The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Anyone knowing Benedetto Croce's Aesthetic as Science of Expression will look forward with eager anticipation to the study on Goethe by this distinguished man, published first in 1918 and available since 1920 in the delightful German rendering by Julius Schlosser.¹

The perusal of this book may perhaps be described as an experience of a dramatic nature. We pass from the Author's Preface through the chapters on 'Moral and Intellectual Life' and 'The Life of the Poet and Artist,' and come to the description of Werther. Throughout this portion of the book we are filled with expectation. Every page seems fraught with the promise: there will arise before us a highly individual and attractive picture of Goethe, conceived with open-hearted sympathy, portrayed with artistic skill.

The opening words already raise our hopes:—'During the sad days of the world war I re-read Goethe's works and gained deeper consolation and greater courage from him than I could have gained perhaps in equal measure from any other poet. This inspired me with a desire to write down certain critical ideas which suggested themselves again during my reading of his works and which had always led me to a true understanding of them.'

Croce would like to enter into Goethe without that heavy burden with which, alas, inartistic learning has so long encumbered him. How few among our Goethe students seem to be aware that he too has the right to be seen in the picture which emerges from his Works—from the real gift of his spirit to the world. In the prevailing Goethe literature the Works are too often eclipsed behind the Life, with all the mass of biographical detail which is available in his case. In this matter Croce preserves his clarity of vision. 'He who said that if Goethe had not been a great poet in verse, he would yet have been a great artist in life, made a statement which cannot be defended in the strict sense of the word, as it is impossible to imagine the life he lived without the poetry which he produced.' Croce recognises that in Goethe above all the Work of the poet and his Life must be seen as one; for Goethe himself incessantly brings life and freshness, from a deep self-observation, to his great vision of the World. 'Nevertheless,' continues Croce, 'the author of the statement has traced in a rather picturesque manner the relation of Goethe's life to his poetry, a relation which is like that of a whole to one of its parts, a very conspicuous part. For is it not true that the greater number of volumes of Goethe's works (even omitting his letters and his "conversations ") consist of reminiscences, annals, diaries, accounts of his travels, and that several other volumes contain autobiographical matter interspersed or concealed, to which critics are still endeavouring to discover the keys?'

By the splendid clearness with which he sees this twofold aspect, Croce is enabled to place the picture of Goethe in such a light that we feel at first: Here we have Goethe's position in the history of culture most pregnantly expressed. 'His own biography, together with his works, offer us a complete and classic course in noble humanity, per exempla et praecepta. It is a treasure which in these days deserves to be used to a much greater extent by educators, and by those who would educate themselves.'

Croce would eliminate from his portrait of Goethe the 'wildness of genius' which is read into him by the fertile imaginations of some people.

For they, wishing to 'live' as they conceive it, scorn the 'banality' of real life—which, as it happens, cannot be without gravity and earnestness. '… the personality of Wolfgang Goethe consists of calm virtue, earnest goodness and justice, wisdom, balance, good sense, sanity, and, in a word, all those qualities which are generally laughed at as being "bourgeois." . . . He was deep but not "abysmal," as some critics of to-day would wish to consider him. He was a man of genius, but not diabolical.'

The fulness of an all-round human nature, to which Goethe in his whole life and work inclined, is powerfully stressed by Croce:—'And what, in substance, did he teach? To be above all, whatever else one may be, thoroughly and wholly human, ever working with all one's faculties in harmony, never separating feeling and thought, never working on externals or as a pedant; a task which, in the turbulent years of youth and fascinated by eccentric minds like Hamann, Goethe may have conceived in a somewhat material or fanciful sense, but which he immediately deepened, and therefore made clearer and corrected, rendering concrete its mystical and ineffable totality by determining it more closely.'

Goethe in Croce's description comes before us as the man who would educate himself 'not to desire and to dream, but to will and to act.' And as Goethe stands before him in this light, Croce is able to place Werther, in a masterly way, both in relation to Art and Life. The life which Werther lives is far removed from that of the poet who creates him. Werther is ill. Goethe feels how possible it is for the Werther illness to take hold on life. For him it becomes a question of feeling the illness truly, and of truly describing it. It is as a healthy man that he undertakes the task. Croce calls Werther, in relation to Goethe's own state of soul, 'a vaccination fever rather than a real malady.' With clear discrimination Goethe's own inner condition is removed from all that drives Werther into the calamity. 'This explains the childishness which makes us smile and almost feel embarrassed when we read the account of, and the documents concerning, the relations of young Goethe with Charlotte Buff and with her betrothed and husband, excellent, patient Kestner. These are matters which biographers and anecdote-writers have in truth emphasized in much too gossiping a fashion, usually misunderstanding their psychological meaning and yielding to the bad advice of immersing again and drowning the work of art in biographical material, by exaggerating and perverting the legitimate ethical interest which Goethe's person arouses. . .

In Croce's eyes the creation of Werther takes place in Goethe's life as an artistic, ethical catharsis. Goethe wished to make the Werther fever an inner artistic experience, so that he might by this very means thoroughly cure himself of all attacks. 'Werther—"unhappy Werther"—was not an ideal for the poet as he was for his contemporaries. Goethe immortalises in Werther neither the right to passion nor nature versus society, nor suicide, nor the other ideas we have just mentioned; that is to say, he does not depict them as mental conditions which, at that moment, predominate in him. But he depicts the "sorrows," as the title expresses it, the sufferings and, finally, the death of young Werther; and just because he looks upon Werther's fate as sorrow, barren sorrow, and its unfolding calculated to lead not to the joy and delight of feeling oneself superior to and rising high above others, but to self-destruction, the book is a liberation or a catharsis…'

Unlike so many others, Croce will not see in Werther 'a sublime legend of love.' On the contrary, to him it is 'a book of malady,' and the Werther way of loving is 'an aspect or an acute manifestation of the malady.' When his mother and his friends urge him to bestir himself and take up fruitful work, Werther replies, 'But am I too not active now? And after all is it not all the same whether I count peas or lentils?' It is the answer of a man given to 'idling, day-dreaming, nay to passionate raving.' Goethe—as Croce very properly remarks—confronts this 'hero' of his book, not as one having ought in common with him, but as a calm and clear observer seeking the cure for a disease. Werther is 'the work of one who knows, of one who understands, and who, without being Werther, discerns Werther completely, and, without raving with him, feels his heart throb with his.'

When we have read thus far in Croce's book, our experience in thought has been not unlike the opening of a drama. With anticipation growing more tense from page to page, we ask ourselves, what will the author eventually have to say on Goethe?

Then comes the chapter 'Wagner the Pedant'—a real surprise, quite in keeping with the quality of drama. For Croce comes forward with a kind of vindication of Wagner's character in Faust. It is as though he had been annoyed once too often by the literary pedants who mock at Wagner in the words of Faust, and feel themselves, no doubt, with quite a touch of genius, nay of the Faust-nature, as they do so. Against these pedants wearing the mask of 'the Free,' Croce comes out with a kind of apologia for Wagner. 'I confess that I cherish a certain tender feeling for Wagner, the famulus, Dr. Faust's assistant. I like his sincere and boundless faith in knowledge, his honest ideal of a serious student, his simple straightforwardness, his unaffected modesty, the reverence which he shews … towards his great master.'

Indeed, a strange antithesis shines through in Croce's description. Faust with his whims and worries, his fancies, his indeterminate spiritual longing, seems like a half-unsteady dreamer and complainer beside the sterling Wagner who steers straight forward to the certain goal of his scholarship. And a curious touch of thought suggests itself to Croce:—'Be careful what you do, when you resolve to take a wife: lest, if you do not happen to choose one of those timid silent creatures, such as Jean Paul frequently places beside his erudite maniacs, but there fall to your lot as a companion a Faust in petticoats, a female Titan, a Valkyrie, you receive no longer merely biting philosophical lashes, but find yourself the object (and this you hardly deserve) of aversion, hatred and nausea…'

Croce does not wish the tenderly loved Wagner so terrible a fate. 'For Wagner's ideal is neither more nor less than the humanistic ideal … the admiring study of ancient histories in order to deduce from them prudential maxims and rules, … and the search for the laws of Nature in order to turn them to social utility.'

Is this 'vindication' of Wagner no more than a dramatic interlude; will it but serve to reveal Goethe's Faust in his real greatness?—The reader feels impelled to ask the question. Great is the tension at this point.

The thickening of the plot—and the catastrophe—these I would describe in the next number.

• 1. English Version: Goethe, by Benedetto Croce, with an Introduction by Douglas Ainslie, Methuen, 1923.—The passages which we take from this translation do not always convey quite the same shade of thought as in the rendering from which Dr. Steiner quotes.

The Goetheanum, as a finished structure in all its beauty, was able to speak its message to humanity only for a few short years. The full wonder of it was revealed to but a small group of people, although day in and day out crowds of eager sight-seers wound up the hill, there to open their hearts to the breath of the Spirit, in curiosity, wonder, admiration, emotion, and—richer by yet another longing—once again to wend their way back to the world of banality. For a short span of time certain human souls had gazed at wonderland, had been raised above themselves, while others were seized by the forces of hatred and anger. Nobody was left indifferent. To those, however, who had learnt to understand the language of the forms, who had actually moulded them from the substance of wood with all its earthly solidity and at the same time ethereal flexibility—to those and to their companions in this work of regeneration, were revealed ever deeper, ever vaster world-connections under the mighty sweep of the architraves, between the capitals and plinths of the columns, whose motifs stood out with sudden boldness and novelty in the process of metamorphosis. There they wound, in and out each other, striving organically from primordial simplicity to complexity of form, and then back in a decrescendo to an inwardly deepened simplicity.

It was an architecture that developed onwards like a symphony, flowing into harmony—an architecture condensed into earthly substance from ethereal worlds, sending forth into space formative forces which were bound to take hold of the creative impulses of man and transmute them. The proportions of this architecture rendered it a dream in wood, too fair to endure, too pure not to be hated to its destruction, yet strong enough to call the new, of like nature with itself, into being.

Life, new and growing, is the Spirit's answer to the stab of death. Life, rich and abundant, is coming to flower around the urn where rest the ashes of Rudolf Steiner and round the new Building arising from the ashes of the old. The wide-flung sparks from the burning brand of the Dornach Sylvester night are becoming a spirit-seed, and those flames will be changed into spiritual life. However feeble our deeds may be, there lies, none the less, in the accomplished work of what has passed away, the Future that rescues mankind from a second death.

Therefore I have ventured to publish these lectures wherein Rudolf Steiner led us to the precincts where his spirit unfolded its creative Art, the while we worked with him in the newly built worksheds of the future Goetheanum. In the evenings we used to encamp ourselves among the planks in the great shed where the gigantic columns were put together, among the machines that shortly before had been ceaselessly working and now had come to momentary rest. There we listened to his words—words which opened up for us in all their inexhaustible fulness, new regions of his spirit, new depths of his being. We hardly dared realise that it was actually our destiny to be able to live among it all. And indeed, near Rudolf Steiner, there was no opportunity for self-indulgence. Time did not permit it nor did the ethereal intensity of his personality, which demanded, by dint of perpetual example, a ceaseless moving from one task to another. The soul had perforce to brace itself to receive the greatness and intensity of that mighty inrushing stream of the Spirit. And indeed if it had not been for the unending kindness and gentleness of one who was ever giving and creating, the soul, without having the power to assimilate all this wealth, could scarcely have endured the strain. Only if the soul were willing to accept this as a necessary sacrifice in the service of man, could it rise above the sheer intensity of the torrent—and then its power was borne as if on wings.

The work on the growing building demanded the constant presence of Rudolf Steiner, and so the earlier life of ceaseless journeys in the service of Spiritual Science was temporarily discontinued. With the erection of the building an abundance of new tasks fell upon him, tasks that he gratefully and willingly took upon himself, though only after repeated requests and urgings that were proof against all discouragement, from friends in Munich who had seen the Mystery Plays there and wanted to build a hall for them. When the building plans were rejected in Munich the pleadings continued, with the same insistence, that they should be carried through in Switzerland. This entailed many burdens for Rudolf Steiner, but his heart was full of gratitude and this gratitude and feeling of responsibility streamed with warmth and inwardness through all the words which stimulated us to work and to understand.

Listening to his words, which led us into new depths of being, we learned to know how in art man becomes one with divine creative power, if this, and not imitation, is the source of his own creative activity; we learned how the Divine-spiritual lives and moves within man as abundance of power if he becomes conscious of his connection with the universe. By giving form and mould to what lives in cosmic laws, by dint of inner penetration of spiritual connections, man creates art that is born from the depths of the universe and his own being. This is no mere hearkening to the secrets of nature; it is a fathoming of the hidden spirituality active behind nature. A fiery power thrilled through Rudolf Steiner's words and gave us life. We were able to feel how ancient civilisations had arisen out of these impelling forces of art and how in our spiritless age of disenchantment, degeneracy and barreness, the same possibilities are once again offered, at a higher stage, at the stage of conscious knowledge. A fire of enthusiasm thrilled through us and gave our artists strength to work, year in and year out, with chisel and mallet at the wood, with diamond drill at the glass of the windows, each of a single colour and shining only in different colours at their different positions in the Building. Both inside and outside, the Building stood there as a masterpiece of art created by a human hand; the relief-modelling of its inner surfaces might well be an organ for the speech of the Gods; its windows showed in the coloured shades of their designs the way to the Spirit, the stations along the path to the spiritual world. Those walls that became living through the movement in the forms, those light effects that were charmed into the windows by the thickness or thinness of the glass surfaces, called to the soul, now also stirred to action, to tread the path to regions whose speech flowed through the ethereal forms in the wood, through the windows which linked the outer and inner worlds together in a music of spiritual harmony.

All earlier buildings pointed to a connection with the earth, they rested within the earthly forces; here the walls were living, inducing exaltation and deepening alike, portraying an onward flowing evolution.

“Thus, O Man, thou findest the way to the Spirit!”—This was what spoke from the forms and windows of the Goetheanum. Gothic architecture contained the prayer: “O Father of the Universe, may we be united with Thee in Thy Spirit.” The hidden Spirit permeating man makes him able to experience the world in forms and movements which to-day confront us like riddles. Rudolf Steiner expresses the thought of the new art of architecture in these words: “We enter with reverence into the Spirit, in order that we may become one with the Spirit which pours out around us in the forms and enters into movement—for behind the Spirits of Form stand the Spirits of Movement.”

To-day, the inner, living growth of man's being would fain come to expression in a building art which in ancient Greece created the dwelling place of the God, and in Gothic times the house of the community in prayer.

The lectures in which Rudolf Steiner thus spoke to us of the new style of architecture, of the art of relief and of the nature of colour, are only available in imperfect, incomplete transcriptions. Sketches made at the time are in many cases missing, as well as quotations which after this long lapse of time can no longer be found when a name had by chance escaped the stenographer. Yet so great is the abundance of the revelations, both in a spiritual and artistic sense, that I feel it my duty to make them accessible to the world. The series of these lectures was broken by the World War, to which the sorrowful utterances of the last lecture point as if prophetically. One after another our artists were called away to the scene of war. With very few exceptions, there remained only those men who belonged to neutral countries, and the women. In the early days of the war, Rudolf Steiner gave us a First Aid Course. For four years we heard the cannons thundering in neighbouring Alsace and they were the terrible daily accompaniment to the beats of the hammer in a work of peace and human brotherhood. Rudolf Steiner's constant thought and heart-rending care during this time was the bringing to pass of peace, of an understanding for its necessity, but his warning voice was unheard. In spite of the deep sorrow into which the tragedy of world happenings plunged him, the words he spoke to those who were working at the Building were as full of light and as kindly as the doors he moulded, as the staircase that called out its welcome to those who entered, crying to them to be fully Man in the service of the radiant, sun-lit power of the Spirit.

In order to give an impression of these stairways, these doors and relief motifs, a series of photographs has been added to the lectures. The first shows the Goetheanum with its double domes in the blossoming time of the Jura countryside. This interpenetration of the two unequal sized domes called forth the astonished admiration of architects and engineers. It was a mathematical problem which they felt themselves wholly unable to solve. A well-known architect from California, who lad constructed many great public buildings there, could not say enough in admiring appreciation: “The man who has solved this problem is a mathematical genius of the highest order. He is a master of mathematics, a master of our science: from him we architects have to learn. The man who built this has conquered the heights because he is master of the depths.”

Here too, as in other spheres, experts recognised their master in Rudolf Steiner.

MARIE STEINER.
Dornach, April 1926.

[ 1 ] Among the manifold streams in the spiritual life of mankind, there is one we can follow which may be described as the overcoming of the concept of purpose in realms where it does not belong. Purposefulness has its own particular nature within the sequence of phenomena. It is a truly real purposefulness only when, in contract to the relationship of cause and effect where a preceding event determines a later one, the reverse applies and a subsequent event affects and determines an earlier one. This happens, to begin with, only in the case of human actions. A person carries out an action, which he pictures to himself beforehand, and lets himself be moved to his action by this mental picture. What comes later, the action, works with the help of the mental picture upon what comes earlier, the person who acts. This detour through mental picturing is, however, altogether necessary in order for a connection to be purposeful.

[ 2 ] In the process which breaks down into cause and effect, the perception is to be distinguished from the concept. The perception of the cause precedes the perception of the effect; cause and effect would simply remain side by side within our consciousness if we were not able to connect them with each other through their corresponding concepts. The perception of the effect can only follow upon the perception of its cause. If the effect is to have a real influence upon the cause, then this can only be through the conceptual factor. For the perceptual factor of the effect is simply not present at all before that of the cause. Whoever maintains that the blossom is the purpose of the root, which means the former has an influence upon the latter, can maintain this only about that factor of the blossom which he can establish through his thinking. The perceptual factor of the blossom has as yet no existence at the time when the root comes into being. For there to be a purposeful connection, however, not merely the ideal lawful connection of the later with the earlier is necessary, but also the concept (the law) of the effect must really, through a perceptible process, influence the cause. A perceptible influence of a concept upon something else, however, we can observe only in human actions. Here alone, therefore, is the concept of purpose applicable. The naive consciousness, which accepts as real only what is perceptible, seeks—as we have repeatedly noted—to transfer something perceptible even into an area where only something ideal is to be known. Within perceptible happenings it seeks perceptible connections, or, if it cannot find such, it dreams them up. The concept of purpose valid for subjective actions is an element which lends itself to such dreamed-up connections. The naive person knows how this makes something happen and concludes from this that nature will do it in the same way. Within the purely ideal interconnections of nature he sees not only invisible forces, but also unperceivable real purposes. Man makes his tools to suit his purposes; the naive realist has the Creator build organisms by this same formula. Only quite gradually is this incorrect concept of purpose disappearing from the sciences. In philosophy, even today, it is still up to its mischief in a very harmful way. There people ask about the purpose, outside the world, of the world, about the determinants (and consequently, about the purpose), outside man, of man, and so on.

[ 3 ] Monism rejects the concept of purpose in all areas with the sole exception of human action. It seeks laws of nature, but not purposes of nature. Purposes of nature are arbitrary assumptions just as unperceivable forces are (see page 109f). But also purposes of life which man does not give himself, are unjustified assumptions from the standpoint of monism. Only that is purposeful which man has first made to be so, for only through the realization of an idea does purposefulness rise. The idea however, becomes operative in the realistic sense only within man. Therefore human life has only the purpose and determination which man gives to it. To the question: What kind of task does man have in life?, monism can only answer: the one which he sets himself. My mission in the world is no predetermined one, but rather it is, at any given moment, the one I choose for myself. I do not enter upon my life's path with fixed marching orders.

[ 4 ] Ideas are realized purposefully only through human beings. It is therefore inadmissible to speak of history as the embodiment of ideas. All such expressions as: “History is the development of man toward freedom,” or the realization of the moral world order, and so on, are untenable from the monistic point of view.

[ 5 ] The adherents of the concept of purpose believe that to give up purpose, they would have to give up all order and unity in the world at this time. Listen, for example, to Robert Hamerling (Atomistic Theory of the Will)¹ “As long as there are drives in nature, it is foolishness to deny purposes in nature.”

[ 6 ] “Just as the form of a limb of the human body is not determined and controlled by an idea of this limb that is hovering somewhere in the air, but rather by its connection with the greater whole, with the body to which the limb belongs, so the form of every being of nature, whether plant, animal, man, is not determined and controlled by an idea of the same hovering in the air, but rather by the formal principle of the greater whole of nature which purposefully expresses itself and gives shape to everything.” And on page 191 of the same volume: “The theory of purpose maintains only that, in spite of the thousand discomforts and sufferings of our creaturely existence, a lofty purposefulness and plan are unmistakably present within the forms and developments of nature—a plan and purposefulness, however, which realize themselves only within the laws of nature, and which cannot aim for some fool's paradise where no death confronts life, and no decay with all its more or less unpleasing but simply unavoidable intermediary stages, confronts growth.”

[ 7 ] “When the opponents of the concept of purpose bring a small, laboriously collected rubbish heap of partial or complete, imaginary or real examples showing lack of purpose, against a world full of wonders of purpose such as nature shows in all its realms, then I just find that ludicrous.”

[ 8 ] What is here called purposefulness? A harmonizing of perceptions into a whole. Since, however, underlying of perceptions, there are laws (ideas), which we find through our thinking, so the systematic harmonizing of the parts of a perceptual whole is, in fact, the ideal harmonizing of the parts of an ideal whole contained within this perceptual whole. The notion that the animal or the human being is not determined by an idea hovering somewhere in the air, is all askew, and when it is set right, the condemned view automatically loses its absurd character. The animal is, to be sure, not determined by an idea hovering somewhere in the air, but is very much determined by an idea which is inborn and which constitutes the lawful nature of its being. Precisely because the idea is not outside the thing, but rather works within it as its very being, one cannot speak of purposefulness. Precisely the person who denies that a being of nature is determined from outside (whether by an idea hovering somewhere in the air, or by an idea existing outside the creature in the mind of a world-creator, makes no difference at all in this connection_ must admit that this being is not determined purposefully and according to plan from outside, but rather causally and lawfully from within. I construct a machine purposefully when I bring its parts into a relationship which they do not have by nature. The purposefulness of the arrangement consists then in the fact that I have incorporated the machine's way of working into it as its idea. The machine has become thereby an object of perception with a corresponding idea. The beings of nature are such entities as well. Whoever calls a thing purposeful because it is lawfully formed should then apply this term also to the beings of nature. But this lawfulness should not be confused with that of subjective human actions. For purpose, it is in fact altogether necessary that the cause which is at work be a concept, and indeed the concept of the effect. In nature, however, concepts as causes are nowhere to be found; the concept always shows itself only as the ideal connection of cause and effect. Causes are present in nature only in the form of perceptions.

[ 9 ] Dualism can talk about purposes of the world and of nature. Where a lawful joining of cause and effect appears to our perception, there the dualist can assume that we are only seeing the copy of a relationship within which the absolute world being realizes his purposes. For monism, with the falling away of the absolute world being who cannot be experienced but is only hypothetically inferred, there also falls away any reason for ascribing purpose to the world and to nature.

Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918

[ 10 ] If one thinks through without prejudice what has been set forth here, one could not conclude that the author, in his rejection of the concept of purpose outside the human domain, stands on the same ground as those thinkers who, by throwing out this concept, create the possibility of grasping everything which lies outside human actions—and then these also—as only a happening of nature. The fact that in the book the thought process is represented as a purely spiritual one should guard against any such conclusion. When here the thought of purpose is also rejected for the spiritual world lying outside of human actions, then this is done because in that world something higher than the purpose which realizes itself within humanity comes to manifestation. And when a purposeful destiny of the human race, thought up along the lines of human purposefulness, is spoken of as an erroneous idea, then by this is meant that the individual person gives himself purposes and out of these the result of the total activity of mankind is composed. This result is then something higher than its parts, the purposes of men.

• 1. Atomistik des Willens

What we have to understand exactly are the relationships between the concepts of existence, life and conscious awareness. What are they seen to be in mystic terms? Let us think of a child learning to write and of all the situations connected with the process, each on its own—the teacher, materials put ready in preparation, with the child not present. If we think of this as the first thing which is part of writing, we have the first aspect of existence. Now [let us consider] on their own all the activities, the movements of the hand which the child learns—life seen separate from existence. We then leave the first and second aspects aside and take the one we have when the child has finished with those activities. All we consider now is what has given the child the power to write—conscious awareness. We always have the three aspects of existence, life and conscious awareness.

Let us define these terms exactly, for wrong ideas tend to creep in when people speak of existence (form), life and conscious awareness in theosophy. It is a matter of existence interacting with life, resulting in conscious awareness. Let us now apply the terms we found in yesterday’s lesson [evolution, involution]. If we look at the interaction between existence and life, we find that existence merges into life, life takes it into itself. Anything of a life taken into existence in this way veils itself in involution again, merging into conscious awareness. We are thus able to say that any conscious awareness is evolution of life and existence which are in involution. If we are able to investigate a conscious mind we ask: What kind of life is in involution in this conscious awareness, and what kind of existence in this life?

Let us now take our conscious awareness, the awareness we have now—self-awareness. If we investigate it we will characterize it the way I tried to do in the book [Theosophy], taking up Jean Paul’s thought: self-awareness is—I am I.⁹¹

Let us now look for anything which is in involution in this. The life of this conscious awareness must be in involution. This conscious awareness, which is now self-awareness, must earlier on have been a life in awareness, and this life in awareness is in involution in there. If we leave aside the ‘I am I’—the ‘I’, then this conscious mind is not saying: ‘I’ [am conscious mind] but ‘I am life.’ The conscious mind has only evolved from it. Being at the level of self-awareness we have aware conscious awareness and not living awareness. Before, we had the extant conscious awareness: I am existence.

Let us do a proper translation of this.

‘I am the I’ is easy to translate: the given situation which the human being experiences.

‘I am life’ is something where we need to take a closer look. Doing so we’ll find that we go beyond the mere ‘I’ to the foundation and have to ask ourselves how ‘I am life’ has developed. There must be interaction between existence and life. Existence is in involution within life. If we consider this, we get a concept of the human being himself, for it is the human being before he became I who lives in the concept ‘I am life’. ‘Human’ is general, ‘I’ specific. The human being is in involution within the I, it comes to evolution in the ‘I’. Uttering the words at this lower level [‘I am life’], we have to say: ‘I am a human being’. When we say these words we bring out from the most inward part what has been woven into it in an occult way, and understand what we no longer are but once have been and what is contained in us in a state of involution.

Third statement: ‘I am existence’. Taking this, we must be clear in our minds that this is a sum of external circumstances which have now slipped wholly into the inside, as the inmost core, the third layer, which lies hidden deep down in us.

I am I = what is given today; I am life = [gap]; I am conscious mind: we address the whole outside world on the level of the conscious mind; we have our essence as such, which is our foundation, for before there was no conscious mind and life, but conditions, conditions that came together and became our inmost essence. We must then change the words to ‘I am an element’. For that is the elemental.

We thus have three levels of conscious awareness which we are able to trace within us:

1) I am I
2) I am a human being
3) I am an element.

If we were to go further, the thread of our three concepts would leave us, but it repeats itself all the time. It becomes ‘existence’ again by connecting with others.

The fourth, then, is union. So that in moving higher we come to the words: I am in union. The I then is like the earlier given situations that united to find their way into life. I-awareness is thus taken up into existence again. In the same way existence has been conscious awareness before. So that the first existence already had an earlier state of consciousness in involution within it. If we now go back from the words ‘I am an existence, an element,’ we come to ‘I am a pre-awareness’. This may also be put as ‘I am a dhyan chohan.’ In Christian esoteric language it is put like this:

I am a god
I am a glory (element)
I am a might (human being)
I am a power (princedom)

Earlier, we called this

All awareness (now pre-awareness)
Life awareness (or plant awareness, i.e. the elemental)
Human-animal awareness or dream consciousness (I am human, humanity awareness)
(now reached) intellectual awareness: (self-awareness).

We thus have the microcosm once more, in its chain.

Let us consider that now the next level breaks through. In union, the I becomes element again.

I am a dhyan chohan = pre-awareness
I am an element = existence
I am a human being = life
I am I = awareness - self-awareness
Existence = psychic awareness
Life = hyperpsychic awareness
Conscious awareness = spiritual awareness

Now self-awareness is raised to existence. What we grasp in our thinking today becomes existence, so that we shall one day have awareness of the whole of humanity in that we make the I cover all human beings. This is then called psychic awareness. The next level will be the one where the I of every other individual comes alive in us—hyperpsychic awareness. At the highest level of all we take the whole world into our conscious awareness: all is in us—spiritual awareness. (Everything that is outside is already inside—divine awareness.)

Let us imagine [demonstrating with a sheet of paper] that the paper is the pre-awareness. Now it narrows down:

1) I am an element

Now it narrows down to something less than that:

2) I am human

Then:

3) I am I

1) The I then itself becomes
2) existence and goes to the outside.
3) It also shines out over life.
4) It shines out over the whole of elemental existence and then comes out again into what it was before.

Recapitulating we find that in the I lies an involution which is as great as we can imagine, so that it contains the complete triad in involution; its essential nature keeps this I completely hidden in the dark. If we examine what entered into this dark element, we find it was life; it brought light into the darkness, shone into it. And before this, existence shone into life, and in existence pre-awareness was in involution. The revelation of pre-awareness is once again the Word.

We are thus able to say: ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. Through him everything entered into existence and without him nothing entered into existence. What existed was life in him and the life of the light of mankind. And the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not taken hold of it.’

The I must let what it is inside, occult, shine out. Nothing from the outside must harm the I, the I must grow strong. What it has inside must emerge in outer strength. What does it find? The tempter, the serpent which evolved earlier and is twisting and turning out there. The I must overcome the serpent, and now we have to understand that this is the sign that someone has given birth to the living Christ in himself in overcoming the deadly, the tempter, death, the prince of this world.

Mark 16: 17-18. Those who believe will have signs which accompany them. In my name they will cast out demons, and they will speak in new tongues. They will pick up serpents and if they drink any poison it will certainly not hurt them. They will place their hands on sick people and they will be well.

If your eye be single, your whole body will be full of light. (It will let the light pass through).

If, however, you are a rogue, there will be darkness in you. If there is darkness in you, how great, then, must darkness be altogether.⁹²

State before the year 30:

I - superhuman I - Christ
I - human chela I - Jesus : Palestine
I - human chela I - John the evangelist: Alexandria
State after 30: Christ in Jesus; Jesus in John

• 91. humorist. Here reference is made to his description of his first Iexperience, published [in German] in his Theosophie (1. Kap., Abschnitt Leib, Seele, Geist): ‘I’ll never forget something which happened in me and which I have never told anyone; it was the birth of my self awareness, and I am able to state the place and the time. One morning I was standing in the front door, a very young child, looking to the left, where the firewood was stacked, and suddenly the inner vision ‘I am an I’ came to me like a bolt of lightning from heaven; it has remained, luminous, ever since. There I saw my I for the first time and for ever.’ First described [in German] in Wahrheit aus Jean Pauls Leben. Kindheitsgeschichte von ihm selbst geschrieben (3 Hefte in 2 Baenden), Breslau 1826 - 1828; 1. Heft, S. 33.
• 92. Matthew 6: 22-23.

Today we offer you a performance of eurythmy. Through this art we want to place something into the spiritual development of humanity. We can view eurythmy from three perspectives: from the purely artistic, the educational, and the hygienic.

As an art, eurythmy represents a kind of voiceless, visible speech. Although it takes the form of gestures and movements, either in groups or individually, you should not confuse it with mime or pantomime or with some form of artistic dance. Eurythmy uses the entire human being as its language; this visible unvoiced speech is developed through a study of the laws of voiced speech.

Voiced speech is a way of expressing what lies within the human being. Schiller was right when he said, “When the soul speaks, then, sadly, the soul no longer speaks.” Language carries the human soul to the external world—or at least it should. It is also the means of communication between one person and another, and is therefore subject to convention. In a certain sense language is a social artifact. The more language must serve as a means of communication and of expressing thoughts, the less it can serve as a means of artistic expression, since art must arise out of the whole person.

Language has two sides. The first is the social side. The person must bow to the social world when speaking. Only in that way does language retain something that is intimately connected with the entirety of the human being. Young children do not learn language from their dreams. They learn it during that time when they need to adjust their entire being to their surroundings. This natural adjustment protects language from being just a means of communication.

When a poet—that is, an artist with words—wants to express something, he or she needs everything that hovers behind language. A poet needs pictures and, above all, musicality. True poetry, that is, the artistic aspect of a poem, is not at all found in the direct content of the words; rather it is in the way the content is formed. In poetry we need most of all to take into account what Goethe said in Faust: “Consider the what, but even more so, the how.” The way the poet shapes the poem is what is most important in poetry.

You can see this much more clearly if, when you express yourself artistically, you do not use a means of expression that is too strongly permeated by thoughts but instead use your entire being. For this reason we have used both sensory and supersensory observation to study the way the human larynx, tongue, and other organs of speech move when people express themselves through voiced speech. We studied the movements that are transformed into sounds, into vibrations in the air through normal speaking. We transferred those movements to other human organs, particularly those that are most comparable to primitive organs of speech: the arms and hands.

When people first see eurythmy, they are often surprised that the performers use their hands and arms more than their other limbs. You can see this as an obvious outcome if you consider that even in normal speech, when someone wants to express more than simple conventions, if someone wants to express his or her own individuality or perception or feelings through speech, that person finds it necessary to move into these more agile, more spiritual organs.Of course eurythmy takes the entire human being into account, not just the arms and hands. Eurythmy uses the expressiveness of movements in space, whether of groups or of individuals.

The most important thing to remember is that those movements, whether they are done by individuals or groups, are not at all arbitrary. They are the same movements that are the underlying foundation of what we express through voiced speech, transferred to the entire human being.

I need to emphasize once again that what we see on stage is essentially the entire larynx, represented through the whole person. What we present is the function, rhythm, and tempo of the larynx. It represents the musical and the pictorial aspects, as well as what is poetic when poetry is genuine art. The entire group reveals it all.

What is presented in eurythmy as voiceless and visible speech is also accompanied by music or recitation. Since music and speech are just other forms of expression for what lives in the human soul, we need to use that good old-fashioned form of recitation that Goethe had in mind when he was working with actors. He kept a conductor’s baton in his hand so that they would not only understand the content of the words but would also learn their rhythms. In our case, we need to avoid precisely the things that our inartistic age sees as important in recitation, namely, the emphasis upon the literal content of the words. We need to go back to what was artistic in more primitive recitations. This is rarely seen today, particularly if you live in a city. However, much of it is still alive in people my age, who can remember the traveling speakers of their childhood who recited their street ballads. They drew pictures on a blackboard and then spoke the text. They never spoke without keeping time with their foot, and at an exciting point in the story, they marched up and down or did other things to indicate that the tempo of the verse and its inner form were as important as the inner content. They wanted the listener to be aware of that. You will see that we attempt at every turn to emphasize this deeper aspect of art. Even on those occasions where we attempt to present poetry in humorous or fantastic ways through eurythmy, we do not present the literal content through such things as facial gestures or pantomime. We do not present the content of the poem through musical or poetic forms expressed solely in space but not in time. Instead we present what the poet or artist has shaped from the content.

These are a few things I wanted to mention about the artistic aspect of eurythmy. Since the human being is the instrument, not a violin or piano, not colors and shapes, eurythmy is particularly able to portray what exists within the microcosm of the human being of the ebb and flow of cosmic forces.

The second aspect of eurythmy is that of education. I am convinced that ordinary gymnastics, which developed during a materialistic period, focuses too much on anatomical and physiological aspects. In addition to physical development, there is also a development of the life of the soul and the will. We very much need these things, but mere gymnastics does not develop them in the growing human being. In the future, when people can look at such things more objectively, they will recognize that such gymnastics can strengthen human beings in a certain way, but that this strengthening does not at the same time strengthen the soul and will.

From a pedagogical perspective, we can see eurythmy as ensouled gymnastics, ensouled movement. In the small example we will present to you today with the children, you will see how those movements are carried by their souls.

We also need to say that although we are presenting some children’s exercises here, the children can study eurythmy only during those few hours available during school time. However, that is not really right. The education lying at the basis of our efforts in Dornach—which the Waldorf School in Stuttgart has realized to a certain extent—has the goal of not requiring children to attend any lessons outside of regular school time.

For that reason, it is especially important that we clearly understand the educational significance of eurythmy and completely integrate it into the school curriculum. Then the children will have everything that can serve them for normal spiritual, soul, and physical development, particularly the content of eurythmy.

Third is the hygienic element. The human being is a little world, a microcosm. All ill health essentially stems from the fact that human beings tear themselves away from the great laws of the cosmos. We could represent ill health by saying that if I removed my finger from my organism as a whole, it would no longer be a finger; it would wither away. My finger retains its inner function only in connection with my organism as a whole. In the same way, the human being realizes its inner nature only in connection with the universe as a whole. What happens in human beings really is connected with the entirety of the universe. People are not merely enclosed within the boundaries of their skin. Just a moment ago the air you now have within you was outside of you. After you have inhaled it, it becomes part of your organism, and what you now have within you will be exhaled. As soon as you have exhaled it, it will be outside you. Even if we only lived within our skin, we could not prove we are only that which is enclosed by our skin. We are not just a part of the air but of the entire cosmos.

We can therefore see that everything unhealthy results from things that people do that are not appropriate, that are not befitting of the entirety of human nature or the age in which we live, and that do not support the harmony and fulfillment that must exist between human beings and all creation. However, since every movement in eurythmy naturally comes forth out of the entire human organism, just as the movements of the larynx and its associated organs do for normal speech, everything done in eurythmy can bring the human being into harmony with the entire universe. We can certainly say that what a person, even as a child, can gain from the movements of eurythmy has a healing element. Of course, it must be performed properly and not clumsily. This is something we can certainly consider as an aspect of soul, spirit, and physical hygiene.

These are, then, the three perspectives from which we should see eurythmy and from which we have placed it in our spiritual movement.

Even though many visitors may have been here often and may have seen our recent attempts to move forward in our forms and utilization of space in the groups, we still need to appeal to your understanding for today’s presentation. Eurythmy is at its very beginnings. This is an attempt at a beginning, but it is an attempt that we are convinced will improve and become more perfect. Perhaps others will need to join in and take up what we can accomplish with our weak forces and develop it further. Nevertheless it is certainly possible to see our intent from what will be shown today. Eurythmy opens the artistic wellsprings at their source, because it uses the entire human being as its means of expression, because it pedagogically develops the soul, spiritual, and physical aspects of the child, and also because it places human beings into movements that have a health-giving effect. Therefore it is an art that can be justifiably placed alongside the other, older arts, especially when our contemporaries turn their interest toward it.

The audience attending this series of lectures in 1920 was at once informed by Steiner that he proposed to consider the connections between natural science and social renewal.

Everyone agrees, he says, that such a renewal requires a renewal of our thinking (one must remember that he was speaking of the groping and soul-searching that followed the great and terrible war of 1914–18), yet not everyone “imagines something clear and distinct when speaking in this way.”

Steiner then sketches rapidly the effects of the scientific world-view on the modern social order. Scientific progress has made us very confident of our analytical powers. Inanimate nature, we are educated to believe, will eventually become transparently intelligible. It will yield all its secrets under scientific examination, and we will be able to describe it with mathematical lucidity. After we have conquered the inorganic we will proceed to master the organic world by the same means.

The path of scientific progress however has not been uniformly smooth. Steiner reminds us that by the end of the 19th century doubts concerning the origins of scientific knowledge had arisen within the scientific community itself, and in a famous and controversial lecture the physiologist du Bois-Reymond asked the question, How does consciousness arise out of material processes? What is the source of the consciousness with which we examine the outer world? To this du Bois-Reymond answers, Ignorabimus—we shall never know.

In this Ignorabimus Steiner finds a parallel to an earlier development, that of medieval Scholasticism. Scholastic thinking had made its way to the limits of the super-sensible world. Modern natural science has also reached a limit. This limit is delineated by two concepts: “matter”—which is everywhere assumed to be within the sensory realm but nowhere actually to be found—and consciousness, which is assumed to originate within the same world, “although no one can comprehend how.” Can we fathom the fact of consciousness with explanations conceived in observing external nature? Steiner argues that we cannot. He suggests that scientific research is entangling itself in a web, and that only outside this web can we find the real world. The great victories of science have subdued our minds. We accept the all pervading scientific method. It has transformed the earth. Nevertheless it seems incapable of understanding its own deepest sources. Scientific method as we of the modern world define it can bring us only to the Ignorabimus because it is powerless to explain the consciousness that directs it. In our study of nature, and by means of our concept of matter, we have made everything very clear, but this clarity does not give us Man. Him we have lost. And the lucidity to which we owe our great successes in the study of the external world is rejected by consciousness itself. For in the depths of consciousness there lies a will, and this will revolts when lucid science tries to “think” Man as it thinks external nature.

To conclude from this that Steiner is “anti-science” would be a great mistake. To him science is a necessary, indeed indispensable stage in the development of the human spirit. The scientific examination of the external world awakens consciousness to clear concepts and it is by means of clear conceptual thinking that we become fully human. Spiritual development requires a full understanding of pure thought, and pure thought is thought devoid of sensory impressions. “Countless philosophers have expounded the view that pure thinking does not exist, but is bound to contain traces, however diluted, of sense perception. A strong impression is left that philosophers who maintain this have never really studied mathematics, or gone into the difference between analytical and empirical physics,” Steiner writes. Mathematical thought is thought detached from the sense world, and as it is entirely based upon rules of reason that are universal it offers spiritual communion to mankind, as well as a union with reality. It is moreover a free activity. Spiritual training, says Steiner, reveals it to be not only sense-free but also brain-free. The operations of thought are directed by spiritual powers. Pure thinking leads to the discovery of freedom and leads us to the realm of spirit. And Steiner tells us explicitly that out of sense-free thinking “there can flow impulses to moral action. ... One experiences pure spirit by observing, by actually observing how moral forces flow into sense-free thinking.” This is something very different from mystical experience, for it is a result of spiritual training, of a sort of scientific discipline through which we discover more organs of knowledge than are available to those who limit themselves, as modern philosophers do, to scientific orthodoxy and to ordinary consciousness. In the last lecture of the present series Steiner speaks of advanced forms of consciousness, of a more acute inner activity, and of higher forms of knowledge.

Contemporary thinkers are often strongly attracted to these higher forms. They approach them enthusiastically, frequently write of them vividly but in the end reject them as retrograde or atavistic, unworthy of a fully accredited modern philosopher.

Paul Valéry, a poet who devoted years of his life to the study of mathematics and who wrote interestingly on Descartes and Pascal, provides us with an excellent example of this in his Address in Honor of Goethe. Goethe fascinates Valéry, for Goethe too was a poet who found it necessary to go beyond poetry—“the great apologist of the world of Appearances,” Valéry calls him. He says, “I sometimes think that there exists for some people, as there existed for him, an external life which has an intensity and a depth at least equal to the intensity and depth that we ascribe to the inner darkness and the mysterious discoveries of the ascetics and the Sufis.” Goethe is an investigative and not merely a reactive poet. Valéry greatly admires his botanical work, seeing in it one of “the profound nodal points of his great mind.” He goes on to say, “this desire to trace in living things a will to metamorphosis may have been derived from his early contact with certain doctrines, half poetic, half esoteric, which were highly esteemed by the ancients and which, at the end of the eighteenth century, initiates took to cultivating again. The rather seductive if extremely imprecise idea of Orphism, the magical idea of assuming the existence of some unknown hidden principle of life, some tendency towards a higher form of life in every animate and inanimate thing; the idea that a spirit was fermenting in every particle of reality and that it was therefore not impossible to work by the ways of the spirit on everything and every being insofar as it contains a spirit, is among the ideas which bear witness to the persistence of a kind of primitive reasoning and at the same time of an impulse which of its nature generates poetry or personification. Goethe appears to have been deeply imbued with the feeling of this power, which satisfied the poet
in him and stimulated the naturalist.”

What Valéry assumes here is that there is only one single legitimate method of examining natural phenomena. As a poet he sympathizes with imaginative knowledge, as a thinker he strikes a note of regret and even condolence. “It is one of the clearest examples of transition from poetic thought to scientific theory, or of a fact brought to light by way of a harmony discovered by intuition. Observation verifies what the inner artist has divined. ... But his great gift of analogy came into conflict with his logical faculties.” And the logical faculties, strictly circumscribed, must be obeyed. Magic and primitive reasoning, alas, will not do says the analytical intellect of Valéry.

Steiner had devoted many years of study to Goethe. He was the editor of Goethe's scientific works and in his lectures often refers to him. And there is no nostalgia for “Orphism” in Steiner, no “magic” or “primitive reasoning.” He too is a modern thinker. What distinguishes him from most others is his refusal to stop at what he calls “the boundary of the material world.” And how does one pass beyond this boundary? By a discipline that takes us from ordinary consciousness and familiarizes us with consciousness of another kind, by finding the path that leads us into Imagination. “It is possible to pursue this path in a way consonant with Western life,” he writes, “if we attempt to surrender ourselves completely to the world of outer phenomena, so that we allow them to work upon us without thinking about them, but still perceiving them. In ordinary waking life, you will agree, we are constantly perceiving, but actually in the very process of doing so we are continually saturating our percepts with concepts; in scientific thinking we interweave percepts and concepts entirely systematically, building up systems of concepts. ... One can become capable of such acute inner activity that one can exclude and suppress conceptual thinking from the process of perception and surrender oneself to bare percepts.” This is not a depreciation of thought. Rather, it releases the imagination. One “acquires a potent psychic force ‘when one is able’ to absorb the external world free from concepts.” Steiner says, “Man is given over to the external world continually, from birth onwards. Nowadays this giving-over of oneself to the external world is held to be nothing but abstract perception or abstract cognition. This is not so. We are surrounded by a world of color, sound and warmth and by all kinds of sensory impressions.” The cosmos communicates with us also through color, sound and warmth. “Warmth is something other than warmth; light something other than light in the physical sense; sound is something other than physical sound. Through our sensory impressions we are conscious only of what I would term external sound and external color. And when we surrender ourselves to nature we do not encounter the ether-waves, atoms and so on of which modern physics and physiology dream; rather, it is spiritual forces that are at work, forces that fashion us between birth and death into what we are as human beings.” I have thought it best not to interpose myself but to allow Steiner to speak for himself, for he is more than a thinker, he is an initiate and only he is able to communicate what he has experienced. The human mind, he tells us, must learn to will pure thinking, but it must learn also how to set conceptual thinking aside and to live within the phenomena. “It is through phenomenology, and not abstract metaphysics, that we attain knowledge of the spirit by consciously observing, by raising to consciousness, what we would otherwise do unconsciously; by observing how through the sense world spiritual forces enter into our being and work formatively upon it.”

We cannot even begin to think of social renewal until we have considered these questions. What is reality in the civilized West? “A world of outsides without insides,” says Owen Barfield, one of the best interpreters of Steiner. A world of quantities without qualities, of souls devoid of mobility and of communities which are more dead than alive.

Saul Bellow

A brochure and yearly report are mentioned.

Dr. Steiner: What is the purpose of all this advertising? A teacher: We are going to send it to all interested people. Dr. Steiner: Then, is it an invitation? In that case, everything you have shown me is much too long. It will not be effective. If you want every potential member of the Waldorf School Association to read it, you should condense it into half a page. What you have here is a small book.

A teacher: I don’t think it is so thick.

Dr. Steiner: Think about Dr. Stein’s manuscript. It’s already thirty printed pages. It is too long and too academic. It’s more like a report to another faculty. It is directed more to pedagogical experts than to people who might want to join the Association. You should direct it to everyone interested in the school. They would never read so much. You did not mention this perspective last time. We always looked at the brochure from the standpoint of public relations.

This brochure could serve only to replace the usual academic presentation. There have always been formal presentations and something like this could provide a general presentation of the school. We could, for instance, describe the facilities and buildings and then go on to describe the pedagogy of the school and the individual subjects.

A teacher: We especially need material for the parents who want to send their children to us.

Dr. Steiner: That’s true. For such parents, we could summarize all the material we already have. For example, there is some good material in the Waldorf News. None of that, however, can replace a brochure that should be no longer than eight printed pages. There should be thousands of members, and we need to give them a short summary.

A teacher: That would not preclude also having a yearly report.

Dr. Steiner: You must remember how little interest people have in things. Today, people read in a peculiar way.

It’s true, isn’t it, that a magazine article is different. However, if you want to make something clear to someone and hope they will become a member and pay fifty marks, you don’t need to go into all the details. You need only give a broad outline. This brochure would be different. It would contain a request for payment of some amount. But, the yearly report might be more like what I would call a history of the school. There, we can include everything individual teachers put together. The reports need not be short. All reports can be long. If the brochure brings in a lot of money, Mr. Molt will surely provide some for the yearly report. All that is a question of republicanism. The number of names it mentions would make the yearly report effective. We should, however, consider whether we should strive for uniformity. One person may write pedantically and report about what happened each month. Another might write, at least from what I have seen, about things I could do only in five hundred years. (Speaking to Dr. Stein) You wrote this so quickly that you could also write the others.

Dr. Steiner is asked to write something also.

Dr. Steiner: That is rather difficult. If I were to write even three pages, I would have to report about things I have experienced, and that could be unpleasant for some. If I were to write it as a teacher, I would tend to write it differently than the brochure. The brochure should contain our intent, what we will improve each year. In the report, we should show what we accomplished and what we did not accomplish. There, the difference between reality and the brochure would be apparent. If I wrote something, I would, of course, keep it in that vein. It will put people out of shape afterward, but I can write the three pages.

A teacher reports about his remedial class with nine children.

Two teachers report about teaching foreign language in the first grade.

Dr. Steiner: The earlier you begin, the more easily children learn foreign languages and the better their pronunciation. Beginning at seven, the ability to learn languages decreases with age. Thus, we must begin early. Speaking in chorus is good, since language is a social element. It is always easier to speak in chorus than individually.

Two teachers report about the classes in Latin and Greek. There are two classes for Latin, but in the lower class, there are only two boys. The upper class is talented and industrious.

Dr. Steiner: There is good progress in the foreign languages.

A teacher reports about the kindergarten with thirty-three children. She asks if the children should do cut work in the kindergarten.

Dr. Steiner: If you undertake such artistic activities with the children, you will notice that some have talent for them. There will not be many, and the others you will have to push. Those things, when they are pretty, are pretty. They are little works of art. I would allow a child to work in that way only if I saw that he or she has a tendency in that direction. I would not introduce it to the children in general.

You should begin painting with watercolors.

You mean cutting things out and pasting them? If you see that one or another child has a talent for silhouettes, you could allow that. I would not fool around, don’t do that. You can probably work best with the children you have when you have them do meaningful things with simple objects. Anything! You should try to discover what interests the children. There are children, particularly girls, who can make a doll out of any handkerchief. The doll’s write letters and then pass them on. You could be the postman or the post office. Do sensible things with simple objects.

When the change of teeth begins, the children enter the stage when they want to imagine things, for instance that one thing is a rabbit and another is a dog. Sensible things that the child dreams into. The principle of play is that until the change of teeth, the child imitates sensible things, dolls and puppets. With boys, it is puppets, with girls, dolls. Perhaps they could have a large puppet with a small one alongside. These need only be a couple pieces of wood. At age seven, you can bring the children into a circle or ring, and they can imagine something. Two could be a house, and the others go around and live in it. In that game, the children are there themselves.

With musical children, you can play something else, perhaps something that would support their musical talent. You should help unmusical children develop their musical capacities through dance and eurythmy. You need to be inventive. You can do all these things, but you need to be inventive, because otherwise everything becomes stereotyped. Later, it is easier because you can connect with things in the school.

A teacher explains how she conveyed the consonants in eurythmy by working with the growth of plants.

Dr. Steiner: That is very nice. The children do not differ much. You do not have many who are untalented nor many who are gifted. They are average children. Also, you have few choleric or strongly melancholic temperaments. Those children are mostly phlegmatic or sanguine. All that plays a role since you do not have all four temperaments.

You can get the phlegmatic children moving only if you try to work with the more difficult consonants. For the sanguine children, work with the easier consonants. Do the r and s with the phlegmatic children, and with the sanguine children, do the consonants that only hint of movement, d and t. If we have other temperaments in the next years, we can try more things. It is curious that those children who do not accomplish much in the classroom can do a great deal in eurythmy. The progress is good, but I would like to see you take more notice of what progresses. Our task is to see that we speak more to the children about what we bring from the teaching material, that we look more toward training thinking and feeling. For example, in arithmetic we should make clear to the students that with minus five, they have five less than they owe to someone. You need to speak with them very precisely.

It is often good to drift off the subject. You then notice that the children are not so perfect in their essays. It’s true, isn’t it, that the children who are more talented in their heads write good essays, and those who are more talented in their bodies are good in eurythmy. You should try to balance that through conversation. When you talk with children, if you speak about something practical and go into it deeply, you turn their attention away from the head.

A teacher asks how to handle the present perfect tense. Dr. Steiner: I would speak with the children about various parallels between the past and the complete. What is a perfect person, a perfect table? I would speak about the connections between what is complete and finished and the perfect present tense. Then I would discuss the imperfect tense where you still are in the process of completion.

If I had had time today, I would have gone through the children’s reading material in the present perfect. Of course, you can’t translate every sentence that way, but that would bring some life into it. Eurythmy also brings life into the development of the head. There is much you can do between the lines. I already said today that I can understand how you might not like to drift off the subject. That is something we can consider an ideal, namely to bring other things in. For example, today I wanted to tease your children in the third grade with “hurtig toch.” In that way, you could expand their thinking. That means “express train.” That is what I mean by doing things with children between the lines.

The eurythmy room is discussed.

Dr. Steiner: I was never lucky enough that someone promised that room to me. Frau Steiner would prefer to have simply the field and a roof above it. Although you can awaken the most beautiful physical capacities in children through eurythmy, they can also feel all the terrible effects of the room, and that makes them so tired. We all know of the beautiful eurythmy hall, but someone forgot to make the ventilation large enough, so that we can’t use it. For eurythmy, we need a large, well-ventilated hall. Everything we have had until now is unsatisfactory for a eurythmy hall. We have only a substitute. Eurythmy rooms need particularly good ventilation. We have to build the Eurythmeum.

A woodland meadow. In the background, high cliffs on which stands a castle. Summer evening. Country folk; Simon, the Jew; Thomas, the Master miner; the Monk. Countryfolk walking across the meadow, and stopping to talk.

First Countryman:
See yon vile Jew; he surely will not dare
To take the same road that we take ourselves;
For things might very well come to his ears
On hearing which they'd burn for many a day.

Second Countryman:
We must make clear to his effrontery,
Aye, very clear indeed, that we no more
Will tolerate his race in our good land
Across whose bounds he hath contrived to slink.

First Countrywoman:
He is protected by the noble knights.
Who live in yonder castle; none of us
May enter; but the Jew is welcome there.
For he doth do whate'er the knights desire.

Third Countryman:
'Tis very hard to know who serves the Lord
And who the devil. Thankful should we be
To our good lords who give us food and work.
What should we be if it were not for them?

Second Countrywoman:
The Jew shall have my praise his remedies
Have cured the evil sickness that I had.—
Besides, he was so good and kind to me;
And many more can tell the selfsame tale.

Third Countrywoman:
Yet did a monk let slip the truth to me,—
The Jew employs the devil's remedies
Beware his drugs; transformed within the blood
They grant an entrance to all kinds of sin.

Fourth Countryman:
The men who wait upon the knights oppose
Our ancient customs, saying that the Jew
Hath stores of knowledge both to heal and bless
Which will in days to come be rightly prized.

Fifth Countryman:
New times and better are in store; I see
Their coming in my spirit, when my soul
Pictures to me what eyes cannot behold.
The knights intend to bring all this about.

Fourth Countrywoman:
We owe the Church obedience, for she guards
Our souls from devil-visions, and from death,
And from hell-fire. The monks bid us beware
The knights, and their vile sorcerer, the Jew.

Fifth Countrywoman:
Only a short time longer need we bear
In patience the oppression of the knights.
Soon will their citadel in ruins lie.
Thus hath it been foretold me in a dream.

Sixth Countrywoman:
I fear such tales betoken mortal sin—
That noble knights do plot to bring us harm—
Nought do I see but good come from their hands;
I needs must count them Christians, as ourselves.

Sixth Countryman:
What men shall think of them in days to come
'Twere best to leave to be adjudged by those
Who shall live after us. Mere tools are we,
Used by the knights in their satanic arts
To war against true Christianity.
If they be driven out we shall be freed
From their pernicious sway, and live our lives
As we shall choose, in this our native land.
Now let us go to vespers, there to find
That which our souls require, and that which is
In harmony with our ancestral ways.
These novel teachings suit us not at all.

(Exeunt the countryfolk.)

(Simon, the Jew, enters from the wood.)

Simon:
Where'er I go, I find awaiting me
The ancient hatred and the bitter taunts.
And yet I suffer not a whit the less
Each time I find myself exposed to them.
There seems to be no reasonable cause
Why people should behave towards me thus.
And yet one thought pursues me evermore
Which Makes the truth apparent to my soul,—
That nothing can befall us without cause.
So too a reason there must be for this,
That suffering is the lot of all my tribe.
So with the lords of yonder citadel,
I find their lot is near akin to mine.
They have but chosen of their own free will
That which by nature is imposed on me.
They set themselves apart from all mankind,
And strive in isolation to acquire
The powers through which they may attain their goal.
Thus can I feel the debt I owe to fate
And find her blessing in my loneliness.
Forced to rely on mine own soul alone
I took the realms of science for my field,
And recognized from what I learned therein
That ripe for new attainments was our time.
The laws of nature, hitherto unknown,
Must now reveal themselves unto mankind
And make him master of the world of sense
Whence he will be allowed to liberate
Powers he can put to use for his own ends.
So have I tried, as far as in me lay,
To make fresh progress in the healing art.
This toil endeared me to the brotherhood;
Its members made me free of their estates
To seek to find the forces that reside
In plants and 'neath the surface of the ground,
That they may yield for us new benefits.
My actions therefore march with their designs,
And I confess that I have plucked with joy
Much goodly fruit whilst going on my way.

(Exit into the wood.)

(Thomas, the Master miner, enters from the wood. Enter the Monk.)

Thomas:
Here will I sit and rest a little while.
My soul hath need of rest to find itself
After the shocks which I have had to bear.

(The Monk comes up to him.)

Monk:
I greet thee heartily, most valiant son.
Thou hast come here in search of solitude.
Thy work well done, thou wouldst have peace and quiet
In which to turn thy thoughts to spirit-worlds.
To see my well-loved pupil thus employed
Rejoiceth me. But why so sad-thine eyes?
'Twould seem anxiety weighs down thy soul.

Thomas:
Pain oft is neighbour unto highest bliss;
That this is so mine own life proves to-day.

Monk:
Hast thou then met with bliss and pain at once?

Thomas:
I told thee, reverend father, that I loved
The overseer's daughter, and confessed
That she was also greatly drawn to me.
She is to marry me and share my life.

Monk:
She will be true to thee, come weal, come woe;
She is a faithful daughter of the Church.

Thomas:
Such an one only would I take to wife;
Since, honoured master, I have learned from thee
The meaning of obedience to God's will.

Monk:
And art thou also certain of thy soul,
That it will walk still further in the way
Of righteousness, which I have pointed out?

Thomas:
So sure as in this body beats a heart
So sure will I, thy son, be true for aye
To those exalted teachings which of old
From thine own lips I was allowed to learn.

Monk:
And now that thou hast told me of thy bliss
Let me,hear also from thee of thy woe.

Thomas:
Oft have I told thee what my life hath been.
Scarce had I left my childhood's days behind
Than I began to travel and to roam.
I never worked for long in any place.
Ever I cherished in my heart the wish
To meet my father, whom I loved, although
I had not heard a good report of him.
He left my dear good mother all alone
Because he wished to start his life anew
Unhampered by a wife and children twain.
The impulse for adventure dwelt in him.
I was a child still, when he went from us;
My sister was a tiny new-born babe;
My mother died of grief in no long time.
My sister was adopted by good folk
Who later moved away from my old home,
And of her fate I never more heard tell.
Some relatives assisted me to learn
A miner's work, in which I grew expert,
So that I found employment where I wished.
The hope that some day I should once more find
My father, never vanished from my heart.
And now at last my hope is realized
But also is for ever torn from me.
Matters of business led me yesterday
To seek for speech with my superior.
Thou knowest how lightly I esteem the knight
Who issueth directions for my work,
Since I have learned he is thine enemy.
From that time forward I made up my mind
Not to remain in service under him.
For reasons which remain unknown to me
The knight alluded in our interview
To matters which allowed him to declare
Himself to be—the father whom I sought.
What followed ... I would gladly leave untold.
It would not have been hard to overlook
My mother's sufferings at his hands, and mine,
When he and I once more stood face to face,
And when he spoke, grief-burdened, of old days.
But in his form, stood facing me, thy foe.
And one thing then was manifest to me:—
How deep a gulf must ever separate
Myself from him, whom I so fain would love,
And whom I sought so long and ardently.
Now have I lost him for the second time,—
Such is the lot that hath befallen me.

Monk:
I would not e'er estrange thee from those ties
Imposed on thee by blood-relationship.
But what I can bestow upon thy soul
Shall ever be to thee a gift of love.

Curtain

One of the most remarkable descriptions of the human soul was provided by the English poet Richard Jefferies, who died in 1887, in his book “The Story of My Heart”. How can I process all the impressions and experiences within me in such a way that the powers of my soul are constantly growing? How can I transform all the pains and joys of existence within me in such a way that the life of my spirit becomes ever richer? Jefferies spent most of his life pondering these questions. Anyone who follows Ludwig Jacobowski's career as a poet will find that a similar basic drive can be observed in it. From his first appearance, with the collection of poems “Aus bewegten Stunden” (1889), to his last works, “Loki. Roman eines Gottes” (1898) and “Leuchtende Tage. Neue Gedichte” (1900), a passionate struggle to increase his mental powers and to grow his inner life can be seen in his development. Goethe once said to Eckermann: “In poetry, only the truly great and pure is beneficial, which in turn stands like a second nature and either lifts us up to it or spurns us.” Jacobowski felt himself to be both lifted up and spurned when he published his first poems at the age of twenty. “Kontraste” (Contrasts) is the first subtitle of this collection. Dissonances resound from the depths of his soul; he anxiously measures his strength against the ideals he dreams of. He is not one of those personalities who, as mere observers, let world events affect them as if they were not involved themselves. From his very own personal destiny, the destiny of all humanity presents itself to him. The experiences of his mind become symbols of the great struggles that humanity fights to balance the contradictions of life.

From the pain and deprivation of his emotional world, Jacobowski grew the courage of his will, which led him to feel a special joy in overcoming life. In his novel “Werther, the Jew” (1892) and his drama “Diyab, the Fool” (1895), the poet presents us with the true stepchildren of existence. Leo Wolff, the Jewish student at the center of the novel's plot, and Diyab, the son of the sheikh, are in similar situations in life, but they have different strengths of willpower, which nature has given them. In Wolff's case, a delicate and sensitive heart is confronted with a weak will, while in Diyab's case it is confronted with a strong will. This makes the former the loser and the latter the winner. Ludwig Jacobowski's psychological powers of observation can only be properly appreciated if it is taken into account that his aim is to show the influence that life has on a person's will. Wolff can only contrast his idealistic sensibilities and his lofty mind with the world; he is crushed by its wheels. Diyab is a man of will. To the extent that his heart is wounded, his will gains strength.

Wolff suffers from his father's ethical views and the prejudices directed against the young Jew. His father's financial speculations cost the teacher of his son, whom he adores, his fortune. The passion that he feels for the teacher's wife makes Wolff a deceiver of his father's friend. At the same time, it has a destructive effect on his beautiful love affair with the child of the people, who seeks release from the torments that her affection for the student has brought her by voluntarily taking her own life. The young man's willpower is not strong enough to guide him through the opposing currents into which life has thrown him, through the confusion into which his passions have thrown him. A genuinely humane spirit alienates him from the people to whom natural ties bind him; at the same time, these natural ties weigh like a lead weight on his life. By birth and by his way of thinking, he is repelled by the world and forced to turn to himself; but in the isolation of his soul he does not find the energy to shape his relationship to life on his own.

What a strong will can achieve in this direction is shown by Jacobowski in “Diyab, the Fool”. The son of the sheik is an outcast because he was born of a white mother. He is exposed to the scorn of his entire environment. But he is not affected by this mockery. He is superior to those who mock him. They know nothing of his innermost self. He hides it from them and plays the fool. They may mock him in this mask. But his own self grows outside in the solitude where the palm trees stand. There he lies between the grasses deep in the forest, living only for himself. Out there he cultivates his strength to the point where he later becomes the savior of the entire tribe, when those who had insulted him shrink back from the enemy. The strong-willed man put on the mask of a fool in order to be master of his fate. Behind this mask, however, the personality matured that takes revenge for the shameful treatment that she and her mother had to endure, and that conquers the throne of the sheikh and the beloved through boldness and strength. The artistic execution is absolutely equal to the train of thought of the two works. Ludwig Jacobowski has an open mind and a broad understanding of the great questions of existence. He is not only able to depict the individual fates of individuals, but also to artistically portray the great interrelationships of cultural development. In “Werther, the Jew”, the experience of the young Jew also symbolically expresses a great historical phase of a people's development. The individual is the representative of a rejuvenating Judaism that is struggling to break free from the prejudices and inherited habits of a tribe and to develop a universal human world view. Jacobowski's symbolizing art is particularly evident in the individual stories in the collection “Satan laughed and other stories” (1898). The first sketch, “Satan laughed”, shows how God takes control of the earth from the devil by creating man, his servant, but how the devil still manages to secure his influence. He catches the woman in his nets. A few characteristic lines are used here to symbolically suggest the demonic powers that lie hidden in human sexuality. The short stories in this collection show how an artist can express life with just a few lines, if these lines are characteristic.

Jacobowski's symbolic style reached its zenith in his book “Loki. Roman eines Gottes” (Loki. A God's Novel). The poet personifies the two powers that wage an unceasing battle in every human breast in the form of the battling gods. Goodness, love, patience, gentleness and beauty are on one side; hatred and defiance on the other. Maeterlinck has said that man is in all his parts a mystical accomplice of higher divine beings. Jacobowski seeks these beings in the depths of human nature and describes the eternal struggle between them, the scene of which is our soul. Man has a power within him that does not allow him to rest. When he believes he has found peace, when he thinks he has brought order into his existence, then this power suddenly appears and disturbs peace and order, in order to replace the old with the new and to remind us that the true essence of the world can only exist in perpetual becoming. It is true that within peace and order, good human qualities flourish; but it is equally true that the old good must be destroyed from time to time. Thus the actual driving force of the world appears as evil, which drives good out of its possession. The creative appears as an unwelcome intruder into existence. Jacobowski has contrasted it with the figure of Loki in relation to the Asen. Far from Valhalla, an Asin gave birth to this god. Terrible apparitions announce his entry into the world to the other gods. We do not know the mother or the father. He is a child of the gods' sin. This child grows up in pain and deprivation. The goddesses mistreat him and give him glacial milk, wolf's foam and eagle meat to eat. This being, who has grown up in a sphere of suffering, has one thing that all the other gods do not have: wisdom. Loki sees the future of the other gods. In this course of the “Gods' novel”, the connection between suffering and knowledge is expressed in a symbolic way. The Aesir live in happiness. They do not concern themselves with the driving forces of the world. Only those who are in pain from these driving forces look at them. They think about the reasons for this pain. This opens their spiritual eyes. Loki becomes the destroyer of the realm of the gods. He ruthlessly destroys Balder, the personification of love. He must hate him, because the becoming must always be the enemy of the persisting, of the carefree enjoyment of the moment. And from the ruins of the old realm of Balder, a new one arises, not ruled by Loki, but by a new god of love, Balder's son. The deepest conceivable tragedy lies in the figure of Loki. He is the eternal destroyer, necessary for the good elements to be constantly renewed, the demon of misfortune that happiness needs in order to exist. The creator who is never allowed to enjoy the fruits of his labor, the hatred that is indispensable to the existence of love: that is Loki.

Jacobowski poetically depicts the eternal conflict of world events in this “novel of a god”. All our wisdom cannot solve this conflict. For it is precisely this conflict that sustains life. We are enmeshed in it with our whole being. We recognize that it is there, and we must bow to the fact. Jacobowski also expressed this in the character of Loki. He knows the fate of all the other gods; only his own is unknown to him. Wisdom may recognize the whole world; it cannot see itself through; it can only live itself out, as it is driven by its demons.

Jacobowski's last collection of poems, his “Leuchtende Tage” (Shining Days), appeared shortly after this novel. Between this work and the “Bewegte Stunden” there are two more volumes of poetry: “Funken” (1890) and “Aus Tag und Traum” (1895). These collections are a reflection of all the struggles that led the poet to the high vantage point from which he sang the eternal secrets of the world in “Loki.”

Jacobowski's poetry reveals a beautiful relationship between this poet and nature. He has the ability to find the poetic and meaningful in the simplest things and processes. Unlike so many contemporary poets, he does not believe that the valuable can only be found in the rare, in the remote charms of existence. He becomes aware of it with every step he takes through life. The most ordinary things take on a poetic form for him.

The great world perspective that is Jacobowski's own also gives him the right view for the poetic representation of social conditions. The poets who seek their material in this area often see only a few steps ahead. Jacobowski's descriptions of big-city life and modern social phenomena grow out of the foundations of a more comprehensive worldview. In this sense, “Der Soldat, Szenen aus der Großstadt” (The Soldier, Scenes from the Big City) is a truly modern creation, in which the experiences of a person are described who is transplanted from the countryside to the big city and is destroyed there by fate. A legend, “The Four Robbers”, expresses a significant moral content in a simple form. This poetry speaks for Jacobowski's healthy imagination, which points everywhere to the ideal forces that hold “the world together at its core”, and yet never leaves the realm of fresh, immediate naturalness.

Seven times seven metamorphoses have to be gone through to get from the beginning to the end of evolution:

7 states of conscious awareness 7 worlds or states of life 7 form states

The seven states of conscious awareness are

deep trance
dreamless sleep
dream state
waking state
psychic state
hyperpsychic state
spiritual state.

The seven worlds or states of life are

first elemental world
second elemental world
third elemental world
mineral world
plant world
animal world
human world.

The seven form states or metamorphoses of form are

In reality these seven globes or form states are not seven different globes but just one orb; this goes through seven successive states. Each state needs to be transformed into the next. To do this calls for a spirit which represents a specific sum of energy and takes the orb from one level to the next. Such a spirit is called ‘prajapati’. These sublime spirits, with their tremendous powers, were given that ability in earlier evolutions. They have a long learning stage behind them. This has made them into energies able to transform one orb into the next in the new universe.

These seven states of form are gone through in all seven worlds of life and in all seven states of conscious awareness. We can see now that anything they achieve in one cycle these spirits (prajapati) can also achieve in the others—on Earth, for example, on the Moon, and so on, so that states of the same kind can always be brought about by spirits of the same kind.

This happens with all cycles, on all seven planets. The prajapati of form exist once and for all; here they are the lowest prajapati that have to bring about the final transformation, coming into play whenever a transition becomes necessary.

The arupa and archetypal states differ markedly from the other five levels. The form state really begins on the rupa plane. There is as yet no form on the arupa plane, only the potential for it, and on the archetypal plane form gives itself its own form; it is all life there. Because of this the first and seventh states of form are really states of life, with the seventh always in the nascent (beginning to evolve) state of the first which is to follow, or where the seventh (archetypal) has become what was in the nascent state at the first.

The archetypal state of form is such that form has become life; on the arupic level form is still life. We therefore really have only 5 prajapati of form, for 2 of the 7 already belong to the higher prajapati of conscious awareness. We might say that stages of life and states of form are merely condensed states of conscious awareness, or perhaps the passive side of active awareness, or perhaps the actual negative aspect of the world view, with conscious awareness the positive aspect. The first and last of the prajapati of form states thus belong to the higher hierarchy of the prajapati of conscious awareness.

Every spirit also goes through the worlds of life. This brings us to the prajapati of the rounds, each of them controlling one world of life. Seven states of life are transformed one into the other by seven spirits. Each time we have completed the seventh round we are at a state corresponding to that of the first round, but at a higher level. The human being entered into Earth evolution with an awakening clear daytime conscious awareness; he is now developing this, and by the end of the seventh round the human being will have brought to full development the potential which he had in the first round, at the beginning.

These seven rounds are the seven days of creation in Genesis.⁷⁰ We are now in the fourth day. In the second chapter of Genesis we have a specific description of the fourth round—the creation of the human being, the time when this happened being the middle of the Lemurian age. It will only be on the seventh day that the human being will truly have developed in the image of God with regard to his physical, astral, mental and arupa bodies. Principles that were content by the end of Moon evolution, had become potential by the beginning of Earth evolution.

We can really only call six rounds ‘rounds of life’, for the seventh is a round of the next higher state of conscious awareness. As there are thus only six states of life there are also only six prajapati of life. We add one of the prajapati of life to the seven prajapati of conscious awareness, and then there are also two prajapati of form. We thus really have ten prajapati of conscious awareness, including the one which arranges the transition to the six prajapati of life, and two which arrange the transition to the prajapati of form. This gives us

10 prajapati of conscious awareness
6 prajapati of life
5 prajapati of form
or 10 + 6 + 5 = a total of 21 prajapati.

Stanza 4 of Dzyan in H. P. Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine refers to this: Ten is called ‘The One from the Egg’⁷¹ = 0. From the egg (0), the 10 prajapati of conscious awareness, came first of all the first prajapati of life, followed by six other prajapati of life and five prajapati of form = 1065,⁷² or 21 (10 + 6 + 5, value of Jehovah).

Concerning the chakras of the astral body,⁷³ just as the human physical body has senses, so does the human astral body have senses. They lie in a row. One of them is above the larynx. They are called chakras, sacred wheels. They do not move in ordinary people, but in a seer they are mobile and rotate. The chakra above the larynx is essentially in a leaf form. All astral chakras are called ‘lotus flowers’. The one above the larynx is called the 16-petalled lotus flower. This wheel evolved gradually in human evolution. [See Fig. 9j It was only in the Lemurian race, in the middle of the Lemurian age, that ideation, the ability to think, gradually began to develop. Only the last Lemurian race had developed it to a reasonable degree. At that time, the first of the lotus petals shone out, and every race that followed added another, if development went normally:

• seven petals in the seven sub-races of the fourth root-race, the Atlantean race,
• seven petals in the seven sub-races of the fifth root-race, the Aryan race (five up to now, as we are in the fifth sub-race)
• one petal in the first sub-race of the sixth root-race.

Then all 16 petals of the ability to form ideas will light up.

From the third sub-race of the fourth root-race onwards, memory also developed. The memory current also changes over to the wheels in stages, through five sub-races of the fourth Atlantean root-race, through seven sub-races of the fifth root race and through four sub-races of the sixth root-race.

The average human being therefore has 13 petals of the ability to form ideas developed, and memory has reached its 10th petal. If memory, which started with the 4th petal of the ability to form ideas meets up with the stream of ability to form ideas, the chakra begins to rotate. In normally developed people this would be in the 4th sub-race of the 6th root-race. The wheel will then go round like a whirlwind. With each successive race the light will move on to another spoke in the wheel, or another petal of the lotus flowers.

The wheel will be finished with the first sub-race of the sixth root-race. At present, the average person still lacks three spokes, which are a dark void. The wheel has not one vortex, but two.

The second stream crosses the first. In the third sub-race of Atlanteans memory was added. Memory will continue until the fourth sub-race of the sixth root-race. After that it will be lost, having become superfluous.

When memory made its appearance in the fourth sub-race, illumination of the ability to form ideas had progressed as far as the fourth spoke; three sub-races were without memory. The last part of the memory stream meets with the other stream. In the fourth sub-race of the sixth root-race the wheel will finally begin to move. When the wheel is set in motion, the human being will give his word to the astral world. Anything he will say then will have an immediate effect on others. Thus another person will feel the kindness that is expressed in a word; he will feel every word.

The human manu of the sixth root-race, who will guide this race, being the first human manu,⁷⁴ will only be able to live with human beings when they have developed so far that they can talk to the master. They will only be able to do this when this chakra is wholly developed, when the human word goes over directly into the stream of the wheels. This would normally be in the fourth sub-race of the sixth root-race. Lagging behind would mean that not all 16 spokes develop. The individual would then not be able to speak in the presence of the master, with the result that he could not be guided by the master at this state in evolution. It is particularly important to develop this chakra, and that will depend on whether the human being gets out of the habit of wounding with his voice.⁷⁵

Human beings have 16 opportunities—in going through 16 sub-races—to develop this chakra. If they do not do so, they will follow the 16 ways of perdition through the word.⁷⁶

In the metamorphoses that follow, the [last petals of the 16-petalled lotus flower] are developed further, plastic, then in thought matter, then archetypally. In the following round the 16-petalled lotus flower will truly be a vegetative petal or leaf at the physical level. The spokes will then be real leaves, and the mineral element will have vanished altogether.

In the 7th root-race, the chakra will develop which is called the two-petaled lotus flower and lies between the eyebrows. (Fig. 9)

• 70. See Genesis (note 46).
• 71. See Special note in this volume
• 72. See esoteric lesson given in Hamburg on 14 March 1909 [in German] in GA 266/1.
• 73. In terms of a second, anterior vertebral column. See lecture given on 29 Sept. 1905 in #GA 93a, Foundations of Esotericism (note 13).
• 74. See Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der ersten Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904–1914, GA 264, S. 199 ff.
• 75. See note 65.
• 76. Also mentioned in the lecture given in Berlin on 23 December 1904 in The Temple Legend, see note 22.