The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In these lectures I should like to bring before you a picture of the nature of the Mysteries and their connection with the spiritual life of humanity. First, by way of introduction, we must come to an understanding with regard to various experiences on the path to the higher worlds. We shall have to bring forward things which in a certain connection have already been touched upon in the course of our anthroposophical studies; but during the next few days we shall need certain points of view which may have so far received less attention, at least in their necessary setting.

Everything that belongs to the Mysteries in their true nature is founded ultimately on the experiences of Initiates in the higher worlds. It is from the higher worlds that the knowledge and the impulses for practical training in the Mysteries have to be brought. We have often emphasised that as human evolution in different regions takes on different forms in successive periods, so is it with everything that we call the nature of the Mysteries. It is not for nothing that our souls pass through successive human lives; we go through them because in every incarnation we experience something fresh and can add it to what we have garnered in previous incarnations. In most cases the appearance of the external world has completely changed when, after our passage through the spiritual worlds between death and a new birth, we enter again through birth into physical existence, And for reasons that we can easily recognise, the principle of Initiation must also change in the successive epochs of humanity. In our own time the principle of Initiation has already undergone a great change, in that Initiation can be attained up to a certain stage without any personal guidance; for it has been possible to set out publicly the principles of Initiation as far as has been done, for example, in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Anyone who tries quite seriously to work through the experiences described in this book can go very far in relation to the principle of Initiation. He can go so far that the existence of the spiritual world becomes for him a matter of knowledge, equally with his knowledge of the external physical world. By slowly and gradually applying to his soul in due sequence the exercises given, he will break through to an understanding of the spiritual worlds. The Way of Initiation can now be described and pursued without exposing the soul to certain events which could lead it into particular catastrophes and revolutions.

Up to this point, accordingly, it is possible today to discuss in public the Way into the higher worlds. But it must be said also that for anyone seriously resolved to go further, the Way is even today bound up with the enduring of certain pains and sorrows, and with some quite special experiences which can have a dismaying, revolutionary effect on a man's life, and for these he must have undergone a thorough preparation. I must again emphasise, however, that anyone can follow through everything that has been published without risk of harm, and by this means he can go very far along the Way. The path to the higher worlds, one need hardly say, is never closed, but anyone who wishes to follow it beyond a certain frontier must be specially prepared if he is to reach the end of it without having his inner life shaken—not morbidly, but shaken through and through. Even these shocks pass quite naturally over the soul when the whole course of Initiation is carried out rightly. But it is very necessary that it should be carried through in the right way.

Now we must understand clearly that if anyone wants to plunge into the Mysteries, everything in his soul-life must gradually become different. The change can be characterised in a few words by saying: for anyone wishing to penetrate the Mysteries, the aims and goals that figure in ordinary soul-life must all become a means to higher purposes, higher goals. In ordinary life a man perceives the external world through his senses. He perceives it in colours, forms and sounds and other sense-impressions. He lives within this world of sense-impressions. At the moment when Initiation is to enter a certain stage, he must not simply experience blue or red or any other colours all the time; without losing these experiences he must learn to make them a means to higher ends. In ordinary life a man looks out on a clear day into space and sees the blue sky and enjoys the sight. But if he wants to be an Initiate of a certain degree he must come to the point of being able to see the blue of the heavens as completely transparent. While normally it is a limit or boundary, it must now become transparent, and he must be able to see what he wants to see through the blue sky. For him it must no longer be a boundary. Or let us take a rose: for external vision the surface of the rose is bounded by its red colour. At the moment of Initiation the red colour ceases to be a boundary. It becomes transparent, and behind it appears that which is being sought. The colour does not cease to produce its own natural effect; but the Initiate perceives something different when he looks through the blue sky, when he looks through the red of the rose, and again when he looks through the rosy dawn, and so on. The colour is experienced in a quite definite manner, but for unmediated vision it becomes transparent and is eliminated by the soul-force which has been acquired through the training that leads to clairvoyance. So it is with all sense-impressions. Whereas previously they were in themselves a complete experience, after Initiation they become merely a means of experiencing what lies behind them.

Thus it is with the whole thought-world. In ordinary life man thinks ... I beg you not to misunderstand this in any way; if you compare it in the right sense with other explanations you will see the agreement, but it is none the less true to say that from a certain stage of Initiation, thinking in the usual sense of the word ceases. It is not that the Initiate could ever come to a time when he would regard thinking as of no significance, but instead of being the aim and object of the life of the soul, thinking must become merely a means to an end. The Initiate, in fact, is entering a new world. In order to experience it, it is necessary for him—besides other things of which we shall have to speak—to pass beyond the standpoint of ordinary thinking on the physical plane. When a man lives on the physical plane he judges things and forms opinions about them. After a certain stage of Initiation these opinions no longer have any meaning or value. But as we are speaking about regions of the soul-life so different from those to which we are accustomed, I must point out that it is very easy for misunderstandings to arise. When this stage of Initiation, which I shall have to describe later on, is reached, then as a rule a person will have to lead a kind of double life. For in everyday life it is impossible not to reflect and form judgments upon things. On the physical plane we are forced to form judgments and to think. Suppose you were sitting in a train and were not thinking, you would go past your station. It could even happen that although an Anthroposophist ought to take care of his membership card, a thoughtless person might leave it lying about, which would be against all the principles that should be observed in looking after it. Well, life is such that we must use our judgment and reflect.

But with this attitude towards judging and thinking we cannot attain to the higher worlds. A mixing of the two attitudes may occur: one can be so absorbed in the urge to reach the higher worlds as to be guilty of such a lapse of memory as I have just mentioned. However, on the whole it should. certainly be possible to keep these two things apart: a truly sound power of judgment for the physical plane, holding all life's duties in view and at the same time never forgetting that what we develop so assiduously for the physical plane can be only a means to an end where the higher worlds are concerned.

Thoughts, ideas, judgments, must be for the would-be Initiate what colours, for example, are for the painter. For him they are not an end in themselves but a means of expressing what he wants to say in his picture. In ordinary physical life thoughts and ideas are an end in themselves; for the Initiate they become the means of expressing what he experiences in the higher worlds. This stage can be reached only when a certain attitude of soul towards one's personal views and opinions has been acquired. A person who has any preference for one view or another; who still prefers one thing or another to be true, cannot enter the stage of Initiation referred to here, but only he who esteems his own views as little as he does those of others, and is prepared to set aside his own opinions and to observe quite objectively what is really there. In general, one of the greatest difficulties of inner experience is to get beyond the standpoint of “opinions” and “points of view”. Here we touch upon certain difficulties which may arise in living together with other people when one is seeking to follow the path into the higher worlds. Anyone who is seeking this path, or has already arrived at a certain stage on it, will take an attitude towards many things in life, through the soul-condition he has attained, which will be different from the ordinary one. Above all, he will reveal the characteristic of knowing quickly, let us say, how one ought to behave in this or that circumstance of life. Then perhaps he is asked by those around him: “Why should we do that?” Certainly, when he can appreciate the other person's point of view, he will always be able to account for this “why”. But first he will have to come down from the level where he sees in a flash what has to be done, and take his stand beside the person, forcing himself to follow the train of thought of ordinary life in order to show what proof there is for what he sees through in a flash. This rapid comprehension of widely varying and complicated circumstances of life is a phenomenon, which accompanies the faculty of rising above personal opinions and views and standpoints.

Apart from this, the attainment that must be sought is connected with various other inner moral qualities. Of these we shall have to speak later. We will point now to only one quality to which allusion has often been made. It is fearlessness. For we must bear in mind that, when the entire soul-life is reduced to being a means, instead of ranking as an end in itself, the experiences into which one enters are transformed. In the first place there will be a quite new mode of experiencing. One is indeed entering into the unknown, and this is at first always accompanied by conditions of fear. And because the whole experience takes place in the intimate depths of the soul, the state of fear may lead to all kinds of inner soul-experiences. Hence the preparations for the path into the higher worlds involves the achievement of a certain fearlessness. This fearlessness must be won by means of definite meditations. It can be done. Only, generally speaking, people lack sufficient perseverance for the kind of meditations required. A good meditation is to give oneself up again and again to the thought that knowing about something makes no difference to the thing itself. If, for instance, someone were at this moment to know that something bad is going to happen in an hour's time, and that nothing he can do could prevent it, his knowledge of it would probably cause him anxiety and fear. But his knowledge does not alter the thing in the least. Hence the fear and anxiety are entirely futile. It is a futility to which all souls quite naturally give way; a folly which assuredly would assail anyone at a certain stage of Initiation if his training had not prepared him for fearlessness by requiring him to say to himself again and again: Is anything at all altered by the fact of knowing about it?

The person who is meditating, who has worked up to certain stages of Initiation, then comes to a very remarkable piece of knowledge: the knowledge that in a certain sense things are in a bad way with regard to his inner being, his own human soul.

Beneath the threshold of the consciousness there is indeed something that one would wish to be different, judging by the opinions of ordinary life. In a certain respect it is something quite terrifying. And it would be in the natural order of things that if a man were to be led unprepared into the depths of his own soul, he would get an incredible shock. One must prepare oneself, then, by an ever-repeated meditation on the thought: Things cannot be altered by knowing about them. Of a truth, the thing that is terrifying in the subliminal regions of the soul is not called forth only when one approaches it and looks at it. It is always there, even when one is not aware of it. But through constantly repeated meditation on the thought that things cannot be altered by knowing about them, one expels a great part of the fear that must be got rid of.

Thus you see from just a few things I have mentioned that in the moment when one is preparing to rise into higher worlds, intellectual and moral qualities of the soul intermingle. For the ordinary external knowledge of our time one requires only intellectual qualities. In this connection I call courage and fearlessness moral qualities. Without them, certain stages of Initiation cannot be reached.

Whether we are speaking of Eastern Mysteries or Western Mysteries, all have certain stages in common, Hence for all Mysteries certain expressions have a valid meaning and can be rendered somewhat as follows. Every soul that wishes to attain to a certain stage of Initiation and the Mysteries must go through certain experiences. The first can be called “Coming into contact with the Experience of Death”; the second is “Passing through the Elementary World”; the third was called in the Egyptian and other Mysteries “Seeing the Sun at Midnight”; and a fourth one is “The Meeting with the Upper and the Lower Gods”. These experiences must be gone through by everyone who attains to a certain stage of Initiation. Through inner experience he must come to know what these phrases mean and must be capable, so to speak, of living in two worlds—the actual world in which man lives today, the world of the physical plane; and a world in which a man can live only when he knows what is meant by having “come into contact with Death”, by having “gone through the Elementary World”, by having “seen the Sun at Midnight”, and by “meeting with the Upper and. the Lower Gods”.

“To come into the vicinity of Death.” The point here is that in his waking condition between birth and death a man really lives continually, in so far as he lives consciously, in all that concerning which I have just been saying: it must be overcome, must become for the Initiated a mere means to an end. Let us try now to be quite clear as to what a man lives in while he is on the physical plane. On the physical plane he lives in his sense-impressions and in the ordinary experiences of his soul. All this must become merely a means, as soon as he enters into the Mysteries. What then remains, over and above what a man feels himself to be in ordinary life? Nothing remains. Everything sinks down into a reality of secondary degree. A man must lay aside all his usual experiences, both of an inward and of an outward nature. Only think, the blue vault of heaven becomes transparent, is no more there; all boundaries produced by colour on the surface of things vanish, are no longer there. The sounds of the physical world cease, are no longer there; the experience of touch ceases, is no longer there. And I beg you to take note that this becomes actual experience. Thus, for example, the feeling, “to stand with one's feet on solid ground” which is nothing else than an expression of the sense of touch, ceases, and the person feels as if the ground has been taken away from under him and he were standing upon nothing; but he cannot draw back and cannot rise. So it is with all impressions of the senses—with everything for which the physical body is an instrument. All that a man goes through in his normal life between waking and sleeping is brought about through the instrumentality of the body, and all this ceases. A condition from which man in ordinary life is preserved now actually occurs—the condition that would come about if someone while sleeping were suddenly to become conscious without waking up again in his physical body. This is not a condition reached in ordinary dreams. The dream is in a certain sense an extra-physical experience, but the consciousness of it is so lessened that the person is not aware of being outside all physical experience. This intensity of consciousness, “Thou standest outside all physical life”, is not produced until Initiation. During the ascent into the higher worlds a moment comes when a man confronts his physical body, whose hands he can move during waking life, with whose feet he can walk, whose knees he can bend, whose eyelids he can open and shut and so on, but now he feels as though his whole physical body were petrified, as though it were impossible to move the eyelids, the legs, the hands, etc. A moment then comes when he knows that there are eyes in this physical body, but they are of no use for seeing. On the one hand all things become transparent, and on the other the possibility of approaching these things with the usual and familiar means ceases completely. Try to grasp what a contradiction this is, in the ordinary sense of the word. When a man prepares himself to reach this point, he finds all things are, so to speak, transparent, that he sees through everything. But at the moment when this begins—e.g. when the heavens become transparent—the eye ceases to have the power of seeing the blue vault of heaven at all. This means that the first moment in the Mysteries consists in a person coming to the point when he overcomes the method of perception by the senses, and also the act of thinking, but what he should thereby attain is at the same moment taken from him. He has worked his way through to the moment where something quite new is given to him; he reaches precisely the moment in which this new thing comes to meet him—but in this very instant it is also taken away. He now knows nothing but: “Thou hast won thy way through in such manner that thou standest before the Higher Worlds, and now in that very moment they are taken from thee.”

Picture this experience to yourselves, and you have the moment which has been designated in the Mysteries of all ages as “The Approach to the Gate of Death.” For the person knows now what is meant by the words: the world is taken from you, i.e. the entire world of impressions. And he knows that he consists of nothing but these experiences of inner impressions. For in reality there exists nothing but these experiences, these inner impressions. As soon as a person falls asleep, when all impressions cease, he normally falls into unconsciousness. This means that he lives in his impressions. Now he overcomes these impressions of ordinary life; he knows he has progressed so far that he can see through everything, but at this moment a new world is taken from him. We shall have to speak more in detail on this point; but first we want to make still clearer what is meant by the expressions used.

In face of this unavoidable halt, with no way of getting further, the only deliverance lies in having developed the inner life—in advance of the actual moment—to such a degree that the aspirant is able to carry with him the only thing which it is at all possible to take beyond that point. He must come to the point where the external world actually denies him all power, and he must have progressed so far in his inner development that at this moment, through training in self-reliance, in self-confidence and presence of mind and other inner virtues (virtues here meaning capabilities), he possesses inner power, inner energy, so that at the moment when the world is taken from him, he has at his disposal a surplus of inner energy. But this brings with it at the same moment an extraordinarily significant experience. Imagine a man coming to the boundary he has striven for, where the world is transparent; then it is taken from him. Now he has preserved nothing; he cannot have saved anything but a certain inner strength through having trained his self-reliance, presence of mind, fearlessness and similar inner qualities. Thereby he comes to the significant experience, one that forces itself upon him: Thou art alone in the world. Thou art quite alone in the world. And then comes an experience which I cannot indicate otherwise than in the words: Thou alone art the whole world. This experience becomes ever stronger and stronger, more and more comprehensive. And the remarkable thing is that from this experience in the soul a whole new world can arise, and truly must arise in him who is to be initiated. He feels he has come to a certain boundary where he has confronted the Void, but that he has brought with him a certain power. It is perhaps quite small at first, but it becomes ever greater and greater and spreads out on all sides. He begins to penetrate into the whole world, to permeate himself with the whole world; and the more he permeates the world with his own being, the more does it appear always different. He extends the power that he has brought with him to one side or the other, and according as he extends it, he will always experience something different. But at first these experiences will be felt to be quite terrifying, because two things are entirely lacking from them. At a certain stage of knowledge the lack of these things may not seem dreadful before it is experienced, because in the ordinary experience of the physical plane the thing is always there, and one first gets a real idea of it only when it is no longer there.

One thing that ceases is every feeling for physical materiality. Everything material has disappeared into indefinite nothingness, the Void—it is not there. The feeling of contacting something hard, or even something soft like water or air—in short, the feeling of being surrounded by matter ceases, is not there. One is concerned only with the qualities of things, not the things themselves. Of heavy, dense physical bodies only the density remains, not the substantiality; of fluid bodies, only the fluidity, but not the water or the fluid; of the air there remains only the tendency to expand in all directions, but not the substantiality. One grows into the qualities of things, but with the feeling that one is growing only into the qualities; that the objects have vanished, all materiality has gone. This is one thing that ceases.

The other thing that ceases for the aspirant at this stage of experience is everything connected with what in ordinary physical life we call sense-perception. This follows from what has already been described. Nothing makes an impression on him, but he is everything himself. The only impression that remains is at the most that of “time”—“Now art thou not yet anything, and after a while thou wilt be something.” But as for having objects external to himself, which are present elsewhere and make an impression on him, nothing like that remains. Either he is something himself, or nothing at all is Elementary there. Everything he encounters becomes himself; he becomes submerged in it, becomes one with it, and finally he becomes as great as the world that is at his disposal; he becomes one with it.

I am picturing actual experience. It is what is generally known in the Mystery centres as “Experiencing the Elementary World”. The aspirant has risen beyond the mere “Contact with Death”, but he is, so to speak, an undifferentiated unity with the whole world that is available to him.

There are now two possibilities. Either the preparation was good or it was not good. If it was good, then the intending Initiate, after having poured himself out to a certain extent over the world, must have so far progressed that he still has surplus strength. In that case—you see that I am describing today from a different point of view things I have often described., but we now need this other point of view—then he now has the following experience.

Whereas in the ordinary world, one confronts an object, gazes at it, and the object makes an impression on the eye so that one then knows something about the object, when the point of Initiation which has just been described is reached, such a thing no longer happens. For the aspirant is not concerned with a reproduction of the ordinary world, but from a definite point onwards he must now have sufficient forces at his command to pour more out of himself. Thus, after he has spent force enough in becoming one with the world, he must now have sufficient strength to spin forces out of himself as the spider spins a web. You see how the whole process of the Mysteries shows the importance of developing strong inner energy in the life of the soul; for one must have large reserves in order that all this may take place.

Then the following may happen. The aspirant naturally has no physical eyes, for they belong to the physical body and he has long left this behind. But because he has poured out something from himself and can pour out still more, as the spider spins her web out of herself, something akin to organs is built up, and he can discern that together with what he is himself producing, something absolutely new appears. Things present themselves not as if, for instance, I had my watch here and my eyes there, but as if the eyes were to send out a ray which formed itself into a watch, so that the watch was there through the activity of the eyes. It is not a matter of constructing or creating a subjective world, but of spinning soul-substance out of ourselves, and the higher worlds we are beginning to live in have to choose this indirect way, in order that we may be able to confront them and recognise them. They must first infiltrate our own soul-substance which we have placed at their disposal. In the physical world things confront us without our co-operation. In the higher worlds nothing confronts us unless we first place our own soul-substance at its disposal. That is why it is so difficult at this point to distinguish the subjective from the objective, for what we spin out of our soul-substance is bound to be entirely subjective, and whatever uses our soul-substance in order to become perceptible is bound to be entirely objective.

I have brought forward these things so that you may experience a definite feeling that all training in the Mysteries consisted pre-eminently in a strengthening of the energies of the soul. That was the important thing—to make the soul powerful, strong, energetic. From the outset the candidate for Initiation had to give up the hope that anyone would hand, him the objects and entities of the higher worlds as though on a platter. He had first to develop himself point by point towards the higher worlds. Nothing without effort, absolutely nothing without effort! So it is for everything that has to be reached individually in the higher worlds; so it is for everything that has been reached in the course of human evolution with regard to the higher worlds.

Let us suppose that some being, the Moses individuality for example, was to be incarnated in the course of human evolution and had to work upon this evolution through his spiritual power. It would be childish to suppose that nothing now needed to happen except that human evolution would proceed on its way, and that at some point or other in its course Heaven would send Moses. Moses is now there; men know that he is Moses, and need only carry out what was being done when Moses came! If Moses had been sent anywhere in this way, the result could only have been that those around him would not have recognised him. The point is not that this or that external personality was there, but that a number of persons should be capable of judging what spiritual being lived in this particular personality. One would never have needed to tell these persons: “This one or other is Moses.” One would. have needed only to prepare their souls in the proper way. Then their souls, without being told, “This one or the other is Moses”, would have known that this was the particular spiritual being who was to be recognised as a certain person.

This, then, is what we have to recognise: that the path into the higher worlds is bound up with an energising, a strengthening of the inner soul-powers; nothing can be given from outside, but it all can be attained only through the strengthening of the inner life; for only by this means can the Threshold be passed into those worlds through which a man passes between death and a new birth. That is what I wished to bring before you today as an introduction.

tomorrow we will go further, by describing first of all what the worlds are like between death and a new birth, and in how far it has become necessary and important that through the Mysteries something should. be communicated to man during his physical life concerning the knowledge of these higher worlds.

My dear friends,

We saw yesterday how the peoples concerned in forming world-history may be divided on the one hand into what may be called the continuous stream of evolving knowledge and wisdom, and, on the other, the life-element which at a certain time must unite with this wisdom. It is an example of the cooperation—immense in its consequences—of the different one-sided elements in world-existence in order to produce a complete and harmonious whole. And I have already pointed out how the after-effect is to be perceived right into our own times, on the one hand, of the lifeless knowledge-principle, the ageing wisdom-principle, and, on the other hand, of the life-without-knowledge, which unites itself like a young shoot in humanity's evolution with the knowledge-principle, brought down from antiquity and becoming dry and withered.

Now today we will consider the world of the same facts somewhat more subjectively, will give our attention to it in direct connection with a consideration of the nature of man. We will place once more before our soul the familiar fact of the rhythmic alternation that occurs in man's daily life; namely, that he alternates in the course of his daily life between the union of his four members—the physical man, the etheric man, the astral man and the ego-man—and a sort of separation of these four members into two and two—the union of the physical man with the etheric man, and of the ego with the astral man.

The alternation of sleeping and waking rests indeed upon this rhythmic succession of the more or less united condition of these four members and their separation. We have already spoken on one occasion of how the fact now expressed can be considered more closely and exactly, but for today's study what has been said can serve for a broad foundation.

If we think of the human being in sleep it can happen that, without any special development having been undergone, he has the following experience. A definite consciousness, particularly in specially clear and aware moments of waking up, can come before his soul that at the moment of waking he, as soul-being, lifts himself out of a living and weaving in what one might call a finely spiritualised existence.

It must strike most people, if the conditions are favourable, that they do not awake from sleep as if out of a nothingness, but as if they emerged from a full but much more etheric, lighter weaving and living than what we pass through from waking up to going to sleep. It will certainly have already struck many people, in waking, that they lived during sleep in an element in which they felt themselves to be actually cleverer than they were when awake. The majority of men must on awaking have said to themselves: Yes, this or the other came; it placed itself before my soul ... I knew quite exactly: I have experienced something there that I cannot bring clearly enough into the waking consciousness. And then one can find oneself quite stupid in contrast to the cleverness in which one was during this nocturnal weaving and living, in this far more etheric element than the life of the physical world is from waking up to going to sleep. One was with one's whole being—of this one must be clear—immersed in a weaving and living which is around us just as is the physical living and weaving for the physical consciousness, but which cannot be grasped by this physical consciousness, and is generally completely forgotten in the moment of waking.

But all the same, and even without any special occult training, a man can be clear that during sleep he was weaving in such an element as he cannot fully take with him into the waking life. This fact too, of which everyone can really very easily convince himself, is understood when we take the wonderful primeval two-fold saying to which we referred yesterday, that two-fold utterance which says: Because men have learnt to know or to distinguish good and evil, because they have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they shall not eat of the Tree of Life.

What does it really mean: Not eat of the Tree of Life? You will perhaps no longer find incomprehensible what I have to say concerning these words if you bring before your soul in a reasoned way the meaning of ‘to have eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ Each can say to himself: If what we call the Luciferic temptation had not taken place, man would obviously be in a different position in this earthly life; for as he is now, the effect of the Luciferic temptation is mingled in his earthly life. This means: in our earthly life we attain to a certain kind of knowledge, a certain way of confronting things with our intellect and reason in order to get certain knowledge of the things of the world. Nevertheless it is quite clear that we should have had a different knowledge of things if the Luciferic temptation had not come to pass. This is exactly what the two-fold utterance implies. It means that the knowledge we obtain of the world and its phenomena is a knowledge that has entered through the Luciferic influence, a knowledge that represents the course of evolution which has entered through the partaking of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. All our knowledge is the sort—such as it has become—that had to enter as a result of the tasting of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Had man not partaken of this Tree, then a different knowledge must needs have been there from that which exists under the present ‘normal’ circumstances, where Lucifer works within our existence.

But now when this unconsciousness of sleep is overcome, when it is possible through a spiritual-scientific methodical development to know something of what really goes on in that weaving and living in an etheric element, then we become aware how we actually spend our life between going to sleep and waking. We spend this life from going to sleep to awaking—it is a fact that can shatter one—in, one might say, the arms of Lucifer. And one can understand the deep mystery that underlies this whole world of facts when we see: in the same moment that man was punished by being forbidden to eat of the Tree of Life, Lucifer was condemned to eat of the Tree of Life perpetually. And since Lucifer lays claim to what weaves and lives from falling asleep to awakening which appears to us so endlessly clever when it echoes to us in waking, then this weaving and living in what does not come to our consciousness (because Lucifer claims it for himself) has quite a definite result.

Thus we can say: Our living and weaving in the fine etheric element that I have indicated, is something of which Lucifer takes possession ... and because Lucifer takes possession of it, it comes about that something predestined for men by the Jahve-Godhead does not take place. It was destined for man by the Jahve-Godhead that on awaking he should possess in his etheric and physical bodies what is weaving and living there in sleep. I must draw this somewhat diagrammatically (see p.5a) so that you may perhaps see more exactly what we are concerned with. I might describe through this (red) the ego living outside the physical body during sleep; the part of our astral that lives during sleep outside the physical I will indicate through this (yellow); what of our physical body remains in bed through this (blue), and what of our etheric body remains in bed I will indicate with this (ochre yellow).

Now the following was determined from the beginning. It was designed for man by the evolving Jahve-Godhead that on his awaking the etheric weaving and living which has been described should dip down into both the etheric body and the physical body. You must not be horrified that it is Lucifer who weaves with us while we live in the fine etheric element from going to sleep to awaking. I have already in various lectures indicated that it is quite false if people think they must be on their guard against Lucifer in every sphere of life. That is a materialistic prejudice. Spiritual beings are not there because they actually ought not to be there. And most people act in a wrong may towards the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic beings when they seem to wish to have nothing to do with what is Luciferic or Ahrimanic. It is a matter of appreciating beings where they are in their element and knowing that they only work harmfully in elements where they do not belong. So it is right for earthly life that Lucifer lives and weaves, from our going to sleep to awaking, in the element of which we men are to know nothing, since we already have the other knowledge which is an effect of the tasting of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

But in the moment of waking, something comes in which we must unfathom if we would understand the necessary development of life that should come today through the world-concept of Spiritual Science. When in specially favourable moments one is aware in one's consciousness of this living and weaving like an echo; this interweaving of which we feel the after-experience, ought to come into our etheric body and physical body when we wake. For what is weaving there is our astral body. This lives and weaves in the swelling cosmic sea—and what it there weaves out, what it lives through and experiences, ought to come into our etheric body and also into our physical body.

If I wished to make a drawing of the intention of the Jahve Divinities guiding earthly evolution, I should have to draw this living and weaving in which our astral body dwells during the night so as to show that all this enters our etheric body as well as our physical body in our waking condition. That I have drawn here would show how the experiences of our astral body would be absorbed by the physical and etheric bodies when we wake up. This should have entered in the course of human earthly evolution or of earthly human evolution if the original purposes of the Jahve-deities could have been accomplished.

This, however, on account of the Luciferic temptation at that time, has not come about. Something else, however, happened, so we must draw the state of affairs which then entered somewhat differently.

If that is the physical body (blue) and that the etheric body (yellow ochre) (all schematically sketched), then the experience of the astral body really only comes into the etheric body, at most presses against the physical body and influences it somewhat. In reality it only enters the etheric body. I am not obliged to draw it like this (b) because it is kept back, because it halts through finding a boundary at the physical body, but because—through a secret pact between Lucifer and Ahriman which has appeared in consequence of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic interweaving in earthly evolution—because Lucifer in the moment of our waking hands over to Ahriman what actually ought to enter the physical body. That which would therefore be here (a) from the night's experience is not given over to our physical body, but to Ahriman in our physical body. To distinguish it as Ahrimanic I will draw it like this (yellow spots)—(c). And the important fact exists: Ahriman experiences in our physical body Lucifer's experiences during our sleep. This is, in other words, the reason why we cannot ourselves bring our night's experiences into our day-consciousness—because Lucifer hands them over to Ahriman at the moment of waking. Only while they strike their bargain and settle their pact with one another, something comes to our consciousness in the ordinary dream, while it is being passed from the hands of Lucifer into the hands of Ahriman. This too is one aspect of the sleep-life and dream-life.

Let us now consider the ordinary knowledge that we have during the time between waking up and going to sleep. This knowledge, such as we have it, is thus a consequence of the fact that we have partaken of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. What happens is that during the day we gain knowledge about things. From waking to sleeping we gain knowledge of things, a knowledge that our intellect combines, putting one thing with another on the basis of the sense perceptions. We gain this knowledge of things, as must be self-evident to you, through our ego. It is a knowledge that man experiences as earth-man. Man as earth-man, has attained to knowledge because to his other three principles, brought over from Saturn Sun and Moon, the ego has been added upon Earth. As earthly man, in the ego, we experience the knowledge that is our ordinary human knowledge, all in fact which we can acquire about the world under the circumstances of our earthly existence. But the knowledge that we obtain like this has precisely the peculiarity of becoming obscured in our ego. It becomes obscured in our ego as soon as we go to sleep.

Hence arises this fact also: we gain knowledge from waking up to going to sleep, but the moment we go to sleep, it ceases to be in our consciousness, that is to say, it goes out of our ego. Philosophers who make the ego the basis of philosophy and then say: We can make the ego the foundation of philosophy because it is the permanent thing in human life between birth and death, utter a very common absurdity; for the ego, as man experiences it, is extinguished every night. So let us hold these facts before us; that we gain knowledge, that knowledge is however gained through the ego, and the ego is extinguished for our condition between falling asleep and awaking.

Whence does that come? This knowledge is really gained in the sphere of existence which we know to be assigned to Ahriman. We know, in fact, that Ahriman has his kingdom in the ordinary outer physical plane, because all death is allotted to him. (I spoke on this once in special detail in the lectures given in Munich.)¹

We traverse Ahriman's realm with our consciousness from waking to going to sleep, and inasmuch as we develop our ordinary everyday knowledge in the way to which we are committed by the Luciferic temptation, it always brings us into the realm of Ahriman in the time we spend between waking and sleeping. We are actually always weaving and living in the kingdom of Ahriman with our ordinary search for external knowledge, for knowledge connected with the outer sense world.

Lucifer—we must always keep this separate—has brought this about, but it is not the kingdom of Lucifer in which we live and weave, but we live and weave and have our existence in Ahriman's realm; and indeed that is very easy to understand since Ahriman as we know is in our physical body. He helps us perpetually when we want to gain knowledge through the physical body. We gain knowledge in the first instance through the physical body, through the senses, the ordinary instruments of the physical body. There within sits Ahriman;

Lucifer gives to him in the moment of our waking, what he has experienced in us during the night. During the day, in connection with Ahriman, we strive after what we call our knowledge in the world; on our falling asleep Ahriman richly repays the gift which Lucifer gave him at our moment of waking.

Whereas at the moment of waking Lucifer gives over to Ahriman for our physical body what he has passed through with us during sleep, at the moment of our going to sleep, Ahriman gives over to Lucifer, what he has experienced with us all day. This then is handed over by Ahriman to Lucifer. And while our whole day's experience ought really to be carried over to the whole night's experience, and I should then have to draw the night's experience like this (a), the truth is that what was gained by day only passes into the astral body. In the ego it is seized by Lucifer (b) so that in the time from our sleeping to our waking up Lucifer experiences in us what continues to live and weave in us from the day's knowledge, from what we have gained for ourselves from waking to going to sleep. We can thus say: Ahriman, instead of ourselves, enjoys during the day our night experiences; and Lucifer instead of us, enjoys in our ego, during our sleep, our day's experiences. In our physical body Ahriman relishes his repast, in our ego Lucifer; Ahriman during the day, Lucifer during the night.

Now it is a matter of discovering the consequences for our human life of these facts. Let us first examine the fact that from our going to sleep to awaking, Lucifer claims our ego. This, you see, prevents us from re-living in the night the knowledge we experience by day, what we contemplate in the world, what judgments we make, what we differentiate, what we combine in the world. We should really live it through, if we could continue it during the night. According to the original purpose of the Jahve-deities we were to gain the knowledge during the day and live it through, work through it, during the night. Had this intention been realised, then we should have a quite different science from what we now have. We should have a science that was really a living science, where every concept which we experience would be alive in us, where, moreover, we should know that concepts which we form during the day are shadows of living beings, as I have often described; for during the night we should see clearly all that we experience during the day. During the day we form some or other concept; in the night all the concepts would wake up and live, and we should know that it was all elemental living beings. That is what we should know. From falling asleep to waking up we should know that what lives and weaves in the world is direct life; elemental working and weaving and life. This cannot be so for us because Lucifer seizes it, because Lucifer takes it away from us. And so he takes from us the life- of science. Every night he sucks out the life of science for himself, and for us remain only the abstract ideas, the dead concepts, which are given us through science. Humanity has a science that is sucked out by Lucifer, well sucked out by Lucifer!

That is the reason why science gives the impression that it cannot get near to what actually lives and weaves in things, why it appears as if one made dead concepts out of the living and weaving. Science seems a kind of compilation, something through which one feels one always stays outside life, never comes inside life. All that philosophers from time immemorial have sweated—I should say, have philosophised—over the boundaries of knowledge, over the impossibility of arriving at the basis of existence, rests upon the fact that they felt: Beneath what we can grasp in concepts lies the living life. This we cannot approach because Lucifer sucks it up and claims for himself, and so, in other words, makes the concepts dry and abstract.

Now let us take the other case. What would happen if we were not at the mercy of the fact that on waking up Ahriman lays claim to our night-experience? What would enter us on awaking? We should possess in our day consciousness the whole connection with our experiences of the night. In other words, we should bring the whole spiritual world into our day consciousness and in what we have as day-consciousness would intermingle what we have lived through in the night. We should not be able to have the sort of relation we have now between our day consciousness and the night experiences, since this exists by virtue of what Lucifer has effected in our day consciousness. But if Lucifer had not influenced this day consciousness in the way described we should approach things in quite a different way. Then our approach to them would be in harmony with what comes into us from our night experiences. That would produce a very considerable alteration in all that we experience during the day.

Our daily life consists, as you know, of observing things, forming ideas and concepts of them. Then of course we also combine ideas, but between birth and death we always couple together something that we have gone through in the day with something else that we have gone through by day. If the position were different, if the night experiences came properly into the life of day, then we should combine each day experience with what has stayed with us like a memory of the night experiences.

As it is now, we meet a person—and we say to ourselves: I know this person. But why do we say, I know this person? Only for the simple reason that we have seen him before in our day's experiences. We combine the one day experience with the other and that is expressed in our saying: We know this man. It would be entirely different if we were to bring in the night experiences in the way I have indicated. Then by day we should know: this or that spiritual being corresponds to him. We should have experienced him in the night, we should be able to identify him with his spiritual background; we should have the physical woven through by the spiritual. And thus would the whole world make itself concrete, woven through with the spirit. By reason of the Luciferic temptation, however, this cannot be, the spirit remains outside, it is not left for us. Ahriman claims it for himself, and so it remains in the etheric body alone (Diagram (b) page 5a). There it remains in the etheric body, it does not come to concrete form, it does not come to the point where one really sees it in the objects. One can only say: I feel in my etheric body that this spiritual element is there as something weaving and living. One feels it in the etheric body but one does not get it out into what one sees.

I hope you mark how this is: the spiritual element, instead of entering our physical body and showing itself to us at every turn, stays behind in the etheric. But we feel it in us and can say: The Spirit is there, it lives and weaves in the world but it does not make itself concrete for us. Above all, what we experience of the spiritual in this way, cannot become knowledge. It would be knowledge for us if it entered the physical body. It remains faith, since it is experienced merely in the etheric body. All that lies in mere faith as rejection of concrete knowledge arises from man's quite justifiable feeling that he will keep within normal life, he will not come to this making concrete, he is afraid of possible errors there.

Thus you see: Faith is Knowledge held back in the etheric body. The knowledge that we have by day is held back in the astral body, and is thus in the night knowledge held back in the astral body, becoming therefore devoid of life. On the other hand the living faith that is devoid of knowledge, because its knowledge is taken by Ahriman, confronts knowledge devoid of faith, the knowledge whose faith is taken away through Lucifer. See that here (p.9) we can add: Lucifer experiences in our ego Ahrimanic experiences.

I should like to epitomize in these two phrases what perhaps can remain in your memory from the extraordinarily important matters considered today. These studies have shown in particular the share of Ahriman and Lucifer in our life, have shown how Lucifer and Ahriman work together so that we may not possess the harmony between faith and knowledge, but have instead the wrong duality, of faith without knowledge, and knowledge without faith.

It is entirely false to think that we can ever flee from Ahriman or Lucifer. It is much more correct that Ahriman and Lucifer have their proper world mission, for all that has been Shown as happening, had to happen; mankind had to be led in the way we have described. Mankind had to be guided for a time through a stream which then found its outflow in what was depicted yesterday, in the gradually dying knowledge. There were certain peoples of the world with a predominating tendency which led to the condition which is sketched here (Diagram (c), p.5a) and there streamed towards this, as I described yesterday, a type of humanity from Central Europe who were so constituted that they had rather developed this condition (Diagram (b), p.5a).

And solely through the co-operation and harmonising of these two streams of humanity can the living grasp of the Christ Impulse come about.

For it is also possible for these two streams to fall apart and not reckon with each other in the comprehension of Christ and the Christ Impulse. Let us suppose that the one stream the stream issuing from Europe—is subject to the predisposition of being overpowered by Ahriman during the waking state. Let us suppose this stream became strongly developed and strove for an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then its development would lead it to reject the facts which are connected with the external occurrence of the Mystery of Golgotha; it wishes to have nothing through the physical body. Inasmuch as it is overpowered by Ahriman it will not penetrate into a concrete grasp of this whole great cosmic event of the descent of the Christ to Earth, and so on. It much prefers to find support in Jesus, through man's inner etheric nature, and founds a Jesus-ology, a science of Jesus; it rejects the part of the Mystery of Golgotha that takes effect outside in the world.

The predominance of this stream (diagram b) has little interest in the direct connection of man's inner nature with the man in Christ, with Jesus; it looks far more to what it is accustomed to look—the abstract grasp of what works out there in the cosmos—this stream strives towards a Christology. The other looks chiefly to Jesus, this one to Christ. One can only know the truth if one conceives of Jesus-Christ or Christ-Jesus as a unity in the way shown by Spiritual Science, which seeks to overcome both the one-sided aspects. It is just as clear that there is a Cosmic Being, the Christ, who was outside the earth sphere before the Mystery of Golgotha, and who through this Mystery came into the earthly sphere and so gave the whole human evolution a new impulse (so that an earthly event was prepared beforehand in the Cosmos), as it is clear that this event is intimately connected with Jesus of Nazareth. That is to say, one must be clear that the Christ, as He was before the Mystery of Golgotha, could not have brought the cosmic happening into the earthly happening without the physical human body of Jesus, and that He therefore had to go through the Mystery of Golgotha. We must be clear that it was necessary for the Christ to go through what He did go through, in the body of Jesus.

It is not a matter of Jesus alone or of the Christ alone, in a one-sided way, but of Christ Jesus. What happened on earth has not happened through the Christ, but through the fact that Christ lived in Jesus. A Christology is just as impossible as a mere Jesus-ology; the one and only possibility is a spiritual science of Christ-Jesus. The fact of the Mystery of Golgotha belongs of necessity to what had to enter earthly evolution.

Thus if that is to happen which is foreshadowed by the Mystery of Golgotha—namely, that a right relation shall enter between Lucifer and Ahriman in respect of what happens in the world through man, then it must be recognized how these two powers, Lucifer and Ahriman, work together in the human being. Man must confront this working together consciously. And this he will do when he seeks through Spiritual Science to characterise the two streams and thereby find the way to Christ-Jesus. This, too, is what is to be shown in that carved work which we venture to assume will one day find a place in an outstanding position in our Building. The Archetype of Man in the centre, the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings at the sides. So that in the whole structure of the group we have a direct expression of what will be enacted in mankind's future evolution as regards the Trinity in place of what was enacted in the past. We have this expression in the triad: Christ-Lucifer-Ahriman.

We will speak of this next time.

• 1. ‘The Secrets of the Threshold’ Munich, 1913.

As described in the previous lecture, cognition through imagination can be attained by lifting into consciousness what is active subconsciously and involuntarily in dreaming. To be more precise, it is the activity behind our dreaming and not the dreaming itself with its content that is lifted into consciousness, since if this were to happen, we should remain in the realm of unreality. (For the moment I will leave this activity behind our dreaming undefined.) It is this activity—lifted into consciousness by controlled will power—that becomes the basis for cognition through imagination, and this conscious activity is very different from that of dreaming. In dream activity, because we are not active participants, we have the feeling that our experiences are real. But when we lift the activity that produces dreams into consciousness, we realize very well that we are seeing images we ourselves made. It is this awareness that saves us from falling into hallucinations instead of doing research through spiritual science.

This first meditative activity of creating images must now be superseded by a second step that involves obliterating those images, thus leading to empty consciousness. If you have been able, in full consciousness and under full control, to enhance your soul powers in this way, you will have in fact entered the spiritual world. You will then be able to engage in an activity that, being solely soul and spirit, is independent of the physical body; you no longer perceive with your physical organs. While thinking becomes freed from the body, your conscious experience becomes purely spiritual.

Yesterday I showed that, for spiritual scientific investigators, dreamlike experience is not to be seen as a model for spiritual perception. Only fully controlled experiences, similar to those of our sensory perceptions, are valid. Obviously there is no possibility of sensory perception in suprasensory cognition. Nevertheless, we can see definite capacities in our ability to move freely when surrounded by sensory perceptions and in our independence from our personal makeup while perceiving. An example will clarify my meaning.

Let us look at one of our most characteristic and representative sensory organs, the human eye. We recognize the relative independence of this organ by the way it rests in its cavity, attached to the remaining organism by insubstantial links. Forgetting for the moment what happens in the act of seeing, we find another, more external process. Near the eye are the lachrymal glands, which, while we are awake, continually secrete a liquid composed mainly of salt water. This liquid flushes the whole eyeball, especially the part exposed to the outer air when the eye is open. Through this glandular activity, the eye is constantly bathed so that dust entering the eye from the outside is washed away through tear ducts entering the nose. This process, which forms part of the normal function of our organ of sight, is hidden from ordinary consciousness.

Now this wisely ordained (though completely unconscious) activity of the lachrymal glands can be accelerated by the various stimuli of pressure or cold, for example, or through exhaustion, either in the eye or in the organism in general. The lachrymal glands thus become more active, and the cause of secretion and the secretion of tears itself begins to enter our consciousness. However, a further increase of this activity may occur in a very different way; when sadness makes us weep, tears flow as a result of a purely emotional stress or because our feelings have been deeply moved. Here we see how, under normal circumstances, the lachrymal liquid is constantly secreted in complete unconsciousness, and how outer irritants will lead to an increase in our consciousness of this activity. But when a person cries because of soul distress, this lachrymal activity is lifted into the sphere of consciousness only through soul or moral issues, not through physical causes.

This simple fact can help to illustrate what happens when, through meditation, we are able to lift ourselves into a bodyfree state of consciousness, in which we can live entirely in soul and spiritual experiences. If you shed tears because you receive a letter that makes you unhappy, you must admit that the cause of your tears has nothing to do with your physical eyes. Nevertheless, it affects your physical eyes. The fact that tears are not connected with the physical act of reading the letter is easily proved if someone else reads the letter to you and you experience the same tearful consequences. Something non-physical has set an organic process in motion.

Now imagine you have gained such mastery over yourself that you can suffer great sorrow without shedding any tears. Of course, this does not imply that your anguish would be any less intense than when you weep. In this situation, soul experiences do not directly affect the bodily functions. This example may illustrate how, through self-development, we can achieve a state of soul and spirit, emancipated from the physical organism. It may help you to form some idea of how imagination, inspiration, and intuition as methods of spiritual science can open the gates into the suprasensory world. If you take the proper steps, you will be able to describe experiences from beyond the tapestry of the senses, experiences that may be seen as an enhanced continuation of what a person experiences in normal life. This, however, is possible only through the practice of specific soul and spiritual exercises.

If now, through continued spiritual training, you have reached the stage where you can suppress previous imaginations of your own creation, and if in the ensuing stage of emptied consciousness you are able to experience real soul and spiritual content, the first thing that comes to meet you is a tableau sort of image of your earthly life, approximately from birth until the present. You will be unable to see your physical body in that picture, because it vanishes when you reach bodyfree perception. And there before you, ready to meet your soul, is everything you have experienced, everything that belongs to your stream of memory, which normally remains unconscious, with only individual images occasionally arising. It confronts you as an entity, as a kind of time organism full of its own inner movement.

If you look at the physical body as it appears spatially, you find that its members are interdependent, all together making up the whole. What happens in the head has a certain relationship with the stomach and vice versa. All the processes in an organism are interrelated. The same is true of an organism existing in time; later events depend on earlier ones, and the past lives in the present. At such a moment, you are all at once confronted by a tableau of your whole life.

Now, if you are able to consciously suppress the tableau of these memory pictures—not just the body but the entire life tableau—you reach the stage where you are able to perceive experiences prior to birth, or rather, prior to conception. The realm of soul and spirit that you inhabited before entering this earthly existence remains part of your inner being, even during life on earth. It works and lives in us in a way similar to the way hydrogen lives with oxygen after they form water. One cannot examine hydrogen separately from the oxygen while they form water; similarly, one cannot examine the human soul and spirit separately while we live on earth. Just as the oxygen must first be isolated from water before we can examine the remaining hydrogen, the soul and spiritual parts of the human being must first be isolated. When this happens, we are led not into the present time but into our pre-earthly existence. Thus, you really can perceive what has descended from the spirit world to assume earthly form. The realm where we lived before entering earthly life is revealed to us.

It is understandable if some are unprepared to go to such lengths to investigate the eternal human being. Certainly, everyone is free not to follow these paths. But to think it is possible to examine the human soul and spirit using ordinary methods of cognition is like believing naively that we could examine hydrogen while it forms a part of water, without first isolating it. One must recognize that ordinary consciousness is unable to enter the realm of soul and spirit. If you are unprepared to accept the results of spiritual investigation, you will have to remain silent about suprasensory realities. And in this case, you will have to be content with involvement only within material existence. The truth may be irksome to some, but there are certain facts in life that one must simply accept.

Continuing along this path of spiritual training, we gradually reach knowledge through inspiration. We become inspired by something that does not normally enter consciousness but permeates our being as does the oxygen we breathe in from the outer air. In full consciousness, we are filled with inspirational cognition and the experience of our pre-earthly life, just as in respiration we are filled with physical oxygen. We breathe with our soul and spiritual being, rising to the stage of inspiration. This word was not chosen arbitrarily, but with the nature of this type of cognition in mind.

Inspirational cognition has yet another characteristic. You will find more about it in How to Know Higher Worlds. In order to develop this higher cognition, another faculty is necessary: presence of mind. It is this faculty that enables us to act spontaneously during any given life situation. In order not to miss the right moment, we may have to act without waiting until we have time to assess an issue properly. We should really use these moments in life to practice swift and decisive action, learning to quickly grasp the moment, because whatever comes through inspiration passes in a flash. As soon as it appears, it has already vanished. One must be able to catch such fleeting moments with the utmost attentiveness.

The ordinary world of the senses appears to us be spread out in space. But when we are confronted by our life tableau, we see it existing in time. However, during inspirational cognition, we are outside the realm of time. We depend on being able to perceive in the flash of a moment; time loses its meaning as soon as we experience inspiration.

If we penetrate this life tableau, we find something far more real than the ordinary memory pictures can give us. The images of memory are neutral and lack inner strength; they are there, and we are free to take them up, but in themselves they have no strength. When viewing our life tableau, on the other hand, we see that it is full of its own life and strength and contains the very forces that form the human being. These are the suprasensory, formative forces that are active, for example, in forming the brain of a young child before the final structure has been finished. It is these formative forces that we begin to recognize, for they are contained within this life tableau. We do not apprehend something abstract, but a full reality, encompassing the course of time and full of power. It is the refined nonmaterial body of forces that we also call the ether body, or body of formative forces. This body presents only momentarily a well-defined appearance in space, for it is in constant motion. If we were to try to paint a picture of it, we would paint something unreal, because the ether body is in a constant flow. Its subsequent stage would be very different again, just as a former stage was different. This ether body is a time organism through and through, and is the basis for the growing processes and the forces active in the human metabolism.

Once we have advanced far enough in imaginative cognition, consciously living in the realm of soul and spirit beyond the physical, and once we have progressed far enough to see our life tableau—or ether body—at will, then we have truly experienced a complete transformation of our cognition. We find that experiences in the etheric world are similar to, and yet very different from, what happens in the world of artistic activity. To experience this, one has to develop a more creative way of thinking, one very different from abstract naturalistic thinking. Although in certain respects this kind of thinking resembles that of a creative artist, in other ways it is quite different. An artist’s creations have to reach a certain finality within the realm of fantasy. The artist’s creativity remains bound to the physical; it is not freed from corporeality. But the activity practiced in imaginative cognition is freed entirely from the physical and, therefore, is capable of grasping spiritual reality. For example, when we look at the Venus de Milo, we hardly have the feeling that this statue will move and walk toward us; an artistic creation does not embody outer realities. If you saw the devil painted on canvas, you would not be afraid that he was coming after you. The important thing is the way an artist, bound to physical reality, deals with material reality. But artists do not plunge into the reality of soul and spirit. What has been achieved in imaginative cognition, on the other hand, is immersed in ultimate reality, the reality of spiritual processes.

Now someone might argue that pure cognition should be kept separate from artistic activities. It is easy to prove by logic that cognizing means moving from one concept to the next in logical sequence and that, if we enter the sphere of art, we are in fact transgressing the realm of cognition. One can argue for a long time about the laws of cognition. But if nature herself is an artistic creator, she will never reveal herself to mere logical thinking. Logic alone will never reach her true being. Therefore, however much logic might prove that cognizing should not be confused with artistic activities, we cannot enter the reality of the etheric world without an artistic mode of cognition. What matters is the way things are and not what the laws of cognition should be. Even when certain suppositions are logically tenable, they may only prevent us from reaching our goal. Therefore it is proper to maintain that an artistic element must become part of our efforts if we wish to raise our ordinary cognition to the level of imagination.

When we reach the stage of inspiration, we may again compare our experiences with something they resemble, yet differ from greatly: moral experiences and the comprehension of moral ideas. Viewed qualitatively, inspirations are like moral ideas. Yet they are totally different, since any moral ideal we may have does not, in itself, have the power to realize itself on its own; in themselves, moral ideals are powerless. We must make them effective through our own physical personality, placing them in the world by means of our physical existence. Otherwise, they remain only thoughts. But this cannot be said of an inspiration. Though qualitatively similar to moral ideas, or moral impulses, inspiration manifests as a reality, existing in its own right. It is a powerful force that works like the elemental forces in nature. Thus we enter a world that, whereas we have to imagine it as similar to the world of moral ideas, has reality because of its primal power.

If one can take a stand in the world of soul and spirit, having advanced far enough in the state of inspiration, then something else is still needed to experience its content. We have to carry something into this realm that does not exist at all in our abstract world of thoughts: complete devotion to our chosen objective. It is impossible to come to know a being or power in the spiritual world unless we surrender lovingly and completely to what we encounter during the state of inspiration. At first, inspiration remains only a manifestation of the spiritual world. Its full inner nature reveals itself only when, with loving devotion, we pour ourselves out into its substance. And only after experiencing the reality of soul and spirit in this way—full of life and with heightened consciousness—do we enter the realm of inspiration.

And this is intuitive cognition. Shadow forms of intuition can be found in ordinary life, where they exist in religious feelings and moods. However, a religious feeling remains a purely inner experience that does not lift us into outer spirituality. Intuition, on the other hand, is an experience of objective spiritual reality. In this way, intuition is similar and yet again very different from a purely religious experience.

If you want to arrange these levels of higher knowledge in a more or less systematic order, we can say, first of all, that in ordinary life we have knowledge of the material world, which we could call naturalistic knowledge. Then we come to knowledge gained through imagination, which has a kind of artistic nature. The next step is knowledge attained through inspiration, which is, in essence, a moral one. Finally we reach knowledge through intuition, which is like religious experiences, but only in the sense just described.

These suprasensory experiences of an artistic, moral, and religious sort work on and transform the whole human being. Although ordinary consciousness knows nothing of them, they nevertheless form part of the human being. Therefore suprasensory knowledge gained through imagination, inspiration, and intuition enables us to know the whole human being. And because these powers streaming from the spiritual world into earthly existence work in an especially strong way in children, higher cognition, in particular, allows us to understand the nature of a child. It is important, however, to recognize how suprasensory forces are related to physical forces.

This can be illustrated particularly well if we take memory as an example, because active memory definitely depends on the functioning of physical organs. Even commonplace experiences can demonstrate how our body must play its part when we use our powers of memory. For instance, we may wish to memorize part of a play or a poem, only to find that the lines simply refuse to become imprinted on the mind. Yet, after sleeping on them overnight, we may suddenly remember them without difficulty. This happens because, during the sleep, our body has regenerated so that we are able to use its renewed vitality the following morning for the task of remembering the lines.

One can also prove anatomically and physiologically that, through paralysis or the separation of certain areas within the nervous system, specific areas of memory may be wiped out. In other words, we can see that memory depends on the functioning of the physical organization and that physical organs are active during the process of remembering. However, this kind of memory activity is completely different from what we experience in heightened consciousness through imagination, inspiration, and intuition. For these suprasensory experiences simply must not be involved in any way in the functions of physical organs. This tells us why such experiences cannot be remembered in the ordinary way; they do not impress themselves into ordinary memory.

Anyone engaged in spiritual scientific research must allow ordinary memory to run its course alongside what one experiences in the suprasensory realm. Ordinary memory must remain intact. In a way, a student of anthroposophy has to maintain a second personality that represents ordinary life and is always present. But the researcher knows full well that there is this other, first personality engaged in suprasensory knowledge that will not allow itself to become imprinted on the memory. In ordinary life we can retain only a memory image of a fish we have seen, not the fish itself. In suprasensory cognition, we have direct perceptions—not mental images—and thus we cannot carry them in our memory. Consequently one has to return to them again and again. However, it is possible to remember the process we used to gain suprasensory cognition, and if we repeat those efforts, suprasensory sight will reemerge, albeit only passively, since it cannot live in the memory. It can be attained only through renewed inner activity. The fact that these higher faculties are beyond the reach of memory is a characteristic of suprasensory cognition. One can regain it, but only by following a route similar to the one traveled earlier. One can remember the path taken previously, but not the suprasensory experience itself.

It is this fact that distinguishes suprasensory experiences from those of ordinary life. It must be emphasized again and again, however, that a healthy memory goes hand in hand with true suprasensory experiences. If you lose the stream of common memory while engaged in suprasensory experiences, you will pour your subjective personality into them. Then you would not be a student of spiritual scientific research but live in hallucinations and personal visions. It is important to understand that all forms of hallucinations should be strictly excluded from suprasensory cognition and that such cognition must be developed along with a normal, healthy soul life. Anyone who argues that imagination and inspiration attained through anthroposophy might simply be hallucinations does not understand the nature of the spiritual scientific path and talks only out of ignorance.

It is essential to recognize this difference between suprasensory cognition and memory, since both are real in life. Suprasensory substance gained through imagination and inspiration has its own separate existence, and we can become aware of it through our own effort. Memory, on the other hand, is not just the result of our own effort, because the subconscious also plays a role. What we experience through imagination remains in the spirit world, as though it comes to unite with us. But memory flows right through us, entering the physical body and causing it to participate; it penetrates the physical human being. Comparing memory with imagination helps us appreciate the difference between everything related to the physical body and the suprasensory forces that live in us eternally, even between birth and death. But, because this eludes ordinary consciousness, it must be shown through spiritual scientific investigation.

We come to know the whole human being only by immersing ourselves in this relationship between the suprasensory aspect of the human being and physical existence. If we penetrate the knowledge gained through suprasensory cognition, we come to know the child and the growing human being in such a way that we can develop a true art of education. This example of the relationship between the suprasensory human being and the activity of memory helps shed light on this problem.

Let us imagine that a teacher is introducing a subject to a class. First he approaches it in a somewhat general way and may have the impression that all was going well. But after a time, he notices that a child in the class is becoming pale. Pallor is not always obvious and might easily go unnoticed by those not trained in exact observation. Ideally, however, teachers should remain fully aware of each student’s condition. The symptoms I will describe could have many causes. But when teachers deepen their knowledge of the human being through anthroposophic training, they awaken and enhance their ordinary pedagogical instincts so they are able to diagnose and address other causes as well. If a science of education establishes fixed and abstract rules, it affects teachers as though they were constantly stepping on their own feet while trying to walk; it robs them of all creative spontaneity. When teachers always have to wonder how to apply the rules prescribed by educational science, they lose all ingenuity and their proper pedagogical instincts. On the other hand, the educational principles based on spiritual science have the opposite effect. They do not allow inborn pedagogical sense to wither away but enliven and strengthen the teacher’s whole personality. At least, this is the intention of the practical educational principles that spring from anthroposophy.

However varied external symptoms may be (life, after all, is full of surprises), our imaginary teacher, whose pedagogical sense has been stimulated and sharpened by anthroposophy, might suddenly realize that this child is growing pale because he was overfed with memory content. Of course, there might be many other reasons for such a symptom, which a gifted teacher would also be able to discover. I am giving you this example, however, to illustrate one of the fundamental tasks of spiritual science: to make people aware of how the human soul and spirit interacts with the physical, material nature of the human being. Anthroposophy does not want to simply reveal spiritual knowledge; most of all, it endeavors to open people’s eyes to the way living spirit works and reveals itself in matter. Such knowledge enables us to deal correctly with the practical problems of life, and it places us firmly in the world where we have to fulfill our tasks.

If this pallor, caused by the overburdening of the student’s memory, is not recognized in time, a perceptive teacher will notice a further change in the child—this time psychological—as an anxiety complex develops. Again, this symptom may not be conspicuous and might be detected only by teachers for whom intense observation has become second nature. And, finally, overtaxing a student’s memory can eventually have the effect of retarding the child’s growth forces; even physical growth can be affected.

Here you have an example of how soul and spirit interact with what is physical. It shows us how important it is for teachers to know how to deal with children’s tendencies toward health and sickness. Of course, illnesses have to be treated by medical doctors, but educators are always confronted by inherent trends toward health or sickness in children, and they should learn to recognize these tendencies. They should also be aware of how illnesses can come out later in life and how, often, they can be traced back to what happened in school. Such knowledge makes teachers far more circumspect in choosing their teaching methods. In the example given, the teacher would certainly avoid placing too much stress on the student’s memory, and he might see a healthier complexion return to the child’s face. He could bring about such a change by showing his student something beautiful that would give pleasure. The next day he might again show the child something beautiful or a variation of the previous object, thus bypassing mere memory.

A teacher may also discover the opposite symptoms in a child. For example, a teacher notices a girl whose face appears permanently flushed, even if only slightly. She may discover that this change is not at all the result of embarrassment, but represents a shift in the girl’s health. Again, this symptom may be so slight that it would go unnoticed by a less perceptive teacher. And this condition could have many other causes, and these would not escape our teacher’s notice either. It could be that this student has a tendency to blush because the teacher did not appeal sufficiently to the child’s memory. Realizing this, she would try to rectify this condition by giving the student more memorizing to do. If not addressed, this irregularity could intensify and spread to the girl’s psyche, where it would manifest in mild but significant outbursts of temper.

This connection between slackness in memorizing and slight but unhealthy fits of temper is certainly a possibility. The general repercussions of such a condition would be injurious to a student’s health. In such cases, the mutual effects between soul and spirit on the one hand, and the body on the other, could lead to breathing and circulatory problems. Thus, teachers who are unaware of such links may unwittingly plant illnesses in their students, and these can remain dormant for many years and then, triggered by other causes, lead to serious illnesses. For this reason, any teacher worthy of the title should be aware of these connections and characteristics in human nature.

As mentioned previously, acute illnesses must be dealt with by medical doctors, but during their developmental stages, children are always moving either toward health or illness. The art of education demands that teachers be conversant with these indications and have the ability to perceive them, even in their more subtle manifestations.

To illustrate this point even more drastically, I will give you one more example that, I realize, may be open to argument, but life presents us with a great number of situations. Consequently, the case I will describe may also be the result of completely different causes. If you live with what anthroposophy offers to teaching, you become used to looking around for the most varied causes when confronted with a particular problem. But the following connections between symptom and cause are certainly possible.

Let us imagine that a boy in a class has followed the lessons attentively and to the satisfaction of the teacher. However, one day he suddenly appears somewhat blasé; he is no longer inclined to pay attention, and much of the subject matter seems to pass unnoticed. Depending on the experience and outlook of the boy’s teacher, he might even resort to corporal punishment or some other form of correction to bring about greater participation. However, if this teacher is aware of the interplay between spirit and matter that manifests in health and illness, he would approach this in a very different way. He might say to the boy, “You shouldn’t allow your finger- and toenails grow too long. You ought to cut them more often.” Outer signs of growth, such as fingernails and toenails, are also permeated by soul and spirit. And if fingernails and toenails grow too long, these growth forces become blocked. Being held back in this way, those forces are no longer able to flow into the nails. This obstruction to the flow of growth forces, which is removed when the nails are cut, similarly affects the soul and spiritual counterpart and manifests as difficulties in concentration. The ability to pay attention can be developed only with a free and unlimited flow of the life forces that permeate the whole organism. In most cases, this kind of change in powers of concentration may pass unnoticed. I give this example to show that anthroposophic principles and methods of education in no way neglect the physical aspects of life. Nor do they lead to a vague kind of spirituality; spirit is taken fully into account, so that life can be understood and treated appropriately.

Educators who gradually learn to understand human nature can learn how to deal correctly with matters related to their students’ health and illness.

The day before yesterday I tried to show that the anthroposophical knowledge which accompanies an inner life of the soul does not estrange one from artistic awareness and creation. On the contrary, whoever takes hold of Anthroposophy with full vitality opens up within himself the very source of such activity. And I indicated how the meaning of any art is best read through its own particular medium.

After discussing architecture, the art of costuming, and sculpture, I went on to explain the experience of color in painting, and took pains to show that color is not merely something which covers the surface of things and beings, but radiates out from them, revealing their inner nature.

For instance, I pointed out that green is the image of life, revealing the life of the plant world. Though it has its origin in the plant's dead mineral components, it is yet the means whereby the living shows forth in a dead image. It is fascinating that life can thus reveal itself. In that connection, consider how the living human figure appears in the dead image of sculpture; how life can be expressed through dead, rigid forms. In green we have a similar case in that it appears as the dead image of life without laying claim to life itself.

I shall repeat still other details from the last lecture in order to show how the course of the world moves on, then returns into itself; and shall do this by presenting the colors which make up its various elements: life, soul, spirit. I said I would draw this complete circle of the cosmic in the world of color. As I told you before, green appears as the dead image of life; in green life lies, as it were, concealed.

If we take the flesh color of Caucasian man, which resembles spring's fresh peach-blossom color, we have the living image of the soul. If we contemplate white in an artistic way, we have the soul image of the spirit. (The spirit as such conceals itself.) And if, as artists, we take hold of black, we have the spiritual image of death. And the circle is closed.

I have apprehended green, flesh color, white and black in their aesthetic manifestation; they represent the self-contained life of the cosmos within the world of color. If, artistically, we focus attention upon this closed circle of colors, our feeling will tell us of the need to use each of them as a self-contained image.

Naturally, in dealing with the arts I must concern myself not with abstract intellect, but aesthetic feeling. The arts must be recognized artistically. For that reason I cannot furnish conceptual proof that green, peach-blossom, white and black should be treated as self-contained images. But it is as if each wants to have a contour within which to express itself. Thus they have, in a sense, shadow natures. White, as dimmed light, is the gentlest shadow; black the heaviest. Green and peach-blossom are images in the sense of saturated surfaces; which makes them, also, shadowlike. Thus these four colors are image or shadow colors, and we must try to experience them as such.

The matter is quite different with red, yellow and blue. Considering these colors with unbiased artistic feeling, we feel no urge to see them with well-defined contours on the plane, only to let them radiate. Red shines toward us, the dimness of blue has a tranquil effect, the brilliance of yellow sparkles outward. Thus we may call flesh color, green, black and white the image or shadow colors, whereas blue, yellow and red are radiance or lustre colors. To put it another way: In the radiance, lustre and activity of red we behold the element of the vital, the living; we may call it the lustre of life. If the spirit does not wish merely to reveal itself in abstract uniformity as white, but to speak to us with such inward intensity that our soul can receive it, then it sparkles in yellow; yellow is the radiance or lustre of the spirit. If the soul wishes to experience itself inwardly and deeply, withdrawing from external phenomena and resting within itself, this may be expressed artistically in the mild shining of blue, the lustre of the soul. To repeat: red is the lustre of life, blue the lustre of the soul, yellow the lustre of the spirit.

Colors form a world in themselves and we understand them with our feelings if we experience the lustre colors red, yellow, blue, as bestowing a gleam of revelation upon the image colors, peach-blossom, green, black and white. Indeed, we become painters through a soul experience of the world of color, through learning to live with the colors, feeling what each individual color tries to convey. When we paint with blue we feel satisfied only if we paint it darker at the edge and lighter toward the center. If we let yellow speak its own language, we make it strong in the center and gradually fading and lightening toward the periphery. By demanding this treatment, each reveals its character. Thus forms arise out of the colors themselves; and it is out of their world that we learn to paint sensitively.

If we wish to represent a spiritually radiant figure, we cannot do otherwise than paint it a yellow which decreases in strength toward its edge. If we wish to depict the feeling soul, we can express this reality with a blue garment—a blue which becomes gradually lighter toward its center. From this point of view one can appreciate the painters of the Renaissance, Raphael, Michelangelo even Leonardo, for they still had this color experience.

In the paintings of earlier periods one finds the inner or color-perspective of which the Renaissance still had an echo. Whoever feels the radiance of red sees how it leaps forward, how it brings its reality close, whereas blue retreats into the distance. When we employ red and blue we paint in color-perspective; red brings subjects near, blue makes them retreat. Such color-perspective lives in the realm of soul and spirit.

During the age of materialism there arose spatial perspective, which takes into account sizes in space. Now distant things were painted not blue but small; close things not red but large. This perspective belongs to the materialistic age which, living in space and matter, prefers to paint in those elements.

Today we live in an age when we must find our way back to the true nature of painting. The plane surface is a vital part of the painter's media. Above everything else, an artist, any artist, must develop a feeling for his media. It must he so strong that—for instance—a sculptor working in wood knows that human eyes must be dug out of it; he focuses on what is concave; hollows out the wood. On the other hand, a sculptor working in marble or some other hard substance does not hollow out; he focuses his attention on, say, the brow jutting forward above the eye; takes into consideration what is convex. Already in his preparatory work in plasticine or clay he immerses himself in his material. The sculptor in marble lays on; the woodcarver takes away, hollows out. They must live with their material; must listen and understand its vital language.

The same is true of color. The painter feels the plane surface only if the third spatial dimension has been extinguished; and it is extinguished if he feels the qualitative character of color as contributing another kind of third dimension, blue retreating, red approaching. Then matter is abolished instead of—as in spatial perspective—imitated. Certainly I do not speak against the latter. In the age which started with the fifteenth century it was natural and self-evident, and added an important element to the ancient art of painting. But today it is essential to realize that, having passed through materialism, it is time for painting to return to a more spiritual conception, to return to color-perspective.

In discussing any art we must not theorize but (I repeat) abide, feelingly, within its own particular medium. In speaking about mathematics, mechanics, physics, we must kill our feeling and use only intellect. In art, however, real perception does not come by way of intellect, art historians of the nineteenth century notwithstanding. Once a Munich artist told me how he and his friends, in their youth, went to a lecture of a famous art historian to find out whether or not they could learn something from him. They did not go a second time, but coined an ironical derogatory phrase for all his theorizing. What can be expressed through the vital weaving of colors can also be expressed through the living weaving of tones. But the world of tones has to do with man's inner life (whereas the sculptor in three-dimensional space and the painter on a two-dimensional plane express what manifests etherically in space). With the musical element we enter man's inner world, and it is extremely important to focus attention upon its meaning within the evolution of mankind.

Those of my listeners who have frequently attended my lectures or are acquainted with anthroposophical literature know that we can go back in the evolution of mankind to what we call the Atlantean epoch when the human race, here on earth, was very different from today, being endowed with an instinctive clairvoyance which made it possible to behold, in waking dreams, the spiritual behind the physical. Parallel to this clairvoyance man had a special experience of music. In those ancient days music gave him a feeling of being lifted out of the body. Though it may seem paradoxical, the people of those primeval ages particularly enjoyed the chords of the seventh. They played music and sang in the interval of the seventh which is not today considered highly musical. It transported them from the human into the divine world.

During the transition from the experience of the seventh to that of the pentatonic scales, this sense of the divine gradually diminished. Even so, in perceiving and emphasizing the fifth, a feeling of liberating the divine from the physical lingered on. But whereas with the seventh man felt himself completely removed into the spiritual world, with the fifth he reached up to the very limits of his physical body; felt his spiritual nature at the boundary of his skin, so to speak, a sensation foreign to modern ordinary consciousness.

The age which followed the one just described—you know this from the history of music—was that of the third, the major and minor third. Whereas formerly music had been experienced outside man in a kind of ecstasy, now it was brought completely within him. The major and minor third, and with them the major and minor scales, took music right into man. As the age of the fifth passed over into that of the third man began to experience music inwardly, within his bounding skin.

We see a parallel transition: on the one hand, in painting the spatial perspective which penetrates into space; on the other, in music, the scales of the third which penetrate into man's etheric-physical body; which is to say, in both directions a tendency toward naturalistic conception. In spatial perspective we have external naturalism, in the musical experience of the third “internal” naturalism.

To grasp the essential nature of things is to understand man's position in the cosmos. The future development of music will be toward spiritualization, and involve a recognition of the special character of the individual tone. Today we relate the individual tone to harmony or melody in order that, together with other tones, it may reveal the mystery of music. In the future we will no longer recognize the individual tone solely in relation to other tones, which is to say according to its planal dimension, but apprehend it in depth; penetrate into it and discover therein its affinity for hidden neighboring tones. And we will learn to feel the following: If we immerse ourselves in the tone it reveals three, five or more tones; the single tone expands into a melody and harmony leading straight into the world of spirit. Some modern musicians have made beginnings in this experience of the individual tone in its dimension of depth; in modern musicianship there is a longing for comprehension of the tone in its spiritual profundity, and a wish—in this as in the other arts—to pass from the naturalistic to the spiritual element.

Man's special relationship to the world as expressed through the arts becomes clear if we advance from those of the outer world, that is architecture, art of costuming, sculpture and painting, to those of the inner world, that is to music and poetry. I deeply regret the impossibility of carrying out my original intention of having Frau Dr. Steiner illustrate, with declamation and recitation, my discussion of the poetic art. Unfortunately she has not yet recovered from a severe cold. During this Norwegian lecture course my own cold forces me to a rather inartistic croaking, and we did not want to add Frau Dr. Steiner's.

Rising to poetry, we feel ourselves confronted by a great enigma. Poetry originates in phantasy, a thing usually taken as synonymous with the unreal, the non-existent, with which men fool themselves. But what power expresses itself through phantasy?

To understand that power, let us look at childhood. The age of childhood does not yet show the characteristics of phantasy. At best it has dreams. Free creative phantasy does not yet live and manifest in the child. It is not, however, something which, at a certain age in manhood, suddenly appears out of nothingness. Phantasy lies hidden in the child; he is actually full of it. What does it do in him? Whoever can observe the development of man with the unbiased eye of the spirit sees how at a tender age the brain, and indeed the whole of his organism, is still, as compared with man's later shape, quite unformed. In the shaping of his own organism the child is inwardly the most significant sculptor. No mature sculptor is able to create such marvelous cosmic forms as does the child when, between birth and the change of teeth, it plastically elaborates his organism. The child is a superb sculptor whose plastic power works as an inner formative force of growth. The child is also a musical artist, for he tunes his nerve strands in a distinctly musical fashion. To repeat: power of phantasy is power to grow and harmonize the organism.

When the child has reached the time of the change of teeth, around his seventh year, then advances to puberty, he no longer needs such a great amount of plastic-musical power of growth and formation as, once, for the care of the body. Something remains over. The soul is able to withdraw a certain energy for other purposes, and this is the power of phantasy: the natural power of growth metamorphosed into a soul force. If you wish to understand phantasy, study the living force in plant forms, and in the marvelous inner configuratons of the organism as created by the ego; study everything creative in the wide universe, everything molding and fashioning and growing in the subsconscious regions of the cosmos; then you will have a conception of what remains over when man has advanced to a point in the elaborating of his own organism when he no longer needs the full quota of his power of growth and formative force. Part of it now rises up into the soul to become the power of phantasy. The final left-over (I cannot call it sediment, because sediment lies below while this rises upward)—the ultimate left-over is power of intellect. Intellect is the finely sifted-out power of phantasy, the last upward-rising remainder.

People ignore this fact. They see intellect as of greater reality. But phantasy is the first child of the natural formative and growth forces; and because it cannot emerge as long as there is active growing, does not express direct reality. Only when reality has been taken care of does phantasy make its appearance in the soul. In quality and essential nature it is the same as the power of growth. In other words, what promotes growth of an arm in childhood is the same force which works in us later, in soul transformation, as poetic, artistic phantasy. This fact cannot be grasped theoretically; we must grasp it with feeling and will. Only then will we be able to experience the appropriate reverence for phantasy, and under certain circumstances the appropriate humor; in brief, to feel phantasy as a divine, active power in the world.

Coming to expression through man, it was a primary experience for those human beings of ancient times of whom I spoke in the last lecture, when art and knowledge were a unity, when knowledge was acquired through artistic rites rather than the abstractions of laboratory and clinic; when physicians gained their knowledge of man not from the dissecting room but from the Mysteries where the secrets of health and disease, the secrets of the nature of man, were divulged in high ceremonies.

It was sensed that the god who lives and weaves in the plastic and musical formative forces of the growing child continues to live in phantasy. At that time, when people felt the deep inner relationship between religion, art and science, they realized that they had to find their way to the divine, and take it into themselves for poetic creation; otherwise phantasy would be desecrated.

Thus ancient poetic drama never presented common man, for the reason that mankind's ancient dramatic phantasy would have considered it absurd to let ordinary human beings converse and carry out all kinds of gestures on the stage. Such a fact may sound paradoxical today, but the anthroposophical researcher—knowing all the objections of his opponents—must nevertheless state the truth. The Greeks prior to Sophocles and Aeschylus would have asked: Why present something on the stage which exists, anyhow, in life? We need only to walk on the street or enter a room to see human beings conversing and gesturing. This we see everywhere. Why present it on a stage? To do so would have seemed foolish.

Actors were to represent the god in man, and above all the god who, rising out of terrestrial depths, gave man his will power. With a certain justification our predecessors, the ancient Greeks, experienced this will-endowment as rising up out of the earth. The gods of the depths who, entering man, endow him with will, these Dionysiac gods were to be given stage presentation. Man was, so to speak, the vessel of the Dionysiac godhead. Actors in the Mysteries were human beings who received into themselves a god. It was he who filled them with enthusiasm.

On the other hand, man who rose to the goddess of the heights (male gods were recognized as below, female gods in the heights), man who rose in order that the divine could sink into him became an epic poet who wished not to speak himself but to let the godhead speak through him. He offered himself as bearer to the goddess of the heights that she, through him, might look upon earth events, upon the deeds of Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus and Ajax. Ancient epic poets did not care to express the opinions of such heroes; opinions to be heard every day in the market place. It was what the goddess had to say about the earthly-human element when people surrendered to her influence that was worth expression in epic poetry. “Sing, oh goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus”: thus did Homer begin the Iliad. “Sing, oh goddess, of that ingenious hero,” begins the Odyssey. This is no phrase; it is a deeply inward confusion of a true epic poet who lets the goddess speak through him instead of speaking himself, who receives the divine into his phantasy, that child of the cosmic forces of growth, so that the divine may speak about world events.

After the times had become more and more materialistic, Klopstock, who still had real artistic feeling, wrote his Messiade. Inasmuch as man no longer looked up to the gods, he did not dare to say: Sing, oh goddess, the redemption of sinful man as fulfilled here on earth by the Messiah. He no longer dared to do this in the eighteenth century, but cried instead: “Sing, oh immortal soul, of sinful man's redemption.” In other words, he still possessed something which was lifted above the human level. His words reveal a certain bashfulness about what was fully valid in ancient times: “Sing, oh goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.”

Thus the dramatist felt as if the god of the depths had risen, and that he himself was to be that god's vessel; the epic poet as if the Muse, the goddess, had descended into him in order to judge earthly conditions. The ancient Greek actor avoided presentation of the individual human element. That is why he wore high thick-soled shoes, cothurni, and used a simple musical instrument through which his voice resounded. He desired to lift the dramatic action above the individual-personal.

I do not speak against naturalism. For a certain age it was right and inevitable. For when Shakespeare conceived his dramatic characters in their supreme perfection, man had arrived at presenting, humanly, the human element. Quite a different urge and artistic feeling held sway at that period. But the time has come when, in poetic art also, we must find our way back to the spiritual, to presenting dramatic figures in whom man himself, as a spiritual as well as bodily being, can move within the all-permeating spiritual events of the world.

I have made a first weak attempt in my Mystery dramas. There human beings converse not as people do in the market place or on the street, but as they do when higher spiritual impulses play between them, and their instincts, desires and passion are crossed by paths of destiny, of karma, active through millennia in repeated lives.

It is imperative to turn to the spiritual in all spheres. We must make good use of what naturalism has brought us; must not lose what we have acquired by having for centuries now held up, as an ideal of art, the imitation of nature. Those who deride materialism are bad artists, bad scientists. Materialism had to happen. We must not look down mockingly on earthly man and the material world. We must have the will to penetrate into this material world spiritually; nor despise the gifts of scientific materialism and naturalistic art; must—though not by developing dry symbolism or allegory—find our way back to the spiritual. Symbolism and allegory are inartistic. The starting point for a new life of art can come only by direct stimulation from the source whence spring all anthroposophical ideas. We must become artists, not symbolists or allegorists, by rising, through spiritual knowledge, more and more into the spiritual world.

It can be attained quite specially if, in the art of recitation and declamation, we transcend naturalism. In this connection we should remember how genuine artists like Schiller and Goethe formed their poems. In Schiller's soul there lived an indefinite melody, and in Goethe's an indefinite picture, a form, before ever they put down the words of their poems. Often, today, the chief emphasis in recitation and declamation is placed on prose content. But that is only a makeshift. The prose content of a poem, what lies in the words as such, is of little importance; what is important is the way the poet shapes and forms it. Ninety-nine percent of those who write verse are not artists. In a poem everything depends on the way the poet uses the musical element, rhythm, melody, the theme, the imaginative element, the evocation of sounds. Single words give the prose content. The crux is how we treat that prose content; whether, for instance, we choose a fast or slow rhythm. We express joyful anticipation by a fast rhythm. If we say: The hero was full of joyful anticipation, we have prose even if it occurs in a poem. It is essential, in such an instance, to choose a rapidly moving rhythm. When I say: The woman was deeply sad, I have prose, even in a poem. But when I choose a rhythm which flows in soft slow waves, I express sorrow. To repeat, everything depends on form, on rhythm. When I say, The hero struck a heavy blow, it is prose. But if the poet speaks in fuller, not ordinary tones, if he offers a fuller u-tone, a fuller o-tone, instead of a's and e's, he expresses his intention in the very formation of speech.

In declamation and recitation one has to learn to shape language, to foster the elements of melody, rhythm, beat, not prose content. One has also to gauge the effect of a dull sound upon a preceding light sound, and a light sound upon the following dark one, thus expressing a soul experience in the treatment of the speech sounds. Words are the medium of recitation and declamation: a little-understood art which we have striven to develop. Frau Dr. Steiner has given years to it. When we return to artistic feeling on a higher level we return to speech formation as contrasted with the modern emphasis on prose content. Nothing derogatory shall be said against prose content. Having achieved it through the naturalism which made us human, we must keep it. At the same time we must again become imbued with soul and spirit. Word-content can never express soul and spirit. The poet is justified in saying: “If the soul speaks, alas, it is no longer the soul that speaks.” For prose is not the soul's language. It expresses itself in beat, rhythm, melodious theme, image, and the formation of speech sounds. The soul is present as long as the poem expresses rising and falling inner movements.

I make a distinction between declamation and recitation: two separate arts. Declamation has its home in the north; and is effective primarily through the weight of its syllables: chief stress, secondary stress. In contrast, the reciting artist has always lived in the south. In recitation man takes into account not the weight but the measure of the syllables: long syllable, short syllable. Greek reciters, presenting their texts concisely, experienced the hexameter and pentameter as mirrors of the relationship between breathing and blood circulation. There are approximately eighteen breaths and seventy-two pulse-beats per minute. Breath and pulse-beat chime together. The hexameter has three long syllables, the fourth is the caesura. One breath measures four pulse beats. This one-to-four relation appearing in the measure and scanning of the hexameter brings to expression the innermost nature of man, the secret of the relation of breath and blood circulation.

This reality cannot be perceived with our intellect; it is an instinctive, intuitive-artistic experience. And beautifully illustrated by the two versions of Goethe's Iphigenie when spoken one after the other. We have done that often and would have done so today if Frau Dr. Steiner were not indisposed. Before he went to Italy, Goethe wrote his Iphigenie as Nordic artist (to use Schiller's later word for him), in a form which can be presented only through the art of declamation, chief stress, secondary stress, when the life of the blood preponderates. In Italy he rewrote this work. It is not always noticed, but a fine artistic feeling can clearly distinguish the German from the Roman Iphigenie. Because Goethe introduced the recitative element into his Northern declamatory Iphigenie, this Italian, this Roman Iphigenie asks for an altered reading. If one reads both versions, one after the other, the marvelous difference between declamation and recitation becomes strikingly clear. Recitation was at home in Greece where breath measured the faster blood circulation. Declamation was at home in the North where man lived in his inmost nature. Blood is a quite special fluid because it contains the inmost human element. In it lives the human character. That is why the Northern poetic artist became a declamatory artist.

As long as Goethe knew only the North he was a declamatory artist and wrote the declamatory German Iphigenie; but transformed it when he had been softened to meter and measure through seeing the Italian Renaissance art which he felt to be Greek. I do not wish to spin theories, I wish to describe feelings which anthroposophists can kindle for the world of art. Only so shall we develop a true artistic feeling for everything.

One more point. How do we behave on a stage today? Standing in the background we ponder how we would walk down a street or through a drawing-room, then behave that way on the stage. It is all right if we introduce this personal element, but it does lead us away from real style in stage direction, which always means taking hold of the spirit. On the stage, with the audience sitting in front, we cannot behave naturalistically. Art appreciation is largely immersed in the unconsciousness of the instincts. It is one thing if with my left eye I see somebody walk by, passing, from his point of view, from right to left, while, from mine, from left to right. It is quite another thing if this happens in the opposite direction. Each time I have a different sensation; something different is imparted. We must relearn the spiritual significance of directions, what it means when an actor walks from left to right, or from right to left, from back to front, or vice versa; must feel the impossibility of standing in the foreground when about to start a long speech. The actor should say the first words far back, then gradually advance, making a gesture toward the audience in front and addressing both the left and right. Every movement can be spiritually apprehended out of the general picture, and not merely as a naturalistic imitation of actions on the street or in the drawing-room. Unfortunately people no longer wish to make an artistic study of all this; they have become lazy. Materialism permits indolence. I have wondered why people who demand full naturalism—there are such—do not adopt a stage with four walls. No room has three. But with a four-wall set how many tickets would be sold?

Through such paradoxes we can call attention to the great desideratum: true art in contrast to mere imitation. Now that naturalism has followed the grand road from naturalistic stage productions to the films (neither philistine nor pedant in this regard, I know how to value something for which I do not care too much) we must find the way back to presentation of the spiritual, the genuine, the real; must refind the divine-human element in art by refinding the divine-spiritual.

Anthroposophy would take the path to the spirit in the plastic arts also. That was our intention in building the Goetheanum at Dornach, this work of art wrested from us. And we must do it in the new art of eurythmy. And in recitation and declamation. Today people do breathing exercises and manipulate their speech organism. But the right method is to bring order into the speech organism by listening to one's own rhythmically spoken sentence, which is to say, through exercises in breathing-while-speaking. These things need reorientation. This cannot originate in theory, proclamations and propaganda; only in spiritual-practical insight into the facts of life, both material and spiritual.

Art, always a daughter of the divine, has become estranged from her parent. If it finds its way back to its origins and is again accepted by the divine, then it will become what it should within civilization, within world-wide culture: a boon for mankind.

I have given only sketchy indications of what Anthroposophy wishes to do for art, but they should make clear an immense desire to unfold the right element in every sphere. The need is not for theory—art is not theory. The need is for living, fully living, in the artistic quality while striving for understanding. Such an orientation leads beyond discussion to genuine appreciation and creation.

If art is to be fructified by a world-conception, this is the crux of the matter. Art has always taken its rise from a world-conception, from inner world-experience. If people say: Well, we couldn't understand the art forms of Dornach, we must reply: Can those who have never heard of Christianity understand Raphael's Sistine Madonna?

Anthroposophy would like to lead human culture over into honest spiritual world-experience.

My dear sisters and brothers,

New members have again come to this School today. It isn't possible to repeat every time the introduction which describes the duties and meaning of this Michael School. Therefore, I ask the members who wish to give the verses to the new members, to do so in the manner I will describe at the end of the Lesson, and to give them the introduction, which everyone who wishes to be a member of this School must necessarily know.

*

And so, we will also begin directly today to inscribe in our souls the words which sound forth, to those who are open-minded enough, from all the kingdoms of nature and the hierarchies of the world which surround us as human beings. In the past, these words sounded forth to man from all the stones and plants, clouds, stars, from the sun and the moon, from the springs and the rocks. They sound forth to him in the present; they will sound forth to him in the future.

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's soulless void
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

My dear sisters and brothers, in the description of the path of knowledge we have reached the place where we stand before the Guardian at the abyss of being. The Guardian of the Threshold has made clear to us that what surrounds us in the exterior world can never reveal our own being to us; how our observation of nature, what on and from the earth lives and moves, what shines and speaks from the realm of the stars—to the extent we can perceive it with the senses and with our reason—all that offers nothing to clarify the being of our own self; that the brightness, this glistening in the sunshine, this living and interweaving which is so grand and powerful, so beautiful and magnificent in the outer world, remains dark and gloomy for our true self-knowledge.

Then it was described how we approach the Guardian little by little, who appears to us in the figure of a spiritual cloud, thus showing us an image of ourselves, which in turn shows us what we should strive for as human beings in order to achieve self-knowledge.

Then we reached the Guardian of the Threshold. He showed us what the true shape of our willing, feeling and thinking is before the countenance of the gods. He showed us how being fainthearted and having fear of knowledge lives in us, as hate for knowledge, as doubt about the knowledge that is nevertheless in us, because the character of our times has driven it into us. He showed us the animal form of our willing, feeling and thinking. It must be a shattering experience for us when the Guardian of the Threshold awakens the forces which lead to true self-knowledge in our souls.

Then the Guardian of the Threshold raised us, first showing us, however, how our thinking, as we use it in normal life, is the corpse of the living thinking which was in us before we descended to physical-sensory existence. He showed us how our body, in earthly existence, is a coffin for the deceased living thinking, which lies in the coffin as a corpse. But we use this corpse for our usual abstract thinkingbetween birth and death in order to understand the things of the physical-sensory world.

Once we grasp how dead this thinking is, we can learn from the corpse that lies before us. We look at this corpse. We say to ourselves: This corpse could never have come into being the way it is now. It is what remains of a human being whose soul and spirit were within it. The living person, the ensouled person, the spiritualized person must have existed beforehand in what lies before us as a corpse. Thus, we approach the reality of our thinking when we become aware of its deadness, and realize that it is the corpse of the living thinking that was in us before we descended into physical-sensory earthly existence.

Then the Guardian reminds us that our feeling is only half-alive, whereas our willing is fully alive, but we are only conscious of this externally.

The Guardian of the Threshold also reminds us that in order to gradually find the transition to living thinking, we should look up to the heavenly heights; that to grasp the nature of feeling we should look out to the cosmic reaches, and to gain an idea of the nature of will we should look to the world's depths, to the earthly depths.

But at the same time the Guardian shows us how we are placed with our thinking—when we look up to the cosmic thinking in which our earthly-physical thinking is rooted—between light and darkness; how the light can be dangerous if we devote ourselves unilaterally to it, how the darkness can be dangerous if we devote ourselves unilaterally to it, how we must seek our direction and goal in the middle between light and darkness if we are to find the truth, how we stand in the middle between warmth and cold with our feeling, and how we can vanish in the sensual embers of feeling if we surrender ourselves to the warmth, and on the other hand harden in the cold.

The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to us how we should walk in the middle between soul-warmth and soul-cold on the Christ-path. The Guardian of the Threshold indicates to us that when we seek willing in the earthly depths we find ourselves in the middle between life and death; how life would have us vanish in timidity; how death would have us cramped in nothingness; that we must findwilling in the Middle Way. That, my dear sisters and brothers, is what the Middle Way is—as it has been described since ancient Mystery times—which the human being must tread if he wants to follow the path to the spirit.

The Guardian of the Threshold, before whom we stand as the earnest first representative of Michael, for the real leader of this School is Michael, gives us further guidance: how we can escape from this apparent thinking, from this dead thinking into the living essence of thinking. For this we must be prepared above all to strictly adhere to the laws which are prescribed for every esotericist in golden letters—he must only seize the gold—which the Guardian of the Threshold now repeats to us.

He makes us attentive to the yawning abyss of being before us, which we must fly over, because with earthly feet we cannot cross; how we will have then entered the spiritual world, for there on the other side of the yawning abyss deep, night-cloaked darkness is still before us. But we must enter beyond the yawning abyss of being into that deep, night-cloaked, cold darkness. Out of it warmth must come to us, out of it must come light which illumines our own Self, which warms our own Self. We cannot find the firm support-point in the spirit if, whenever we are over there, we do not remember the pledge that our soul makes, now that we are in this situation, after having received the previous admonitions from the Guardian of the Threshold, who now says:

Do not forget that as long as you are an earthly human being, even when you have crossed over to the spiritual world, that once you have returned you must adhere to the laws of the earth. When you enter the spiritual world with your thinking, you may not believe that when you return and organize your work and your thoughts in the earthly environment you may fly around dreaming within the earthly environment. You must reserve the flying for your thinking when you are in the spiritual world. You must practice deep, inner, intimate modesty, always wanting to be a man among men when you cross back to the ordinary world of ordinary consciousness. It is precisely by wishing to stay modest in the world, by abstaining from using the laws of the spiritual life in the ordinary world, that you will have the strength to grasp thinking in a way that it can serve you in spiritual worlds.

The Guardian of the Threshold therefore teaches us about thinking thus:

You climb down to the earthly element
With forces of your will unfolding;
As thinker you bestride the earthly realm,
Your animal-likeness will be shown
To you by your own force of thought;
The fear you feel of self you must
Transform into courage of soul.

We must go through this by letting the mantric verse work on us. We must, if we wish to enter into the essential element of the earth, that means in the spiritual element of the earth; we must, my dear sisters and brothers, come to the point where we realize that our thinking is at first animal-like. We must experience fear of our own Self that is still animal-like; then the fear will give birth to its opposite and become the courage we need. That is the Guardian of the Threshold's urgently strong, earnest admonition, which cuts deeply into the heart. He admonishes us that we should feel this way when we tread the earth-element. We have already heard about treading the elements from the Guardian of the Threshold.

He admonishes us further: when, as feeling beings, we enter the fluid element, in the world of the water-beings, that we should not be aware of fear of our own Self, but we should be aware of how we sleep dreaming in this water element, which is our sculptor, as we have seen. And it is just when we become conscious that we live a plant-like existence in our earthly human feeling, that this feeling awakens us, for it shows us how lame our Self is. We will awaken once we have the humility to recognize the lameness of our Self.

Thirdly, when we feel ourselves to be in the air element with our willing—first in the earth-element with thinking, then in the water-element with feeling, then with willing in the air-element—then we will feel in this air-element that we have nothing in willing except what our normal memory gives us: memory-image-forms. We must seize these image-forms, which rest passively in our thoughts, with the will; then we are grasping the air-element in inner images. And our own soul will appear to us as if it were ossified. If we eliminate the earth and the air in thought and imagine ourselves wanting to breathe in the air-element, how ossified will we seem. But just by feeling this death by cold that we pass through, the spiritual fire will come to us, which we need in order to really grasp our willing.

The verses are profound, which the Guardian of the Threshold presents to our souls. Only if we observe them well and have fear of ourselves and know that we are nullified if we only perceive the earth in thought, will we have the courage in our souls for living thinking. When we sense how lame in feeling we are on earth, half living and lame, will the strength grow in us which allows us to awaken, so that we are awake in spiritual life, with the feeling we had before we descended to earthly physical existence. Then, when we have willingly descended into the air-element with our memory, we feel sclerotic and shivering with cold. But it is just when we feel this shivering from the cold the opposite happens, the spiritual fire awakens, showing us that our earthly willing is sleeping, but rooted in the living willing which was in us before we descended to earthly existence. We must learn to remember our existence before we descended to earthly existence.

In respect to feeling, the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us:

You live with the water-element
Through feeling's weaving dream alone;
To wake pervading water's being
Will show the soul in you
To be a sluggish plant-like being;
But lameness of your Self
Must Lead to self-awakening.

In respect to willing, the Guardian speaks:

You sense in the waves of air
The image-forms of memory only;
Through willing to seize the essence of air,
Your own soul will threaten you
As coldly hardened stone;
But self-hood's death by cold,
It must give way to spirit-fire.

[The mantra is written on the blackboard with the corresponding underlining:]

The Guardian speaks with great earnestness:

You climb down to the earthly element
With forces of your will unfolding
As thinker you bestride the earthly realm,
Your animal-likeness will be shown
To you by your own force of thought
The fear you feel of self you must
Transform into courage of soul.

You live with the water-element
Through feeling's weaving dream alone;
To wake pervading water's being
Will show the soul in you
To be a sluggish plant-like being;
But lameness of your Self
Must Lead to self-awakening.

You sense in the waves of air
The image-forms of memory alone;
Through willing to seize the essence of air,
Your own soul will threaten you
As coldly hardened stone;
But self-hood's death by cold,
It must give way to spirit-fire.

We descend from thinking to feeling in memory when we let this verse work on us. And when we arrive at the depths of memory—where soul-life otherwise vanishesbecause the images of memory arise anew—there is the boundary, just as a mirror is a boundary. What comes to us from without arrives at something like a memory-wall, then it returns again and again. If one does not look behind the mirror, one does not see behind the memory-wall. But here the Guardian of the Threshold advises us that we must push through what is otherwise a boundary in order to enter the realm of spirit.

After the Guardian of the Threshold has referred us more to our interior with his admonishing verses and has left us time to process the contents of the verses in the soul—for when we use these mantric verses in meditation, we must allow ourselves a very long time, especially at this point, so they can work in us with their force and really bring our I downward through thinking, feeling and remembrance to what lies behind all remembrance—then the Guardian tells us how we should comport ourselves in respect to the outer world.

He draws our attention again up to the light, which however only lives in us in what seem to be thoughts. It is light that thinks in us. When the light pervades us, it thinks in us. But in earthly life light is only the appearance of a thinking that thinks itself. If we don't go beyond it, untrue spiritual being will lead us to the illusion of self-hood rather than to true self-hood So we must realize that if we only concentrate on thinking, we will wind up with the illusion of self-hood. But it is just this understanding of ourselves as earthly human beings, after having gone through the delusion of self-hood—through thinking, which, however, is capable of carrying us over the abyss of being to grasp the world's hardships and problems—that will enable us to gradually find support for experiencing existence in thought.

From light's shining force
Your thoughts you retain within;
When shining light in you itself does think,
Will then an untrue spirit-being cause
Illusion of self-hood to arise in you.
Reflecting on the needs of earth
Preserves your human state of being.

Now the Guardian of the Threshold teaches us how in feeling, at first, we only retain the wonderful, all-embracing forms of the world. But when we only retain these forms in feeling, our spiritual experience remains powerless. Self-hood suffocates if we always only stare, feeling, at what has been formed in the world. But if we begin to love all that is worthy in the world around us, we find being in feeling and we rescue our humanity.

The world's forms you only retain
In feelings held fast within;
When world-form feels itself in you,
The powerless experience of spirit
Will stifle in you the sense of self-hood;
But love of all that's worthy on earth
Will rescue for you your human soul.

Generally, we try to hatch thoughts from earthly values. We only retain the illusion of light if we don't consider the earth's weighty problems. We retain what is formed on the earth only in vague feelings if we don't experience this earthly interweaving of forms and gestalt with love.

And what can we retain of the world's life by willing? Our willing exists in the world's life. But if we only retain it by willing, we again fail to reach being. When the life of the world completely engulfs us, destructive spiritual exaltation kills the experience of Self. Immersion in the world's willing causes spiritual exaltation to erupt, which kills us. But if we develop the will in spiritual dedication to the higher worlds, if we think about what we are willing in the physical-sensory world in a way that the gods act in us, who inspire and give impulse to our willing, if we will in the service of the gods, then God lets his being give impulse to us as humans, and we sense real being in godly permeated willing.

You only retain of worldly life
The will within;
If worldly life takes hold in full,
Destructive spirit exaltation
Will kill experience of Self in you;
But spirit-dedicated earthly willing
Allows the God in man to reign.

These are the three admonitions which the Guardian of the Threshold calls out to us in the most earnest moments.

[The mantra is written on the blackboard:]

The Guardian speaks as though the Cosmic-Word itself were resounding:

From light's shining force
our thoughts you retain within;

—It is as though the Guardian wanted to bring our attention to what we are actually doing. He says that we have not yet gotten over forming mere thoughts about light's shining—

When shining light in you itself does think,
Will then an untrue spirit-being cause
Illusion of self-hood to arise in you.
Reflecting on the needs of earth
Preserves your human state of being

The world's forms you only retain
In feelings held fast within

—Once again, the admonition that in our vague, unfocused feelings only what is so wonderfully formed by the world is alive. At first the forming of the world is apprehended in the microcosm through the vagueness of feelings—

When world-form feels itself in you

—that is, not when we sense the world-form with our feelings, but when the world-form penetrates us, the macrocosm into the microcosm—

When world-form feels itself in you,
Experience of spirit is powerless,

—we become aware of our own powerlessness—

When world-form feels itself in you,
Experience of spirit is powerless,
And stifles in you the sense of self-hood;
But love of all that's worthy on earth
Will rescue for you your human soul.

We need this rescuing, for we are about to cross over the abyss. If we only carry over the thoughts instilled by the illusion of light, if we only carry over the vague feelings about world-form, then spiritual exaltation destroys the true light on the other side; powerless feeling, asleep, destroys the experience of the spiritual. We need awareness of the earth's needs, of all that the earth suffers, in order to be worthy to cross over to the spiritual world and not be destroyed by worldly thinking. We need love for what is worthy on the earth in order not to be turned to dust if we cross over with vague feelings. And thirdly, for willing we need this:

You only retain of worldly life
The will within;
If worldly Life takes hold in full,

—and it will do so over there—

Destructive spirit exaltation
Will kill experience of Self in you;
But spirit-dedicated earthly willing
Allows the God in man to reign.

We may not merely carry over to the spiritual world what we have on this side. We must carry over a stronger soul than we have here. We must prepare the soul:

[As the following is spoken, the words between quotation marks are underlined on the blackboard:]

On the other side, we find “light's shining force”. It lives in our thinking. We need “Reflecting on the needs of earth”. Compassion for all the earth's suffering will preserve our “human state of being”.

Over there, because we are coming to the World-formation, we don't only need our “feelings”, we need “love for all that's worthy on earth”; then our “human soul” will be rescued. Here [in the first verse]: preserve our human state of being; here [in the second verse:] the human soul is rescued.

We must enter the full “worldly life”, which in our “willing” is only a weak reflection, is too flimsy to pass over. And we must develop “spiritually developed earthly willing” for the “god in man” to reign.

This is the escalation:

Light's shining force
World-formation
love for all that's worthy on earth

Thoughts
Feelings
Willing

We need:
Reflecting on the needs of earth,
Love for all that's worthy on earth,
Spiritually developed earthly willing;

for we need:
to preserve our human state of being,
to rescue the human soul,
to receive the reigning God within us.

That, my dear sisters and brothers, is what the Guardian places before our souls so that we may develop the wings of soul needed to cross over.

In the next esoteric lesson, to be held on Wednesday, it will be necessary that we receive the mantras through the Guardian of the Threshold—who in this case is Michael's representative at the threshold to the spiritual lands—the mantras which are the first that we speak when we arrive in the spiritual realm, which, however, appears before the human being when receiving these mantras as deep, night-cloaked, cold darkness.

Today, though, after this has been shown to our souls, let us again contemplate what speaks to us from all being, encouraging us toward all that the Guardian of the Threshold has placed before us with such firmness:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's the soulless void
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destroying flow.

And what has been placed before our souls by the Guardian of the Threshold's words is Michael's message in this rightfully established Michael School. If we receive them with the right attitude, Michael's being is present in this room, consecrating and strengthening what has been placed before our souls. Therefore, it may be accompanied by Michael's Sign. Michael's Sign is:

[in red]

and Michael's Seal, which he has impressed on the Rosicrucian mood for centuries, and which is expressed in the dictum:

ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

The first words, “I revere the Father”, are spoken accompanied by the gesture:

The second words, “I love the Son” are accompanied by the gesture:

The third words, “I unite myself with the Spirit”, are accompanied by the gesture:

The first gesture means:

I revere the Father

the second gesture:

I love the Son

the third gesture.
I unite myself with the Spirit.

Thus, we may understand what is spoken as having been strengthened by Michael's sign and confirmed by Michael's Seal, which is thus, thus and thus, [indicating the Seal gestures on the blackboard] which is impressed over the Rosicrucian words.

So, should the verses live, which have been given through Michael's Sign, and sealed by the Michaelic Rosicrucian-School for your souls:

[Michael Sign]

The following is spoken, accompanied by the Seal Gestures:

ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

My dear sisters and brothers, the mantric verses which are given in this School may only be possessed by the School's rightful members, that is, those who have the blue membership certificate. Someone who could not be present at a lesson after the date of his admittance at which he could have been present, may receive the verses given after the date of his admittance from another member who has rightfully received them here in the School. For this it is necessary to obtain permission from either Dr. Wegman or myself.

This is not an administrative measure, but it is a basis of an occult school that a real action precedes something like this. Only the person who wants to give the verses to another may make the request to Dr. Wegman or to me, not the one who wants to receive them. Therefore, one can request the verses from another. But permission may not be requested by the one who is to receive the verses, but the one who is to give them. It would be useless for the recipient to ask.

Whoever copies something other than the mantras may keep it for a week; thereafter he is obliged to burn it, for what lives in this School should only live within the School and not outside it. This has nothing to do with power or arbitrary measures. It is all based on occult laws. Because if anything falls into the wrong hands, it loses its effectiveness for those for whom it is intended. If misuse prevails in that mantric verses or the contents of what is given here are given to the wrong people, the mantric verses and what is being given here lose their effectiveness for those who are present. These are facts, not some kind of arbitrary measures.

*

The program for tomorrow is: again at 9.30 the Pastoral Medicine lesson, at 12 o'clock the speech-formation course, at 5.30 the course for theologians and at 8 o'clock the lecture for members.

From the different considerations we have brought forward, you can see—even though this, may not be externally noticeable—that an inner connection exists between the chief beings who dwell in a planetary-cosmic body at a given time, and that cosmic body itself. From the most diverse points of view this connection between man and the entire earth life can be studied, with all that belongs to it. We will keep this in mind to-day from one particular point of view, and from that form certain ideas concerning the real being of man.

We know that man has passed his life on earth in a succession of incarnations. These successive incarnations bring him to a far more inward connection with his own planet, as such, than do the epochs of time which lie between his death and re-birth. The times which man passes between death and re-birth are for him times of a more Spiritual existence, and during such times he is himself more withdrawn from the Earth than the times between birth and death.

To be withdrawn from the Earth or to stand in a more intimate connection with the Earth, signifies also certain relationships with other beings, because, my dear friends, that which we call the external, sensible, perceptible sphere of the Cosmos is finally merely the expression of certain relationships between Spiritual beings. Although to physical vision the Earth appears as it presents itself to the Geologists, in such a way that they regard it simply as a stony mass surrounded by an atmosphere, that fundamentally is simply an external illusion. What appears thus as this stony mass is simply the body for certain Spiritual beings. And again, that which appears to us as being outside the Earth, that which shines down on to our Earth as the world of the Stars, even that, as it appears to our external sense perception, is merely the external sensible expression of a certain relationship of Spiritual Beings, of the Hierarchies. What appears to us as the Earth filled with gravity,—that which approaches us very closely because it forms the firm basis on which we develop our life between birth and death,—through what is presented to us as the external physical Earth we develop especially our life between birth and death. Through everything which shines down to us from cosmic space, and with which we seem to have far less connection, with that which shines down to us from the world of Stars, with that we are more closely related between death and re-birth. We can even say it is more than a picture, it is a reality of the deepest significance when one says:—that man descends out of the starry worlds to physical birth in order to fulfil his existence between birth and death. Only we must not imagine that the reflection of the Universe which we see when we speak of the starry world from the earthly point of view, is also the view presented to our super-sensible perception between death and re-birth. That which appears simply externally to us here on Earth as the starry world, then reveals itself in its inner nature, in its Spiritual being. We have then to do with the inner aspect of what, while we are on Earth, simply reveals its external aspect. Indeed we must admit that both when we look down on the Earth as well as when we look up to the Cosmos, in so far as we are dealing with a sense-impression we always have a sort of illusion before us; and we only come to the truth when we can penetrate to those Beings who lie at the bottom of this illusion, with their various degrees of Cosmic self-consciousness.

Whether man looks up or down, I must therefore call it illusion; the truth, the Being, lies behind this illusion. That illusion which reveals itself both above and below is connected with the fact that on the one hand our life between birth and death and on the other our life between death and re-birth, is subject to the possibility of being drawn out of the path of complete human development. Here on Earth between birth and death we may become too allied to the Earth; we can, as it were, develop in ourselves the instinct, the impulse to become too much related to the earthly powers, just as in the life between death and re-birth we can also develop too strongly the impulse to become too closely related to the Cosmic powers outside the Earth. Here on Earth we stand too close to the external, pictorial expression of certain Beings that veil themselves in sensible materialities, here we are in a sense too far removed from the inner Spirituality. When we develop between death and re-birth, we are fully in Spirituality, we share the life of spirit, and then the possibility again threatens us of drowning ourselves, of dissolving in this Spirituality. And so whereas here on Earth the possibility threatens us of hardening in Physical existence, when we are living between death and re-birth the possibility threatens us of being drowned in Spiritual existence.

Both these possibilities depend on the fact that besides those powers which one has in mind when one speaks of the normal Hierarchies, such as the elementary Beings in the three kingdoms of nature, or man himself, or the Hierarchies next to him, when one speaks in the sense of true Spiritual Science of these who are in their right cosmic ages, besides these, there are other Beings, who seek to develop their nature at the wrong time, inopportunely. These are the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings of whom we have often spoken and of whom you will already have formed the idea that the Luciferic beings as such, present themselves as they do because they now reveal themselves as they should have revealed themselves in an earlier Cosmic age; and the Ahrimanic beings are those as such who ought not to have revealed themselves as they now reveal themselves until a later Cosmic epoch. The Luciferic beings are backward, retarded cosmic spirits; the Ahrimanic beings are the opposite;—they are premature cosmic beings. The Luciferic beings are those who rebelled in a sense against sharing all the time allotted them for their evolution; they did not evolve so far, because they rebelled against fully sharing that evolution. So when they reveal themselves to-day, they appear at an earlier stage of existence.

The Ahrimanic beings, on the other hand, if we may so express it, could not wait for a later age to become that which they were intended to become, they could not wait for the development of what was laid down in them. They want to be that now. Therefore, they harden themselves in present existence, and show themselves now in that form which they should rightly attain only in a later development of cosmic life.

We look out into the space of the Cosmos at the “tout ensemble” of the Stars;—what is their appearance? Why have they this appearance?—We only have that special vision of the Stars, of the Milky Way, of the Heavens bedecked with the Stars, because it is the revelation of the Luciferic nature of the Cosmos. That which shines down to us, which surrounds us so radiantly, is the revelation of the Luciferic nature of the Cosmos. It is that which is as it now is because it has remained behind at an earlier stage of its being, and when we turn away from the Cosmos to the earthly soil upon which we walk, this soil is rigid and hard because, rolled up together within it, as it were—are the Ahrimanic beings, those beings who now reveal artificially the stage which they ought only to show at a later stage of their development. Hence, we are confronted with the possibility, that whenever we give ourselves to the sense world, then, through our vision of the heavens, we make ourselves more and more Luciferic. Thus if, in the life between birth and death, we have a special inclination to give ourselves up to the vision of the heavens that signifies nothing immediate or direct, but simply something which remains to us as an instinct belonging to the time we pass before our physical birth or conception. It is an instinct remaining to us from the time we passed through in the Spiritual world, when we lived with the Stars between death and rebirth. We then entered into too close a cosmic relationship with cosmic worlds, we became too similar to them, and from those worlds there has remained to us that inclination which indeed does not express itself as any very strong inclination in humanity, but simply as a desire which has remained, to give ourselves utterly up to that sense-vision of the starry world. We develop that inclination if, through our karma which we fulfil here between birth and death, we develop such a tendency that between death and rebirth we sleep too strongly, if, in the Spiritual world we develop too little inclination to have a full consciousness there.

Now on the other hand, being entirely devoted to the life on Earth, is a state which we directly develop here between birth and death. That is the real Ahrimanic possibility in the life of humanity. The Luciferic possibility is connected with what we prepare in ourselves through too close a relationship with the Spiritual world of vision, and the Ahrimanic relationship we assimilate here on Earth, if between birth and death we develop too strong an inclination for what surrounds us as the external world of sense.

If we grow too strongly into the Earth, if, as it were we grow so strongly into the Earth that we have no tendency to guide our soul towards the super-sensible, then we enter into an Ahrimanic relationship.

Now all this has a deeper significance for the entire evolution of the human being. For as between death and rebirth we can sink, drown in the Spiritual World, and thus become something which here on Earth can no longer find the right equilibrium between the Spiritual and material world, and because we can develop too strong a relationship to this super-Earth, thereby as these things increase in number more and more in our soul, we can become foreign to our Earthly existence. We are now approaching that epoch of time when such things are lying within the sphere of man's own decision, and already, under certain circumstances in our next incarnation, unless we can find the right equilibrium between the Spiritual and material world, we can come in to an incarnation in which we cannot grow up, cannot grow old. That is even now a possibility which stands before us as a certain danger,—that we may be unable to grow old. We may be re-born but the Luciferic beings can hold us back at the childhood stage. They can suspend something over us, so that we cannot mature. Those human beings who give themselves up so willingly to a nebulous mysticism, who have such a horror of sharp clearly defined thinking, who rebel against forming clear concepts of the world, and those persons also who rebel against developing their inner soul-powers, the inner activity of their soul, who want more or less to dream through life, those persons in their next incarnation will be exposed to the danger of not being able to grow up, of remaining childish in the evil sense of the word. That is a Luciferic impulse which will come to mankind in this way. That means, of course that these human beings will not be able in their next incarnation to enter fully into the life on Earth; they will, as it were, not be able sufficiently to draw themselves out of the Spiritual world to enter properly on the Earth. The Luciferic powers, who once entered into a union with our Earth, endeavour to find such instincts in man that his development on Earth will reach such a stage that human beings will remain children, and will not be able to age. The Luciferic powers would like to bring it to pass that at a certain stage in the future, there shall be no old people on the Earth, but only human beings who pass through life in a certain delusion of youth. In this way, the Luciferic powers would be able to bring the entire Earth into ONE body as it were, one body having a common soul, in which all the individual souls of humanity will be dissolved. One common soul-element of the Earth, united with one common body of the Earth; that is what Lucifer is striving for in the evolution of mankind; to make the Earth a great organic being endowed with one common soul, in which the separate souls of humanity lose their individuality.

If you remember, my dear friends, I have often told you that the important thing in earthly development does not lie in the mineral, plant, or animal kingdoms. All those are simply “wind-falls” of evolution; they are not the essential point of evolution, for that plays its part within the limits of the human skin. There are forces in the organisation of man himself which are the forces of development of our planet. If you recollect this, you will understand that what is finally to become of our Earth is not to be grasped by physical conceptions; our physical conceptions have but a limited interest. We only gain ideas concerning what the Earth is to become, when we know the human being himself. But this human being can enter into a union with those Luciferic powers which have united themselves with the Earth, and this brings it about that the Earth, as it were, carries beings who are too little individualised. It may thus become a common being, an indefinite communal being, with a common soul-quality. That is what the Luciferic powers are striving for, and if you take that picture which so many nebulous mystics regard as the most desirable future, which they always describe as a merging oneself into universal being, a kind of longing to disappear into a pantheistic whole, in such things you can perceive what already lives as a Luciferic tendency in many a human soul.

On the other hand, the Ahrimanic beings have also united themselves with the Earth; but they have the opposite tendency. They work above all through those forces which can draw our organism to themselves between birth and death, and permeate our organism through and through with cleverness, with intellectuality, fill us more and more with understanding; for our waking-intelligence depends upon the union of the soul with the physical body, and if that intelligence hypertrophies and becomes too strong, we become too closely related to physical existence, and then too, we lose our equilibrium. Then appears the inclination in man which hinders him from oscillating in the right way in the future between Earthly life and Spiritual life, between death and rebirth.

What lies in the striving of Ahriman is, to hold man back in such a way that he cannot in his next incarnation pass in the right way through earthly life and super-earthly life, Ahriman wants to keep humanity back from undergoing any future incarnations. He wants to make man of such a nature in this incarnation that he already experiences everything which he can possibly experience on earth. That can only be done intellectually—one cannot do it with one's full humanity. But it is absolutely possible for man to become so clever that in his cleverness he can form ideas for himself of everything which can possibly exist on the Earth. That is the ideal of many human beings» to get into their minds an idea of everything which can possibly be on the Earth, but one cannot have those experiences which one will only have in future lives; one cannot get those beforehand. One can only, in this life get the images intellectually, pictures which then harden in the physical body and then one also gets a deep disinclination to undergo future incarnations, it seems a kind of bliss not to desire to appear again on the Earth.

In this decadent life in the East (I have often told you how this Eastern civilisation came to its decadence)—in this decadent life in the East Ahriman can especially produce this confusion. In the East, the people are more ruled inwardly by the Luciferic powers, therefore Ahriman can attack their being from outside; and just because they are inwardly governed by Lucifer, therefore Ahriman can fill them with a desire to conclude their life on Earth in a particular nation, no longer wanting to appear within a physical body. That can be put forward as an ideal by certain teachers of humanity—of course, those who work in the service of Ahriman—the ideal that man should strive to finish with the Earth in one incarnation, before the Earth has attained its goal, and from that time no longer have to appear again in physical existence.

You know, my dear friends, that amongst all the Theosophical teachings which have been slavishly borrowed from the modern decadent life of the East, something appears which has never been taken over into our Anthroposophical view—i.e. to regard it as a special grade of perfection in a man when he no longer wants to appear in life on Earth. That is an Ahrimanic application, and through this something terrible is produced. Through this Ahrimanic idea, the Earth might become,—no longer one great organism with a unified common soul, (which Lucifer desires to bring about), but will follow the opposite path, by becoming super-individualised: Human beings would then reach such a stage of Ahrimanic evolution that, although they would indeed die, yet the terrible thing would occur that after death they would be like the Earth, they would cling to the Earth, and the Earth itself would simply be an expression of these single individual human beings. The Earth would be a colony of these separate individual human souls.

That is what Ahriman is striving for with the Earth—to make it simply an expression of this intellectuality, to completely intellectualise the Earth. Humanity must begin to recognise to- day that the fate of the Earth itself depends on the will of the human beings. The Earth will become that which man himself makes of it, not that which the physical forces are making of it. Those physical forces will fall away and be of no significance for the future of the Earth; but the Earth itself will simply be what man himself makes of it.

We are now living in that decisive hour of human evolution in which man can undertake one of three things:—One, to pass his life in a nebulous mysticism, in dreaming, he can be ensnared by physical existence in a brooding inner life, (and what is the life of sense but such a brooding). He can live in a nebulous mysticism, in a dream-condition, in which he can no longer form clear concepts of life. That is one thing which may become the inclination of humanity.

The second possible inclination of man is, to permeate himself utterly with intellect and understanding, to scrape together everything which the intellect can accumulate, to despise everything which poetry or fantasy pours over Earth-existence, and simply to turn to what is mechanical and pedantic. Human beings are now faced with the decision—either to become Spiritual voluptuaries entirely absorbed in their own existence, (Because, my dear friends, whether one spends their existence in a nebulous mysticism or in sensible lusts, these are simply two sides of one and the same thing); or, on the other hand, to absorb themselves in dry, barren thinking; dividing and separating everything up according to rule. These are two possibilities.

The third it to seek the balance between the two. One cannot speak of equilibrium in the same definite way as one can speak of either of those other two extremes. The balance must always be striven for, so that one can look both to the right and the left, without being drawn too strongly towards either; and pass through life holding both in equilibrium, regulating and ordering the one through the other.

This Cosmic Hour of Decision stands to-day before the human soul. Man can decide to follow the Luciferic temptation and not allow the Earth to complete its development, but to let it remain behind like the Old Moon,—to make it what I might call a caricature of the Old Moon, to turn it into a great organism having an individualised dreaming soul, in which human souls are contained, as in a great common Nirvana. Or, on the other hand, men can decide to pass over into that super-intellectual stage, to abandon the community of Earth, to wish to have nothing in common with one another, but to allow their bodies to ossify and harden by pouring too much intellect and understanding into it. A nebulous mysticism and voluptuousness will turn the body into pulp; while super-intellectuality and understanding will turn it into stone. Our modern humanity is tending not to desire equilibrium, but wants either the one or the other of these two.

We can see already on the one hand, how more and more the Western instincts are developing, which run towards intellectualism, understanding and pedantry, which judge everything in such a way that man thereby forces his intellectuality too strongly into his body. On the other hand, from the East we see the other danger threatening for man to kindle and consume his body. We see that in the views of the decadent East; and we can see in developments in Eastern Europe the same things appearing, only in another aspect, in the terrible social struggles now going on there. Already the Hour of Decision has come to humanity, and humanity must resolve to find that equilibrium. You see that what is put before humanity as a task to-day can only be recognised out of the depths of the knowledge of Spiritual Science. We must assimilate those ideas which can draw our attention to the possibilities of human development on one side or the other. On the one side is the dissolution in Nirvana, which has already become a holy doctrine of the East, but which today has grown far away from the ancient idea of Nirvana which then was a striving towards an Equilibrium based on the ancient clairvoyance. That which the decadent Oriental understands to-day by Nirvana is simply the world under the sway of Lucifer. And that which increasingly strives to come about from the efforts made in the West, from those strivings which develop out of our modern civilisation in so far as that is not permeated with Spiritual knowledge, simply means the mechanising of the world; an effort to make the processes of human existence more and more mechanical. An Ahrimanisation on the one side, and a Luciferisation on the other.

If the things described from a certain point of view in the last lecture, as the chaotic life of recent times without any sense of guidance, be continued into the future,—then, without a shadow of doubt, you will see the Ahrimanisation of Mankind. This can only be checked if, into this super-intellectual life, this super-individualised existence of mankind, this existence of man to-day which is being more and more permeated by egoism, there is brought a perception of the Spiritual world. Everywhere we need this perception of the Spiritual world. Above all it is necessary that into different sciences this Spiritual impulse should come, for otherwise, in time to come they will rule as an abstract authority over humanity, and it will be dominated entirely by these various sciences, which would batten them down with authoritative power, and Ahrimanise them. It is especially important in our modern times, when the social riddles of life beat in strongly on human evolution, especially now is it important to elevate one's perception to that which can reveal the connection of man with his planetary life.

The old ideas of man's relationship with a Spiritual world contained in the different creeds, have been crippled in various directions, crippled on the one side and reduced to a merely abstract intellectual understanding such as threatens to happen for instance in the Evangelical Confessions, or, on the other to an external principle of power, as happens in the Roman Confession. These are but different expressions of what threatens man to-day. What is really necessary is, that man should find his inner orientation, that he should attain an inner impulse in order to have a free vision, so that he can look up to that which unites him with his planet, and through his planet with the whole Cosmos. He must feel to-day:—Geology is not knowledge of the Earth; that vision of a stony colossus, on which are oceans of water, and surrounded by air.—that is not the Earth; and what surrounds us as the Milky Way and Suns, is not the Cosmos. The Universe consists of Ahrimanic beings below, and Luciferic beings above, which shine through the external sense illusion. And then we have the beings of the normal Hierarchies, to whom man can elevate himself when he can break through both sense-illusions and come to the truth; for the real beings do not appear in this external sense-illusion, they only reveal themselves, as it were shining through this external sense-appearance.

Man of to-day must recognise: “I can perceive the Earth. If I am able to see that what appears below on the Earth appears as the outflow of Spiritual beings, then I can perceive what lives in the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. But if I am not able to present to myself Spiritually what lives on the Earth, I yield to the illusion of what appears to me physically on the Earth. If I remain a Geologist, I cannot raise myself to Geosophy—and then my being is Ahrimanised. If I look up to the world of the Stars and form ideas only about what I can see sensibly, I Luciferise myself. But if I am in a condition to take what appears in the external illusion, and break through that to the spirit, then I can say: `Yes, I can see the Stars, the Milky Way, Suns appear to me. But they announce to me Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynamis, Spirits of Wisdom, Motion and Form.' Then only do I find equilibrium.”

There is no question of our speaking of Cosmic beings as better than Earthly beings, it is a question of our being able everywhere to penetrate through that sense-illusion to the true essence, to the real beings behind, with whom we as human beings are actually connected. Sense-appearance as such does not deceive us, for if we can take that sense-appearance in the right way and interpret it, the Spiritual beings are there. Then we have them. Sense-appearance as such, is not deceptive; it is only our interpretation of sense-appearance which can be deceptive; our too strong relation with the Earth on the one side: and the Super-earth, what is outside the earth, on the other, when we traverse it between death and re-birth.

Man to-day, hardly experiences anything of such ideas, if he only turns to what has gradually developed within our civilisation. The fact that all that was once different, has been utterly and entirely forgotten by civilisation to-day. People certainly do read with a certain curiosity what has been written about the things in Nature in the 12th, 13th centuries, but they do not read it with sufficient understanding. If they did, they would see that the time in which men began to think as they think now, is really only a few centuries ago—that in the 11th, 12th, 13th, and even 14th centuries, they thought quite differently about the things of the external world. They did not merely see stone in the stony, and Earth in the earthly, but they saw the Stony and Earthy as the body of Divine Spiritual beings; in the Stars they did not see merely what is seen to-day, but the revelation of the Divine Spiritual. It is only in the last century that man was first reduced, to having Geology and a Cosmology, instead of a Geosophy and a Cosmosophy. Now through his Cosmology man would become Luciferic, through Geology he would become Ahrimanic, unless he can struggle to equilibrium through a Cosmosophy and Geosophy, and Anthroposophy alone combines them because man is fundamentally born of the entire Cosmos. Anthroposophy consists of these two “sophies,” Cosmosophy a wisdom of the Cosmos, and Geosophy, a wisdom of the Earth; and so on. We only understand man aright when we know how to bring him into Spiritual relation with the Universe. Then we shall not seek him one-sidedly only in his relationship with the LIGHT; that would be working for the Luciferic being; nor shall we seek him one-sidedly only in relationship with GRAVITY; that would be working for the Ahrimanic being; But we shall endeavour to pour an impulse into the will, which will give him the power henceforth to find the equilibrium between Light on the one hand and gravity on the other; between the tendency to the Earthly and the tendency to become Luciferic. Man must attain this equilibrium, and he can only do so when he can add the supersensible to his sensible concepts.

Now, my dear friends, in conclusion, something quite paradoxical. Just place before your souls, that of which it has been said that man needs to know it, so that thereby he can face a decision in this Cosmic age. Just consider that we must really speak of a possible Ahrimanising or Luciferising of the world. Place that before your souls, and consider it is an important affair of humanity, and then, my dear friends, take what you can read in the ordinary literature of to-day—that which comes to you as Spiritual life out of the lecture rooms, and the other Educational Institutes. Just consider the great cleft between these, and you will realise what is necessary for man so that he can rise above the decadence of his modern life. What is so urgently necessary is Earnest labour in Spiritual spheres. One can only begin that, if one is resolved to take earnestly such ideas as those we have considered to-day

And of these same things we will speak further in the next lecture.

I would like, in order to be aware of the connections, to recapitulate briefly what we have been studying during recent days in relation to cognition of the soul-spiritual life of the human being. In particular I would like to refer to the most important things in what has been said as a sort of prelude to what has still to be added as a temporary conclusion to these studies. Today I shall speak more of the results; I have already explained the process of observation in the past few days.

We have seen that in the space between the etheric body and the physical body there exists a sort of web of living thoughts. What exactly is this web of living thoughts? It is what we bring through birth into the earthly world from the soul spiritual world. It is necessary for one to imagine that what we possess within our thinking activity merely in pictures, what therefore only reflects something within our thinking activity, has an independent life of its own. What we feel in having thoughts, however, is not within this, but the web of thought is permeated by objective being, that is to say, it is a working, weaving, active web of thought. Indeed, it works on the human being during his whole life between birth and death, helping to shape him.

I beg you to keep what I just said fully in mind. One cannot say, for instance, that the human being is formed entirely by this web of thought, that man is thus woven entirely out of what one can call world thoughts. That is not the case, at least not regarding this web of thought to be found between the etheric and physical bodies. Man is definitely constituted by something else as well, which approaches him out of the universal cosmos, and what I have described as this web of thought is only weaving with it. We find it, as it were, in the place where our subjective thinking also lies, for we weave the subjective thoughts into this web of thought. The objective thoughts do not appear to the ordinary consciousness at all, but because the subjective thoughts, which are kindled through the outer world, have their life in this web, that which is the content of our thoughts comes to our consciousness.

This, then, is the human being from the one side. It is the human being from the side of the skin, insofar as the sum of the senses is basically embodied in the skin. As soon as we approach the sense world itself today, however, the fact is that we do not come right to the senses, in looking upon them as being what was incorporated into man when he entered existence through birth. We would have to draw it like this. If this is the web of thought between the etheric body and the physical body (see drawing, bright), it is surrounded from outside by the sense life incorporated in the skin (red). This sense life is thus formed out of the cosmos, as it were, and incorporated into the human being. It is what man has received as a gift, as it were, from the cosmos when coming in through birth he brings what at first is in his web of thoughts. Actually, when one speaks of the human being as evolving through the Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth evolutions, as I have described in my Outline of Occult Science, one at first finds this outer evolution, begun on Saturn, expressed mainly in the configuration of the sense organs. This is continued through processes from within into the glandular system, nervous system, and so on; what the human being receives as his organization out of the cosmos, however, proceeds from the senses.

What I have drawn here as a web of thought is something that belongs fully to the individual human being. It is incorporated from the etheric world when the human being enters existence through birth, yet it definitely belongs to the individual human being, that is, it has to do with the individual earthly evolution of the human being. One can thus say that this objective thought organization works upon us during our embryonic life and during our whole life from birth to death, but it is in no way all that produces the entire being of man.

On the other hand we have found what is of the nature of will, and we could say that this will nature develops between the astral body and the I. The I as possessed by the human being is entirely of a will nature. During the life between birth and death the I develops, as I have indicated, in such a way that the impulses of willing pass over into deeds of the human being, though not completely; certain things remain behind. What remains behind of a will nature passes over into future karma. When we therefore consider the human begin from the point of view of his physical body, we come in the web of thought to his past karma. Looking at man from the viewpoint of the I, we must be fully conscious that it is the I that actually lives fully in his deeds, actually only first awakes in the deeds of man. What the I withholds in itself is then carried through the portal of death and passes over into future karma, the karma that is coming into existence.

Viewed objectively, therefore, we find what is otherwise in us subjectively as soul life. We find it objectified. We find that we are able to consider it objectively. We find, however, when we look toward the relationship with the subjective, that on the one side we have the thought structure and on the other we have the will structure. In the middle, for subjective experience, stands feeling.

One can arrive at the actual essence of feeling only when one is clear that actually every separate feeling that man can shelter is woven into the whole life of feeling of the human being. The feeling life of man can really be studied only when we understand it in such a way that we say: in any moment of life we are permeated by the totality of our life of feeling. We could also say that we are in a certain mood of feeling [Gefahlstimmung]; in every moment of our life we are in a certain mood of feeling. We should try sometime—each one, of course, can only do it individually—to bring this mood to consciousness. Let us try to bring to consciousness how in some moment of his earthly life man is in a certain mood, a certain state of feeling. You know, of course, how mood has infinite variations. It is such that it can degenerate in one case into a sort of excess gaity; one person may be gay to excess, another suffers from depression, and a third is more equable. If we merely wish to examine this mood in some moment of life, there is no need to go into its ultimate cause; we need only look at the particular shading, the particular nuance of this mood, how in one person it can approach the deepest depression, in another it can be equanimity, in a third it can reach extreme gaiety, and how thousands of intermediate stages can lie between. This mood of feeling is actually different in every human being. Now, if one explores this mood in oneself through a kind of self-knowledge, one actually finds in this mood nothing other than subjective experience, shaded in all sorts of ways by outer events, but nevertheless subjective experience.

If one remains in this subjective experience, that is, in the actual inner weaving of soul, and does not advance to beholding these things objectively, one cannot clarify to oneself the nature, let us say, of this emotional mood of soul at some given moment. One can arrive already in ordinary life, however, at what this mood is, this mood living utterly and entirely in feeling. To do so one must have above all the ability to make psychological observations. One must have the possibility of investigating particularly outstanding personalities regarding the content of their feeling. Then one can have the following experience. Outer observation, it is true, will give only an approximation of the actual truth, but even this approximation is extraordinarily valuable.

We can, for instance, set ourselves the task of studying Goethe, whom one can follow very well from his diaries, his letters, and that which has flowed into his most characteristic works. Following his biography sometimes from day to day, sometimes from morning to afternoon, we can see in his case just what were the moods of his soul [Gemütsstimmung]. One can, for example, set oneself the task of studying in delicate psychological ways the mood of soul that Goethe had at some particular time, let us say in 1790. One will first try to describe it as precisely as possible. One can do this, one can describe this mood as precisely as possible, but then one is pointed in two different directions—it is extraordinarily important to bear this in mind—one is pointed in two directions: to Goethe's life before 1790 and to what he lived through after 1790. When from a psychological viewpoint one compares all that impressed Goethe's soul before 1790 with what then worked upon his soul up to his death—that is, when one brings into the present the preceding and the following part of life—then the wonderful fact emerges that every momentary mood in man represents a cooperation between what has gone before, what he knows and already has consciously encountered in life, and what is yet to come and is not yet given to his conscious experience. What is still unknown to him lives already, however, in the general mood of feeling. One thus can arrive biographically, I would like to say, at this secret of the mood of soul at any moment. Here one touches the borders of those realms of human observation that are gladly neglected by people who spend their lives without much thought. What the future brings to the human being, he still does not know—or so he imagines. In his life of feeling, however, he knows it.

One can go further and make more investigations, investigating for instance, the mood of soul of some person whom one has known very well and who died, let us say, a few years after one had grasped this mood of soul. Then one can see clearly how the approaching death and all connected with it had already thrown its light back on the mood of soul. If one goes into these things, therefore, one can really see the person's past from the life between birth and death and his future up to death playing into what lives in his soul by way of feeling. Hence man's life of soul [Gemütsleben] is so inexplicable to himself; it appears as something elemental since as feeling it is already colored by what is still to be experienced.

All this had to be taken into consideration at the time when I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom. Why did I have to stress that the free deed can proceed only from pure thought? Simply because if the deed is based on the feeling, the future is already playing into it, and therefore a really free deed could never arise out of feeling. It can arise only from an impulse truly based on pure thought. If you remember what I have presented in the last two days, you will be able to see the matter still more clearly. I have said that what actually takes place in us, what goes on in our human nature, is reflected up into our consciousness in feeling. If I make a sketch, I can say that in feeling there streams upward into our consciousness just what the experience of the feeling is, but downward there streams what can be experienced by Imaginative consciousness as dream pictures (see drawing), that is, what comes into play entirely in Imaginations. For the entire human being, therefore, the life of feeling runs its course in such a way that what we are conscious of as feeling streams upward (blue), and downward there streams into the organization what is actually picture, what is really seen when it is seen through Imaginative consciousness as picture (red, inside). For the ordinary consciousness this streams down into the whole human being as something quite unknown. Not indeed in the individual events, for they must first come about—I beg you to realize this—but in the general mood of life there lives in man as a sort of basic tone the outcome of his future experiences. It is not as if the pictures of what takes place lived there; the impressions of it live in the pictures.

You must not imagine these pictures that stream downward to be like a movie reeling off the future; you must rather picture them as the result of the impressions. Only in the case of certain people who have an atavistic clairvoyance can pictures arise that may be interpreted as pictures of definite facts, and then there can be a certain vision into the immediate future. Today, however, we shall mainly interest ourselves in the fact that what constitutes man's world of feeling descends into him in a pictorial way.

Now, as we pass over from feeling to willing, what enters man here, as I presented to you, presses outward and becomes his karma that is becoming, his future karma (red, outside). What arises in man through his feelings, therefore, has to do with his karma up to his death, while what arises out of the willing is concerned with his karma beyond death.

It is therefore fully possible to follow these things and study them in detail. As the development of anthroposophical spiritual science progresses, one never talks in an abstract way of mere concepts; one speaks rather of the concrete reality that lives in man, which, when he brings it to consciousness, can give him an explanation for the first time of what he actually is. You must receive a strong feeling, however, of how the will, depending as it does on the life of feeling, actually works into the future beyond death, how the will is the creator of future karma.

If we turn once more to the other side, to the web of thought that we found and that lives in man really between the etheric body and the physical body, we must be clear about the following. In experiencing something of the world through sense impressions and thus forming a sensory world conception, in working over these sense impressions thoughtfully, we actually weave with our subjectivity within this web of thought. What we experience in our soul as a result of the sense impressions we unite on the one hand with what is incorporated into us through birth as a web of thought. The objective web of thought, however, remains unconscious, and only that which we interweave, which we press in, as it were, out of our own inner activity of thought, enters our consciousness. It is actually as if the web of thought were there; the subjective thoughts strike against it, beat their way into this web of thought, and this web of thought then reflects our subjective thoughts in a helter-skelter way so that our subjective thoughts come into consciousness (drawing). Note that I say, in a helter-skelter way.

Let us say that you perceive some outer object, a cube, for example, a crystal cube: I will describe the exact process. First of all we see it. We do not stop short at seeing. We think about it, but the thought continues up to the web of thought, and the web of thought, which is incorporated into us through birth and which we have attached to ourselves when we were in the cosmos, which in fact we received through the cosmos—this web of thought is constituted in such a way that we now begin from certain hypotheses to form crystalline ideas that we build up out of our inner being. In forming thoughts, for example, of the isometric system, the tetragonal, the rhombic, the monoclinic, the triclinic, the hexagonal systems, that is to say, in thinking out crystal systems in a mathematical, geometrical way, we find that we can think out the crystal systems. This cube fits into the isometric system that we have cultivated in our inner being. In incorporating something such as, for example, the thought of the cube, into what are, as it were, a priori thoughts that we draw out of our inner being, we are, in this moment when subjective thoughts arise in us, led to the region of objective thoughts. What we cultivate as the geometric element, as purely geometrical-mechanical physics and so on, we draw out of this web of thoughts that is incorporated into us with our birth; the separate, individual elements that we incorporate into these thoughts that we develop about outer sense perceptions and impressions are those that become clear to us in letting them be reflected back to us. They must be permeated, however, by the web of thought living and forming in us eternally—the process at all events is eternal, if not in its individual forms, for these alter from incarnation to incarnation.

We live, therefore, in that we think and incorporate the thought element into our inner life of thought in such a way that we understand it; we live in such a way that we draw forth what is within this web of thought also for our subjective thinking.

Now, what I have just said is something that takes place in the human being continuously, that plays into man's life continuously. At the same time, however, you will see that if on the one hand we begin with feeling we observe what enters from feeling into the organism, what passes over into the will. What stops short in the will, as it were, remaining in the I, becomes future karma. All this brings us in the direction of man's future. If we look to the opposite side, to the web of thought toward which our subjective thoughts also flow, this brings us completely into the stream of the human past. Hence our past on this path, our completed karma, is also to be sought. In feeling, in the most essential sense, past and future meet each other in the human being. The human being is thus born, as it were, out of thoughts. He lives through feeling and weaves in his will what goes with him through the portal of death.

With these words we point to what we actually have subjectively in our life of soul between birth and death. We can go still further, however; we can turn our attention to the following. We can ask ourselves: what actually happens when the subjective thoughts, which we tie to the outer impressions, unite with what is certainly only the past, as I have just described? You see, the subjective thought becomes conscious to us first as thought. As thought it has a certain conceptual content [Vorstellungsinhalt]. We think a content when we think about the cube. You must be quite clear, however, about what I suggested two days ago, that in the life of soul we cannot simply separate thinking, feeling, and willing.

In willing all the motives of our moral thoughts are living. Also in thinking, however, in subjective thinking, we are conscious that not only do we have a thought content, but we link one thought to another, and we are conscious of the activity that links one thought to another. What, then, is at work in thinking? In a delicate way, the will lives in thinking, particularly in subjective thinking. We must be clear, therefore, that in thinking there lives on the one hand the content of thought and on the other hand the will's activity in thinking. Now, if the thoughts strike against us here (see drawing, page 82), they are reflected back to us, of course, as thoughts, but in the thoughts, in these subjective thoughts that we project inward, thrust inward toward the web of thought, the will in fact is also living. We cannot actually use this will in our ordinary consciousness; just think how it would be if this activity that I have pointed out to you here came quite clearly to expression in memory—in memory, the will must already have disappeared! It must still be active, but when the memory is complete, when the remembered thought is there, the memory certainly would not be pure, it would not clearly reflect what it should reflect as a past experience, if it were permeated by will! When you remember what you ate yesterday, you naturally can no longer alter the soup, for the will is already outside, is it not? The pure content of thought must arise. In reflecting, therefore, the will must be laid aside. Where does it go then?

Now, if I make the same drawing and have the web of thought here, and there the reflecting, then the content of thought simply enters the consciousness. The will content of the thought goes below and unites itself with the other content of will and feeling and passes into future karma, becoming thus a constituent of future karma (light shading; dark shaded arrows from above).

On the other hand, our will impulses are like a sleeping portion even during our waking life. We do not see down below into the regions where the will actually lives. We first have the thought of the will impulse. This then passes in an unconscious way, as it were, into willing, and only when willing is manifested outwardly do we observe again what happens through us, what we experience in ordinary consciousness through willing. With deeds we actually experience everything in the conceptual life; we dream of it in the life of feeling, but we sleep over it in the actual life of will.

It is thoughts, however, that we direct into this life of will. Yes, but when? Only when we do not surrender ourselves to our instincts, our desires, to the so-called lower human nature—for this is indeed down below—which urges us then to willing and to deeds. We receive our will, however, into that which constitutes our subjective experience when we control it with our pure thoughts, which are directed toward willing, that is to say, when we control it with our intuitively grasped moral ideals. We can give these intuitively grasped moral ideas to the thought-will on the path down below toward the region of the will. In this way our will becomes permeated by our morality, and hence in the inner being of man the struggle takes place continuously between what man sends down into the will region out of his moral intuitions and what rages and boils down below in his instinctive, dreamlike life. This is all going on in the human being, but what goes on in the human being down below is at the same time that in which his human future beyond death is being prepared. This future thrusts up into the region of feeling. This future actually lives in willing. It thrusts upward into the region of feeling, and more is woven into feeling than what I have already described as the mood of feeling that has a significance for the life between birth and death. In the general state of feeling that I have described as ranging from an extreme depression to complete wildness and excess of gaiety, there can take place everything in which the human past and the human future play into one another in the life between birth and death. Also what goes beyond death, however, penetrates into what comes up from below. And what is living there? Something lives there that we sense as something objective, because it emerges out of the regions where consciousness no longer participates. It is also something objective, because it has to do with the laws by which we bear ourselves as moral beings through death. What is reflected there is the conscience. Grasped psychologically, this is the actual source of conscience. If psychology really wished to approach these things, it would have to investigate the details of the soul life along these lines, and everywhere it would find confirmation of the guiding principles given by anthroposophical spiritual science, right into the most minute details of the life of soul.

We see, therefore, that our feelings stream toward our thoughts. They stream first toward our subjective thoughts and give them life, but they also strike against the objective web of thoughts, and in this we experience ourselves as given, as beings who have come into earthly existence through birth. On the other hand, we can experience ourselves as beings who go through death. One need only study the inner being of man and one finds proclaimed in that inner being something that points beyond man, that is, beyond birth and death; it points therefore into that world which is not encompassed within the sensory, for this world that is not encompassed within the sensory indeed gives us what actually exists in our inner being. It would be of especially great importance if there were research in a real psychology (what is considered psychology today is nothing but a sum of formalisms) into the mood of soul of the human being in a moment where past and future flow into one another. Much that is enigmatic in human life would be discovered in this way, and people would be convinced that a protest very easily made has, in fact, no basis. The protest that is often made is this: well, what would a man become if he were continually examining himself and gazing into his inner being in order to see from his subjective mood of soul what perhaps lay in his future? This protest is easily made, but it is only fanciful. It is imagined that the way in which the future appears is just the same as it is when actually beheld and experienced. The future is not reflected, however, as it is later experienced! It is experienced in intercourse with the outer world, in encounter with things in the outer world. What goes on inwardly in man manifests itself as a raying out and is something that can never mislead him on his life's path, however precisely he knows the human being. Generally, the protests against a knowledge of the human being arise out of fear based utterly on illusions, which one creates because one judges simply by the life of ordinary consciousness, because people will not rise to the view that as soon as consciousness ascends into higher regions it experiences something entirely new.

Yesterday I showed you how, when man comes through the portal of death, he develops himself with two longings that proceed on the one hand from the life of thought and on the other from the life of will. We saw how the thought life longs for cosmic existence and how the will life after death longs for human existence. This lasts until what I called the Midnight Hour of Existence, when a rhythmic reversal then takes place. The thought element then begins to long for the human state, and the will element begins to long to pour itself out into the cosmos. The will element thus lives in the inherited characteristics, while the element of thought lives in the individual, in what is incorporated into the new earthly life.

The will element surrounds us, as it were, in what we receive from our ancestors, seen outwardly in the inherited characteristics and inherited substances. The thought element is that which is incorporated into us, and during life we again unite this thought life with all that we draw up from the depths of the life of feeling and will. This thought life at first is incorporated into us not as something warm and living like our inner life generally. Were we to remain with the thought life as it was when we were born, we would become thought automatons, as it were, full of inner coldness. At the moment of birth, however, the individual inner being begins to stir out of the will and out of the feeling and to permeate with warmth and life that which had first become cold on the way from death to birth. Hence as human beings we have the possibility of permeating with individual warmth that which must constitute cold in us out of the wide universe.

Man thus incorporates himself into the spatial and into the course of world becoming. He thus stands within it. These things are completely hidden from present-day natural scientific thinking. Present-day natural scientific thinking does not wish to approach a true knowledge of the human being. Man thus experiences himself today—and will do so always more and more—in such a way that he cannot recognize in himself his actual being, though he may recognize much about the surrounding world. By reason of the present scientific education and education in general, man lives in such a way today that fundamentally he grasps nothing of his own being. This state will increase more and more. If it could be fully realized what comes to the human being directly through one-sided natural scientific knowledge, he would be entirely estranged from himself. His inner individual element would want to live upward and to melt, through its warmth, the ice masses that we have carried into earthly existence through birth. The human being would go to pieces in his soul in this process that inwardly overpowers him; it indeed goes on without his knowledge, but he can endure it for a long period only if he recognizes it. All the signs of the times point to the fact that the human being must really come to the self-knowledge characterized. It is simply the task of the present life of spirit in its progress toward the immediate future truly to embody these things in cultural evolution.

Education, however, has employed up to now great quantities of fear, great quantities of antipathy, to prevent the vindication of what is so necessary to humanity if it does not wish to sink into decline but to come to a new ascent.

One thought will probably lie near at hand for all of you; it may be clothed in this question: “How did it happen, in consequence of the events which we have been considering, that the materialistic mode of thought assumed precisely the form in which we observe it to-day, permeating all human impulses of our time?” With open mind we must observe the ingredients that have entered into the spiritual life of modern time. We must not be influenced, in so doing, by what the orthodox historian describes as ‘historic necessity.’ We must turn our attention to those events that can explain and illumine what is actually experienced.

Among all the important transformations that have taken place in the new epoch of humanity, we must also include one that was, in a sense, an echo or aftermath of earlier transformations. I refer to the last third of the 18th century, when European humanity finally lost the last vestiges of an understanding for the Mysteries. In recent lectures I have cursorily referred to the fact that in the 18th century there still existed such a mode of thought as that of Louis Claude de Saint Martin, whose ideas gained influence in wide circles—not only owing to himself but owing to the prevailing impulse of the time during that century.

In the 19th century, on the other hand, Saint Martin's ideas and ways of thought receded altogether. We need only remember one feature of his mode of thought, and we shall observe at once how radically it differs from all that our own time, for example, is able to think and feel. In his important work, Des Erreurs et de la Vérité, he speaks among other things of a certain event in earthly evolution—an event that took place, however, before Man became physically Man. Looking backward as it were, he speaks of a deeply significant cosmic transgression—if we may call it so on the part of mankind as a whole, before man ever entered into physical heredity. This is significant, for we here see that those who shared Saint Martin's way of thinking still had a wider horizon. They were still able to look beyond the physical world of humanity, into the purely spiritual. Thus it was possible for them to speak of such things, the connection of which with the evolution of humanity differs from anything that could be contained in the mere physical domain. A follower to some extent of Jacob Boehme, Louis Claude de Saint Martin had a few disciples, it is true, scattered throughout the civilised world, even as late as the 19th century—nay, even on into the most recent period. But the prevailing consciousness of the time, during the 19th century, cannot be said to have been influenced by any such impulses as occur in his writings. The open outlook, above all, into the Spiritual World, which we find here and there in his work, was utterly lost to the 19th century.

Such teachings as Saint Martin's were, in reality, the very last relics of an ancient Mystery-wisdom. To understand, however, even in an outer historic sense, how such a mode of thought as we find in Saint Martin was supplanted, we must not put the question thus: “Who was it who disseminated doctrines calculated to supplant his ways of thinking?” No, we should rather frame it thus: “In what personality does the sum-total of those impulses, whereby the humanity of the 19th century became so utterly materialistic, find the most characteristic expression?”

To understand what was really happening, we must realise that by this last transformation, at the end of the 18th century, the understanding of the Mysteries was completely lost to humanity. Thus, in the 19th century, only a very few people—only a very few human souls—knew anything of the deep importance and influence of the Mysteries.

The personality to whom I refer—though he is only the typical expression of the prevailing Zeitgeist of the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries—is Dupuis; and his important work, whereby the death-blow, so to speak, was dealt to the understanding of the Mysteries, is entitled Origine de tour les Cultes. This book came out in the year 1794.

When we conceive the outlook of men in the 19th century, we generally think of natural-scientific materialism. This natural-scientific materialism however, if I may say so, assumed the character and stamp which the 19th century impressed on nearly all human activities. I mean, what we found most characteristically expressed in the ‘bon Dieu citoyen’—the words with which Heinrich Heine greeted Jesus. I mean the character of bourgeois Philistinism. Materialism too was steeped, by the 19th century, in the channels of Philistinism. Philistine limitation was the essential characteristic of 18th century materialism. To understand the root-nerve of the 19th century, we must look for this impulse of Philistinism everywhere, Dupuis' materialism, on the other hand, was in a sense not yet Philistine; there was a certain grandeur and freedom about it, reaching far beyond Philistine, middle-class limitations. His was in a sense a heavenly—a celestial materialism; he still had the courage to conceive a more thorough-going materialistic theory than all the learned and brilliant men of the 19th century.

Dupuis got behind certain things—at least, he thought he got behind them. And the way he did so is extremely interesting. We must not forget that he was a man of genius. Already in the 1780's he had set up a kind of private telegraphic apparatus, with which he used to telegraph, from his own house, to a friend, Fortine, who lived at a considerable distance. When the Revolution broke out, he was afraid his telegraphic communications might appear suspicious; therefore he destroyed his machines, and the whole thing was forgotten. Of course, I do not say he had an electric telegraph; nevertheless, the principle of the telegraph was thoroughly carried out by him.

Dupuis was also a Commissary of Public Education in France at the end of the 1780's. Leaving Paris when the Revolution broke out, he was elected very soon after as a member of the National Assembly; and on his return, he played no little part in the Convention, and subsequently in the Council of Five Hundred. He belonged, as a rule, to the moderate parties. We must imagine what was living in Dupuis, as an impulse that passed from him to many other souls; but it is still more important for us to realise that the Time itself was possessed with this impulse, which only found its most characteristic expression in him.

What Dupuis perceived was the following. He made a study of ancient myths and legends—say, the Hercules legend, or the legend of Isis and Osiris, or of Dionysos, He studied these ancient myths, which, as we know, are only veiled statements of the truths of the Mysteries. Take, for example, the Hercules myth. Dupuis observed the Twelve Labours of Hercules. Following up the Labours in detail, he perceived that certain things which occur in the narrative justify one in assuming a connection between the passage of Hercules through his twelve Labours and the Sun's revolution through the twelve Signs of the Zodiacs. Dupuis studied these things quite consciously and carefully, and as a result he evolved the following theory:—In antiquity there were certain persons, so-called priests of the Mysteries, whose aim it was to keep the broad masses of the people as quiet and docile as possible, in order to rule and guide them easily. Therefore they told, to certain of the people, the myth, for example, of a Hercules who lived once upon a time; whom man should emulate, with whom he should associate his labours. In like manner, other myths were told—the Isis and Osiris myth, for instance. Within the Mysteries, however, in their own circle, the priests—according to Dupuis—knew that it was so much ‘eye-wash.’ They knew that such a person as Hercules or Osiris or Isis had, of course, never existed; they knew that all that goes on the Earth is brought about by the material heavenly bodies and their constellations. The myths are only veiled descriptions of the events in the sky. According to the ancient Mystery-priests—so said Dupuis—that which takes place on the Earth depends on the Sun's passage through the twelve Signs of the Zodiac, or on the passage of the Moon through the twelve Signs of the Zodiac. The priests were well aware what these celestial processes bring about on Earth. They knew that the material process which finds expression in the starry constellations—the material process in the outer cosmos—is the real cause of plant-growth and of human progress, human fertilisation, and so on. The priests were well aware of all these things. Far from believing that there were any other spiritual Powers here at work, they were ‘enlightened’ enough to believe in the mere play of material forces in material celestial space. But, for the common folk, they clothed these facts of astronomy in myths, believing, as they did, that this was necessary to delude the people; for only by such means could they be ruled and guided.

Thus, for Dupuis, the Mysteries were so many lie-factories, instituted for the purpose of clothing in suitable language, for the credulous and 'stupid' populace, what was well known to the priests themselves, namely that it is the material processes in the Heavens which bring about other material processes here on the Earth. In Dupuis' work, Origin de tons les Cultes, we find for example the following sentence: Truth knows no Mysteries. All Mysteries without exception belong to the realms of error and deceit ... Their origin—namely, the origin of the Mysteries—must be looked for outside the realms of truth and reason; offspring of night, they flee the light of day.

No doubt it was only a small minority who read such writings, but that is not the thing that matters. The point is that such things take effect; the point is simply that they are there. When they are voiced by an individual like Dupuis, it only means that he has the special faculty to formulate them. These things began to work from the end of the 18th century onward; and they worked on throughout the 19th.

Now we must bring forward something of the real historic truth, as against the things Dupuis discovered with such genius when he laid the foundations of his celestial materialism—for so we may justly describe it. After all, the Philistine scientists of the 19th century only looked for the material processes in the atoms; they remained in the earthly realm. Dupuis was bold enough to propound heavenly materialism; to conceive all that is working towards the Earth from the Cosmos as material influences of the stars and constellations, and to describe the so-called ‘Spiritual’ as so much ‘eye-wash’—the mere aftermath of the conscious deception which was practised by the priests of the old Mysteries.

This conclusion above all was drawn by Dupuis in his important and famous book:—All the great figures, in reality, are none other than facts of Astronomy, welded together and appropriately garbed for the edification of the common people. Hercules is the Sun, his twelve Labours are the passing of the Sun through the twelve Signs of the Zodiac. Isis is the Moon; what is narrated of her is the passage of the Moon through the Zodiac. Dionysos—in that great cosmic poem with its 48 cantos—is only a description of the Sun in its passage through the Signs of the Zodiacs. And so on ... the Christians merely put Christ in the place of Hercules, Dionysos and Osiris. Christ too is none other than a mask for the Sun. The priests knew well enough that the real thing is the Sun; but, for the common folk, they needed the story of the Nazarene—Christ Jesus, the Sun of the New Testament, by contrast to Hercules, Dionysos and Osiris, the Suns of the Old Testament.

Truly, a radical destruction of all religious ideas is contained in Dupuis' work, Origine de tous les Cultes.

The general consciousness commonly remains behind,—does not pursue these radical changes. Hence it came that in the 18th century very few people clearly perceived that these thoughts were in the air—if I may use the trite expression. Nevertheless, they left them in the air. Few, no doubt, had the courage to rise to the clear-cut conclusions of Dupuis. But these thoughts were contained in the spiritual consciousness of all educated people. And it was under the pressure of these thoughts that all the theological absurdities of the 18th century developed. The underlying fact is nothing else, than that Dupuis had pointed out to those that were of a like mind:—Just as little as Hercules or Osiris existed as physical and human personalities ; just as they were only Suns, so likewise, Christ never was a physical personality, but a Sun. It was under the pressure of this thought that for the later theologians of the 19th century Christ gradually vanished into thin air. Then they began to take the greatest pains to make the ‘bon Dieu citoyen’ of Nazareth presentable. The liberal Philistines dressed him up as a humane ethical preacher; the Social Democrats as a Social Democrat, and so on ; the psycho-pathologists as a madman or an epileptic. Thus, each one in turn set him forth under the pressure of these thoughts.

Now you may place this beside the other important truth which I have told you, namely that man really dreams historic evolution. Then you will well be able to conceive that thoughts like the above—even where they are not radically expressed—play their part in the dreams of men.

Over against it, as I said, we must now set forth the real historic truth. Look back into the ancient Mysteries—those that had their origin in the 3rd post-Atlantean epoch. Wherever these Mysteries appear, we see that esoteric as well as exoteric truths were represented. What then was esoteric, what was exoteric? This question must be applied especially to those Mysteries whose origin goes back into the 3rd post-Atlantean epoch. Esoteric—in the ancient Mysteries to which I now refer—was all that relates to physical science—to the manipulations, the technique of science. The science of religion was never esoteric in those ancient times; we give ourselves up to an utterly false belief if we imagine that the ideas about God and the Gods were esoteric in those old Mysteries. What they preserved as esoteric were the facts they knew about certain matters which we nowadays investigate in our chemical laboratories and clinics. That which related to outer physical science was in the main kept esoteric. It was this that the esotericists held to be dangerous. Never, in the Mysteries of those ancient times, did they conceive a religious truth to be in any way dangerous. Whatever they represented in matters of religion they expounded quite openly. Not so what we to-day call Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics. The latter were strictly preserved and guarded; they held their hands over these sciences, and were only willing to pursue them in the severely limited circle of those who took on the obligation to keep these truths within the Mysteries. They had to make this promise under very stringent oaths indeed.

Then came a time when the Mysteries changed their policy—albeit only in a certain sense—as regards the teachings over which they held their hand. This is the case in all those Mysteries whose origin mainly goes back into the 4th post-Atlantean epoch (reaching on, therefore, into the 15th century A.D.). During this time, it was the custom in the Mysteries to keep secret not so much physical science, but what we may describe—in a certain aspect—as a kind of symbolic treatment of the mathematical, and indeed, the intellectual sciences generally. I mean for instance all that is connected with such things as circle, triangle and spirit-level—in short, all that is mechanical, mathematical and intellectual knowledge. These things they tried to keep within the walls of certain Brotherhoods, whose members were laid under strict obligation not to betray the truths they there learned about the circle, the triangle, the spirit-level, the plumb-line and so forth. In other respects they gradually grew more lenient. Namely, in keeping esoteric the truths of physical science they grew more lax. These truths gradually penetrated out of the Mysteries, into the general consciousness of the public.

You may object: “What, after all, had the Mysteries of the 3rd post-Atlantean epoch to keep secret? Surely very little! Science was in its swaddling-clothes; there was practically no Chemistry. They knew nothing at all of the great world of facts which has been so gloriously discovered in our time.” Well, if you judge so, you are merely repeating what's usually said to-day. Yet even ordinary outer history should make one hesitate to pronounce such judgments. Having discovered gunpowder as a result of their external science, the Europeans were naturally, nay indeed, justly proud. But it soon emerged that the Chinese had had gunpowder in very ancient times; and, for that matter, the art of printing, and many other inventions. One might adduce numerous instances where the accepted notion on these matters becomes very shaky, to say the least.

The plain truth is that in ancient times (to mention radical matters at once) such principles as that of the airship or of the submarine were known. Only, as forming part of physical science, they were kept strictly secret. They were withheld from the general populace; were not released from the Mysteries. In other words (for it comes to the same thing) the results that could have been attained by such knowledge were not made use of in the general social order.

It is an amateurish idea, for the Mysteries of the 3rd post-Atlantean epoch, not to relate the concept of ‘esoteric’ and ‘exoteric’ to these things, but to imagine that the Mysteries of that time contained within them specially mysterious and hidden truths on matters purely spiritual.

Afterwards, in the Middle Ages, they endeavoured to withhold a certain aspect of mathematical and mechanical knowledge, not letting the people in general gain access to it.

These things had their good meaning and their real value in those olden times. With the approach of modern time they gradually lost their value. As I have often said, the life of the Mysteries cannot be continued in the same way as before. Nay, in the present—the 5th post-Atlantean epoch—it is in many respects no longer even allowable (no longer allowable, I mean, over against the higher spiritual Powers) to keep certain matters quite esoteric. The ‘esoteric’ nowadays would consist in certain psychological truths. In very ancient times it was the physical truths; then it became the intellectual; to-day, as I said, it would be certain psychological truths—truths of the soul-life. These truths, however, are only kept under lock and key nowadays by Brotherhoods such as those of which I told you, when I described the general world-situation of to-day as proceeding from certain dark Brotherhoods, whose origin, you will remember, I characterised last year.

Now the question arises: Why did the old Mystery-priests keep back what we may call physical science? The reason is deeply connected with the evolution of mankind. As I have often pointed out, humanity has indeed undergone an evolution, passing from form to form—from one form to another. The time in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place is, in reality, the greatest transition-time of all Earth-evolution. External history is of course unaware of this fact; indeed, it is ignorant of some of the actual facts connected with this transformation.

In olden times, my dear friends,—especially in the times that went before the Mystery of Golgotha—the human being received quite special forces when he reached the age of 14 or 15, over and above the forces he possessed in earlier childhood. At the 14th or 15th year of life, in those olden times, man received forces which have been lost to mankind since the Mystery of Golgotha. These forces are no longer there; or they are only there in a backward, atavistic manner;—no longer as normal forces of human nature generally.

The forces which the human being thus received when he became about 14 or 15 years old were simply there in his environment inasmuch as he himself was there. Moreover, they were such as could unite with the processes of physical manipulations. When a man to-day combines oxygen and hydrogen—well, he simply combines them, and he gets water. Nothing that flows out from man himself enters into the process. In those ancient times it was very different. Something that flowed out from man did indeed enter into it and became united with it. Man himself partook in the process. Laboratory manipulations became real magic by virtue of these forces which were developed in the human being at the 14th or 15th year of life.

It was for this reason that the Priests of the Mysteries had to keep the outer manipulations secret. For the outer manipulations would have become magical manipulations, simply by virtue of the then prevailing properties of man. Magic would have been spread abroad everywhere; and, needless to say, it would only too easily have become what is called ‘black magic.’ Therefore at that time it was necessary to veil certain truths of physical science in the deepest secrecy. It was necessary, simply on account of the prevailing human nature.

The forces man then received about the 14th or 15th year of life have gradually been lost. It was with the 15th century that they disappeared almost entirely. That is why many things that were written before the 15th century A.D. are no longer intelligible at all to-day, save with the help of Spiritual Science. For in these olden times, the moment a man set to work with any physical manipulations (such as are done nowadays quite commonly in our laboratories),—the moment he did so, he gave occasion for certain Luciferic elemental beings to arise at the same time. At any rate, he could give occasion for this. These Luciferic elemental beings were thoroughly effective; and, if engendered, would have played their part in the social life of men, if these things had not been kept secret.

(Such an epoch as the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century had least of all any idea of the true facts of human evolution. The men of that time had not the vaguest notion. Hence, all that proceeded from their blank ignorance was gathered up in such statements as that Truth knows of no Mysteries, or that all Mysteries belong to the realms of error and deceit.)

Human beings had to be preserved, so to speak, from any immediate knowledge of physical secrets, Moreover, not only had they to be preserved from such physical manipulations as are normally carried out to-day in our laboratories. They also had to be preserved from a purely physical knowledge of Astronomy. Therefore the spiritual counterpart of such knowledge was given out in the form of myths and legends. It was a necessary requirement of the time. But the times have now changed, and greatly so. Mankind to-day is not exposed to those Luciferic elemental spirits of whom we may speak in this connection. But in compensation for this, human beings are exposed all the more strongly to certain Ahrimanic elementals. Ahrimanic elemental spirits come into being to-day with a like necessity, as the aforesaid Luciferic beings did in antiquity. Only they come into being in a very different way—out of quite other forces and impulses in human nature. To-day (I am not merely referring to science, but to the social life, which concerns all people, not only the so-called educated people),—to-day a great number of things are working in social life; things which are simply there because man has acquired purely mechanical, technical, physical, chemical thoughts, and the like;—in a word, because he possesses a certain range of physical science. Man to-day is acquainted with and makes use of machines; moreover, he applies a certain mechanical technique to the financial affairs of the world. He thinks mechanically, the whole world over. Once more, I am not merely referring to the mechanical theory of the universe. (What I now refer to concerns every human being, down to the simplest peasant in the remotest Alpine hut. He, of course, knows nothing of mechanical science; but the medium in which he lives is permeated with such thoughts, and that is the thing that matters. Now just as in antiquity the mechanical, physical, chemical manipulations became mingled with a Luciferic force, so to-day (when they can no longer be held in reserve) they become mingled with Ahrimanic forces. And this is due to a certain specific circumstance. There is a Law, according to which all that proceeds from a mechanical, chemical, physical way of thinking can in a peculiar way be fertilised by that which proceeds from a partial human nature. I refer to the following fact. The thoughts which relate to chemical, physical, mechanical, technical, even financial matters are being thought nowadays by people who are still immersed, for instance, in a national habit of thought. (Other things too come into play in this connection.) Now the thoughts in themselves are incompatible with this; they do not agree with it. Or a man thinks physical, mechanical or chemical thoughts nowadays, in such a way that the brain which is thinking these things is at the same time filled with a national outlook; the national outlook works upon the things which he is thinking, of physical, chemical, mechanical and technical matters; and works so as to fertilise Ahriman. (And by this union of a national mentality with international physical science, Ahrimanic elemental spirits come into being in our environment to-day. For by their nature, such thoughts and manipulations as are contained in modern chemistry, physics, technics, mechanics, even finance and commerce, are only compatible with a non-national way of thinking.

This is a deeply significant secret, which we must know if we would understand the texture of modern life. It lies not in the possibility of the Time to hold these things in check by any other means than by knowledge. The leaders of the ancient Mysteries sought to restrain the corresponding evils by practising secrecy. To-day the very opposite must happen: the evil must be checked and balanced by the widest possible spread of spiritual knowledge,—for spiritual knowledge works in the opposite direction. Humanity, in this respect, has undergone a complete inversion. In the old time, certain matters of physical science had to be held back behind the barriers of the Mysteries. To-day, Spiritual Science must be spread as far and wide as possible. Only by this means can we drive out what works in the direction I have just indicated.

For the most part, humanity to-day has not an inkling of what it means to be nationally-minded on the one hand, while on the other hand one is trying to pursue international physics. These things, however, meet in human nature; they fertilise one another in human nature, and lead to Ahrimanic formations in our time, just as in ancient times they led to Luciferic. Mankind to-day have no other alternative—either they must leave off the pursuit of all that belongs to Physics, Chemistry and the like; or else they must become truly international in their way of thinking.

The people of to-day have as yet no inkling of the existence of such Laws, intimately connected as they are with the general life of mankind. Yet this very truth is beating against the doors of our consciousness at the present moment of evolution, and, for the well-being of this present evolution, it must gain entry. The powers most hostile to human progress are opposing these truths above all,—misleading the people of to-day to lay the most radical stress on the idea of nationality. Such things ought to be pointed out in our time, for they contain the truth; and they, perhaps, alone are able—just because they contain the pure and real truth—to heal humanity from the nonsense that figures in so many heads today. Unbelievable as it may seem, there are still many people who appear capable in our time, both in theory and practice, of not perceiving how the opposing powers of the age have artfully contrived, for instance, to produce the incarnated nonsense, and call it Woodrow Wilson. Not only what I have told you now, but many other things, are connected—essentially connected—with what is thus named and characterised.

He who lets pass through his mind all the religious systems that were right and justified before the Mystery of Golgotha, and recognises them in their real depths, knows that they all had the definite impulse to preserve men from contact with those powers who if they were not combatted would work in the way I have just described. It was one of the cardinal impulses of the old religious systems to preserve man from the harmful effects of the forces that emerged in the fourteenth or fifteenth years of life, in relation to outer physical manipulations. That their action in this respect was justified, the ancient priests of the Mysteries were able to perceive from one definite fact, namely this:—When they were initiated in holy ancient Mysteries and were thus enabled to communicate with the dead, then they discovered the great thankfulness of the human being after death, for such measures as they had taken. The dead proved thankful, above all, for the fact that before their passage through the Gate of Death they had been saved from contact with these forces.

And the analogy exists to-day. He who becomes acquainted with the life of the human soul between death and new birth, knows how thankful the dead are if they were able to be preserved during their life from these extreme aberrations of mankind,—the separatism of groups, the strait-jacketing of men into national groups for example, and the like.

The old religions had to restrain and regulate and give the proper form to certain forces that emerged in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. With the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ-force entered the evolution of mankind. ‘In the Beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and a God was the Logos’:—It is an indication of the Word, the incarnated Logos, who, among all the other impulses, has also the impulse to overcome every separate and special logos—all that arises from human nature into the human larynx, the creator of words, severing men into divided groups over the Earth, even through the creator of words in man.

Just as the old Gods had to overcome those other forces, likewise the Power of the Logos has to overcome the special, separating forces that are connected with the development of the word—that is, with language. To the human beings of that moment who were far more advanced than were the subsequent writers on the Christ-impulse, it was not the mere word that mattered; and when they used a word, they did so with a specific object. Notice, when the writer of St. John's Gospel used the word ‘Word’ itself, when he used this word and no other, he did so with the very aim which I have now described.

These things are intimately connected with the evolution of mankind. The evolution of mankind is calling out to be recognized in its deeper forces. That, once and for all, is the task of our time. We therefore will now study, above all, the things that are connected so significantly with the great and thoroughgoing transformation which was inaugurated for mankind at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and from which in the sequel many other, smaller transformations have ensued.

Yesterday I began to speak to you of the spiritual-scientific strivings of the ninth or tenth century after Christ. We learnt how such strivings were still seriously followed as late as the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries; and I endeavoured to tell you something of the content of these strivings. Today I should like to touch more on their historical aspect. We have to remember that the Mysteries of ancient times were of such a nature and character that in the places of the Mysteries an actual meeting with the Gods was able to take place. I described in the lectures recently given at the Christmas Foundation how the human being who was an Initiate or was about to receive Initiation could verily meet with the Gods. And it was also possible, in the Mysteries, to discover places which by their very locality were expressly fitted and prepared to induce such meeting with the Gods.

The preparation of these centres and the adoption of them as the official places—if I may use so crude an expression—is at the foundation of the impulses for all the older civilisations. Gradually, however, knowledge and understanding of these places disappeared; we may even say that from the time of the fourth century it is no longer to be found in its old form. Here and there we can still find survivals, but the knowledge is no longer so strict and exact. Notwithstanding this, however, Initiation never ceased; it was only the form in which the candidates found their way that changed. I have already indicated how things were in the Middle Ages. I have told you how here and there were individuals, living simple, humble unpretentious lives, who did not gather around them a circle of official pupils in one particular place, but whose pupils were scattered in various directions in accordance with the karma of mankind or the karma of some people or nation. I have described one such instance in what I said about Johannes Tauler in my book Mysticism and Modern Thought. There is no need for me to speak about that here. I should like however to tell you of another typical example, one that had very great influence, lasting from the twelfth and thirteenth on into the fifteenth century. The spiritual streams that were working during these centuries are in large measure to be traced to the events of which I would like now to speak. Let me give you first, as it were, a sketch of the situation.

The time when these events took place is round about the year 1200 A.D. There were at that time a great number of people, especially younger people, who felt within them the urge for higher knowledge, for a union with the spiritual world—one may truthfully say, for a meeting with the Gods. And the whole situation and condition of the times was such that very often it looked as though a man who was searching and striving in this way found his teacher almost by chance. In those days one could not find a teacher by means of books, it could only come about in an entirely personal way. And often it looked from without like a chance happening, although in reality deep connections of destiny were at work in the event. And it was so in the case of the pupil of whom I am now going to tell you.

This pupil found a teacher in a place in Middle Europe through just such an apparently chance event. He met an older man of whom he at once had the feeling: He will be able to lead me farther in that search which is the deepest impulse of my soul. And now let me give you the gist of a conversation between them. I do not of course mean that only one such conversation took place between teacher and pupil, but I am compressing several into one.

The pupil speaks to the teacher and tells him of his earnest desire to be able to see into the spiritual world; but it seems to him as though the nature of man as it is in that time—it is about the twelfth century—does not allow him to penetrate to the spiritual worlds. Nevertheless, he feels that in Nature one has something that is the work, the creation of divine-spiritual Beings. When one looks at what the objects of Nature are in their deeper meaning, when one observes how the processes of Nature take their course, one cannot but recognise that behind these creations stands the working of divine-spiritual Beings. But man cannot come through to these spiritual Beings. The pupil, who was a young man somewhere between 25 and 28 or so, felt strongly and definitely that the humanity of the time, because of the kind of connection of the physical body with the soul, cannot come through, it has hindrances in itself.

The teacher began by putting him to the test. He said to him: You have your eyes, you have your ears: look with your eyes on the things of Nature, hear with your ears what goes on in Nature; the Spiritual reveals itself through colour and through tone, and as you look and listen, you cannot help feeling how it reveals itself in these.

Then the pupil replied: Yes, but when I use my eyes, when I look out into the world, with all its colour, then it is as though my eye stops the colour, as though the colour suddenly turns numb and cold when it reaches the eye. When I listen with my ear to tones, it is as though the sounds turn to stone in my ear; the frozen colours and the dead, hard sounds will not let the spirit of Nature through. And the teacher said: But there is still the Revelation of the religious life. In Religion you are taught how Gods made and fashioned the world, and how the Christ entered into the evolution of time and became Man. What Nature cannot give you, does not Revelation give?

And the pupil said: Revelation does indeed speak powerfully to my heart, but I cannot really comprehend it, I cannot connect what is out there in Nature with what Revelation says to me. It is impossible to bring them into relation with one another. And so, since I do not understand Nature, since Nature reveals nothing to me, neither do I understand the Revelation of Religion.

And the teacher made answer: I understand you well; it is even so. If you must speak thus, if it is with your heart and soul as you say, then you, as you stand in the world today, will not be able to understand either Nature or Revelation: for you live in a body that has undergone the Fall—such was the manner of speaking in those days—and this “fallen” body is not suited to the earthly environment in which you are living. The earthly environment does not afford the conditions for using your senses and your feeling and your understanding in such a way that you may behold in Nature and in Revelation a light, an enlightenment that comes from the Gods. If you are willing, I will lead you away out of the Nature of your earthly environment, which is simply unsuited to your being, I will lead you away from it and give you the opportunity to understand Revelation and Nature better. And the teacher and the pupil discussed together when this should take place.

One day, the teacher led the pupil up a high mountain, whence the surface of the Earth with its trees and flowers could no longer be seen at all—you know how this is so on high mountains—but as the pupil stood there with his teacher he could see below him as it were a sea of cloud, which completely covered the Earth with which he was familiar; up there one was far removed from the affairs of Earth—at all events, the situation suggested this. One looked out into space with its great masses of cloud, and one saw below as it were a sea, a moving, surging sea composed entirely of cloud. Morning mist, and the breath of morning in the air! Then the teacher began to speak to the pupil. He spoke of the wide spaces of the worlds, he spoke of the cosmic distances, of how, when one gazes out into these vastnesses in the night time, one sees the stars shining forth from thence. He told him many things, so that gradually the heart of the pupil, removed as it were far away from the Earth, became wholly given up to Nature and the manner of Nature's existence.

The preparation continued until the pupil came into a mood of soul which may be indicated by the following comparison. It was as though, not for a moment only, but for quite a long time, all that he had ever experienced during his earthly life in this incarnation were something he had dreamed. The scene now spread out before him, the rolling waves of cloud, the wide sea of cloud, with here and there a drift rising up like the crest of a wave; the far spaces of the worlds, broken here and there by rising shapes of cloud—and scarcely even that, for there was no more than a glimpse here and there of cloud forms at the farthest end of space—this whole scene showing so little variation, having so little content in comparison with the manifold variety of all his experiences down below on the surface of the Earth, was now for the pupil like the content of his day-waking consciousness. And everything he had ever experienced on Earth was for him no more than the memory of a dream he had dreamed. Now, now, so it seemed to him, he had woken up. And whilst he continued to grow more and more awake, behold, from a cleft in the rock which he had not hitherto noticed, came forth a boy of 10 or 11 years old. This boy made a strange impression upon him, for he at once recognised in him his own self in the 10th or 11th year of his age. What stood before him was the Spirit of his Youth.

You will easily guess, my dear friends, that to this scene is due one of the impulses that made me introduce into the Mystery Plays the figure of the Spirit of Johannes' Youth. [Footnote: The Soul's Awakening. Scene 6. Four Mystery Plays.] It is the “motif” alone you must think of, certainly not of anything like photography. The Mystery Plays are no occult romances where you have but to find the key, and all is plain!

The pupil stood before the Spirit of his boyhood, his very self. He, with his 15 or 28 years, stood face to face with the Spirit of his youth. And a conversation could take place, guided by the teacher, but in reality taking place between the pupil and his own younger self. Such a conversation has a unique character; you may see that for yourselves in the Mystery Plays, from the style that is there followed. For when a man is face to face with the Spirit of his own youth—and such a thing is always possible—then he gives something of his ripe understanding to the childlike ideas of the Spirit of his youth, and at the same time the Spirit of his youth gives something of his freshness, his childlikeness, to what the man of older years possesses. The meeting becomes fruitful in a spiritual way through the very fact of this mutual interchange. And this conversation had the result that the pupil came to understand Revelation, the Revelation that is given in religion.

The conversation turned especially on Genesis, the beginning of the Old Testament, and on the Christ becoming Man. Under the guidance of the teacher and because of the special kind of fruitfulness that worked in the conversation it ended with the pupil saying these words: “Now I understand what Spirit it is that works in the Revelation. Only when one is transplanted, as it were, far away from the earthly into the heights of the Ether, there to comprehend the Ether-heights with the help of the power of childhood—this power of childhood being projected into the later years of life—only then does one understand Revelation aright. And now I understand wherefore the Gods have given to man Revelation—for the reason that men are not able, in the state in which they are on Earth, to see through the works of Nature and discover behind them the works of the Gods. Therefore did the Gods give them the Revelation which is ordinarily quite incomprehensible in the mature years of life, but which can be understood when childhood becomes real and living in the years of maturity. Thus it is really something abnormal, to understand the Revelation.”

All this made a powerful impression on the pupil. And the impression remained; he could not forget it. The Spirit of his youth vanished. The first phase of the instruction was over. A second had now to come. And the second took its course in the following way.

Once more the teacher led the pupil forth, but this time on a different path. He did not now lead him to a mountain top, but he took him to a mountain where there was a cave, through which they passed to deep, inner clefts, going down as far as the strata of the mines. There the pupil was with the teacher in the deep places of the Earth, not now in the Ether-heights raised high above the Earth, but in the depths, far down below the surface of the Earth.

Once again it was for the consciousness of the pupil as though all that he had ever experienced on Earth went past him like dreams. For he was living down there in an environment in which his consciousness was particularly awakened to perceive his relation with the depths of the Earth. What took place for him was really none other than what lies behind such legends as are told, for example, of the Emperor Barbarossa and his life in Kyffhauser, or of Charles the Great and his life beneath a mountain near Salzburg. It was something of this nature that took place now, if only for a short time: it was a life in the depths of the Earth, far removed from the earthly life of man.

And again the teacher was able, by speaking with the pupil in a special way, to bring to his consciousness the fact—this time—of his union with the Earth-depths. And now there came forth out of a wall an old man, who was less recognisable to the pupil than the Spirit of his Youth, but of whom he nevertheless felt that after many years he would himself become that old man. He knew that there stood before him his own self in future old age. And now followed a similar conversation, this time between the pupil and his own older self—himself as an old man—once more a conversation under the guidance of the teacher.

What resulted from this second conversation was different from what came from the first; for now there began to arise within the pupil a consciousness of his own physical organisation. He felt how his blood flowed, he felt every single vein in his body; he went with it, went with the nerve fibres; he was made aware of all the single organs of his human organisation and the meaning and significance of each for the whole. And he felt too how all that is related to man out in the Cosmos works into him. He felt the inworking of the plant-world, in its blossoming, in its rooting; he felt how the mineral element in the Earth works in the human organism. Down there in the depths he felt the forces of the Earth—how they are organised and how they circulate within his being; he felt them creating there within him, undergoing change, destroying and building substances; he felt the Earth creating, and weaving and being, in man. The result of this conversation was that when the old man, who was himself, had disappeared, the pupil could say: “Now has the Earth, in which I have been incarnated, at last really spoken to me through her beings; now a moment has been mine when I have seen through the things and processes of Nature, seen through them to the work of the Gods that is behind these things and processes of Nature.”

The teacher then led the pupil out again on to the Earth, and as he took leave of him, said: Behold now! The man of today and the Earth of today are so little suited to one another that you must receive the Revelation of Religion from the Spirit of your own Youth, receiving it on the mountain high up above the Earth, and you must receive the Revelation of Nature deep below the Earth, in clefts that are far down below the surface of the Earth. And if you can succeed in illuminating what your soul has felt in the hollow clefts of the Earth, with the light your soul has brought from the mountain, then you will attain unto wisdom.

Such was the path by which a deepening of the soul was brought about in those times—it was about the year 1200 A.D.—this is how the soul became filled with wisdom. The pupil of whom I have told you was thereby brought verily to Initiation, and he now knew what power he must put forth in his soul to arouse to activity the light of the heights and the feeling of the depths. Further instruction was then given him by the teacher, showing him how self-knowledge really always consists in this:—one perceives on the one hand that which lies high above Earth-man, and on the other hand that which lies deep below Earth-man: these two must meet in man's own inner being. Then does man find within his own being the power of God the Creator.

The Initiation that I have described to you is a characteristic example of the Initiations which led afterwards to what we may designate as “mediaeval Mysticism.” It was a mysticism that sought for self-knowledge, but always in order to find in the self the way to the divine. In later times this mysticism became abstract. The concrete union with the external world, as it was given for these pupils who were carried up into the Ether-heights and down into the Earth-depths, was no longer sought for. Consequently there was not the same deep stirring of the soul, nor did the whole experience attain to such a degree of intensity. And yet there was still the search, there was still the inner impulse to seek within for the God, for God the Creator. Fundamentally speaking, all the seeking and striving of Meister Eckhart, of Johannes Tauler and of the later mystics whom I have described in my book Mysticism and Modern Thought owes its impulse to these earlier mediaeval Initiates.

Those who worked faithfully in the sense of such mediaeval forms of Initiation were however very much misunderstood, and it is by no means easy for us to find out what these pupils of the mediaeval Initiates were really like.

It is, as you know, possible to come a considerable distance along the path into the spiritual world. Those who follow thoroughly and actively what is given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment do find the way into the spiritual worlds. Everything that has been physically real in the past is of course only to be found now by way of the spiritual world—therefore also such scenes as I have now described, for there are no material documents that record such scenes. There are however regions of the spiritual world which are hard of access even for a very advanced stage of spiritual power. In order to research into these regions, we must have come to the point of actually having intercourse with the Beings of the spiritual world, in a quite simple, natural way, as we have with men on Earth. When we have attained so far, we shall come to perceive and understand the connection between these Initiates of whom I have told you, and their pupils, e.g., such a pupil as Raimon Lull, who lived from 1235 to 1315 and who, in what history can tell of him, seems to leave us full of doubts and questions.

What you can learn of Raimon Lull by studying historical documents is indeed very scanty. But if you are able to enter into a personal relationship with Raimon Lull—you will allow me to use the expression: perhaps, in the light of all I have been telling you lately, it will not sound so paradoxical to you after all—if you are able to do this, then he shows himself to you as someone quite different from what the historical documents make him out to be. For he shows himself to be pre-eminently a personality who, under the influence and inspiration of the very Initiate of whom I have spoken to you as the “pupil,” made the resolve to use all his power to bring about a renewal in his own time of the Mysteries of the World, of the Logos, as they had been in olden times. He set himself to renew the Mysteries of the Logos by means of that self-knowledge for which so powerful an impulse was working in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The so-called Ars Magna of Raimon Lull is to be adjudged from this point of view. He said to himself: When man speaks, then we really have in speech a microcosm. That which man utters in speech is in truth the whole man, concentrated in the organs of speech; the secret and mystery of each single word is to be sought in the whole human being, and therefore in the world, in the Cosmos.

And so the idea came to Raimon Lull that one must look for the secret of speech first in the human being, by diving down, as it were, from the speech organs into the whole organism of the human being; and then in the Cosmos, for the whole human organism is to be explained and understood out of the Cosmos. Let us suppose, for example, we want to understand the true significance of the sound A (as in “father”). The point is that the sound A, which comes about through the forming and shaping of the outgoing breath, depends on a certain inner attitude of the etheric body, which you can easily learn to know today. Eurhythmy will show it you; for this attitude of the etheric body is carried over in Eurhythmy to the physical body and becomes the Eurhythmic movement for the sound A.

All this was not by any means fully clear to Raimon Lull; with him it was more of a dim, intuitive feeling. He did however get so far as to follow the inner attitude or gesture of the human being out into the Cosmos and say, for example: If you look in the direction of the constellation of the Lion (Leo), and then look in the direction of the Balance (Libra), the connection between the two lines of vision will give you A. Or again, turn your eye in the direction of Saturn. Saturn stops your line of vision, comes in the way. And if Saturn, for example, stands in front of the Ram (Aries), you have, as it were, to go round the Ram with Saturn. And then you have from out of the Cosmos the feeling of O. [Footnote: Readers unfamiliar with the movements in Eurhythmy for the sounds of speech, are recommended to turn to the first three chapters of the book Eurhythmy as Visible Speech (15 lectures) by Rudolf Steiner]

From ideas like these, though dimly perceived, Raimon Lull went on to find certain geometrical figures, the corners and sides of which he named with the letters of the alphabet. And he was quite sure that when one experiences a feeling and impulse to draw lines in the figures—diagonals, for instance, across a pentagon, uniting the five points in different ways—then one has to see in these lines different combinations of sounds, which combinations of sounds express certain secrets of the World-All, of the Cosmos. Thus did Raimon Lull look for a kind of renaissance of the secrets of the Logos, as they were known and spoken of in the Ancient Mysteries. You will find it all quite misrepresented in the historical documents. When however one enters little by little into a personal relationship with Raimon Lull, then one comes to see how in all these efforts he was trying to solve once more the riddle of the Cosmic Word. And it is a fact that the pupils of the mediaeval Initiates continued for several centuries to spend their lives in endeavours of this kind. It was an intensive striving, first to immerse oneself in man, and then to come forth as it were, to rise out of the human being into the secrets of the Cosmos.

Thus did these wise men—for we may truly call them so—seek to unite Revelation with Nature. They believed—and much of their belief was well-founded—that in this way they could come behind the Revelation of Religion and behind the Revelation of Nature. For it was quite clear to them that man, as he is now living on the Earth, was destined and intended to become the Fourth Hierarchy, but that he has “fallen” from his true and proper nature, and become more deeply involved in physical existence than he should be, thereby at the same time losing the power adequately to develop his soul and spirit. It was from such strivings that there arose, later on, what we know as the Rosicrucian Movement.

It was at a place of instruction of the Rosicrucians, of the first, original Rosicrucians, that the scene I have depicted to you today, the scene between the teacher and the pupil, at first upon a high mountain and then down in a deep cleft of the Earth, emerged like a kind of Fata Morgana, came again as it were like a ghost, reflected within a Rosicrucian school as knowledge. And it taught the pupils to recognise how man has by inner effort and striving to attain to two things, if he would come to a true self-knowledge, if he would find again his adjustment to the Earth and be able at last to become in actual reality a member of the Fourth Hierarchy. For within the Rosicrucian School the possibility was given to recognise what it was that had taken place with the pupil when he had seen before him in bodily form the Spirit of his Youth. A loosening of the astral body had taken place; the astral body, that was stronger at that moment than it otherwise ever is in life, was loosened. And in this loosening of the astral body the pupil had come to know the meaning and significance of Revelation. And again, what took place with the pupil in the depths of the Earth was also made clear and comprehensible in the Rosicrucian School. This time the astral body was drawn right back within. It was contracted and drawn together, so that the pupil was able to perceive and apprehend the certainty of man's own inner being.

And now exercises were found within Rosicrucianism, comparatively simple exercises, consisting in symbolic figures, to which one gave oneself up in devotion and meditation. The force and power of which the soul became possessed through devotion to these figures, enabled the students on the one hand to loosen the astral body and become like the pupil on the mountain top in the Ether-heights, and on the other hand, through the compression and contraction of the astral body, to become like the pupil in the clefts of the Earth. And it was then possible, without the help, as before, of external environment, simply through performing a powerful inner exercise, to enter into the inner being of man.

I have given you here a picture of something to which I have made a slight allusion in my preface to the new edition of the book Mysticism and Modern Thought. I said there that what we find in Meister Eckhart, in Johannes Tauler, in Nicolas Cusa, in Valentine Wiegel and the rest, is a late product of a great and mighty striving of mankind, an earlier, original striving that preceded them all. And this earlier striving in the Spirit, this search for self-knowledge, in connection on the one hand with Revelation and on the other hand with the illumination of Nature—I wanted to show you today how this is one of the currents that take their course in the so-called “Dark Ages.”

The man of modern times conjures darkness into the Middle Ages out of his own imagination. In reality there were in those times many enlightened spirits, of such a kind however, that the “enlightened” spirits of today cannot understand their light and consequently remain in the dark.

It is indeed characteristic of modern times, that men take light for darkness and darkness for light. If however we can look into what lies behind the literature of those earlier times and are able to see that of which the literature gives only a dim reflection, then we may receive a powerful and lasting impression.

Something of this I wanted to show you today: tomorrow we will complete the picture.

The Michael period into which the world has been entering ever since the last third of the nineteenth century, and into which human beings will have to enter with increasing consciousness, is very different from former periods of Michael. For so it is in the earthly evolution of mankind. One after another the seven great Archangel Spirits enter from time to time into the life of man. Thus, after given periods of time a certain guidance of the world—such as the guidance of Gabriel or Uriel, Raphael or Michael—is repeated. Our own period is, however, essentially different from the preceding period of Michael. This is due to the fact that man stands in quite another relation to the spiritual world since the first third of the fifteenth century than he ever did before. This new relation to the spiritual world also determines a peculiar relation to the Spirit guiding the destinies of mankind, whom we may call by the ancient name of Michael.

Recently I have been speaking to you again of the Rosicrucian Movement. Rosicrucianism, I remarked, has indeed degenerated to charlatanry in many quarters. Most of that which has been transmitted to mankind under the name is charlatanry. Nevertheless, as I have explained on former occasions, there did exist an individuality whom we may describe by the name of Christian Rosenkreutz. This individuality is, in a sense, the type and standard: he reveals the way in which an enlightened spirit—a man of spiritual knowledge—could enter into relation with the spiritual world at the dawn of the new phase of humanity.

To Christian Rosenkreutz it was vouchsafed to ask many questions, deeply significant riddles of existence, and in quite a new way when compared with the earlier experiences of mankind. You see, while Rosicrucianism was arising, directing the mind of man—with “Faustian” endeavour, as it was sometimes called in later times—towards the spiritual world, an abstract naturalistic science was arising on the other hand. The bearers of this modern stream of spiritual life, men like Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Copernicus or Kepler—worthy as they are of fullest recognition—were differently situated from the Rosicrucians, who wanted to foster, not a merely formal or abstract, but a true knowledge of the world. The Rosicrucians perceived in their own human life and being how utterly the times had changed, and with it the whole relation of the Gods to mankind.

We may describe it as follows.—Quite distinctly until the fourth century A.D., and in a rudimentary way even until the twelfth and thirteenth century, man was able to draw forth from himself real knowledge about the spiritual world. In doing the exercises of the old Mysteries, he could draw forth from himself the secrets of existence. For the humanity of olden times it really was so: the Initiates drew forth, what they had to say to mankind, from the depths of their souls to the surface of their thought—their world of ideas. They had the consciousness that they were drawing forth their knowledge from the inner being of the human soul. The exercises they underwent were intended, as you know, to stir the human heart to its depths, to inform the human heart and mind with experiences which man does not undergo in the ordinary round of life. Thereby the secrets of the world of the Gods were, so to speak, drawn forth from the depths, from the inner being of man.

Man, however, cannot see the secrets he draws out of himself while in the very act of doing so. True, in the old instinctive clairvoyance man did behold the secrets of the world: he beheld them in Imagination; he beheld them hearingly in Inspiration; he united himself with them in Intuition.

These things, however, are impossible so long as man merely stands there alone—just as little as it is possible for me to draw a triangle without a board. The triangle I draw on the board portrays to me what I bear in a purely spiritual way within me. The triangle as a whole—all the laws of the triangle are in me; but I draw the triangle on the board, thereby bringing home to myself what is really there within me. So it is when we make external diagrams. And it is the same when it is a question of deriving real knowledge out of the being of man, after the manner of the ancient Mysteries. This knowledge too must, in a sense, be written somewhere. Every such knowledge, in effect, to be seen in the Spirit, must be inscribed in that which has been called from time immemorial “the astral light,”—i.e., in the fine substantiality of the Akasha. Everything must be written there, and man must be able to develop the faculty of writing in the astral light.

This faculty has depended on many and varied things in the course of human evolution. Not to speak, for the moment, of pristine ages, I will leave on one side the first Post-Atlantean epoch, the ancient Indian. At that time it was somewhat different. Let me begin with the ancient Persian epoch, as described in my Outline of Occult Science. There was in that time instinctive clairvoyance, there was knowledge of the divine-spiritual world. This knowledge could be written in the astral light so that man could behold it, inasmuch as the Earth, the solid Earth, afforded resistance. The writing itself is done, needless to say, with spiritual organs; but these organs also require a basis of resistance. The things that are thus seen in the Spirit are not inscribed, of course, on the Earth itself; they are written into the astral light. But the Earth acts as a ground of resistance. In the old Persian epoch the seers could feel the resistance of the Earth: thereby alone, the perceptions they drew forth from their inner being grew into actual visions.

In the next, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, all the knowledge that the Initiates drew forth from their souls was able to be written in the astral light by virtue of the fluid element. You must conceive it rightly. The Initiate of the old Persian epoch looked to the solid earth. Wherever there were plants or stones, the astral light reflected back to him his inner vision. The Initiate of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch looked into the sea, into the river, or into the falling rain, the rising mist. When he looked into the river or the sea, he saw the secrets that endure. Those secrets, on the other hand, which relate to the transient—to the creation of the Gods in transient things—he beheld in the downpouring rain or the ascending mist. You must familiarise yourself with the idea. The ancients had not the prosaic, matter-of-fact way of seeing the mist and rain which is ours today. Rain and mist said very much to them—revealed to them the secrets of the Gods.

Then in the Graeco-Latin period, the visions were like a Fata Morgana in the air. The Greek saw his Zeus, his Gods, in the astral light; but he had the feeling that the astral light only reflected the Gods to him under the Proper conditions. Hence he assigned his Gods to special places—places where the air could offer the proper resistance to the inscriptions in the astral light. And so it remained until the fourth century A.D. Even among the first Fathers of the Christian Church, and notably the old Greek Fathers, there were many (as you may even prove from their writings) who saw this Fata Morgana of their own spiritual visions through the resistance of the air in the astral light. Thus they had clear knowledge of the fact that out of Man, the Logos, the Divine Word revealed Himself through Nature. But in the course of time this knowledge faded and grew feeble. Echoes of it still continued in a few specially gifted persons, even until the twelfth or thirteenth century. But when the age of abstract knowledge came—when men became entirely dependent on the logical sequence of ideas and the results of sense-observation—then neither earth nor water nor air afforded resistance to the astral light, but only the element of the warmth-ether. It is unknown, of course, to those who are completely wrapped up in their abstract thoughts. They do not know that these abstract thoughts are also written in the astral light. They are written there indeed; but in this process the element of the warmth-ether is the sole resistance.

The following is now the case. Remember once more that in the ancient Persian epoch men had the solid earth as a resistance so as to behold their entries in the astral light. What is thus contained in the astral light—all that, for which the solid earth is the resistance—rays on and out, but only as far as the sphere of the Moon. Farther it cannot go. Thence it rays back again. Thus it remains, so to speak, with the Earth. Man beholds the secrets reflected by virtue of the Earth; they remain because of the pressure of the lunar sphere.

Now let us consider the Egypto-Chaldean epoch. The water on the Earth reflects. What is thus reflected goes as far as the Saturn-sphere. And now it is Saturn that presses for man on Earth to “hold” what he beholds in spirit. And if we go on into Graeco-Latin period—even into the twelfth or thirteenth century—we find the visions inscribed in the astral light by virtue of the air. This time it goes to the very end of the cosmic sphere and thence returns. It is the most fleeting of all; yet still it is such that man remains united with his visions. The Initiates of all these epochs could say to themselves every time: Such spiritual vision as we have had—through earth or water or air—it is there. But when the most modern time arrived, only the element of the warmth-ether was left to offer resistance. And the element of the warmth-ether carries all that is written in it out into the cosmic realms, right out of space into the spiritual worlds. It is no longer there.

It is so indeed, my dear friends. Take the most pedantic of modern professors with his ideas. He must of course have ideas—some of them have none at all—but if he has ideas, then they are entered through the warmth-ether in the astral light. Now the warmth-ether is transient and fleeting; all things become merged and fused in it at once, and go out into cosmic distances. Such a man as Christian Rosenkreutz knew that the Initiates of olden times had lived with their visions. They had fastened and confirmed what they beheld, knowing that it was there, reflected somewhere in the heavens—be it in the Moon sphere or in the planetary sphere, or at the end of the Universe—it was reflected. But now, nothing at all was reflected. For the immediate, wide-awake vision of man, nothing at all was reflected. Now men could find ideas about Nature, the Copernican cosmology could arise, all manner of ideas could be formed, but they were scattered in the warmth-ether, out into cosmic vast.

Then it came about that Christian Rosenkreutz, by inspiration of a higher Spirit, found a way to perceive the reflected radiation after all, in spite of the fact that it was only a reflection by the warmth-ether. It was brought about as follows. Other conditions of consciousness—dim, subconscious and sleep-like—were called into play; conditions in which man is even normally outside his body. Then it became perceptible that that which is discovered with modern abstract ideas is after all inscribed, albeit not in space, but in the spiritual world. This, then, is what we see in the Rosicrucian Movement: the Rosicrucians, as it were in a transition stage, made themselves acquainted with all that could be discovered about Nature in this epoch. They received it into themselves and assimilated it as only man can assimilate it. They enhanced into true Wisdom what for the others was only Science. Holding it in their souls, they tried to pass over into sleep in highest purity and after intimate meditations. Then the divine-spiritual worlds—no longer the spatial end of the Universe, but the divine-spiritual worlds—brought back to them in a spiritually real language what had first been apprehended in abstract ideas.

In Rosicrucian schools, not only was the Copernican cosmology taught, but in special states of consciousness its ideas came back in the form I explained here during the last few days. It was the Rosicrucians, above all, who realised that that which man receives in modern knowledge must first be carried forth, so to speak, and offered to the Gods, that the Gods may translate it into their language and give it back again to men.

The possibility has remained until this present. It is so indeed, my dear friends. If you are touched by the Rosicrucian principle as here intended, study the system of Haeckel, with all its materialism; study it, and at the same time permeate yourselves with the methods of cognition indicated in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. Take what you learn in Haeckel's Anthropogenesis. In that form it may very likely repel you. Learn it nevertheless; learn all that can be learned about it by outer Natural Science, and carry it towards the Gods. You will get what is related about evolution in my Outline of Occult Science.

Such is the connection between the feeble, shadowy knowledge which man can acquire here until his physical body, and that which the Gods can give him, if with the proper spirit he duly prepares himself by the learning of this knowledge. But man must first bring towards Them what he can learn here on the Earth, for in truth the times have changed.

Moreover another thing has happened. Let a man strive as he will today; he can no longer draw anything forth from himself as did the old Initiates. The soul no longer gives anything forth in the way it did for the old Initiates. It all becomes impure, filled with instincts, as is evident in the case of spiritualist mediums, and in other morbid or pathological conditions. All that arises merely from within, becomes impure. The time of such creation from within is past; it was past already in the twelfth or thirteenth century. What happened can be expressed approximately as follows:

The Initiates of the old Persian epoch wrote very much in the astral light with the help of the resistance of the solid earth. When the first Initiate of the old Persian epoch appeared, the whole of the astral light, destined for man, was like an unwritten slate. I shall speak later of the old Indian epoch. Today I shall only go back to the ancient Persian epoch. All Nature: all the elements—solid, liquid, airy, and warmth-like—were an unwritten slate.

Now the Initiates of the old Persian epoch wrote on this slate as much as could be written by virtue of the resistance of the earth. There, to begin with, the secrets destined to come to man from the Gods were written in the astral light. To a certain degree the tablet was inscribed; yet in another respect it was empty. Thus the Initiates of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch were able to continue the writing in their way; for they gained their visions by the resistance of the water.

Then came the Greek Initiates; they inscribed the third portion of the tablet. Now the tablet of Nature is fully inscribed; it was quite fully inscribed by the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Then human beings began to write in the warmth-ether; that, however, scatters and dissolves away in the vast expanse. For a time—until the nineteenth century—men wrote in the warmth-ether; they had no inkling that these experiences of theirs stand written in the astral light. But now, my dear friends, the time has come when men must recognise: not out of themselves in the old sense, can they find the secrets of the world, but only by so preparing themselves in heart and mind that they can read what is written on the tablet which is now full of writing. This we must prepare to do today. We must make ourselves ripe for this—no longer to draw forth from ourselves like the old Initiates, but to be able to read in the astral light all that is written there. If we do so, precisely what we gain from the warmth-ether will work as an inspiration. The Gods come to meet us, and bring to us in its reality what we have acquired by our own efforts here on Earth. And what we thus receive from the warmth-ether reacts in turn on all that stands written on the tablet by virtue of air, water, and earth.

Thus is the Natural Science of today the true basis for spiritual seership. Learn first by Natural Science to know the properties of air, water, and earth. Attain the corresponding inner faculties. Then, as you gaze into the airy, into the watery, into the earthy element, the astral light will stream forth. It does not stream forth like a vague mist or cloud; but so that we can read in it the secrets of world-existence and of human life.

What, then, do we read? We—the humanity of today—read what we ourselves have written in it. For what does it mean to say that the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians wrote in the astral light? It was we ourselves who wrote it in our former lives on Earth.

You see, my dear friends: just as our inner memory of the common things that we experience in earthly life preserves them for us, so too the astral light preserves for us what we have written in it. The astral light is spread around us—a fully written tablet with respect to the secrets which we ourselves have inscribed. There we must read, if we would find the secrets once more. It is a kind of evolution-memory which must arise in mankind. A consciousness must gradually arise that there is such an evolution-memory, and that in relation to former epochs of culture the humanity of today must read in the astral light, just as we, at a later age, read in our own youth through ordinary memory. This must come into the consciousness of men. In this sense I have held the lectures this Christmas-time, so that you could see that the point is to draw forth from the astral light the secrets that we need today. The old Initiation was directed mainly to the subjective life; the new Initiation concentrates on the objective—that is the great difference. For all that was subjective is written in the outer world. All that the Gods have secreted into man ... what they secreted in his sentient body came out in the old Persian epoch; what they secreted in his intellectual or mind-soul came out during the Grecian epoch. The Spiritual soul which we are now to evolve is independent, brings forth nothing more out of itself; it stands over against what is already there. As human beings we must find our humanity again in the astral light.

So then it was with the Rosicrucian Movement: in a time of transition it had to content itself with entering into certain dream-like conditions, and, as it were, dreaming the higher truth of that which Science discovers here—in a dry, matter-of-fact way—out of the Nature around us.

And this is how it has been since the beginning of the Michael epoch, since the end of the 1870's: The same thing that was attained in the way above-described in the time of the old Rosicrucians, can now be attained in a conscious way. Today, therefore, we can say: We no longer need that other condition which was half-conscious. What we need is a state of enhanced consciousness. Then, with the knowledge of Nature which we acquire, we can dive into the higher world; and the Nature-knowledge we have acquired emerges and comes towards us from that higher world. We read again what has been written in the astral light; and as we do so, it emerges and comes to meet us in spiritual reality. We carry up into a spiritual world the knowledge of Nature here attained, or again, the creations of naturalistic art, or the religious sentiments working naturalistically in the soul. (Even religion has become naturalistic nowadays.) And as we carry all this upward—if we develop the necessary faculties—we do indeed encounter Michael.

So we may say: the old Rosicrucian Movement is characterised by the fact that its most illumined spirits had an intense longing to meet Michael; but they could only do so as in dream. Since the end of the last third of the nineteenth century, men can meet Michael in the Spirit, in a fully conscious way.

Michael, however, is a peculiar being: Michael is a being who reveals nothing if we ourselves do not bring Him something from our diligent spiritual work on Earth. Michael is a silent Spirit—silent and reserved. The other ruling Archangels are Spirits who talk much—in a spiritual sense, of course; but Michael is taciturn. He is a Spirit who speaks very little. At most He will give sparing indications, for what we learn from Michael is not really the word, but, if I may so express it—the look, the power, the direction of His gaze.

This is because Michael concerns Himself most of all with that which men create out of the Spirit. He lives with the consequences of all that men have created. The other Spirits live more with the causes; Michael lives with the consequences. The other Spirits kindle in man the impulses for that which he shall do. Michael will be the true spiritual hero of Freedom; He lets men do, and He then takes what becomes of human deeds, receives it and carries it on and out into the Cosmos, to continue in the Cosmos what men themselves cannot yet do with it.

For other beings of the Hierarchy of Archangeloi, we feel that impulses are coming from Them. In a greater or lesser degree, the impulses come from Them. Michael is the Spirit from whom no impulses come, to begin with; for His most characteristic epoch is the one now at hand, when things are to arise out of human freedom. But when man does things out of spiritual activity or inner freedom, consciously or unconsciously kindled by the reading of the astral light, then Michael carries the human earthly deed out into the Cosmos; so it becomes cosmic deed. Michael takes care for the results; the other Spirits care more for the causes.

However, Michael is not only a silent, taciturn Spirit. Michael meets man with a very clear gesture of repulsion, for many things in which the human being of today still lives on Earth. For example, all knowledge that arises as to the life of men or animals or plants, tending to lay stress on inherited characteristics—on all that is inherited in physical nature—is such that we feel Michael constantly repelling it, driving it away with deprecation. He means to show that such knowledge cannot help man at all for the spiritual world. Only what man discovers in the human and animal and plant kingdoms independently of the purely hereditary nature, can be carried up before Michael. Then we receive, not the eloquent gesture of deprecation, but the look of approval which tells us that it is a thought righteously conceived in harmony with cosmic guidance. For this is what we learn increasingly to strive for: as it were to meditate, so as to strike through to the astral light, to see the secrets of existence, and then to come before Michael and receive His approving look which tells us: That is right, in harmony with the cosmic guidance.

So it is with Michael. He also sternly rejects all separating elements, such as the human languages. So long as we only clothe our knowledge in these languages, and do not carry it right up into the thoughts, we cannot come near Michael. Therefore, today in the spiritual world there is a very significant battle. For on the one hand the Michael impulse has entered the evolution of humanity. The Michael impulse is there. But on the other hand, in the evolution of humanity there is much that will not receive this impulse of Michael but wants to reject it. Among the things that would fain reject the impulse of Michael today are the feelings of nationality. They flared up in the nineteenth century and became strong in the twentieth—stronger and stronger. By the principle of nationality many things have been ordered, or rather, have become sadly disordered in the most recent times.

All this is in terrible opposition to the Michael principle; all this contains Ahrimanic forces which strive against the inpouring of the Michael-force into the earthly life of man. So then we see this battle of the upward-attacking Ahrimanic spirits who would like to carry upward what comes through the inherited impulses of nationality—which Michael sternly rejects and repels.

Truly today there is the most vivid spiritual conflict in this direction. For this is the state of affairs over a great portion of mankind. Thoughts are not there at all; men only think in words, and to think in words is no way to Michael. We only come to Michael when we get through the words to real inner experiences of the Spirit—when we do not hang on the words, but arrive at real inner experiences of the Spirit.

This is the very essence, the secret of modern Initiation: to get beyond the words, to a living experience of the Spiritual. It is nothing contrary to a feeling for the beauty of language. Precisely when we no longer think in language, we begin to feel it. As a true element of feeling, it begins to live in us and flow outward from us. This is the experience to which the man of today must aspire. Perhaps, to begin with, he cannot attain it for speech, but through writing. For in respect of writing, too, it must be said: Today men do not have the writing but the writing has them. What does it mean, “the writing has them”? It means that in our wrist, in our hand, we have a certain train of writing. We write mechanically, out of the hand. This is a thing that fetters man. He only becomes unfettered when he writes as he paints or draws—when every letter beside the next becomes a thing that is painted or drawn ...

Then there is no longer what is ordinarily called “a handwriting.” Man draws the form of the letter. His relation to the letter is objective; he sees it before him—that is the essential thing.

For this reason, strange as it may sound, in certain Rosicrucian schools learning-to-write was prohibited, even until the fourteenth or fifteenth century; so that the form, the mechanism which comes to expression in writing, did not enter the human being's organism. Man only approached the form of the letter when his spiritual vision was developed. Then it was so arranged that simultaneously with his learning of the conventional letters, needed for human intercourse, he had to learn others—specifically Rosicrucian letters—which are supposed to have been a secret script. They were not intended as such; the idea was that for an A one should learn at the same time another sign: 8. For then, one did not hold fast to the one sign but got free of it. Then one felt the real A as something higher than the mere sign of A or 8. Otherwise, the mere letter A would be identified with that which comes forth from the human being, soaring and hovering as the living sound of it.

With Rosicrucianism many things found their way into the people. For it was one of their fundamental principles:—from the small circles in which they were united, the Rosicrucians went out into the world, as I have already told you, generally working as doctors. But at the same time, while they were doctors, they spread knowledge of many things in the wide circles into which they came. Moreover, with such knowledge, certain moods and feelings were spread. We find them everywhere, wherever the Rosicrucian stream has left its traces. Sometimes they even assume grotesque forms. For instance, out of such moods and feelings of soul, men came to regard the whole of this modern relationship to writing—and a fortiori, to printing—as a black art. For in truth, nothing hinders one more from reading in the astral light than ordinary writing. This artificial fixing hinders one very much from reading in the astral light. One must always first overcome this writing when one wants to read in the astral light.

At this point two things come together, one of which I mentioned a short while ago. In the production of spiritual knowledge man must always be present with full inner activity. I confess that I have many note-books in which I write or put down the results I come to. I generally do not look at them again. Only, by calling into activity not only the head but the whole man, these perceptions which do indeed take hold of the entire man come forth. He who does so, by and by accustoms himself not to care so much for what he sees physically, what is already fixed; but to remain in the activity, in order not to spoil his faculty of seeing in the astral light. It is good to practise this reticence. As far as possible, when fixing things in ordinary writing, one should adhere not to writing as such, but draw the letters and re-draw them after one's pleasure (for then it is as though you were painting, it becomes an art). Thus one acquires the faculty not to spoil the impressions in the astral light.

If we are obliged to relate ourselves to writing in the modern way, we mar our spiritual progress. For this reason, in the Waldorf School educational method, great care is taken that the human being does not go so far in writing as in the profane educational methods of today. Care is taken to enable him to remain within the Spiritual, for that is necessary.

The world must receive once more the principle of Initiation as such among the principles of civilisation. Only thereby will it come about that man, here on the Earth, will gather in his soul something with which he can go before Michael, so as to meet Michael's approving look, the look that says: “That is right, cosmically right.” Thereby the will is fastened and made firm, and the human being is incorporated in the spiritual Progress of the Universe. Thereby, man himself becomes a co-operator in that which is about to be instilled into the evolution of mankind on Earth by Michael—beginning now in this present epoch of Michael.

Many, many things must be taken into account if man wishes rightly to cross that abyss of which I spoke yesterday, where in truth a Guardian is standing. We shall show in the next lectures how the abyss opened out in the 1840's, and how man today, as he looks back, can find his true relation to this abyss and to this Guardian—helped by such detailed knowledge as I have once again been trying to present.