allow our limbs to reach their full growth potential. If they did, we would not just have nails but our arms and legs would be completely stiffened and cornified. By holding our limbs back we are able to develop the will in them, and this provides the basis for future lives on earth. If we allowed the limb person to reach full maturity, life would consist of one life on earth only. We preserve the basis for our future by not letting the limb person grow to maturity.

Thus we have a complete contrast: When it goes in the direction of thought, our inner life becomes a life in images; when it goes in the direction of our limbs, life becomes material, it is flesh and organic matter—“young”, I’d say. It does not cornify and grow old and because of this it is possible for the flesh to fall away and the image of youth to go through death and into the next life on earth.

There (Fig. 19) the will is able to develop, and we may say that the “will-end” of the human being is organic development not taken to its conclusion. At the head end we were able to speak of image quality, and here we must speak of something else. Organic development not taken to its conclusion remains germinal, an embryo capable of further development. At the head end we have something like an oyster shell, pure matter that has been secreted out. At the limb end we have something that is embryonic.

Here (above) we can say we have living inner experience of a purely etheric principle—the image. Here (below) we live not in the image but in germinal life and we know ourselves to be bound up with matter, which is also why we are able to move our limbs. We do not have much physical movement in the head, except in so far as our senses are transformed into limbs, so that in the head, too, we are human beings with limbs. One thing is also always to be found in the other, that is a basic principle. In a sense our eyes are also hands, in so far as they are able to move. Nevertheless, the head is largely immobile, and the lobes of the brain and similar structures in particular are incapable of voluntary movement. Even the outside of the head does not show much mobility; it is quite rare even for people to be able to move certain ear muscles; if they can, it provides them with an excellent opportunity for showing off.

Life experienced in organic substance does not allow conscious awareness to arise and this makes it possible for us to develop the will. (Up) here, then, we destroy physical matter, and (down) here we retain, in embryo, the powers for our next life on earth when physical substance falls away from us at death.

Between the two lie the life of breathing and the life of circulation, as we called them yesterday. We also saw that with regard to form this area relates to the constellations of the zodiac that lie between the upper and the lower ones.

If we consider the present-day fixed stars to be Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes, we need to relate these four (Fishes, Ram, Bull, Twins) to the head. Under their influence and in accord with the planetary movements that are above the earth, the head is given a dying life that offers experience of life in images, an inner life of ideas. The four opposite constellations—it would have been slightly different in ancient Greece—would be Virgin, Scales, Scorpion and Archer. The constellations that lie between the upper and lower ones would relate to the rhythmical aspect of the human being, just as in planetary life Mars and Mercury hold a middle position. Here, we may say, the human being swings to and fro between image and embryo. The life of breathing and of the blood illustrates this quite beautifully. We take in oxygen which gives life and is connected with the limb organism and with everything that is mobile in us. We combine the oxygen with carbon, a substance that initially has a stimulant effect on the life of the nerves and senses, bringing in an element of death, and is then cast out as a dying element. Here we have in physical, material terms the continuous contrast of extreme life in oxygen and extreme death in carbon: dying and enlivening, dying and enlivening. Life swings to and fro between these extremes.

At the level of soul life it is like this: we have inward experience of something that on the one hand is still purely etheric, like the life of thoughts; but the ether body takes hold of certain glandular structures and these glands secrete matter. At the physical level, therefore, the ether body acts on the glands. Glands do not make a connection with etheric life, the way muscles do—which are essentially part of the limb organism but secrete matter when etheric life takes hold of them. Etheric life and physical, material life therefore do not fuse completely, and we have a stage of transition. Matter is taken hold of but it also resists and is secreted out. If you study muscles and bones, the elements of the limb system, you find that matter is rigorously taken hold of by the human ether body, most of all in the bones. Nothing falls to dust and is dispersed, everything stays fresh and alive. In the head, none of the matter is taken hold of, but as the head develops, matter falls to dust. Unbound, etheric activity develops to become the life of thought. When the ether body takes hold of the glands, it unites with them but they resist. Muscle tolerates the ether body and take it into itself. Glands do not tolerate it; they immediately secrete matter and drive out the ether. At the soul level this is the life of feeling.

We can now get a real idea of the life of thought. Matter is not put to use, it only goes as far as the etheric, and conscious awareness lives in this etheric element. In the life of feeling, the ether body takes hold of glandular life, which does not tolerate it. Yet for the time that the ether body vanishes into glandular life, before secretion actually comes into effect, human beings are without their ether body, which has vanished into the glands. At that point they find themselves only in their I and astral body, and that is how it is when we feel.

idea—ether body, astral body, I
realm of feeling—astral body, I
life of will—I

If we take the ideas that come in the life of thought—the life of the physical body is cast off; human beings experience themselves in ether body, astral body and I. In the human head the I is active in the astral and the ether bodies and rejects the physical element; the I is thus able, with the aid of the astral body, to experience thoughts, thinking, in the ether body. In the realm of feeling human beings have the ether body taken away from them when it takes hold of glandular life; it is withdrawn from them until the gland has taken the secretory activity to its conclusion. The ether body is therefore in the physical body and human beings have only the astral body and I available for conscious inner life. Experience is at the level of feelings and dream-like in quality, because we enter into the physical body.

In their life of will, human beings enter completely into organic matter with the ether body. When we are awake, the ether body takes the astral body with it, and this enables us to move our limbs. The astral body is also taken into matter and is therefore withdrawn from us so that we have conscious awareness only of the I.

Thus we find that the inner life and the physical life are related at every level. Basing ourselves on the science of the spirit we merely need to have a clear picture of the way in which I, astral body and ether body are involved in the physical body and we perceive the difference between the inner life of thought, the inner life of feeling and the inner life of will. We find that the inner life of thought is in the dying part of the organism which has torn itself away from the upper part of the world of the fixed stars and the upper world of the planets, and become a life in images by reducing the past to dust. We find that in the middle, or rhythmical region we are able to share in life relating to the past and therefore also to the macrocosm, which has evolved out of the past; yet we also react to this because there is a continuous rhythmical element—on the one hand the rhythm of oxygen combining with carbon, and on the other that of glands being taken hold of and responding with secretion. When the macrocosmic life in us is taken hold of and takes hold, the microcosm, that is, the individual human being, reacts. We live in rhythm not only inside ourselves but with the world; we open up to the cosmos and take it back into ourselves. We are half-way individual beings and move rhythmically to and fro between macrocosm and microcosm, and this is where we are alive and active in our feelings. Here we can see exactly how the physical, material aspect of the organism interacts with the element of soul and spirit. In the life of the will, physical matter is most strongly taken hold of and this is where we are most of all mere microcosm, withdrawing entirely from macrocosmic activity in becoming active ourselves.

Living in the northern hemisphere, we withdraw from the other fixed stars and planets in our own way; people living in the southern hemisphere do the same in a similar way, and the whole does, of course, rotate. In our limbs we are therefore entirely microcosm between birth and death, in a world of our own which therefore is also able to take itself forward into a future. We are today developing the will as the youngest element in the inner life. This is still entirely dependent on the physical body for support; it allows only the I to find to itself, with the astral body and the ether body caught up in the physical body.

We shall never understand the inner life unless we are able to differentiate between I, astral body and ether body. Anyone who does not have a real, inner grasp of these will never be able to understand the life of thought, the life of feeling and the life of will. What happens when people refuse to grasp this reality today?

What happens is that people who carry some authority stand there and tell people that it is not really possible to know anything about the inner life, though certain phenomena suggest that something exists that has soul quality, which they call “psychoid”. Giving an explanation of the way Descartes¹⁵ and Spinoza¹⁶ endeavoured to discover the nature of this interaction, they are unable to be anything but abstract—the body on one side, the soul on the other. It will never be possible to get at the truth in this way, because the relationship between soul and body is different in the life of thought, the life of feeling and the life of will. People will not get to the truth if they insist on making one big muddle of the whole inner life and talk of a “psychoid” element rather than giving real consideration to the way the I, astral body and ether body are related in real life. It is as if someone were to refuse to look at the real human being and talk about an “anthropoid” in order to avoid speaking of the anthropos¹⁷ That kind of science is anthropoid-sophy rather than anthroposophy; it is psychoidology.

If we give real consideration to the life of soul and spirit, we can give full detail of the “interactions” and so on, as people call them. There will be no need to cut out bits of the liver, or the brain, and present them neatly as abstract tissues, the way anatomists do. Instead we must know that the relationship of the human being to the cosmos is different at the head end and the limb end. At the head end we reduce it to dust, destroying the past. At the limb end we do not allow growth to reach its full potential but remain embryonic.

The worst thing is when people leave truth aside and speculate on the nature of the physical body as well as of soul and spirit. Using worn-out old words and making them into -oids, they fail to grasp the real truth. There are people nowadays who have no notion of how to get from a word to a concept. Someone called Arthur Drews¹⁸ has been giving lectures to non-conformist religious and monist congregations in Germany today, both of which live on the dregs of the materialistic science that goes back to the 1860s and 70s. He has studied Hartmann’s philosophy¹⁹—as a young man he would always dance attendance on him—but he really only took in the words, which roll about in his head like the balls in a pin-ball machine, and he has no idea of how to get from word to concept. And he uses these words from Hartmann’s philosophy, words that whizz around in his head as if in a pinball machine, to criticize anthroposophy!

Those are the fruits of education in our modern civilization, where people refuse to give serious consideration to the methods available for gaining real insight into the relationship between human being and cosmos. These enable us to describe the human form and human life on the basis of the cosmos and to understand that because human beings are specifically torn away from the cosmos they have dying life at one end, which enables them to develop an inner life of ideas based on images, and a life that remains embryonic at the other extreme, which allows the will element to develop.

These things sound incomprehensible to the people involved in the official science of today, and as a rule—not always but as a rule—we cannot expect them to gain access to them, for essentially they have lost all real understanding with their kaleidoscope of words. For anyone who knows the real situation, those lectures about psychoids are essentially no more than word kaleidoscopes; the things said about Descartes, Spinoza and so on, right up to Fechner,²⁰ have no inner connection and are kaleidoscopes of words. The scraps of words that whirl around in confusion can only gain inner meaning through insight into I, astral body, ether body, and so on. It seems a pity that one has to talk about the present time like this; but when it comes to the “intellectual life”, as it is called, we have to speak about the present age like this. The philosophers have no longer been able to get their bearings because decades ago their words have lost all meaning.

The latest thing is to appoint modern scientists as professors of philosophy. They are asked to hand down philosophy. It started with Mach,²¹ and today Driesch²² is one of the main representatives of the species. Scientists are being appointed as professors of philosophy because the philosophers no longer have anything meaningful to say, whilst scientists at least still have the faculty of external observation. What they say about philosophy is, of course, even more empty of meaning than the things said by philosophers, who at least still had the words. This really has been a strange development. We have seen philosophy, which still had meaningful content in the first half of the 19th century, evaporate completely in the wordy works of someone like Kuno Fischer,²³ for instance. But in his day the chairs of philosophy were still held by philosophers, even if their philosophy no longer had inner meaning.

It is absolutely necessary that we realize this clearly and that there are at least a few people in the world who see through all the glitter of those “psychoids” and know that we are deeply in decadence, particularly in the field of academics. You can’t know this strongly enough, and I think it will be good for you to enter deeply into the things I have tried to put before you in these three lectures.

We have seen that on the one hand man appeared to be connected with the universe in outer form and in the way of life, but that he has renounced the universe at the head end and at the limb end, so that we are only wholly given up to the rhythm of the universe in so far as we are rhythmical human beings; renounced in order to develop the life of thoughts as life in images, that is, independent of physical matter, at one end, and at the other end to develop the life of will by keeping matter at an embryonic level, not letting it assume the rigid form that the macrocosm is able to impose. The limb end is thus kept mobile and has the potential to evolve and progress from earth to existence on Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan.

Hold on to these things and you can see that the insight gained in anthroposophy really wants to take hold first of all of our sense of truth, secondly of our sense of aesthetics—when you study the human form as it arises out of the macrocosm—and thirdly also in the direction of what is good and of religious life. These three lectures are particularly able to show the profound justification of the statement that has been made so many times here, in courses and also on other occasions, that we must look for a synthesis, bringing together in harmony religion, art and science. This cannot be achieved unless we come to a genuine cosmology which clearly shows the reality of the human form and of human life.

Something else we need is a theory of independent activity in the inner life, a theory that shows us the true nature of man, who has torn himself away from the cosmos at either end. And we also need to know the qualities which human beings develop independently, relating to future worlds which will take the place of the earth within the macrocosm. This will lead to deeply religious inner responses and feelings.

If human civilization is to show true progress we need a cosmology that includes the human being and does not leave humanity aside the way our present-day cosmology does. We also need a theory of independent activity and we need ethics that are able to show that the potential for good which they hold is the seed for worlds. We need ethics that have reality, their values not abstract but having the power in them to come to realization. Cosmology, a theory of independent activity and ethics—these are the things humanity will need to be able to rise to something higher.

• 15. René, Descartes (1596–1650), French philosopher and mathematician.
• 16. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch-Jewish philosopher and theologian.
• 17. Anthropos, Greek for “human being”.
• 18. Arthur Drews (1865–1935), a professor of philosophy who gave a number of lectures against anthroposophy in the autumn of 1921. See his Metaphysik und Anthroposophie, Berlin 1922, esp. the chapter on perception of the supersensible.
• 19. Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), German philosopher
• 20. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87), German philosopher and psychologist.
• 21. Ernst Mach (1839–1916) Austrian physicist and philosopher.
• 22. Hans Driesch (1867–1914), German zoologist and philosopher.
• 23. Ernst Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), German philosopher who wrote a major history of modern philosophy, books on logic and metaphysics and on Kant, Descartes, Goethe, Lessing and Schiller.

Having considered the way human beings relate to the cosmos in the form of the human organization, in levels of life and with regard to the contents of their inner life, let us today consider the life of the mind and spirit This will be in preparation for our subject for the next two days.

Remember how we considered the form of the human organism, relating the human organization to the fixed stars out in the cosmos. To consider the levels of human life, we had to look at our own planetary system. For the phenomena of the inner life we had to change our line of approach and relate the inner nature of human beings to their physical organization, which they owe to the fixed stars and the planetary system. Looking at form and life, we perceived the differences between head organization, chest organization, and metabolism and limbs as a third organization. We found that the inner life of sensory perception and of ideas comes into its own through the head organization, through nerves and senses. We found that the life of feeling comes to expression through the breathing and circulatory organization, and the life of will through the system of metabolism and limbs. For our study of the inner life, account had to be taken of the way the I, astral body, ether body and physical body act together in the human being. We gained a general idea of the way soul and body interact, even at the level of glandular function, and of muscle function being made to serve the will, and found that account had to be taken of the way the soul principle comes to expression in the living body.

To study the life of mind and spirit, we have to consider the alternation between waking and sleeping. As you know, this consists in the first place in life swinging to and fro between day-time waking state and night-time sleep within the 24-hour day. We also know that human beings are awake and asleep in another way, for we are really only fully awake when we form ideas and perceive with the senses. The life of the will and of physical actions is really a life of sleep even when we are awake.

The life of feelings, we know, is a dream life even when we are awake. This, then, is another way in which human beings let life swing to and fro between waking and sleeping. Waking sleep, as we may call it, influences the life of ideas when we bring an act of will to expression and are awake in our doing by being able to form an idea of the action. We do, however remain unconscious of what actually happens when we perform the action, as unconscious as when we are asleep.

The fact that we feel ourselves to be individual beings we really owe to sleep. If we were always awake and given up to the life of ideas, our experience of the world would be limited to a sequence of images. We would have the feeling that we are at rest, as it were, in a fixed location in the universe, and the universe itself would be present in form of images. The I, too, would be no more than a kind of mirrored reflection. We are brought back to ourselves in our wide-awake life of ideas in two ways. Firstly, we pour into this life the continual memory of being in a condition of sleep between going to sleep and waking, a condition in which we do not experience anything. Secondly, we have indefinite recollections of our will intent, that is, of something that is sleep-like by nature, playing into conscious life. This gives us a feeling for the I and the I impulse. In ordinary life we do not have conscious awareness of the I impulse but experience it as a nudge coming from our organization. On the other hand we are aware of it because between going to sleep and waking up we go out into the cosmos with the I, which otherwise does not enter into ordinary consciousness, and astral body, which equally does not come to awareness. It is the dimming-down of consciousness between going to sleep and waking up that comes to conscious awareness.

What is it that puts us to sleep over and over again, pushing our will intent and much of our feeling life into the night-time darkness of the conscious mind? It is the need to develop organic activity in the exercise of the will. In the last lecture we noted that when human beings exercise the will they let their soul principle influence even the life of the muscles. The soul immerses itself in the life of the muscles, as it were, and we become unconscious of it, just as we become unconscious of the soul when it leaves the body and enters into a different state during going to sleep and waking up. We are therefore able to say that it is due to the needs and conditions of the living body that we are consciously aware of our I in ordinary life. It is due to the fact that we have a body which lays claim to the soul when will is to be exercised, and chases the soul down into the unconsciousness of sleep because it wants to balance the energies it develops in will activity. This enables it to mediate full awareness of the I at all times, even though the I exists at an unconscious level.

We are thus able to say that we enter into the living physical body by pouring our spirit, and that means in the first place the soul principle, into it. We shall see in a minute that with the soul principle we actually pour the spirit into the physical body. We feel physically strong when the soul has been poured into the body. We do not feel physically strong, but wide awake, when we have ideas and sensory perceptions.

To have ideas and sensory perceptions means not to live in the body. It is quite wrong to think that we must have imaginative, inspired and intuitive perception to enter into the world of the spirit. People are actually in the world of the spirit when they make sensory perceptions and have ideas. We have seen in these lectures that sensory perceptions depend on dead matter, purely physical apparatus, being embedded in the organism, with only the ether body present in them. In sensory perception we have experiences in the physical apparatus, which does not in itself come to experience . It is the spiritual process in the apparatus that we experience. The content of sensory perception is definitely spiritual by nature. It is merely that when we form ideas we extend the sensory activity to the nerve organization. Nerve activity actually is a process of dying. Organic activity has to be excluded when we want to form ideas. This is why we are definitely in the sphere of the spirit when we have sensory perceptions and ideas.

As we are human, and live between birth and death, our life in this sphere of the spirit is such, however, that we have only images of it. Characteristically, therefore, the things of the spirit first come to conscious awareness in sensory perceptions and ideas, but only in images. We are thus able to say: Sensory perceptions and ideas are experiences of life in the spirit, but only in images (written on the board, see table). When it comes to ideas we are in fact aware that they are abstract by nature and that the images they give are not rich and full. Things turn grey, we might say, when we move back from sensory perception to the life of ideas. That greyness exists only for our conscious life, however, for in reality all ideas developed by human beings contain Imaginations.

I am therefore able to say that ideas contain Imaginations, but these do not come to conscious awareness. The ideas we have in everyday life are a kind of extract of those Imaginations. The imaging process extends back into the body, and a pale reflection of our ideas comes to conscious awareness. Every single time you have an idea you also have an Imagination, but whilst the idea remains in the conscious mind, the Imagination slips down and lives in the general vitality, or vital activity, of your organism.

To draw it (Fig. 21), I would have to put the head here, with the process of sensory perception (red), then comes the activity of forming an idea (blue, green) based on sensory perceptions, and this really shows a Janus²⁴ face. In front it is the pale idea which comes to conscious awareness; at the back it is the Imagination which does not become conscious. The Imagination goes down into the organism, where it becomes part of general vital activity. It enters into every organ—it lives in the brain, in the heart, in the lungs, in the kidneys, everywhere. It unites with our general vitality.

Remarkably, the result is this: here, where I have drawn in red and blue, we have the spirit in our picture. None of that which extends down into the physical body comes to conscious awareness, but we experience it as our inner life. The spirit, then, is spirit in the forward direction; it is soul at the back, where it faces the organism (green). In the sphere of the soul, however, it immediately begins to go down into half conscious and unconscious spheres, uniting with the living body.

Below this here (pointing to the drawing) lies unconscious soul activity, and the Imagination vanishes into it. Coming from the other side we have the living physical body, but this is immersed in the night of our consciousness, in sleep, and only comes to expression when it sends the will upwards into conscious awareness. The will is the counter thrust; it makes us physically strong and gives us experience of reality. That experience, however, will at most come up as a feeling. We dream of this reality but essentially do not have it in waking consciousness.

As human beings between birth and death the price we pay for existing in the sphere of the spirit is to experience the spirit in the images of our sensory perceptions and of our ideas. We have living experience of reality, but it enters our conscious mind unconsciously, just as the reality of the outside world comes in unconsciously.

We enter into outside reality, but essentially it enters into us at an unconscious level because we know nothing of the states of sleep when we are out there in the outside reality, which spins a web around us, as it were and enters into us all unconscious. There (pointing to the drawing) we live in the reality, but we live in a physical body, or in an outer, physical element. In so far as we live in the element of the spirit we know it only as image. The physical body is however created out of the spirit, and if we develop our faculty of Imagination, we can gain living insight into the imaginative life that lies at the back of it.

Going further back in the sphere of the soul, we can also gain experience of what in ordinary consciousness are our feelings. First of all, conscious experience of feeling is gained. But behind our feeling lies Inspiration. Every single time you have a feeling you also have an Inspiration. But just as your Imaginations slide down into general vitality when you have ideas, so the Inspiration slides down into the physical body when you feel. You need it down there for your breathing activity and rhythmical function. The Inspiration unites with general rhythmical activity.

I can now put it like this: Further back in us we experience our feelings, and by entering more deeply into these we have inner experience, which is at a dream level. In this, however, Inspiration lies hidden (see Fig. 21).

A hidden Inspiration slips into rhythmical movement and activity, into our breathing and the circulation of the blood. If we were to have a look at someone who was thinking and feeling we might say: You have ideas and you think; this is something you know. But from this activity Imaginations are continuously instilled into every part of your body to maintain your vitality. You feel—and Inspirations are continually going down into your breathing and circulation.

Below this lies will activity. Among the activities of life between birth and death, will activity in the first place belongs purely to the living physical body, and it is experienced as such, for muscle activity lays claim to the spirit. So we have experience of it in the body, but at the sleep level, for only the spirit can be experienced in full consciousness. Here, it sleeps. But there is Intuition in there. It is genuine Intuition when human beings do what I spoke of the last time and send their inner activity and therefore also the spiritual experience they have into their muscle activity in form of images and thus become doers, people with will intent. They are then truly intuiting. They go outside their I life, letting the I enter into something entirely different, which is the movement of muscles and bones. Thus we can say: Intuition slips into metabolic and movement activity. The spirit therefore has its life in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

You see, we now have the spirit wholly inside the body. We have Intuition in metabolism and in the movement of the limbs, Inspiration in rhythmical activity, and Imagination in general vitality. Only the perception of objects exists at the level of images, activity of the spirit in images. Being mere images they are also able to combine with the images of the outside world.

The last time we tried to see soul and body together in our thoughts. We have seen that the soul principle is active in the head and in the nerves and senses, where a continual dying process occurs, which allows the soul principle to come into its own as the organic principle is destroyed.

We have seen that in glandular activity the soul principle lays claim to the physical, but only to a limited extent, so that the gland then secretes matter. When muscles and bones are actively used, the soul principle is completely laid hold of by the physical. I made it very clear that we do not waffle on about an abstract interrelationship between the living physical body, the soul and the spirit, nor of the physical relating in some way to a “psychoid” element. No, we consider the soul in real terms and perceive the way the physical body takes the soul principle into itself and everywhere makes it part of itself. Now we have also seen that the spiritual principle, which initially exists only in images in us, nevertheless also lives in the living physical body.

Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are not something we grasp the way we do the wind and the clouds. They are something that is very much present in the activity of the living body, slipping across into it, whilst we are only able to hold on to images of the things of the spirit. We are thus also able to penetrate to the spiritual principle in the human being. We can consider the human being in terms of form, of levels of life, of soul content, and of the spirit coming to revelation.

The human form is of course dependent on the fixed stars, but it presents itself to us in visible form. The levels of life are dependent on the planetary sphere. In our ordinary consciousness we cannot see them in physical form. We perceive them in so far as they come to expression in aspects of form. Deep down in us rests the soul principle. We gain access to it by considering the mysterious relationships between the activity of nerves and senses and the soul principle, turning our attention to glandular activity in relation to the life of feeling and everything connected with rhythmical activity. We also saw how the soul principle is connected with the metabolism and limbs. At one extreme of life, however, the spiritual enters into the soul principle; it is only able to take hold of images and pushes Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition down into the physical body. And when the spirit thus pours into the soul, it lives in the soul as the most inward element that human beings possess.

The other extreme does not draw human beings into the particular way in which they have sensory activity from within, ideas and feelings, where human beings go down into the physical, into reality, with their spirit, and where the physical, with the spirit, is tinged with the Inspirations which in turn take in Imaginations that come down. This is something that comes to expression when we contemplate in an inward way a human being who is before us and who is fully at rest. When we study the physiognomy, which shines out when the spirit enters into the living body, sending Inspiration into it, the spirit comes to the surface again, coming out through the impulses given by life and giving the human being first of all the flesh colour of the skin, and whatever else there is by way of physiognomy, showing itself in the noble brow, in the shape of the mouth and chin, the form of the nose, and so on. This spirit, entering into the body as Inspiration, becomes active through the levels of life and thus shows itself in the human being who is at rest.

As soon as people start to walk, to be active, and even if they just blink an eye, we see the Intuition aspect of the spirit which is sent down into the living body. When we look at the way someone walks, and at their gestures, we see the working of that person’s spirit, which, however, enters into the body as Intuition, being present not as spirit but as processes that generate heat, processes of chemical decomposition that occur in the body when a person is active in the world.

When we looked at the form, we had something which the world gives to the human being. Now that we have seen the spirit enter completely into the living body, we find that in activity the human being is in turn giving things to the world. But the price we have to pay for having part in the spirit between birth and death is that we have the spirit not in its reality but in the form of images. We do have the spirit in us as something real when we are between birth and death, but the price we have to pay is that we know this reality only when asleep, albeit in waking sleep. We really should say that life between birth and death means that human beings experience the spirit in the reflected glory of images but have no conscious experience of its reality, which only presents itself through the medium of the living body.

Between birth and death we see the spirit in the living body it has created. It is not really matter which we see, for matter is the outer reflection and not the inner reality of the spirit. We may therefore say that when we see any kind of matter in the world around us or in human beings it always means the the reality is hidden from us and only the surface present itself. There the spirit reveals itself out of the reality of the body and of matter. Fig. 22.

It is different when human beings partake of the spirit. Then the physical aspects, for instance the inner parts of the head—and the outer part, too, if they are not just looking in a mirror, though even then all they have is an image—remain in the background, whilst the spirit is really experienced, though only in its image. In the conscious mind we inwardly see the spirit, but as an image. Sleeping, and also in waking sleep, we perceive the spirit in its activity, but the essential reality of the perception does not come to conscious awareness; it remains outside.

Everything is always completely the other way round.

You see, to consider the human form we have to go a long way, to the great world of the fixed stars. Out in that world lie the impulses responsible for giving the human head, chest and limbs their specific form. Coming closer to the human being we encounter the planetary system, the sphere of the planets, and we find that this creates the levels of life in human beings. Then we have to go right inside the human being to find the soul principle. And when we actually enter into this we find the alternation between waking and sleeping, image and reality. Coming to the human being of mind and spirit we discover the spiritual principle in man.

I am now going to present something to you that many of you may well find to be extraordinarily abstract and indeed most strange. Please take it and think of it as some nuts that you have to crack, for what I intend to develop during these last fifteen minutes may prove important for you when you come to consider the nature of the world one day.

If we really visualize the road we have to travel from the whole universe, the fixed stars, through the planetary system and all the way to inside the human being, something quite specific comes to mind for those who are in a position to have this happen. You see, mathematicians establish the location of a body, or of a point—this is very important for those who work with the theory of relativity today—by thinking of three lines at right angles to one another that intersect in one point.

If they then want to give the location of point A, let us say (Fig. 23), they measure the distance from the three planes defined by the three lines. So if you have those three lines, you can give the location of any point. All it needs is to assume these three axes at right angles to one another, which are called “co-ordinates”. They enable us to define the location of any other point, or line, which after all can only be defined by the points it contains, and so on. (Fig. 23)

Mathematicians are inordinately proud of being able to define any location in this way. They speak of the three coordinates as the x, y and z co-ordinates. Yet for someone who is not just a mathematician but is someone connected with reality, as well as having studied mathematics, a question arises at this point.

Such a person would say: During life between birth and death—our mathematicians today do not work with life between death and rebirth, and everything they work with lies between birth and death—we, as human beings, are really always also in the outer reality, and as human beings we see, or perceive with some other sense, what is in the world outside us. I think you’ll agree that the world looks quite different if I stand in one place or another. When I stand over there—well, there would be a considerable difference due to the fact that when I stand here I look you straight in the eye, and if I were over there I would see you all from the other side. Speaking in terms of reality, then, we can always assess reality only from one particular point of view, for human beings can never completely remove themselves from reality.

In a way modern thinkers are always longing, however, to remove themselves from reality. Physicists want to exclude anything that is subjective. A modern physicist recently asked the question: What exists, really? What has being?—Even in our (German) language, the verb for “to be” (sein) derives from the verb “to see” (sehen), so that if we do not exclude the human being we would have to say, in popular terms: Anything you see, exists.—However, physicists are unable to accept this, and a modern physicist therefore gave the following definition: “Anything that can be measured, exists”. This means the object is not seen in relation to the human being but to an objective measuring rod; the human being is excluded.

Another example of excluding the human being is one I have mentioned on a number of occasions. It is the explanation given for the nebular hypothesis of Laplace. You take a droplet of oil, a playing card on a pin—a sewing pin will also serve—and rotate it, and droplets separate out. But nothing would separate out, and the whole small planetary system would not arise if it were not for the schoolmaster who turned the pin! Yet when people want to explain the universe they leave out the schoolmaster. Otherwise the teacher would have to say: Look, children, there a planetary system is evolving, but I am the one who turns the pin; and out there the great planetary system is evolving, and there is the great God who turns the great pin. The world could not evolve if there were not a god out there, who relatively speaking would be much bigger, as I am the little god to you here.—You see, that is what the teacher should really be saying.

He does not, of course. In modern thinking we have got into the habit of declaring that the point of view does not exist, as it were. It is declared non-existent even in analytical geometry, as I have shown. But then it is difficult to answer the question: Who is it who is looking? Who is really seeing this object here without seeing the x, y and z co-ordinates in perspective? Where is the individual who sees it like this? (Fig. 23) Well, you know, he can’t be in that place, nor in that place, he can’t be in any of those place, for if he were, he’d always see in perspective. But if he were far enough away, over yonder in infinity, he would see the vertical z line in the right way. He’d have to be a devil of a fellow to see this axis of co-ordinates, as it is called, which is shown meeting in a point in Figure 23; for he’d have to be out there in infinity—in that place, that place, and that one, everywhere within infinity. That is the point of view, which has to be everywhere at once, from which to consider all three dimensions as they are at right angles to each other. When we speak of space, and indeed of analytical geometry, the point of view has to be from all points in infinity.

And now let us take the opposite. Let us consider how human beings truly experience themselves inwardly. They feel themselves to be a point at the centre of the universe, and they are really always taking sights. Before them, or rather around them, they have their horizon. Anything at, above or below the horizon is experienced in a way I might describe as follows: They experience along their line of vision—it could also be the line of touch—or somewhere above or below, it might also be over here; in short they increase or decrease the angle, or open it in an upward or downward direction.

Mathematicians do the same thing, but they do so from a specific point of view. In this case they are actually taking the human being into account, though they won’t admit it since it would be disgraceful for a modern thinker to include the human being in one’s approach. So they speak of a point and define a second point somewhere else by determining the deviation from the line of vision. Thus they say: this point here is so far away that there is a possibility—well, I won’t go as far as to introduce you to the cosine, as it is called—of defining it. The point will always be different, however, and so will be its cosine, if the sight is taken from higher up or lower down. And if you really think about it, this is where we find ourselves entirely in the real world. The mathematicians have it; they call it a polar co-ordinate system.

We now arrive at a rather peculiar statement. We are able to say: That’s not a devil of a fellow, for it is always I myself. Wherever I may be, the point at the centre of the co-ordinate system is my point of view. If we are looking at space, which is what we are in fact doing, we are everywhere out there in infinity. We ourselves are that devil of a fellow. But if you consider the centre we have here from everywhere out there in infinity, what lies in between? Between point and infinity lies the circle.

If you go out to infinity, passing through space, you will find something in there. But if you visualize the point of view that is everywhere in infinity, you are in the region where things are seen from the point of view of the fixed stars. If you move inwards to the centre, you are in the region of the human point of view. Between the two lies the circle, or at least an approximate circle: the movements of the planets. It cannot be any other way. When the human being is mediated to the world through the soul, this has to happen through a circular movement, through spheres. This is simply due to the inner constitution of the universe. We therefore have to find the stars that move in orbits between ourselves and infinity.

You see, in very early times, instinctive clairvoyance established mathematics on the basis of this very real situation: cosmic space with its three dimensions and a point of view everywhere at infinity; the sphere and the centre which is oneself. This was the starting point for the mathematics of old. Today the science has become abstract and deals only in formulae, not reality. But if we consider it in an inner way, as we have been doing, we can still get a feeling for the way in which the science which modern mathematicians are forced to put before their mind’s eye as a system of co-ordinates, or polar co-ordinates, originates in the inner structure of the universe.

You see, if Einstein, or one of his followers, began to talk today, you would almost always find that they base themselves on some form of co-ordinate system and then move on to the theory of relativity. It is not surprising that all things become relative in this case. For as soon as you start to consider reality you have to change, or ought to change, into the devil of a fellow who is everywhere at infinity. And it makes no difference if the distance is a mile, or more, or less, or the diameter of the earth or even the sun—for all things become relative. We have the theory of relativity because the point of view is at infinity and it makes no difference how far things are apart. If you consider all the arbitrary reasons that are given, you find everything becomes relative. That is the true, psychological reason. All you have to do is look into these things.

Tomorrow we shall build on the basis we have gained today.

• 24. Janus was an ancient Italian deity said to be the protector of doors and gates. He was shown with a face on the front and another on the back of his head. The month January is named after him.

From the previous lecture you will have been able to see that the very form of man's body is a result of the co-operation of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers.

It is particularly important in the present age for man to recognize this co-operation between Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers; for only by such recognition can he gradually learn to understand the forces that are at work behind the external phantasmagoria of existence. We know very well that we have no occasion either to hate Ahriman or to fear Lucifer, since their powers are inimical only when they are working outside the realm where they belong. We spoke on this subject at some length in Munich last year [ see Secrets of the Threshold, by Rudolf Steiner. ]; and we have also given indications in this direction in lectures here in Dornach.

When we saw last time how the physical spatial body of man owes its form to the interaction of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, we were dealing with the most external element of human life in which Lucifer and Ahriman play a part. We come a little nearer to the inner nature of man when we pass from the physical to the etheric body. The etheric body may be regarded as the shaper of the physical body. At the foundation of our physical organism—and embedded at the same time in the whole etheric world—lies this etheric organism, in perpetual inner movement. Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers are active here too, as well as in the physical body. Man as etheric being—and it is important to recognize the fact—is also placed into the counterplay of these forces.

In order to give focus to our study of this question, let us now turn our attention to the three fundamental activities of the human being in so far as he is not physical human being. I refer to the activities of Willing, Feeling and Thinking.

So long as we regard man in respect of his physical body alone, we do not of course see this willing, feeling and thinking. Only in its physiognomy or in the performance of certain gestures or the like, does the physical body give us any indication of what is in man's inner nature. The etheric body, however, which is in perpetual movement, is continually giving expression to man's thinking, feeling and willing.

A purely external science finds itself in difficulties when it comes to consider these activities of the human soul. If you will study the various philosophies you will find that one gives pre-eminence to the will, another to thought; and there are again others which consider feeling as the most important force in man. But as to how thinking, feeling and willing unite in man to form a whole—to that problem none of the philosophies of modern times can offer a solution. This inability to form a correct idea of the relationship between thinking, feeling and willing in the life of the soul is not unlike the difficulty someone might experience who, in order to relate himself rightly to the world around him, set out to form a clear conception of man as he appears in the external world. We do not know—so say the philosophers—whether the human soul in its essential nature has more the character of willing or feeling or thinking. It is exactly as if someone were to say: “I have no idea what a ‘man’ really is. One person brings me a five-year-old child and says: There is a man for you! Then another person comes along and points me out a much taller being, who is what is called ‘middle-aged.’ Finally a third person comes and shows me an entirely different being, with wrinkled countenance and grey hair. And now I am really at a loss to know what the being called ‘man’ is, for I have been shown three totally different beings with this name.” Of course the true answer is that they are all of them “man.” The one is very young, the second somewhat older and the third quite old; they are very different in appearance. But by taking all three ages together we acquire a knowledge of “man.” It is the same with willing, feeling and thinking. The difference there too is one of age. Willing is the same soul-activity as thinking, but willing is still a child. When it grows a little older, it becomes feeling, and when it is quite old it is thinking. The matter is made difficult by the fact that the different ages live together in our soul in these three activities.

We have explained on other occasions (and you may read of it in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World) that when we leave the physical world we come into a world where the law of change prevails instead of the law of persistence or fixity. There all is in constant change; what is old can suddenly grow young again and vice versa. Hence in that world the three activities can and actually do appear at one and the same time. Willing shows itself contemporaneously as young willing, as older willing (i.e., feeling) and at the same time also as quite old willing (i.e., thinking). The different ages are in that world intermingled, everything is mobile. This is how it is with the etheric body of man.

These changes cannot, however, simply come about of themselves. To begin with, a uniform and single action of the soul does not come to consciousness at all in ordinary life, we are quite incapable of bringing such a thing into consciousness. If we think of the etheric body in the likeness of a flowing stream—for it is in the etheric body that we have to make our observations—then we are obliged to say that this stream of soul-activity does not come to consciousness at all in our life; but into this stream, into this perpetual movement of the etheric body that flows in the current of time, Luciferic—and again Ahrimanic—activity enters. Luciferic activity has the result of making the will young. When the activity of our soul is streamed through by Luciferic activity the result is will. When the Luciferic influence predominates, when Lucifer makes his forces felt in the soul, then will is active in us. Lucifer has a juvenating influence on the whole stream of our soul-activity.

When, on the other hand, Ahriman brings his influence to bear on our soul-activity, he hardens it, it becomes old, and thinking is the result. Thinking, the having and holding of thoughts, is quite impossible in ordinary life unless Ahriman exerts his influence within our etheric body. We cannot get on in our life of soul, in so far as this comes to expression in the etheric body, without Ahriman and Lucifer. If Lucifer were to withdraw entirely from our etheric body, we would have nothing to fire our will. If Ahriman were to withdraw entirely from our etheric body, we would never be able to attain cool thinking. In between stands a region where Lucifer and Ahriman are in conflict. Here they interpenetrate; their activities play into one another. It is the region of feeling. The etheric body has actually this appearance; one can perceive in it Luciferic light and Ahrimanic hardness. If you could look at it, you would not of course see it as we might try to show it in a drawing; you would see it all in movement. But there are places where the etheric body seems to be quite untransparent, as if it had ice tracings in it. Forms and figures show themselves which resemble the patterns made by ice on a window pane. These are hardenings in the etheric body, and they are the result in it of the life of thought. This freezing of the etheric body at certain places is due to Ahriman; his forces have found entry there by means of thought. There are also places which seem to be full of light. Here the etheric body is transparent and gleams and glows with light. It is Lucifer who sends his rays into the etheric body of man and makes there centers of will. Then there are regions in between, where the etheric body is in perpetual movement and activity. Here you see at one moment hardness—and then suddenly the hardness is caught by a ray of light and melts right away. Hardening and dissolving, in perpetual alternation—such is the expression of the activity of feeling in the etheric body.

Not only, therefore, is the form of the physical body of man called into being by the interplay of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces—now creating a balance, now disturbing it again—but in the whole etheric body too, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are continually active. When the Ahrimanic forces gain the upper hand, we have an expression of thinking; when the Luciferic forces are in ascendance, we have an expression of willing; and when they are in mutual conflict one with the other, we have an expression of feeling. Thus do Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces play into one another in the etheric body of man. We human beings are as it were ourselves the resultant of these forces, we are placed into their midst.

Now we must not imagine that we are present in this interplay with our full Ego. Our earthly Ego, the Ego that we have acquired in the course of earth evolution, can only come to its full consciousness in the physical body. Not until the time of Jupiter will the Ego be able to unfold itself completely within the etheric body. In all that takes place within the etheric body the real Ego of the human being has no immediate part. Had the progress of world evolution gone on without the intervention of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, then man would have been an altogether different being. He would, for example, have been able to have perceptions in his physical body, but he would not have been able to have thoughts. The capacity to have thoughts he owes to the fact that Ahriman can acquire influence over his etheric body. And he has impulses of will because Luciferic forces can acquire influence over his etheric body. These forces are therefore necessary for man, they must needs be present.

We have said that with our earthly consciousness we cannot descend fully into the etheric body. Only in the physical body can we experience our full Ego-consciousness. With the etheric body we enter a world with which we cannot fully identify ourselves. And it is so, that when Ahriman enters into our etheric body, something more enters in with him besides the thoughts he forms there. Nor is it only impulses of will that enter our etheric body with Lucifer. And the same must be said of the feelings, the realm where the two are in conflict. In so far as Ahriman lives in our etheric body we dive down with our etheric body into the sphere of the elementary Nature spirits—the Earth, Water, Air and Fire spirits. We are not cognizant of the fact because we are not able to descend fully into our etheric body with our Ego. Nevertheless it is always so. Within this etheric body not only does there live the power of the thoughts that we ourselves think, but the influences also of the Nature spirits; these enter in and make themselves felt. When a man has met with these Nature spirits he is able afterwards to tell of some experience he has had which he did not have in his ordinary Ego-consciousness. For it is when he, is in an abnormal condition that man meets the Nature spirits, namely, when the etheric body is to some extent loosened from the physical body.

How can such a thing happen? It can happen in the following way. The etheric body of man is in communion with the whole surrounding etheric world, therefore also with the whole sphere of the Nature spirits. Let us imagine, to take a simple case, that a man is walking along a road. When he is walking along a road in the daytime with his ordinary consciousness, his etheric body is properly in his physical body and he perceives with his Ego-consciousness what one is normally able to perceive with the Ego-consciousness. But now suppose that he is walking along a path by night. When we walk along a path by night, it is generally dark, and this fact will of itself produce in many persons a “creepy” feeling. And just because he gets into this condition, then the peculiar sensations that he experiences enable Lucifer to seize hold of him. His etheric body becomes loosened from the physical body, and then this emancipated etheric body can enter into relation with the surrounding etheric world.

Now let us suppose that the man comes into the vicinity of a churchyard where etheric bodies are still present over the graves of recently deceased persons. In the condition in which he is, with his etheric body loosened, he is perhaps able to perceive something of the thoughts which are still remaining in the etheric bodies of the dead persons. Suppose someone has died only a short time ago leaving debts behind him; he died with the thought that he has incurred debts. Then it can be that this thought is still present in the etheric body of the person after he has died. We do not of course ordinarily perceive the thoughts in the etheric body of a dead human being. But for a man who has come into the condition I have described it might well be possible. He could enter into relation with the etheric body of the other and perceive within it the thought: “I have incurred debts.” And then because this experience strengthens the Luciferic power in him, there arises in him the feeling: “I must pay the debt for him.” He experiences in this way in his etheric body something he would never experience in the physical body in normal life. Such an experience does not happen to us in ordinary human life, and when it comes it makes an extraordinary impression upon our consciousness. For it arouses the knowledge: “I have had a strange and singular experience. I have not had this experience within the body, nor can I ever have it within the body.” We have the feeling quite distinctly that we are somewhere else than in our body, and that is a strange, an unaccustomed feeling. We experience at the same time an overpowering desire to return once more into the body, we long for help to return again into the body.

This feeling of longing to return attracts to us certain elementary Nature spirits for whom this very feeling in us is food and nourishment. They come, because they are attracted by the feeling, “I want to be drawn into my physical body,” and they help us to find the way back to it. If one is asleep in the ordinary way, one finds the way back quite easily. But when one has undergone an experience such as I have described, it is difficult to find the way back. You must not of course imagine that we see the situation as we perceive things in the physical body; no, we see it imaginatively, in pictures. Someone comes to us—it is really a Nature spirit, appearing perhaps in the guise of a shepherd, and gives us the advice: “Go to a certain castle, I will take you there in my wagon,”—or some similar words. The situation may even be still further developed. The body which we have left and outside of which we have had the experience, may assume the appearance of an enchanted castle from which we have to release someone when we return into it. So do we “imaginate” in pictures the longing for the physical body and the help that the Nature spirits bring to us. And then we come back into the physical body—that is to say, we wake up.

People who have had such experiences will tell us that they feel they have in actual reality come into contact in this way with the thoughts of a dead man. They say to themselves: “That feeling I had was not something that was merely in myself, it was no mere dream that I dreamed, it was a feeling that communicated to me something that was taking place in the world outside. It is of course all expressed in pictures, but it does truly correspond to an event.” I will now read to you such a picture, where a man narrates what he has experienced. As you will see, it was an experience somewhat similar to the one of which I have spoken. He describes it as follows. “When I had taken leave of the soldiers I met three men. They wanted to exhume a dead person who owed them three marks. I was filled with compassion and at once absolved the debt, in order that the dead man might rest in peace and not be disturbed in his grave. I walked on a little further. A strange man with pale countenance accosted me, invited me to mount a leaden carriage, and persuaded me to go with him to a castle. In the castle, he said, dwelt a princess, who had declared she would marry only a man who came to her on a carriage of lead. He turned to the driver and said: ‘Drive in the direction of the sunrise.’ Then came a shepherd who said: ‘I am the Count of Ravensburg.’ He ordered the driver to drive faster. We came to a door and we could hear a tumult within. The door was opened. The princess asked the man whence he came and how it had been possible for him to drive in company with that old man—and behold, I saw that he who had led me thither was a spirit. Then I entered in at the door and took possession of the castle.”

That is to say, he came back into his body. There you have the description of just such an experience as I have been speaking of.

And what is such an event, when it happens to someone who then tells others of it? It is a Märchen (a fairy-tale [ see Goethe's Standard of the Soul, by Rudolf Steiner. ]).

You must not imagine that an experience of this nature is the only way in which man comes into relationship with the external etheric world through his etheric body. There is another. And that is, in an activity which is only half conscious, an activity in which the Ego only half participates—namely, the act of Speech. Our speaking is not so conscious as our thinking. It is not the case that speaking is something which belongs to us and which we have in our power. In speech live etheric Powers, and a good part of our speaking is unconscious. The Ego does not reach fully down into speech. When we speak we are in communication through our etheric body with the surrounding etheric world. We learn to think as individuals, but not to speak. We are taught to speak through the fact that our Karma places us into a particular set of circumstances in life. We have already seen how we may come into relation with the Nature spirits in abnormal conditions when the etheric body is loosened, and now we find that inasmuch as we speak and do not merely think silently, we come into relation with the Folk Spirits. The Folk Spirits enter our etheric body and live there—without our being aware of it. This life of the Folk Spirit within the human being really belongs just as little to his fully conscious Ego activity as does the “Märchen” of which I have told you. So much, then, for the activity of Lucifer and Ahriman in man's etheric body.

The Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces enter also into the astral body. When we come to study the astral body of man, we must turn our attention to what is the distinguishing mark of the astral human being as he is on earth—namely, consciousness. In the physical body form and force are the essentials, in the etheric body, movement and life: in the astral body, consciousness. Now in the body of man we have not only one consciousness, but two; the ordinary waking state and the state of sleep. But, strange to say, neither of these two states is entirely natural to us. Natural would be for us an intermediate state between the two, a state which, as a matter of fact, we never really consciously have.

If we were perpetually awake we would scarcely be able to develop in a proper, orderly manner through the various ages of life. Something is always present in us which is less awake than we are in our day-consciousness, and only by virtue of this are we in a position to evolve and develop. Ask yourselves, how much do you expect to be able to evolve through all that you experience and receive in ordinary life? For the most part, we merely satisfy thereby our desire, our curiosity, or our need of sensation. It is not often we act with deliberate intent to place what we experience in waking day life in the service of our development. The truth is, development takes place through the fact that something is continually sleeping in us, even in the daytime. I am not alluding to the habit of dropping off to sleep in the daytime! But when man is wide awake by day, something still remains fast asleep in him, and this it is which brings it about that he does not remain for ever a child, but evolves further.

The ordinary waking state is what comes to consciousness through our astral body. In this ordinary waking state we are, however, too strongly awake, we are too intensely given up to the external world; we are, in fact, quite lost in it. How does this come about?

The reason is that the waking consciousness lives under the influence of Ahriman. Ahriman has great power over our waking consciousness. It is quite different in the case of the sleep consciousness. In sleep consciousness we are too little awake. We are too engrossed in our own evolution; we are so completely and so powerfully within ourselves that all consciousness is obliterated. In sleep consciousness, Lucifer has the upper hand.

This is then how the matter stands with our astral body. When we are awake, Ahriman has the upper hand over Lucifer, and when we are asleep Lucifer has the upper hand over Ahriman. They are in equilibrium only when we dream; there they pull with equal force, they strike a balance between them. The ideas which are called forth by Ahriman in day consciousness and which he causes to harden and crystallize, are dissolved and made to disappear under the influence of Lucifer; everything becomes pictures when Ahriman is no longer busy fixing them in rigid ideas. They melt and become mobile in themselves. A state of equilibrium is induced in a pair of scales by having both scale-pans equally laden; we have, then, not a state of rest but a state of equilibrium. It is the same with the life of man. We have not in man a state of rest, but a state of equilibrium; and the two forces which hold the scales and each of which at certain times brings extra weight to bear, are Lucifer and Ahriman. In waking consciousness Ahriman's side sinks down, in sleep consciousness Lucifer's. Only in the intermediate state, where we dream, are the two scale-pans held in poise, not at rest, but delicately poised in equilibrium.

We can go on to carry our study into still higher regions of human life. Here too we shall find evidence of how Lucifer and Ahriman fill the world with their inter-working. Two ideas play a great part in human life. One is the idea of duty. We might also say, when we consider it from a religious point of view, the idea of commandment or behest. We speak sometimes, do we not, of the “behest of duty.” The other idea, which can be placed over against it, is the idea of right (or rights).

If you will reflect a little on the part played in human life by these two ideas of duty and of right—I mean, the “right” one has to do this or that—you will very soon realize that they are polar opposites, and that men's inclinations are turned now more in the direction of duty, and now again in the direction of right. We live certainly in an age when people are more ready to speak of right than duty. All possible spheres of life claim their rights. We have Workers' Rights, Women's Rights, and so on and so on.

Duty is the opposite idea of right. Our age will be followed by an age when duties will be more regarded than rights, and this will be directly attributable to the influence of the anthroposophical spiritual world-conception. In the future—certainly, in a rather distant future—we shall have movements where less and less emphasis will be laid on the demand for rights and people will inquire more and more as to their duty. The question will rather be: What is our duty as man, as woman, e.g., in this or that situation of life? The present epoch that demands rights will be succeeded by an epoch that asks after duties.

We said that right and duty play into life like two polar opposites. Whenever a man turns his thought and attention to duty, he looks right away from himself. Kant has given great and grand expression to this fact. He pictures duty as a lofty goddess, to whom man looks up: “Duty, thou great and exalted Name, thou has nought to do with fondness nor with favor; all that thou requirest is to submit thyself and serve.” Man beholds duty, so to say, raying down upon him from regions of the spiritual world. In a religious sense, he feels duty as an impulse laid upon him by the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. And when man surrenders himself to duty, he goes right out of himself. It is in this going-out-of-himself in the feeling of duty, that man can begin to learn how to get beyond his ordinary self.

There is, however, a danger to man in all such going-out-of his ordinary self, in all such endeavor after spiritualization. If man were to give himself up entirely to this, he would lose the ground from under his feet, he would lose his feeling of gravity. Therefore he must endeavor, when he surrenders himself to duty, to find within himself at the same time something that shall give him weight, so that he may keep his sense of gravity. Schiller expressed it very beautifully when he said that man has the best relation to duty when he learns to love duty.

This is really saying a great deal. When a man speaks of learning to love duty he no longer merely surrenders himself to duty; he rises out of himself, taking with him the love with which otherwise he loves himself. The love that lives in his body, in his egoism—this love he takes out of himself, and loves with it duty. So long as it is self-love, so long is it a Luciferic force. But when man takes this self-love out of himself and loves duty in the way that otherwise he loves only himself, he releases Lucifer. He takes Lucifer into the realm of duty and gives him, so to say, a justified existence in the impulse and feeling of duty.

If, on the other hand, a man cannot do this, if he cannot draw forth the love out of himself and offer it to duty, then he will continue to love only himself; and since he cannot love duty, he is obliged to subject himself to her, he becomes a slave to duty, he becomes, as we say, a man who “does his duty,”—hard and cold and uninspired. He hardens in an Ahrimanic sense, notwithstanding that he follows duty devotedly.

You see how duty stands, as it were, in a midway position. If we surrender ourselves to her, she annuls our freedom, we become her slaves, because Ahriman draws near on the one hand with his impulses. But if we bring ourselves—if we bring all our power of self-love—as an offering and offer it up to duty, bringing thus to duty the Luciferic warmth of love, then the result is that, through the state of balance induced in this way between Lucifer and Ahriman, we find a right relation to duty.

Thus we are truly, in a certain connection, redeemers of Lucifer. When we begin to be able to love our duty, then the moment has come when we can help towards the redemption and release of the Luciferic powers; we set free the Lucifer forces which are held in us as by a charm, and lead them forth to fight with Ahriman. We release the imprisoned Lucifer (imprisoned in self-love) when we learn to love our duty.

Schiller sets himself this very question in his “Aesthetic Letters”: How is it possible to rise above slavery to duty and attain to love of duty? Of course he does not use the expressions “Lucifer” and “Ahriman,” because he does not see the problem in its cosmic aspect. Nevertheless these wonderful letters of Schiller on the Aesthetic Education of Man are directly translatable into Spiritual Science.

Right, on the other hand, immediately shows that it is united with Lucifer. Man does not need to learn to love his right, he loves it already! It is perfectly natural that he should do so. It is natural for Lucifer to be connected with right in man's feeling—man feels that this or that is his right. Everywhere that right asserts itself, Lucifer is speaking there too. It is very often only too evident how Lucifer makes his voice heard in the demand of some right. Here it is a question of calling in something that can be set over against right. We have to call in Ahriman to create a polarity to Lucifer. And this we can do by cultivating the polar opposite of love.

Love is inner fire, its opposite is calmness—the quiet acceptance of what happens in the world. As soon as we approach our right with this quiet and calm interest we call in Ahriman. It is not easy to recognize him here, for we set him free from his merely external existence, we summon him into ourselves and warm him with the love that is already united with right. Calm and peace of mind have the coldness of Ahriman; in the quiet understanding of what is in the world, we unite our warmth and our understanding love with the coldness that is in the world outside. And then we release Ahriman, when we meet what has come about with understanding, when we do not merely demand our rights out of self-love but understand what has come about in the world. This is the eternal battle that is waged between Lucifer and Ahriman. On the one hand man learns in a conservative way to understand the conditions that are in the world, he learns to understand how they have come about from cosmic, karmic necessity. That is one aspect of the matter. The other aspect is that he feels in his heart the urge to make new conditions possible, continually to let the old give place to the new. This is the revolutionary current in human life. In the revolutionary stream lives Lucifer, in the conservative stream Ahriman, and man in his life of right lives in the midst between these two poles.

Thus we see how right and duty show each of them a state of equilibrium between Lucifer and Ahriman. We only learn to understand how the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body manifest in life, or how duty and right come to expression in the life of duty and the life of right, when we learn to recognize the interplay of great spiritual Powers, above all of those spiritual Powers who bring about the state of equilibrium.

For just as what is in the external world stands under the influence of the spiritual forces that bring about balance, so does our moral life too belong in a world of polar opposites. The whole morale of human conduct, the whole ethical life of man with its poles of right and duty, only become comprehensible when we take into account the instreaming forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. And when we look at the life of man in history, that takes its course in an alternation between, on the one hand, revolutionary and warlike—that is to say, Luciferic—movements, and on the other hand, conservative—that is, Ahrimanic—movements, there too we find a condition of balance between Lucifer and Ahriman. In no other way is the world to be understood than by recognizing in it these opposite forces and influences.

What we behold in the world outside is dualistic, it shows itself to us in opposites. And in this connection Manichaeism, correctly understood, has its complete justification. How Manichaeism is fully justified even within a spiritual monism—of that we shall have more to say in the future. The object I have had in view in these lectures is to show you how the whole world is a result of the working of balance.

Particularly evident is the result of the working of balance in the life of art. With this as our starting-point we will go on in later lectures to consider the arts and their evolution in the world, and the part that has been taken by different spiritual Powers in the evolution of the life of art among mankind.

To lead our present studies to a fruitful conclusion we must still pursue the rather subtle course I have been adopting, bringing together a great variety of ideas from different fields. For this reason we shall have to continue with this course also while the other course¹ is going on—between the 11th and 15th January. We must arrange the times by agreement with the Waldorf School. There is so much to bring in that we shall need these days too. Now I am also well aware how many queries, doubts and problems may be arising in connection with this subject. Please prepare whatever questions you would like to put, if you need further elucidation. I will then try to incorporate the answers in one of next week's lectures, so as to make the picture more complete. Working in this way we shall be able to continue as heretofore, bringing in what I would call the subtler aspects of our theme.

Let us envisage once again the course we have been pursuing. Our aim is to gain a deeper understanding of Astronomy—the science of the Heavens—in connection with phenomena on Earth. To begin with, we pointed out that as a rule the Astronomy of our time only takes into account what is observed directly with the outer senses aided, no doubt, by optical instruments and the like. Such, in the main, were all the data hitherto adduced when seeking to explain and understand the phenomena of the Heavens. They took their start from the ‘apparent movements’, as they would now be called, or the celestial bodies. First they considered the apparent movement of the starry Heavens as a whole around the Earth and the apparent movement of the Sun. Then they observed the very strange paths described by the Planets. Such, in effect, is the immediate visual appearance; portions of the planetary paths look like loops (Fig. 1) the planet moves along here, reverses and goes back, and then forward again, here ... And now they reasoned; if the Earth itself is moving and we have no direct perception of this movement, the real movements of the heavenly bodies cannot but be different from the visual appearance. Interpreting along these lines—applying mathematical and geometrical laws—they arrived at an idea of what the ‘real’ movements might be like. So they arrived at the Copernican system and at its subsequent modifications. Such, in the main, were the methods of cognition used; first, what our senses when looking out into the Heavens, and then the intellectual assimilation, the reasoned interpretation of these sense-impression.

We then pointed out that this procedure can never lead to the adequate penetration of the celestial phenomena, if only for the reason that the mathematical method itself is insufficient. We begin our calculations along certain lines and are then brought to a stop. For as I was reminding you, the ratios between the periods of revolution of the several planets are incommensurable numbers,—incommensurable magnitudes. By calculation therefore, we do not reach the innermost structure of the celestial phenomena. Sooner or later we have to leave off.

It follows that we must adopt a different method. We have to take our start not only from what man observes when he looks out into the Universe with his senses; we must take man as a whole in his connection with the Universe, and perhaps not only man, but other creatures too,—the kingdoms of Nature upon Earth. All these things we pointed out, and I then showed how the whole organization of man can be seen in relation to certain phenomena in the evolution of the Earth, namely the Ice-Ages in their rhythmical recurrence. They also have to do with the inner evolution of man and of mankind. This too, I said, will give us indications of what the real movements in celestial space may be. These are the kind of things we must pursue.

Before continuing the rather more formal lines of thought with which we ended yesterday's lecture, let us consider once again this connection of man's evolution with the evolution of the Earth through the Ice-Ages. We saw that the special kind of knowledge or of cognitional life which the man of present time calls his own has only come into being since the last Ice-Age. Moreover all the civilization-epochs, of which I have so often told, have taken place since then—namely the Ancient Indian, the Persian, the Egypto—Chaldean, the Graeco-Latin and then the epoch in which we are now living. Before the last Ice-Age, we said, there must have been developing in human nature what in the man of today is more withdrawn, less at the surface of his nature, namely his power of ideation—the forming of mental pictures. The inner quality, we said, of this part of our inner life is truly to be understood only if we compare it with our dream-life. It is through sense-perception that our mental pictures receive clear and firm configuration and, as it were, a fully saturated content. The mental pictures are being formed in a more inward region of our bodily organic life—farther back, as it were behind the sense-perceptions,—and this activity is dim and hazy like our dream-life. Our forming of mental pictures would be as dim as it is in dreams, if the experiences of the senses did not strike in upon us every time we awaken. (We may allow the supposition, to help explain what is meant.)

More dim and hazy than our life in sense-perception, this inner life of ideation, mental imagery, is related to those earlier phases in the evolution of man's nature which preceded the last glacial epoch, or which—to speak in anthroposophical terms—belonged to old Atlantis.

What must it then have been like for man? In the first place he must have had a far more intimate inner connection with the surrounding world than he has today through sense-perception. We can control our sense-perception with our will. It is with our will at any rate that we direct the vision of our eyes, and by deliberate attention we can go even farther in governing our sense-perception by our own will. At all events, our will is very much at work in our sense—perceptions, making us to a large extent independent of the outer world. We orientate ourselves by our own arbitrary choice. Now this in only possible because as human beings we have in a way emancipated ourselves from the Universe. Before the last Ice-Age we cannot have been thus emancipated. (I say ‘cannot have been’ since I am wanting now to speak from the empirical aspect of external Science.) During that time, as we have seen, the power of ideation—the forming of mental images—was especially developed, and in his inner conditions man must have been far more dependent on all that was going on around him. Today we see the world around us shining in the sunlight, but the way we see it is considerably subject to the inner culture and control of our own life of will. In Atlantean time the way man was given up to the outer world must have been somehow dependent on the illumined Earth and its illumined objects, and then again—at night-time when the Sun was not shining—on the darkness, the gloaming. He must in other words have experienced periodic alternations in this respect. His inner life of mental imagery, which as we saw was then in process of development must alternately have been lighting up and ebbing down again. This inner periodicity, brought about by man's relation to the surrounding Universe, was indeed not unlike the peculiar periodicity of woman's organic functions of which we spoke before, which is related to the Lunar phases though only as regards length of time. This inner functioning of the woman's nature (I said, you will remember, it is there in man too but in a more inward way and therefore less easily perceived) was at one time actually linked with the corresponding events in the outer Universe. It then became emancipated—a property of human nature on its own,—so that what now goes on in the human being in this respect need not coincide with the outer events. yet the periodicity—the sequence of phases—remains the same as it was when the one coincided with the other.

Something quite similar is true of the rhythmic alternation in our inner life—in our ideation, our forming of mental images. The whole way we are organized in this respect, implanted in us in a far distant past, is to this day more or less independent of the life of the outer senses. Day by day we undergo an inner rhythm, our powers of mental imagery alternately lighting up and growing more dim; it is a daily ebb and flow. We only fail to notice it, since it is far less intense than that other periodicity which runs parallel to the Lunar phases. Nevertheless, in our head-organization to this day we have an alternation between a brighter and a dimmer kind of life. We carry in our head a rhythmic life. We are at one time more and at another less inclined to meet our sense-perceptions actively from within. It is a 24-hour rhythmic alteration. It would be interesting to observe—it might even be recorded in graphically—how human being vary as regards this inner period of the head, the forces of ideation and mental imagery alternating between brighter and more lively and then again dimmer and more sleepy times. The dim and sleepy times represent, so to speak, the inner night of the head, the brighter ones the inner day, but it does not coincide with the external alternation of day and night. It is an inner alternation of light and darkness, or relatively bright and dim conditions. And people vary in this respect. One human being has this inner alternation of light and dark in such a way that he tends rather to connect the lighter period of his mental image-forming power with his sense-perceptions. Another tends to it with the darker. Individuals are organized in one way or the other, and differ accordingly as to their power of observing the outer world. One human being will be inclined sharply to focus the phenomena of the outer world; another tends to do so less,—is more inclined to an inner brooding. All this is due to the alternating conditions I have been describing. Notably as educators, my dear Friends, we should cultivate the habit of observing things like this. They will be valuable signposts, indicating how we should treat the individual children both in our teaching and in education generally.

What interests us however here and now is the fact that man thus makes inward, as it were, what he once underwent in direct mutual relation with the outer world; so that it now works in him as an inner rhythm, the phases no longer coinciding with the outer yet still retaining the periodicity Before the Ice-Age, man's periods of brighter and more intimate participation in the surrounding Universe,. and then of dim withdrawal into himself, will have coincided regularly with the processes of the outer world. He still retains an echo of this rhythm, which in those long-ago times proceed from his living-together with the Universe around him, where at one moment his consciousness was lightened and filled with pictures while at another he withdrew into himself, brooding over the pictures. It is an echo of this latter state whenever we today are inclined to brood more or less melancholically in our own inner life. Once again therefore, what man experienced in and with the world in those older times has been driven farther back into his inner bodily nature, while at the outer periphery a new development has taken place in his faculties of sense-perception. He had these faculties, of course in earlier epochs too, but not developed in the way they now are.

While looking thus at what has taken place in man through his connection with the phenomena of the world around him, we are in fact looking into the Universe itself. Man then becomes the reagent for a true judgment of the phenomena of the Universe. But to complete this we need the other kingdoms of Nature too. Here I should like to draw your attention to something well-known and evident to everyone, the essential significance of which, however, remains unrecognized.

Consider the annual plant,—the characteristic cycle of its development. We see in it quite evidently what I was mentioning yesterday—the direct and indirect influences of the Sun. Where the Sun works directly, the flower comes into being; where the Sun works in such a way that the Earth comes in between, we get the root. The plant too makes manifest what we were speaking of yesterday as regards the animal and then applied in another way to man.

Yet we shall only see the full significance of this if we relate it to another fact. There are perennial plants too. What is the relation of the perennial plant to the annual, as regards the way in which plant-growth belongs to the Earth as a whole? The perennial retains its stem or trunk, and the truth is: Year by year a new world of plants springs, so to speak, from the trunk itself. Of course it is modified and metamorphosed, yet it is a vegetation growing on the trunk, which in its turn grows out of the Earth (Fig. 2). If you have morphological perception you will see it as clearly as can be,—it almost goes without saying. Here on the left I have the surface of the Earth, and the annual plant springing from it. Here on the right is the stem or trunk of the perennial, from which new vegetation, new plant-growth springs in each succeeding year. I must image something or other (to leave it vague, for the moment) continued from the Earth into the trunk. I must say to myself—what this plant here (Fig. 2 on the left) is growing on, must somehow be there in the trunk too (on the right). In other words there must be some element of the Earth—whatever it may be—entering into the trunk. I have no right to regard the trunk of the perennial as a thing apart, not belonging to the Earth; rather must I regard it as a modified portion of the Earth itself. Only then shall I be seeing it rightly; only then shall I discern the inner relationships, such as they really are. Something is there in the perennial plant, which otherwise is only in the Earth. It is through this that the plant becomes perennial. In effect, precisely by taking something of the Earth into itself it frees itself from dependence on the yearly course of the Sun. For we may truly say: The perennial wrests itself away from its dependence on the Sun's yearly course. it emancipates itself from the yearly course of the Sun, in that it forms the trunk, receiving into its own Nature—becoming able, as it were, to do for itself what otherwise could only come about through the working of the whole cosmic environment.

Do we not here see prefigured in the plant world, what I was just describing with regard to man in preglacial times? For in those times, as I was showing, the inner rhythm of the man's ideation—his life in mental pictures—developed by relation to the surrounding world. What then lived in the mutual relation between man and the surrounding world has since become a feature of his own inner life. There is an indication of the same kind of change in the plant kingdom, in that the annual is changed to a perennial. This is indeed a universal tendency in evolution; the living entities are on the way to emancipation from their original connections with the surrounding world.

Seeing the perennials arising, we have to say: It is as though the plant, when it becomes perennial, had learned something it you will allow the expression—learned from the time when it depended on cosmic environment, something which it can now do for itself. Now it is able of itself to bring forth fresh plant-shoots year by year. We do not reach an understanding of the phenomena of the world by merely staring at the things that happen to be side by side, or that are crowded into the field of view under the microscope. We have to see the larger whole and recognize the single phenomena in their connection with it.

Look at it all once more. The annual plant is given up to the cycle of the year, with all the changing relations to the Cosmos which this involves. This influence of the Cosmos beings to fade away in the perennial. In the perennial, what would otherwise vanish in the further course of the year is, as it were, preserved. In the trunk we see springing from the ground the working of the year, made permanent and lasting. This transition of what was first connected with the outer Universe into a more inward way of working we see it throughout the whole range of Nature's phenomena, in so far as they are cosmic. Hence too there are phenomena in which we can more quickly find the living connections between our Earth and the wider Cosmos, whilst there are others in which the cosmic influences are more concealed. We need to find out which of them are sensitive reagents, telling of the cosmic influences. The annual plant will tell us of the Earth's connection with Cosmos, the perennial will not be able to tell us much.

Again, the relation of the animal to man can give us an important clue. Look at the animal's development. (Though we might also include it, we will for the moment disregard the embryonic life.) The animal is born and grows up to a certain limit. It reaches puberty. Look at the animal's whole life, until puberty and beyond. Without any added hypotheses—taking the simple facts—you must admit that it is strange, what happens to the animal once puberty has been attained. For in a way the animal is finished then, so far as the earthly world is concerned. Any such statement is of course an approximation to the truth, needless to say; yet in the main we must admit that in the animal no further progression is to be seen, not after puberty. Puberty is the important goal of animal development. The immediate consequence of puberty—all that happens as an outcome of it—is there of course, but we cannot allege that anything takes place thence forward, deserving to be called a true progression.

With man it is different. Man remains capable of development far beyond puberty; but the development becomes more inward. Indeed it would be very sad for man if in his human nature he were to end his development at puberty in the way animals do. Man goes beyond this. He holds something in reserve by means of which he can go farther,—can undertake quite other journeys, unconnected with sexual maturity or puberty. This again is not unlike the “inwarding” of the cycle of the year in the perennial as against the annual plant. What is in evidence in the animal when puberty is reached, we see it transmuted into a more inward process in man, from puberty onward. Something therefore is at work in man, that is related to a cosmic process in his development from birth until puberty, and that then gets emancipated from the Cosmos—just as it does in the perennial plant—when puberty has been outgrown.

Here then you have a subtler way of estimating the phenomena among the kingdoms of Nature; so will you presently find signposts, indicating the connections between the creatures upon Earth and the Cosmos. We see how, when the cosmic influences cease as such, they are transplanted into the inner nature of the several creatures. We will take note of this and set it on one side for the moment; later we shall find the synthesis between this and quite another aspect.

Let us now take up again what I have frequently mentioned: The incommensurable ratios between the periods of revolution of the planets of the solar system. We may ask, what would the outcome be if they were commensurable? Cumulative disturbances would arise, whereby the planetary system would be brought to a standstill. This can be proved by calculation, though it would lead too far afield to do it now. Only the incommensurability between the periods of revolution enables the planetary system, so to speak, to stay alive. In other words, the solar system contains among other things a condition even tending to a standstill. It is precisely this condition which we are calculating. When in our calculations we get to the end of our tether, there is the incommensurable—and there, withal, is the very life of the planetary system! We are in a strange predicament when calculating the planetary system. If it were such that we could fully calculate it, it would die,—nay, as I said before, would have died long ago. It lives by virtue of the face that we can not calculate it fully. What is alive in the planetary system is precisely what we cannot calculate.

Now upon what do we base these calculations, from which once more, if we could pursue them to the end, we must deduce the inevitable death of the whole system? We base them on the force of gravitation—universal gravitation. Suppose we take our start from gravitation and nothing more, and think it out consistently. We get the picture of a planetary system subject to the force of gravitation. Then indeed we do arrive at commensurable ratios. But the planetary system would inevitably die. We calculate, in other words, to the extent that death prevails in the planetary system, basing our calculations on the force of gravity. In other words there must be something in the planetary system—different from gravitation—to which the incommensurability is due.

The planetary orbits can be brought into accord with the force of gravity very nicely, even as to their genesis, but their periods of revolution would then have to be commensurable. Now there is something which cannot be brought into accord with the force of gravitation, and which moreover does not so tidily fit into our planetary system. I mean what reveals itself in the cometary bodies. The comets play a very strange part in the system, and they have recently been leading scientists to some unusual ideas.

I leave aside the kind of explanations which often tend to arise, where anything most recently discovered is seized on to explain phenomena in other fields. In physiology for instance there was a time when they were fond of comparing the so-called sensory nerves to telegraph-wires leading in from the periphery. Through some central switch or commutator the impulse was supposed to be transmitted, leading to impulses and acts of will. From the centripetal nerves it was supposed to be switched over to the centrifugal; they compared it all to a telegraphic system. Maybe one day something quite different from telegraph-wires will be invented and by this way of thinking quite another picture will be applied to the same thing. So do the scientific fashions change. Whatever happens to have been discovered is quickly seized on as a handy way of explaining the phenomena in other fields. Much as they do in medicine! Scarcely has any new thing been found,—it is “discovered” to be a valuable remedy, though little thought is given to the inner reasons. Now that we have X-rays, X-rays are the remedy to use; we only use them because we happen to have found them. It is as though men let themselves be swept along chaotically, willy-nilly by whatever happens to turn up from time to time.

So for the comets: By spectroscopic investigation and by comparison with the corresponding results for the planets, the idea arose that the phenomena might be explained electromagnetically. Such ideas will at most lead to analogies, which may no doubt have some connection with the reality, but which will certainly not satisfy us if we are looking into it more deeply.

Yet as I said, leaving this aside, there was one thing which emerged quite inevitably when the phenomena of comets were studied in more detail. While for the rest of the planetary system they always speak of gravitational forces, the peculiar position of the comet's tail in relation to the Sun inevitably drove the scientists to speak of forces of repulsion from the Sun—forces, as it were of recoil. The terminology is not the main point; it will of course vary with the prevailing fashion. The point is that science was here obliged to look for something in addition to—and indeed opposite to gravity.

In effect, with the comets something different enters our planetary system,—something which in its nature is in a way opposite to the inner structure of the planetary system as such. Hence it is understandable that for long ages the riddle of the comets gave rise to manifold superstitions. Men had a feeling that in the courses of the planets laws of Nature, inherently belonging to our planetary system, find expression, while with the comets something contrary comes in. Here something disparate and diverse makes its way into our planetary system. Thus they inclined to see the planetary phenomena as an embodiment of normal laws of Nature, and to regard the cometary apparitions as something contrary to these normal laws. There were times—though not the most ancient times—when comets were associated, as it were, with moral forces flying through the Universe, scourges for sinful man.

Today we rightly look on that as superstition. Yet even Hegel could not quite escape associating the comets with something not quite explicable or only half explicable by ordinary means. The 19th century, of course, no longer believed the comets to appear like judges to chastise mankind. Yet in the early 19th century they had statistics purporting to connect them with good and bad vintage years. These too occur somewhat irregularly; their sequence does not seem to follow regular laws of Nature. And even Hegel did not quite escape this conclusion. He though it plausible that the appearance or non-appearance of comets should have to do with the good and bad vintage years.

The standpoint of the people of today—at least, of those who share the normal scientific outlook—is that our planetary system has nothing to fear from the comets. Yet the phenomena which they evoke within this planetary system somehow have little inner connection with it. Like cosmic vagrants they seem to come from very distant regions into the near neighborhood of our Sun. Here they call forth certain phenomena, indicating forces of repulsion from the Sun. The phenomena appear, was and wane, and vanish.

There was a man who still had a certain fund of wisdom where by he contemplated the Universe not only with his intellect but with the whole human being. He still had some intuitive perception of the phenomena of the Heavens. I refer to Kepler. He was the author of a strange saying about the comets—a saying which gives food for thought to anyone who is at all sensitive to Kepler; way of though and mood of soul. We spoke of his three Laws—a work of genius, when one considers the ideas and the data which were accessible in his time. Kepler arrived at his Laws out of a feeling for the inner harmony of the planetary system. For him it was no mere dry calculation; it was a feeling of harmony. He felt has three planetary Laws as a last quantitative expression of something qualitative—the harmony pervading the whole planetary system. And out of this same feeling he made a statement about the comets, the deep significance of which one feels if one is able to enter into such things at all. Kepler said: In the great Universe—even the Universe into which we look by night—there are as many comets as there are fishes in the ocean. We only see very, very few among them, while all the rest remain invisible, either because they are too small or for some other reason. Even external research has tended to confirm Kepler's saying. The comets seen were recorded even in olden time and it is possible to compare the number. Since the invention of the telescope ever so many more have been seen than before. Also when looking out into the starry Heavens under different conditions of illumination—that is to say, making provision for extreme darkness—a larger number of comets are recorded than otherwise. Even empirical research therefore comes near to what Kepler exclaimed, inspired as he was by a deep feeling for Nature.

Now if one speaks at all of a connection between the Cosmos and what happens on the Earth, it surely is not right to dwell one-sidedly on the relation to our Earth of the other planets of our system and to omit the heavenly bodies which come and go as the comets do. It is especially one-sided since we must now admit that the comets give rise to phenomena indicating the presence of quite other forces—forces opposite in kind to those to which we usually attribute the coherence of our planetary system. The comets do in fact bring something opposite into our system, and if we follow it up we must admit that this too is of great significance. Something in some way opposite in nature to the force which holds it together, comes with the comets into our planetary system.

In an earlier lecture-course about natural phenomena I drew attention to something of which I must here remind you. Those who were present—the course was mainly about Heat or Warmth²—will no doubt recall it. I said that when we look at the phenomena of warmth in their relation to other phenomena of the Universe we are obliged to form a far more concrete idea of the Ether, of which the physicists generally speak in rather hypothetical terms. I said that in the formulae of Physics, wherever the force of pressure occurs as regards ponderable matter, we have to replace it by a force of suction as regards the ether. In other words, if we insert a plus sign for the intensity of a force in the realm of ponderable matter, we must give a minus sign to the corresponding intensity in the ether. I suggested that the well-known formulae should be looked through with this end in view; for one would see how remarkably, when this is done, they harmonize with the phenomena of Nature.

Take for example that whole game of thought, if I may call it so, the Kinetic Theory of Gases, of of Heat itself,—the molecules impinging on each other and on the walls of the containing vessel. Take all this brutal play of mutual impact and recoil which is supposed to represent the thermal condition of gas. Instead of this phenomena will become clear and penetrable the moment we perceive that within warmth itself there are two conditions. akin to the conditions that prevail in ponderable matter; the other must be thought of as akin to the ether. Warmth is in this respect different from Air or Light. For light, if we are calculating truly we must use the negative sign throughout. Whatever in our formulae is to represent the effects of light, must bear a negative sign. For air or gas the sign must be positive. For warmth on the other hand, the positive and negative will have to alternate. What we are wont to distinguish as conducted heat, radiant heat and so on will only then become clear and transparent.

Within the realm of matter itself, these things reveal the need for a qualitative transition from the positive to the negative in characterizing the different kinds of force. And we now see, very significantly, how for the planetary system we also have to pass from the positive—that is, gravitation—to the corresponding negative, the repelling force.

One more thing I will say today, if only to formulate the problem. For the moment I will carry it no further, but only put the problem; we shall have time to go into these things in later lectures. Now that we have ascertained all this about the cometary bodies, let me compare the relation between our planetary system and the comets to what is there in the ovum, the female germ-cell, in its relation to the male element, the fertilizing sperm. Try to imagine, try to visualize the two processes, as you might actually see them. There is the planetary system; it receives something new into itself, namely the effects of a comet. There is the ovum; it receives into itself the fertilizing effect of the male cell, the spermatozoid.

Look at the two phenomena side by side without prejudice, as you might do in ordinary life when you see two things obviously comparable, side by side. Do you not find plenty of comparable features when you contemplate these two? I do not mean to set up any theory or hypothesis, I only want to indicate what you will see for yourselves if you once look at these things in their true connection.

Taking our start from this, tomorrow we may hope to enter into more concrete and more detailed aspects.

• 1. Examples of the relation of Spiritual Science to the different branches of Science. Four lectures to students, Stuttgart, 11th to 15th January, 1921. Published (in the original German) in the Swiss periodical “Gegenwart”, Vol. 14, nos. 2 to 8, Berne, 1952.
• 2. Stuttgart, 1st to 14th March 1920, generally known as the “Second Scientific Lecture-Course”. Issued (in the original German) by the Science Section of the Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland, 1925.

In the evolution of mankind, as I have recently been showing, inner spiritual connections prevail, which send their influences through the soul of man. I showed this in relation to Goethe's endeavours in his Faust, where he relates Faust to the impulse of the fifth post-Atlantean age by associating him with Mephistopheles, an Ahrimanic power. I then tried to show how Faust had to dive down into the impulses of the fourth post-Atlantean age, which I tried to describe in their real essence. All this is necessary, so that there takes place in the soul of Faust a conscious interpenetration of that which prevails unconsciously in human souls by virtue of the laws of evolution.

I said that the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—our epoch—will have to do with the great and significant life-question of Evil,—the mastery of Evil in all directions. Human beings will have to learn to know all that the soul must rouse and bring forth within itself in order partly to overcome the powers of Evil, partly to transmute them into impulses of Good. All this has arisen on the foundation of the impulses of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, which had to do especially with the problem of Birth and Death,—a problem which it had received as heritage from Atlantean time. We need only turn our gaze to the Christ-Impulse itself, entering in as it did in the first third of the fourth post-Atlantean period. This period began with the founding of Rome in the year 747 before the Birth of Christ. Thus, of the 2160 years of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, 747 years had to run their course before the main impulse—the Christ-Impulse could enter in, as indeed it did precisely in this fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Has not the Christ-Impulse to do with the great and important question that summons into the evolution of mankind problems of Birth and Death in their supersensible significance? How much discussion, how much thought and feeling has there not been on Christian soil about the Birth of Christ! How infinitely significant a part is played by the Death of Christ! In the Birth and Death of Christ we see most pregnantly this wrestling of the soul of man with the problem of Birth and Death. It was a wrestling in the soul, because the same struggle had already been there in a more elemental, in a more physical form in the great Atlantean epoch. Notably in the fourth civilisation-epoch of Atiantis-in the middle of Atlantean time, and as an after-effect in the fifth period also,—forces connected with Birth and Death were subject to the power of individual human beings. I have already described some aspects of this fact. Forces there were in the Atlanteans—forces that could be developed and that had influence on Birth and Death in a far more than merely natural degree. The good and evil forces in the human being had a far-reaching influence upon the health and sickness of their fellowmen, and thereby also upon Birth and Death. In Atlantean time one saw an actual connection between the things one did as human being and what took place in the so-called “course of Nature,” as Birth and Death.

In post-Atlantean time—in the fourth civilisation-epoch of post-Atlantean time—this problem of Birth and Death was transplanted more into the region of the soul. But in our epoch, in the fifth, human beings will have to grapple with the forces of Evil in an elemental way, just as they did with Birth and Death in Atlantean time. Notably through the quite different mastery over the forces of Nature, the impulses of Evil will work into the world on a grand scale, in a gigantic way. In the resistance which human beings will have to summon forth from spiritual depths, the opposite forces—the forces of Good—will have to grow. And in particular, already during the fifth epoch it will be possible for men to bring Evil over the Earth, by exploiting the force of Electricity, which will assume far greater dimensions than hitherto. Even directly out of the force of Electricity itself, Evil comes over the Earth.

We need to place these things before our consciousness. He who desires to receive the spiritual impulses will then find points of resistance; he will find the starting-points for those impulses which must evolve by the very resistance of Evil. It is difficult as yet to speak in any detail in this connection; for in the widest spheres as yet, these details touch on interests of human beings which they do not wish to have molested. In this respect, human beings are divided. On the one hand are those who suffer greatly, because they cannot clearly realise how they are interwoven with World-Karma; how they simply must take part in this thing or that, and cannot become abstractly pious all at once. On the other hand are those who in many ways are caught up in this World-Karma of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. They would rather not hear of what is really contained in the impusles that are going through the world, for it is often to their interest to represent as constructive the very impulses that are destructive. We have described, how since the last third of the nineteenth century there have been working among human beings those Beings whom I characterised as fallen Spirits of Darkness—Beings of the hierarchy of Angeloi. In the fourth post-Atlantean period, these Beings were still ministering members of the good, progressive Powers. They served in the creation of those orders which, as I told you, are derived out of the blood-relationship of men. Now they are in the realm of men, and as Angel-beings who have remained behind, they work into the inner impulses of human beings, to make effective in a retrogressive way—and thereby in an Ahrimanic way—all that which is connected with relationships of blood and clan, nation and race. Thereby they work to mar and to hinder those other social structures of mankind which should now arise out of quite other foundations than for example the bonds of blood, of family and race, clan and nation. To-day a very serious beginning of the work of these Spirits consists precisely in the abstract emphasis that is laid on the principle of Nationality. This abstract emphasis on Nationality, this setting up of programmes on the foundations of a national principle, is among those endeavours which we must attribute to the Spirits of Darkness who will stand far nearer to man—who will approach man in a far more intimate way—than did the backward Spirits of the fourth post-Atlantean period. The latter belong to the hierarchy of Archangeloi. Precisely this will be the significant aspect of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. These Beings who stand immediately above the hierarchy of Man—these Angel-beings—are able to approach the individual human being very nearly and intimately. They do not merely approach the groups. The individual will believe that he is representing things out of his own personal impulse, where in reality—for we can truly put it so—he is possessed by the kind of Angel-being of whom we have been speaking.

Let us once more make clear to ourselves, what was the nature of the efforts of the backward retrogressive Spirits of Darkness of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. For we shall then be more able to understand what is the nature of their efforts in our present, fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, as I have told you, it was the normal thing to build all the social structure of humanity upon the bonds of blood—blood-relationship. During that time—that is, during the Graeco-Latin civilisation-epoch—the Ahrimanic-Luciferic backward Beings rebelled precisely against the bonds of blood. They were the inspirers of that rebellion which wanted to loosen human beings from blood-kinship. You can derive it even from the general teachings of Spiritual Science. And above all, it was in a sense the descendants of individualities who in the Atlantean time had still been working in a magical way,—it was the descendants of these, who as rebelling individualities, became the “Heroes” in the recapitulation of Atlantean time, in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. I beg you now to observe how the Graeco-Latin epoch met these rebel-beings. For in that time, after all, there was still the wise guidance of mankind out of the Mysteries. They did not say to human beings: “Avoid these rebel natures! Avoid the Ahrimanic, Luciferic spiritual Beings!” They did not say this to them; they knew that it lay in the wise plan of cosmic evolution to place these Beings where they were and to use them. It is a weakness of many people to-day, when they hear of Lucifer and Ahriman, to explain: “For Heaven's sake, let us avoid them!” As though they could avoid them! I have often spoken of this. Knowledge was brought to the human beings of the fourth post-Atlantean time in the form in which it had to be at that time. The influence of the good Gods was there in the bonds of blood. Human beings gave themselves up to it, in the mutual love which was founded in the blood-relationships (for so it was at that time; to-day it must be more purely spiritual.) Yet, for the sake of progress, rebellions always had to take place. This way of cosmic evolution had to be explained to the people in myths and legends. To the Initiates they were communicated in another form—in a way more similar to the way in which these truths are being taught to us to-day. But in the widest circles, human beings of that time would not have been ready to receive the explanations of the myths. Therefore the exoteric myths were told to them. In these, however, deep significant truths of evolution lay concealed.

Let us consider an outstanding myth, connected with the very thing I have just been placing before you. It tells how an oracle prophesied to Laius of Thebes at his betrothal with Jocaste. It prophesied that from this union a son would be born who would become his father's murderer and live in incest with his mother. Laius did not let this deter him from the contemplated union; but when the son was born, he pierced his heels and had him exposed on Mount Cithaeron. To a shepherd the boy became entrusted. The shepherd's wife called him Oedipus on account of his pierced heels. You know how the story goes on. The boy Oedipus grew up; his talents developed. At an early age his soul was beset by doubts concerning his descent, for his companions drew his attention to many things. Then the Delphic Oracle pronounced an important saying, painful to study nowadays, if you can study it in its whole context. The saying is: “Avoid thy home-country; otherwise thou wilt become thy father's murderer, thy mother's husband.” This was said to Oedipus.

Now he was under a complete illusion. He did not know who his father and his mother really were. He could not but think Corinth, where he had grown up, his home. At last he wandered from Corinth in order not to bring about disaster there by killing his father and marrying his mother. But the very fact that he set out and took the way to Thebes became his doom. On the way he met a chariot in which his father Laius was travelling with a companion. A conflict arose; he killed his father and continued on his way to Thebes, and his first deed was, as you know, to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx. So we hay e Oedipus placed in the very fullest way into the evolutionary nexus of the fourth post-Atlantean age. For in a certain sense the Riddle of the Sphinx—the Riddle of Man—belonged to the fourth epoch. Oedipus was one of those who knew. Far from replying to the Sphinx: “I am reluctant to unveil a higher secret”; he solved the secret. Something was thereby implanted in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. It was an impulse that worked on and on, and in which Oedipus played an essential part. For we Wright speak for many hours about the solving of the Riddle of the Sphinx by Oedipus; but we need not do so to-day. To-day we will only make clear that this deed reveals him as a characteristic Hero of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch.

Now he went on to Thebes, married his mother, whom of course he did not hold to be his mother, and was comparatively happy—till a plague arose. At length it was the seer Tiresias who revealed the truth. Jocaste, suddenly knowing herself tobe the wife of her son, killed herself by suffocation. Oedipus blinded himself and was driven away by his own sons. Another one, Theseus, then protected him in the Grove of Attica until his death, and he was buried in Attic soil. We need only call to mind the Oedipus-drama up to this point.

What does it represent? It represents an individuality—the Oedipus individuality—taken out of the blood connection, growing up outside the bonds of blood and then transplanted back again into the blood-connection, to his own detriment. We have before us no mere subjective rebel against the bonds of blood, but one who by the very laws of Nature becomes a rebel against the bonds of blood and thereby kindles and enflames them even against himself.

Look through the Greek mythology, and you will often find such human beings—Heroes who are placed into the blood-relationship in such and such a way, but who are then exposed so that they undergo their evolution outside the blood-relationship. Through the very fact that they are removed from the old order, from the normal order, they then bring in quite other impulses of evolution. Such an Hero is Oedipus; such too is Theseus who protects him in the wood of Attica.

No wonder if in ancient Greece they could not tell the people who was really behind these Heroes! They could not tell them that they were the great rebels, who were none the less necessary in the wise course of World-evolution. Think, for example, of Theseus himself. Here, too, it was an oracular saying that reached the ears of his father, so that he had his son educated far away. The mother, who had given birth to Theseus far from his father's home, was told: When the youth grows up so that he can wield a certain sword, then and then only let him return. Here again, Theseus is removed, transplanted away from the blood-connection. He too has to solve important riddles of the fourth post-Atlantean time. You know the legend of how he liberated Athens from the tribute of the youths who had to be sacrificed to the Minotaur, and of how he saved himself by means of Ariadne's thread. Theseus became the protector of Oedipus; yet Theseus is the very one who carries Helena away when she is ten years old, and keeps her in hiding. Theseus is brought into close connection with Helena.

Deep evolutionary riddles of the fourth post-Atlantean age are concealed beneath these things. The Court lady of the sixteenth century naturally had no more inkling of them than to exclaim: “From her tenth year onward she was nothing worth.” Yet in this line again, Goethe is hinting at sometning deeply significant. Goethe was well aware that that which stands behind Helena is in reality worthy of reverence, even as Faust revered her. But with regard to Helena of all people, the worst forces of calumny have been at work. Mankind might learn from such things; it can very easily happen that that which is worthy of true recognition—that which perhaps is highest—can be the most calumniated!

I only wished to point this out, to show how Helena herself stands in mysterious connection with those individualities who were the rebels of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and who at that time had the task—for the wise guidance of the Universe—to break through the blood-relationship.

How does it stand with Paris, who is presented to us by Goethe in the Invocation Scene—forgive the trite expression, I do not mean it trivially—as Faust's competitor or rival? How does it stand with Paris? Here too we are told; he was the son of Priam and of Hecuba, and his mother had a dream when she was pregnant with him. In this case it began not with an oracle but with a dream—albeit a dream containing deeper wisdom. It prophesied to Paris' mother that she would give birth to a burning torch that would set fire to the city of Troy. Therefore the parallel legend tells also of an oracle which announced to the father that this his son would serve in Troy's destruction. Whether for the one reason or the other, the father had Paris exposed. Paris, therefore, was also among those who were put outside the blood community. He was brought up in Parion, far from the bonds of blood; and it was there that there took place what the legend tells: how Eris assigned the apple to the most beautiful, and how Paris was called upon by the Goddesses, Hera, Pallas and Aphrodite, to determine which of them was the fairest. It was even said that Hera promised Paris Asia, that is the ruler- ship over the Earth, for ‘Asia’ at that time signified the rulership of the entire Earth. Pallas Athene promised him fame in battle; Aphrodite the fairest of women. Paris gave Aphrodite the prize of beauty.

Nov the great Song of Homer describes how significantly Paris thereby entered into the whole course of the affairs of Greece. In Paris himself we have an individuality rebelling against the bonds of blood. He takes Helena out of the Grecian bonds,of blood and tries to transplant her to Troy. He wants to break the bonds of blood. These things are always connected in this way; in the Greek Hero-legends we always see how there is placed into the midst of evolution that which is meant to break the bonds of blood. For the bonds of blood—in themselves strong, mighty and powerful—they are the thing that really brings about the social structure in that time.

There is one question which can come before us very clearly in this field, and it shall occupy us now for a few minutes. Someone might easily raise the following question: How does it stand with human freedom if such important deeds as the rape of Helena by Paris are accomplished by something taking place in the Spiritual World above, as in this case the rivalry of the three Goddesses? The human being then appears as the mere tool to execute what is not only prepared, but actually worked-out, in spiritual realms above. Now in a certain sense we must truly say: That which takes place through human beings here below is the reflected image of what happens in the Spiritual World. This is a point where the great riddle of freedom mightily knocks upon the doors of human knowledge. Are we really automata, who by their actions reveal the mere reflected image of what happens in the Spiritual World above? And again, how would the Spiritual World, which is the guide and leader in all that happens,—how would the Spiritual World stand there if, so to speak, it had nothing to do, if it were actionless? Two things must be understood: First, the universal course is really led and guided by spiritual forces, spiritual Powers; and nothing happens that does not happen down from the Spiritual World. And the second is, that the human being has Free Will. The two things seem diametrically opposite. We are here touching a great riddle, a problem that gives men very much to do, and they can never get beyond it lightly. For it is truly so: If we look up into the Spiritual World, what the Gods do there represents the deeds of Gods; and the human beings here below carry out the impulses of Gods. So indeed it is. How then can human beings be free?

Let me now place these problems before you with a few brief strokes. Of course one can only indicate a little of this problem at a time. Let us assume therefore: Up yonder are the three Goddesses with the conflict that is taking place among them. As a result of their conflict, there comes clown on to the Earth the impulse that proceeds from these their actions. We need not consider for our present purpose how these actions are in turn connected with still higher Hierarchies. That which takes place up yonder takes place with absolute Necessity; and as to that which Paris does, this also happens because the three Goddesses above have had this conflict with one another. How then is any freedom possible for Paris? It is practically out of the question, you will say. Yet it is not. For the ray falls down, as it were, on to the Earth; and here on Earth there is not one whom it can reach, but there are many. Assume, for example, that there are an hundred. Ninety and nine do not do the deed; the hundredth does it. Here in effect once more the Mystery of Number plays its part. These things are always confused. Paris does the deed, it is true, but the point is that Paris only becomes fully Paris inasmuch as he finds himself prepared to put himself in the very place where this impulse was able to he fulfilled. In short, the Gods would have found another one if Paris had not done it; and in that case the legend would be told of another.

It is through Number that you will come to the solution of this Riddle of Freedom. And if so be, at any given point of time, among the hundreds who stand here below no one is found, then the Gods wait till one arrives. He then accomplishes what the Gods place before him. Be that as it may, Paris it is who has accomplished the deed. It does not mar his freedom in the very least, for he could perfectly well have left the deed undone. Think of this aspect of the problem of Number, and you will find that the divinely necessary, wisdom-filled guidance of the Universe stands not in contradiction to human Freedom. Needless, to say, this does not exhaust the problem of freedom; this again is only a part.

You see, therefore, how in the total evolution of mankind the Heroes of ancient Greece, of whom we are told that they were exposed in childhood, are of great significance. And you may also call to mind (you will find it in one of my lectures; I do not know, I may even have said it several times) there is a similar legend of exposure in connection with Judas. Of Judas Iscariot we are also told that he was put out in his youth. This is a typical feature; it signifies in the language of myth and legend the entry of the rebel Powers, who rebel against the bonds of blood of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch.

Now the region out of which these impulses proceeded in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch is the region wherein the Archangel-Beings rule. Therefore the narratives are always such that the human being stands rather remote from the influences that take place out of the Spiritual World. Either it is an oracle that brings the message from the Spiritual World, or else it is the direct intervention of the World of the Gods Themselves. Helena, you know, is a daughter of Leda and Zeus; here too the Spiritual World works in directly. In our time it is the dark and backward Angel-Beings, and they naturally work through a far more intimate intercourse with human beings. I have already told you, if one would discuss or even only hint at many things that are connected with this working of the Dark Powers since the last third of the nineteenth century, one treads on very thin ice indeed! But you can tell from the whole context; the seeking of social structure through the bonds of blood, which was the right and normal evolution for the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, represents, where it remains behind in the fifth epoch, one of those impulses with which the human beings of this epoch will have to battle. We must however add another thing which I have also told you. Something entirely new is now occurring. The fourth post-Atlantean epoch—its wrestling with Birth and Death—was a repetition of Atlantean time. Now something new makes it appearance—something created directly out of Maya or Illusion. Yet this Illusion we must also understand; we must only understand it rightly. It goes without saying, Maya was always there. As I explained in the essay which you will shortly be able to read in the Reich, in relation to the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, all consciousness originates out of Illusion. Yet since the fifth post-Atlantean epoch began, Illusion is present in a more than usual degree. Illusion will appear increasingly in this form:—Human beings will give themselves up to illusions. Illusions there always were, but they were always connected with other powers in the third post-Atlantean epoch, with the forces of “elective affinity”; in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch with the forces of Birth and Death; in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch with the forces of Evil. Illusion, Maya itself, will be seized upon by Evil. Moreover, it will all be permeated by that element of which I have also told you—by cleverness, intelligence.

It sounds paradoxical when one asserts that it is good for men that they can learn to know all these things. But the fact is, the human being can only come to spiritual freedom by growing strong against resistance. This, one can readily see.

Moreover, precisely that which is connected with the number Five is always connected in this way with the unfolding of Evil. Human beings will have to accustom themselves to one thing: to regard the inrush of the forces of Evil as an inrush of very laws of Nature, forces of Nature. Then they will learn to know them, and they will know what lives and moves in the very depths of things. We must not regard Evil from the outset as one would, who in the fulness of his egoism merely wanted to get away, to flee from it. We cannot do so. But we must penetrate it with consciousness; we must learn to know it,—really learn to know it. Above all, in our time already a force is preparing in the realm of human beings,—a force which tends to create illusions that are harmful and destructive. I will give you a little example of one such illusion. In giving this example, once again I do not wish in any way or in the very least to take sides in one direction or the other; I simply wish to give you an example of this entry of Illusion.

Assume that a politician appears upon the scenes to-day, wishing to speak out of his inmost impulse of his own attitude to the wheel of the world—to the various things that are being said and done to-day, from one quarter or another. Suppose that this politician found occasion to express himself about the part that is being played in the events of our time by the British State system (I say the State system; for with the nations themselves we are not concerned in this connection) and by the hidden powers that are behind it,—powers of which we have often spoken. Assume that a politican feels called upon to speak of this. He wishes to make plain how he considers that a right relationship to the British impulses can be established.

Suppose now that such a politician were to say the following. Suppose he were to say: It would be an unfriendly action against the Power that rules the Sea, to paralyse or lessen its superiority. What would you say? This politician notes the fact that there is a Power that rules over the Sea. One must take some attitude towards it. Since, after all, this Power rules the Sea, it would be an unfriendly act, he says, to hinder its development. Therefore one should refrain from such unfriendly action.

What could one say of such a politician? I think the very least that one could say would be that he stands for a policy of Power—Machtpolitik. Is is not so? Wherever the Power is, in that direction let us turn. This, at the least, seems to emerge from his words. But to-day one does not say so. One does not take one's stand in such a case and frankly say: “I stand for a policy of Power; I will attach myself to the Power which happens to have power.” But on the contrary one says, one defines it thus: “I stand for Right and Freedom and for the Independece of Nations.”

One says these two things side by side. One says that one stands for Right and Freedom of the Nations, and directly side by side with this, one says: “Let us above all attach ourselves to the particular Power which has the power, and commit no unfriendly act in relation to it.”

You see from this how human beings involve themselves in illusions. For I have here put before you the case of the Swedish politician Branting. He, a neutral politician, is the man who spoke in this way. That is the way one carries on a neutral policy, of course. I do not say it as a reproach or to take sides with one or another party. I say it as a pure description of how such things must take their course to-day. One is enthusiastic, needless to say, for Right and Freedom of the Nations, and yet—one stands for a such a policy. One does not confess that one stands for it for the simple reason that one can do no other,—that would be the truth,—but on the contrary one says that one stands for it inspired by the impulses of Right and Freedom for all Nations.

With such things as these we must indeed concern ourselves. It is not enough for anyone to give himself up to the fairy-tales that are going through the world to-day; we must take these things into our consciousness. Only by this means is it possible to attach oneself to the real impulses of evolution which I have described. No age was ever so little enlightened about itself as is the present. No other age stands in such dire need of enlightenment about itself. Think only how proud it was of its great progress in every kind of human thought. Why, they had even succeeded in finding impulses for Social Science, out of Natural Science! I have often spoken to you of the science of social life.

Think for a moment, what is so often said in official quarters to this day on educational and social questions, questions of right and justice and so forth. Try to transplant yourself into the frame of mind in which these people bring forward their supposed infallible truths, while at the same time they would suppress absolutely everything that resounds from any other quarter. Part of what modern humanity believed thus fondly, has led to the event that through the impulses of this humanity,—impulses of Illusion upon the one hand, of Nationality upon the other—five million human beings have been consigned to death during two years and three to three-and-a-half million have been permanently wounded. It was so after two years, and now, considerably more than three years have elapsed. This is only the consequence of the false thoughts that were entertained,—thoughts in which illusion was allied with destructive power. From many another thing that is spoken nowadays about education or questions of right and justice, similar consequences will evolve if it goes on in this way, uninfluenced by spiritual life and being. For in the last resort everything depends on this. To kindle the spiritual forces in the consciousness of mankind is an absolute need for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Our criticism of the opposite, materialistic opinion is but a part of the zeal with which we call to life the spiritual impulses within us. This is the thing that matters. Whatever has to happen among men must also be undertaken by men. If we have made ourselves ready to take our stand where the ray falls, the ray will come in good time; of that you may be certain. This preparation, this making-ready, can, however, only take place through the community. It will be for the individual human beings, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, only so far as the ideas are concerned; but it will depend on the understanding with which communities will receive these ideas.

Hold to this thought, my dear friends.

Yesterday I spoke to you of the scene from Part II of Goethe's Faust that had just been performed, and I should like to run over again the main thoughts then under consideration. For in this scene we are dealing with one of the most significant of Goethe's creation, with a scene he added to his Faust after having wrestled with the problem of Faust for about sixty years. Moreover, we have to do here with a scene through which we can look deep into Goethe's soul, in so far as it was dominated by the urge for knowledge—dominated above all by the great seriousness of this urge. While grasping all the knowledge in this poem of Faust we must never forget, however, that everything revealed in it with such lofty wisdom in no way prejudices—as is frequently the case with lesser poets who attempt anything of the same kind—in no way prejudices the purely artistic force of its construction. I have drawn your attention before to what Goethe stressed to Eckermann, namely, that there is much concealed in his Faust, many riddles of man to be recognised by Initiates, but that he had taken trouble to put it all into a form that, regarded merely from the theatrical standpoint, can with its pictorial quality impress even the simplest natured minds. Now let us bring again before our souls just the main points of what was said yesterday about all that is thus concealed, and afterwards go on to what we could not then touch upon. I mean, the conclusion of the scene.

I said yesterday that this scene shows clearly how Goethe was following up the problem of man's self-knowledge, man's comprehension of himself. For Goethe, knowledge was never something merely abstract and theoretical; to grasp the truth was for him a scientific urge. Also, for him—as it will increasingly be for future human evolution—what he sought in his soul as knowledge was something that has to be an impulse to experience life in all its fullness, to experience all that life can bring to man in the way of fortune and misfortune, of joy and sorrow, of blows of fate and opportunities of development. But, in addition to this, the urge for knowledge must be related to all the claims life makes on a man, as regards his behaviour towards society as a whole, as regards what he does and creates. Faust is not meant to be represented merely as a man striving after the highest knowledge, but as one bound up in his innermost being with all that life demands and brings. To this end, Goethe seeks knowledge for his Faust, that is, knowledge of man, comprehension of the self, comprehension of the forces at present latent in mankind. But Goethe sees clearly that ordinary knowledge, dependent on the senses and conditioned by the understanding, cannot lead to this self-knowledge. For this reason he introduces into the Classical Walpurgis-Night Homunculus, the product that was supposed to be, for mediaeval research, the copy of a human being that, within external nature, the physical understanding was able to put together out of natural forces and natural laws. All this comes into the idea of Homunculus. Yesterday I went more deeply into what Goethe meant to convey in his Homunculus, apart from any superstition connected with him; but now let us consider his more obvious meaning. In his Homunculus-idea he wished to represent what a man, here in the physical world, can recognise in himself. Whoever makes use only of the knowledge offered him by science, or by the study of physical life, can never gain knowledge and comprehension of man in accordance with Goethe's conception. He will never know Homo, the human being; he will be able to picture in his soul only Homunculus, an elemental spirit who has come to a standstill on the path to becoming man. Goethe wrestles with this as with a problem of knowledge: How can the idea of Homo grow out of the idea of Homunculus?

The whole mood and tenor, the whole artistic structure of the Classical Walpurgis-Night shows how clearly Goethe saw that the problem of human nature con only be solved by a knowledge based on investigation pursued, outside the body, by man's soul and spirit.What he wishes to ray forth from his Faust is his conviction that information concerning man can be given only by those who admit the validity of knowledge acquired outside the instrument of the physical body. Hence, true Spiritual Science, true Anthroposophy, alone can lead to the knowledge of man, of Homo; while all the other knowledge dealing with the physical world, can only lead to the idea of Homunculus. As far as possible, during the whole of his life, Goethe was ceaselessly occupied in striving towards this supersensible knowledge. He sought it on various paths, and those paths that opened out to him he endeavoured to portray artistically in his Faust. Faust was to represent for him a man who at last arrives at a real knowledge and comprehension of mankind.

Now, in Goethe's time Anthroposophy was not yet, and could not have been, in existence. Hence Goethe tried to associate himself with his contemporary culture, in which thee were still echoes of atavistic spiritual vision. And after showing all that is in the Romantic Walpurgis-Night of the first part of Faust to be inadequate for knowledge of man, his great desire was then to take refute in the Imaginations of the Grecian myths. We have so often spoken of Goethe that we can easily see what lay beneath this idea of his.—Goethe felt and experienced that man is not to be grasped through the concepts of physical understanding. But he had no wish, as yet, to supersede these by his own Imaginations; therefore he sought to give a new form to those of ancient Greece. Thus, if we wish to give a more exact description of the scene just presented, we may say: Goethe wanted to show how a man, Faust, has been approached (from outside, but that is of no importance) by the idea of Homunculus, the only idea to be obtained in this respect in the physical world. He wanted to show how such a man, by his state of consciousness undergoing a change through his leaving the body, will then behave differently. He will behave like a man who, asleep at night outside his body, becomes able to perceive what is around him, all that surrounds him of a soul and spirit nature. Then, if he goes to sleep consciously, as it were, retaining his consciousness in sleep, if, sleeping on, he can take with him into his sleep-knowledge the idea of Homunculus acquired in his physical life, he can so transform it that it seizes hold of human reality. This is what Goethe wished to represent; and to help in the task, he took the pictures of the Grecian myths. He shows often in this scent how far in his feeling he was removed at least form the superstition of the pedant, who sees nothing more in such myths than poetic fiction and creations of fantasy. And I have often told you that, as a result of this superstition, it is claimed that legends, traditions, myths, persisting among simple peoples, are conceptions of nature transformed by fantasy. These superstitious pedants have really no idea how small a part fantasy plays in the creations of simple minds, not how prevalent among them is a certain atavistic power of beholding reality in dreams.

Now in the myths developed by the Greek spirit, there is not merely poetry, there is a true vision of reality. And the element Goethe first presented was the one in which all ancient peoples have seen the impulse in the soul that brings about its separation from the body. Connection with the outside world was much closer for the men of old than for the present-day abstract rationalistic man. In olden days when men climbed a mountain, for instance, they did not merely experience a physical, barely perceptible difference in the breathing, a densification of the atmosphere, or a change to the eye in perspective; for them it was a passing from one condition of the soul to another. For a man of those days the ascent of a mountain was a far more living experience than for modern man who has become so abstract. They felt with special vividness, what some sea-farers still experience today in a primitive, less delicate way, that, to a certain degree, soul and spirit actually free themselves from their instrument, the body. The more sensitive sea-faring folk still have this experience. But the men of old felt as a matter of course: “When I sail out on the open sea, and am no longer connected with the solid earth and its definite forms, then my soul frees itself from the body, and I see more of the supersensible than when I am surrounded by earth's rigid outlines.”—This is why, when Homunculus is to be changed into Homo, Goethe introduces a gay festival of the sea, and it is Thales, the man of natural philosophy, who conducts Homunculus thither.

And we see the Sirens. I spoke of this yesterday so today I shall not dwell upon the dramatic an pictorial way in which everything here is put into external form. I will, however, point out that the deeper mystery that Goethe would also have us see, the mystery of the Sirens' song, lies in these demonic beings belonging on the one side to the sea, but being able to become living, as demonic beings of the sea, only when the moon shines upon it. The moonlit sea lures forth the Sirens who, in their turn, lure forth man's soul from within him. The state of consciousness in which the supersensible world can be perceived in Imaginations, in pictures, is therefore brought about by the Sirens. Above all they practise their wiles on the Nereids and Tritons, who are on their way to Samothrace, to the sacred Mysteries of the Kabiri.

Precisely why does Goethe introduce the Kabiri? This is because his Homunculus is to become Homo, to become man, and because the Initiates of the holy Mysteries of the Kabiri in Samothrace were above all destined to learn the secret of man's becoming. It was this secret that was represented in the Kabiri. Here in the physical world is accomplished physical becoming, but this has its counterpart in the sphere of spirit and soul, a counterpart only to be seen outside the body in Imaginations. Unless the abstract idea of Homunculus is brought into connection with what can be seen here, Homunculus can never become Homo. Thus Goethe believes in all that the Greek felt when thinking of his Kabiri in Samothrace; he believed something was to be found there over and above the abstract idea of Homunculus, through which it might grow to the idea of Homo.

Let us without prejudice speak of what this really involves. In what man can experience of himself through ordinary knowledge, that amounts only to what he is as Homunculus, Goethe saw something to be compared with the unfertilised human germ-cell. Considering the unfertilised germ-cell in the human mother, we recognise it as something from which no physical human being can arise. It must first be fertilised; only then can there be a physical human being. And when we think with physical understanding alone, in these thoughts the inner being of man can never be lit up, for this is only what can be produced one-sidedly, and may be compared with what can be produced by the woman one-sidedly. All it is possible to grasp with out physical understanding, must be fertilised by knowledge gained outside the physical body. Half the riddle on man is hidden from the mere physical power of understanding. The atavistic clairvoyance adapted to ancient times wished to point, in the Mystery of the Kabiri, to what, in the spiritual connection of nature, is the other half of man's becoming which in its turn points to the immortal in man. That is why Goethe thought that possible through the impulse of the Kabiri the developing of Homunculus into Homo might be represented.

But Goethe, as one who sought knowledge, was not only to a high degree a serious seeker, but, at the same time, something which, my dear friends, is very much rarer in the sphere of knowledge than one might think—a deeply honest soul. He wished to test how far he would get by breathing new life into such a mystery as that of the Kabiri. Those who seek knowledge with less honesty make a few antiquarian studies, perhaps adding a few fantasies founded upon these, and then consider they know something of what is expressed in the Kabiri Mystery. Yes, my dear friends, the honest seeker after knowledge never knows as much as the seeker who is less honest, for he always considers himself more stupid than those who light-heartedly piece together information from here and there, which, easily acquired, is then said to be absolutely complete. Goethe was not one of those who took knowledge thus light-heartedly. He knew that, even if he had striven for it from the year 1749 to the year 1829, in which he wrote this scene just witnessed (a scene written in the most difficult circumstances about two years before his death) even if he has grown old in this striving and has never relaxed, nevertheless, for the honest searcher after knowledge there is always a remaining sting. Perhaps in some direction one ought to have done better.—This is what worked so intensively out of Goethe's very nature—this absolute honesty. This made him recognise, where the riddle of the Kabiri is concerned: As a modern man who can no longer call upon clairvoyance, I cannot know what the Greeks thought about the Kabiri—I cannot know this for certain!—But perhaps that is not of most importance, for Goethe had the feeling that there was a kind of knowledge of the Kabiri Mystery within him, which, however, he could not wholly grasp. It was like a dream that not only immediately fades, but of which one knows that, although it passes away so quickly, it contains something most profound; it hovers so lightly that the understanding, the intellect, does not suffice, the soul-forces do not suffice to give it clear and definite outline. It is precisely in this intimate inner development that there lies the significance of this scene. We do not understand it at all if we wish to explain every detail. For Goethe has called up pictures for the very purpose of showing—“Here I am close to my goal yet cannot reach it.”

Thus, he introduces the Kabiri to show how, perhaps not he but someone who fully grasps the Kabiri Mystery, may find the bridge for Homunculus, with the help of that Mystery, to come to Homo. He himself cannot yet succeed in this, and has therefore chosen other paths in the imaginative world. That is why he makes the philosopher Thales conduct Homunculus into the presence of Nereus. Now Goethe thought very highly of Thales, though not to the point of giving him credit for being able to show Homunculus how to become Homo. This Nereus has a great gift of human understanding and knows how to transform the divine into the demonic, thus foreseeing the future, so that it may be supposed he knows something about changing Homunculus into Homo. But here again Goethe wishes to show that this is not the path. For on this path we come to a one-sided development, raising the human critical understanding to a demonic height that not only runs to dull criticism but to actual prophetic criticism holding in mind the good side of human criticism. Nereus, however, a kind of priest among the demons, is not in a position, either, to approach the Homunculus-problem. He does not even want to do so. Goethe has the feeling that, should human understanding be developed to the demonic, should the critical faculty of investigation possessed by man be—shall we say—demonised, he would then lose all interest in this most profound human problem of raising Homunculus to man. Thus nothing is to be gained from Nereus. But he does at least draw attention to the imminent approach of his daughters, the Dorides, sisters of the Nereids, and among them, the most outstanding of them all, Galatea. Yesterday I tried to indicate what is represented in this picture of Galatea.

You see, my dear friends, the modern man of research sees everything telescoped into a single moment of life. In the Greek world-conception—by no means confined to what is generally known as classical Philology—what live in the human being was still closely connected with all that lives in the whole of external nature. All that contributes to the becoming of man exists in another form, weaving and pulsing through every process of nature. But we have to be able to discover it. Our present capacity for knowledge is not sensitive enough to penetrate into the regions through which we participate in external nature, in the experiences of the great universe. These experiences are, indeed, concealed in man, in his development from the human germ-cell, from conception, fertilisation, to birth and his appearing as a human being. The same processes that then take place, in concealment within the human being, are going on continuously all around us. It was precisely this which, in the Kabiri Mystery was disclosed to the candidate for initiation—how in nature conception and birth are living. We see the moon rise and set, we see the sun rise and set, feel the warmth the sun sheds around, receive the light it radiates; we see the clouds moving, look upon their changing forms. Within all this weaving and pulsing through the world lies the impulse of becoming. But modern man no longer perceives this; he will perceive it, however, if he develops himself further through Spiritual Science. And formerly he perceived it with an atavistic sense of cognition, with the atavistic perception and conception of olden times.

Here we must have recourse to that finer capacity for perception still existing in days of yore. It might be said that what happens when, instead of direct sunlight, moonlight is on the sea, moonlight is reflected on the waves, is experienced half consciously as dreamy presentiment, as the foreshadowing of a dream. Man today looks at the way moonlight is reflected on the waves; and all the physicist can say is that moonlight is polarised light. That is an abstraction that says very little; and the physicist experiences nothing of what is actually happening. We experience it today if someone burns us with red-hot tongs; our capacity for sensitive feeling takes us that far. But in the Greek world-conception it was recognised that something of soul and spirit lives in the rays of the sun, something similar, yet distinct, is living in the rays of the moon, and that something actually happens when the moonlight—that borrowed sunlight—is wedded to the waves of the sea. It knew what was surging there when the pulse of the moonlight throbbed in tune with the waves of the sea. When the moon was thus wedded to the waves, the Greeks perceived in this light-enchanted weaving the impulse surging, pulsing, through the external world which, from conception the birth, pulses and surges in man. Outside in nature the Greek perceived in another form what is present in man when, in the physical sense, the mystery of human becoming is being accomplished.

Goethe, by putting into new and artistic form what intimately and delicately the Greeks might have felt, shows clearly how it echoed in his own feeling. He expresses all this by making Thales point to the retinue of the moon approaching on little clouds, accompanying Galatea's shell-chariot. This shell-chariot is the generating force in external nature pulsing through the sea. Goethe associates it with Luna, the Moon-force, the Moon-impulse. Thus, once again he evokes a significant Imagination from the Greek world-conception, in order to draw nearer the process by which, in man's conception, the abstract Homunculus-idea can become that of the Homo. Only when we can with feeling experience the intimate details weaving and surging in Goethe's wonderful pictures, do we really enter into what in this scene was living in Goethe's soul. We shall never go deep into all this scene contains if we try to grasp it with our bald, abstract concepts, and without arousing in ourselves an intimate sympathy with what Goethe was able to experience.

Thus, if I may express myself in dull, theoretical fashion, we shall come nearer the solution of the Homunculus-Homo problem if this idea, seen from outside the physical body, is planted into the generative impulse weaving, throbbing, through nature. Even before he brought Homunculus into contact with this generative impulse, Goethe had called in Proteus, the demonic being whose inner bent of soul Goethe regarded as most closely allied to his theory of metamorphosis. He has endeavored in this theory of metamorphosis, to follow up the changes in the living form, from the lowest order of beings up to man, hoping in this way to come nearer the riddle of man's becoming, the riddle of Homunculus-Homo. We know that Goethe had far to go before being able to arrive at the solution. He thought to recognise that the foliage leaf changes into the petal of the flower that, in its turn, becomes the stamen and pistil of the flower. He also believed that the bones of the spinal column are transformed into the skull bones. There he stopped, for he could not press on to the crown of this metamorphosis-idea, that appears for us when we know that a metamorphosis takes place in the forces which, from one incarnation, from one earth-life to another, permeate the human body. What today is my head has its form through the metamorphosis of the rest of the body of the previous incarnation; and what is my present body will be, with the exception of the head, transformed till, in the next incarnation, it becomes my next head. This is the crown of Metamorphosis. But Goethe could only give us the elementary stages of the idea of metamorphosis which flows on into Spiritual Science. He came nearer its further stages when trying to grasp and put into poetic form the problem of Homunculus-Homo.

And he set forth with honest doubt all that could be reached through Proteus as the representative of the metamorphosis-idea. Proteus appears in his various forms that exist, however, side by side. Everything that can lead to the birth, the supersensible birth, of the Homunculus-idea is here brought in by Goethe. Now he again comes to a standstill. Then fresh light flashes in. In contrast to all that is demonic, the elemental beings of a spiritual nature, Nereids, Tritons, Dorides, Nereus, Proteus, and so forth, in contrast to all these, there appear the Telchines. These, the oldest artists, as it were, of the earthly world during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, remind us that Goethe was trying to approach the riddle of man, not only by the path of physical science, but also by another path of the senses—the path of art. As man, Goethe was neither one-sidedly a scientist, nor one-sidedly an artist; in him scientist and artist were consciously combined. Hence, as he stood before works of art in Italy, he said that he saw something there suggesting that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, worked in accordance with the laws nature applied, the same laws that he himself was tracking down. And if you let Goethe's book on Winckelmann work upon you, you will see how Goethe sought to come nearer knowledge of the riddle of man by way of art, how he sought to follow the course of natural phenomena to the point where, as he so beautifully expresses it in this book, nature becomes conscious of herself in man. What can be done here by the artistic conception of nature—seen from the other side, from the standpoint of supersensible knowledge—is made evident to us with the appearance of the Telchines, those ancient artists who first depicted Gods in human form.

Goethe intimates that, whereas he generally leads the human consciousness away from the physical to the superphysical, here he is making one look back from the superphysical to the physical; the Telchines are in the superphysical, but what they mean, what they stand for, passes over into the physical. They are portrayed as being in contrast with all the other figures—those dedicated wholly to Luna, to the Moon, and referred to by the Sirens as follows:

“Helios' initiated
Ye to bright day consecrated
Greet us in this stirring hour,
When we worship Luna's power.”

Thus they actually belong to the Sun. On the island of Rhodes they erected statue after statue to Apollo. The attempt has been made to solve the Homunculus-Homo problem by looking across to the supersensible world; but that too has been unsuccessful. And Proteus himself energetically denies that anything is to be gained from the Telchines for the transformation of Homunculus into Homo.

And what happens next? There now appear the Psylli and the Marsi, kinds of snake-demons, who bring with them the previously described shell-chariots of Galatea. The Psylli and Marsi are demonic snakes, who draw into the spiritual the souls of human beings; at the same time they are servants in the world man inters on leaving his physical body. In that world there is no separation between the purely animal and the purely human, the animal from passes over, merges, into the human.

Now after being shown by means of the sailor boys, and the Dorides who represent that world, how difficult it is to put before man the relation of the spiritual world to the world of the senses, we then see the shattering of Homunculus against the shell-chariot of Galatea. There is deep meaning in the Dorides thus ushering in the sailor lads in this scene. The Dorides are demonic beings of the sea, the sailors, human beings. Goethe is wishing to show how man is abel to approach spiritual beings from the other side of existence, and how destiny (we are distinctly told the sailor lads have been saved by the Dorides) brings man into connection with the Gods. But here in physical life this relation is immediately broken down; there is no continuous connection when the superphysical and physical wish to unite—the Gods will not suffer it.

Then at the end of this scene we ar confronted by this wonderful picture. After everything ha been tried through majestic Imaginations to turn Homunculus into Homo, there follows, as the highest, nearest, most significant approach to the solution of the riddle of man, the actual plunging of Homunculus into the generative force of nature in so far as it shows itself through the moonlit, moon-enchanted ocean waves. Into these waves Homunculus now plunges. And what do we see at the end of the scene? A flashing-up, a flaming forth, a manifestation of all the elements—earth, water, fire, air, all these elements overpower what is here taking place. And it almost seems to us that sunk with our cognition into sleep, we ourselves learn to know the Imaginations which, in the other side of existence, can alone interpret the riddle of humanity—it seems then, that through the rolling on of the generative forces we are called back into the life we must live out in the body. I told you yesterday that the force underlying impregnation, conception, pregnancy, embryonic life and birth, is only a more extended, more intensive form of the same force as that which lures us back from our nightly sleep, or from the sleep of cognition, to physical waking existence. These forces are identical. Every morning when we wake, the force that wakes us is, though different in intensity, the same as that by which a human being is conceived, carried as embryo, and born. One only of these is seen here on earth, and that merely in its external, not in its deeply mysterious, inner aspect. The other passes over us unperceived. The holy mystery of waking is unperceived in its passing. We sink down into a spiritual world, we are submerged in a spiritual world; we wake up, take possession of our body, and are in the physical world of the senses.

There are, nevertheless, even among those who are not clairvoyant, some men who when they are asleep know quite well what is actually living above, and through their sleep dreamily experience the spiritual world in its reality. Then they wake through the same force as the one living in Galatea's shell-chariot—the generative force of nature with which Homo-Homunculus unites himself on his way to becoming man. Some men know this even when not clairvoyant. There is, however, in clairvoyance, a knowledge that is perfectly clear concerning this waking. It may be understood in imagination only as a diving out of the spiritual world, down into the physical world of the senses, the world that lives in the elements of fire, water, earth, air. And on returning to this reality, all we think to have gained above in the other world, towards making a Homo of Homunculus, is dashed to pieces.

Faust is to plunge into the reality of ancient Greece; he is to meet Helen in person. And when you turn the page from the mighty finale of this scene where it runs:

“Hail the ocean! Hail the surge!
Girt with holy fire its verge,
Hail the water! Hail the fire!
Hail the chance that all admire!
Hail the breeze that softly swelleth!
Hail the grot where mystery dwelleth!
All we festally adore
Hail ye elements, all four!”

When you turn the page, you come to the third act:

“Admired much and much reviled Helena,
Leaving the shore where we but now did land, I come
Still drunken with the unrestful hallows' tumultuous
Commotion, that from Phrygian lowlands ...” and so on,

Faust is to enter Greek reality, he is to be wakened out of spiritual perception, highest spiritual perception, of the Homunculus-Homo problem, wakened into the Greek world. He is to wake there consciously, as Goethe wished to do; the moment of waking has to be brought about so as to show that what has been perceived in the spiritual world, in the supersensible, concerning the riddle of man, is shattered when the descent is made again into the external, physical reality of the body. That is an external process in nature, when the moon disappears and dawn breaks. But man today experiences this relation at best as something allegorical, symbolic or poetic. The reality underlying it is little recognised. We meet it here in something that is at the same time an embodiment of the problem of knowledge and also of true poetry. Goethe has indeed succeeded in leading Faust into the supersensible world in a noble way, and in making him wake to life in Greek reality.

We might remind ourselves here that it was during the eighties of the eighteenth century that Goethe took flight to Italy—for it was indeed a flight. Having studied nature in the north, he then wished to discover, for the benefit of his conception of the riddle of the world, what he believed that art of the south alone could give him. He gained much for we know what Goethe had become by the nineties of the eighteenth century. By then he had grown older, and that means younger in soul, for as a man outwardly ages, in his soul he grows young—youngest of all when he comes to dying. The life of the soul runs backward.—And so we come to about the year 1829. We may trace and experience what Goethe may then have felt: If, when I had the opportunity of really penetrating the art of the south, of making the spirit of Greece alive before my soul, if at that time I had only been able to take the plunge into the spiritual world that I now merely divine, how much richer, more intensive, all my experience would have been.—The characteristic mood of this second part of Goethe's Faust depends on our recognising in it an artistic representation of what has been experienced in life by a soul grown young again, a soul who in thus growing young has been enriched to a very high degree. That is why no philistine will be able to make much of this second part of Faust. And I can perfectly understand it when Schwaben-Vischer, the so-called V-Vischer, in many ways so spiritually minded, and who has said so much that is good about Goethe's Faust, has found that this kind of thing is tedious—the cobbled together patchwork of an old man. But philistinism, my dear friends, however learned and intelligent, can never penetrate into all the poetry, the lofty poetry, of the second part of Faust. No one can enter into this who does not allow his poetic sense to be warmed through, fired, by what spiritual vision gives.

Tomorrow, after the performance, we will say more about this scene, in connection with Goethe shown there concerning his own impulses.

Our subject for today will relate in a wider way to many of the spiritual truths which will be known to you as anthroposophists. You are no doubt familiar with the kind of description given, for example, in my book Theosophy, of the spiritual worlds through which man has to go between death and a new birth. Today I will tell of those spiritual worlds from a rather different point of view. For in Theosophy, Imaginations are mainly used to describe the world of soul and the world of Spirit through which man passes when he has gone through the gate of death to advance into a new life on Earth. In today's lecture I shall relate these things not so much from the standpoint of Imagination, but rather from the aspect which is revealed by Inspiration.

To gain some access to it for our understanding, we may take our start from the experiences which are ours during earthly life. At any given moment between birth and death, we are here in our physical body, face to face with the outer world. We should describe as ourselves, our human being, what is contained within our skin, within the confines of our physical body. No doubt we take this “human being” to include not only the anatomical and physiological data; we take it for granted that processes of soul and mind are also somehow going on in there. Yet, speaking of “ourselves,” we generally have in mind what is contained within our skin, and now from here we look out into the world. There all around us is the world we call our “outer world.” And as you know, we make mental images of this outer world. We have the outer world around us, and mirror-images thereof—or something like it—in our life of soul.

Now in the life between death and new birth the essence of the matter is that we are in this very world which, here on Earth, is external to us. All that is now your “outer world,” including what you see in full, clear focus and what you but distantly divine, is then your inner world,—to that you say “mine I.” Just as you now regard your lung as belonging to your I, so, between death and new birth, do you regard the Sun and Moon as your organs,—in other words, as being in you. The only outer world which you then have is you yourself, such as you are on Earth—your earthly organs.

Whereas on Earth we say; “In us—a lung; in us—a heart; outside of us a Sun, a Moon, a Zodiac,” during the life between death and new birth we shall say; “In us—a Zodiac, in us the Sun, in us the Moon; outside of us, lung and heart.” Between death and new birth all that we now carry inside our skin increasingly becomes our outer world, our Universe, our Cosmos. Our view of the relation between World and Man becomes completely opposite when we are living between death and a new birth.

When we live through death—when we go through the gate of death—we have a distinct picture, to begin with, of what went before, of how we were on Earth. True, it is only a picture, but it is like the outer world. This picture, then, shines forth in you to begin with. Thus in the first period after death you still have a consciousness of the man you were on Earth—consciousness in the form of earthly memories and earthly pictures. But these do not last long; ever increasingly you have this other outlook upon man: “‘I’ is the World; the Universe is Man.” This becomes ever more enhanced. Of course, you will not imagine that the human lung, for instance, looks the same as it does now; that would not be a sight to compensate for all the greatness and beauty of the Sun and Moon. Yet in reality, what lung and heart there become is vastly greater and more sublime even than Sun and Moon are, here and now, to human vision.

Only in this way do you gain an adequate idea of that which Maya is. People speak of Maya—the great illusion of this present earthly world—and yet they do not quite believe in what they say. Deep down, they cherish the belief that things are as they look to be to earthly eyes. But it is not so. The human lung as we now see it is a mere semblance; so is the heart. In truth, our lung is but a part—a mighty part—of our Cosmos; and even more so is our heart. The heart in its true essence is vastly greater and more majestic than any Sun.

Thus we begin to see an immense and sublime cosmic world arising—a world of which we speak in this way: Beneath us are the Heavens. In saying this, we mean: Beneath us is all that which is preparing the human head of the next incarnation. Above are, we then say, what was below. For it is all inverted. Above are all the forces which prepare man for his earthly walking—prepare him to stand firm on his two legs in the next earthly life.

All this can then be summed up in the saying: The nearer we approach a new earthly life, the more does this Universe which is Man contract for us. Majestic it is indeed, notably in the middle period between death and a new birth. But now we grow increasingly aware of how this Universe, with all its erstwhile majesty and greatness, is shrinking and contracting. The planets which we bear within us—planets in their weaving movement—become what then pulsates and surges through the human ether-body. The fixed stars of the Zodiac become what forms our life of nerves and senses. All this is shrinking, to become a body—spiritual to begin with, and then ethereal. And not until it has grown quite tiny, is it received into the mother's womb, there to be clothed with earthly matter.

Then comes the moment when we draw near to earthly life. Vanishing from us we now feel the Universe which until recently was ours. It shrinks and wanes, and this experience begets in us the longing to come down again to Earth,—once more to unite with a physical body on the Earth. For the great Universe we had before, withdraws, eludes our spiritual gaze; now therefore do we look to become Man again.

All this involves, however, quite another scale of time. Life between death and rebirth goes on for many centuries, and if a man is born, say, in the 20th century, his descent will have been prepared for gradually, even as early as the 15th century. All through this time moreover he himself has in a certain sense been working down into the earthly conditions and events.

A great-great ... grandfather of yours, way back in the 15th century, fell in love with a great-great ... grandmother. They felt the urge to come together, and in this urge you were already working in from spiritual worlds. And in the 17th century when a rather less distant great-great ... grandfather and great-great ... grandmother loved each other, you once again were in a sense the mediator. So did you summon all the generations to the end that at long last those should emerge who could become your mother and your father.

In that mysterious and intangible quality that pervades the relationships of earthly love, forces are indeed at work, proceeding from human souls who look for future incarnations. Therefore full consciousness and freedom are never there in the external conditions which bring men and women upon Earth together. These things still lie outside the range of human understanding,

What we call history nowadays is in the last resort far too external. Little is known to us in outer life today of the soul-history of human beings. Even as late as the 12th or 13th century A.D., souls of men felt very differently than they do now. Yet this is quite unknown. Not indeed as distinctly as I have just been telling, but in a more dream-like way, the men and women of the 10th, 11th, or 12th century were aware of these mysterious forces working down to Earth from spiritual worlds,—working down, in effect, from human souls. Little was said in Western countries of repeated earthly lives—reincarnation—but there were human beings everywhere, who knew. Only the Churches always eschewed, not to say anathematized all thoughts about repeated lives. Yet you should realize that even as late as the 12th and 13th centuries there were not a few in Europe who were aware that man undergoes repeated lives on Earth.

Then came the time when mankind in the Western world had to go through the stage of intellectuality. For man must by and by acquire spiritual freedom. When the dream-like clairvoyance of olden time prevailed, there was no spiritual freedom. Nor is there freedom—there is, at most, belief in freedom—in those affairs of human life, governed, shall we say, by earthly love, of which we have been speaking. For here the interests of other souls, on their way down to Earth, are always mingled.

Yet in the course of earthly evolution mankind must grow freer, yet ever freer. For only by man's growing freer, will the earth reach her goal in evolution. Now to this end, during a certain period intellectuality was necessary. The period in question is, of course, our own. Look back into earlier times and conditions upon Earth, when human beings still enjoyed dream-like clairvoyance. Living in this dreamlike clairvoyance there were always spiritual beings. Man at that time could never say, “I have my own thoughts in my head,”—that would have been quite untrue. In very olden times he rather had to say “I have the life of Angels in my head”; and then in later times: “I have the life of elemental beings in my head.” Then came the 15th century, and at long last the 19th and the 20th. Now man no longer has spiritual beings in his head, but only thoughts—mere thoughts. And by not having any higher spiritual life but only thoughts in his head, he can make for himself pictures of the outer world,

Could man be free, so long as Spirits were indwelling him? No, he could not, for they directed him; everything was due to them. Man could only become free when spiritual beings no longer directed him—when he had mere pictures, mere images, in his thoughts. Thought-pictures cannot compel you to do anything. Say you confront a looking-glass; the mirror-images of other men may be howsoever ill-disposed, they cannot hit you, for they are not real—they are mere pictures. And if I am resolving on some action, I may cause the mirror-image in my thought to picture the resolve, but the picture can of itself make no resolve.

Thus in the epoch when intellectuality puts only thoughts into our heads, freedom is born, inasmuch as thoughts have not the power to compel, In that we hold our moral impulses simply in the form of pure thoughts—as described in my “Philosophy of Freedom” [Philosophie der Freiheit, 1894. The later English editions have been entitled Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.]—we can achieve true freedom in the present age. The intellectual age, therefore, had to be.

Yet, strange as it may sound, in essence this age is already past. The age in which it was right for man to develop mere intellectuality, mere thinking-in-images, has run its course. With the 19th century it has become a thing of the past. And if men now continue to develop mere image-thoughts, their thoughts will fall a prey to Ahrimanic powers. The Ahrimanic powers will then gain access to man, and having reached his freedom, man will lose it—lose it to the Ahrimanic powers. Mankind is at the threshold of this danger now. Mankind today is faced with the alternative: either to comprehend the spiritual life—to comprehend the reality of such things as I have been telling you today—or to deny them. And if man now persists in denying what is spiritual, he will no longer be able to think freely. On the contrary, Ahriman—the Ahrimanic powers—will then be thinking in mankind, and all humanity will undergo a downhill evolution.

Therefore it is in the highest degree necessary for an ever-growing number of human beings in our time to appreciate the need for a return to spiritual life. A feeling for the need to get back to a spiritual form of life, is what the men of today should try to awaken in themselves. For if they fail to seek for this, mankind will fall a prey to Ahriman. Seen from a higher standpoint, the situation of mankind on Earth today is no less grave than that, and we should put this thought before all others, testing all other thoughts in the light of this one.

So much for the first part of the lecture. If Mr. Kaufmann will now be kind enough to translate, I will then go on.

Descriptions such as these may help illustrate the fact that the life we lead in the spiritual world between death and new birth is very different from that we undergo here between birth and death. Pictures, therefore, borrowed from the earthly life, however well conceived, will always be inadequate. Slowly and gradually we must be led to an understanding of the kind of reality that prevails in spiritual worlds. Let me give some examples.

Suppose a human being leaves his earthly body, and, with his life of soul and spirit, enters the world of soul and spirit. Suppose moreover that someone here on Earth, who has achieved Initiation-knowledge in the deeper sense, is able to observe human souls in their continued life after death. Much preparation is necessary to this end; also a certain Karma is essential, connecting the human being upon Earth with the one in yonder world. Now he must find some means of mutual understanding with the other soul. The spiritual experiences which I shall here be relating are not all easy to achieve. Generally speaking, it is far easier to describe the Universe in its spiritual aspect than to come near to a departed soul. People will with ease persuade themselves that it is not so difficult, yet in reality it is far more difficult to gain access to the dead than to achieve spiritual knowledge of other kinds.

I will now relate some characteristic features of the real intercourse with the dead. To begin with, we can only communicate with them by entering into such memories of the physical world as they are still able to evoke. For example, they still retain an echo of human speech, even of the particular language which was mainly theirs while on Earth. But their relation to language undergoes a change. For instance, in conversing with a soul who has died, one will soon observe that they have no understanding for substantives—for nouns. The living may address such words to the dead; the dead, if I may use this expression, simply do not hear them. Verbs on the other hand—words expressing action—these they will understand for a comparatively long time after death.

As a general rule you will only become able to converse with a soul who has gone through death if you know how to put your questions to him. You may have to proceed as follows. One day you concentrate on him as quietly as you are able. You try to live with him in something definite and real, for he has pictures in his soul rather than abstract notions. Therefore you concentrate on some real experience which he was glad to enter into during earthly life; thus you will gradually get near him.

You will not as a rule get an immediate answer to your question. You will very likely have to sleep on it—sleep on it, may be, several times, after some days you will get the answer. But you will never get an answer if you ask in nouns. You must take pains to clothe all nouns in verbal form. Such preparation is indispensable. He will most readily understand verbs, especially if you make them pictorial and vivid. The dead will never understand for instance the word “table,” but if you imagine vividly what is astir while a table is being made—a process of becoming, therefore, instead of a finished thing—then you will gradually become intelligible to him so that he apprehends your question and you get an answer. But the answers too will always be in verbal form, or may be not even that; they may only consist of what we on Earth should call interjections—exclamations.

Above all, the dead speak in the actual sounds of the alphabet—sounds and combinations of sound. The longer a soul has lived in the spiritual world after death, the more will he be speaking in a kind of language which you can only make your own by cultivating a true feeling of discrimination even in the realm of earthly speech, insisting no longer on the abstract meaning of the words but entering into their feeling-content. It is as I was saying in the educational lectures here. With the sound a [a, pronounced as in father.] we experience something like astonishment and wonder. Moreover we take the sense of wonder deep into our soul when we not only say a, but ach [German or Scottish pronunciation of ch as in Loch. Ach is the German equivalent of the exclamation Ah.]. Ach signifies: “A—I feel wonder. The sense of wonder goes right into me: ch.” And if I now put m before it and say mach [Mach: German for ‘make’ or ‘do.’], I follow what awakens wonder in me as though it were coming nearer to me step by step—mmm—till at long last I am entirely within it. It is with this kind of meaning—meaning that issues from the sounds themselves—that the answers of the dead will often come. The dead do not speak English, nor do they speak German, nor Russian; their speech is such that only heart and soul can understand them,—if heart and soul are in the ears that hear. I said just now; the human heart is greater and more majestic than the Sun. Seen from the earthly aspect it is true, the heart is somewhere inside us, and will be no pretty sight if we excise it anatomically. Yet the real heart is there throughout the human being, permeating all the organs; so too it is in the ear,

We must get used to the heart-language of the dead, if I may so describe it. We get used to it in learning gradually to jettison all nouns and noun-like forms and live in verbs. It is the words of action and becoming which the dead still understand for a comparatively long time after death. Then, at a later stage, they understand a language that is no longer language in the ordinary sense, and what we then receive from them has first to be re-translated into an earthly language.

Thus as man grows out of his body and ever more into the spiritual world, his life of soul becomes altogether different. Then, as the time approaches for him to come down again to Earth, once more he has to change his life of soul. For now the moment draws ever nearer, whereat he is confronted with a mighty task. He will himself now have to put together—first in an astral and then in an etheric form—the whole future human being who will one day be standing physically here on Earth. The tasks which we fulfil on Earth are external. For while our hands are at work, something external to us is always being made or altered. In the life between death and re-birth it is the inner being of our soul that is at work, putting the body together. Truth is, it only seems as if man came into existence by hereditary forces. In reality, only the outermost aspect of the physical body he then wears is due to heredity. He has to make for himself even the forms of his organs. I will give an example,—if one of you will kindly lend a glove.

On his way down towards a new earthly life, man, to begin with, still has the Sun and the Moon within him. But they begin to contract. It is as though you were to feel the lobes of your lungs shrinking within you. So do you feel your cosmic life and being, your Sun- and Moon-organ, shrinking. And thereupon, something detaches itself from the Sun and from the Moon. Hitherto, you had Sun and Moon within you, but now you have before you a kind of image of Sun and Moon. All glistening and luminous, you have before you two immense spheres—immense they are, to begin with. One of them is the Sun in spiritual form, the other is the Moon. The one is all alight and sparkling, the other glimmering in its own warmth, more fiery-warm, holding the light as though more egoistically to itself.

Now the two spheres which thus detach themselves from cosmically transmuted man—even from ‘Adam Kadmon’ who is a reality to this day—draw ever nearer to one another. We, on our way to Earth, say to ourselves: Sun and Moon are becoming one. Moreover it is this that guides us—far away back you must imagine it to be, even from our great-great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother and so on—guides us at last to the mother who will give us birth. Sun and Moon are our guides—Sun and Moon, drawing ever nearer to each other.

And thereupon we see another task before us. Far in the distance like a single point we see the human embryo that is to be. We see the single entity that has become of Sun and Moon, drawing near our mother. And now we see a task before us, which I can describe as follows. Take this (the glove) to represent what goes before us there—the Sun-and-Moon united. We are aware that when our cosmic consciousness will have vanished and we shall go through a phase of darkness (for so we do when we dive down into the embryo after conception), then we shall have to turn inside-out this entity that goes before us. And as we do so a tiny aperture will arise, through which, as Ego, we shall have to go.

This, in its image, will then be there in our human body upon Earth. It is none other, my dear Friends, than the pupil of the human eye. For the one entity becomes two again, as though two mirror-images were to arise. These are the two human eyes: for they were once united—they were the united Sun-and-Moon, and thereupon they turned inside-out.

Such is the task which then confronts you. You do it all unconsciously. You turn the whole thing round and inside-out, and go in through the tiny aperture that remains. And then it cleaves asunder; two physical images become of it in the growing embryo. For the physical embryonal eyes are but images, representing what has thus become of Sun and Moon.

In this way we elaborate the several parts of the human body. Experiencing the entire Universe, we gather it and give to every item its destined form. What is thus formed in the Spirit, only then gets clothed and permeated with plastic material. It clothes itself in matter; as to the forces however, which have formed it, we ourselves had to develop them from the entire Universe,

For example, there is a time between death and new birth when we go through the Sun while the Sun is in the sign of Leo. (It need not be at birth; it can be farther back in time). We do not fashion then the eye of Sun and Moon which I described just now—we do that at a different time,—but we unite with the interior of the Sun. What do you imagine the interior of the Sun to be? If you could enter there, you would find it altogether different from what our physicists naively and unwittingly suppose. The interior of the Sun is no mere ball of gas; it is in fact something less than space—a realm where space itself has been taken away. If you begin by imagining an extended space in which some pressure is prevailing, you must conceive the interior of the Sun rather as a realm of suction. It is a negative space—space that is emptier than empty. Few people have an adequate idea of what this means. Now when you go through there, again you have a definite spiritual experience which you are able to elaborate and work upon, and as you do so it becomes the form of the human heart. Not only is the form of the eye made of Sun and Moon; the heart form too is fashioned from the Sun. But this is only possible when the Sun contains forces which issue from it as from the constellation of Leo.

So does man build his entire body both from the movements of the stars and from the constellations of the stars in the great Universe. The human body is indeed an image of the world of stars. Much of the work we have to do between death and new birth consists in the building of our own body from the Universe. Man as he stands on Earth is indeed a shrunken Universe. Science is so naive as to suppose that the human form is produced from the physical germ-cell alone. Suppose a man is looking at a magnet-needle, one end of which always points to the North and the other to the South. Perhaps another man to whom this is explained does not believe it, but begins looking for the cause inside the magnet-needle only, failing to see that the whole Earth is acting as a magnet. It is no less naive when someone thinks that man originates from the physical human germ-cell, whereas in fact he springs from the entire Universe. Moreover his life of soul and spirit between death and re-birth consists in working with the spiritual Beings—working at the super-sensible form of man, which is created first in the ethereal and astral realm and only then shrinks and contracts till it is able to be clothed in physical material. Man in reality is but the scene of action of what the Universe, and he himself with his transmuted powers, do thus achieve when the physical body in its true nature is being formed.

Such then is the development man undergoes. It begins with language when he no longer uses nouns but finds his way into another and more verbal form of speech. Thence he goes on to an inner beholding of the world of stars, until at last he lives right in the starry world Then he begins to detach from the world of stars what he himself is to become in his next incarnation. Such is man's pathway: out of the physical, via the transmutation of language into the spiritual, and then on the returning journey transmuting the Universe once again into Man. Only if we can understand how the soul-and-Spirit, having thus lost itself in language, becomes one with the world of stars and then recovers itself from the world of stars,—only then do we apprehend the complete cycle of human life between death and a new birth.

These things, dear Friends, were still clear to many people at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on Earth. At that time the idea did not prevail that Christ Jesus was, first and foremost, the Being whom they saw developing on Earth. They thought of Him as One who until then had belonged to the self-same world to which man himself belongs during the life between death and new birth. Therefore they pondered on the question: How did He descend from thence and enter into the life of Earth? It was the Roman world which then exterminated Initiation-Science. Only the dogmas should remain—such was their intention. There was in Italy in the 4th century of our era an actual organization, a specific body of people who left no stone unturned in seeing to it that the old methods of Initiation should not be transmuted into new ones. There should be left to men on Earth only the knowledge of the outer physical world, while of the super-sensible there should be no more than dogmas—dogmas which men would by and by receive as mere concepts into their intellectual life, till at long last they would no longer even have the power to conceive and understand, but only to believe them. So was the knowledge, which had in fact existed at one time, rent asunder into a knowledge of the earthly world alone, and on the other hand a mere faith, a mere belief in another world, till even this is so attenuated that for one group of believers it is a set of dogmas they do not understand, while for another it is no more than a point d'appui; there must be something to start from, to have any faith at all. For in effect, what is the substance of a modern man's belief, when he no longer holds to the ancient dogmas about the Trinity? He believes in something vaguely spiritual; the content of his belief is altogether nebulous.

We now need to return to a genuine perception of the Spiritual, into which we can enter livingly and fully. We need once more a Science of Initiation, able to relate such things as you have heard today of the human eye,—that we should look at it with wonder, for it is verily a shrunken Universe, This is no mere figure of speech; it is real and true, and as I have been explaining. For in the life between death and new birth this eye of ours was single, and from the unity it was—merging the images of Sun and Moon—it was then turned inside-out.

Truth is, we have two eyes because if it were our nature to see with a single eye like the Cyclops we could not attain to Egohood in an outward and visible world; we should attain it only in the inner world of feeling. Helen Keller for example has quite a different world of feeling and ideation than other people; she is only able to make herself understood because language has been taught her. We could never reach the idea of ‘I’ without being able to lay our right hand over our left, or, more generally speaking, to bring any two symmetrical members into coincidence. Thus in a subtle way we reach the idea of ‘I’ inasmuch as we cross the axes of vision of our two eyes when focusing upon the outer world. Just as we cross our hands, so do we cross the two axes of vision of our eyes: whenever we look at anything we do so.

Materially two, our eyes are one in spirit. This single spiritual eye is located behind the bridge of the nose. It is then reproduced in a twofold image—in the two outer eyes you see. By being left-and-right-hand man, man is enabled to feel and be aware of himself. If he were only right or only left—if he were not symmetrically formed—all his thinking and ideation would merge into the world; he would not become self-possessed in his own ‘I’.

In that we weld the twin images of Sun and Moon into one, we get ready for our coming incarnation. It is as though we were saying to ourselves: You must not disintegrate into the wide world. It is no use to become a Sun-man and have the Lunar man there beside you. You must be one; but you must also be able to feel your own oneness, you must be aware of it. So then you form the single Sun-Moon eye of man, which in its metamorphosis becomes the eye as we now bear it. For our two eyes are the twin images of the single archetypal Sun-Moon eye of man.

These are the things I wished to say to you today, my dear friends, about the kind of experience we have when we are in the spiritual world,—so very different from our experiences in the physical. They are related to one another none the less, but the relationship is such that we are turned completely inside out. Suppose that you could take the human being as you see him here and turn him inside out so that the inside of him—the heart for instance—would become outer surface. Physical man, you will readily believe, could not stay alive under these conditions. But if one could do this, taking hold of him in the inmost heart and turning him inside out like a glove, then man would not remain man as we see him here; he would enlarge into a Universe. For if we have the faculty to concentrate in a single point within the heart and thence to turn ourselves inside out in spirit, we simply do become the Universe which in the normal course we experience between death and a new birth. Such is the secret of the inner man. It is only in the physical world that he cannot be turned inside out. The heart of man however is in effect a Universe turned inside out, and that is how the physical and earthly world is really joined to the spiritual. We must get used to the ‘turning inside out.’ If we do not, we gain no real idea of how the physical world which surrounds us here is related to the spiritual world. These are the things which I was wanting to impart today.