The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Play in four acts by Hermann Bahr
Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

Bonaparte is madly in love with the beautiful Josephine Beauharnais - so much so that he wants to do nothing all day but make out with the sweet woman. But she wants to cheat on him with Barras. So she sends him away from Paris to the army. While the storm of battle rages all around him, he thinks of nothing but his Josephine. If she writes to him too seldom or if her letters are too short, he gets angry, throws himself into the fray and wins one of his brilliant victories. Thus, through no fault of his own, he becomes a hero. The French make him consul. Now he thinks a little about what is right for a great man. It's not right for him to spend the whole day making love. So he neglects good Josephine, to whom he owes his fame. But it is also a good idea for him to acquire "decent manners". So he calls in the actor Talma to teach him. This is how the infatuated little Bonaparte became the great Napoleon. There are undoubtedly two people who represent this point of view; one is the soldier who accompanies Napoleon on his campaigns to shine his boots, the other is the Viennese poet Hermann Bahr. Both have the attitude that one usually wants to hit with the sentence: "There is no greatness for the valet de chambre." With the above few sentences we have reproduced the content of a "drama" by Hermann Bahr, which was performed at the Lessing Theater on 9 December. A long time ago, it had already been performed in Vienna on the stage that sometimes means the world. I suspect that the "poet" was laughed at at the time. For he felt compelled to write the following "salvation of honor" of his "drama": "It has been said that I wanted to mock Bonaparte in my "Josephine". Some have praised it, many have been annoyed by it; but no one has doubted that the purpose of the play was to make a hero ridiculous and small. It was strange for me to hear that, because I would never have thought of it, but I wanted to show what life is about an undoubtedly great person."

"Of course, this will only be expressed through the whole. Josephine is the first play of a trilogy..., the beginning man ... still believes that he is in the world for himself, to represent himself. He does not yet know that he can mean nothing for himself, but is only to take part in the great action of the eternal comedy. No, he wants to live his own life. The first act of our life is about how he is taught to do this and how he has to learn to move to the beat of fate. Here the young man wrestles with fate. He does not want to renounce himself, he resists, he wants to determine himself and his life. He does not want to serve. He has his own plans for himself, and he wants to follow them. But he must experience that fate is stronger. Whoever has reached this point, whoever has learned to obey fate, whoever no longer resists, enters the second act, the melancholy, cheerful play of the man. The man knows that it is not for man to determine his life. He knows that he is subject to a great power which he cannot resist. He knows that we are instruments with which inscrutable works are created according to inscrutable plans. No one can ever guess what his actions mean. We feel that a tremendous purpose rules our existence, but we are not allowed to see it. There is nothing for us but to obey.... At last, in the third act of life, man has become free from fate. He has played his part, now he steps down from the stage, the great director dismisses him... the essence of the old man is that he has become free and now, having cast off his part, he may finally live for himself... Fate needs a tyrant and takes a troubadour. How small are our wishes, how great is fate! This is what I wanted to portray: in "Josephine, how the unknown power captures him, sends the dreamer to war and lets the poet become a hero, even if he resists and wants nothing to do with his heroism; in the second part, his love for Walewska, how he has become a man who has surrendered to fate and knows that we must serve, and obediently performs his incomprehensible role. ... in the third part, on the island, how he has played out and become free of fate, how he is finally allowed to live according to himself, and how the emperor and hero falls from him and he becomes a Corsican enthusiast again, gazing out with wild dreams...".

It's funny how the world is reflected in this poet's head. The man who wants to be free to make love to Josephine, but whom fate makes unfree, a man who shakes up the peoples of Europe from West to East because he must "serve, obey", and who finally becomes "free" when he spends his last days imprisoned on a lonely little island!!!! The valet's attitude must turn grotesque somersaults if it is to become philosophy. It is a pity that Hermann Bahr did not become a natural historian. I imagine a natural history written by him according to the recipe of his Napoleon-Fate-Wisdom would be quite nice. It could read, for example: "The lion is the most good-natured animal. When he is ravenously hungry and encounters a wanderer in the desert, he lies down and begs the man to "eat me up so that I may be relieved of my hunger"... And in another passage you could read: "The odeur producers have long searched for a plant that is particularly fragrant - they finally found it in the devil's filth." - -

Prayer to the Spirit of Monday:

Great embracing Spirit,
Sensation shone in your life forms before my sensation existed.
You were.
I raise my soul to you.
I was in you.
I was part of your sensations.
You connected yourself with the earth's first beginnings and the shining of my sensation began in my body.
I felt myself in your feelings.
You were.
My sensations felt your being in them.
My soul began to be in itself.
Because you were in me.
You were.

Great embracing Spirit
May my I raise itself from below upward,
May it get an inkling of you in the all-embracing.
May the spirit of my being be illumined
By the light of your messengers.
May the soul of my being be enkindled by the fire flames of your servants.
May the will of my I grasp
Your creatorword's force.
You are.
May your being permeate my will
That my I be grasped by an understanding of your light's shining,
Your life's love-warmth
And your being's creator words.
You are.

We have helpful thoughts to support us in our meditations, which were given in all proper esoteric schools and are of great value if you place them before you in pictures, let them work on you, and immerse yourself in them meditatively. These thoughts aren't like our ordinary, everyday ones, for when we work with them they have germinating, awakening forces for us.

Thoughts that can lead to deeper insights into spiritual connections relatively quickly are the following:

The Gods sleep in the mineral kingdom.
They dream in the plant kingdom.
They wake and think in the animal kingdom.

Taking the animal kingdom first, we have to imagine that the spiritual beings were previously at our level and had thoughts that were just as confused as ours, whereas their thoughts have now become so regular and definite that they spread out before us as the animals we see. If we immerse ourselves in such ideas, then our thoughts will become consolidated, and we'll thereby become more closely connected with the beings who've placed their thoughts in the earth and also with that being who placed the force in the earth which in its totality is the Christ-force.

We must keep in mind that we become different from other men through our occult development. Our interests change, and one often hears esoterics complain that they've lost interest in many things that used to interest them, and that they feel a inner boredom and emptiness. This is a quite normal state that soon passes And the emptiness of their soul will soon be filed with interests that'll replace the other ones a thousandfold. Nevertheless, we should not give up our connection with other men and the interests that filled us previously, and above all things we shouldn't demand that people must change their circle of interests. The difference between exoteric and esoteric men is that an exoteric man permeates his physical body firmly with his other bodies and as it were presses everything toward the outer surface. Thereby the average person who's born into a nation and family inherits certain concepts about good and evil, truth and other virtues that the creator Gods placed into them in the course of evolution. An esoteric will gradually live in accordance with these virtues out of his own knowledge. But he mustn't place himself above the concepts that are present in men about this, for then he would get into serious trouble with respect to his development. The inner man is gradually separated from the outer one in him. His higher parts leave the lower ones by themselves, and if he does not heed the ordinary laws of mankind, for instance about truthfulness, he can get into a dishonesty that of course hinders his development and that can do a lot of harm. All ill feelings and disputes, also among esoterics, are due to this.

We not only leave part of our etheric body and our sentient soul by themselves—we begin esoteric work in the sentient soul—but also, as it were, our physical body, and we experience all possible conditions, also diseases in the latter. We get into conditions that we didn't know before, but which we don't have to look upon as diseases for which we have to run to a doctor right away, for an exoteric doctor can of course not give us anything for these conditions, and in any case, they disappear by themselves. On the other hand, one shouldn't look upon every disease one gets as something that is caused by occult development or think that doctors can't treat one anymore That's spiritual arrogance. One can still get advice from a doctor for a long time. An esoteric should always pay attention to his health in the right way.

No one should let himself be kept from development by the difficulties that one can encounter and that arise through the loosening of the etheric body, or by cowardice and laziness. This loosening is something that must occur if one wants to press into higher worlds. And if we struggle towards it with serious striving, the master of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings will come to meet us with his strength and not fail to help us.

We'll reach the goal of seeing spiritually in the next life for sure, if not in this one.

[ 1 ] The sense for reality that lives in the idea of the threefold social organism will not be found by comparing it with that which traditional education and habits have taught people to think possible. The very reason for our present confusions in government and society is that these traditions have led to habits of thought and feeling that life itself has outgrown. Therefore anyone who objects that the idea of a threefold social order takes no account of the impulses that have formed until now the basis of all human institutions, are under the delusion that the overcoming of these old impulses is a sin against any possible social order. Rather, the threefold order is founded upon the recognition that a belief in the sustaining power of the old impulses is the worst obstacle to healthy and progressive steps which take into account our present stage of evolution.

[ 2 ] The impossibility of continuing to cultivate the old impulses should be clear from the fact that they have lost their power as an incentive to productive labor. The old econonomic motives of capital returns and wage earnings could maintain their power as incentives only as long as enough of the old treasured objects remained that could arouse people's inclination and love. These treasures have plainly become exhausted in the age that has just ended. Ever more numerous were the people who, as capitalists, no lon ger knew why they were amassing capital; ever more numerous, too, were wage earners who did not know why they were working.

[ 3 ] The exhaustion of the impulses that had kept together the nexus of the state was shown by the fact that in recent times many people have come almost as a matter of course to regard the state as an end in itself, and to forget that the state exists for the sake of human beings. To regard the state as an end in itself is possible only when one has so much lost the ability to assert one's inner, human individuality that one no longer expects from the state the kind of institutions this self-assertion would demand. Then one is indeed obliged to look for the essence of the state in all sorts of institutions that are quite contrary to its proper task. One will become determined to put more into the institutions of the state than is needed for the self-assertion of the human beings who compose it. However, every such more in the state evidences a less in the human beings who bear the burden of the state.

[ 4 ] In cultural life, the sterility of the old impulses is displayed in the mistrust with which people look on the spirit.What proceeds from life's unspiritual concerns arouses people's interest; they form views and concepts of it. What originates in spiritual productivity, people choose to regard as a private affair of the particular producer; they are inclined to hinder rather than help if it tries to find a place in public life. One of the most widespread characteristics of our contemporaries is that they remain closed to the individual spiritual achievements of their fellows.

[ 5 ] The present age needs to see clearly that it has exhausted its economic, political and cultural impulses. Such insight must kindle energetic will and social purpose. Until people recognize that our economic, political and cultural troubles are not due merely to external life circumstances, but also to the state of our souls, the necessary renewal has not yet been given its proper foundation.

[ 6 ] A split has come about in the constitution of the human soul. In the instinctive, unconscious impulses of human nature, something new is stirring. In conscious thought, the old ideas refuse to follow the instinctive stirrings. However, when the best instinctive promptings are not illuminated by corresponding thoughts, they became barbaric, animalistic. Modern humanity is rushing into a dangerous situation through this animalization of the instincts. Salvation can be found only in striving for new thoughts to meet a new world situation.

[ 7 ] Any cry for socialization that disregards this fact can lead to nothing salutary. Our disinclination to recognize ourselves as beings of soul and of spirit must be overcome. A one-sided transformation of the economic life, a one-sided reconstruction of political institutions without nurturing a socially healthy and productive state of soul, is more likely to lull humanity with deceptive dreams than to fill it with a sense for reality. It is because there are so few who can bring themselves to look on the problems of today and tomorrow as questions comprehending both external arrangements and inner renewal that we move so slowly along the road to a new social order. When many people say: Inner renewal takes a long time; it is a process that must not be hurried, behind such words lurks a fear of such renewal. For the right mood can only be this: to examine energetically everything that might lead to renewal, and then watch and see how slowly or quickly life's voyage proceeds.

[ 8 ] The events of recent years have cast a certain weariness about the souls of our contemporaries. For the sake of the coming generations, for the sake of the civilization of the near future, this weariness must be combatted. These are the feelings that have brought the idea of the threefold order before the public. Say that this idea is imperfect, say that it is all wrong; its supporters will understand if it is opposed from the standpoint of other new ideas. That it should so often be found to be “incomprehensible” because it contradicts the old and customary—this they cannot regard as a sign that such opponents can hear the present call of human evolution. One would think this call is sounding plainly enough for all to hear.

Berlin, undated transcript, 1904

During the Lemurian period something happened that has been among the most important events for many millions of years: the actual self of the human being took up residence in the human body. The human soul was further developed than the bodies that already existed at that time. Before the bodies were ready, the souls had a different development on other planets. Pitris: different degrees of development. Different level of consciousness. This consciousness, which we have now, has been gradually built up.

Through long periods of time, we have developed what is now on Earth on the Moon. Then it slept over. When man begins his Earth career, he is further than the Earth. He must build bodies in association with other high beings. “The Earth was desolate and confused.” The forms must be built from the material; this happens in the first three rounds. He builds forms as one builds a house. A kind of affinity with earthly matter brings this about. When he begins the fourth round, the bodies are so far ready that the entire physical system - bone, muscle, digestive, blood circulation system - is complete. The human brain is still in the design. The fourth round is for building this physical organ for consciousness.

Three main stages initially:

First: purely spiritual, arupa, formless; second: spiritual state of formation, rupa, astral state. At the end of the astral state, there is in the innermost part of the being:

1. an arupic being
2. enveloped by a thought body or rupa
3. by an astral body or sentient body.

He now begins the physical formation by first forming an impression of what he was astral in the finest matter, in ether. In earlier planetary development, man had a very different etheric body, which built up the one we now know, but in the fourth state of the fourth round, when the earth itself was etheric matter. It is the template of the physical body, roughly the color of peach blossom. During this time, the etheric body was the only human body. It was the first root race, subtle people floated in the etheric space and multiplied by one emerging from the other.

Becoming denser and denser, man goes through seven stages – racial – and now comes the second state, the air man. The ether attracts the air, permeates it, forms bodies. What we find in fairy tales is based on ancient memory. They are called Hyperboreans: “And the Lord made the winds his messengers.” Meaning: He formed a body of air for the spiritual beings. Hyperborea became more and more dense; air was very thick back then; yet the people were wonderfully beautiful. Etheric people were luminous fire figures. The astral earth would have been completely dark to a physical eye; during the etheric earth it would have begun to shine. The fiery figures are characterized as follows: “And God said, let there be light.

The Lemurians are so important because this important section was in the middle of it. Earlier catastrophes were not so violent because the earth was not yet so dense. Hyperboreans by rearranging the heat by moving the continent from the North Pole to the South.

Water-soaked, dense matter: the first Lemurians were formed from this; not as dense as lower jellyfish - they are called “egg-reproducing humans”, just like certain animals, amoebas, which first have indentations in which the nucleus is distributed, then it contracts. Thus man was materially immortal in those days, he divides but does not perish, so that man is materially immortal as such. In those days Pitri still hovered around the body; only in the middle of the Lemurian period could he take possession of it. He had everything, except the right brain. Now an approach to it was emerging. Fire mist had become protein-like, a brain approach was emerging and the soul could take possession. Only the very advanced Pitri could now form the body from within. So-called sons of the fire mist, Arhats, initiates, and indeed from the highest beings. Less strong Pitris would not yet have been able to form bodies. First representatives of wisdom. Other Pitris could have taken possession now, but then beings such as those that had emerged could not have come into being. Man would never have attained full freedom; he would have had a dull consciousness. Towards the end of the second Lemurian period, further Pitris began to incarnate.

Those bodies, however, that were not inhabited by Pitris at that time, developed into animality. If there were no brain in the body, no highly developed Pitri could work in it on our earthly plane. This development into animality is what all religions call the Fall of Man. At the expense of the brain, the rest of the human being has been pushed down into animality. By taking possession inwardly, the human being must develop senses in order to perceive. The Fall of Man creates the first karma.

Externally, physically, the first humans were much more perfect, but duller. At that time there were no apes; those bodies that were inhabited now developed into humans; the uninhabited ones decayed; they were soulless, amanasic ones. So during the second Lemurian period, a developed state of consciousness is achieved by sinking deeper into sensuality. The task of the eighth round, of all earthly development, is to achieve this state of consciousness.

On the moon he had a low one, and an even lower one earlier.

So through seven planets he develops seven states of consciousness. When they migrate from the moon, they had dream trance, before that plant trances, before that deep trances. Seven planets or states of consciousness. Seven kingdoms, seven races.

Report in the “Züricher Post”, November 24, 1905

Theosophy and the “world riddles”. We request the following lines to be included:

Th. S. On the evening of November 13, in front of a large audience of around 250 people, Dr. phil. Rud. Steiner from Berlin spoke about Theosophy and “The World Riddles” by E. Haeckel in the courtroom of the Schwurgericht (court of assizes). The speaker explained that the worldview called “Theosophy” (the wisdom of God) originated about thirty years ago. It is a spiritual movement that encompasses and unites religion, science, philosophy and ethics and answers questions about the origin, nature, purpose and goal of human beings. The world riddles are solvable; but only Theosophy is able to solve them, and in a way that satisfies all people, learned and unlearned. It is Theosophy that creates peace between the different worldviews, sciences and religions, all of which have a kernel of truth. But above all, Theosophy does not contradict the achievements of the natural sciences.

The lecturer now turns specifically to Haeckel's work “Die Welträtsel” (The Riddle of the World), whose widespread popularity is a testament to humanity's great interest in the most important questions. Many Theosophists speak out very sharply against Haeckel. I, the speaker continues, do not want that. Rather, I want to contribute to an understanding of Haeckel's world view. Haeckel's importance lies in the continuation of Darwinism, in the expansion of the evidence that all living things are based on a unified organization and that humans are also a link in the one great series of the animal world. But all this was recognized long before Darwin, for example by Goethe. However, his thoughts were in too lofty regions to be accessible and comprehensible to all people. Darwin's and his epigones' most significant work consists mainly in the fact that they drew the ideas of the unified context of all organisms (including humans) down to a level accessible to all of humanity, proved them to be true, and thus made them understandable to the mind. In this respect, Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Mysteries) is an astonishingly great achievement.

But great men also have great faults. From a theosophical point of view, there is nothing to be said against Darwin's theory of the origin of species. However, a distinction must be made

between Darwin's Darwinism and Haeckel's Darwinism, because in his writings, Darwin speaks of the “Creator” and the “Omniscient and Almighty, who foresees everything”. However, the original Darwinism occurred during a materialistic era and therefore received a thoroughly materialistic interpretation and explanation from its followers and developers. And it is only against this interpretation and explanation that Theosophy is directed.

The material and visible world is based on a transcendental and invisible one. If Darwinism had come into a spiritualistic-idealistic age instead of a materialistic one, it would undoubtedly have been interpreted and explained in a spiritualistic-idealistic way. But in an age when even the smallest living creature, the cell, can be seen by the armed bodily eye, the materialistic world view – and especially materialistic biology – is understandable. The “habits of thought”, whether religious, idealistic, materialistic and so on, play a major role. But thinking purely materialistically is a mistake; for there are perceptions (for example, the perception of the color red, the scent of roses, the sound of an organ) that cannot be conceived and explained in a materialistic way. They are based on material impulses, but these are not the deepest, ultimate cause. Materialism cannot solve the riddles of the world; this was also recognized, for example, by Du Bois-Reymond in his famous Ignorabimus speech. Haeckel's mistake, then, is that he brought his materialistic thinking habits into Darwinism, and that he also wants to explain mental and spiritual processes in material terms. But Theosophy does not want to criticize Haeckel's explanations of the physical or sensual, but to recognize them.

Steiner now turns specifically to Theosophy, which recognizes two entities in man, one soul or spiritual and one physical or material, and claims, for example, that these two entities are separate in the sleeping person. The fact that the soul or spirit does not express itself and does not feel in deep sleep is only because it lacks the organs to do so. Therefore, it is the task of every human being to recognize this and to decide to provide his soul with certain means corresponding to the sensory organs of the supersensible. The moment this happens is what the theosophist calls “rebirth”. Through the continued use of these means (which, however, were not mentioned), the soul or spirit develops into an organized supersensible, true or divine human being, to whom the dream world is also an entity and who can see the spirits with the “inner eye” just as the sensual human being can see the bodies with his outer eye. The body is transitory, the spirit or soul is eternal, an ineradicable unity. Therefore, theosophy is monism in the highest sense.

Will the newly formed “Theosophical Society Zurich” prosper and turn us all into Theosophists? The author of these lines does not think so. He believes it is a mistake to consider that what we call mind or spirit is not physical or natural, and finds it curious that we need to obtain organs for it. The theosophical identification of the terms soul and spirit is also unlikely to fall on fertile ground. Although today's state of science allows for certain differences, it no longer allows for sharp boundaries between what we call spiritual, mental and physical. Of course, theosophy has its merits in that it opposes crude materialism and seeks to give the spiritual side of man its due. But the theosophical degradation of the physical side of man, which, after all, also – to quote Darwin – originates from the “almighty and omniscient Creator” as his material and spiritual product, cannot stand up before the judgment seat of true science, such as natural science.

Held in Dornach on 27 May 1923, 23 October 1923, 3 January 1924 for the “Wachsmuth-Lerchenfeld Group” ¹

Text by Maria Röschl-Lehrs, “written down immediately afterwards from memory”.

I

n the introduction, it was explained why such a group is possible again now. A clear consciousness is necessary. In the past, people approached the institutions of anthroposophy with too little awareness, too little spiritual awareness.

If what had been given in those old esoteric contexts had been published, it would have given rise to many cults in the world. But because it was not published, hatred and betrayal of the cause arose.

These people here have not been summoned by him, they have gathered together themselves. He has refused to continue forming such groups himself in the face of the spiritual world. Don't be proud! There are more people who would be suitable, including those who are further along! Here are only those who have found each other. Through meditation. It is not just a personal matter, but has world significance. The Cosmos is interested in whether we do it or not.

Oh man...²

Legend [Temple Legend] new appendix two directions - in John the center. Recognizing what comes from the two directions. Fire, because both unite against the center. Hatred against the continuation of this center.

Wake up! Wake up to these two directions, but also in general. Wake up through right meditation! Goethe was fully awake, Schiller only half awake, Herder and Lessing slept completely.

In the face of the mystery of Golgotha, the words of an initiate were: Salem. Now the reversal: Melas... the circle is complete.

Addendum: Before that, Mach ben ach - son of the earth of suffering, or the physical body has separated from the soul and spirit.

Vocal exercise – pilgrimage to the self ³
O A J A O: I in the midst of light and space
A J O J A: Space for me and light
J O A O J: Light through space and me
I am

Now only that of the two directions and the fire.⁴

The Temple Legend

The wording of the temple legend from the esoteric hour of May 27, 1923, was reconstructed afterwards by various participants from memory and from texts from the earlier Erkenntnis cultic work context. The designation “New version, given in spring 1923”, under which this wording was passed on, actually applies only to the last conclusion (in the notes of Maria Lehrs-Röschl designated as “New Appendix”). In the first part, the legend text corresponds word for word to that of Rudolf Steiner's 1906 transcript (p. 365). The subsequent description of the casting of the brazen sea and Hiram's death, on the other hand, shows some variants compared to the earlier descriptions. The description in the 1923 version, which begins after the sentence from Rudolf Steiner's transcript (p. 367): “Hiram is only in possession of a real-human ego,” reads as follows:

From this point on, King Solomon is seized by violent jealousy against his master builder Hiram Abiff. The latter had three journeymen working on the temple construction who demanded the master's degree from him. However, they had shown their incompetence by cutting a mighty beam, which was irreplaceable for the construction of the temple, too short. Hiram had remedied the accident by stretching the beam to the correct length with his special powers. They are now Hiram Abiff's opponents because they had to be rejected by him when they demanded the master's degree and the master's word from him, for which they were not yet ready. The three treacherous companions have no difficulty in finding the ear of the king for the deed by which they want to corrupt Hiram Abiff.

The completion of the temple construction was to be crowned by a work in which Hiram Abiff sought to reconcile the tension and enmity between the Cain and Abel sons. It was the brazen sea, whose casting was to be made from the seven basic metals (lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, mercury and silver) and water, the metal of the earth, in such a way that the finished casting would be completely transparent. The thing was finished except for one very last step, which was to be carried out in front of the assembled court, including the Queen of Sheba, and which was to transform the still cloudy substance into one that was completely clear.

Now the three treacherous companions who had the task of adding the last ingredient mixed the water in the wrong proportion, and instead of becoming transparent, the casting sprayed in devastating flames. Hiram Abiff tried to calm the fire, but failed. The flames burst out on all sides.

But Hiram Abiff heard a voice from the flames and from the glowing mass: Plunge into the sea of fire, you are invulnerable. He plunged into the flames and realized that his path led to the center of the earth. Halfway there he met Tubal Cain, his ancestor. He led him to the center of the earth, where the great ancestor Cain was in the state he was in before the sin of killing Abel. He gave him the golden triangle with the master word. Halfway up, Tubal Cain gave him a hammer and instructed him to touch the casting of the brazen sea with it. There Hiram Abiff receives from Cain the explanation that the vigorous development of human powers on earth ultimately leads to the height of initiation, and that the initiation attained in this way must take the place of the old vision in the course of the world, that the latter will disappear. With the hammer, Hiram returns to the earth's surface; he touches the brazen sea with it, the casting is successful, and he was able to make it completely transparent.

Hiram wanted to see his work, the temple, for the last time and went there at night. There the false companions waylayed him. The first struck him on the left temple at one of the gates, so that the blood flowed down to the shoulder. Hiram Abiff turned to the second gate to leave the temple. There the second companion struck him on the right temple, so that the blood flowed down to the shoulder. He turned to the third gate. There the third journeyman struck him on the forehead, so that he collapsed. He still dragged himself out to a well, into which he sank the golden triangle. The three journeymen buried his body. Before his death, Hiram was still able to sink the golden triangle with the master word into a deep well. On his grave grew a cassia tree, an acacia. It was known to the initiated that a cassia tree grows out of the grave of an initiate. When his body was found, the new master word resounded: “Mach ben ach”.⁵ This means: The spiritual soul has separated from the physical body or: the otherness of the body.⁶ They then searched for the golden triangle and found it in the well. A cubic stone with the Ten Commandments was placed on the triangle and thus it was hidden and walled up in the temple.

With this symbolism, that which in meditation elevated the inner essence of human development on earth to imagination was given. The brazen sea can be seen as a symbol of what man would have become if the three treacherous forces had not found a place in the soul. These three treacherous forces are: doubt, superstition, and the illusion of personal self.

Hiram Abiff was reborn as Lazarus and was thus the one who was first initiated by Christ. With him began the (reconciliation of the differences) that stood between the Cain and Abel currents.

According to another record, the “new appendix” reads as follows:

Hiram Abiff was reborn as Lazarus and thus became the first to be initiated by Christ. With him began the current of the center, which stood between the Cain and Abel currents. Over time, the Cain current found its main representatives in the F. (Masonry current), while the Abel current found its expression in the priestly current of the (Catholic?) Church. Both currents of humanity remained strictly hostile to each other. Only once did they unite in harmony: in their hatred of the current of the center. The result of this harmonious union of two otherwise hostile directions was the destruction of the Johannesbau (Goetheanum).

II

First, the Indian mantram was given for the first time, the translation for the first time. After this Indian mantram, the regular invocation was made: “Brothers of the...”

True esotericism is initially incomprehensible. As an example, imagine a living person who expresses absolutely no spiritual life on the outside. His spiritual life is directed entirely inwards. Nevertheless, it is an intense inner life.

About the vowels: hierarchies are involved.
I A O Seraphim, Cherubim and partly Thrones are involved.
U Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynamis
E _ Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi.

The whole together means the ancient-holy word of Jahve in place of the I-am. To create this word of Jahve out of the hierarchies means an act. The execution of this act on earth: the butterfly meditation:

Catch the butterfly
Send it to the icy heights
Where the world's secrets prevail.
It will become a bird for you
Then you have done half the work
. Dip the bird
Into the depths of the sea - - - - - JAOUE
Where the will of the world is at work.
If the bird drowns,
Then you still have to do,
Purifying the bird's corpse
By burning it in the fire.
Then consume the ashes
And you are
The light in the darkness of the world.

The visualization of this butterfly meditation has an ethereal effect. Only a simple interpretation. Searching in memory with the three and a half years following the butterfly meditation. Its ethereal effect is connected with the fact that it causes one to occupy oneself with one's own will, and in the retrospective examination of one's own will, one can find a point in one's life where this will has had a very specific impulse towards certain tasks. It is often the case that when searching for such moments of volition, the non-fulfillment of which has caused dissatisfaction, one comes to a point about three and a half years ago. (Prevention by external circumstances, for example, threefolding.)

Once this point has been reached, the task is to cultivate the content of this longing, not to try to carry out the deed, but to cultivate the content as much as possible, in the highest way. Then, three and a half years after this point in time, there will be another opportunity for realization. And then the task will be to perform a selfless act that has nothing to do with the starting point of seven years ago. This can also be a very inconspicuous act outwardly.

Description of the times, the situation. The present lectures and this hour are, in comparison to the prevailing fanaticism at the height of democracy outside, just the opposite; they signify the height of aristocracy and hierarchy. An enormous abyss that evolution must leap across in order to overcome these contradictions. Descriptions of this abyss, over which some courageously leap, others are dragged, others are torn. The whole thing is a heroic tragedy in the history of mankind.

Falter-Meditation
Invocation
Indian Mantram

III

Brothers of the... Indian Mantram

Indication that the new society was founded without mentioning the esoteric reason. (He had previously said that the reasoning had esoteric reasons.) Esotericism does not tolerate playing around, everything so far has been playful [taken]. Now esotericism must be brought openly and seriously into life, from Dornach, as the center. But now we really must not play with esotericism anymore. For that, modesty is needed, above all modesty before the ego.

Therefore, wake up! Become aware that we are asleep! With each waking we enter into a new sphere of the world, for we live completely surrounded by spheres of the world, only we sleep and know nothing of them. So far, everything in man only happens in dreams. The importance of the Falter meditation (he had said last time that everything he said about the effect of this meditation and its connection with the two times three and a half years only applies to people over 28). Reading it out loud – J A O U E.

Something should be added to enhance the effect of this meditation by Falter:

4 stages of falling asleep: in thinking, feeling, willing, in the I
4 stages of waking up: in thinking, feeling, willing, in the I

Thinking:

The head is like a fruit, the heart like a glowing chalice. We should experience our head as self-illuminating right down to our heart. We should experience our thinking as an etheric organ that feels its way towards everything it is meant to grasp. The difference between the occultist and the non-occultist is that the occultist is aware that this organ radiates out into the etheric. We should experience ourselves as a snail stretching out its feelers. Thinking must become a feeling process! Help for this:

Awaken in thinking: you are in the spiritual light of the world.

Experience yourself as radiant, feeling the radiance.

Through such thinking, all of nature becomes radiant. Stone and plant shine forth in the earthly... as animal and human being... in the moral. Through the experience of thinking as touching, we develop something like a sense of touch: we see a dandelion blossom and experience it as sand; we see chicory and experience it as silk, a sunflower as a spiky animal...

Feeling:

This is still a deep dream. We should experience our heart as glowing, but in such a way that it absorbs light from our entire environment and reflects it back outwards like the moon. Through our awakening feeling, we must experience the world quite differently; the earth as a sentient being that laughs and cries. In the withering of autumn there is a kind of weeping in nature, but joy of the Ahrimanic beings in winter, joy of the luciferic beings in spring. Natural processes as deeds of spiritual beings! Trees - in winter they are only their physical body, the etheric is outside. One can come to see how the trees solve tasks in the etheric.

When one awakens in thinking, one expands into infinity. When one awakens in feeling, one sets oneself in motion, one leaves oneself.

Awaken in feeling: you are in the spiritual deeds of the world.

Experience yourself, feeling the spiritual deeds.

Wanting:

In this respect, the human being of the present is still in a state of deep sleep. But in the realm of the will, the human being is completely on his own. He has his thinking only in this embodiment, taking nothing of it with him into the afterlife. The gods need our thinking, but they do not need our feeling and willing. A person may be ingenious, but only because the gods need it that way. Geniuses are the lamps that the gods need. Our thinking abilities return to the gods after death.

Our will, on the other hand, goes with us through our embodiments; it is a result of our embodiments, we work on it through our earthly lives. In our cooperation in shaping the world, our will is what is essentially characteristic. The will is man's property, while man's thinking belongs to the gods. Envy of the gods! In our volition, we have a life of our own. But people are still asleep in their volition. They love their volition because they always believe that what they want is already the right thing. But with our volition, we are helping to shape the world. We wake up in our volition by becoming aware that we are not alone, but are responsible for the actions of others. For example, Kully: What he does, especially what upsets us the most, is our fault, we are actually participating; Goesch affair = Maya.⁷When we no longer feel ourselves as separate individual beings, but so connected in the general activity, then we awaken in the will, then we come to the living will, then we think the spiritual beings: Awaken in the will: you are in the spiritual beings of the world. The spiritual beings experience you thinking.

Awakening in the I:

We sleep in the I. We use the word “I” only because the gods once spoke it for us - our angeloi - and now, imitating them, we speak it. But we must awaken in the I! Imagination for this: altar, above it the sun. We approach the altar and experience ourselves entirely as shadows, entirely as insubstantial. So far we have said: I am. Now we consciously say: I am not. – Then a deity rises out of the sun above the altar and animates the shadow. We are like a bowl that receives the light of the deity rising out of the sun. – By grace we receive this deity, it gives itself to us. – Fichte experienced this, but only in a shadowy way. Therefore, what he says about it is completely abstract.

In the I awaken: you are in your own spiritual being.

Experience yourself as receiving from and giving to the gods.⁸

Then it was said:
The stones are mute...
Brothers of the...
Indian saying

• 1. Named by Rudolf Steiner (see page 466) because the initiative came from the two Wachsmuth brothers, Count Lerchenfeld and Harriet von Vacano. The following participants are known by name: Marie Steiner, Dr. Ita Wegman, Dr. Elisabeth Vreede, Albert Steffen, Dr. Günther Wachsmuth, Wolfgang Wachsmuth and his wife, Dr. Kurt Piper, Dr. Otto Palmer, Dr. von Baravalle, Dr. Maria Röschl, Count Lerchenfeld, Harriet von Vacano, Jürgen von Grone, Margarita Woloschin.
• 2. This mantram was later incorporated into the mantras of the first class of the School of Spiritual Science.
• 3. See original recording on page 473.
• 4. Regarding this, Maria Röschl-Lehrs' note: “Only very sparse notes here. The order is not clear.”
• 5. Here, according to the usual traditions, the intermediate link is missing: Solomon gave the order to search for Hiram's body. Since it was believed that the murderers had extorted the master word from Hiram, it was agreed that they would remain silent during the search. The first word that one of the masters spoke unintentionally while digging up the body was to be considered the new master word. When the body was found after a long search, the word “Mach ben ach” escaped from one of them at that moment. This was accepted as a new master word.
• 6. Another record has here: “Earth son of suffering”.
• 7. Kully and Goesch: two opponents actively appearing at the time.
• 8. Cf. the manuscript on page 477.

I

There are poetic tasks¹ that any naturalism must fail to fulfill. These are the ones that relate to the struggle of eternal powers in the human soul. This struggle represents the entire development of the human inner life, from birth to death. This struggle is not exhausted in individual actions, moods or events. May the individual events that life brings to man find this or that, tragic or joyful outcome: the fundamental struggle that the eternal fights in the human breast always arises anew. Naturalistic art can only depict the individual, self-contained circles of struggle. For only these belong to the world of reality. In order to depict the primal struggles, the imagination must go beyond this reality. It must depict in a higher, ideal sphere as complete what reality never brings to a conclusion. The philosopher can do this in ideas, the artist in pictures. At a certain level of civilization, poetic imagination depicts these eternal struggles in the soul in the form of mythological and legendary figures. This divine or legendary world is nothing other than an image of what goes on at the bottom of the human mind. If the poet wants to depict the reign of the eternal, he must detach it from the contingencies of human life, from the joys and sorrows of everyday life. His figures will still be human, but human beings stripped of the contingent.

Ludwig Jacobowski has set himself such a supreme artistic task in his latest work: “Loki. Roman eines Gottes” (Bruns Verlag, Minden i. W. 1899). Two powers are constantly fighting in every human breast, a hot, heavy, life-and-death struggle. The one contains: kindness, love, patience, friendliness, beauty; the other: hatred, enmity, anger, hostility and the element that, in its strength, always forgets the soft forms of beauty. The poetic spirit of an earlier cultural stage contrasted the two powers in the Nordic deities Balder and Loki. Ludwig Jacobowski has depicted them again in his novel. The ancient Nordic deities served him as models for his characters. But the characters that the Nordic saga placed in these deities are no more than a starting point for Jacobowski. For the powers fight differently in the modern soul than in that of prehistoric man. Modern man leads a more profound life than that of prehistoric man. The man of an earlier age imagined the forces that ruled within him to be similar to the forces of nature that he perceived with his senses in the outside world. For the modern man, these forces take on a more spiritual content. This change in man's consciousness of himself corresponds to the transformation that Jacobowski's imagination has carried out with the figures of the saga. Loki's battle against the gods in the Norse saga appears like a natural process, invented by the imagination that feeds on sensual reality. Jacobowski portrays him as a personification of what moves the modern human soul. The poet has thus deepened the saga. He has described a battle that arises from love. Balder and Loki love Nanna. But Balder loves as love itself loves; he loves with a passion that is free of selfishness. With the love that Goethe has in mind when he says: “No self-love, no self-interest lasts, before their coming they have shrunk away. We call it: being pious!” Loki loves like selfishness loves, which celebrates the festival of the highest self-indulgence in love. The modern poet depicts the eternal struggle between egoism and selflessness. It is the struggle that the modern soul fights out in all its depth; the struggle that forms the content of the conflicting world views of the present. Jacobowski views this struggle with the calm that comes from the objective imagination of the true poet. And from this objectivity, he has created a philosophical work of the first order. He has thus found a higher expression for the modern soul than his contemporaries, who are forever groping and experimenting, can find.

[ 1 ] Michael's intervention in the evolution of the world and of mankind, at the end of the nineteenth century, appears in a remarkable illumination, if we consider the history of spiritual life in the centuries that went before.

[ 2 ] In the early fifteenth century lies the moment from which the epoch of the spiritual Soul first begins.

[ 3 ] Previous to this moment, a great change may be seen taking place in the spiritual life of mankind. One can trace how everywhere, previously, Imaginations played through all men's outlook on the world. Particular persons, it is true, have, before this, already arrived in their soul's life so far as bare ‘concepts.’ But the general soul-life of the majority of mankind goes on in a mutual intermingling of Imaginations and of mental conceptions drawn from the purely physical world. It is so with their conceptions about processes of nature, and also with their conceptions of events in history.

[ 4 ] What spiritual observation can discover in this direction is in every way confirmed by external testimony. A few instances may be mentioned here.

[ 5 ] The tales of historical events, which had lived in the minds and mouths of men during the preceding centuries, began to be written down just before the Age of Consciousness.^t1 And thus we have preserved from that period ‘legends’ and such things, which give a faithful portrayal of the manner in which men pictured ‘history’ to themselves in the times before.

[ 6 ] A beautiful example is the Tale of the Good Gerard, preserved in a poem by Rudolf of Ems, who lived in the first half of the thirteenth century. ‘Good Gerard’ is a rich merchant of Cologne. He sets out on a trading expedition to Russia, Livonia and Prussia, to buy sables. Thence he goes on to Damascus and Nineveh, to procure silks and similar merchandise.

[ 7 ] On the homeward journey he is driven out of his course by a tempest. He is thrown upon a strange shore, where he makes acquaintance with a man who is keeping prisoner certain English knights and also the bride of the English king. Gerard offers him everything that he has gained by trade upon his journey, and receives the prisoners in return. He takes them on board his ship and sets out on his journey home. When the ships come to where the ways part, one way to Gerard's country and the other to England, Gerard dismisses the men-prisoners and sends them on their way to their own country. The king's bride he keeps with him, in the hope that her betrothed, King William, will come and fetch her, as soon as he hears that she is free and where she is dwelling. The bride-queen and the ladies of her company are treated by Gerard with all conceivable kindness. She lives as a well-loved daughter in the house of him who has redeemed her from captivity. A long, long time goes by, without the king's appearing to fetch her. At last, in order to secure the future of his foster daughter, Gerard resolves to marry her to his own son; for it seem reasonable to believe that William is dead. The wedding feast is already in full train, when an unknown pilgrim appears amongst them. It is William. He had been long wandering about, seeking for his betrothed bride. She is restored to him, after Gerard's son has unselfishly resigned her. Both remain for a while still with Gerard; and then he fits out a ship to take them to England. Gerard is the first to be seen and welcomed in England by his former prisoners—all now attained to high dignities, and they at once want to choose him for their king. But he can tell them in reply that he is bringing them their own rightful king and queen. For they too had believed William to be dead, and were about to choose another king to rule the country, where everything had fallen to into confusion during the long time that William had been on his wanderings. The merchant of Cologne rejects everything they offer him in the way of honours and riches; and returns to Cologne, to live again as the simple merchant that he was before.

The story is couched in the form that the Saxon Emperor, Otto the First, journeys to Cologne to make the acquaintance of Good Gerard. For the powerful emperor in much that he has done, has not escaped the temptation of looking for an ‘earthly reward.’ Through acquaintance with Gerard, there is brought keenly home to him, by example, the untold good done by a plain man: The sacrifice of all the merchandise he had acquired, in order to set prisoners free; the restoration of his son's bride to William; and then all that he performs in order to bring William back to England, and so on—without coveting any earthly reward whatever in return, but looking for his reward from the hand of God alone. In the mouths of the people the man goes by the name of ‘the good Gerard.’ The Emperor feels that he has received a powerful spur, religiously and morally, through acquaintance with a man so minded as Gerard.

[ 8 ] This story—of which I have here given the bare outline, so as not merely to allude by name to something little known—shows from one aspect very distinctly what was the constitution of men's souls in the age that preceded the dawning of the Spiritual Soul in human evolution. [ 9 ] Anyone who lets the story, as told by Rudolf of Ems, work within him, can feel what a change has taken place in men's realization of the earthly world since the days when Emperor Otto lives (in the tenth century.)

[ 10 ] Looking thence to the age of the Spiritual Soul, we may see how the world has grown as it were ‘clear’ to the vision of men's souls, in respect of their grasp of physical entities and physical processes. Gerard sails with his ships, so to speak, through a mist. He only knows, each time, one little bit of the world with which he has to do. In Cologne, one learns nothing of what is happening in England; and one must go for years in search of a man who is in Cologne. The life and possessions of such a person as the man on whose shore Gerard is cast on his homeward voyage, first become known to one when Fate carries one directly to the spot. Compared to the perspicuity of the world's circumstances to-day, that of those days is like the difference between gazing over a broad, sunny landscape, and groping in a dense mist.

[ 11 ] With anything that to-day is accounted ‘historic’ the Tale of Good Gerard and the circumstances narrated in it have nothing whatever to do. But all the more do they shew the general tone of feeling and the whole state of mind of the age. And this, not the particular occurrences of the physical world, is depicted in Imaginations.

[ 12 ] The picture so drawn reflects Man's feeling that he is not merely a being who in all his life and actions is simply a link in the chain of events in the physical world, turned men's eyes to the beholding of the spiritual world. They did not see into the length and breadth of physical existence; but all the more they saw into the depths of spiritual existence.

[ 13 ] The tale of Good Gerard shews how the twilight haze which preceded the age of the Spiritual Soul as regards the perspective of the physical world, turned men's eyes to the beholding of the spiritual world. They did not see into the length and breadth of physical existence; but all the more they saw into the depths of spiritual existence.

[ 14 ] But as once it had been, when in their dim dreamlike clairvoyance men had looked into the spiritual world, it was now no more, in the age of which we are speaking. The Imaginations were there, but the apprehension they met with in the human soul was one already strongly tending towards the intellectual form of thought. The result was that people no longer knew how the world which reveals itself in Imaginations is related to the world of outer physical existence. And therefore, to people who adhered with more penetration to the intellectual form of thought, the Imaginations appeared to be free ‘fictions,’ with no actual reality.

[ 15 ] People no longer knew that through Imaginations men look into a world in which they dwell with quite another part of their being than in the physical world. And so, in the descriptions, both worlds are portrayed side by side; and both, from the style of the narration wear such a character, that one might well think that the spiritual events described had taken place alongside the physical ones, as visibly as the physical events themselves.

[ 16 ] Moreover, in many of these stories, the physical events themselves were confounded together. Persons whose lives lay hundreds of years apart appear on the scene as contemporaries. Actual events are transferred to wrong places or wrong times. [ 17 ] Facts of the physical world are looked at by the human soul in a way in which one can only look at things of the spirit, for which time and space have another meaning than they have for physical things. The physical world is described in Imaginations, instead of in thoughts. And, in return, the spiritual world is woven into the story as though one had to do, not with a quite other form of existence, but with a continuation of the physical facts.

[ 18 ] The history which holds solely to physical interpretations of everything, thinks that the old Imaginations from the East, from Greece, etc. were taken over, and woven poetically into the historical material which interested people at the time. In the writings of Isidore of Seville (7^th century A.D.) there was indeed a regular collection of old stories and legendary ‘motifs.’

[ 19 ] But this is a surface view of the matter. It can have a value only for one who has no sense of that other form of human soul-life, which knows itself and its own external existence to be in direct touch with the spiritual world, and feels impelled to express in Imaginations what thus it knows. And if then, instead of the narrator's own ‘Imagination,’ he uses one that has been handed down in history and which he has made his own by familiarity, this is not the essential feature; the essential feature is, that the soul's whole orientation is towards the spiritual world, so that the soul sees her own doings and all the proceedings of Nature interwoven with this spiritual world.

[ 20 ] There is, however, a certain confusion observable in the style of narrative in the period just before the dawn of the Spiritual Soul.

[ 21 ] In this confusion, when viewed with spiritual understandings, may be seen the actions of the Luciferic Powers. [ 22 ] The impulse which makes the soul adopt Imaginations into her personal store of life-experience, corresponds less with the faculties that she possessed in primeval times—through dream-like clairvoyance—and more with those already in existence in the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. These later faculties were already impelling the soul more towards a thinking interpretation of what was perceived through the senses. The soul is placed betwixt the two: betwixt the old orientation—where all turns upon the spiritual world, and the physical world is only seen as in a mist—and the new orientation, where all turns upon physical proceedings, and spiritual vision has grown dim.

[ 23 ] Into this unstable balance in the human soul is thrown the Luciferic influence. The Luciferic Powers want to prevent Man from coming to a complete orientation in the physical world. They want to keep him with his consciousness in spiritual regions that were suited to him in primeval times. They want to keep his dream-like, imaginative world-vision from the influence of that pure thinking which is trained to the understanding of physical existence. They are able indeed, in a wrong way, to keep back his powers of vision from the physical world; but they are not able, in a right way, to keep alive his power of realizing the old Imaginations. And so they leave him musing in Imaginations, without being able quite to transport him in soul into those worlds, where Imaginations have real validity. [ 24 ] The effect of Lucifer's influence, in the first beginning of the Age of the Spiritual Soul, is to transport Man out of the physical world into the supersensible one that lies just on its borders.

[ 25 ] This may be seen clearly illustrated in the Legend of Duke Earnest, which was one of the favourite stories of the Middle Ages, and circulated far and wide:

[ 26 ] Duke Earnest comes into conflict with the Emperor; and the emperor makes war unjustly upon him, to destroy him. To escape these impossible relations with the head of the empire, Duke Earnest sees himself obliged to join the crusade which is on its way to the East. In the various adventures that now befall him before his journey reaches its end, physical things and spiritual things are interwoven in the ‘legendary’ style above described. The duke, for instance, comes on his journey to a race of men with heads like cranes. He is cast with his vessels upon the ‘Magnetic Mountain,’ which attracts all ships by its magnetic power, so that people who come into the neighbourhood of the mountain cannot get away again, but are bound to perish miserably. Duke Earnest and his followers manage to escape by sewing themselves into skins and letting themselves be carried off by griffins, who are used to come down and prey upon the people who have been cast on the Magnetic Mountain. They are carried to a mountain top; and there, whilst the griffins are away, they cut themselves out of the skins and so escape. After further wanderings, they come to a people whose ears are so long that they can wrap them round their whole body like a coat; and then to another race of people with such big feet that when it rains they lie down on the ground and spread their feet over them like umbrellas. They come to a race of dwarfs, a race of giants, and so on. A great deal of this kind comes into the tale, as part of Duke Earnest's adventures upon his crusade. This ‘legend’ does not let one feel—in the way one should, wherever ‘Imaginations’ come in—that here the story is passing into a spiritual sphere, telling in pictures of things that are going on in the astral world and have a connection with the wills and the fate of the people upon earth.

[ 27 ] It is the same with the fine ‘Story of Roland,’ which celebrates Charlemagne's expedition against the heathens of Spain. Here it is even narrated, in analogy with the bible, that in order to enable Charlemagne to reach a desired place the sun stays its course, so that this one day is as long as an ordinary two.

[ 28 ] And, in the Saga of the Niebelung, one can see how the form of the story preserved in Northern countries has maintained the vision of the Spiritual in much greater purity; whereas in Middle Europe the Imaginations have been brought very close to physical life. The form of the Northern legends expresses clearly that the Imaginations have reference to an ‘astral world.’ In its Mid-European form, the ‘Niebelungen Lied,’ the Imaginations glide over into the views of the physical one.

[ 29 ] Those imaginations too, which come into the Legend of Duke Earnest, have in reality to do with experiences that are realised, between the adventures on the physical plane, in an ‘astral world’, to which Man as much belongs as to the physical one.

[ 30 ] All this, examined with the eye of the spirit, shows that the entrance into the Age of Consciousness means growing out of a phase of evolution in which the Luciferic Powers would be victorious over mankind, if the Spiritual Soul with its intellectual power did not bring a new strain of evolution into Mans being. That tendency to take their whole orientation from the spiritual world, by which men are confused and led astray, finds its check in the Spiritual Soul; men's gaze is drawn out into the physical world. All that takes place in this direction helps to withdraw mankind from the bewildering influence of Lucifer.

[ 31 ] In all this, Michael is already working from out of the spiritual world on Man's behalf. From the region above the senses he is preparing his work for later. He gives to mankind impulses which conserve the primeval relation to the divine-spiritual world, without this conservation assuming a Luciferic character.

[ 32 ] Then, in the last third of the nineteenth century, Michael pushes forward, and carries his action—which from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century has gone on preparatorily from the supersensible region—into the physical earth-world itself.

[ 33 ] It was necessary, for a while, that mankind should pursue their spiritual evolution in the direction of freeing themselves from a relation to the spiritual world which was threatening to become impossible. Subsequently, this evolution turned again, through Michael's mission, into paths which bring human progress upon earth once more into a relation with the spiritual world in which Man can find health and wholeness.

[ 34 ] So Michael stands, in his working, between the World-Picture of Lucifer, and the World-Understanding of Ahriman. The World-Picture turns, with Michael, to wisdom of itself as divine World-Working. And in this World-Working lives the care of Christ for mankind, which can thus disclose itself through Michael's World-Revelation to the human heart.

Leading Thoughts

[ 35 ] The dawn of the Age of Consciousness (age of the Spiritual Soul) in the 15^th century is preceded, in the evening of the age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, by an enhancement of Luciferic activity, which lasts on for a while into the new period.

[ 36 ] The aim of this Luciferic activity is unrightfully to preserve old forms of mentally picturing the world, and to keep Man back from using the intellect to comprehend the physical life of the world and make himself familiar with it.

[ 37 ] Michael unites himself with Man's activity, in order that the emancipated power of the intellect may abide by its divine, spiritual parentage, not in a Luciferic but in a rightful way.

• t1. Footnote by translator. In this and in several of the following Letters, the phrase ‘Age of Consciousness’ (Bewusstseins-Zeitalter) is often used synonymously with ‘Age of the Consciousness-Soul or spiritual Soul’ (Zeitalter der Bewusstseins-Seele)—compare what is said of this in the Preface.

In Lucifer's kingdom. A space which is not enclosed by artificial walls, but by fantastic forms which resemble plants, animals, etc. All in various brilliant shades of red. In the background are arranged three transparencies showing the top of Raphael's ‘Disputa,’ Leonardo's ‘Last Supper,’ and Raphael's ‘School of Athens.’ These are illuminated from the back of the stage whenever Maria or Benedictus challenges Lucifer. At other times they are invisible. On the right, Lucifer's throne. At first only the souls of Capesius and Maria are present. After a time Lucifer appears, and later on Benedictus and Thomasius, with his etheric counterpart or ‘double,’ and lastly, Theodora.

Maria:
Thou, who within the realm of sense art named
Capesius, ...
Art thou the being whom I meet the first
In Lucifer's domain: 'tis dangerous
To feel and breathe the spirit of this place.

Capesius (in astral garb):
O speak not to me of Capesius
Who in the kingdom of the Earth erewhile
Strove through a life which he hath long since known
Was but a dream. Whilst there he bent his mind
Upon such things as ever come to pass
As time streams on. And he had set himself
In that way to discover all the powers
Through which mankind fulfils its spirit-life.
What thus he came to know about those powers
He tried to keep deep fastened in his soul.
Now only in this realm one understands
To judge aright the knowledge he pursued.
He thought the pictures he possessed were true
And could reveal to him reality;
But, viewed from here, they clearly show themselves
As naught but empty dreams, which Spirit-hands
Have woven round about weak men of Earth.
They cannot bear the cold clear light of truth.
They would be utterly afraid and stunned
If they should learn how all the course of life
Is turned by spirits after their ideas.

Maria:
Thou speakest as I've only heard those speak
Who ne'er have been incarnate on the Earth.
They tell you Earth hath no significance,
That in the universe its work is small.
But he who hath belonged to realms of Earth
And owes to it the best powers that he hath,
Will have a different tale to tell thereof.
He finds important many threads of fate
Which bind Earth's life to that of all the worlds.
E'en Lucifer who works here with such power
Must keep his gaze fixed fast upon the Earth,
And seek to turn men's deeds in such a way
That their results may ripen his own soul.
He knows he'd fall a victim to the dark
If he could find no booty on the Earth,
And so his fate is bound up with that sphere.
So too, with those who dwell in other worlds.
And when the human soul can clearly see
The cosmic goal, which Lucifer desires,
And can compare with it what those powers wish
Who have him as opponent to their aims,
Then will it know that he can be destroyed
Through conquests which it gains o'er its own self.

Capesius:
The human being who here talks with thee
Thinks that fate dreadful, which compels him now
To wear a body round him; which hath yet
The breath of life and keeps its earthly form,
Although the spirit hath no more control.
At such a time this spirit feels indeed
That worlds, he values, fall at one fierce blow.
He feels himself within a prison-house
Narrow and horrible with naught all round.
Remembrance of the life that he passed through
Seems, as it were, extinguished from his soul.
At times he feels aware of human souls,
But what they say he cannot understand;
He only catches some especial words
Which lift themselves from out the general talk,
And bring remembrance of the loveliness
Which he can gaze on in the Spirit-realms.
He's in his body then, and yet is not;
He lives within that frame a life he fears
When he beholds it from this region here:
And he is longing for the time to come
When from the body he will be set free.

Maria:
The body which is proper to Earth-souls
Bears in itself the means to recreate
In lofty pictures loveliness sublime:
Which pictures, even if their substance now
Seems but a shadow in the human soul,
Are yet the buds which in the future worlds
Will open out to blossom and to fruit.
So through his body man may serve the gods.
And his soul's life doth show in its true light
Only when in his body he doth find
The power to give his “I” reality.

Capesius:
Ah, utter not that word in front of him
Who stands before thee now in Spirit-realms
And on the Earth is called Capesius.
He fain would flee away when that word sounds,
So fierce it burns him here.

Maria:
So thou dost hate
That which first gives true being unto men?
How canst thou come to live within this realm
If so appalling seems that word to thee?
For no one can arrive as far as this
Who hath not faced the nature of that word.

Capesius:
He who appears to thee hath often stood
Before great Lucifer who rules this realm.
And Lucifer hath made it clear to him
That only souls, who consciously make use
Of powers that from their earthly bodies come,
Can harm the realm which doth obey his will.
Those souls however who go through their life
Within the body, as it were in swoon,
And yet already have clairvoyant power,
These only learn in Lucifer's domain,
And cannot cause it harm in any way.

Maria:
I know that in these realms of Spirit-life
'Tis not by words, but sight, that one doth learn.
What in this moment I have come to see
Because of thine appearance to me here,
Will later show itself within my soul
As progress in my spirit-pupilship.

Capesius:
Here 'tis not only teaching that one gains;
Duties are also shown one in this place.
Thou hast here spoken with the soul of him
Who calls himself Capesius on earth.
The spirit-glances into former lives
That are accorded thee, will show to thee
Thou owest much through Karma unto him.
Therefore thou shouldst petition Lucifer
That he, great Light-Bearer, give thee the means
Capesius to shield, in life on Earth.
Thou knowest through thy wisdom well enough
What thou canst do for him, so that he may
Be led again to thee in later lives
So that through thee the debt may be wiped out.

Maria:
And so this duty which I hold so dear
Must be fulfilled through power from Lucifer?

Capesius:
Thou dost desire this duty to fulfil,
And that can only be through Lucifer.
Look! Here he comes, the Spirit of the Light.

(Lucifer appears and, in the course of his speech, Benedictus.)

Lucifer:
Maria, thou art asking at my throne
Self-knowledge for that very human soul
Who standeth near thee in the life on Earth.
It cannot learn to know itself aright
Except by gazing deep into myself;
And that it will achieve without thine aid.
How canst thou think that I would grant to thee
All that thou mayst desire for this thy friend?
Thou vainest Benedictus as thy guide,
Who is my strong opponent on the Earth,
Lending unto mine enemies his strength.
Already hath he stolen much from me.
Johannes cut himself adrift from him
And placed himself beneath my guiding hand.
He cannot yet indeed see my true self
Because he hath not yet the seer's full power.
He will attain it later through myself,
And then he will entirely be mine own.
But I command thee not to speak a word
That might apply to him in any way
So long as thou dost stand before my throne.
Any such word would burn me in this place.
Here words are deeds, and deeds must follow them;
But what might follow—from such words of thine—
It must not be—

Benedictus:
Thou must give ear to her.
For where words have an equal power with deeds
They come in consequence of former deeds.
The deed is done that conquers Lucifer:
Maria is my spirit-pupil true:
I could direct her to that point, whence she
Could recognize the highest spirit-task,
Which same she will most certainly fulfil.
And in fulfilling it she will for sure
Build in Johannes, power and balm to heal,
Which will release him from thy kingdom's grip.
Maria carries deep within her soul
A solemn holy vow which doth awake
Such healing powers in progress of the worlds.
Soon wilt thou hear all this put into words;
But if with powerful thought thou wouldst suppress
And veil the rays of light through which thou hast
The magic power to strive against, and win
The victory o'er all that selfhood means,
I think that then thou'lt glimpse the healing rays,
Which will in future shine with such a strength
That they will draw Johannes to their realm,
By their all-powerful love.

Maria:
Johannes soon
Will here appear; yet side by side
With his own wonted form, which on the earth
His soul would recognise, there will emerge
The being whom as his more potent double
Man carries hidden in his nature's depth.
And if Johannes could but recognize
Thee as thou seemest to his earthly form
It could not bring to him all he requires
To help him in the progress of his soul.
But to his double thou shalt now vouchsafe
What he requires upon those spirit paths,
O'er which I shall in future guide his steps.

Lucifer:
Johannes then must stand before me now.
I feel full well the power which comes from thee;
It hath opposed me since the Earth began.

(Enter Johannes Thomasius and his Etheric Counterpart from different sides of the stage at the same moment, and meet face to face.)

Thomasius:
O mine own Likeness, up till now thou hast
Shown thyself to me only that I might
Be frightened at the sight of mine own self.
I cannot understand thee much as yet;
I only know that thou dost guide my soul.
'Tis thou then who dost baulk me of free life
And dost prevent me from due cognizance
Of what I really am. Now must I hear
Thee speak in front of Lucifer, to see
What I in future years shall yet achieve.

Thomasius' Double:
'Tis true I often was allowed to come
And bring Johannes knowledge of himself.
But I could only work in those soul depths,
Which still are hidden from his consciousness.
My life within him hath for some long time
Been subject to considerable change.
Maria used to stand close to his side.
He thought her bound in spirit to himself;
I showed him that the true guides of his soul
Were only passion and impulsiveness.
He could but think of this as some reproach,
But thou couldst show, 0 Light-Bearer sublime,
To sensual tendencies the way by which
They best might serve the spirit-purposes.
Johannes from Maria had to part,
And give himself forthwith to earnest thought
Which hath the power to purify men's souls.
What from his purity of thought streamed forth
Flowed also unto me, and I was changed.
I feel his purity within myself.
Nought need he fear from me, if he should now
Feel once more drawn towards Maria's soul.
But he belongs, as yet, to thy domain,
And at this moment I demand him back.
For he shall now experience my being,
Without thy guidance and directing will.
He needs me now, that from me there may flow
Into his thought with mighty conscious strength
Both warmth of soul and also power of heart.
Then once more shall he find himself as man.

Lucifer:
I count thy striving good. Yet can I not
Grant to thee all that thou dost ask of me.
For should I give thee to Johannes now
In that same form wherein in former years
Thou didst appear before his mind and soul,
He would at present only give his love
To thinking and to knowledge cold and bare,
And all warm individuality
Would seem unfeeling, meaningless and dead.
It is not thus my power must fashion him.
Through me he must discover in himself
His living personality and self.
I must transform thee, if the thing that's right
Shall come forth for his health and progress now.
I have a long time since prepared for all
That now shall clearly show itself in thee.
Henceforth thou shalt appear in different guise:
Johannes will no more Maria love,
As he hath loved her in the days gone by.
Yet none the less he'll love, with all the strength
And all the passion he once gave to her.

Benedictus:
The glorious work in which we've gained success
Thou wouldst now turn unto thine own account.
Thou hast Johannes through his power of heart
Marked for thine own one day; and yet thou seest
That thou must make the fetters stronger still
If thou wouldst keep his being for thyself.
His heart will be beneath his spirit's rule—
If that is so then all the knowledge-work
Which he on Earth accomplished, must be giv'n
In future, for their own, to those great Powers
Which thou, since Time began, hast combated.
If thou succeed'st in capturing that love
Which now Johannes for Maria feels
And changing it by cunning to the lust
Which thou dost now require for thine own ends,
Then will he turn the good he did on Earth,
To evil ends from out the Spirit-worlds.

Maria:
Then he may yet be saved? 'Tis not decreed
That he must fall a victim to the Powers
That want to gain his work now for themselves?

Benedictus:
It would be so if all the Powers remained
Just as at present they have formed themselves;
But if at the right hour thou dost allow
Thy vow to take effect in thine own soul
Those Powers must change their course in future times.

Lucifer:
So work, compelling forces;
Ye elemental sprites,
Feel now your Master's power;
Smooth now for me the way,
That leads from realms of Earth
That so there may draw near
To Lucifer's domain
Whate'er my wish desires,
Whate'er obeys my will.

(Theodora appears.)

Theodora:
Who calleth me to realms so strange to me?
I like it not, unless the world of gods
Reveals itself in love unto my soul,
And glowing warmth entwining round my heart
Draws spirit-speech from out mine inmost soul.

Thomasius' Double:
Ah, how thou dost transform my very life!
Thou hast appeared, and here am I, a man
Who now can only work when filled by thee.
Johannes shall, through me, be now thine own,
And from henceforward thou shalt have the love
Which once so fearful and so radiant
Was wrested for Maria from his heart.
He saw thee years ago, but did not then
Feel all the warmth of love which was to grow
In secret in the depths of his own soul.
Now it will rise, and fill him full of power,
And turn his thoughts entirely to thyself.

Benedictus:
The crucial moment is arriving now,
His strongest power hath Lucifer let loose:
Maria, all the training of thy soul
Thou must put forth in strength to vanquish him.

Maria:
O Bearer of that Light, which would confine
Love only to the service of the self;
Thou hast from Earth's beginning granted men
Knowledge, when they, still guided by the gods,
Obeyed the spirit, knowing nought of self.
But since that time each soul of man hath been
The place in which thou fightest 'gainst the gods.
Yet now the times are coming, which must bring
Destruction on thyself and on thy realms.
A thinker bold was able to release
Science from all thy gifts in such a way
That unto mankind's gods it gave itself.
But thou dost try once more to get the powers,
Which for the gods are destined, for thyself.
Because Johannes through his work hath now
Deprived thee of that knowledge, with whose fruit
Thou from the first deceived'st all mankind,
So now thou would'st deceive him, through that love
Which, should he follow out his destined path
For Theodora he should never feel.
Thou fain wouldst conquer Wisdom now by Love,
As once 'gainst Love thou didst by Wisdom fight.
But know full well that in Maria's heart,
With which she now opposeth thy designs,
The spirit-pupilship hath planted powers
To keep far off, for ever, all self-love
From Knowledge. Never from this hour will I
Allow myself to be possessed by joy
Such as men feel when thoughts grow ripe within.
I'll steel my heart to serve as sacrifice
So that my mind can always only think
In such a way that through my thoughts I may
Offer the fruits of Knowledge to the gods.
My sacred service shall such Knowledge be,
And what I thus effect within myself
Shall o'er Johannes powerfully outstream,
And oft, in future, when within his heart
These words are whispered from thyself to him:
‘Man's human nature shall through love find out
What gives strength to his personality.’
Then shall my heart this powerful answer give:
‘Once thou wert listened to, when Earth began,
And there didst show forth signs of Wisdom's fruit;
The fruits of Love can only come to man
When they are brought to him from realms divine.’

Lucifer:
I mean to fight.

Benedictus:
And fighting, serve the gods.

Curtain

Address Given in Berlin on September 13, 1900

[ 1 ] It is strange that with the infatuation for Nietzsche in our day, someone must appear whose feelings, no less than those of many others, are drawn to the particular personality, and yet who, in spite of this, must constantly keep before him the deep contradictions which exist between this type of spirit, and the ideas and feelings of those who represent themselves as adherents of his world conception. Such a one who stands apart must, above all, beware of the contrast between the relationship of those contemporaries to Nietzsche a decade ago as the night of madness broke over the “fighter against his time” and what existed when death took him from us on the 25th of August, 1900. It seems as if the complete opposite has happened from what Nietzsche prophesied in regard to his effect on his contemporaries in the last days of his creative work. The first part of his book, in which he tried to recoin the values of thousands of years, his Antichrist, lay completed at the onset of his illness. He begins with the words, “This book belongs to the very few; perhaps not even one of these is yet living. There may be those who understand my Zarathustra; how could I confuse myself with those for whom ears are growing already today? Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some of my readers will be born posthumously.” At his death it seemed as if the “day after tomorrow” had already come. One must call into this apparent “day after tomorrow” the words of Zarathustra: “You say you believe in Zarathustra? But of what importance is Zarathustra? You are my believers, but of what importance are all believers? Now I exhort you to lose me and to find yourselves; and only when you have denied me will I return to you.” Who would dare to say whether Nietzsche, were he to live today in fresh creativity, would look with greater pleasure upon those who revere him with doubts, or upon others? But it must be permitted, especially today, to look back, beyond these present-day admirers, to the time when he felt himself alone and misunderstood in the midst of the spiritual life surrounding him, when some people lived who felt it blasphemous to be called his “believers,” because he appeared to them to be a spirit whom one could not encounter importunately with a “yes” or “no,” but like an earthquake in the realm of the spirit, which stirs up questions for which premature answers can only be like unripe fruits. But ten years ago, more moving than the news of his death today, two pieces of news which followed closely upon each other, came to the “ears” which had “grown” for the Nietzsche admirers of that time. The first concerned the cycle of lectures which Georg Brandes had held about the world conception of Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen in the year 1888. Nietzsche felt this recognition to be one which had come forth from “single ones” which were “born posthumously.” He felt himself jerked out of his loneliness in a way which was in harmony with his spirit. He did not want to be evaluated; he wanted to be “described,” characterized. And soon upon this news followed the report that his mind, tom from its loneliness, had succumbed to the frightful destiny of spiritual darkness.

[ 2 ] And, while he himself could no longer contribute, his contemporaries had the leisure to sharpen the outlines of his picture. Through the observation of his personality, the picture of the time could imprint itself ever more clearly for them; the picture of the time, from which his spirit rises like a Böcklin figure. The worlds of his soul ideals could be illuminated by the light which the spiritstars of the second half of the nineteenth century cast upon them. In full clarity stood the points in which he was truly great. But these also overshadowed the reason why he had to wander in loneliness. The nature of his being led him over, heights of spirit life. He stepped forth like one to whom only the essentials of mankind's development are of concern. But this essential touched him as much as others are touched in their soul by only the most intimate situations. Just as the souls of others are burdened directly by only the most immediate personal experiences, so the great questions of culture, the mighty needs for knowledge of his age, decisively passed through his soul. What permeated only the heads of many of his contemporaries, became for him a personal affair of the heart.

[ 3 ] Greek culture, Schopenhauer's world conception, Wagner's music dramas, the knowledge of the more recent natural science, aroused in him such personal, deep feelings as would have been aroused in others only by the experiences of a strong, passionate love. What the entire age lived through in hopes and doubts, in temptations and joys of knowledge, Nietzsche experienced in his special way on his lonesome heights. He found no new ideas; but he suffered and rejoiced in the ideas of his time in a way different from that of his contemporaries. It was their task to give birth to the ideas; before him arose the difficult question, How can one live with these ideas?

[ 4 ] His educational path had made Nietzsche a philologist. He had penetrated so deeply into the world of Greek spiritual culture that his teacher, Ritschl, could recommend him with these words to the University of Basel, which engaged the young scholar before he had taken his doctorate: Friedrich Nietzsche is a genius and is able to do whatever he puts his mind to. He may well have achieved excellent results in the sense of the requirements made of philologists. But his relationship to Greek culture was not only that of a philologist. He did not live in ancient Greece in thought alone; with his whole heart he was deeply engrossed in Greek thinking and feeling. The bearers of Greek culture did not remain the object of his studies; they became his personal friends. During the first period of his teaching activity in Basel, he worked out a book about the philosophers of the tragic age before Socrates. It was published among his posthumus works. He does not write like a scholar about Thales, Heraclitus and Parmenides; he converses with these figures of antiquity as with personalities with whom his heart is closely connected. The passion which he feels for them makes him a stranger to the Western culture, which according to his feelings, since Socrates has taken paths other than those of ancient times. Socrates was Nietzsche's enemy because he had dulled the great tragic fundamental moods of his predecessors. The instructive mind of Socrates strove toward an understanding of reality. He desired reconciliation with life through virtue. But there is nothing, according to Nietzsche, which can degrade mankind more than the acceptance of life as it is. Life cannot reconcile itself with itself; man can only bear this life if he creates over and above it. Before Socrates, the Greeks understood this. Nietzsche believed that he found their fundamental mood expressed in these words which, according to legend, the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, gave as answer to the question, What is best for mankind: “Miserable creation of a moment, children of accident and travail, why do you force me to tell you what is not the most profitable for you to hear? What is the very best for you is not attainable by you; that is, not to be born, not to exist, to be nothing. But the second best for you is to die soon.” Ancient Greek art and wisdom sought consolation in the face of life. The servants of Dionysus did not wish to belong to this community of life, but rather to a higher one. For Nietzsche this was expressed in their culture. “In song and dance, the human being expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and how to speak, and he is about to fly, to dance into the air.” There are two paths for man which lead him over and above existence; in a blessed enchantment, as if in an opium dream, he can forget existence and, “singing and dancing,” feel himself at one with a universal soul; or he can look for his satisfaction in an ideal picture of reality as if in a dream which flutters gently above existence. Nietzsche characterizes these two paths as the Dionysian and the Apollonian soul conditions. But the more recent culture since Socrates has looked for reconciliation with existence, and thereby has lowered the value of mankind. It is no wonder that with such feelings, Nietzsche felt lonely in this more recent culture.

[ 5 ] Two personalities seemed to pull him out of this state of loneliness. On his life path he encountered Schopenhauer's conception of the worthlessness of existence, and Richard Wagner. The position he took in relation to these two clearly illuminated the being of his spirit. Toward Schopenhauer he felt a devotion more intimate than can be imagined. And yet Schopenhauer's teachings remained almost without importance for him. The wise one from Frankfurt had innumerable disciples who accepted faithfully what he had to say. But Nietzsche never was one of these believers. At the same time that he sent his pean of praise, Schopenhauer als Erzieher, Schopenhauer as Educator, into the world, he wrote secretly for himself his serious doubts about the philosopher's ideas. He did not look up to him as to a teacher; he loved him like a father. He felt the heroic quality of his thoughts even when he did not agree with them. His relationship to Schopenhauer was too intimate to necessitate an external faith in him or an outer confession. He loved his “educator” so much that he attributed his own thoughts to him in order to be able to revere them in another. He did not want to agree with a personality in his thoughts; he wanted to live in friendship with another. This desire also attracted him to Richard Wagner. What then were all those figures of pre-Socratic Greek culture with whom he had wished to live in friendship? Indeed, they were mere shadows from a far distant past. And Nietzsche aspired to life, to the direct friendship of tragic human beings. Greek culture remained dead and abstract for him, despite all the life his fantasy tried to breathe into it. The Greek intellectual heroes remained for him a yearning; for him Richard Wagner was a fulfillment which tried to re-awaken the old world of Greece within his personality, his art, his world conception. Nietzsche spent most glorious days when from Basel he was allowed to visit the Wagner couple on their Triebschen estate. What the philologist had looked for in spirit, to breathe Greek air, he believed he found here in reality. He could find a personal relationship to a world which previously he had sought in ideas. He could experience intimately what he could otherwise only have conjured before himself in thought. To him the Triebschen idyll was like home. How descriptive are the words with which he describes his feelings in regard to Wagner: “A fruitful, rich, stirring life, quite different and unheard of in more mediocre mortals! For this reason he stands there rooted deeply in his own strength, with his gaze over and above all that is ephemeral; eternal in the most beautiful sense.”

[ 6 ] In Richard Wagner's personality Nietzsche believed he had the higher worlds, which could make life as bearable for him as he imagined it to be in the sense of the ancient Greek world conception. But precisely here did he not commit the greatest error in his sense? Indeed he sought in life for what, according to his assumptions life could not offer. He wanted to be above life; and with all his strength he threw himself into the life that Wagner lived. For this reason it is understandable that his greatest experience had to be his deepest disappointment at the same time. To be able to find in Wagner what he was searching for, he had first to magnify the true personality of Wagner to an ideal picture. What Wagner could never be, Nietzsche had made out of him. He did not see and revere the true Wagner; he revered his image, which towered far above reality. Then when Wagner had achieved what he aspired, when he had reached his goal, Nietzsche felt the disharmony between his impression and the true Wagner. And he separated from Wagner. But only he interprets this separation psychologically correctly who recognizes that Nietzsche did not separate from the true Wagner, because he never was his follower; he only saw his deception clearly. What he had looked for in Wagner, he could never find in him because that had nothing to do with Wagner; it had to be freed from all reality as a higher world. Then Nietzsche later characterized the necessity of his apparent separation from Wagner. He says that what in his younger years he had heard in Wagner's music had absolutely nothing to do with Wagner. “When I described the Dionysian music, I described what I had heard; instinctively I had to translate and transfigure everything into the new spirit which I bore within me. The proof of this, as strong as proof as can be, is my book, Wagner in Bayreuth; in all psychologically decisive places one can place my name, or the name Zarathustra wherever the text uses the name Wagner. The complete picture of the dithyrambic artist is the picture of the pre-existentialist poet of Zarathustra, drawn with profound depth, and without really touching the reality of Wagner for a single moment. Wagner himself had an idea of this; he did not recognize himself in the book.”

[ 7 ] In Zarathustra Nietzsche sketches the world for which he had searched in vain in Wagner, separated from alt reality. He placed his Zarathustra ideal in a different relationship to reality than his own earlier ideals. He had had bad experiences in his direct turning away from existence. He must have done injustice to this existence, and for this reason it had avenged itself so bitterly against him; this idea gained the upper hand within him more and more. The disappointment which his idealism had caused him, drove him into a hostile mood toward all idealism. During the time following his separation from Wagner, his works become accusations against ideals. “One error after another is placed upon ice; the ideal is not refuted—it freezes to death.” Thus in 1888 he expresses himself about the goal of his book which had appeared in 1878, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Human, All Too Human. After this Nietzsche looks for refuge in reality; he deepens himself in the more recent natural science, in order that through it he can gain a true guide to reality. All worlds beyond this world, which lead human beings away from reality, now become abominable, remote worlds for him, conceived out of the fantasy of weak human beings, who do not have sufficient strength to find their satisfaction in immediate, fresh existence. Natural science has placed the human being at the end of a purely natural evolution. Through the fact that the latter has conceived the human being out of itself, all that is below him has taken on a higher meaning. Therefore, man should not deny its significance and wish to make himself an image of something beyond this world. He should understand that he is not the meaning of a super-earthly power, but the “meaning of this earth.” What he wishes to attain above what exists, he should not strive for in enmity against what exists. Nietzsche looks within reality itself for the germ of the higher, which is to make reality bearable. Man should not strive toward a divine being; out of his reality he should bring forth a higher way of existence. This reality extends over and above itself. Humanity has the possibility to become superhumanity. Evolution has always been. The human being should also work at evolution. The laws of evolution are greater, more comprehensive than all that has already been developed. One should not only look upon that which exists, but one must go back to primeval forces which have engendered the real. An ancient world conception questioned how “good and evil” came into the world. It believed that it had to go behind existence in order to discover “in the eternal” the reasons for “good and evil.” But with the “eternal,” with the “beyond,” Nietzsche had also to reject the “eternal” evaluation of “good and evil.” Man has come into existence through the natural; and “good and evil” have come into existence with him. The creation of mankind is “good and evil.” And deeper than the created is the creator. The “human being” stands “beyond good and evil.” He has made the one thing to be good, the other to be evil. He may not let himself be chained through his former “good and evil.” He can follow further the path of evolution which he has taken till now. From the worm he has become a human being; from man he can develop to the superman. He can create a new good and evil. He may “reevaluate” present day values. Nietzsche was torn from his work on Umwertung aller Werte, Transvaluation of All Values, through his spiritual darkness. The evolution of the worm to the human being was the idea which he had gained from the more recent natural science. He himself did not become a scientist; he had adopted the idea of evolution from others. For them it was a matter of the intellect; for him it became a matter of the heart. The others waged a spiritual battle against all old prejudices. Nietzsche asked himself how he could live with the new idea. His battle took place entirely within his own soul. He needed the further development to the superman in order to be able to bear mankind. Thus, by itself, in lonely heights, his sensitive spirit had to overcome the natural science which he had taken into himself. During his last creative period, Nietzsche tried to attain from reality itself what earlier he thought he could gain in illusion, in an ideal realm. Life is assigned a task which is firmly rooted in life, and yet leads over and above this life. In this immediate existence one cannot remain standing in real life, or in the life illuminated by natural science. In this life there also must be suffering. This remained Nietzsche's opinion. The “superman” is also a means to make life bearable. All this points to the fact that Nietzsche was born to “suffer from existence.” His genius consisted in the searching for bases for consolation. The struggle for world conceptions has often engendered martyrs. Nietzsche has produced no new ideas for a world conception. One will always recognize that his genius does not lie in the production of new ideas. But he suffered deeply because of the thoughts surrounding him. In compensation for this suffering he found the enraptured tones of his Zarathustra. He became the poet of the new world conception; the hymns in praise of the “superman” are the personal, the poetic reply to the problems and results of the more recent natural science. All that the nineteenth century produced in ideas, would also have been produced without Nietzsche. In the eyes of the future he will not be considered an original philosopher, a founder of religions, or a prophet; for the future he will be a martyr of knowledge, who in poetry found words with which to express his suffering.